But for the bells and groan of runners, which drowned sound for them even as it did for Danvers, Helen and Rhodes were near enough to have heard Mrs. Jack's call. Interpreting the latter's warning morally, Helen had accepted Rhodes's escort as the lesser of two evils, or, if she had speculated on tentative attempts at flirtation, had not doubted her own ability to snub them.

A sudden frost, winter's last desperate clutch at the throat of spring, had hardened the sun-rotted trails; and as the cutter sped swiftly over the first mile, she chatted freely, without thought of danger. Of the three male guests, Rhodes had, as aforeseen, pestered her least, so, ignorant of the pitiless brutality masked by his reserve, she was paralyzed – almost fainted – when his arm suddenly dropped from the cutter-rail to her waist.

Recovering, she spoke sharply, "Take it away!"

Instead, he drew her tighter. She could not see his face; but as she struck, madly, blindly, at its dim whiteness, his laugh, heartless, cynical, came out of the dusk, "Kick, bite, scratch all you want, my little beauty," he said, forcing his face against hers, "your struggles are sweet as caresses."

Yet, withal his boast, he found it difficult to hold her. Twice she broke his grip and almost leaped from the sleigh; and as she fought his face away, her hand suddenly touched the reins that were looped over his arm.

In the black confusion he was unable to specify just what happened thereafter. He knew that, alarmed by the scuffling, the ponies had burst into a gallop; but, though he felt her relax, he could not see her throw all of her weight into a sudden jerk on the left rein. Ensued a heaving, tumultuous moment. Pulled from the trail, the ponies plunged into deep drift. The cutter bucked like a live thing, and as it dropped from the high trail a runner cracked with a pistol report. Simultaneously they were thrown out into deep, cold snow.

They fell clear of each other, and Helen heard Rhodes swearing as he ran to the ponies' heads. The sound spurred her to action. She could only count on a minute, and, rising, she ran, stumbling, falling headlong into drifts to rise and plunge on, in her heart the terror of the hunted thing. Each second she expected to hear his pursuing foot. But he had to tie the ponies to a prairie poplar, and by that time she had gained a bluff two hundred yards away, and was crouched like a chased hare in its heart.

That poor covert would not have sufficed against a frontiersman. Tracking by the fainter whiteness of broken snow, he would soon have flushed the trembling game, but it was ample protection from Rhodes's inefficiency. Alarmed when he saw that she was gone, he ran back and forth, shouting, coupling her name with promises of good behavior. As her line of flight had angled but slightly from the trail, she heard him plainly.

"My God! You'll freeze! Mrs. Carter! Oh, Mrs. Carter! Do come out! I was only joking!"

She did not require his assurance as to the freezing. Already her limbs were numb, her teeth chattered so loudly she was afraid he would hear. But she preferred the frost's mercy to his, and so lay, shivering, until, in despair, he got the ponies back to the trail and drove rapidly away. Then she came out and headed homeward like a bolting rabbit. Twice she was scared back into the snow: once when Rhodes turned about and dashed down and back the trail; again just before she picked Leslie's voice from passing bells. He was merely talking to his horses, but never before had his voice fallen so sweetly on pretty ears.

As at some wan ghost, he stared at the dim, draggled figure that came up to him out of the snows; indeed, half frozen and wholly frightened, she was little more than the ghost of herself. "The cad!" he stormed, hearing her story. "I'll punch his head to-morrow!" And he maintained that rude intention up to the moment that he dropped her at her own door.

"Don't!" she called after him. "Elinor won't like it." But the caution was for his own good, and she was not so very much cast down when he persisted.

"Then she can lump it!" he shouted back.

The proverb gives the trampled worm rather more than due credit when one remembers that a barrel-hoop can outturn the very fiercest worm, but it should be remembered in Leslie's favor that he mutinied in the cause of another. Having all of the obstinacy of his dulness, he went straighter to his end because it was allied with that narrow, bull-dog vision which excludes all but one object from the field of sight. Meeting Rhodes, Chapman, and Newton, with lanterns, at the point where the sleigh had capsized, he rushed the former and was living in the strict letter of his intention when the others pulled him away. They could not, however, dam his indignant speech. On that vast, dark stage, with the lanterns shedding a golden aureole about Rhodes and his bleeding mouth, he gave them the undiluted truth, as it is said to flow from the mouths of babes and sucklings.

