"I might do worse."
She said it so deliberately that he could not but feel some special thing was meant, and asked quickly:
"What?"
"Well, I might be given talents of benefit to people, and fritter them away for the people's pastime. The people would never know they had lost anything, or come so near a great gain; but I, the cheat, would know it. After the lights were turned out and the curtain down on the farce, I would realize that it was too late to begin anew, but that the same lights and the same theater would have served as well for the truths of Christ as the pranks of Pantaloon—the choice lay only in the will of the worker."
Her eyes were turned away from him, as if she was seeking for metaphors in the white stretch of the snow-fall. He reached over and laid his hand on hers.
"Rachel!"
It was the only time he had called her that, and the caress of the name gave voice to the touch of his fingers.
"Rachel! What is it you are talking about? Look around here! I want to see you! Do you mean that you think of—of me like that—tell me?"
If Miss Fred could have seen them at that moment it would have done her heart good, for they really looked rather lover-like; each was unconscious of it, though their faces did not lack feeling. She drew her hand slowly away, and said, in that halting yet persistent way in which she spoke when very earnest yet not very sure of herself:
"You think me egotistical, I suppose, to criticise work that is beyond my own capabilities, but—it was you I meant."
"Well?"
His fingers closed over the arm of the chair instead of her hand. All his face was alight with feeling. Perhaps it was as well that her stubbornness kept her eyes from his; to most women they would not have been an aid to cool judgment.
"Well, there isn't anything more to say, is there?" she asked, smiling a little out at the snow. "It was the book that did it—made me feel like that about you; that your work is—well, surface work—skimmed over for pastime. But here and there are touches that show how much deeper and stronger the work you might produce if you were not either lazy or careless."
"You give one heroic treatment, and can be merciless. The story was written some time ago, and written under circumstances that—well, you see I do not sign my name to it, so I can't be very proud of it."
"Ah! that is it? Your judgment, I believe, is too good to be satisfied with it; I shouldn't waste breath speaking, if I was not sure of that. But you have the right to do work you can be proud of; and that is what you must do."
Rachel's way was such a decided way, that people generally accepted her "musts" as a matter of course. Stuart did the same, though evidently unused to the term; and her cool practicalities that were so surely noting his work, not himself, had the effect of checking that first impulse of his to touch her—to make her look at him. He felt more than ever that the girl was strange and changeable—not only in herself, but in her influence. He arose and walked across the floor a couple of times, but came back and stood beside her.
"You think I am not ambitious enough; and you are right, I suppose. I have never yet made up my mind whether it was worth my while to write, or whether it might not be more wise to spare the public."
"But you have the desire—you must feel confidence at times."
"How do you know or imagine so much of what I feel?"
"I read it in that book," and she nodded toward the table. "In it you seem so often just on the point of saying or doing, through the people, things that would lift that piece of work into a strong moral lesson; but just when you reach that point you drop it undeveloped."
"You have read and measured it, haven't you?" and he sat down again beside her. "I never thought of—of what you mention in it. A high moral lesson," he repeated; "but to preach those a man should feel himself fit; I am not."
"I don't believe you!"
"What do you know about it?" he demanded so sharply that she smiled; it was so unlike him. But the sharpness was evidently not irritation, for his face had in it more of sadness than any other feeling; she saw it, and did not speak.
After a little he turned to her with that rare impetuosity that was so expressive.
"You are very helpful to me in what you have said; I think you are that to everyone—it seems so. Perhaps you are without work of your own in the world, that you may have thought for others who need help; that is the highest of duties, and it needs strong, good hearts. But do you understand that it is as hard sometimes to be thought too highly of as to be accused wrong-fully? It makes one feel such a cheat—such a cursed liar!"
"I rather think we are all cheats, more or less, in that respect," she answered. "I am quite sure the inner workings of my most sacred thought could not be advertised without causing my exile from the bosom of my family; yet I refuse to think myself more wicked than the rest of humanity."
"Don't jest!"
"Really, I am not jesting," she answered. "And I believe you are over-sensitive as to your own short-comings, whatever they happen to be. Because I have faith in your ability to do strong work, don't think I am going to skirmish around for a pedestal, or think I've found a piece of perfection in human nature, because they're not to be found, my friend."
"How old are you?" he asked her suddenly.
She laughed, feeling so clearly the tenor of his thought.
"Twenty-two by my birthdays, but old enough to know that the strongest workers in the world have not been always the most immaculate. What matter the sort of person one has been, or the life one has lived if he come out of it with knowledge and the wish to use it well? You have a certain power that is yours, to use for good or bad, and from a fancy that you should not teach or preach, you let it go to waste. Don't magnify peccadillos!"
"You seem to take for granted the fact that all my acts have been trifling—that only the promises are worthy," he said impatiently.
