CHAPTER XVIII
THE LAW AND A MAN'S DESIRE
Drennan slept two hours that night. He awoke rested, refreshed, eager.He did not need sleep. He was Youth's own, tireless, stimulated withthe golden elixir.
Ygerne must not be before him at the trysting place; she must not waitfor him a short instant. It was his place to be there to welcome her.She would come with the early dawn; he must come earlier than the dawnitself.
When he came to the old fallen log the smile upon his lips, in hiseyes, bespoke a deep, sweet tenderness. He had brought with him thetwo gifts for her. He put the box of candy in the grass, covering it,planning to have her search for it. He felt like a boy; she must joinwith him in a childplay. The pendant necklace, its pearls as pure andsoft as tears, he placed upon the log itself, in a little hollow,covering it with a piece of bark. Then he found her note.
It was very short; he read it at a sweeping glance. His brain caughtthe words; his mind refused to grasp their meaning. And yet Ygerne hadwritten clearly:
"_Dear Mr. Drennen_: The greetings of Ygerne, Countess of Bellaire, tothe Son of a Thief! Thank you for a new kind of summer flirtation.May your next one be as pleasant. A man of such wonderful generositydeserves great happiness. Good-bye. YGERNE."
Simple enough. And yet the words meant nothing to him. By his footwas a square box of chocolates peeping out at him. He had telegraphed. . . where was it? . . . to Edmontville for them. They were forYgerne. There on the log, right where she had sat, under the littlechip of bark, was her necklace of pearls. She was coming for it in amoment, coming like Aurora's own sweet self through the dawn. He hadtelegraphed for that, too. It was his first present for her.
The Son of a Thief! The Countess of Bellaire! That meant DavidDrennen, son of John Harper Drennen; it meant Ygerne, the girl-womanwho had come into David Drennen's life before it was too late, who hadmade of him another man.
He sat down on the log and filled his pipe. The note he let lie, halffolded, upon his knee. His eyes went thoughtfully across the thin misthanging like gauze above the river; then turned expectantly toward theSettlement. She would come in a moment. And the glory of her! Theeternal quivering, throbbing glory of the woman a man loves! She wouldcome and he would gather her into his arms. . . . For that the worldhad been made, for that he had lived until now. . . .
He had lighted his pipe and was puffing at it slowly, each little cloudof smoke coming at the regular interval from its brethren. And he didnot know that he was smoking. He was not thinking. For the moment hewas scarcely experiencing an emotion. He knew that Marshall Sothernwas John Harper Drennen; he knew that the Golden Girl had been sold; heknew that a box of candy and a pearl necklace were waiting for Ygerne;he knew that there was a note upon his knee which purported to be fromher. Each of these things was quite clear and separate in his mind;the strange thing about them was that they had in some way lostsignificance to him.
Presently, with a start, he took his pipe from his lips and ran a handacross his forehead. What was he sitting here like a fool for? EitherYgerne had written that note or she had not. If she had written it shehad done so either in jest or seriously. He turned back toward theSettlement. He did not think of the jewelled thing hidden under a bitof bark or the cardboard box in its nest in the grass.
He went swiftly. The town was sleeping, would not awake for anotherhour. His eyes were upon Marquette's house as soon as the ramblingbuilding came into view. There were no fires; window shades weredrawn, doors closed.
He came to Ygerne's window. It, too, was closed. Here, also, theshade was down. He tapped softly. When there was no answer he tappedagain. Then he went to Marquette's door and knocked sharply.
"_Nom de nom_." It was Pere Marquette's voice, sleepy and irritable.The old man was fumbling with the bar or the lock or whatever it wasthat fastened his door. He seemed an eternity in getting the thingdone. Then his towsled head and blinking eyes appeared abruptly.
"Where is Miss Bellaire?" said Drennen quietly. "I want a word withher."
"Mees Bellaire? _Hein_?"
"Yes," answered Drennen a trifle impatiently, though he was holdinghimself well in hand. "Miss Bellaire. I know it is early, but . . ."
Pere Marquette blinked at him curiously with brightening, birdlikeeyes. He didn't like Drennen; God knows he had little enough reason tosee any good in this gaunt, wolf-like man. There was a dry cackle inthe old man's voice as he spoke again, the door closing slowly so thatonly half of his face with one bright eye looked out.
"Early? _Mais, non, m'sieu_! It is late! M'am'selle, she is gone _ily a quelques heures_, already! Pouf! Like that, in a hurry."
"Gone?" demanded Drennen. "Where? When?"
