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

to escort her back to the ship. She was glad. Her heart was choking her with hope and fear. She had measured him differently this time. And she was afraid. She had caught a glimpse that had taken her beyond the man, to the monster. It made her shudder. And yet what did it matter, if Blake helped them?

She had forgotten Wapi. Now she found him again close at her side, and she dropped a hand to his big head as she hurried back through the pallid gloom. She spoke to him, crying out with sobbing breath what she had not dared to reveal to Blake. For Wapi the long night had ceased to be a hell of ghastly emptiness, and to her voice and the touch of her hand he responded with a whine that was the whine of a white man’s dog. They had traveled two-thirds of the distance to the ship when he stopped in his tracks and sniffed the wind that was coming from shore. A second time he did this, and a third, and the third time Dolores turned with him and faced the direction from which they had come. A low growl rose in Wapi’s throat, a snarl of menace with a note of warning in it.

“What is it, Wapi?” whispered Dolores. She heard his long fangs click, and under her hand she felt his body grow tense. “What is it?” she repeated.

A thrill, a suspicion, shot into her heart as they went on. A fourth time Wapi faced the shore and growled before they reached the ship. Like shadows they went up over the ice bridge. Dolores did not enter the cabin but drew Wapi behind it so they could not be seen. Ten minutes, fifteen, and suddenly she caught her breath and fell down on her knees beside Wapi, putting her arms about his gaunt shoulders. “Be quiet,” she whispered. “Be quiet.”

Up out of the night came a dark and grotesque shadow. It paused below the bridge, then it came on silently and passed almost without sound toward the captain’s quarters. It was Blake. Dolores’ heart was choking her. Her arms clutched Wapi, whispering for him to be quiet, to be quiet. Blake disappeared, and she rose to her feet. She had come of fighting stock. Peter was proud of that. “You slim wonderful little thing!” he had said to her more than once. “You’ve a heart in that pretty body of yours like the general’s!” The general was her father, and a fighter. She thought of Peter’s words now, and the fighting blood leaped through her veins. It was for Peter more than herself that she was going to fight now.

She made Wapi understand that he must remain where he was. Then she followed after Blake, followed until her ears were close to the door behind which she could already hear Blake and Rydal talking.

Ten minutes later she returned to Wapi. Under her hood her face was as white as the whitest star in the sky. She stood for many minutes close to the dog, gathering her courage, marshaling her strength, preparing herself to face Peter. He must not suspect until the last moment. She thanked God that Wapi had caught the taint of Blake in the air, and she was conscious of offering a prayer that God might help her and Peter.

Peter gave a cry of pleasure when the door opened and Dolores entered. He saw Wapi crowding in, and laughed. “Pals already! I guess I needn’t have been afraid for you. What a giant of a dog!”

The instant she appeared, Dolores forced upon herself an appearance of joyous excitement. She flung off her coat and ran to Peter, hugging his head against her as she told him swiftly what they were going to do. Fort Confidence was only one hundred and fifty miles away, and a garrison of police and a doctor were there. Five days on a sledge! That was all. And she had persuaded Blake, the trader, to help them. They would start now, as soon as she got him ready and Blake came. She must hurry. And she was wildly and gloriously happy, she told him. In a little while they would be at least on the outer edge of this horrible night, and he would be in a doctor’s hands.

She was holding Peter’s head so that he could not see her face, and by the time she jumped up and he did see it, there was nothing in it to betray the truth or the fact that she was acting a lie. First she began to dress Peter for the trail. Every instant gave her more courage. This helpless, sunken-cheeked man with the hair graying over his temples was Peter, her Peter, the Peter who had watched over her, and sheltered her, and fought for her ever since she had known him, and now had come her chance to fight for him. The thought filled her with a wonderful exultation. It flushed her cheeks, and put a glory into her eyes, and made her voice tremble. How wonderful it was to love a man as she loved Peter! It was impossible for her to see the contrast they made—Peter with his scrubby beard, his sunken cheeks, his emaciation, and she with her radiant, golden beauty. She was ablaze with the desire to fight. And how proud of her Peter would be when it was all over!

She finished dressing him and began putting things in their big dunnage sack. Her lips tightened as she made this preparation. Finally she came to a box of revolver cartridges and emptied them into one of the pockets of her under-jacket. Wapi flattened out near the door, watched every movement she made.

When the dunnage sack was filled, she returned to Peter. “Won’t it be a joke on Captain Rydal!” she exulted. “You see, we aren’t gong to let him know anything about it.” She appeared not to observe Peter’s surprise. “You know how I hate him, Peter dear,” she went on. “He is a beast. But Mr. Blake has done a great deal of trading with him, and he doesn’t want Captain Rydal to know the part he is taking in getting us away. Not that Rydal would miss us, you know! I don’t think he cares very much whether you live or die, Peter, and that’s why I hate him. But we must humor Mr. Blake. He doesn’t want him to know.”

