Isobel : a Romance of the Northern Trail, James Oliver Curwood [have you read this book .TXT] 📗

where they bury him."
He put on his cap and heavy coat and went as far as the door, then turned back. From his kit he took a belt-ax and nails.
The wind was blowing more strongly over the Barren, and MacVeigh could no longer hear the low lament of the Eskimos. He moved toward their fires, and found them deserted of men, only the dogs rema g in their deathlike sleep. And then, far down the edge of the timber, he saw a flare of light. Five minutes later he stood hidden in a deep shadow, a few paces from the Eskimos. They had dug the grave early in the evening, out on the great snow-plain, free of the trees; and as the fire they had built lighted up their dark, round faces MacVeigh saw the five little black men who had borne forth Scottie Deane leaning over the shallow hole in the frozen earth. Scottie was already gone. The earth and ice and frozen moss were falling in upon him, and not a sound fell now from the thick lips of his savage mourners. In a few minutes the crude work was done, and like a thin black shadow the natives filed back to their camp. Only one remained, sitting cross-legged at the head of the grave, his long narwhal spear at his back. It was O-gluck-gluck, the Eskimo chief, guarding the dead man from the devils who come to steal body and soul during the first few hours of burial.
Billy went deeper into the forest until he found a thin, straight sapling, which he cut down with half a dozen strokes of his belt-ax. From the sapling he stripped the bark, and then he chopped off a third of its length and nailed it crosswise to what remained. After that he sharpened the bottom end and returned to the grave, carrying the cross over his shoulder. Stripped to whiteness, it gleamed in the firelight. The Eskimo watcher stared at it for a moment, his dull eyes burning darker in the night, for he knew that after this two gods, and not one, were to guard the grave. Billy drove the cross deep, and as the blows of his ax fell upon it the Eskimo slunk back until he was swallowed in the gloom. When MacVeigh was done he pulled off his cap. But it was not to pray.
"I'm sorry, old man," he said to what was under the cross. "God knows I'm sorry. I wish you was alive. I wish you was going back to her-- with the kid-- instid o' me. But I'll keep that promise. I swear it. I'll do-- what's right-- by her."
From the forest he looked back. The Eskimo chief had returned to his somber watch. The cross gleamed a ghostly white against the thick blackness of the Barren. He turned his face away for the last time, and there filled him the oppression of a leaden hand, a thing that was both dread and fear. Scottie Deane was dead-- dead and in his grave, and yet he walked with him now at his side. He could feel the presence, and that presence was like a warning, stirring strange thoughts within him. He turned back to the cabin and entered softly. Pelliter was asleep. Little Isobel was breathing the sweet forgetfulness of childhood. He stooped and kissed her silken curls, and for a long time he stood with one of those soft curls between his fingers. In a few years more, he thought, it would be the darker gold and brown of the woman's hair-- of the woman he loved. Slowly a great peace entered into him. After all, there was more than hope ahead for him. She-- the older Isobel-- knew that he loved her as no other man in the world could love her. He had given proof of that. And now he was going to her.


