# The Beloved Pawn (Everybody's Magazine 1922-23)/Part 2

Extracted from Everybody's Magazine Nov 1922, pp. 38-62.

### PART II

Eve Eldred Is Forced to Take a Step That Means Great Peril. David MacKinnon Will Not Learn His Lesson, and King Norman Finds His Realm in Complete Chaos
Begin this serial with any instalment. The story is here up to this issue.
IT WAS surely fate that drove David MacKinnon in his little trading hooker to seek shelter in the harbor of Garden Island in Lake Michigan on the night of a spring storm, for it was the very place he had been warned to keep away from—the place where his father had come to a tragic end, his boat driven on the rocks through the treachery of “King Norman” Eldred, who changed the beacons that marked the narrow channel.
The island was Eldred's realm. Here he lived with his daughter Eve, now in the years of early womanhood, and held despotic sway over the rough men that helped him with his fishing industry. Eve was all the world to him. He had taught her to fear the men and kept her to himself, resenting strongly the interest taken in her by Jenny Borden, wife of the lighthouse keeper on near-by Squaw Island, So the girl was quite alone and had no companion but her dog. Her chief duty was tending the island store which her father had established. The arrival of David wakened new interests. He was different from the other men, and she believed that he would be a friend—but he would leave in a day or two. Perhaps this was just as well, for her father's hostility toward the lad was only too evident,
The night before his departure, David came into the store, and found Eve repelling the unwelcome advances of Jean Mosseau, a French-Canadian, David thrashed the fellow and threw him out. Eldred, when he learned what had occurred, set out to find Mosseau, and later Eve took David into the house to show him a picture of her mother. Here she told him of her life and wretched loneliness, and warned him against her father, who wouldn't stop at anything if he knew what she had told him.
As they talked, a light from the harbor came through the window. David rushed out, turning one searching, accusing look on the girl. There at the dock, his hooker, the Annabelle, was a mass of flames. Had Eve, by detaining him at the house, been a party to a dastardly deed?
Norman Eldred left his house to hunt Jean Mosseau and make him pay for his treatment of Eve, but outside he paused for one look about, and the first object on which his gaze focused was the hooker at the dock, gleaming white in the moonlight
Dimmock had carried the story of what transpired to his master, omitting nothing, and now a portion of Eldred's rage was diverted from Mosseau to MacKinnon. All day, anyhow, he had been uneasy. The shock of last night's recognition had endured without a break.
Jode MacKinnon was buried in the lake; he had no fear that a law would be brought to harry him—no law from boos—but he was uneasy before the accusing eye of this other MacKinnon, and David's warning had been ringing in his consciousness during all waking-hours since last night.
A dull ache flooded his breast as he stood there, but after that came strength, the strength of rage that has been held back, and he went along the dock and stepped carefully aboard the Annabelle.
The hatch cover was off and he dropped into the hold, stood still to listen and struck a match. The clean brasses of the motor gleamed at him and, again in darkness, he knelt beside it, fumbling beneath the gasoline-tank. A grunt and a sigh; another match, but his fingers were not strong enough. By the smoky flare of the match he found the pliers in a closed box. He groped for the pet-cock with their jaws, and clamped his hand and felt the tool bite into the softer metal. He moved his wrist, and a trickle of running liquid sounded. There was work with a tin bucket. He stumbled in the dark and muttered impatiently. Then a third match and a hasty scramble for the deck.
As Eldred's heavy torso was lifted upward, his watch-chain broke and, on hands and knees on deck, he felt the dangling ends and groped hastily for the charm that was missing. He cursed under his breath as he felt along the planks, then peered into the hold, lighted well enough by then, and stared, but could not see the trinket. He stuffed the broken chain into his vest pocket as he began running stealthily up the dock. Behind him, the spars of the schooner commenced to flush from the light in her hold.
DAVID MacKINNON shouted a protest to a man who ran before him with an ax to cut the lines that held his hooker against the dock, and then he realized that it was useless to keep her there, for in her vitals roared a furnace that no line of buckets could extinguish. She drifted off, flames belching through her one hatch, illuminating the night. With a sharp thud, a leap and a shower of flame, the gasoline-tank exploded and burning fluid clung to spars and rigging and took hold and ate until the Annabelle looked like some pageant-ship festooned in fire as she drifted on to her flamboyant death.
The trader stood with drawn face among the other watchers, seeing the fire eat up the thing he loved so well. The mainmast went down with a crash and a shower of sparks; the foremast went next, slowly, as if yielding reluctantly to weakness. The planking melted; the vessel grounded and held motionless, then began to list slowly. Dismantled, black, with great holes eaten in her body, she lay there helpless. But no flame had found hold on the bowsprit. The spar remained intact, and pointed shoreward with that saucy tilt, as though the Annabelle had gone to her end unbroken and undismayed.
Norman Eldred appeared from nowhere. His men made way for him. He stopped beside MacKinnon.
“Unfortunate,” he said, when he saw that his presence alone would not compel the other's notice. After their gazes met, he added, “For you.”
Light-points danced in his eyes—not anger, this time, but hinting at good humor, a feeling of well-being. And as he saw this and caught the ironical ring of triumph in King Norman's voice, thunder grew in MacKinnon's face.
“An ill wind that blew you in here,” Eldred said, “although it might have happened anywhere—might have,” he repeated, and could not keep the gloat from his tone.
MacKinnon said harshly,
“Until now, Eldred, it's blown you no good.” He walked away, cramming his hands into his pockets.
A gasoline-boat was standing into the harbor, but David gave it no heed until the Kittiwake docked and Gam Gallagher stood beside him.
“That yours?” the Irishman asked.
Their eyes met, and words were not necessary for reply.
“This soon? Ah, boy, it's hell's acre ye picked out to trade in this time!”
MacKinnon nodded.
“And I'd like to get away now. I don't want to go off half cocked, and I'm pretty mad. If I stay here, I'll have to hurt somebody, and maybe I wouldn't do a good-enough job.”
They went aboard the Kittiwake together and started out of the harbor. Until they made the turn toward Beaver Island, MacKinnon stood on the stern watching the ember that had been his Annabelle. Then he muttered,
“If it's so, you're as black a vixen as you seemed to be a white angel.”
And about that time a Mackinaw boat, which had been making her slow way up Thunder Bay all the afternoon, came to anchor off Alpena. An old man was sailing her alone. His hair was gray, his scraggly beard gray, his skin gray and drawn and wrinkled. Over his right eye was a ragged scar, suet against gray. The sinews at his wrists stood out sharply, making deep hollows as he stowed his canvas for the night.
He had a crude little shelter rigged between the two stubby spars; an oil-stove was there, some pots and pans, a bunk. He lighted the stove and put water on to boil. Then, standing up outside, he scanned the fishing-boats at anchor between him and the lights of the town. His lips worked continually and his eyes roved without cessation with a queer, bright, vacant light.
Ever since the ice moved in Lake Huron he had been doing that—staring at boats with his vacant eyes. More, he had scanned the settlements of fishermen, and in the towns where only one or two made their livelihood by handling nets, he hunted out their homes and peered and mumbled.
Last year it had been the Canadian side of the lake he sailed; the year before it had been Lake Erie, and always his manner and method were the same. He asked few questions, just mumbled and stared, but he was persistent, and little remained unseen by those odd eyes.
People talked to him rarely, and then, for the most part, he appeared not to hear what was said to him. One question, though, always arrested his attention, for when men asked, “Lookin' for somebody, dad?” or, “Who you expectin', uncle?” his eyes would remain on their faces a lengthy period and his hands would rummage in his beard as though striving to concentrate on a reply; now and then he would mumble as he shuffled away, “Two—two hearts—both mine—one to—and one to keep——”
He was a weird figure as he stood in his boat this May evening, weak of body, burning with some uncanny strength of purpose. Once, however, as his eyes roved among the scattered boats at anchor about him, tears came into them and a sob ran through his thin throat. After that he turned back to his sputtering oil-stove and sat down on the edge of the narrow bed and began preparing a scanty meal, his lips still moving.
His boat swung idly at her anchor. On her bows a name was painted, done in crude characters. The lettering read:
REVENGE
PORT BRUCE, ONT.
SO DAVID MacKinnon came to the Beavers, where his father had met disaster and confronted the same force, bravely, arrogantly, and came off second-best, as other and older and as good men had done.
The story spread out over the lake, into the Straits, over into Green Bay and the Bays de Noc, where David was well known; it went down the east shore, too, and whenever men heard it they shrugged and said it would be well for the lad to let bad enough alone.
That is what the good Irishmen at St. James, where David had gone with Gam Gallagher told him, too; more, they urged that he keep away from Garden Island and Norman Eldred. They urged, because, when they spoke their minds and proffered advice to this son of the man they had known and liked, he did not respond with assent, he did not argue with them, and though he whistled his aimless, gay little tune, there was a look on his face which was nothing if not determination—unless it were obstinacy.
The trader liked Gallagher; it was to his house he went for shelter on the night of the fire. It was Gam alone of those the lad met who forebore any well-intentioned attempt to frighten David away from the islands and Norman Eldred; he kept silent and never brought up the matter until the last night that David was to be in his house.
After a winter of idleness and with his boat gone, it was necessary for David to do some manner of work. As Gam had given his shelter, so he gave him opportunity to be busy, because he had planned extensive fishing and men were scarce. A set of trap-nets off the shore of High Island bothered him particularly, and he talked it over and found that MacKinnon was willing to handle the Islander, another of his gasoline-boats, and live on that island with the Indians who were to be his helpers.
“There's a good house to live in there,” he said. “I've used it myself other springs. The Indians have their own shack, too, an' ye'll have so much to do that maybe it'll help ye forget yer hot reception to the Beavers.”
David laughed shortly.
“I wouldn't like that. I want to remember it.”
Gam rubbed his Ibeard thoughtfully.
