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The World is Yours

Chapter Four

page 85

Chapter Four

'The hot weeks went by upon the Kanana as summer in the Yukon always goes. All day and far into the night the sun stood in a brassy sky, and under it the men cut and rafted lumber for the wood-piles, painted walls, patched roofs, and cut and dried the water-hay for the winter-feed of their few animals. Under it white women and Indian women were out on the hills, gathering berries—blueberries, raspberries, cranberries, saskatoons—to preserve them for the winter-feed of their men. On all the bars miners dug in the silt and washed out by cradles, looking anxiously to make the winter's grubstake. Bears came lower on the flanks of Tall Thing after the scarlet soap-berries. Fox, lynx and coyote went higher, and in the evenings moose or caribou sometimes swam the river, shouldering gleaming silver lines on the level violet flood.

The quiet men who passed up and down always left something for Tamsin. Blueberries, skinned ducks ready for the oven, flowers tied in clumsy bunches, a little brown bear-skin, pale nuggets of placer-gold, and silken cushions worked painfully in patterns learned in hospitals overseas. Only Kirk brought her nothing, and she did not want it. By now she knew that himself was enough, but what he knew she could not guess. Nor did he know himself. Sometimes he felt that through Tamsin he was receiving more than he could hold from this mysterious universe which surrounds us like a skin and of which we know no more than our bones know of our skin until we happen to sustain a compound fracture. Kirk occasionally believed that he must have suffered just that on the Kluane. Some bone of his spirit smashed by that shock had there pierced through the invisible skin, destroying the mystery, teaching him more than he ought to know.

He could not rest away from Tamsin, and yet he thought often of that dark girl, Dierdre, with her lean-hipped body page 86sliding round corners and her slant eyes below brows black and narrow as waxed thread. He thought of Ooket's soft bunched fingers and her secret knowledge of men that is the heritage of a race of slaves. And he thought of other girls …

"I could never be faithful to any one," he thought, "and I ought to get right out of here at once. Tamsin is a darn sight too good for this."

But he did not go.

He protested against Tamsin taking her learning from that old Doctor O'Kane up at Aroya.

"Aw! He's no doctor. I got my ears full of him all over the North. An English Army surgeon or somethin' with no legal right to practise in Canada. Lived down on the Lower Yukon before the Klondike was thought of, and stuck up a board with Doctor on it in a sand-bank. Miners and that came five hundred mile to have him cure them of scurvy or op'rate on them. He had the cheek to do it, too. Must have made his pile a dozen times."

"What has he done with it since you know so much?" demanded Tamsin.

"Aw!" He gave her a quick look, walking beside her through the moonlight town. "I dunno. Spent it. Gave it to some woman to hang around her neck, I guess. That's what we all do."

"Yes. And don't care when the weight of it breaks her back," said Tamsin, sharply. Kirk was troubling the calm waters of her soul with his sayings in these days. A volcano in him, she felt, that any moment might rise and overwhelm her. Her pulses throbbed like the Indian drum beaten outside Tommy Tom's shack as they passed the Indian village, reached the landing shadowed by the smudgy petuna-purple light, and climbed into MacDonald's launch.

MacDonald never let Tamsin make the ten-mile trip up the Kanana and Lone Lake to Aroya alone; but since Kirk came page 87he had taken the place of Dick Dan, the Indian boy who usually ran the motor, and in spite of Aggie's protests that "Tamsin's jest stringin' you like she does all the fellers," he kept it. He knew well enough what Tamsin's honest eyes were telling him now.

He set the motor going, and the little launch ran swiftly through the sedges that grew in a night and bloomed in a day to the open river where reflections of the great sky and hills came down in strong deep colours until the launch seemed to be penetrating monstrous caverns underground.

Underground caverns of a man's mind, thought Kirk, leading him the devil knew where. He squatted in the middle of the boat, watching Tamsin at the tiller. She sang softly:

"Once I was part of the music I heard
On the boughs, or sweet between earth and sky,
For joy of the beating of wings on high
My heart shot into the breast of a bird."

He looked at her with speculative eyes. There was that in her, but there was also the woman who could—maybe would —give everything to the death. She was not yet conscious of that, but nearing it, he thought; fiddling with the motor; hearing through the far-stretched stillness the faint crashings of moose or bear plunging down some run-way to drink; feeling the long cool wash of air about him after the terrible heat of the day.