"Where? Who knows? When?" He shrugged. "Two, t'ree, four hours,_peutetre_ six."
"Who was with her?"
"Ho," cackled the old man so that Drennen's hands itched to be at thewithered throat, "where she go, there are men to follow! Me, when I amyo'ng, before Mamma Jeanne make me happy, I . . ."
"Damn you and your Mamma Jeanne!" cried Drennen. "Tell me about thisgirl. Who went with her?"
"Not so many," muttered Marquette, "because she go quiet, in the dark.In the day the whole Settlement would follow, _non_? But Marc Lemarc,he go; an' M'sieu Sefton, he go; an' M'sieu Ramon, he go. . . ."
"I'll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me which way theywent!" broke in Drennen crisply. "I'll give you five hundred if youcan tell me why?"
"_Qui sait_?" grumbled Marquette. "They go, they go In the dark, theygo with horses runnin' like hell. M'am'selle sleep; then come Lemarc,fas', to knock on her window. I hear. She dress damn fas', too, orshe don't dress at all; in one minute she's outside with Lemarc. Ihear Sefton; I hear Ramon Garcia, a little song in his throat. I hearhorses. I hear M'am'selle Ygerne laugh like it's fon! Then she wakeme an' she pay me; I see Lemarc give her money, gol' money, to pay.Me, I go back to bed an' Mamma Jeanne suspec' it might be I flirt withthe M'am'selle by dark!"
He chuckled again and closed the door as Drennen turned abruptly andwent back down the street towards his dugout.
Marc Lemarc had robbed him of the ten thousand dollars. He beganthere, strangely cool-thoughted. That didn't matter. He had halfexpected it all along. He knew now, clearly, that, more than that, hehad half hoped for it. The money meant less than nothing to him; thetheft of it, he had thought, would show Ygerne just what sort of manLemarc was, would separate her from her companions, would draw her evencloser to him. But Ygerne, too, had gone with the money and withLemarc. Marquette had seen him hand her the gold that she might payher reckoning. Here was a contingency upon which he had not counted.
As soon as Lemarc had returned she had gone. Sefton had gone withthem. Ramon Garcia, too. Why Garcia?
A scene he had not forgotten, which now he could never forget, occupiedhis mind so vividly that he did not see the material things among whichhe was walking: Ramon Garcia at Ygerne's window, the gift of a fewfield flowers, the kissing of a white hand.
Men who had known Drennen for years and who would have been surprisedat what was in the man's face yesterday, saw nothing new to note in himto-day. He went his own way, he was silent, his face was hard and notto be read. All day he was about the Settlement, in his own dugout alarge part of the time, going to his meals regularly at Joe's. It wasrumoured that he had sold his claim; men began to doubt it. He wasn'tscattering money as men had always done when they had made a fortune ata turn of the wheel; he wasn't getting drunk which was the customarything; he wasn't even looking for a game of cards or dice. There wasno sign of any new purpose in the man.
And yet the purpose was there, taken swiftly, to be acted upon with acold leisure. Drennen was not hurrying now. There was no other horselike Major, his recently purchased four-year-old, and Drennen knew it.He had ridden Major hard yesterday; to-day the brute must rest and beready for more hard riding.
One thi
ng only did Drennen do which excited mild interest, though thereason for the act was naturally misunderstood. He went to Joe andbought from him two heavy revolvers. Drennen had never been a gun man,had ever relied upon his own hands in time of trouble. But now, Joefigured the matter out, he had money and he meant to guard against ahold-up.
Entire lack of haste was the only thing remarkable about David Drennento-day and through the days which followed. There was no hesitation,no doubt, no being torn two ways. He had made up his mind what he wasgoing to do. It was settled and not to be reconsidered. But he wouldnot hurry. The very coolness with which his purpose was taken steadiedhim to a strange deliberateness. He knew that it was folly to expectto come up with Ygerne and the men with her immediately. It would taketime; they had fled hastily and they were in a country where pursuitwas necessarily slow. Was that not the reason why such people camehere? And he told himself grimly that it was an equal folly to desireto come upon them too soon. The punishment he would mete out would bethe harder if their flight had seemed crowned with security.
Upon the second day he rode in widening circles about MacLeod'sSettlement. He hardly hoped to pick up a trail here where questinghundreds in search of his gold had cut the soft spring ground into ajumble of indecipherable tracks. But, beginning his own quest with apainstaking thoroughness which omitted no chance however remote, hespent the day in seeking.