“It's none of my business boy, but I like ye, as I liked yer father, an' I'm not wantin' to see ye in more trouble.” This elicited no response, and after a pause he went on: “I've had a notion ever since yer boat burned that mebbe ye wanted, or mebbe ye thought ye could get back at Eldred.” He looked cautiously at his companion. “It's a bad job, lad. To try to do anything would only—” It was his manner to leave sentences unfinished.
“Make matters worse; is that it, Gam?” David stirred and smiled slightly.
“Perhaps,” Gam answered.
“Funny how time'll heal up hurts, and how a man can't get away from his job! It don't seem real any more—the things I went through when I wasn't any bigger than your littlest. I was just that—a little kid—when you come over to Fayette to tell us about my father. I cried all night, I remember; thought I'd never have a dry eye again, but that was only the beginnin'. I thought a lot of my sister——”
HIS hands were locked behind his head, and he gazed at the low ceiling as he spoke without a tremor of emotion.
“And then, when we'd scarce got used to havin' her out of the house, my mother began to go, and something told me from the beginnin' that she'd never get up again. She didn't care about it, I guess. Oh, she cared enough for me; but her heart was gone—understand? Nobody can keep on without a heart. Just one thing she seemed to care about in those days—that Eldred didn't take the last of us, which was me. She'd talk about what I was goin' to do when she was gone and planned school and things for me that'd take me off the lakes, and make me promise over and over that I'd never set foot on the Beavers.
“But I couldn't keep off the lakes—might as well have tried to stop eatin' as that. I grew up with the fishermen, but the older I got the more restless I was—because I was tryin' to dodge my real job, I expect. I went with a trader, and we had a little luck and I got hold of a boat of my own. She made money, carryin' shingles and hay and the like, and finally I had the Annabelle and thought I was satisfied and settled down.
“I'm no better or worse than the run of men on the lakes. Sort of shiftless, maybe. All I cared about, I thought, was to keep my hooker in as good shape as a good boat deserved. I've done my share of hellin'. I've been broke and drunk for quite a while at a stretch. I've combed the beaches after wrecks and beat the underwriters to it more 'n once. But I guess all the while I've been dodgin' what I had to do, tryin' to keep busy and keep away from it, and that made me sort of shiftless.
“When I pulled out of Green Bay this spring, I meant to go way below, into Erie, anyhow, and maybe Ontario, which I expect was another scheme to make me keep the promise I made to my mother. But it wouldn't work. The lake—see?—tossed me into Eldred's arms, and here I am, with the whole thing— my father and what happened to the rest—as fresh as it was when I was a kid, almost—only, I don't feel like cryin' now.”
He was silent a moment.
“Of course you and I and the rest round here are pretty well satisfied my father was killed. Nobody can prove it, though. I—I sort of dared Eldred to try dirty work with me, and the next night he burned me out. Anyhow, it's reasonable to think he did. I don't know for sure yet, but I'm goin' to find out, if that can done. I think he and the girl planned the whole works; she dragged me ashore with a damned cock-and-bull story, and when I flared up about her father—he was mentioned—she got sore, and about that time the Annabelle was on fire.
“That's why I want to hang round. I don't want to try to hit him before I know, but I'll tell you and these islands and anybody else who wants to listen that if I find out for sure that he set my hooker afire, he's goin' to pay with everything he's got. We never can quite prove that other—what he likely did to my father, but if I can prove this, I'll collect enough to square the whole account, as near as a bill like that can be collected!”
It was indicative of the judgment of Gam Gallagher that he made no remonstrance. His only comment was:
"Luck to ye, lad!”
AND so another tale went across the lake—not told with so much interest as the other, not reaching such remote places, but it was a tale which made men who knew Eldred stop and consider, for tongues had it that young Dave MacKinnon, the trader, had not been frightened away by the king of Garden Island—that he had made threats, not as men usually threaten, but only when forced to it by those well-intentioned advisers who would have him make the best of a bad mess.
Among the other places, this story was told on Garden Island itself, in Eldred's own house, by the red-beard Dimmock. Eldred listened without comment; even his eyes did not change as they rested on Dimmock's face, but once his hand moved on the chair arm jerkily.
Fragments of the tale reached elsewhere—the ears of Eve Eldred, for one; she knew that MacKinnon was fishing on High Island, but when she carried the query to her father, she was met by evidence of displeasure. It was well, he said, that MacKinnon's hooker had burned, because he was a trouble-hunter by nature.
“But Jode—” she began.
“He is not like his father,” Eldred interrupted sharply.
A moment of silence.
“I thought, perhaps, he might be, that he might be my—friend.”
The man walked away then with a short laugh, and the girl stood watching him go, greatly troubled.
It had been momentary relief to Eve to tell David MacKinnon of her fears and misgivings and unhappiness. Relief had come when she was talking to him and could see response in his face, but thereafter it seemed as though the very crystallizing of thought into expression increased the significance of all those factors which had disturbed her. The thing on which she had touched most lightly in her talk with her father was the outstanding phase of the situation, and this weighed the more heavily thereafter. She inwardly shrank from his touch and was in turmoil when near him. Fear of betraying this revulsion came now to heighten her discomfort, and, with the attitude of the men of the crew, such as it was, she needed his actual protection more than ever.
Whenever mention had been made of MacKinnon, her father acted strangely, and twice after the fire she had seen him aboard the ruin that had once been a graceful hooker, poking among the charred timbers as though in search of something. Quite innocently, she remarked about his missing watch-charm, and he had been impatient at her wonder, saying he had lost it back in the forest.
Mosseau had escaped, vanished, without leaving a trace of which she was aware, but what he had done remained a matter for discussion among the crew. She could tell that from the way they looked at her. She did not know who would be the next to dare.
Then there was MacKinnon. She did not care so much, because the men who had seen him humiliate her did not know that he had made amends for that, but, having made him her confidant, she was in great need of him, and he was gone, his return unlikely, now that his schooner was a charred ruin on the beach. One thing troubled her—that look he had flashed before he swung through the door to run toward the burning Annabelle. It was little short of ferocious, and it shocked her as his rebuke in the store had shocked her. But it was unexplained; she was not certain that she had interpreted the expression rightly, and there were so many other memories of him that were pleasant.
She kept to the house largely in the following days, and when she went outdoors it was with care not to be far from her father, at once a cause for depression and her protector. For hours she would scan the lake with a glass, hoping to discover David coming back, that she might again talk to him. And one afternoon that hope took fire as Gam Gallagher's Islander banged her way into the harbor and came to anchor in the shallow water by the remains of the Annabelle, and MacKinnon and Fred Mink, one of his Indian helpers, protected by hip-boots, dropped into the charred hulk and began the task of salving what remained of value.
Atremble with excitement, Eve stood by a window to see the men toil. Stood there until darkness came—uneasy, undetermined, seeing the motor slung laboriously aboard, watching David and his man work in the cold water. This vigil was interrupted by the coming of her father, who had been back on the island on some errand. Half guiltily the girl turned away from the window when she saw his approach, and soon after he entered she left the room. Returning shortly, she found that he had taken her place and stood, hands clasped behind his back, head hung forward. He did not appear to hear Eve coming, and she stopped in mid-room, attracted by his heavy breathing. When he did turn, it was with a start, as though detected in some guilty act, and he went to his desk, where he sat with his head bowed so his daughter might not see the strange new lights of apprehension that danced with the anger in his eyes.
TWO hours passed. Eve was in the store, with the usual dozen or more men lounging about the stove. The buying for the evening was practically over, and the girl behind the counter piled stocks on a shelf, acutely aware of the eyes which did not leave her for long.
Dimmock and another stood near the door, conversing lowly, when boots came up the steps in hurried measure and stopped on the threshold. The newcomer was David MacKinnon, and he stopped outside, looking in. About him was that which caused men to stop talking, and it was the hush which attracted Eve and made her turn. Her heart leaped, because he was there, within a few feet of her; and then it went on in swift measure because she saw a belligerent tensity which alarmed her.
David's survey of the room was swift and decisive. He advanced toward Dimmock.
“Where's Eldred?” he asked, and Eve started because his manner was clearly a challenge.
Dimmock eyed him suspiciously and replied.
“Ain't he in the house?”
“Went there first.”
“If he ain't there, I don't know.” And then, “What you after?”
With that question, MacKinnon's face broke into a scornful smile as he looked down at the articles he held in his hands.
“See that, Dimmock?” Eve heard him say, as he held up a blackened bit of twisted metal. She could not see that attached to one end was a pet-cock, turned open and with the marks of pliers' jaws on it. “And that?”—as he flipped the pliers open. He thrust them toward the other so he could see. “Those marks came from these, didn't they? And it was closed when I left. She burned like a torch, Dimmock. You know where that came from!” He tossed the watch-charm that Eldred had worn to the counter. His words were meaningless to the girl, and she could not see Dimmock's face as he studied the pet-cock which had drained the Annabelle's gasoline-tank, with its telltale evidence of treachery.
“What do I want, Dimmock? I'll tell you what I want. I want to tell the man that you call 'king' here that he's been runnin' on a long line, but that now he's used up the slack. I want to tell him that he's tried the MacKinnons once too often. That other”—voice shaking a trifle—“is too long ago, so long that it's all guesswork. There ain't any guesswork here”—wiping his hands slowly on his hips—“and I'm lookin' for King Norman to knock his damned crown off!”
His voice was steady and clear and loud, rising as he delivered his threat, and Eve felt her heart chilling. Not because of the threat against her father, not because of any outraged sense of loyalty, but because this was the man she had liked—he who, she had hoped, was to be her friend.
She found herself slipping round the end of the counter, walking quickly toward him.
“I thought from the first that this happened,” David went on, “and everybody else thought so, but I wouldn't open my head until I was sure. I'm sure enough now, and I've come to say that for the last time Eldred has played his hand too high. I——”
He stopped shortly, because Eve was before him, very white of face.