They talked little, for the hush of the great world bound them: Kirk into uneasy definace, Tamsin into communion with it. The sun was low, but it would do no more than hide for a half-hour behind Tall Thing at this midsummer, and a silver moon already walked in the blue of the sky. The boat ran up on the beach beside Dead Aroya. Dark buildings sagging already stood up along the foreshore, tangled already in quick-growing scrub. Ghostly houses glimmered behind. Echoes went with them over the silent boardwalks among the page 88shacks and torn tents, frame-houses and tall shells of empty-eyed hotels smothering now in weeds and creepers as they smothered in snow throughout the stark winters. Tamsin said:

"Feyther and I were here when the boom broke, you know, and we prefaired to stay through the winter. Anyhow, the prices the boats were charging for a passage just before the ice came was ridiculous. People had to go just with what they stood up in—and standing it was, too, wi' the boats packed like herrings. A few came back in spring for their gatherings, but most just had to cut their losses."

Kirk nodded. It was the same all over the North when a gold-boom broke and the speculators Outside refused to put up more money. He walked among the litter which winds had swept back and forth down the desolate ways and thought that in this pallid light which would not get any darker Aroya was worse than the lonely Dawson Trail.

"I missed the folk that winter," said Tamsin. "But I went around and shut all doors and windows against the squirrels and wolverines. O'Kane's opened them since. He's slept in every house by now, I guess. Last time I came he was here, in Miron's store."

She went into a room where a butcher's cleaver lay on the counter and hooks rusty-red from the meat that had once hung there crossed a beam above. Rats had gnawed where the blood had dripped and nested under the counter. The place, even when Tamsin called up the rickety stair, was silent as the grave.

They went on down the half-stumped streets where pink foam of roses and saffron froth of rock-cistus pushed among the granite out-crops. From the scrub either side half-submerged dwellings peered under sagging brows.

"Guess they'll talk of us when we're gone," said Kirk, uneasy in the grey shadows. Tamsin laughed. Her imagination found the glories of the world, not the horrors.

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"O'Kane says he hears 'em. He says he hears the drunken ghosts go shouting down the streets at night on their ways home from the hotels."

"He would." Kirk went up broken steps to the platform of the Golden North Hotel whose unbroken windows stared at them coldly. "Let's look around here a piece."

Tamsin opened a door and went into the restaurant with all the delight of a showman. A faint swirl of leaves and papers rose on the bare floor and fell again. A pack-rat ran up the wall, paused with bushy tail hanging to blink bright eyes at the two in the door, and dipped off through a hole. On the bar stood glasses and bottles, a cork-screw pinning down a sheaf of discoloured bills, a man's hat with the crown eaten away. On the covered tables along the walls were brown stains as though food had been spilt when the diners left suddenly. Some animal, probably a wolverine, had dragged the cloth from one table and made havoc of the heap on the floor. Kirk fancied the savage triangle-headed brute crunching glass and cutlery here in the dark in mockery of man's dominion. The place was dead as a place can only be where man has once been alive.

"The Indians won't come in Aroya. They think it's haunted," said Tamsin, going through to the corridor. "Mrs. Berry used to make me tea in this wee room, and I guess all the lads that ever came through gave her their pictures. And just look at 'em now."

The small half-stripped room where she stood was strewn with nibbled books, photographs, music, torn curtain-strips, children's toys, the bones of a silk umbrella. Tamsin picked up a faded carte-de-visite.

"My. He was a lad," she said, reflectively. "I wonder what happened him."

To Tamsin, whose spirit never really lost touch with those high gods on the hills of dawn, there was nothing here but the ordinary law of change. Summer goes and Fall comes. Fall page 90goes and winter comes, and so it is with the people of the North. She went singing up the bare stair presently, but Kirk stood still. His more developed knowledge of life felt here a most terrible atmosphere of warning. The whole town, he felt, was repressed into a submission that was not resignation, a silence that was not peace, just as man is repressed and conquered by life.

His quick blood rebelled at that oblivion which must sweep over him and all mankind. He almost ran up the echoing stairs, seeking Tamsin. Along the upper corridor he glanced into rooms where tattered coats still hung on nails and squirrels had nested in the straw mattresses, and women's gear was half-spilled from the open drawers. By a window Tamsin stood, rolling a blue faded ribbon in her fingers. In the grey light she seemed already a ghost. Her blue dress, losing colour, blurred her outlines. She seemed remote, escaping him. With an impulse that was almost fear he went forward and caught her in his arms.

Momentarily she submitted, with a soft little sigh. Then, as passion roused in him, he held her roughly, raining kisses on her face. She fought him then, cried out, and he laughed, gripping her tight.

"Did you call me, Miss Tamsin?" asked a voice from the door; and Kirk loosed her, seeing a man stand there: a small spare man with a curiously courtly manner and red-rimmed eyes either side a thin veined nose. He pulled at his long grey moustache with a thin veined hand, looking at man and girl with a cool cynical appraisement.

