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The Alaskan: A Novel of The North, a novel by James Oliver Curwood |
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Chapter 16 |
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_ CHAPTER XVI The physical sign of strain in Stampede's face, and the stolid effort he was making to say something which it was difficult for him to put into words, did not excite Alan as he waited for his companion's promised disclosure. Instead of suspense he felt rather a sense of anticipation and relief. What he had passed through recently had burned out of him a certain demand upon human ethics which had been almost callous in its insistence, and while he believed that something very real and very stern in the way of necessity had driven Mary Standish north, he was now anxious to be given the privilege of gripping with any force of circumstance that had turned against her. He wanted to know the truth, yet he had dreaded the moment when the girl herself must tell it to him, and the fact that Stampede had in some way discovered this truth, and was about to make disclosure of it, was a tremendous lightening of the situation. "Go on," he said at last. "What do you know about Mary Standish?" Stampede leaned over the table, a gleam of distress in his eyes. "It's rotten. I know it. A man who backslides on a woman the way I'm goin' to oughta be shot, and if it was anything else--_anything_--I'd keep it to myself. But you've got to know. And you can't understand just how rotten it is, either; you haven't ridden in a coach with her during a storm that was blowing the Pacific outa bed, an' you haven't hit the trail with her all the way from Chitina to the Range as I did. If you'd done that, Alan, you'd feel like killing a man who said anything against her." "I'm not inquiring into your personal affairs," reminded Alan. "It's your own business." "That's the trouble," protested Stampede. "It's not my business. It's yours. If I'd guessed the truth before we hit the Range, everything would have been different. I'd have rid myself of her some way. But I didn't find out what she was until this evening, when I returned Keok's music machine to their cabin. I've been trying to make up my mind what to do ever since. If she was only making her get-away from the States, a pickpocket, a coiner, somebody's bunco pigeon chased by the police--almost anything--we could forgive her. Even if she'd shot up somebody--" He made a gesture of despair. "But she didn't. She's worse than that!" He leaned a little nearer to Alan. "She's one of John Graham's tools sent up here to sneak and spy on you," he finished desperately. "I'm sorry--but I've got the proof." His hand crept over the top of the table; slowly the closed palm opened, and when he drew it back, a crumpled paper lay between them. "Found it on the floor when I took the phonograph back," he explained. "It was twisted up hard. Don't know why I unrolled it. Just chance." He waited until Alan had read the few words on the bit of paper, watching closely the slight tensing of the other's face. After a moment Alan dropped the paper, rose to his feet, and went to the window. There was no longer a light in the cabin where Mary Standish had been accepted as a guest. Stampede, too, had risen from his seat. He saw the sudden and almost imperceptible shrug of Alan's shoulders. It was Alan who spoke, after a half-mixture of silence. "Rather a missing link, isn't it? Adds up a number of things fairly well. And I'm grateful to you, Stampede. Almost--you didn't tell me." "Almost," admitted Stampede. "And I wouldn't have blamed you. She's that kind--the kind that makes you feel anything said against her is a lie. And I'm going to believe that paper is a lie--until tomorrow. Will you take a message to Tautuk and Amuk Toolik when you go out? I'm having breakfast at seven. Tell them to come to my cabin with their reports and records at eight. Later I'm going up into the foothills to look over the herds." Stampede nodded. It was a good fight on Alan's part, and it was just the way he had expected him to take the matter. It made him rather ashamed of the weakness and uncertainty to which he had confessed. Of course they could do nothing with a woman; it wasn't a shooting business--yet. But there was a debatable future, if the gist of the note on the table ran true to their unspoken analysis of it. Promise of something like that was in Alan's eyes. He opened the door. "I'll have Tautuk and Amuk Toolik here at eight. Good night, Alan!" "Good night!" Alan watched Stampede's figure until it had disappeared before he closed the door. Now that he was alone, he no longer made an effort to restrain the anxiety which the prospector's unexpected revealment had aroused in him. The other's footsteps were scarcely gone when he again had the paper in his hand. It was clearly the lower part of a letter sheet of ordinary business size and had been carelessly torn from the larger part of the page, so that nothing more than the signature and half a dozen lines of writing in a man's heavy script remained. What was left of the letter which Alan would have given much to have possessed, read as follows: "_--If you work carefully and guard your real identity in securing facts and information, we should have the entire industry in our hands within a year_." Under these words was the strong and unmistakable signature of John Graham. A score of times Alan had seen that signature, and the hatred he bore for its maker, and the desire for vengeance which had entwined itself like a fibrous plant through all his plans for the future, had made of it an unforgetable writing in his brain. Now that he held in his hand words written by his enemy, and the man who had been his father's enemy, all that he had kept away from Stampede's sharp eyes blazed in a sudden fury in his face. He dropped the paper as if it had been a thing unclean, and his hands clenched until his knuckles snapped in the stillness of the room, as he slowly faced the window through which a few moments ago he had looked in the direction of Mary Standish's cabin. So John Graham was keeping his promise, the deadly promise he had made in the one hour of