“Don't say that!” Her voice was pinched, and the words sounded as though very little breath had been behind them. “Go away! You don't know what you're doing!”
She was unconscious, as she spoke, of the men about her, hardly conscious of what she said. She wanted this man to run, to board his boat and seek the safety of distance, wanted to warn him that this was foolhardy. though she did not even know the quarrel. She had wanted him for her friend, but now she knew she could not have him. The next thing was to be a friend to him, to wish him well, to head him away from difficulties into which he was rushing.
But he did not take it so. Some of the rigidity went from his shoulders as he looked down at her, and she heard him laugh.
“So you'd like to have me pull out, eh?” he ask. “The king wants me to go, and the princess, too!” He laughed again and moved forward. Eve felt hot blood beating into her cheeks and her knees trembled. “I'd almost forgotten about you,” he went on, “almost forgotten you, you little—decoy!”
He fairly spat out that epithet. Eve checked her slow retreat.
MacKinnon laughed once more.
“You were damned anxious to thank me, weren't you? You were right on the job with your song and dance. Or was the whole thing framed with the Frenchman to drag me in?”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said breathlessly. “You threatened my father and I told you to go. Now, don't you threaten me!”
She drew herself up in an unconvincing show of courage, not designed to impress the trader but for the men.
“I don't recollect makin' any threats to you,” he said, “but, now you mention it, maybe there's one or two due you. Bad luck—wasn't it?—when I stopped the frog here in this room. It'd have served you right—if it wasn't a frame-up—to 've had him kiss you. Maybe that'd help even our score—yours and mine.”
His advance had brought him close to her, reckless amusement with the anger in his eyes. His hand went to hers, which lay on the counter, and clenched it.
“Let me go!” she cried sharply. “Let me— What are you doing?”
David laughed and imprisoned her other hand when it flashed out to strike his wrist.
“I'm goin' to take back the only thing I ever did for you. The frog isn't here, but I'll finish for him. I'll kiss you, you decoy, and make you like it!”
Eve cried out, and her voice sounded faint even in her own ears—just the one word: “Father!” She saw Dimmock's amazed face behind MacKinnon, saw others, heard them moving, and caught for a scant instant the picture of one fisherman grinning. They were glad to see her in trouble.
MacKinnon's arms were about the girl, and his body was pressing close to hers. She was making half-choking, throaty sounds, and she bent backward, shaking her head, fighting against this humiliation with her weakened body, her faint heart. He was only playing her, then, as an angler plays a well-hooked fish. Then her face was brought close to his, roughly and bruskly; she saw his lips lowering, saw for an instant his eyes so close to hers, and with all the hard luster in them there was something else—some new thing, something which neutralized a part of her fear.
And then his lips were on hers, bruising and burning, and she was fighting to be rid of their touch, even while some bursting emotion which had forever been pent up and held from expression rose to that brutal caress. She felt his breath on her cheek and was conscious of the dependable strength of his arms, of the firmness of his flesh—and of the peculiar pleasure which came even with his roughness. She did not want to escape. She did not want to be free. And so, for a split instant, she relaxed and lay there in his arms, her lips against his.
A cackling laugh, rising from behind, roused the girl and caused her to throw her head desperately aside, tearing her lips from his. She was free, staggering from him, brushing a hand across her mouth as though to wipe off the memory of that enforced kiss, flaming with humiliation while MacKinnon stood laughing in easy triumph.
The silence which had shut down upon the room after that scant fraction of time was as complete as it was unprefaced. MacKinnon followed some intuitive impulse and looked toward the doorway.
NORMAN ELDRED was standing there. He had seen and stopped, balanced on the balls of his feet, watching MacKinnon, watching Eve now, who was backed a half-dozen paces from the man who had accomplished that which he had once prevented another from doing.
Time seemed to slow for that instant; it was only the space of a breath, but for Eve Eldred it was a season, an era, an unendurable period. She saw her father's rage, saw the tensity sweep over those others as it had come upon her, because she knew what happened to men on Garden Island when Norman Eldred's temper was roused.
And then it came—a squaring of his feet for a firmer stance, the whipping of a hand toward his hip beneath the jacket he wore, and it came back in the space of an eye-wink, dragging in its clasp the dull blue of an automatic pistol.
Dimmock turned and vaulted the counter; behind the stove men scurried for safety, for they were in line with the trader, who stood crouching for his spring.
But he did not leap because, as the hand with the pistol whipped upward to fire, there came another movement and Eve closed the distance between herself and MacKinnon. She was beside him, before him, back against his body, clutching for his wrists and crying:
“Father! Father!”
The gun-hand had come to its shooting-position. Eldred was swaying forward as though he would speed the bullet with the bitterness in his own heart, but the trigger-finger did not move. That cry, twice repeated, was filled with pleading, with terror, and for an instant Eldred stared into his daughter's face as she shrank there, braving the weapon he held.
Then came a twitching of the arm. It lowered slowly, hesitated, began to rise. It went up, and his teeth fished in the depths of his beard as at a twinge of pain, or as though it required great physical effort to move that arm. And then his hand sank to his side, all but dropped to his side; the fingers opened and the pistol thumped to the floor. He put out the other hand quickly to the door-casing, while the one which had dropped the weapon groped to his side and clenched there, as if some burning pain gnawed at the flesh.
That roused the girl, who through the tense interval had made no move. She took the few steps quickly and stopped very close to her father.
“Father—I will go to the house.”
Then she moved again toward the door, but a twitching of the hand that had been at his side checked her, and she stood watching him while he seemed to struggle for strength to speak. His eyes focused on her face after an effort, and with a shove of the hand against the casing, he brought himself erect. His voice came dully.
“House? Whose house?”
“Why—” She did not go on, for he was smiling—a sickly, terrible smile.
“Not my house,” he said. “You have made your choice. Not to my house. To his house who will have you—who can take you——”
By the stove, some one stirred and muttered, and Eve turned her head quickly. She looked at that group of faces, saw them staring at her father, saw the man who had grinned turn a brutal gaze on her face. Still looking over her shoulder at them as one who was all but compelled to remain in danger by the fascination of that danger, she went through the doorway.
And then, in the silence, MacKinnon laughed again, and with a hand in his pocket went close to Eldred, who stood with his head drooping.
“I was lookin' for you, King Norman, to knock your damned crown he said, “but this—it's enough for a beginnin'!”
He lifted his free hand then, and snapped the thumb close against Eldred's face and, chuckling to himself, walked out.
EVE halted half-way between store and house and watched David MacKinnon go down the beach.
For a certainty she was without protection now. There went the only man but one who had ever defended her, and that other had just refused even the shelter of his house.
She could hear the men stirring in the store, hear their voices rising in the first murmurs of embarrassed talk, and those sounds struck her with cold fear. No longer was the presence of her father a restraint upon them; no longer was there anything between their impulses and her safety.
Go back to her father and argue? It gave her a creepy sensation, for she had seen him enraged before, but never had she seen such evil in his face as had been there a moment ago.
If she could get away from this island, she might be safe, but what good would an attempt do when stronger arms than hers could propel boats in chase? If a friendly tug should happen in, if that woman from the light should come, if David MacKinnon— She caught her breath. She heard a man on the store steps speak. She was flying through the shadows.
It was only a short distance to the beach, but by the time Eve had emerged from the shadow of the net-house, her breathing was desperately fast.
“Come back!” she called chokingly.
David, splashing through the water and already half-way to his anchored boat, stopped and looked about. She stood at the water's edge, watching him.
“Now what do you want?” he asked sharply.
“Come back!” she repeated, and added a faint “Please!”
For a moment the man remained irresolute, and then turned slowly toward shore, curiosity stirred by this summons.
“Well, I'm back,” he said, stopping close to her.
The girl studied his shadowed face.
“You didn't hear what my father said?”
“Yes.”
Eve looked back at the store again and tugged at one hand with the other.
“He said—that his house wasn't mine any more. He told me——”
“I was there, and I've got ears. Did you think——”
“That is why I followed you, to have a place—to go.”
The man lifted a hand and rubbed his chin with the backs of his fingers.
“So that's it!” She nodded. “You're comin' to me for help?”
“You are my only chance.”
“What makes you think I'll help you?”
She waited a bit before saying in a whisper,
“Because you—you're different.”
He laughed rather scoffingly.
“What if I say that I won't help you?”
“You're not going to say that! You know what it means to leave me here.” He laughed once more, but she went on, reaching out to grasp his sleeve and shake the arm intently: “I told you the other night that it's been my father who's stood between me and those men. I told you how they—how they looked at me, how they waited and watched, and how I'd been safe because they were afraid of him—my father. To-night they heard him send me away—and he said that I belonged to—whoever could take me. That's what he said, and they heard him.” She halted, for her excited breathing broke up the sentences. “You're my only chance at safety—that's why I ran after you. Just to-night—just to help me away.”
Her voice caught on the last, and the hand that had touch his sleeve let go its hold.
MacKinnon stirred and look from her frost-white face to the shadows of men approaching the shacks. Some had stopped and were watching him, he knew. The girl had not overstated her situation.
“You're not safe here,” he said. “That's sure. Do you think you'd be safe with me?”
She looked up, and her expression changed from desperation to a certain calculation, a certain hardness.
“I'm not asking you for—for safety,” she said. “I'm just asking you to take me away—that's all——”
Her expression puzzled him; he did not know whether it was fear or guile, but while he watched her and absorbed the shock of her reply this fact struck him: that the girl was in his hands. To-night he had shattered King Norman's dream of keeping his daughter ever loyal to him, and it was not unlikely that Eldred's regret for what he had done would be as sudden and as profound as the rage which had put her away. Here, then, was a chance to remove her presence, and should the king want her back, that revenge would be picturesque indeed!
