Back to God's Country and Other Stories, James Oliver Curwood [hot novels to read .TXT] 📗

for her—in his own way? And to do that he must read the letter. To know its contents would mean—Josephine. If there was nothing in it that would stand between them, he would have done no wrong, for he would still take it on to Peter God. So he argued. But if the letter jeopardized his chances of possessing her, his knowledge of what it contained would give him an opportunity to win in another way. He could even answer it himself and take back to her false word from Peter God, for seven frostbiting years along the edge of the Barren had surely changed Peter God’s handwriting. His treachery, if it could be called that, would never be discovered. And it would give him Josephine.

This was the temptation. The power that resisted it was the spirit of that big, clean, fighting North which makes men out of a beginning of flesh and bone. Ten years of that North had seeped into Philip’s being. He hung on. It was November when he reached Port MacPherson, and he had not opened the letter.

Deep snows fell, and fierce blizzards shot like gunblasts from out of the Arctic. Snow and wind were not what brought the deeper gloom and fear to Fort MacPherson. La mort rouge, smallpox,—the “red death,”—was galloping through the wilderness. Rumors were first verified by facts from the Dog Eib Indians. A quarter of them were down with the scourge of the Northland. From Hudson’s Bay on the east to the Great Bear on the west, the fur posts were sending out their runners, and a hundred Paul Reveres of the forests were riding swiftly behind their dogs to spread the warning. On the afternoon of the day Philip left for the cabin of Peter God, a patrol of the Royal Mounted came in on snowshoes from the South, and voluntarily went into quarantine.

Philip traveled slowly. For three days and nights the air was filled with the “Arctic dust” snow that was hard as flint and stung like shot; and it was so cold that he paused frequently and built small fires, over which he filled his lungs with hot air and smoke. He knew what it meant to have the lungs “touched”—sloughing away in the spring, blood-spitting, and certain death.

On the fourth day the temperature began to rise; the fifth it was clear, and thirty degrees warmer. His thermometer had gone to sixty below zero. It was now thirty below.

It was the morning of the sixth day when he reached the thick fringe of stunted spruce that sheltered Peter God’s cabin. He was half blinded. The snow-filled blizzards cut his face until it was swollen and purple. Twenty paces from Peter God’s cabin he stopped, and stared, and rubbed his eyes—and rubbed them again—as though not quite sure his vision was not playing him a trick.

A cry broke from his lips then. Over Peter God’s door there was nailed a slender sapling, and at the end of that sapling there floated a tattered, windbeaten red rag. It was the signal. It was the one voice common to all the wilderness—a warning to man, woman and child, white or red, that had come down through the centuries. Peter God was down with the smallpox!

For a few moments the discovery stunned him. Then he was filled with a chill, creeping horror. Peter God was sick with the scourge. Perhaps he was dying. It might be—that he was dead. In spite of the terror of the thing ahead of him, he thought of Josephine. If Peter God was dead—

Above the low moaning of the wind in the spruce tops he cursed himself. He had thought a crime, and he clenched his mittened hands as he stared at the one window of the cabin. His eyes shifted upward. In the air was a filmy, floating gray. It was smoke coming from the chimney. Peter God was not dead.

Something kept him from shouting Peter God’s name, that the trapper might come to the door. He went to the window, and looked in. For a few moments he could see nothing. And then, dimly, he made out the cot against the wall. And Peter God sat on the cot, hunched forward, his head in his hands. With a quick breath Philip turned to the door, opened it, and entered the cabin. Peter God staggered to his feet as the door opened. His eyes were wild and filled with fever.

“You—Curtis!” he cried huskily. “My God, didn’t you see the flag?”

“Yes.”

Philip’s half-frozen features were smiling, and now he was holding out a hand from which he had drawn his mitten.

“Lucky I happened along just now, old man. You’ve got it, eh?”

Peter God shrank back from the other’s outstretched hand.

“There’s time,” he cried, pointing to the door.

“Don’t breathe this air. Get out. I’m not bad yet—but it’s smallpox, Curtis!”

“I know it,” said Philip, beginning to throw off his hood and coat. “I’m not afraid of it. I had a touch of it three years ago over on the Gray Buzzard, so I guess I’m immune. Besides, I’ve come two thousand miles to see you, Peter God—two thousand miles to bring you a letter from Josephine McCloud.”

For ten seconds Peter God stood tense and motionless. Then he swayed forward.

“A letter—for Peter God—from Josephine McCloud?” he gasped, and held out his hands.