“Odd,” mused Peter. “It’s sort of—sneaking away.”

His eyes had in them a searching question which Dolores tried not to see and which she was glad he did not put into words. If she could only fool him another hour—just one more hour.

It was less than that—half an hour after she had finished the dunnage sack—when they heard footsteps crunching outside and then a knock at the door. Wapi answered with a snarl, and when Dolores opened the door and Blake entered, his eyes fell first of all on the dog.

“Attached himself, eh?” he greeted, turning his quiet, unemotional smile on Peter. “First white woman he has ever seen, and I guess the case is hopeless. Mrs. Keith may have him.”

He turned to her. “Are you ready?”

She nodded and pointed to the dunnage sack. Then she put on her fur coat and hood and helped Peter sit up on the edge of the bed while Blake opened the door again and made a low signal. Instantly Uppy and another Eskimo came in. Blake led with the sack, and the two Eskimos carried Peter. Dolores followed last, with the fingers of one little hand gripped about the revolver in her pocket. Wapi hugged so close to her that she could feel his body.

On the ice was a sledge without dogs. Peter was bundled on this, and the Eskimos pulled him. Blake was still in the lead. Twenty minutes after leaving the ship they pulled up beside his cabin.

There were two teams ready for the trail, one of six dogs, and another of five, each watched over by an Eskimo. The visor of Dolores’ hood kept Blake from seeing how sharply she took in the situation. Under it her eyes were ablaze. Her bare hand gripped her revolver, and if Peter could have heard the beating of her heart, he would have gasped. But she was cool, for all that. Swiftly and accurately she appraised Blake’s preparations. She observed that in the six-dog team, in spite of its numerical superiority, the animals were more powerful than those in the five-dog team. The Eskimos placed Peter on the six-dog sledge, and Dolores helped to wrap him up warmly in the bearskins. Their dunnage sack was tied on at Peter’s feet. Not until then did she seem to notice the five-dog sledge. She smiled at Blake. “We must be sure that in our excitement we haven’t forgotten something,” she said, going over what was on the sledge. “This is a tent, and here are plenty of warm bearskins—and—and—” She looked up at Blake, who was watching her silently. “If there is no timber for so long, Mr. Blake, shouldn’t we have a big bundle of kindling? And surely we should have meat for the dogs!”

Blake stared at her and then turned sharply on Uppy with a rattle of Eskimo. Uppy and one of the companions made their exit instantly and in great haste.

“The fools!” he apologized. “One has to watch them like children, Mrs. Keith. Pardon me while I help them.”

She waited until he followed Uppy into the cabin. Then, with the remaining Eskimo staring at her in wonderment, she carried an extra bearskin, the small tent, and a narwhal grub-sack to Peter’s sledge. It was another five minutes before Blake and the two Eskimos reappeared with a bag of fish and a big bundle of ship-timber kindlings. Dolores stood with a mittened hand on Peter’s shoulder, and bending down, she whispered:

“Peter, if you love me, don’t mind what I’m going to say now. Don’t move, for everything is going to be all right, and if you should try to get up or roll off the sledge, it would be so much harder for me. I haven’t even told you why we’re going to Port Confidence. Now you’ll know!”

She straightened up to face Blake. She had chosen her position, and Blake was standing clear and unshadowed in the starlight half a dozen paces from her. She had thrust her hood back a little, inspired by her feminine instinct to let him see her contempt for him.

“You beast!”

The words hissed hot and furious from her lips, and in that same instant Blake found himself staring straight into the unquivering muzzle of her revolver.

“You beast!” she repeated. “I ought to kill you. I ought to shoot you down where you stand, for you are a cur and a coward. I know what you have planned. I followed you when you went to Rydal’s cabin a little while ago, and I heard everything that passed between you. Listen, Peter, and I’ll tell you what these brutes were going to do with us. You were to go with the six-dog team and I with the five, and out on the barrens we were to become separated, you to go on and be killed when you we’re a proper distance away, and I to be brought back—to Rydal. Do you understand, Peter dear? Isn’t it splendid that we should have forced on us like this such wonderful material for a story!”

She was gloriously unafraid now. A paean of triumph rang in her voice, triumph, contempt, and utter fearlessness. Her mittened hand pressed on Peter’s shoulder, and before the weapon in her other hand Blake stood as if turned into stone.

“You don’t know,” she said, speaking to him directly, “how