Tamsin, pushing back her hair, stammered out something. Kirk believed that she introduced him to Doctor O'Kane. "I … I want to ask you what I can do for auld Sophia, Doc. Kirk, will you go down and start up the motor? I'll be right along."

"Would you like me to return with you, Miss Tamsin?" said the man in that same cool courtly voice.

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"No, and be damned to you!" shouted Kirk. He ran down the stair and out into the night. In a land where women are few and well-regarded he had behaved like a brute, and that this polished and sardonic old gentleman should know it was not the least of his misery. Girls for amusement he had found in plenty, but Tamsin was another matter, and her submission, her soft little sigh, frightened him now he thought of it. She had been ready to give love and had found only passion. What would she do to him for that?

As he went down the ghostly ways the spirits of men such as he stepped from their empty dwellings and stood in a hushed phalanx to watch him pass; weak foolish hot-blooded men, like all of us, and, like all of us, capable of divine moments. Heavily he got into the launch and set it chugging, but its puny voice in this great silence pouring endlessly over half a world made him shudder. A puff of fragrance blew warm against his lips, and he remembered Tamsin's lips and shuddered again.

Tamsin came down through the dark buildings with O'Kane, and Kirk set his teeth. If she brought that man along as protector he felt that his soul was for ever damned. But she sent the tow-rope spinning into the boat, and followed it alone, crying good-night to O'Kane as she settled down to steer.

O'Kane called after them, a dim grey ghost in the ghostly town.

"A peaceful voyage," he said; and Kirk heard faint mocking laughter that seemed to come from the empty streets as the boat shot away.

Both sat silent as the night world slid by; an enchanted primeval world that heard God's voice when first He called it out of chaos and has remained indifferent to other voices since. Rocks and broken timber lay on the barren foreshores like the cast-away weapons of giants dead long ago. Up on the hill-sides the stunted trees were primeval: pinched-pointed little Yukon spruce; jumper that creeps on the ground page 92with the scrub-willow; spindling saskatoon near as high as the dwarf poplars; writhen skeletons of larger trees dead in past fires. Pallid evening stood among them with haunted eyes.

So Kirk saw it: saw shadows move like panthers across the slope to squat darkly in his heart. But Tamsin saw them through her own clear eyes, and welcomed them as the blessed realities that arbitrate between man and his Maker. "Eh, mountains, rivers an' trees; they're what one needs to hang on to," she thought, trying to quiet the tumult in her heart.

They passed the Asulkum, that old two-decker slain in its last struggle to reach the dying Aroya and long since shot by outgoing ice floes up the bank and in amongst the scrub to become the nesting-place of the little furtive creatures of the wild. Many such Kirk had seen on the Yukon rivers, and he and Tamsin passed her indifferently, not knowing what she was going to mean to them one day. Not until they opened the home stretch with Knife shining pale across the pale water did Kirk speak.

"It was … just a moment's …"

"Dinna speak of it again."

Her voice was more Scotch, as always when she was moved. Kirk knew that he should leave it there, but, insatiable collector of emotions as he was, he could not. He came to her side.

"You are very mad with me, Tamsin?"

"Eh, forget it, lad." She drew back, wincing, as though he touched something too sacred. "And don't do it again, for I'm a fair deil when I am mad."

"Tamsin, I've always respected you above …"

"Damn it all! What kind o' handling do the girls you don't respect get, then? Stop that motor, you fool, or we'll be into the bank."

She sprang out before they touched the bank and was speeding up the shadowed street to her home where MacDonald, who slept early and log-heavy did not hear her come page 93in. But Aggie Colom heard the launch, and prodded Mat awake.

"What did I tell yer o' yer precious Tamsin? Keeping Kirk outer his bed till near midnight! That's the sort she is."

"Tiger, tiger, burnin' bright," murmured Mat, and slept again.

Stewart also had heard the launch and did not sleep after. Night is the usual time for Northern picnics and outings, the summer days being too hot and filled with hurrying labour. But those two had gone alone. He wondered if Challis would speak of it as he drew his chair up noisily to the breakfast-table to summon Miss Tinney who presently flapped in, her horseface shining and a row of little dishes like roosting birds down her arm.

"Shredded wheat, fish and chips … there's fresh waffles berries …" She dealt them out rapidly. "Ever git Tamsin MacDonald to make you sourdough biscuit, Mr. Stewart? She got that old sourdough box her mother used at the Klondyke in their kitchen right now."

"She made me one," said Challis. "I couldn't eat it."

"You're chechako. It had a right to indigestion you. Coffee …"

"I'm no chechako now," said Challis, slightly annoyed. "If only I had a chance …" He turned to Stewart. "They're sending us a description of that man who was lost on the Dawson Winter Trail in case he comes out this way," he said. "Not much hope of it, I should think."