At night he came again into camp. He saw to the Major's wants beforehis own. He ate his meal at Joe's and having passed no word with anyman came back to his dugout.
The supreme blow which his destiny could give him had been smittenrelentlessly. He had received it like the slave who has been beaten somany times that he no longer cries out or strikes back prematurely.Like the tortured bond-man who makes no useless protest but hides inhis bosom the knife which one day he will plunge into his master'sthroat, Drennen merely bided his time.
He saw no good in a world which had had no good to offer him. He nolonger looked for the light. New shoots of faith, bursting upwardunder Ygerne's influence from the dry roots of the old, were in aninstant shrivelled and killed. He came to see that in an old worldthere was no basic law but that law which had held from the first dayin the new world. There was no good; bad was only a term coined forfools by other fools. Each man had his life given to him, and he coulddo with it as he saw fit. Each wild thing in the depths of the NorthWoods had its life given to it to do with as it saw fit. Each createdbeing, were it not maudlin, strove for itself alone. It took its ownfood where it could get it, rending it with bared teeth and bloody jawsfrom the weaker creature that had preyed upon a still weaker. It madeits lair where it chose, crushing under its careless body those otherstill lesser things which had not sense enough or the opportunity toslip out from under it. Love, as man looked upon it or pretended tolook upon it, was no real emotion but a poetical illusion. Nor was itso much as truly poetical, since poetry is truth and this thing was alie. There was no love but the old, primal love of life, a blind,unreasoning instinct. He did not love Ygerne; he had never lovedYgerne because, in the nature of nature, there could be no such thingas such a love.
But hatred was another matter. That was nature. A man, with all ofhis bluster, cannot get away from nature. Don't the winters freeze andkill him? Doesn't water drown him, fire burn him? Love had no placein nature; hatred was a part of the one law, the primal law. The wolfkills the rabbit in hot rage; the black ant tears down the soft-bodiedcaterpillar not so much in hunger as in wrath.
The lower order of created beings seemed to Drennen to be the trulyhigher order. For they did not philosophise; they killed their prey.They did not reason and thus follow a blind goddess; they moved astheir swift instincts dictated and made no mistake. Now he did notneed to bolster up his purpose with seeking to wander through thethousand lanes of reason's labyrinth; he did not need to seek thefallacies of logic to tell him why he hated Ygerne Bellaire and MarcLemarc and Sefton and the Mexican. He hated them. There the factbegan and ended. One by one he would kill them until he came toYgerne. And if in her eyes he saw that the terror of death was greaterthan the terror of the suffering he could inflict upon her living, thenhe would kill her.
At first he thought only of these four. But after a while in histhoughts there was room for another. . . . John Harper Drennen,masquerading as Marshall Sothern. Drennen sneered at his old hero.The old man was a fool like so many other fools. He had committed whatthe world calls a crime and the weight of it had shown upon him.Drennen's sneer was not for the wrong done but for the weakness ofallowing suffering to come afterward. The old man had seemed glad,touched almost to tears, when his son had paid off the old score. . . .And now Drennen's sneer was for himself. Why had he not kept thatforty thousand dollars? Money meant power and power was all that hewanted. Power to crush men who would have crushed him had they beenable; power to seek his prey where he would and to pull it down.
Ygerne's note he never read the second time. He had had no need to.He burned the paper and washed his hands free of the ashes which he hadcrumpled in his palm.
The third day he rose early, saddled Major and left the Settlement,riding slowly toward Lebarge. He had an idea that they might have gonethere to take the train. When half way to the railroad he met a manwho was pushing on strongly toward the north. The man stopped andaccosted him. It was the mounted police officer, Lieutenant Max.
"Mr. Drennen," said the lieutenant bruskly coming straight to thebusiness in hand after his way; "you come from MacLeod's?"
"Yes."
"You know two men named Sefton and Lemarc? And a girl named Bellaire?"
"Yes."
"Were they in MacLeod's when you left?"
"Why do you ask?" countered Drennen sharply.
"The law wants them," replied the lieutenant.
Drennen laughed.
"So do I!" he cried as he spurred his horse out of the trail, turningeastward now, heading at random for Fanning instead of Lebarge.
As he forded the Little MacLeod he was cursing Max.
"Damn him," he muttered. "Are there not enough cheap law breakers?Why must he seek to do my work for me?"
So began Drennen's quest for three men and one girl with grey eyes anda sweet body that was like a song, a girl who had awakened the old,dormant good in him and then had driven him so deep into the blackchasm that no light entered where he was.
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