CHAPTER VI
SHEBA SINGS--AND TWO MEN LISTEN
Elliot did not see Miss O'Neill next morning until she appeared in thedining-room for breakfast. He timed himself to get through so as to joinher when she left. They strolled out to the deck together.
"Did you sleep well?" he asked.
"After I fell asleep. It took me a long time. I kept seeing you on thetraverse."
He came abruptly to what was on his mind. "I have an apology to make,Miss O'Neill. If I made light of your danger yesterday, it was because Iwas afraid you might break down. I had to seem unsympathetic rather thanrisk that."
She smiled forgiveness. "All you said was that I might have sprained mywrist. It was true too. I might have--and I did." Sheba showed a whitelinen bandage tied tightly around her wrist.
"Does it pain much?"
"Not so much now. It throbbed a good deal last night."
"Your whole weight came on it with a wrench. No wonder it hurt."
Sheba noticed that the Hannah was drawing up to a wharf and thepassengers were lining up with their belongings. "Is this where wechange?"
"Those of us going to Kusiak transfer here. But there's no hurry.We wait at this landing two hours."
Gordon helped Sheba move her baggage to the other boat and joinedher on deck. They were both strangers in the land. Their only commonacquaintance was Macdonald and he was letting Mrs. Mallory absorb hisattention just now. Left to their own resources the two young peoplenaturally drifted together a good deal.
This suited Elliot. He found his companion wholly delightful, not theless because she was so different from the girls he knew at home. Shecould be frank, and even shyly audacious on occasion, but she held alittle note of reserve he felt bound to respect. Her experience of theworld had clearly been limited. She was not at all sure of herself, ofthe proper degree of intimacy to permit herself with a strange andlikable young man who had done her so signal a service.
Macdonald left the boat twenty miles below Kusiak with Mrs. Mallory andthe Selfridges. A chauffeur with a motor-car was waiting on the wharf torun them to town, but he gave the wheel to Macdonald and took the seatbeside the driver.
The little miner Strong grinned across to Elliot, who was standingbeside Miss O'Neill at the boat rail.
"That's Mac all over. He hires a fellow to run his car--brings him uphere from Seattle--and then takes the wheel himself every time he rides.I don't somehow see Mac sitting back and letting another man run themachine."
It was close to noon before the river boat turned a bend and steamed upto the wharf at Kusiak. The place was an undistinguished little log townthat rambled back from the river up the hill in a hit-or-miss fashion.Its main street ran a tortuous course parallel to the stream.
Half of the town, it seemed, was down to meet the boat.
"Are you going to the hotel or direct to your cousin's?" Gordon askedMiss O'Neill.
"To my cousin's. I fancy she's down here to meet me. It was arrangedthat I come on this boat."
There was much waving of handkerchiefs and shouting back and forth asthe steamer slowly drew close to the landing.
Elliot caught a glimpse of the only people in Kusiak he had known beforecoming in, but though he waved to them he saw they did not recognizehim. After the usual delay about getting ashore he walked down thegangway carrying the suitcases of the Irish girl. Sheba followed at hisheels. On the wharf he came face to face with a slender, well-dressedyoung woman.
"Diane!" he cried.
She stared at him. "You! What in Heaven's name are you doing here,Gordon Elliot?" she demanded, and before he could answer had seized bothhands and turned excitedly to call a stocky man near. "Peter--Peter!Guess who's here?"
"Hello, Paget!" grinned Gordon, and he shook hands with the husband ofDiane.
Elliot turned to introduce his friend, but she anticipated him.
"Cousin Diane," she said shyly. "Don't you know me?"
Mrs. Paget swooped down upon the girl and smothered her in her embrace.
"This is Sheba--little Sheba that I have told you so often about,Peter," she cried. "Glory be, I'm glad to see you, child." And Dianekissed her again warmly. "You two met on the boat, of course, comingin, I hope you didn't let her get lonesome, Gordon. Look after Sheba'ssuitcases, Peter. You'll come to dinner to-night, Gordon--at seven."
"I'm in the kind hands of my countrywoman," laughed Gordon. "I'llcertainly be on hand."
"But what in the world are you doing here? You're the last man I'd haveexpected to see."
"I'm in the service of the Government, and I've been sent in onbusiness."
"Well, I'm going to say something original, dear people," Mrs. Pagetreplied. "It's a small world, isn't it?"