"Yes?" Stewart would not allow his sudden eagerness. "Perhaps you might let me see it? Just in case you were away and he passed through."

"Well. No harm in that, I suppose. He wore big brass earrings, like so many foreign sailors…."

Challis spread the paper, and Stewart took notes. He thought of Kirk Regard, and yet it gave him a start when Challis named him.

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"I'm going to Aroya this afternoon with Regard. An Indian fishing-camp has settled in just below. Want to come?"

"Can't, thanks. Young Blair is sick."

Stewart had rescued young Blair from spoiling himself in an Indian village and taught him how to take Morse messages. He went back now to dose him for summer colic with something recommended by Tamsin, and then sat in the door, his lean legs crossed., watching the white and brown men who passed in the bright morning. All over the world were the watchers and the passers-by, he thought: lives following lives, generations on the heels of generations; men and women with their fierce passions and tragic silences; all going on with eternal contact of the flesh and eternal isolation of the soul. Sitting there he felt he knew their travail, saw the blind and shadowed way the nations went, a multitude greater than all the pollen blown on the winds of the world. "And Tamsin among them," he thought. "Just as blind … that precious girl."

Mat Colom came to send a night-letter for Aggie. He talked of Kirk.

"I lammed the devil outer him. He wanted it, but he sure is a good boy now. I bin a bad man meself. I ha' ploughed wickedness an' reaped iniquity, though I dunno a man oughter call his wife that. But I'm strugglin' all the time, jes' as I struggled wi' Kirk." He rambled on innocently about Tamsin and Kirk on the Kluane, and when he left at last Stewart went with him to the door, and saw down on the river Chief Bill Boss's launch driving against a stiff breeze with full sails spread. Truly Indian, that, and truly representative of the lives of many men, including himself. He went back into the shadowed room with his gaunt face grim. Almost certainly old Colom had grossly exaggerated a boy's sins in order to emphasize his pride in the man he had made. Stewart was level-headed enough to know this, and to know that he did not want to know it.

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"I want to believe harm of that fellow," he told himself. "It's natural I should, for he's going to take Tamsin from me." And then he laughed harshly, realizing that he had never had her.

Probably Kirk would not have gone with Challis if Tamsin had not been gentler than usual that morning. They picked berries with the Sheridans and the whole Jackson family on the flanks of Tall Thing where Sheridan set his bear-traps among the vermilion soap-berries which quarrel with the stomachs of all but bears and Indian children. In the blue-grass a stray cock-grouse was dramming to his mate, late in the season although it was. A very loving or a very undespairing bird. One who tried to make the lady happy. Kirk watched the brown feather contortions, the flip and flutter of spurred feet in the dust, and wondered grimly if he was as ready to abase himself before Tamsin if she wished it.

"Better not," he thought, feeling his blood suddenly leap and hurry. "I'd be tied up maybe before I knew. And then … I dunno …"

He watched Tamsin with the children about her like June bugs. There were blue butterflies, too, pale green of the upper woods, scents, vague threadings of bird-song. The right place for that big buoyant girl, here among beauty, with children about her.

If he spoke to Tamsin now he would ask her to marry him. His thought swerved suddenly to lean-hipped Dierdre with her amative eyes and stayed there.

Tamsin knelt to drink at a stream the colour of old sherry as it ran above brown stones. Swallows wove invisible incantations around her head. Her eyes were clear as the water when she walked on with him behind the others, and he knew that she was gallantly trying to put them back where they had been before last night. She began to talk tentatively of the people up here: Christian Science, chess, Free Thought: Challis's belief that a murder-case would deliver him; Aggie page 96Colom's belief in the world as a scandal-mart; Sheridan's belief that the earth is flat.

"And I have all my gods." She sketched them for him delicately. The blue river-god, lazy, splendid, communing with the clouds whose shadows came and went on his breast. The hill-gods, bluff blunt-headed old chaps in ironstone armour and patched cloaks of tough juniper and firs. The tree-gods, dark, secretive, hearing the wild cries of the night. The strong glad gods of the wind and the early morning.

"Squirrels were over the roof early, so I went out and chased them off. My, I certainly do love warm grass under my bare feet. The hills and river were still dreamin' in a wide grey ghostly light, Kirk, and there were pinky clouds around the sun. I had to kneel," her voice shook a little, "for it was like the world before man came and who was I to look at that?"

Unconsciously she was wooing the deeply-submerged god in himself, and he knew it and was afraid. Her strength he needed, but not set against his weakness. He said roughly:

"Your pet gods were there, I suppose—getting drunk on Olympus."