“Fair enough!” he said and laughed. He stooped and lifted her and sloshed out through the water and set her lightly down on the rail and scrambled aboard himself.
IT IS an hour's run from Garden to High Island for a craft like the Islander with its heavy-duty motor, and in that time at least two people aboard did a deal of thinking. Fred Mink, the Indian, sat at the wheel and steered, and if he thought much, he gave little evidence of it.
After the motor was turning regularly and he had looked at the oil-supply, David drew off his oilskins and stood abaft the engine, looking at the girl, who sat crouched on a locker behind the Indian, dimly revealed by the reflected glow of the binnacle-light. She had not spoken since she came aboard; she had dropped on that locker as though the last strength had gone. Her face was in shadow.
THE man went out on the stern, where he stood looking along their wake to the few lights that showed on Garden Island. That particular smile with which he had listened to the warnings of men who feared that he would come to grief with Eldred was on his face now, accentuated and augmented by a dancing light of boyish triumph. He ran a hand through his hair as he remembered Eldred's collapse when Eve sprang to protect him, and he chuckled when he thought how the story would go over the lakes—that Jode MacKinnon's boy had run away from Garden Island, with Eve Eldred for his prisoner.
That is what she was—his prisoner. He considered her so. For a flash, back there on the beach, he had been conscious of pity, because it was not pleasant to think of any girl with eyes and lips and a body like Eve's left to the mercy of men like her father. But that was gone now, and what he saw in the situation was a second blow at her father; more than a blow—stock with which to make the man ridiculous!
And he owed the girl a score, too. He was now helping her out of one hideous situation, but she would be far from comfortable in that escape, he told himself. No, indeed! She would pay for this rescue, and fully! She would pay, too, for the part she had played in the destruction of the Annabelle. She would pay with suspense and uncertainty and fear, for he would keep this girl guessing.
And while he stood outside. Eve sat slumped forward. As the boat gathered way her spinning mind had steadied a bit, and by the time David had gone on deck, she was thinking fast.
She was free from the menace of her father's men, and she had traded on the beach with MacKinnon very eagerly; but now, with the one danger obviated, the other loomed before her as a thing as monstrous as the first.
She heard again his challenge: “Do you think you'd be safe with me?” and in memory his tone became more insinuating, more forbidding. She had come with him; she had even said that she was not asking for safety. She had lied then in her bargaining, for she thought it would be a bribe which she could retrieve later. There had been no time for regard of truth and honor there on the beach.
At least she had achieved something. The menace was concentrated in one man. She knew that, except for the Indians, he lived alone on High Island; she did not fear Fred Mink and the other. To protect herself from MacKinnon, then, became her sole objective.
And, as she planned, she became desperate; but she was alert, frightfully calm, driven to clear thought by the situation. There would be no escaping him; that much was certain. She could not argue with him because his front to-night had been one of scornful enmity.
She tapped a foot swiftly and hugged her body. To protect herself from him—to keep him away until morning—for a day—a week. He was hard—as hard as rock, as hard as steel. As hard as the steel of those knives used in dressing fish which were racked against the wall—as hard as those knives— She started. There were three, blades narrow and thin from long use. They were sharp knives—very sharp, she knew. A bargain meant nothing; she was concerned with one thing—her safety. MacKinnon had taunted her with his own menace. And her strength was no strength for his.
She sat further forward. David could not see her. Mink lounged on the wheel, watching the water ahead. She drew a foot across the boards, but he did not look back. She stirred, but still the Indian showed no interest. She stood up, and he did not move. And then, like a stalking cat, she crossed the housing, waited, looked swiftly about. She sat down again and tapped her foot and hugged her body, but not so tightly as before, for in her blouse was a knife, one hand gripping its handle.
She was aware of the mechanics of bringing the boat to dock, heard the lines go out and made fast. She was alone, with both men outside. She heard words, muffled, and then Mink said:
“All righ'. See you in the mornin', Dave.” And his footsteps went up the resounding dock.
Eve was more alone than she had ever been in her life. A show of strength, her father had preached, was the assurance of safety; she had summoned that front almost daily for years, but it had never been convincing perhaps to any man, and she even had confessed her weakness and fear to MacKinnon.
But now it was not so. What protection she might have would come from her own wits and strength of heart, and as she stood there in the darkness of the boat listening for David's next movement or word, that front which she had only assumed became real. It was one of those moments of peril when slack and flabby courage becomes taut and strong, and as she felt the boat list slightly when MacKinnon's weight came on it, she gathered herself for a spring, and her heart was as determined, as unfaltering as the grip of the hand on that knife-handle. He was saying,
“Come along now; we'll go to the house.”
One impulse in the girl was to rebel, to force the issue then and there; but another—some sudden weakness, some part of her which still shrank from the crisis, which, perhaps, was hope for an easier way—urged her on, and she went.
His one foot was on the rail and the other on the dock. She hesitated, and, as though from a considerable distance, she heard him say, “Here; I'll help you across.” And his hand was on her arm, helping her step to the dock, steadying her; and the hand held there while they walked forward, tightening like a locked band of steel.
“Cold?” he asked, and she shook her head, at which he laughed. “Not afraid, are you?”—mockingly. “You tremble so.”
Resentment came with that, and she tried to pull away, but he hung on and, an instant later, steadied her as she walked a stringer of the half-ruined wharf. She did not know whether his hand was aid or trap. She was aware that he was searching her and she flashed a look at him, at which he laughed. Rage came, paralleling fresh fear; he seemed to be so sure of her, so sure of himself, as though he followed some well-formed and familiar plan.
They went slowly up the beach. Eve's pulses hammering at her ears, fully alive to but one thing: the knife which she clutched—her last hope, her only chance, she felt.
They stopped in the shadow of a log house and MacKinnon fumbled at the latch and looked at her with that deviling laughter still in his eyes.
And then she was inside, alone with him in a dark room, and his hand was gone from her arm. She went forward swiftly, turning in the darkness with the knife drawn, for she expected pursuit. She heard him moving. He was not following, and under cover of the sound she kept on until she touched a wall. It was rough and hung with clothing. She went along it slowly, breath quick, until she came to a door—a door!
She reached for the knob, all but sobbing aloud in suspense. She could not face him there in a room within four walls—strong walls. Her courage was failing; she could not fight with the spirit that her father had encouraged. She must flee, must be away, outside—and here was a door!
Her hand found the knob, and in a flutter of excitement and relief she turned it, but before the latch moved, a match scratched and flared. Eve found herself backed tightly against the door, facing him, waiting. But David was turned the other way as he fussed with the bracket-lamp on the wall, burning match in one hand, chimney in the other. The wick flared; the chimney went on. Carefully he waved out the match, tossed it toward the cook-stove which stood in one corner and turned.
The girl shrank farther back against the panels of the door. Her face was half averted as though from an expected blow.
He stepped forward, and a last flare of desperate courage swept through the girl, but he stopped by a chair in mid-floor and drew it back against the w;all. Then he looked closely at her.
“Rough—but good enough,” he said. “Your room”—with an exaggerated wave of a hand toward the door against which she cringed and a derisive bow—“and the door locks from the inside. I sleep on the boat. Sweet dreams!”
Eve found herself standing alone, staring at the knife she held as though it fascinated her. Then, with a gesture that was almost fright, she sent it spinning across the floor.
HOW long a time passed before Norman Eldred moved from the doorway in which Eve had left him he did not know.
It was a seemingly endless interval of suffering, of dumb pain, of confusion and heart-break. He stood there as a man whose whole world has collapsed and who has no further need for the ability to move or think or speak. In an instant his kingdom had become chaos. Not because he had lost command of his crew, not because his property or profits or ascendency was threatened, but because the object for which he had worked and dominated was wiped out.
Strong as he was, Eldred had had moments when rage could not drive fear completely from his heart. One of them came when he looked into the face of Jode MacKinnon's son and saw that the boy was undismayed at the prospect of a clash with him. That was something new—encountering a man who dared challenge him, who, instead of showing humility, showed insolence.
For the hour he had been able to put this by, promising himself that the trader would pay as others had paid, and then he had stood in the shadows and seen David Mac Kinnon listening to what Eve so earnestly told him—listening and watching her with something more than curiosity.
With that came panic. Eldred fired the Annabelle, and felt sure that the way of strength had triumphed again and that he was rid of the trader. But MacKinnon would not learn his lesson. He remained near and made threats; he was audacious; he knew no caution, and all these factors combined to put Eldred in a ferment of rage.
He planned many manners of revenge, but in each instance he came against this hard fact: David MacKinnon did not fear him, and it was fear in the hearts of other men on which Eldred had built his position. And then, this night, he had come upon the trader in the store, with Eve in his arms, fighting and calling for help—the fairest avenue to revenge that even a fair-minded man could ask!
A GREAT joy had come into his heart as he reached for the pistol, and a great sickness as Eve, in that stressed second, made her choice. She would defend against her father the man who had humiliated her! Beyond that, there could be no more complete renunciation of the thing for which Norman Eldred had hoped. And so, as a man who had dedicated every hour and every energy toward one objective, only to see it go beyond his touch, he was rocked to the foundations of his consciousness.
The chagrin, the disappointment, the heart-wrench which Eve's action caused him turned the passion that had held her close to his heart to an equally virulent passion that would put her away. She was gone in that one moment, dismissed from his life, he thought. He was once more at the beginnings, with nothing at hand but his tortured heart, his body, his senses. He was aware that the men went out, leaving him alone; he moved to a packing-box and sat down like one who is mortally wounded. His hands hung between his knees; his head drooped forward. After a long time he lifted his face and stared about dully, as though expecting to find others viewing his misery.
But he was alone, except for Friend, just coming to a stop in the doorway, peering at him inquiringly with his amber eyes. The dog was dripping water, for he had swum until tired in the wake of the boat that carried Eve away and had come back.