An hour later they sat facing each other—Peter God and Curtis. The beginning of the scourge betrayed itself in the red flush of Peter God’s face, and the fever in his eyes. But he was calm. For many minutes he had spoken in a quiet, even voice, and Philip Curtis sat with scarcely a breath and a heart that at times had risen in his throat to choke him. In his hand Peter God held the pages of the letter he had read.

Now he went on:

“So I’m going to tell it all to you, Curtis—because I know that you are a man. Josephine has left nothing out. She has told me of your love, and of the reward she has promised you—if Peter God sends back a certain word. She says frankly that she does not love you, but that she honors you above all men—except her father, and one other. That other, Curtis, is myself. Years ago the woman you love—was my wife.”

Peter God put a hand to his head, as if to cool the fire that was beginning to burn him up.

“Her name wasn’t Mrs. Peter God,” he went on, and a smile fought grimly on his lips. “That’s the one thing I won’t tell you, Curtis—my name. The story itself will be enough.

“Perhaps there were two other people in the world happier than we. I doubt it. I got into politics. I made an enemy, a deadly enemy. He was a blackmailer, a thief, the head of a political ring that lived on graft. Through my efforts he was exposed, And then he laid for me—and he got me.

“I must give him credit for doing it cleverly and completely. He set a trap for me, and a woman helped him. I won’t go into details. The trap sprung, and it caught me. Even Josephine could not be made to believe in my innocence; so cleverly was the trap set that my best friends among the newspapers could find no excuse for me.

“I have never blamed Josephine for what she did after that. To all the world, and most of all to her, I was caught red-handed. I knew that she loved me even as she was divorcing me. On the day the divorce was given to her, my brain went bad. The world turned red, and then black, and then red again. And I—”

Peter God paused again, with a hand to his head.

“You came up here,” said Philip, in a low voice.

“Not—until I had seen the man who ruined me,” replied Peter God quietly. “We were alone in his office. I gave him a fair chance to redeem himself—to confess what he had done. He laughed at me, exulted over my fall, taunted me. And so—I killed him.”

He rose from his chair and stood swaying. He was not excited.

“In his office, with his dead body at my feet, I wrote a note to Josephine,” he finished. “I told her what I had done, and again I swore my innocence. I wrote her that some day she might hear from me, but not under my right name, as the law would always be watching for me. It was ironic that on that human cobra’s desk there lay an open Bible, open at the Book of Peter, and involuntarily I wrote the words to Josephine—PETER GOD. She has kept my secret, while the law has hunted for me. And this—”

He held the pages of the letter out to Philip.

“Take the letter—go outside—and read what she has written,” he said. “Come back in half an hour. I want to think.”

Back of the cabin, where Peter God had piled his winter’s fuel, Philip read the letter; and at times the soul within him seemed smothered, and at times it quivered with a strange and joyous emotion.

At last vindication had come for Peter God, and before he had read a page of the letter Philip understood why it was that Josephine had sent him with it into the North. For nearly seven years she had known of Peter God’s innocence of the thing for which she had divorced him. The woman—the dead man’s accomplice—had told her the whole story, as Peter God a few minutes before had told it to Curtis; and during those seven years she had traveled the world seeking for him—the man who bore the name of Peter God.

Each night she had prayed God that the next day she might find him, and now that her prayer had been answered, she begged that she might come to him, and share with him for all time a life away from the world they knew.

The woman breathed like life in the pages Philip read; yet with that wonderful message to Peter God she pilloried herself for those red and insane hours in which she had lost faith in him. She had no excuse for herself, except her great love; she crucified herself, even as she held out her arms to him across that thousand miles of desolation. Frankly she had written of the great price she was offering for this one chance of life and happiness. She told of Philip’s love, and of the reward she had offered him should Peter God find that in his heart love had died for her. Which should it be?

Twice Philip read that wonderful message he had brought into the North, and he envied Peter God the outlaw.

The thirty minutes were gone when he entered the cabin. Peter God was waiting for him. He motioned him to a seat close to him.

“You have read it?” he asked.

Philip nodded. In these moments he did not trust himself to speak. Peter God understood. The flush was deeper in his face; his eyes burned brighter with the fever; but of the two he was the calmer, and his voice was steady.

“I haven’t much time, Curtis,” he said, and he smiled faintly as he folded the pages of the letter, “My head is cracking. But I’ve thought it all out, and you’ve got to go back to her—and tell her that Peter God is dead.”

A gasp broke from Philip’s lips. It was his only answer.

“It’s—best,” continued Peter God, and he spoke more slowly, but firmly. “I love her, Curtis. God knows that it’s been only my dreams of her that have kept me alive all these years. She wants to come to me,