"Gosh!" cried Tamsin. She stopped, stamping her foot. Her eyes blazed. "Talking to you is like tearing off sticking-plaster that's been on a week. Quit off wi' you, my lad. You gar me grue."

"I'm sorry," he began, instantly penitent.

"Dom your sorry! Quit off!"

He went, raising his cap elaborately. She followed, sobbing in her throat, clenching her hands. She knew the Kirk of old, with his hot sudden malice and generous regrets, and she guessed that it was himself he was scourging now. But because she knew now that the boy she had loved was become the man whom she would for ever love she was bewildered, uncertain. And her peaceful world had been less secure since Kirk came.

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Among the pink pipsissima-flowers Tamsin went on her knees, on her face. She lay there a long time.

Aggie Colom saw her shining face as she passed, later, swinging her berry-pails, and called out:

"For the love of Mike! Who you bin carrying on with, Tamsin MacDonald?"

"Only God," said Tamsin with her clear smile.

"Mark my words," screamed Aggie after her, "you'll come to a bad end, blasphemin' that away. Mark my words!"

Tamsin neither heard nor marked them. Her soul was at peace again.

Challis took Kirk up to Aroya in Chief Bill Boss's launch, for Police on the side-stations have to hire their own locomotion. The launch was noisy, but Challis talked above it of hidden stills and forest fires.

"If I go turn the district out to help with a fire," he complained, "the bill goes into the Government and I get rowed for the expense. If I let it be and the fire wipes out a settlement I'm rowed again. Get it in the neck either way. Then it's against the law to supply Indians with drink, but I know that old rascal up at Aroya is doing it right now. They are getting it someplace, and why would he stay in that ghastly hole if he didn't have a still there?" Against the level claret-colour of the river Challis' keen young face showed almost wild. "By God, I'm fed up with this. Wish I could get a chance on that Olafssen business," he said.

Already he had questioned Kirk there, and Kirk had told the same story he had told to the Dawson Patrol. The matter no longer troubled Kirk, for, like all men who live by quickness of hand and mind, he knew that mistakes cost lives and decisions save them. He had made his decision and now must take his chance, as he did when stalking a grizzly, as he had done when going over the top in France. The vital matter was Tamsin at present, and here he could make no decisions. He knew enough about women to be aware that she loved him.

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He knew enough of himself to be aware of the difference in his own standards. His loves were fierce, short, desirous and soon over. Tamsin's would be like the hill-fires that worried Challis; running secret and hid along roots and little tendrils in the peaty soils for days, weeks, with only a wisp of smoke now and again to mark their passage until the moment came and half the hill-side was afire. He thought of Tamsin like that and was shaken, knowing that he must see it. He thought of her again, gallant, generous and happy, and knew he could never forgive himself if he did that to her. For he would fail her in the end. He knew that he must fail her. He had chased so many loves. How could he settle to one?

High on either side the hills stood bare with patches of yellow-brown scrub cast about them like the pelts of animals about giant-naked limbs. Cloud-shadows fingered them lightly, enquiringly; drifted off on the breath of some wind unfelt below. A few Indian fishing-boats spilling over with fat bodies, doubled in the river—all but the smell of them— passed slowly. A grey bleached building which had once drawn water for a mine stood against black pines with a pebble beach in front. The launch rounded a bluff and sounds came into the quiet evening. Aroya lay in its dark hollow with the torn hills behind, and on the shore a missionary was holding a service at the new Indian camp.

Challis damned the missionary, but he could not break into the service. He saw a feather of smoke on the dark hill and went after it, leaving Kirk with the launch. "These nitchies are always lighting fires and I have to put 'em out," said Challis, going off, red as his coat.

Kirk went over the thin ghosts of anemones and bronze columbines to the camp, and on the edge of it he ran into the old doctor, O'Kane, who greeted him like a friend.

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and there's his ambassador come to declare his own glory," said O'Kane.

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"Shall we attend service, Mr. Regard? I can't remember doing such a thing since I married."

He pulled his long grey moustaches, smiling at Kirk. A lingering aroma of quality and polish hung about his wreckage and he smelt of drink. Kirk wondered how he dared live up here alone. Alone in the nights when moonlight fingered into the empty eye-sockets of broken cabins, and ghosts companioned hilariously with their drunken shadows down the sounding corridors of those big shells of the taverns, or crept among the litter of the city's out-going and along the trails wide in the scrub as though the feverish feet still beat along them. He could face a grizzly any day, but he could not have faced what O'Kane must meet here day and night along with his own soul.