Eldred rose. Friend advanced, sniffing, and watched as the man stooped to recover his pistol; then he smelled the weapon, and after the tongue of fire had leaped out to sear his troubled nose, he ran in a brief half-circle with his head held close to one shoulder. Then he lay down and turned on his side, and when Eldred walked out, his lifeless tail was thumping the floor in a reflex of his gone happiness. For long Eldred had hated the dog because he had a place in Eve's affections. That cruel and childish revenge seemed to steady his weakened legs and he walked with a degree of assurance as he passed out of the store, unmindful of the lights which still burned, not even taking the precaution to close the door behind him.
He went up the path to his house. Opening the door, he stood and peered into the big room. No lamp was there, but a half-burned log smoldered, throwing the room into eery lights and shadows. He went within, closing the door softly, and looked about. For many minutes he stared into the shadows, and then began to walk among them slowly, groping with his feet, half leaning on chairs as he passed, as though feeling out the obscured places.
He came to a halt by the stairway door and stood looking at the black knob. He was listening, and after he drew the door wide he listened again.
“Eve?” he called finally. “Eve?”—waiting. “Eve?”—the last in a husky tone.
No response, and he made as if to call again, but did not and went up the stairs, clinging to the rail. He paused before her door and listened again and tapped timidly, as though fearful of touching the pine panel. The force of his knuckles was enough to start the unlatched door swinging wide open.
It was as though an invisible hand had drawn it back to show him the white interior bathed in moonlight—and empty.
Eldred spoke the girl's name in a whisper again, and then turned and went downstairs. A thin blue flame burned in the maw of the fireplace, and as he stood at the foot of the stairs, a reflected light-point caught his eye—in the glass of that one picture which hung against the wall. He began to move across the darkened room, eyes on that mirrored light as though it fascinated him. He did not stop until he stood directly before the photograph.
“So!” he cried, and the sound was soft, and long-drawn, like the sighing of wind. “So-o-o! So!”
Then, with a mighty sweep of an arm he snatched the picture from the wall, brandished it about his head and dashed it violently to the floor. He stood staring down at it a long moment as though trying to realize what he had done; then he lifted his feet and stamped the glass and frame and picture to slivers and splinters and rags. It was a dance, a wild, weird dance of hate—and when it was ended the man went across the room with an exaggerated swagger, climbed the stairs and threw himself, still clothed, upon his bed.
The Mackinaw boat, Revenge, was standing up Lake Huron in a light night breeze. The soiled and aged man was at the tiller, scanning the lake with those vacant eyes. He was holding almost due north, which course would put him into Detour Passage and Lake Superior. For long he had been muttering incoherently to himself, hut of a sudden he stopped. He laughed, too, a strained, husky sound, there alone on the lake, and put his tiller down. The Revenge swung up. He flattened his canvas as she took the tack into the west, toward the Straits of Mackinac, which gave him egress to Lake Michigan.
For an hour or more Eve Eldred lay face down on the bed, hands gripping the blankets lightly, breath at first swift and irregular as it bordered on sobs, later easing to a degree of calmness. Finally she sat up. The lamp still burned in the other room, and its glow fell on her through the open door. She rose and went to that door, examining it. A bolt was there, attached to the inside.
“Yes—he was right,” she said.
Then she went in, extinguished the lamp and gazed through the window. The boat lay. against the dock, and no movement disturbed the still night. She turned and went back to the bedroom, closing the door behind her. For a moment she fingered the bolt, sliding it into its socket; then pushed it back, leaving the door secured only by its latch. She unlaced her boots and without further preparation covered herself with the blankets.
“I was wrong,” she said soberly. “And he—didn't mean it.”
For the first time her breath caught in an actual sob, but tears did not come, and presently she slept.
SHE watched him come up from the boat in sharp outline against the hard silver of the young day. She stood motionless in the middle of the room as he approached, and could see through the cracks in the door that he paused outside as if listening. She saw, too, his one hand draw back as though he would rap to announce his coming, and heard him grunt to himself as instead of sending his knuckles against the wood he opened the door with a shove of his palm.
“Good-morning,” he said and bowed, as he had bowed last night, ironically, with that half-sneering smile on his face.
Eve's lips moved to acknowledge that greeting, but her voice was only a murmur.
MacKinnon advanced to the stove and dropped to his knees, thrusting driftwood into the box and striking a match.
“Pleasant dreams?”—as he carefully applied the flame to the tinder.
“One—I think,” she said, and he looked over his shoulder sharply. When he saw the serenity of her eyes, a flicker of astonishment crossed his face and he turned back to the fire.
He rose and began taking cooking-utensils and food from the shelves behind the stove, whistling lightly to himself, not looking at the girl, who stood watching him. Then he took the water-pail from its box and started for the door, still whistling and ignoring her.
“While you get water,” she said, “I'll start getting things ready.”
She said this eagerly, and the tone might have arrested David under other circumstances, but his reply, as he passed out was:
“You can't do anything here any more than you could if you were in jail.”
Eve folded her hands rather meekly before her.
“My, but you put yourself to a lot of trouble!” she said.
He did not reply to this and, as he was then through the doorway, she could not see that his color deepened. She watched him as he tied a line to the pail and dropped it into the lake. Then, before he drew it up, she saw him rub his chin with the backs of his fingers.
For a time thereafter, Dave was occupied with the preparation of breakfast. He made a great clatter with his pans and spoons; he set the table carelessly, dropping plates and cutlery with much noise, and not once did he look at the girl.
He finished stirring his cake-batter. He was adept, demonstrating those fine points of cookery which men who have lived much alone develop, but with the griddle smoking and the fat ready to be smeared on its surface, just, in fact, as he dipped the spoon into the golden batter, the girl asked,
“Don't you ever put salt in your cakes?”
He did not know whether the clearing of her throat before she spoke was an indication of apology or to check laughter; it sounded suspiciously like the latter, and he mumbled something and began to whistle quite loudly, but by the time the salt was stirred in and the first cake was baking, his whistle had died. The coffee boiled over with gusto, and when David thumped down his bowl of batter and pulled the pot to one side. Eve spoke again.
“There! Now, if I'd been helping——”
At once he resumed whistling, without deigning reply.
THE breakfast ready, MacKinnon dragged a chair to the table and looked at Eve.
“Bring up a chair,” he said.
They ate in silence, David with a show of appetite, Eve slowly, as though the food did not interest her. The man did not look up from his plate except once, and then to ask Eve if she would have more coffee.
The meal was over, and the sun, which had climbed above the forest-crowned sand bluffs of Beaver Island, was flinging its first level rays through the windows of the cabin. MacKinnon shoved his chair back to rise when Eve spoke abruptly:
“When I tried to thank you that other time, you wouldn't let me. You'll have to now.”
The half-concealed smile which had been in her eyes until then was gone, and she was very serious.
“Thank me for what?”
“For last night.”
He shrugged then and rose and laughed.
“You better hang on to your thanks until you see what'll happen to you. Remember, you've only landed here; there's lots of time for things to happen that you won't thank me for.”
The steadiness of her eyes was most discomfiting, less so, though, than her words, for she went on:
“That's what you said last night, or you meant about that. You're a lot like my dog, Friend. He growls pretty bad, but that's as far as it goes. He'll be friends with anybody. I told you once that a girl doesn't have to know much about men; she can feel what men are like, and you're not like any man I ever knew. You scared me, like Friend scares folks, but you're—you're just decent.”
In the silence that followed, she looked up at him, and there was that frankness in her eyes which checked what he had in-intended to say.
“Last night, when I asked you to bring me away with you, I thought—I thought you meant what you said, maybe, that I wouldn't be safe with you. But I'd rather be in danger from one man than from a lot—and—besides, you were different. I meant it when I said that all I cared about was getting away; I meant that until we got out of my father's harbor. For a long time I've tried to make men think I was a fighter when I knew I wasn't, but last night, when I was alone with you, I thought I sure was going to have to fight. So I got hold of that.” She pointed beneath the stove, and MacKinnon saw the dressing-knife on the floor, where she had flung it.
“Ready to knife me, eh? I'd expected as much, even after you made your bargain. I didn't promise anything but to take you away.”
She nodded assent.
“I wasn't thinking about that. I knew that if you were mean I'd have to fight, and that I wasn't strong enough to drive you off. That knife was the best help I could find, and I brought it along.”
He said something that indicated contempt, but she did not notice.
“And then you gave up your bed to me and told me I could lock the door. That's what I wanted to thank you for.”
“I told you once to be careful of your thanks. That ought to be enough.”
She looked soberly at him a moment.
“You're trying to scare me. You had trouble with my father, and you're trying to take it out on me. I don't know what that was about. All I know is that you've treated me as no other man I've ever known would treat me. You were good to me last night; you almost knocked on the door before you came in this morning. You were—were almost kind to me at breakfast. You would've been, too, if you hadn't kept your mind on trying to act as if you weren't decent. You can't scare me—not any more.”
“All right,” he said, as he picked up his cap. “If that's the way you look at it, fair enough!” He started out and paused, half turning in the doorway. “I'm goin' to be working on the traps yonder”—with a gesture—“and I'll be in sit of the harbor all day. The only boats on the island are here, and if you try to make a getaway. I'll see you. You won't have a chance!”
He went away toward the dock, but the girl followed as far as the threshold.
“David,” she called, “don't worry about my running-away! I'm going to stay here—with you—as long as you'll let me!”
He did not even look back, but as he reached for the bow line of the Islander, the backs of the fingers of the other hand rubbed his chin in that gesture of perplexity.
An hour later Eve stood on the extreme point of the sand spit which strikes out eastward to form the High Island harbor. The stiff south wind whipped the skirt about her slim legs and riffled tendrils of dark hair about her erect little head. In her nostrils was that fine, clean smell of wind over great bodies of fresh water, damp, and soft with spring. Her blue eyes were very bright, her lips parted, and cheeks stained with color as she watched. One after another, tugs had appeared from Norman Eldred's harbor and had gone their way to the business of fishing. Now the last had cleared the buoys and was swinging to the northward with a stake-driver in tow. The girl drew one hand through the other and swallowed slowly, and her lips moved.