Arrived home, moreover, he staggered his wife by his stubborn opposition. "It is no use talking, Elinor," he said, closing a bitter argument. "To-morrow I go to the bush for a load of wood, and if that cad is here when I return I'll break a whip on his back." Then, ignoring her bitten lips, clinched hands, the bitter fury that was to produce such woful consequences, he went quietly off to bed.

Of all this, however, Helen remained in ignorance until after the denouement that came a few days later along with a scattering of new snow. Those were days of misery for her – of remorseful brooding, self-reproach, hot shame that set her at bitter introspection that she might find and root out the germs of wickedness that had brought these successive insults. As hundreds of good girls before her, as thousands will after her, she wondered if she were really the possessor of some unsuspected sensuousness. Comparisons, too, were forced upon her. Revolting from the rough settler life, she had turned to the English set only to find that their polished ease was but the veneer of their degeneracy, analogous to the phosphorescence given off in the dark by a poisoned fish, and equally indicative of decay. She could not fail to contrast her husband's sterling worth with their moral and intellectual leprosy.

The nights were still more trying. She would sit, evenings, and stare at the lamp as though it were the veritable flame of life, while her spirit quested after the cause of things and the root of many enigmas. Why, for instance, is it that pitilessness, ferocity, ruth, which were good in the youth of the world, should cause such evil in its old age? For what reason the cause of the lily willed also its blight? Why conditions make fish of one woman, flesh of another, and fowl of a third, and wherefore any one of them should be damned for doing what she couldn't help in following the dictates of her nature? In fact, from the duration of her reveries, she may have entertained all of the hundred and odd questions with which the atom pelts the infinite, and, judging from her dissatisfaction, she received the usual answer – Why? It is nature's wont to deliver her lessons in parables, from which each must extract his or her own meanings; and a momentous page was turned in Helen's lesson the day that she rode over to Leslie's to verify a rumor which Nels had brought from the post-office.

As sleighing was practically over and wheeling not yet begun, she went horseback. As aforesaid, a scattering of new snow covered the prairies, and she rode through a bitter prospect. Everywhere yellow grass tussocks or tall brown weeds thrust through the scant whiteness to wave in the chill wind. Under the sky's enormous gray, scrub and bluff and blackened drifts stood out, harsh studies in black and white. Nature was in the blues, and all sentient things shared her dull humor. Winging north, in V or harrow formations, the wild ducks quacked their discontent. Peevish snipe cursed the weather as they dipped from slough to slough. A lone coyote complained that the season transcended his experience, then broke off his plaint to chase a rabbit, of whose red death Helen was shuddering witness.

The settlement was even less cheerful. Such houses as she passed rose like dirty smudges from the frozen mud of their dooryards. Moreover, the looks of the few settlers she met were not conducive of better spirits. MacCloud, a bigoted Presbyterian of the old Scotch-Canadian school, gave her a malignant grin in exchange for her nod. Three Shinn boys, big louts, burst into a loud guffaw as their wagon rattled by her at the forks of Leslie's trail. Their comment, "Guess she hain't heard!" increased her apprehension.

She could now see the house, smokeless, apparently lifeless, frowning down from a snow-clad ridge. But when, a minute later, she knocked, Leslie answered, and she entered. The living-room, with its associations of gayety, was dank, cold, cheerless. Ash littered the fireless stove; the floor was unswept; the air gave back her breath in a steamy cloud. Through the bedroom door she saw drawers and boxes wide open, their contents tossed and tumbled as though some one had rummaged them for valuable contents. And amid these ruins of a home Leslie sat, head bowed in his hands.

"You poor man!" she cried. "You poor, poor man!"

He turned up his face, and its sick misery reminded her of a worm raising its mangled head from under a passing wheel as though questing a reason for its sudden taking off. His words strengthened the impression: "I couldn't seem to satisfy her, and she was angry because I took your part against him. Of course she isn't so much to blame. I did as well as I could, but I'm neither clever nor ornamental, like Rhodes. But I tried to treat her well, didn't I? You shall judge."

"You did – of course you did, poor man!" she sobbed.

"Then why did she leave me?"

Somehow his blind questioning raised the prairie tragedy in her mind. The rabbit's death-scream was equally sincere in its protest against inscrutable fate in the coyote's green eyes. Its innocence was blameless as this. Yet – how could she answer problems as unsolvable as her own?