He stood silent, brown nervous hands thrust into the leather belt about his narrow waist and black brows drawn in a frown, and O'Kane considered dryly what this young man might be doing with Tamsin MacDonald. The possibilities which those two vigorous natures could beget between them interested him, and he had an admiration for Tamsin which curbed his tongue and sometimes his thoughts before her. The Athenians wore golden grasshoppers in their clothing to prove that they were sprung direct from Attic soil. Tamsin needed no such exotic proof. She had something of the stern terrible simplicity of the Yukon itself.

"Let us step up a bit and hear what this sky-dog is saying," he said.

Services like this were common in the Yukon where the patient missionary must follow his drifting congregations; catching here a handful of miners rocking on the river-bars, there a colony of white folk tied down by dredges and machinery into isolation, and everywhere Indians that gather and depart like the birds. Here hastily run-up drying stages where split fish were already blackening in the sun and a clutter of tarpaulins, tents and patched nets flung over the blossoming page 100roses might betoken a stay of no more than a few weeks, and the Indians gathered round the missionary at his portable harmonium were a miserable lot. Gaudy cottons and filthy rags, broken plug hats and weathered expressionless faces with all the high emprise of the early Indians gone. The missionary was singing in his strong young voice:

"Oh, that will be Glory for me,
Glory for me, Glory for me.
When by His Grace I shall look on His face,
That through the ages is Glory for me."

"Now, how much would you imagine that means to them?" said O'Kane. "And yet any priest will tell you God is not mocked. The white man has taken away the gods they made for themselves and given them a God which they can't by any possibility understand—which no one can by any possibility understand. A Parliamentary manœuvre. A circus stunt. I shall ask that fellow up to supper. You and Challis will be staying?"

The missionary—his name was Clauson—promised to come when he had christened some children, and Kirk went up with O'Kane into Aroya.

"This place will do," said O'Kane, stepping into a house. "I slept here last week and I have a larder handy. Rustle a fire in the back room, will you, Mr. Regard?"

Kirk filled rusty kettles from the river and broke over his knee wood that had once helped to build a dwelling. There was something colossal and yet horrible in this old sinner's taking a whole town for his usage; supping at the tables of other men; sleeping in rooms that were maybe their holy of holies; warming his toes at their stoves while the wind and snow went down the empty streets and homeless ghosts pressed lank faces against icy panes in the moonlight. O'Kane brought out a bottle from under a shelf.

"Part of my permit," he said. "I don't drink the rot-gut page 101that Challis says I sell to the Indians." The lines down his thin cheeks creased in a small smile. "Oh, yes. I know Challis says so. Don't you believe him?"

"Well; I guess you'd be a mutt if you didn't run a still up here."

"I think you and I are going to be friends," observed O'Kane, looking at him with those sunken red-rimmed eyes.

"Mighty nice of you. Shall I get some supper?"

He stepped to the door; raised his rifle at a couple of fool-hens sitting on a nearby balsam, and dropped them both with shock by barking the bough just beneath them. He felt a foolish youthful desire to show this courtly evil-looking old gentleman whom Tamsin liked that he could keep his end up without patronage. As he wrung their necks and proceeded to skin them O'Kane was still smiling, and Kirk knew that his bluff was seen through. By the time Challis came in, angry and smoke-dried, he was nearly as surly as Challis.

"Those damn fires, you never know when you've got 'em," he raged.

"Like sin," said O'Kane, gravely. "Tell Clauson about them. He is supping with us, Challis. No doubt you heard him conducting a service at the fishing-camp just now."

"Oh, is he, damn him," said Challis, crossly. "Well, he's not going to conduct any service over me, if I know it."

He squabbled bitterly with Clauson over supper.

"No, sir. Hanged if I believe in Mission schools. An Indian's only moral when he's down to brass tacks. Keep him busy hunting food and his squaw busy tending kids and they're decent. But give 'em English ways that spoil their hunting instincts and where are they? The boys go as deck-hands on the river-steamers and earn big money. What do they do with it? I wish I had just a part of what they waste on smokes and candy. The girls want pianos they can't play and smart shoes they can't wear and the Lord knows what beside. No Indian page 102buck ever has the money for all those frills, so the girls go to the first white man who has. Then the joke is on the Missions, I take it."

"The English race must missionize something," said O'Kane. "It's an integral part of the national make-up."

"I don't deny that Indian girls are one of the tragic problems of the North," agreed Clauson. "But I guess we must just do the best we can."