“Mother,” she said huskily, “is it wrong? Is it wrong to feel this way? So—relieved?”
IN THE early afternoon. Gam Gallagher, standing home from the northward, headed in toward the Islander, which swung at anchor. He put out in a pound-boat to watch David and his Indians setting the trap-nets, and though the talk was of the fishing, the older man's curiosity was caught by that half-laughing, half-perplexed look in the eyes of his helper.
The work over, David and Gallagher sat on the stern of the Kittiwake while the Indians cleared up odds and ends preparatory to going ashore, and it was there that Gam's curiosity was satisfied.
His eyes did not leave the younger man's face for an instant until MacKinnon looked up and laughed, like a delighted boy.
“And here I am, holdin' the apple of his eye in the palm of my hand!”
Then Gam shook his head slowly and chuckled.
“It's a good un on him, lad! It's the best ever.” Then he became grave. “Ye couldn't've struck so hard a blow by cuttin' the heart out of his body! Ye're not expectin' him to let her go without tryin' to get her back, are ye?”
“It's likely he'll try.”
“An' if he does?”
“That'll be another thing. I'm not makin' any more cracks, but he don't thrill me a dime's worth. In a fight, Gam, it's' the first punch that counts the most. I wasn't scared of him at first, and there's sure no need to get lily-hearted now.”
The other shook his head skeptically.
“Mebbe not, Dave; mebbe not.” And then, after a moment, “An' now, if it's any of my business, what's yer plan for her?”
The lad stirred restlessly, and the other looked closer, for a change came over the face he watched—a shadow of doubt.
“It's killin' two birds with one rock, Gam. It don't square any account, not by a damn sight, but it's a fair beginnin' because it's such sweet punishment for him to lose her; and it'll serve her right to be kept guessin' a while—a few days.”
“Ye'll turn her back, then?”
David shrugged.
“I only want to worry her a lot, and after that I don't care.”
But he did not look at Gallagher when he said this, and the man's eyes were very keen as they searched his face. After a moment, he laid a big hand on Dave's knee.
“Go easy, boy; ye're young, an' it's springtime, an' whatever else ye'll say of her, she's as fair as a May mornin'!”
David laughed rather hollowly, but Gam did not notice that. He stood up.
“Come inside, lad. I guess Eldred's put no fear into ye, an' mebbe ye can go it alone, but I know him an' his ways, an' I don't want to see ye caught with nothin' but yer hands an' wits when mebbe ye'll need somethin' else.”
He opened a locker and drew out a rifle, wrapped in greasy cloths.
“I've carried it,” he said, holding it out, “because Eldred fishes these same waters; but I guess he'll bother none of the rest of us for a while now. Take it an' keep her handy.”
Dave stepped into his boat and pushed off. Gam stood watching him.
“That's for Eldred,” he said, as Dave put down the rifle; “but for the other—there's nothin' I can give ye for her, not even advice.”
{[di|E]}VE watched the work that David did that afternoon, and when she saw that the task was almost over, she began preparing the evening meal. She was frying potatoes when he entered and did not look up, though the comers of her mouth twitched as if begging to be allowed to smile. She said,
“It'll be ready in a minute.”
He stood over the stove, and finally she lifted her face to see his, cold and clouded.
“Hereafter you'll do no cookin',” he said.
“But I like to! And there's nothing for me to do——”
“That don't matter to me,” he snapped. “I don't trust you—in anything. A man wants to know what he eats. There's nothing here but toadstools and broken glass, but——”
She put down the fork and again her mouth twitched, but not from laughter this time.
“David, if I'd wanted to hurt you, it would have been easy last night,” she said flatly.
He only said,
“You can't get up any argument here; what I say happens to go!”
If developments depended on his saying anything, little would have been accomplished thereafter that night, for they ate without the exchange of a word and the man went out immediately, without so much as a glance at the girl. Eve listened to his departure and drew a chair close to the stove and put her feet on the hearth and clasped her arms about her knees. Her brows were in a frown and on her face now was real melancholy.
She did not know that aboard the Islander, an oil-lamp swinging in gimbals, blankets of his bunk folded to make a comfortable couch, David MacKinnon stared for a half-hour at a single paragraph on the page of a battered magazine. At the end of that time he threw the book away irritably and sat up, putting his head in his hands, and remained so for another lengthy interval. Then he rose and went outside and stood on the dock, gazing out into the lake. There was about his picture something counterfeit, as though his chief interest did not lie yonder across the water, and when the moon, which had been shining through a rift, was again obscured, he turned and went up the beach. But when he approached the cabin where Eve sat before the stove, he went slowly and with great caution, and when he drew near the window through which he could see her, he halted.
For an interval he stood there, a score of feet from her. She moved but little and then only her head, for she still hugged her knees. Once more he became acutely conscious of the luster of her hair, the fineness of feature, soft texture of her skin. And she seemed small—small and alone and defenseless, as she had last night when he held her prisoner and strained her against his body to force her lips to his.
It was of that moment Eve was thinking while he watched. Twenty-four hours ago—and yet it seemed so long since he made that threat before her father's men, and she swallowed dryly as some of the fright returned to her and her lips trembled at memory of that humiliation.
At this point, a strange thing occurred. She could feel his arms roughly about her, again sensed the panic of helplessness as she tried to break free, could feel, in memory, his hot breath on her throat, on her cheek and his lips on hers, and, with this last, that odd something which had been brought to life by the hard caress last night and which had been driven back into her subconsciousness by the events which immediately followed burst into new life. It sent her heart thumping, shot a strange warmth through her body, and she felt herself trembling, not with fright or shame but with some other thing, something new, something delightful!
She lifted her face as though she had been alarmed by a sound, and the man outside was startled at sight of the dynamic beauty which came over her and started back, fearing that in that moment of excitement he had spoken or betrayed himself in some other way.
He circled away from the house and made toward the boat. Eve rose shortly and put out the light. She was turning toward the bedroom door when a low hail from outside attracted her. She paused and listened and heard the voice again; she moved to the window and stared out.
A man was standing there, half-way between the house and the water, and another was coming rapidly toward him through the sand. The first was Mink; the other was MacKinnon. She heard David ask:
“What you doin', Fred?”
“After wood.”
“You don't come this way after wood. Get it off the spit.”
The Indian said something Eve could not hear.
“Never mind that! You get your wood in daylight from now on, and don't prowl round this house any time so long as she's here.”
Without reply. Mink turned and went back to his shack and slammed the door behind him.
Eve saw MacKinnon return to his boat, and watched until the light was extinguished. Then she turned to her bed and nestled in the blankets, curled closely, at once perplexed and at peace. She was puzzled, but felt safe—very safe—on this island with him.
THAT night, Ned Borden and his wife, Jen, were waiting the return from St. James of Pete Larsen, the first assistant keeper, who had gone over at dawn in the supply-boat.
The light glowed in its tower; the fire roared in the stove below, and Aunt Jen, who had been busy for a week in her hours off watch arranging and readjusting the furniture in the dwelling, rocked and darned beside the stove while her husband read from a published volume of sermons by the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage. Her eyes were far away when her work dropped into her lap. She sighed and breathed an “Oh dear!” Ned looked up.
“What is it, Jenny?”
The woman stopped her rocking.
“I'm just wondering if Pete'll bring back my Up-to-Date. I'm all settled now and 've got the goods; time I was working on clothes if I ain't going to look like a grand old relic whenever I go offen this light.”
Borden's face broke into a grave smile.
“Bless you, Jenny! You're the best dressed woman on the lakes. Seems to me we didn't bring much but your clothes when we moved over.”
Jen sniffed.
“Clothes! I ain't got a thing but that mohair and my old tan tailored to wear ashore. I got that piece of taffeta and the lawn for a dress. If Up-to-Date ever gets here. I'll know what they're going to wear this summer, and then I can get busy. This setting and setting when I'm off watch ain't very satisfying.”
“What boils were to Job, idleness is to you, my dear. Didn't I hear the machine going late last night?”
“Just some underthings—didn't need 'em, and nobody who counts ever 'll see 'em unless I get in a wreck, but a body has to be doing.”
Ned went back to his book of sermons; then after a moment looked up at his wife and cleared his throat.
“My dear, you aren't going to be unhappy here?”
Jen looked at him, startled.
“Unhappy? Why in tarnation do you ask a question like that, Ned Borden? Ain't I got you, you blessed old hay-bag?”
There was, with her bluster, something like fright.
“Why, it's seemed to me that ever since we came here you've been uneasy. It's Eldred's being near here hasn't gotten on your nerves, has it?”
“Humph. Him?"
“I know—I know you wouldn't worry over a dangerous man; but there's—I don't know”—closing his book on a finger in the place and leaning forward earnestly—“I can't tell you what it is, but it seems like there's something about you I don't understand. Ever since that night we had to put into his harbor, it's seemed like there was—something between us, Jenny.”
“Something between us? Why, you old rooster, you don't mean anything I do 's making you unhappy, do you?”—voice trembling with concern.
“Me unhappy? The only way you could ever make me unhappy would be to be unhappy yourself or to do something that would be unworthy of you, Jenny. You know that. I've thought you were worried and hiding what worried you so it wouldn't upset me. That'd be like you. And be cause you couldn't sleep that night in Indian Harbor, I thought maybe it was the stories you'd heard about Eldred.”
“Do I look like a woman to be upset by fairy-tales?”—driving the husk out of her voice with a forced belligerence. “I guess not! You're mooning, Ned; you need a dose of sulphur and molasses.” She shifted her big bulk on the chair and sniffed contemptuously. “He may be called bad by folks round here, but I've yet to see a black-whiskered devil who'd scare me!”