"I have been a fool," he went on; and his next words helped to lessen the astonishment, though not the pain, which his calamity had brought her. "A blind fool! When we used to drive out to Regis last summer it was going on – I can see it now. They did their billing and cooing under my very eyes. Yet they were not so clever, after all, were they? I trusted her – with my honor, expecting her to protect it as I would have defended her virtue. Was I at fault? If a man can't trust his wife, what can he do? Surely not lock her up. What could I do?"

Puzzled, she stood and looked down upon him. But under its delicate complexities the feminine mind is ever practical, and her attention quickly turned to his physical welfare. He must be taken away – weaned from his sick brooding, blind questioning. "Have you eaten to-day?" she asked. "Not for three days! Go out and harness your ponies at once, and come home with me to supper." Anticipating objection, she added, "Really, you must, for I am too tired to ride back again."

Her little fiction was hardly necessary, he found it so easy to let her do his thinking. He obeyed as one in a trance; and not till they drove away, leading her pony behind, did action dissipate his lethargy. Then he began to display some signs of animation.

It was a silent and uncomfortable drive. Instead of the usual lively jingle, pole and harness rattled dully, the light snow hushed the merry song of the wheels to a slushy dirge. The raw air, bleak sky, slaty grays of the dull prospect were eminently oppressive. Nature had shed her illusions and, fronting her cold materialism, there was no dodging issues. Facts thrust themselves too rudely upon consciousness. Leslie spoke but once, and the remark proved that the chill realities had set him again at the riddle of life.

"I shall sell out," he said, as the ponies swung in on Carter's trail. "Go to South Africa. My brother is a mining superintendent on the Rand."

She sighed. "I can't go to South Africa."

Rousing from his own trouble, he looked at her. "You don't need to. You'll see. Carter will come home one of these days." And during the few days that he stayed with her he extended such brotherly sympathy that she felt sincerely sorry when, having placed the sale of his farm and effects in the hands of Danvers, he followed his faithless wife out of her life and this story.

XVIII
THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ESTABLISHED

Save for a few dirty drifts in the shadows of the bluffs, the snow was all gone when, one morning a week or so after Leslie's departure, Helen went south under convoy of Jimmy Glaves to open school. The day was beautiful. Once more the prairies wore the burned browns of autumn, but to eyes that had grown to the vast snowscape during a half-year of winter the huge monochrome rioted in color. In fact it had its values. There a passing cloud threw a patch of black. Bowing to the soft breeze, last year's grass sent sunlit waves chasing one another down to the far horizon. Here and there a green stain on the edge of cropped hay-sloughs bespoke the miracle of resurrection, eternal wonder of spring, the young life bubbling forth from the decay and death of parent plants. Also the prospect was checkered with the chocolate of ploughed fields. On these slow ox-teams crawled, and the shouts of the drivers, the snapping crack of long whips, alternated as they drove along with the cheep of running gophers, the "pee-wee" of snipe, song of small birds. Noise was luxury after the months of frozen silence. The warm, damp air, the feel of balmy spring, the sunlight on the grasses were delightfully relaxing. Helen gave herself up to it – permitted sensation to rule and banish for the moment her tire and trouble. She chatted quite happily with the trustee, who, however, seemed gloomy and preoccupied.

A philosopher coined a phrase – "the persistence of the established" – to explain the survival of phenomena after the original cause lies dead in the past. It admirably defines the trustee's mental condition, which was a product of causes set up by Helen in these last months. Ignorant of the change in her feeling towards her English friends, he was vividly aware of the prejudice which her dealings with them had aroused in the settlers. In the beginning he and Flynn had earned severe criticism by giving her the school. Since the Leslie scandal he doubted their ability to keep her in it. At meeting, "bees," on trail, her name was being coupled with grins or gloomy reprobation according to the years and character of the critics. The women had plucked her character clean as a chicken, and were scattering their findings to the four winds. Just now, of course, the heavy work of seeding sadly interfered with these activities and diversions, but Jimmy looked for trouble in the slack season. If, in the mean time, she could be weaned from her liking for the English Ishmael, they might be able to weather the prejudice. To which end he steered the conversation to the greenness, credulity, and execrable agriculture of the remittance-people.

