“I don’t suppose that you could,” said Larry slowly. “I suppose he’s fond of you just for the sake of your sister. But I see that makes no difference with you. You don’t care to be loved for your own sake.”
She raised her hand. His malevolence showed through too plainly. It made her wince.
“I admit,” she said, “that I may have made up my mind to marry him for some such reason. But lately, Larry, I…”
“Ah!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Lately you’ve been thinking about him, and, because he was a long distance from you, you suddenly began to make a hero out of him, you began to make him romantic!”
She flushed hotly and made no answer. He realized that he had gone much too far and instantly changed his tactics. His tone altered to the most soothing smoothness.
“It’s because you’re too good for him or for any other man,” he said gently. “You see, Alice, you are ashamed of yourself because you can’t love him. You think it’s your duty. You don’t see that he’s exactly what he seems…a great clod of a man, Alice! There’s no spark of real feeling in him. There’s no fire in him! Why, you’d be miserable with him!”
She shook her head and smiled at him in such a cocksure and confident manner that he was amazed. Her flush, also, had changed in quality. There was a misty touch to her eyes that alarmed young Haines.
“I thought just what you think about Joe Bigot,” she answered. “I’ve thought it all my life. I’ll even confess now, Larry, that the reason I first became engaged to Joe was because I pitied him, and because I felt, if he were so willing to raise Nora’s babies, I should at least try to do my share. I thought, too, that the only reason he cared for me at all was simply because I’m Nora’s sister. But…” She paused.
“Well?” asked Larry Haines impatiently. “Well?”
“But a few weeks ago there was a change. The letters I have been getting from Joe Bigot would have driven a saint mad. He told me about the weather. He told me about the number of furs he was taking.And that was about all. Any plowman could have written such letters. Then there was a change! You see, all the time, from the very first, I had been half hoping that behind the dull exterior there might be fire. And it turned out that I was right…I was right! It was like the breaking of a dam. I opened a letter, and his words picked me up on a flood and carried me out of myself! Oh, I wish I could show you that letter!”
“I wish you could,” said Larry dryly. “I’d sure like to see Bigot’s poetry.”
“That’s exactly what it was. It was poetry. The words had actually a rhythm to them. They keep running through my mind…not the real words, you know, but the tune of them.”
“I see,” said Larry in the tone of one who does not see and does not wish to see.
“He began in just the way he usually began a letter…except that there was a little difference in between the words that took my breath away. He began by talking about the cold and the hoar frost and the bursting trees around the cabin and the sense in the air that the world was freezing to death. And, after he had made such a picture of it that I started to shiver myself, he went on to talk about what the mountains would be like when the spring came. And he made such a picture, Larry, such a picture.” Her words failed her; her voice trembled. “And all at once, toward the end of the letter, Larry, he told me that he felt he had been frozen all of his life, and that he had never been able to say what he felt, because he was really asleep…in a wintertime, so to speak. But now he felt a change. It was a thawing, a coming of spring. That was the first letter. It set me tingling to my fingertips to read it. I kept saying to myself…is the giant going to wake up? Oh, Larry, when I opened the next letter, I knew that he had. And all at once the spring was there! It seems that he loved Nora, or thought he did. But that is nothing to the way he cares for me. It isn’t true that I only shine by her reflected light. And…”
“In one word, you love him at last, Alice.”
“Yes!”
“Then there’s no more to be said about Montreal, of course.”
“But, Larry, I’m terribly sorry.”
“Of course you are. You’re too nice a girl not to be sorry, Alice.”
“Are you sarcastic now?”
“I?”
“I never know. I never can quite tell what’s going on in you.”
“That’s because I’m so simple.”
“At least, I know you’ll forget me quickly.”
“Perhaps you hope so.”
“And I’m right, Larry.”
“You’re wrong. You know what I think of marriage.”
“Marriage? You mean that a man should never marry more than once…that it’s sacrilege to marry more than once? But what has that to do with mere love?”
“Mere love? It means just this…that a man, if he really is in love, can only love once. It’s nonsense to talk about any second affairs. It’s nonsense. It’s Continental, no doubt, but it’s not true. I tell you, my dear, that I shall never care for another woman.”
“Oh, Larry!”
He was silent.
“I know it can’t be true. You are only bitter and angry now. A month from today in Montreal you’ll be smiling when you remember me off here in the grasslands.”
“A month from today I’ll still be here.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I do.”
“Larry, does it mean that there’s going to be trouble between you and poor Joe?”
He started to deny it, then changed his mind, and there was a wicked gleam in his eye.
Chapter 6
They had shipped the pelts. Now they were ready to start eastward into the lowlands.
“But why,” said Jack Trainor, “should I go with you?”
Joe Bigot blinked. “How else will you get your share of the money?” he said simply. “Unless you want me to send it after you.”
“Money is nothing,” said the cowpuncher. “Don’t you lie awake worrying about me and money. We’ll get on.”
Bigot shook his head. “A quarter of that coin is coming to you…it belongs to you. If you don’t take it, I’ll put it in a jug and let it rest there until you come. I’ll never touch it.”
Trainor slapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “Well,” he said, “let it rest in the jug, then. But I can’t go home with you.”
“You’ve got work some place?”
“I’ve got work all the time, now that the roads are opened up. I’ve got to keep moving, Joe. The law is behind me.”
And he told the big man, for the first time, the true story about his flight to the North. At least, he told the truth from the point where he climbed onto the rods of the freight that took him on his first stage toward the Northland. But he left Joe to infer that the charges against him were true. When he had finished, he waited and studied the face of Joe with great curiosity. For all the simplicity of the big man, he was never able to tell exactly how Joe would act. He had not long to doubt.
“I’m sorry,” said Bigot, “but when they come for you, we’ll give them a hard job, the two of us. Why, Jack, you can’t go off by yourself. You wouldn’t have anybody to guard your back if they came at you from two sides at once.”
Trainor was so touched that the tears sprang into his eyes, but he laughed it off. “But suppose she should guess that I wrote these letters for you? If I go, we must arrange a story, Joe. We must pretend that you and I met when you were coming down from the mountains, eh?”
It was so arranged. That simple lie would do harm to nobody. But the subject of the letters was a sore one with poor Joe. They made up the first real lie he had ever told in his life. He could not get over the fact that he had signed his name to words that he had not written.