He looked troubled, filling his pipe with big scarred hands. Kirk thought of Ooket and suddenly hated what man had made of the whole Indian race. He also attacked Clauson. Indians had been fine enough in the early days. Those Indians who fought the pioneers were men, and the pioneers were stout fellows, too. Their names stood like landmarks across the country. Kirk rang those names out like gold coins. Ogilvie, Kitchen, Kennicot: Schwatka, on his clumsy raft, re-christening the wilderness by book and Bell; Alexander Campbell, who walked all the roads back to England to tell her that the Indians had burned out the first—and last—Hudson Bay Post on the edge of the Yukon …"

"But for any sake," cried Clauson. "I guess our profession was through near as early, and often with their wives, too. Bishop Bompas, Canham, Archdeacon Kirby …"

"The H.B.C. beat 'em everywhere. Their initials mean Here Before Christ," Kirk reminded him. Clauson went a little red.

"There are heroes everywhere," he cried.

"Very ordinary life-histories," suggested O'Kane.

"There are no ordinary life-histories. Each man is a saga to himself—"

"To himself. Exactly," agreed O'Kane. "In any case life is little more than a criminal waste of energy on the part of some clumsy giant Power. A misdirected waterfall."

"We can harness the waterfall and light a city," cried Clauson.

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"To illuminate our vices," assented the doctor with a little bow.

Challis moved restlessly. Disliking Clauson on principle he yet disliked this bull-baiting still more. Kirk was amused. Here were the concrete forces of Good and Evil in the persons of this sky-dog who believed in everything and this experienced old sinner who believed in nothing. Very well, then, let the best cause win. O'Kane said, softly:

"The last belief men of your temperament lose is the belief that God can't work without them."

"So you do believe in God," said Clauson on a sudden deep note.

Against the grey light Kirke saw O'Kane's moustache lift like antennae with which he was feeling for the other man's vulnerable part.

"Certainly I believe in some kind of Supreme Being. You surely don't imagine that mankind would be capable of getting the world into its present hideous state without help?"

Challis got up abruptly and went out. At home he walked to church with his Dorothy through green fields. He preferred to smoke on the foreshore now and think of her and them. Kirk sat silent on the floor, drawing sticks together with his moccasined toes which he kept prehensile as a monkey's. A man, he knew, must be supple from end to end if he would live long at the Big Game Guiding. Clauson was not supple anywhere. He hammered away in honest earnestness at O'Kane, and the doctor met him with probes and sharp stiletto. Kirk ceased to listen. In the growing dusk he saw shapes, shadows, movements, as he was apt to do when he was tired and his inner self aroused as Tamsin had roused it. Gradually drawing itself together out of nothing as it often did he began to feel what to him was the real spirit of the Yukon: the most ancient god of all gods, entrenched here in its last lonely stronghold. He fancied it squatting there in the dim dust page 104behind Clauson; an earless, eyeless, brainless lustful Thing, indestructible, relentless; the Flesh-God, whom men still secretly recognized, despite their prayers.

"God has put us here to help ourselves," said Clauson, earnestly: "The world is a bigger Co-operative Society than you think, Doctor O'Kane. Wild oats is all the Lord chooses to make of our best grain if we don't put our own mind to the business."

"Regard," said O'Kane, rising and yawning a little, "haven't you heard all that Mr. Clauson can tell us at your mother's knee? But I'll be bound you didn't hear all that I could tell you at your father's. Tarry at Jericho until your mental beard is grown, Mr. Clauson—I am sure you'll remember the Biblical reference—and we will listen to you with pleasure. May I put you up here for the night?"

Clauson got up, distressed and angry.

"Yes. I remember, Doctor O'Kane. But you've not caught and stripped and shaved me. Don't think it. Those who follow my Master will be going up and down the land long after those who follow yours are forgotten."

"I follow no masters," said O'Kane, blandly. "I have always preferred the feminine equivalent."

Kirk laughed, and the young missionary turned slow eyes on him.

"May God forgive you, Doctor O'Kane. Good-night," he said, and went out into the dark.

O'Kane, moving like an exhausted satyr, stooped to blow up the fire in the rusty stove. Even on this sultry night his thin blood could not warm him. But how hot it must have been once, Kirk thought. And that squatting Thing was still there, whetting its appetites like a knife against its hairy hide Nature; that's what it was. How can a man get away from his nature?

"Yes. I think you and I shall be good friends, Mr. Regard," said O'Kane, smiling.

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"Old beast," said Challis, as the launch slipped back to Knife through the stillness.

Kirk thought the same, but he said, perversely:

"He amuses me, I guess."

"He makes me sick at the stomach. I don't know how Miss Tamsin can stand him."

"You don't reckon he shows her what he showed us, do you?"

"She must know it's there. She's no fool."

Kirk considered this. Maybe she did. Maybe in Tamsin as in other folk there was something that could be attracted by evil; some stealthy secret ugliness of the mind. He felt the lighter and the heavier for that idea. It brought her down to him. "Well, and isn't that where I want her?" he asked himself, savagely.