"I kain't see," he said, among other things, "what a fine gal like you kin see in 'em. They're dying stock, an' one o' these days the fool-killer will come along an' brain the hull biling. Brain, did I say? The Lord forgive me! Kedn't scratch up the makings of one outen the hull bunch."

Had she known his mind she might easily have laid his misgivings. Instead, she tried to modify his bitter opinion. "They are certainly inefficient as farmers. But as regards their credulity, don't you think it is largely due to a higher standard of business honor? Now when a Canadian trades horses he expects to be cheated, while they are only looking for a fair exchange."

Jimmy's face wrinkled in contemptuous disparagement. "Hain't that jes' what I said? A man that expects to get his own outen a hoss-trade kain't be killed too quick. It's tempting Providence to leave him loose. As well expect a nigger to leave a fat rooster as a Canadian to keep his hands off sech easy meat. 'Tain't human natur'. As for their honor – " He sniffed. "Pity it didn't extend to their morals."

"It is, indeed."

Afterwards they had many a tilt on this same subject. Smoking in his doorway of evenings, Jimmy would emit sarcasms from the midst of furious clouds, while she, as much for fun as from natural feminine perversity, took the opposite side. And neither knew the other's mind – until too late. But placated by her low answer, he now let the subject rest.

Three feet of green water was slipping over the river ice when they forded Silver Creek, and they had to dodge odd logs, the vanguard of Carter's drive. "Another week," the trustee remarked, "an' we couldn't have crossed."

He was right. That week a warm rain ran the last of the snows off several thousand square miles of watershed, feeding the stream till it waxed fat and kicked like the scriptural ox against the load Carter had saddled upon it. Snarling viciously, it would whirl a timber across a bend, then rush on with mad roar, leaving a mile of logs backed up behind. But such triumph never endured. With axe, pevees, cant-hooks, Bender and his men broke the jams; whereupon, as though peevish at its failure, the river swept out over the level bottoms and stranded timbers in backwaters among dense scrub.

To see this, the first log-drive on Silver Creek, the children who lived near the valley scuttled every day from school, and they would gaze, wide-eyed, at Michigan Red riding a log that spun like a top under his nimble feet, or watch the Cougar, shoulder-deep in snow-water, shoving logs at some ticklish point. Then they would hang about the cook's tent, while that functionary juggled with beans and bacon or made lumberman's cake by the cubic yard. Also there were peeps into the sleeping-tents, where men lay and snored in boots and wet red shirts, just as they had come out of the river. Of all of which they would prattle to Helen next day at school, reciting many tales, chief among them the Homeric narrative of the cutting of a jam – in which she had a special interest, and which proved, among other things, that Michigan Red was again at his old tricks.

It was Susie Flynn who brought this tale. Dipping down, one end of a bridge timber had stuck at an acute angle into the river-bed. A second timber swung broadside on against its end, then, in a trice, the logs had backed up, grinding bark to pulp under their enormous pressure. "Mr. Bender," Susie said, "he was for throwing a rope across from bank to bank so's they ked cut it from above. But one wasn't handy, an' while they was waiting a big red man comes up an' hands Mr. Carter the dare.

"'If you're scairt, gimme the axe an' I'll show you how we trim a jam in Michigan.'

"But Mr. Carter wouldn't give it. 'No,' he says, awful quiet, yet sorter funny, for all the men laughed – 'no. They'll need you to show 'em again.' Then he walks out on the jam an' goes to chopping, with Mr. Bender calling for him to come back an' not make a damn fool of himself."

The scene had so impressed the child that she reproduced every detail for her pale audience of one – Carter astride of the key-log; his men, bating their breath with the "huh" of his stroke; Bender's distress; the cynical grin of Michigan Red. Once, she said, a floating chip deflected the axe, and he swore, easily, naturally, turning a smile of annoyance up to the bank. It drew no response from eyes that were glued to the log, now quivering under tons of pressure. A huge baulk, it broke with a thunderous report when cut a quarter through, and loosed a mile of grinding death upon the chopper.

Then came his progress through the welter. As the jam bore down-stream, timbers would dip, somersault, and thrash down on a log that still quivered under the spurn of his leap. Young trees raised on end and swept like battering-rams along the log he rode. Yet, jumping from log to log, he came up from death out of the turmoil in safety to the bank.