"I do believe," she answered smiling brightly, "that you would rather I thought you an altogether wicked person than an average trifler. But I will not—I do not believe it possible for you deliberately to do any wicked thing; you have too tender a heart, and—"
"You don't know anything about it!" he repeated vehemently. "What difference whether an act is deliberate or careless, so long as the effect is evil? I tell you the greater part of the suffering in the world is caused not by wicked intents and hard hearts, but by the careless desire to shirk unpleasant facts, and the soft-heartedness that will assuage momentary pain at the price of making a life-long cripple, either mentally, morally, or physically. Nine times out of ten the man whom we call soft-hearted is only a moral coward. Ah, don't help me to think of that; I think of it enough—enough!"
He brought his clenched hand down on the arm of the chair with an emphasis that was heightened by the knitted brow and compressed lips. He did not look at her. The latter part of the rapid speech seemed more to himself than to her. At least it admitted of no answer; the manner as much as the words kept her silent.
"Come! come!" he added, after a little, as if to arouse himself as well as her. "You began by giving me some good words of advice and suggestion; I must not repay you by dropping into the blues. For a long time I've been a piece of drift-wood, with nothing to anchor ambition to; but a change is coming, I think, and—and if it brings me fair weather, I may have something then to work for; then I may be worth your belief in me—I am not now. My intentions to be so are all right, but they are not always to be trusted. I said, before, that you had the faculty of making people speak the truth to you, if they spoke at all, and I rather think I am proving my words."
He arose and stood looking down at her. Since he had found so many words, she had seemed to lose hers; anyway, she was silent.
"It can't be very pleasant for you," he said at last, "to be bored by the affairs of every renegade to whom you are kind, because of some fancied good you may see in him; but you are turning out just the sort of woman I used to fancy you might be—and—I am grateful to you."<
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"That's all right," she answered in the old brusque way. To tell the truth, a part of his speech was scarcely heard. Something in the whole affair—the confidence and personal interest, and all—had taken her memory back to the days of that cultus corrie, when another man had shared with her scenes somewhat similar to this. Was there a sort of fate that had set her apart for this sort of thing? She smiled a little grimly at the fancy, and scarcely heard him. He saw the ghost of a smile, and it made him check himself in something he was about to say, and walk toward the door.
She neither spoke nor moved; her face was still toward the window. Turning to look at her, his indecision disappeared, and in three steps he was beside her.
"Rachel, I want to speak to you of something else," he said rapidly, almost eagerly, as if anxious to have it said and done with; "I—I want to tell you what that anchor is I've been looking for, and without which I never will be able to do the higher class of work, and—and—"
"Yes?"
He had stopped, making a rather awkward pause after his eager beginning. With the one encouraging word, she looked up at him and waited.
"It is a woman."
"Not an unusual anchor for mankind," she remarked with a little laugh.
But there was no answering smile in his eyes; they were very serious.
"I never will be much good to myself, or the rest of the world, until I find her again," he said, "though no one's words are likely to help me more than yours. You would make one ambitious if he dared be and—"
"Never mind about that," she said kindly. "I am glad if it has happened so. And this girl—it is someone you—love?"
"I can't talk to anyone of her—yet," he answered, avoiding her eyes; "only I wanted you to understand—it is at least a little step toward that level where you fancy I may belong. Don't speak of it again; I can hardly say what impelled me to tell you now. Yes, it is a woman I cared for, and who was—lost—whom I lost—long ago."
A moment later she was alone, and could hear his step in the outer room, then on the porch. Fred called after him, but he made no halt—did not even answer, much to the surprise of that young lady and Miss Margaret.
The other girl sat watching him until he disappeared in the stables, and a little later saw him emerge and ride at no slow gait out over the trail toward camp.
"It only needed that finale," she soliloquized, "to complete the picture. Woman! woman! What a disturbing element you are in the universe—man's universe!"
After this bit of trite philosophy, the smile developed into a noiseless laugh that had something of irony in it.
"I rather think Talapa's entrance was more dramatic," was one of the reflections that kept her company; "anyway, she was more picturesque, if less elegant, than Mrs. Stuart is likely to be. Mrs. Stuart! By the way, I wonder if it is Mrs. Stuart? Yes, I suppose so—yet, 'a woman whom I cared for, and who was lost—long ago!'—Lost? lost?"
* * *
CHAPTER VIII.
"I'LL KILL HIM THIS TIME!"
Rumors were beginning to drift into camp of hostile intents of the Blackfeet; and a general feeling of uneasiness became apparent as no word came from the chief of their scouts, who had not shown up since locating the troops.
The Major's interest was decidedly alive in regard to him, since not a messenger entered camp from any direction who was not questioned on the subject. But from none of them came any word of Genesee.
Other scouts were there—good men, too, and in the southern country of much value; but the Kootenai corner of the State was almost an unknown region to them. They were all right to work under orders; but in those hills, where everything was in favor of the native, a man was needed who knew every gully and every point of vantage, as well as the probable hostile.
While Major Dreyer fretted and fumed over the absentee, there was more than one of the men in camp to remember that their chief scout was said to be a squaw man; and as most of them shared his own expressed idea of that class, conjectures were set afloat as to the probability of his not coming back at all, or if it came to a question of fighting with the northern Indians, whether he might not be found on the other side.