The launch slipped on. Silence was complete except for the rare wild laugh of a loon on its lone crazy flight off in the shadows. Grey river and mountains held the world. The sound of an engine came suddenly. MacDonald's launch ran past with Tamsin standing at the tiller.

"A picnic. Loon Lake. Come on," she shouted, waving her hand.

Challis turned with a sigh of relief. He too wanted to get away from his thoughts. Kirk wondered if he too felt a sudden rush of clean freshness come into the night. Both men were whistling as the little launch followed the larger one crowded with people.

On the sandy beach Sheridan, Colom, MacDonald and Jackson women set out dishes and unpacked baskets, while the men went back in the woods for spring water and set light to a great tree lying out on the sand and hung kettles above the fire on stick-tripods. There was a long line of throbbing fire from end to end of the tree as they ate supper, and behind it river and mountains turned dark against the pale sky. On the far side of the fire Kirk watched Tamsin with the glow on her page 106face. She looked tremendously happy, although more quiet than usual. He screwed his flute together presently, and then they were all singing Three Blind Mice, and:

"The animals went in two by two,"
(Down the river of Jordan).
The grizzly bear and the kangaroo,
(Down the river of Jordan)."

He heard Tamsin clear and musical, leading the chorus:

"There's one more river, and that's the river of Jo-or-dan.
There's one more river. One more river to cross."

Was there only one more river for the two of them to cross,, he wondered, and what would it be? He went to her when Clementine and Pretty Redwing were done and everyone talking loudly.

"It's good to be here, Tamsin," he said, low at her ear.

She smiled, touching his hand a moment; but she did not speak, and he was content to sit by her, watching the flickering light on her round firm throat and chin, and hearing old Mat commiserating with Challis.

"Yeah, Yeah. Them hill-fires is like the fires in man, I guess. He passes from immense to immense, puttin' on po-protean changes o' form. The Great Blake says so, though I dunno was he ever in the Yukon. Fires'll be bad this year, Challis, wi' all the heat we've had, I wouldn't wonder."

MacDonald, lying his length on the sand, called out:

"Ye can putt thae fires oot wi' all the whuskey ye're fmdin' in yer secret stills, Challis." And because matters for jest are rare in the North and this jest had only been going a year everyone laughed at Challis. Mat said, seriously:

"It's man's natur' to be always huntin' something I guess. Maybe it's what we're here for. Huntin' food … an' Truth … an' experyence …"

"And fleas," added Mrs. Sheridan, making a dab at a sand-hopper.

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Raised on an elbow MacDonald looked at Mat consideringly. He never got used to wild coarse-fibred old Mat Colom of the Tinky-Tink going this road. Mat was completely honest over his search for the truth, and even the dullest people take on a certain power when they are honest. And Mat was more than honest, thought MacDonald. He was educated. No one on the Kanana, with the possible exception of Stewart, had Mat's learning. MacDonald had tried the Great Blake himself, and so he knew.

Light from the long burning body of the log struck the water into fiery gleams, but the woods behind were cowled in a dark silence. Birds slept sweetly there, passing perhaps into the unknown with barely a chirp when some roving sharp-toothed little animal brought to them death. Thinking of little round heads innocent under the feathers Tamsin saw Kirk stand before the blaze like a spirit encircled in hell-fire. She called him to her in sudden panic, and then was ashamed. It dismayed her to find how much she was thinking of Kirk, but when he sank down by her in the shadow, asking his questions, she was weak enough to confess her thought.

"If I was in hell, Tamsin," he said, holding her with his bright eyes; "what would you do? Pray me out, or wade in and grab me by the hair?"

"Both," she said. And then, hastily: "Neither." And when he laughed, with his eyes still on her, she had no more to say. She found, as she knew other women must have found, a flavour in Kirk's talk, an elemental force backing his lightest word that stirred her more than she wished to be stirred.

"Eh; there's a veery singing," she said. "A queer fall its note has. Too human to be a bird."

"Sometimes," said Kirk very softly, "I wonder if you're human enough to be a woman."

"Time to pack an' go, folks," cried Sheridan, and the picnic was over. But there would be others—plenty of them. Tamsin felt that she could not bear to leave this half-way house page 108between light and dark if she were not certain that there would be plenty more picnics.

"Have a care, my girl. You're getting mushy," she warned herself, and raced Challis along the beach to the launch like a glowing Atlanta.

Even Aggie Colom sat silent as the little beach and the dying fire and the tall trees stood quietly back into the gloom. The aromatic scent of pines accompanied them on the water. Very far up the pale sky was secretly preparing for dawn. Kirk, sitting by Tamsin, had her hand close in his. Mystery dimmed the hills….