Borden smiled, but he was not satisfied.
Jen rocked again when he stepped to the door and looked out to see that the light burned properly.
“If I was to set out, now, to make you uneasy, just what would you recommend me to do?” she asked gruffly. “The time may come, dearie, when I want to devil you, and just what would you recommend?”
“You're making fun of me.”
“I'm making talk on a lonesome night.”
Borden placed a marker in his book and stretched and yawned.
“Oh, you could lie to me or you could do something dishonorable. That is, another woman could; you couldn't——”
“Go 'long with you!” she said, but there was trouble in her heart. “Lying would do it, eh? Or something dishonorable?”
Borden was not particularly interested in this discussion of a possible provocation of his distrust, and though Aunt Jen tried in a clumsy manner at intervals to continue talk on the point, conversation rambled into less speculative affairs. It did not lag, however; their talks never did. They had enough in common and enough diversity in points of view to interest one another, and there were few silences.
THE contentment, with its rare suggestion of romance, had come to both after years of loneliness. Borden had entered the service when the lights were few and primitive. He had been reared on the shore of Lake Ontario, but assignment took him into the St. Lawrence River, where he served through his young manhood and into middle life. He was competent, conscientious and liked responsibility; he was a keeper at thirty, and many a season thereafter he was privileged to wear the efficiency star, badge of faultless performance of duty.
He was not worried about pay or pension; he saved always, and men who worked with him knew that he invested what little he could put by. He had but one extravagance, and this was the purchase of books on theology and volumes of sermons. In the years he had accumulated a sizable library of these which he reread slowly, carefully and, it is likely, with good understanding. A Christian, Norman Eldred had heard of him, and all men recognized a fine spirit in the keeper, but there was yet to be one who had heard cant from his lips or who had been urged to change his manner of life. Borden's religion was a personal matter with him, not to be boasted of, not to find outlet in dictation to other men. His business was to guide ships, and he let the spiritual misadventures of men alone.
Early in that last decade in which the white wings of sailing craft vied with the coming of steam to the Great Lakes, “Red Jenny” was well known from Superior to Buffalo—just “Red Jenny” to most men, marine cook, with personality and temper, and a tongue and a quantity of blazing red hair which had given her the name.
She was of the lakes wholly; so it caused speculation when the thing happened which sent her ashore and establish her as mistress of a sailors' rest, a Buffalo boarding-house.
THE early history of her establishment was no different from that of many another water-front boarding-house in many another lake port. It was frankly and openly in its special class, without pretense or distinction except that the woman who operated it was headstrong and had certain rigid rules which she enforced. Then, too, there was her room off the kitchen and, at first, the sound of a child's voice there. Both room and infant were guarded without relaxation.
But of a sudden there came a face-about in the conduct of the sailors' rest. It was after a night when the mistress was heard crying behind her locked door, and the next morning at an unseasonable hour certain occupants went tumbling through the door, unceremoniously ejected. There were two women and a half-dozen men in this group.
That was the only time, it developed, that objectionable people were flung out of her boarding-house, due to that discrimination with which she accepted guests thereafter. Her place became known as respectable and, finally, unprofitable. The beds were clean, the meals splendid, but no drunken sailors were accepted, and no woman entered the door. Neither, it was casually remarked, was there sound of a child's voice. The clientele was limited indeed, and though Red Jenny was cook and clerk and chambermaid in one, she was finally forced to give up and to bend over a stove that was not her property.
She made her arrangements, and as the last thing went to. the office of the rental agency to settle that obligation, she gave them a piece of her mind loudly and without regard for niceties.
“There's your blood-money!” she boomed. “I hof)e the devil himself 'll blister the heart of the party who owns that shack that depends on whisky and women for profit!”
There were expostulations, of course, and the manager glanced apprehensively at the one other occupant of the room, a tall, well-boned man, in reefer and cap, who listened intently. Jen saw that man when she turned to go, and met his stare defiantly.
A week later, in her new place, she saw him again. The man became regular at his table, and before long he spoke to the cook, saying, without preface:
“I hope you don't mind being followed up. I sort of liked what you said about the guilt of a certain person.”
Jen was about to retort bruskly, but his honesty and gentleness checked her, and instead she mumbled an evasive reply and talked of other things. That night the man stayed on, and within a fortnight she had consented to be the wife of Ned Borden.
“You know me?” she asked tremulously, when he asked her to go with him. “Red Jenny?”
“I know enough.”
“Mebbe you think you do. You've got to know everything. Now, listen.” She began at the beginning then and talked, revealing her life completely, resolutely, and it was not until she appreciated his fine understanding and the genuine greatness of his heart that her courage failed and she stopped—just before she had reached the one thing which she held lowest of all. She tried to go on and could not. She put it off and was married, and tried again a number of times, and failed, and locked the secret in her breast, dreading the consequences of its revelation.
It was remarked on the lakes that Red Jenny, the bellowing shrew, had married that fellow from down the St. Lawrence and that she was quite changed. Men laughed when they heard this.. Red Jenny, the wife of that soft-spoken deacon! He'd bitten off a sweet mouthful, he had! But their skeptical prophecies did not materialize, and Red Jenny became “Aunt Jen,” as loud as ever, perhaps, but with a great heart close behind her bruskness.
This changed life could not change one impulse in the woman, and that was to excel. Instead of dominating men and being recognized as an outstanding figure among sailing people, she now took up the matter of dress, and although most of the time she was on lonely lights, she devoted more energy to the matter of clothes than a débutante. She studied fashion magazines and shopped with fervor when given the opportunity, and sewed hours at a time when not on watch, because she soon earned herself a recognized place in the service. Most of her spare time was spent in cutting and stitching, or in altering the many clothes which hung unused for months at a time.
Since their coming to Squaw Island, Aunt Jen had employed the machine regularly, It was to her like drug to an addict, and when her nerves were in a jangle, it was the manufacture of garments which would steady them. Also, when she was bent low and apparently absorbed in her work, none could see a reflection of that misgiving and fright which was in her heart.
To-night there were indications of a growing restlessness while she talked, but she kept to her chair until the thin whistle of the returning supply-boat came to them.
Jen followed her husband to the water's edge and took from Larsen the bundle of mail he had received at St. James. She went back to the house while the two men drew the boat up its slide and tore the wrapper from a magazine. She spread it on the table, scanning with great interest the slight, hollow-chested young woman who adorned the cover of Up-to-Date Modes and who was attired with all the elegance of contemporary dressmaking art. There was admiration in Jen's eyes for the lines of the figure which she could never have, and with a movement as of resignation she riffled the pages until she came to a department headed: “The Stylish Stout.” Then she sat down and propped her head on her hand and read diligently.
She did not look up when the two men entered, though the Dane was talking almost excitedly. Ned interrupted him.
“What do you think's happened, Jenny?”
She put a finger on the paragraph she had been reading and turned her head:
“They're going to wear 'em to their heels for one thing; what else?”
“Remember that trader, MacKinnon? Well, he's kidnaped the girl.”
The finger which had held Jen's place dragged across the page as if pulled by a great weight; the hand fell over the edge of the table into her lap.
“Say that again,” she said sharply.
“You tell her, Pete”—turning to his assistant. “Go back to the first. There's the hand of the Almighty in this somewhere.”
“Well, I was 'use comin' down from das store when Gam Gallagher he coom oop an' tole about young MacKinnon,” he began, and then recited at length the tale that Gam had taken to St. James that afternoon.
WHILE he talked with a small measure of excitement showing through his natural stolidity, Jen sat tense and tight-lipped, following his every syllable. She did not move except for a clenching of the hand that had dropped into her lap, but her gray eyes, fixed on the Dane's face, were alive—alive with something more than interest, with alarm, perhaps—perhaps with anxiety. She was as one who has waited for long, half in horror, half in impatience for some specific happening, and it was as though the story which Pete told was the thing which she had anticipated.
He finished with a short laugh.
“Eferyboty say Eltret, it serfes him right,” he said. “He bane crazy aboot das gel, an' now he ain't got her aany more.”
“The hand of the Almighty,” repeated Ned solemnly.
“Yah. Das iss it. He had it coomin'—sure!”
And then Jen shifted sharply in her chair and leaned forward.
“And you say this young MacKinnon's got her down on High Island alone?”
“Yah. 'Use him an' der Indians.”
“And he's keeping her there against her will?”
“Yah; das what Gam said”—nodding enthusiastically. “She helped wreck his ladder, an' she teast him away froom hiss hooker when her old man set her afire. Serfes her right, by gosh!”
“Oh, the poor dearie!” Jen rose and moved about aimlessly, letting one hand rise and fall repeatedly into the palm of the other. “The poor dearie! There alone with him— And did Gam say that he'd—” She broke the question as her voice caught. Then, stopping before Jensen, “He ain't harmed her, has he, Pete?”
The other flicked the ash from his cigar.
“By gosh, I dunno! She's dere alone with him.”
“Oh, that dearie! There alone with him! Ned, ain't that tough?” Her husband started to comment, but she went on: “Still, he didn't look like a bad sort and he didn't seem like a bad sort. That morning he done his wash before he done anything else, and when a man's clean— Oh dear!”
Ned put a hand on her shoulder.
“Jenny, don't take on like this. It's likely she's all right, and, anyhow, you don't even know the girl——”
“Know her?” she burst out. “Know her!”—looking up with a blaze of fury through her tears. “Ain't I—ain't she”—her voice weakening as her husband stared at her with amazement—“ain't she a human being? Ain't she in trouble, and ain't I the nearest woman to her?”
It was all too evident that this sense of general obligation was not the thing which had been in her mind when she interrupted her husband. The contrast between her hard-flung challenge and the subsequent questions was too great to cover that truth. Ned doubted, too. He looked closely into her face.
“Yes; you're the nearest woman to her, Jenny. You're right. We must help her if we can.”