"You can't bet any money on a squaw man," was the decision of one of the scouts from over in Idaho—one who did not happen to be a squaw man himself, because the wife of his nearest neighbor at home objected. "No, gentlemen, they're a risky lot. This one is a good man; I allow that—a damned good man, I may say, and a fighter from away back; but the thing we have to consider is that up this way he's with his own people, as you may say, having taken a squaw wife and been adopted into the tribe; an' I tell you, sirs, it's jest as reasonable that he will go with them as against them—I'm a tellin' you!"
Few of these rumors were heard at the ranch. It was an understood thing among the men that the young ladies at Hardy's were to hear nothing of camp affairs that was likely to beget alarm; but Stuart heard them, as did the rest of the men; and like them, he tried to question the only one in camp who shared suspicion—Kalitan. But Kalitan was unapproachable in English, and even in Chinook would condescend no information. He doubtless had none to give, but the impression of suppressed knowledge that he managed to convey made him an object of close attention, and any attempt to leave camp would have been hailed as proof positive of many intangible suspicions. He made no such attempt. On the contrary, after his arrival there from the Gros Ventres, he seemed blissfully content to live all winter on Government rations and do nothing. But he was not blind by any means and understanding English, though he would not speak it, the chances were that he knew more of the thought of the camp than it guessed of his; and his stubborn resentment showed itself when three Kootenai braves slouched into camp one day, and Kalitan was not allowed to speak to them save in the presence of an interpreter, and when one offered in the person of a white scout, Kalitan looked at him with unutterable disdain, and turning his back, said not a word.
The Major was not at camp. He had just left to pay his daily visit to Hardy's; for, despite all persuasions, he refused to live anywhere but with his men, and if Fred did not come to see him in the morning, he was in duty bound to ride over to her quarters in the afternoon.
The officer in command during his absence was a Captain Holt, a man who had no use for an Indian in any capacity, and whose only idea of settling the vexed question of their rights was by total extermination and grave-room—an opinion that is expressed by many a white man who has had to deal with them. But he was divided between his impulse to send the trio on a double-quick about their business and the doubt as to what effect it would have on the tribe if they were sent back to it in the sulks. Ordinarily he would not have given their state of mind a moment's consideration; but the situation was not exactly ordinary, and he hesitated.
After stowing away enough provender in their stomachs to last an ordinary individual two days, and stowing the remainder in convenient receptacles about their draperies, intercourse was resumed with their white hosts by the suggestive Kalitan.
Just then Stuart and Rachel rode into camp. They had taken to riding together into camp, and out of camp, and in a good many directions of late; and in the coffee-colored trio she at once recognized the brave of the bear-claws whom she had spoken with during that "olallie" season in the western hills, and who she had learned since was a great friend of Genesee's. She spoke to him at once—a great deal more intelligibly than her first attempt—and upon questioning, learned that she was well remembered. She heard herself called "the squaw who rides" by him, probably from the fact that she was the only white woman met by their hunters in the hills, though she had not imagined herself so well known by them as his words implied.
He of the bear-claws—their spokesman—mentioned Kalitan, giving her for the first time an idea of what had occurred. She turned at once to Captain Holt—not protesting, but interested—and learned all she wanted to.
"Kalitan does not like your southern scouts, for some reason," she said, "and I rather think i
t was his dignity rather than his loyalty that would suffer from having one of them a listener. Let them speak in my presence; I can understand them, and not arouse Kalitan's pride, either."
The Captain, nothing loath, accepted her guidance out of the dilemma, though it was only by a good deal of flattery on her part that Kalitan could at all forget his anger enough to speak to anyone.
The conversation was, after all, commonplace enough, as it was mostly a recital of his—Kalitan's—glories; for in the eyes of these provincials he posed as a warrior of travel and accumulated knowledge. The impassive faces of his listeners gave no sign as to whether they took him at his own valuation or not. Rachel now and then added a word, to keep from having too entirely the appearance of a listener, and she asked about Genesee.
The answer gave her to understand that weeks ago—five weeks—Genesee had been in their village; asked for a runner to go south to the Fort with talking-paper. Had bought pack-horse and provisions, and started alone to the northeast—may be Blackfoot Agency, they could not say; had seen him no more. Kalitan made some rapid estimate of probabilities that found voice in—
"Blackfoot—one hundred and twenty miles; go slow—Mowitza tired; long wau-wau (talk); come slow—snows high; come soon now, may be."
That was really the only bit of information in the entire "wau-wau" that was of interest to the camp—information that Kalitan would have disdained to satisfy them with willingly; and even to Rachel, whom he knew was Genesee's friend, and his, he did not hint the distrust that had grown among the troops through that suspicious absence.
He would talk long and boastfully of his own affairs, but it was a habit that contrasted strangely with the stubborn silence by which he guarded the affairs of others.
"What is the matter back there?" asked Rachel, as she and Stuart started back to the ranch. "Ill-feeling?"
"Oh, I guess not much," he answered; "only they are growing careful of the Indians of late—afraid of them imposing on good nature, I suppose."
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