XIV
THE SNOW-MAN
After his return from the scene of burial Billy undressed, put out the light, and went to bed. He fell asleep quickly, and his slumber was filled with many dreams. They were sweet and joyous at first, and he lived again his first meeting with the woman; he was once more in the presence of her beauty, her purity, her faith and confidence in him. And then more trouble visions came to him. He awoke twice, and each time he sat up, filled with the shuddering dread that had come to him at the graveside.
A third time he awakened, and he struck a match to look at his watch. It was four o'clock. He was still exhausted. His limbs ached from the tremendous strain of the fifty-mile race across the Barren, but he could no longer sleep. Something-- he did not attempt to ask himself what it was-- was urging him to action. He got up and dressed.
When Pelliter awoke two hours later MacVeigh's pack and sledge were ready for the trip south. While they ate their breakfast the two men finished their plans. When the hour of parting came Billy left his comrade alone with little Isobel and went out to hitch up the dogs. When he returned there was a fresh redness in Pelliter's eyes, and he puffed out thick clouds of smoke from his pipe to hide his face. MacVeigh thought of that parting often in the days that followed. Pelliter stood last in the door, and in his face was a look which MacVeigh wished that he had not seen. In his own heart was the dread and the fear, the thing which he could not name.
For hours he could not shake off the gloom that oppressed him. He strode at the head of old Kazan, the leader, striking a course due south by compass. When he fell back for the third time to look at little Isobel he found the child buried deep in her blankets sound asleep. She did not awake until he stopped to make tea at noon. It was four o'clock when he halted again to make camp in the shelter of a clump of tall spruce. Isobel had slept most of the day. She was wide awake now, laughing at him as he dug her out of her nest.
"Give me a kiss," he demanded.
Isobel complied, putting her two little hands to his face.
"You're a-- a little peach," he cried. "There ain't been a whimper out of you all day. And now we're going to have a fire-- a big fire."
He set about his work, whistling for the first time since morning. He set up his silk Service tent, cut spruce and balsam boughs until he had them a foot deep inside, and then dragged in wood for half an hour. By that time it was dark and the big fire was softening the snow for thirty feet around. He had taken off Isobel's thick, swaddling coat, and the child's pretty face shone pink in the fireglow. The light danced red and gold in her tangled curls, and as they ate supper, both on the same blanket, Billy saw opposite him more and more of what he knew he would find in the woman. When they had finished he produced a small pocket comb and drew Isobel close up to him. One by one he smoothed the tangles out of her curls, his heart beating joyously as the silken touch of them ran through his fingers. Once he had felt that same soft touch of the woman's hair against his face. It had been an accidental caress, but he had treasured it in his memory. It seemed real again now, and the thrill of it made him place little Isobel alone again on the blanket, while he rose to his feet. He threw fresh fuel on the fire, and then he found that the warmth had softened the snow until it clung to his feet. The discovery gave him an inspiration. A warmth that was not of the fire leaped into his face, and he gathered up the softened snow, raking it into piles with a snow-shoe; and before Isobel's astonished and delighted eyes there grew into shape a snow-man almost as big as himself. He gave it arms and a head, and eyes of charred wood, and when it was done he placed his own cap on the crown of it and his pipe in its mouth. Little Isobel screamed with delight, and together, hand in hand, they danced around and around it, just as he and the other girls and boys had danced years and years ago. And when they stopped there were tears of laughter and joy in the child's eyes and a filmy mist of another sort in Billy's.
It was the snow-man that brought back to him years and years of lost hopes. They flooded in upon him until it seemed as though the old life was the life of yesterday and waiting for him now just beyond the edge of the black forest. Long after Isobel was asleep in the tent he sat and looked at the snow-man; and more and more his heart sang with a new joy, until it seemed as though he must rise and cry out in the eagerness and hope that filled him. In the snow-man, slowly melting before the fire, there was a heart and a soul and voice. It was calling to him, urging him as nothing in the world had ever urged him before. He would go back to the old home down in God's country, to the old playmates who were men and women now. They would welcome him-- and they would welcome the woman. For he would take her. For the first time he made himself believe that she would go. And there, hand in hand, they would follow his boyhood footprints over the meadows and through the hills, and he would gather flowers for her in place of the mother that was gone, and he would tell her all the old stories of the days that were passed.
It was the snow-man!


XV
LE MORT ROUGE-- AND ISOBEL
Until late that night Billy sat beside his campfire with the snow-man. Strange and new thoughts had come to him, and among these was the wondering one asking himself why he had never built a snow-man before. When he went to bed he dreamed of the snow-man and of little Isobel; and the little girl's laughter and happiness when she saw the curious form the dissolving snow-man had taken in the heat of the fire when she awoke the following morning filled him again with those boyish visions of happiness that he had seen just ahead of him. At other times he would have told himself that he was no longer reasonable. After they had breakfasted and started on the day's journey he laughed and talked with baby Isobel, and a dozen times in the forenoon he picked her up in his arms and carried her behind the dogs.
"We're going home," he kept telling her over and over again. "We're going home-- down to mama-- mama-- mama!" He emphasized that; and each time Isobel's pretty mouth formed the word mama after him his heart leaped exultantly. By the end of that day it had become the sweetest word in the world to him. He tried mother, but his little comrade looked at him blankly, and he did not like it himself. "Mama, mama, mama," he said a hundred times that night beside their campfire, and before he tucked her away in her warm blankets he said something to her about "Now I lay me down to sleep." Isobel was too tired and sleepy to comprehend much of that. Even after she was deep in slumber and Billy sat alone smoking his pipe he whispered that sweetest word in the world to himself, and