While he was dressing for dinner later in the day, Elliot recalledearly memories of the Pagets. He had known Diane ever since they hadbeen youngsters together at school. He remembered her as a restless,wiry little thing, keen as a knife-blade. She had developed into a verypretty girl, alive, ambitious, energetic, with a shrewd eye to the mainchance. Always popular socially, she had surprised everybody by refusingthe catch of the town to marry a young mining engineer without a penny.Gordon was in college at the time, but during the next long vacationhe had fraternized a good deal with the Peter Pagets. The youngmarried people had been very much in love with each other, but not toopreoccupied to take the college boy into their happiness as a comrade.Diane always had been a manager, and she liked playing older sisterto so nice a lad. He had been on a footing friendly enough to drop inunannounced whenever he took the fancy. If they were out, or about to goout, the freedom of the den, a magazine, and good tobacco had been his.Then the Arctic gold-fields had claimed Paget and his bride. That hadbeen more than ten years ago, and until to-day Gordon had not seen themsince.
While Elliot was brushing his dinner coat before the open window of theroom assigned him at the hotel, somebody came out to the porch below.The voice of a woman floated faintly to him.
"Seen Diane's Irish beauty yet, Ned?"
"Yes," a man answered.
The woman laughed softly. "Mrs. Mallory came up on the same boat withher." The inflection suggested that the words were meant not to tell afact, but some less obvious inference.
"Oh, you women!" the man commented good-naturedly.
"She's wonderfully pretty, and of course Diane will make the most ofher. But Mrs. Mallory is a woman among ten thousand."
"I'd choose the girl if it were me," said the man.
"But it isn't you. We'll see what we'll see."
They were moving up the street and Gordon heard no more. What he hadheard was not clear to him. Why should any importance attach to the factthat Mrs. Mallory and Sheba O'Neill had come up the river on the sameboat? Yet he was vaguely disturbed by the insinuation that in some wayDiane was entering her cousin as a rival of the older woman. He resentedthe idea that the fine, young personality of the Irish girl was beingcheapened by management on the part of Diane Paget.
Elliot was not the only dinner guest at the Paget home that evening. Hefound Colby Macdonald sitting in the living-room with Sheba. She camequickly forward to meet the newly arrived guest.
"Mr. Macdonald has been telling me about my father. He knew him onFrenchman Creek where they both worked claims," explained the girl.
The big mining man made no comment and added nothing to what she said.There were times when his face was about as expressive as a stone wall.Except for a hard wariness in the eyes it told nothing now.
The dinner went off very well. Diane and Peter had a great manyquestions to ask Gordon about old friends. By the time these had beenanswered Macdonald was chatting easily with Sheba. The man had been inmany out-of-the-way corners of the world, had taken part in much thatwas dramatic and interesting. If the experience of the Irish girl hadbeen small, her imagination had none the less gone questing beyond thenarrow bars of her life upon amazing adventure. She listened withglowing eyes to the strange tales this man of magnificent horizo
ns hadto tell. Never before had she come into contact with any one like him.
The others too succumbed to his charm. He dominated that littledining-room because he was a sixty-horse-power dynamo. For all his bulkhe was as lean as a panther and as sinewy. There was virility in thevery economy of his motions, in the reticence of his speech. Not evena fool could have read weakness there. When he followed Sheba into theliving-room, power trod in his long, easy stride.
Paget was superintendent of the Lucky Strike, a mine owned principallyby Macdonald. The two talked business for a few minutes over theircigars, but Diane interrupted gayly to bring them back into the circle.Adroitly she started Macdonald on the account of a rescue of two menlost in a blizzard the year before. He had the gift of dramatizing hisstory, of selecting only effective details. There was no suggestion ofboasting. If he happened to be the hero of any of his stories the factwas of no importance to him. It was merely a detail of the picture hewas sketching.
Gordon interrupted with a question a story he was telling of a fight hehad seen between two bull moose.
"Did you say that was while you were on the way over to inspect theKamatlah coal-fields for the first time?"
The eyes of the young man were quick with interest.
"Yes."
"Four years ago last spring?"
Macdonald looked at him with a wary steadiness. Some doubt had foundlodgment in his mind. Before he could voice it, if, indeed, he had anysuch intention, Elliot broke in swiftly,--
"Don't answer that question. I asked it without proper thought. I am aspecial agent of the General Land Office sent up to investigate theMacdonald coal claims and kindred interests."
Slowly the rigor of the big Scotchman's steely eyes relaxed to a smilethat was genial and disarming. If this news hit him hard he gave no signof it. And that it was an unexpected blow there could be no doubt.
