“Forgery,” he used to say, “that’s what it is!”
“Bah!” Jack Trainor would answer. “It isn’t a check, Joe.”
But all of his persuading could never quite lift the cloud from the brows of Bigot.
“The only reason I can do it,” he used to say, “is because I feel all the things you have said for me. I feel all those things, Jack, but I can’t put them down in words. Because I feel them, it isn’t altogether a lie if I let you write the letters for me, is it?”
And Jack, of course, would insist that it was a mere nothing. He himself had been passing through a strange time of trial. It had grown a peculiar pleasure and a peculiar torment to sit down before the picture of Alice Cary once a week and write to her as though he loved her. Not that the letters were hard to write, for, indeed, there was nothing easier. That faint smile of the girl in the picture was enough to keep his pen working forever, he felt. But, now that he was to see her in the flesh—what?
There were two dangers. The first, and what he felt to be the more imminent, danger was that she would not be a tithe so charming as she was in the photograph. That would mean the destruction of a pleasant dream that, otherwise, he might have taken with him to his grave. The second danger, although it was one that he declared to himself over and over would never become an actuality, was that when he saw her she might be a thing of beauty even greater than the picture promised. And in that case, what would happen to his poor head, already swimming from too much thinking of her? And what would happen to his friendship for the man who had saved his life, great-hearted, unsuspicious, gentle Joe Bigot?
He knew his own impulsive nature well enough to fear what he might do. He dreaded seeing her because seeing her might make him desire to marry her. And once he desired to marry her, he felt that he would not be able to exercise any control. He would be gone in a flash.
Because of this, he had dreaded going home with Joe Bigot. But now he succumbed to the temptation. It was decided that he would be described, in the village, as a man who Joe had simply encountered on his way down from the mountains, and who he had brought back to help him work his little farm. With this plan in mind, they started home.
There was much to be done, however, before that journey was pressed on. In the first place, Jack Trainor must have a horse. Joe was equipped with a mighty-boned Canadian gray that was capable of carrying a ton on its back. Jack Trainor, a large man himself, was by no means content with such an animal.
“I’ve got to have speed,” he declared to Joe, and for speed they started looking through the little town into which they had dropped out of the hills. They found what they wanted in the mid-afternoon on the place of a French-Canadian, 2,000 miles away from his beloved Quebec, cursing the land he farmed and caring nothing for the bad-tempered four-year-old that, as he said: “Eats the head off all day, and, when it is for riding…mon Dieu!…le bon Dieu!…it is a wild tornado!”
He offered the colt and the saddle for hardly more than the price of the latter alone, and straightway Jack saddled the lithe-limbed bay tornado and gave it its head. There followed five savage minutes. When the tornado was breathless, Jack raked a spur down its neck—not cruelly, but with an eye to the future.
It brought out another frantic effort. That effort did not avail to unseat the rider. And so Jack Trainor paid the price, swung into the saddle, and jogged onto the long East Road.
“I’ve seen good riding,” said Joe Bigot, “but I never dreamed that a man could stay on a horse when a horse done what the bay has just finished doing.”
“Bah!” Jack Trainor grinned. “This hoss means mighty well when it comes to bucking, but he ain’t been rode enough to get any practice in fancy bucking. And it takes practice to make a good bucker, just the way it takes practice to make a man a good shot.”
“There’s exceptions to that.”
“There are?”
“I know one man who’s a dead shot, but he never practices hardly at all.”
“You know such a man?”
“Larry Haines. He can shoot as straight as an eagle looks. He never misses. But he ain’t had much practice.”
“I’d like to meet up with him,” said Jack slowly. “I’ve heard such a lot about him that I’d like to meet up with him. These dead shots…I’ve heard about ’em here and there, but I’ve never seen ’em pan out when it came to a showdown. Maybe this Larry Haines will be different.”
Such was the mood in which they started. But as they journeyed on, and day after day, they struck farther and farther into the green heart of the cattle ranges of Canada, and Jack stopped pondering the question of Haines and the girl. He was too much occupied with the beauty of the country through which they were traveling.
“We’ll go first,” said Joe, “straight for the hill that looks over the town. It ain’t very high, but it’s high enough to give us a look over the country.”
And so, on the last day, they struck for the hill, and, when they came in view of it, they could plainly make out, upon the top, the forms of two riders sitting their horses quietly there. Those forms grew into a woman and a man and these in turn grew more and more distinct, until Joe Bigot uttered a shout and spurred his horse into full speed.
“It’s Alice!” he cried. “Come on, Jack!”
Now there was enough speed in the long legs of the bay colt to lay a circle around the big gray, but Jack Trainor held his mount in. He felt that it was too important a crisis simply to be rushed upon.
And so the face of the girl grew out slowly upon him until at length, with a cry of excitement, she started her horse on to meet her lover. Then Jack Trainor knew that the test would be even grimmer than he had expected, for she was far more lovely than the photograph had been able to hint.
Chapter 7
He passed the two at a trot. They were in a flurry of exclamations and laughter, and even big Joe Bigot seemed to have found his tongue. For that matter, Jack Trainor declared to himself that she would have roused a dying man to eloquence and foolishness. Another great question was settled in his mind. How would she greet the big trapper when he came down to her? After the letters that had been poured upon her, how would she reconcile their eloquence—and Jack felt that they were eloquent indeed—with the slow-moving mind of the big man? One glance at her excited face as he moved past the two settled that matter. She was thinking of nothing except that he had returned to her. There was no doubt about him in any respect.
But, in the meantime, the attention of Jack began to center around another figure, the companion of Alice Cary who had remained in the background. One glance at that sallow, handsome face, now strangely pinched and drawn as he looked down upon the girl greeting Bigot, and Jack felt sure that he had an answer to the riddle. It was Larry Haines, the invincible fighter, the sullen and dark-minded youth.
He saw Larry, now, produce the makings and roll a cigarette in spite of the blowing wind and the emotion that, Jack guessed, would have reduced any other man to trembling. The cigarette was lighted despite the gale, and then, as the issuing cloud of smoke hung for a moment and was dashed by the breeze, Jack Trainor came up to the smoker.
“Only the lucky ones,” said Jack with great good cheer, “have someone waiting for them, eh?”
Larry Haines turned toward him with an indecipherable expression.
“That sounds as though it might be true,” he said. “Are you a friend of Joe’s?”
“Just met him when he was coming down out of the hills. We drifted this way together.”