"Brought his axe erlong, too!" Susan triumphantly finished. "An' you should have jes' seen that red man – he looked that sick an' green through his wishy-washy smiling. But Mr. Carter! Ain't he a brave one? You must be awful proud of him, ain't you, Miss Helen?"

What could she answer but "Yes," though the trembling admission covered only a small portion of her psychology? Misery, fear, regret made up the rest. The remainder of that day dragged wearily by to a distant drone of lessons. She, who had tried to eject her husband from her life, shuddered as she thought how nearly her wish had come to accomplishment. Death's cold breath chilled resentment, expunged the memory of her months of weary waiting. It would return, but in the mean time she could think of nothing but his danger. Hurrying home, she asked Glaves to saddle her a horse, saying that she would try to gallop off a headache.

Heartache would have been more correct; but she certainly galloped, rode westward, then swung around north on a wide circle that brought her, at dusk of the short spring day, out on a bald headland that sheered down to the river. Beneath her lay the camp, with its cooking-fires flickering like wind-blown roses athwart the velvet pall of dusk, and in either direction from that effulgent bouquet a crimson garland of sentinel fires laid its miles of length along the valley.

Men moved about the nearer fires, appearing to her distant eyes as dim, dark shapes. But what sight refused hearing supplied. She heard the cook cursing his kettles with a volubility that would have brought shame on the witches in Macbeth – the imprecations of some lumber-jack at war with a threatened jam. Above all rose the voice of a violin, quivering its infinite travail, expressing the throbbing pain of the world; then, from far up the valley, a lonely tenor floated down the night.

"He went to cut a key-log an' the jam he went below,
He was the damnedest man that ever I did know."

Some lumberman was relieving his watch by chanting the deeds of a hero of the camps, and as, like a dove of night, the voice floated high over the river's growl through a score of verses, it helped to drive home upon Helen a sense of the imminent jeopardy Carter had passed through that day. While her beast pawed its impatience, she sat for an hour trying to pick his voice from the hum of the camp. It was easy to distinguish Bender's. His bass growl formed the substratum of sound. She caught, once, the Cougar's strident tones. Then, just as she was beginning to despair, a command, stern and clear, rose from the void.

"Lay on there with that pevee! Quick! or you'll have 'em piled to heaven! Here! – Bender, Cougar! – lend a hand! this fellow's letting them jam on him!"

She started as under a lash. All that day she had lived in a whirl of feeling, and, just as a resolvent precipitates a chemical mixture, the stern voice reduced her feeling to thought. Unfortunately, the tone was not in harmony with her soft misery. If it had been – well, it was not. Rather it recalled his contempt under the moonlight, her own solitary shame. Whirling her bronco, she cut him over the flank and galloped, at imminent risk of her neck, over the dark prairies in vain attempt to escape the galling recurrence of injured pride, the stings of disappointment.

"He doesn't care for me! He doesn't care for me!" It rang in her brain. Then, when she was able to think, she added, in obedience to the sex instinct which will not admit Love's mortality, "He never did, otherwise he couldn't have left me!" Her conclusion, delivered that night into a wet pillow, revealed the secret hope at the root of her disappointment. "I won't ride that way again."

But she did, and her changed purpose is best explained by a conversation between Carter and Bender as they stood drying themselves at the cook's fire after averting the threatened jam.

Carter began: "I reckon you can get along well enough without me. Of course I'd have liked to seen the drive down to the Assiniboin, but in another week the frost will be out enough to start prairie grading. I'll have to go. Let me see… One week more on the creek, two on the Assiniboin – three weeks will put the last timber into Brandon. In less than a month you'll join me at the Prairie Portage."

Turning to bring another area of soaked clothing next to the fire, his face came under strong light. These seven months of thought and calculation had left their mark upon it – thinned and refined its lines, tooled the features into an almost intellectual cast. His mouth, perhaps, evidenced the greatest change, showing less humor, because, perhaps, self-repression and the habit of command had drawn the lips in tighter lines. Deeper set, his eyes seemed darker, while a straight look into their depths revealed an underlying sadness. Sternness and sadness, indeed, governed the face, without, however, banishing a certain grave courtesy that found expression in pleasant thanks when, presently, the cook brought them a steaming jug of coffee. Lastly, determination stamped it so positively that only its lively intelligence saved it from obstinacy. One glance explained Bender's answer to Jenny: "He's stiffer'n all hell!" – his attitude to Helen. In him will dominated the emotions. Summed, the face, with its power, dogged resolution, imperturbable confidence, mirrored his past struggles, gave earnest for his future battles.