Pete rose to go to his own quarters, but before he had exchanged the briefest of good-nights with the keeper, Jen had left the room and was back with a bolt of white goods under her arm. She dropped it to the table, dragged her sewing-machine closer to the lamp with great vigor, produced shears and patterns and fell to work.
“Sewing this time of night?” Ned asked.
“Tarnation, yes! It's my watch in an hour, and that dearie probably didn't take a stitch with her except what she had on her blessed back.” She smoothed out the pattern muttering, “She can't be more 'n a thirty-four.”
Ned climbed the tower to the room where the lamp burned in its nest of lenses, where the silent machinery revolved, making the fixed red light wink with a deeper crimson at regular intervals. He timed the mechanism with a stop-watch and went down again slowly.
When he entered the room where he had left his wife, he was greeted by the click of the foot clamped down on her cloth. She spun the wheel with her hand, and then, leaning heavily on the machine with both arms, face close to the zipping needle, drove the device at high speed, intent on her work. And long after Ned Borden, whose watch ended at midnight, went to bed, the machine whirred on, driven at a speed which made the very building vibrate.
Now and then it was halted while the woman smoothed out patterns and wielded her shears and mumbled to herself while holding thread and pins in her lips. After these intervals, she would back to the machine once more, still mumbling.
At half-hour intervals she got up and went outside, looked upward at the beacon and across the lake at the weather, for she was in charge now, and nothing, not even the turmoil in her heart, could make her relax her vigilance which would guide mariners who might be out there. Except for two instances, her work was otherwise uninterrupted.
The first of these was when, with an explosive “Tarnation!” which sent pins showering from her mouth, Jen stopped her machine and searched irritably for a handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose with vigor. The next break was of a longer duration, when she sat back in her chair, stout arms folded, and stared blankly before her, chin unsteady now and then. Tears came this time, also, but they were unheeded until she muttered aloud:
“And I've lied to him and done a dishonorable thing! And my cowardly heart ain't got a drop of faith! Oh, Neddie, Neddie!” She clapped a hand over her mouth and gave way to a moment of bitter sobbing. Then she sniffed angrily, spun the wheel and resumed her feverish work.
It was dawn when she snipped the last thread and put the cover on her precious machine. She could hear the keeper stirring in their room.
“He'll know,” she sighed. “He always knows when I'm upset, but I'm hanged if I ain't done a night's work for that dearie!”—pitting the pile of nearly finished garments with pride.
BY THE time the story of MacKinnon's prank had reached the woman on the light, it had spread the length of Beaver Island, reaching the remote farm in the forest where a countryman of Jean Mosseau's eked out a living and where the Frenchman had taken refuge from the wrath of Norman Eldred.
When his friend brought that word to him, Mosseau shoved his cap at a rakish angle and thrust his hands into his waistband and swaggered about the room, his eyes dancing.
“So!” He laughed. “So she iss no longair wit' Keeng Norman! An' she iss on High Islan'; an' de trader he iss not so smart— Jean she owes heem wan grudge, too! Eef Jean she not be drunk, yo'ng MacKinnon he be seek now, wit' broken bones—eh?”
He laughed again and twirled his mustache. He did not forget his grudges, nor the blows which David MacKinnon had rained on him. No more could he forget that he had openly defied the king of Garden Island.
And the next morning, Norman Eldred, seated at his desk, idle, silent, motionless, saw Dimmock come rapidly up from the beach. Dimmock had been in St. James that morning and had just returned; his haste denoted that he bore news of importance.
Though they had been together for years, sharing hardships and fortunes, and though Dimmock knew many of the secrets which Eldred held in his heart, there was ever between them that gulf which separates conscious master from conscious man, and when he entered the room, the red-haired fisherman closed the door and paused with that hesitancy which may indicate respect or fear or both.
Eldred turned in his swivel chair and fixed the other with that slowly focusing gaze—a gaze that Dimmock had never known until forty-eight hours ago. It was as though a deep sickness had fallen on the man. His eyes were not alert and alive and responsive as they had been. His step was slow; his speech was feeble. The reason for living had gone out of his life and taken his strength. For a moment he eyed Dimmock and then said, in a little more than a whisper,
“Well?”
On the word the other moved forward quickly and leaned on the desk, both hands gripping it.
“I thought you'd like to know. She's on High Island with him.”
The spring of the swivel chair creaked sharply, though Eldred's outward movement was hardly perceptible. His eyelids sagged as though they would close; his head moved backward ever so slightly.
“On High Island—with—with——”
“Aye. With MacKinnon.”
“And they know in St. James?”
“It's all they do know to-day.”
“What else, Dimmock?”
The voice was louder and his question came almost sharply.
“That's about all. He's plannin' on keepin' her there, they say. She's all right, I guess, but he's holdin' her to get back at you. That's what he told Gallagher—to hit back at you, an' that's what they're sayin' on Beaver to-day. She's livin' in his house, an' he's goin' on with his trap-nets.” He had spoken quickly and stopped short. “That's all,” he finished, and stood erect.
Eldred reached out for a corner of the desk and pulled himself from the chair. He turned toward the window and, hands clasped behind his back, head slightly hung, he stared out across the dancing lake to where the two humps of High Island showed in the distance. Dimmock stood still, waiting. Then Eldred turned his head.
“I'm not afraid of him.” A simply stated and simple sentence, but it was a shock to the other, because Eldred had deemed it necessary, and that shock showed in the man's china-blue eyes.
“I'm not afraid of him,” Eldred repeated, voice rising, quivering slightly. One hand at his side opened and closed slowly. “Damn him!”—in a whisper. “Damn him! I'm not afraid!”
AND then that was revealed to Dimmock which he had never dreamed: Norman Eldred knew the fear of another man. After those years of ruthlessness and heartlessness and unbroken triumph, he was afraid! It showed in his speech now, in the assertion of fearlessness which was only an indication of the craven in his heart. It showed in his face, too, and in the roving of his tongue along his lips.
Dimmock said,
“No. Sure not!”
“No. Sure not!” Eldred repeated his man's words and then walked the length of the room, steadier than he had been yesterday, pace quickening as his excitement grew. He came back. “Listen to me! If you think or any man on this island or any man on the lakes thinks I'm afraid of him. I'll—I'll”—he drew the one clenched hand up to a level of his chin and stared at it—“I'll ruin him—as I'll ruin this trader before I get through!”
“Sure you'll spoil him! We all know that.”
Dimmock himself was afraid now to see his master trying to cover with such hollow braggadocio that very evident misgiving.
“I'll ruin him—when the time comes, but that time isn't now. There's one thing to do now, and that's to bring her back— now—to-day! You understand that?” He looked about dully for a moment as though bewildered by his inability to think in terms of action. “He must not harm her! To prevent that I'll hold back. I'll be gentle, I'll even be humble, Dimmock.” There was relief in his manner now. He had found a way, an excuse, a plan whereby to slip past acknowledgment of this fear and attain his end.
“He wouldn't dare——”
“He would dare! He's a fool, and a fool will dare anything. He dared me, didn't he? He came here and defied me. A man who'll do that—would harm her”—rage congesting in his throat to make his voice thick. He paced again, and Dimmock watched, his heart hammering. “Here”—halting with a gesture—“here it is: We'll go gently so she will be safe, as gently as you'd carry precious eggs—or dynamite! Yes; dynamite. We'll be humble; we'll admit—to him only—that we're beaten.” He advanced and took the front of Dimmock's shirt between thumb and forefinger, shaking it slowly. “You go now. You find MacKinnon, wherever he is, at his work, ashore, in St. James—wherever he is. You find him to-day! Hear that?”
“Sure! To-day.”
“You find him and you tell him this.” He looked away, tongue on his lips. “No; you ask him this—ask him when and where he will talk with me, when and where he will—treat with me. Put it that way, Dimmock, in your own words. Let him think he has me beaten; let him think he has me down, and that I've had enough—hear? Understand that? Make it strong, but not too strong. He'll know what I want to talk about. Ask him when and where— Only, it's got to be to-day, because—” The hand which had grasped Dimmock's shirt dropped to his side and then went slowly behind his back, clasping the other. He averted his eyes so that his gaze went down upon his harbor, the heart of his little kingdom. “There's only one thing I fear, and that's being without her—” It was again the voice of a sick man, and he looked back at Dimmock and nodded with that melancholy again in his face. “I'm not ashamed of that. You know. You've been here; you've watched her grow up, too. You know that the roots of her life are tangled round my heart-strings. To tear her away from me—” His hand sought his side and clenched there, fingers gripping the flesh. “I thought that night when she turned on me, when she crossed me and protected the man who had—humiliated her, that it was only anger. I meant it, then, that I was through. I thought I could put her out of my life. That is what I thought when I told her to go.”
HE drew a great, unsteady breath and searched the face before him as if in desperation, as a man who, for the first time in his experience, needs sympathy and knows that all sources of sympathy are closed to him. He realized at last the prodigality with which he had frittered his human relationships and for lack of that one touch he was compensating for all that he had won. He did not find response he needed in Dimmock, and something like a cynical smile played about his mouth.
“That is what I thought—that I could do without her. And I was wrong. I get what I want, Dimmock—I always have—and now I want her more than I want this beat in here”—a hand on his breast.
He turned away abruptly, as though he could say no more, and went to the desk to seat himself again, but before it he steadied and his voice came firm and deliberate again, perhaps a bit forced, but no longer faltering and husked.
“That is why I can be clever instead of strong for an hour; that is why I can humble myself. I need her so. And if I'm to have her back unharmed, I—” He cut off with a quick gesture of dismissal. “You understand. Go, now!”
He sat down stiffly as the man went out with no delay, relieved at being away from bis master.
Norman Eldred wants his daughter back. But will he get her? See the next instalment of this absorbing serial in January Everybody's—out December 15th