his father's triumph--that hour in which the elder Holt might have rid the earth of a serpent if his hands had not revolted in the last of those terrific minutes which he as a youth had witnessed. And Mary Standish was the instrument he had chosen to work his ends! In these first minutes Alan could not find a doubt with which to fend the absoluteness of the convictions which were raging in his head, or still the tumult that was in his heart and blood. He made no pretense to deny the fact that John Graham must have written this letter to Mary Standish; inadvertently she had kept it, had finally attempted to destroy it, and Stampede, by chance, had discovered a small but convincing remnant of it. In a whirlwind of thought he pieced together things that had happened: her efforts to interest him from the beginning, the determination with which she had held to her purpose, her boldness in following him to the Range, and her apparent endeavor to work herself into his confidence--and with John Graham's signature staring at him from the table these things seemed conclusive and irrefutable evidence. The "industry" which Graham had referred to could mean only his own and Carl Lomen's, the reindeer industry which they had built up and were fighting to perpetuate, and which Graham and his beef-baron friends were combining to handicap and destroy. And in this game of destruction clever Mary Standish had come to play a part! _But why had she leaped into the sea?_ It was as if a new voice had made itself heard in Alan's brain, a voice that rose insistently over a vast tumult of things, crying out against his arguments and demanding order and reason in place of the mad convictions that possessed him. If Mary Standish's mission was to pave the way for his ruin, and if she was John Graham's agent sent for that purpose, what reason could she have had for so dramatically attempting to give the world the impression that she had ended her life at sea? Surely such an act could in no way have been related with any plot which she might have had against him! In building up this structure of her defense he made no effort to sever her relationship with John Graham; that, he knew, was impossible. The note, her actions, and many of the things she had said were links inevitably associating her with his enemy, but these same things, now that they came pressing one upon another in his memory, gave to their collusion a new significance. Was it conceivable that Mary Standish, instead of working for John Graham, was working _against_ him? Could some conflict between them have been the reason for her flight aboard the _Nome_, and was it because she discovered Rossland there--John Graham's most trusted servant--that she formed her desperate scheme of leaping into the sea? Between the two oppositions of his thought a sickening burden of what he knew to be true settled upon him. Mary Standish, even if she hated John Graham now, had at one time--and not very long ago--been an instrument of his trust; the letter he had written to her was positive proof of that. What it was that had caused a possible split between them and had inspired her flight from Seattle, and, later, her effort to bury a past under the fraud of a make-believe death, he might never learn, and just now he had no very great desire to look entirely into the whole truth of the matter. It was enough to know that of the past, and of the things that happened, she had been afraid, and it was in the desperation of this fear, with Graham's cleverest agent at her heels, that she had appealed to him in his cabin, and, failing to win him to her assistance, had taken the matter so dramatically into her own hands. And within that same hour a nearly successful attempt had been made upon Rossland's life. Of course the facts had shown that she could not have been directly responsible for his injury, but it was a haunting thing to remember as happening almost simultaneously with her disappearance into the sea. He drew away from the window and, opening the door, went out into the night. Cool breaths of air gave a crinkly rattle to the swinging paper lanterns, and he could hear the soft whipping of the flags which Mary Standish had placed over his cabin. There was something comforting in the sound, a solace to the dishevelment of nerves he had suffered, a reminder of their day in Skagway when she had walked at his side with her hand resting warmly in his arm and her eyes and face filled with the inspiration of the mountains. No matter what she was, or had been, there was something tenaciously admirable about her, a quality which had risen even above her feminine loveliness. She had proved herself not only clever; she was inspired by courage--a courage which he would have been compelled to respect even in a man like John Graham, and in this slim and fragile girl it appealed to him as a virtue to be laid up apart and aside from any of the motives which might be directing it. From the beginning it had been a bewildering part of her--a clean, swift, unhesitating courage that had leaped bounds where his own volition and judgment would have hung waveringly; that one courage in all the world--a woman's courage--which finds in the effort of its achievement no obstacle too high and no abyss too wide though death waits with outreaching arms on the other side. And, surely, where there had been all this, there must also have been some deeper and finer impulse than one of destruction, of physical gain, or of mere duty in the weaving of a human scheme. The thought and the desire to believe brought words half aloud from Alan's lips, as he looked up again at the flags beating softly above his cabin. Mary Standish was not what Stampede's discovery had proclaimed her to be; there was some mistake, a monumental stupidity of reasoning on their part, and tomorrow would reveal the littleness and the injustice of their suspicions. He tried to force the conviction upon himself, and reentering the cabin he went to bed, still telling himself that a great lie had built itself up out of nothing, and that the God of all things was good to him because Mary Standish was alive, and not dead. _ |
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