"Glad you've come, Mr. Elliot. We ask nothing but fair play. Tell thetruth, and we'll thank you. The men who own the Macdonald group ofclaims have nothing to conceal. I'll answer that question. I meant tosay two years ago last spring."
His voice was easy and his gaze unwavering as he made the correction,yet everybody in the room except Sheba knew he was deliberately lyingto cover the slip. For the admission that he had inspected the Kamatlahfield just before his dummies had filed upon it would at least tend toaggravate suspicion that the entries were not _bona-fide_.
It was rather an awkward moment. Diane blamed herself because she hadbrought the men together socially. Why had she not asked Gordon moreexplicitly what his business was? Peter grinned a little uncomfortably.It was Sheba who quite unconsciously relieved the situation.
"But what about the big moose, Mr. Macdonald? What did it do then?"
The Alaskan went back to his story. He was talking for Sheba alone,for the young girl with eager, fascinated eyes which flashed withsympathy as they devoured selected glimpses of his wild, turbulentcareer. Her clean, brave spirit was throwing a glamour over the man.She saw him with other eyes than Elliot's. The Government officialadmired him tremendously. Macdonald was an empire-builder. He blazedtrails for others to follow in safety. But Gordon could guess howcallously his path was strewn with brutality, with the effects of anethical color-blindness largely selfish, though even he did not knowthat the man's primitive jungle code of wolf eat wolf had played havocwith Sheba's young life many years before.
Diane, satisfied that Macdonald had scored, called upon Sheba.
"I want you to sing for us, dear, if you will."
Sheba accompanied herself. The voice of the girl had no unusual range,but it was singularly sweet and full of the poignant feeling thatexpresses the haunting pathos of her race.
"It's well I know ye, Sheve Cross, ye weary, stony hill, An' I'm tired, och, I'm tired to be looking on ye still. For here I live the near side an' he is on the far, An' all your heights and hollows are between us, so they are. Och anee!"
Gordon, as he listened, felt the strange hunger of that homesick crysteal through his blood. He saw his own emotions reflected in the faceof the Scotch-Canadian, who was watching with a tense interest the slim,young figure at the piano, the girl whose eyes were soft and dewy withthe mysticism of her people, were still luminous with the poetry of thechild in spite of the years that heralded her a woman.
Elliot intercepted the triumphant sweep of Diane's glance from Macdonaldto her husband. In a flash it lit up for him the words he had heard onthe hotel porch. Diane, an inveterate matchmaker, intended her cousin tomarry Colby Macdonald. No doubt she thought she was doing a fine thingfor the girl. He was a millionaire, the biggest figure in the Northwest.His iron will ran the town and district as though the people werechattels of his. Back of him were some of the biggest financialinterests in the United States.
But the gorge of Elliot rose. The man, after all, was a law-breaker,a menace to civilization. He was a survivor by reason of his strengthfrom the primitive wolf-pack. Already the special agent had heard manystrange stories of how this man of steel had risen to supremacy bytrampling down lesser men with whom he had had dealings, of terriblebattles from which his lean, powerful body had emerged bloody andbattered, but victorious. The very look of his hard, gray eyes wasdominant and masterful. He would win, no matter how. It came to Gordon'srebel heart that if Macdonald wanted this lovely Irish girl,--and theyoung man never doubted that the Scotchman would want her,--he wouldreach out and gather in Sheba just as if she were a coal mine or aplacer prospect.
All this surged through the mind of the young man while the singer wason the first line of the second stanza.
"But if 't was only Sheve Cross to climb from foot to crown, I'd soon be up an' over that, I'd soon be runnin' down. Then sure the great ould sea itself is there beyont the bar, An' all the windy wathers are between us, so they are. Och anee!"
The rich, soft, young voice with its Irish brogue died away. The littleaudience paid the singer the tribute of silence. She herself was thefirst to speak.
"'Divided' is the name of it. A namesake of mine, Moira O'Neill, wroteit," she explained.
"It's a beautiful song, and I thank ye for singing it," Macdonald saidsimply. "It minds me of my own barefoot days by the Tay."
Later in the evening the two dinner guests walked back to the hoteltogether. The two subjects uppermost in the minds of both were notmentioned by either. They discussed casually the cost of living in theNorth, the raising of strawberries at Kusiak, and the best way to treatthe mosquito nuisance, but neither of them referred to the Macdonaldcoal claims or to Sheba O'Neill.
The Yukon Trail: A Tale of the North Page 7