A hint of these last inhered in a remark that Bender slid in between two gulps of coffee. "They're saying as the C.P. will never let you cross their tracks?"

Carter smiled. "Yes? Who's saying it?"

"Oh, everybody. An' the Winnipeg paper said yesterday as 'Old Brass-Bowels'" – he gave the traffic manager his sobriquet – "will enjoin you an' carry the case through the Dominion courts to the British privy council. The newspaper sharp allows that would take about two years, during which the monopoly would either buy out or bust your crowd by building a competing line."

This time Carter laughed heartily, the confident laugh of one sure of himself. "So that's what the paper said? Well, well, well! That scribe person must be something of a psychic. What's that? Oh, a fellow who tells you a whole lot of things he don't know himself. Now, listen." (In view of what occurred six months later, his words are worth remembering.)

"Courts or no courts, privy council to the contrary, we'll run trains across 'Brass-Bowel's' tracks before next freeze-up."

"Hope you do," Bender grinned. "But the old man ain't so very slow."

They talked more of construction – tools, supplies, engineering difficulties, the hundred problems inherent in railroad-building. Midnight still found them by the fire, that twinkled, a lone red star, under the enormous vault of night.

But, though interesting and important, in that the success of the enterprise involved the economic freedom of a province, the conversation – with one exception – is not germane to this story, which goes on from the moment that, two days later, a Pengelly boy carried the news of Carter's departure to Helen at school.

The exception was delivered by the mouth of Bender, as he rose, stretching with a mighty yawn, to go to his tent. "Of course it's none of my damn business, but do you allow to call at the school as you go down to-morrow?"

Carter's brows drew into swift lines, but resentment faded before the big fellow's concern. "I didn't reckon to," he said, gently; yet added the hint, " – since you're so pressing."

But Bender would not down. "Oh, shore!" he pleaded. "Shore! shore!"

Carter looked his impatience, yet yielded another point to the other's distress. "If Mrs. Carter wished to see me, I allow she'd send."

"Then she never will! she never will!" Bender cried, hitting the crux of their problem. "For she's jes' as proud as you."

With that he plunged into the environing darkness, leaving Carter still at the fire. From its glow his face presently raised to the valley's rim, dim and ghostly under a new moon, ridged with shadowy trees. It was only six miles to Glaves's place, a hop, skip, and jump in that country of distances. For some minutes he stood like a stag on gaze; then, with a slow shake of the head, he followed Bender.

"An' he ain't coming back till winter," the small boy informed Helen. "He'll be that busy with his railroading."

After two days of embittered brooding, Helen had come to consider herself as being in the self-same mood that had ruled her the January morning when Mrs. Leslie broke in on her months of loneliness. But this startling news explained certain contradictions in her psychology – for instance, her startings and flushings whenever her north window had shown a moving dot on the valley trail these last two days. Moreover, her pallor was hardly consistent with the assertion, thrice repeated within the hour, that even if he did come she would never, never, never forgive him now! Not that she conceded said contradictions. On the contrary, she put up a gorgeous bluff with herself, affected indifference, and – borrowed Jimmy's pony that evening and rode down to the ford.

Bender had built a rough bridge to serve traffic till the drive should clear the ford. Reining in at the nearer end, Helen looked down on the pool, the famous pool wherein her betrothal had received baptism by total immersion – at least she looked on the place where the pool had been, for shallows and sand-bar were merged in one swirl of yellow water. But the clay bank with its bordering willows was still there, and shone ruddily under the westering sun just as on that memorable evening. Here, on the straight reach, the logs floated under care of an occasional patrol. A rough fellow in blue jeans and red jerkin gave her a curious stare as he passed, whereafter there was no witness to her wet eyes, her rain of tears, convulsive sobbing, the break-up of her indifference – that is, none but her pony. Reaching curiously around, the beast investigated the grief huddled upon his neck with soft muzzle, rubbing and sniffing "cheer up," and she had just straightened to return his mute sympathy when a voice broke in on the bitter and sweet of her reverie.