# The Girl and the Anarch

Extracted from Cosmopolitan magazine, Dec 1910, pp. 35-44. Accompanying illustrations by Hermann C. Wall may be omitted.
The Girl and the Anarch
A STORY OF LOVE AND DARING IN THE CANADIAN NORTH-WEST—THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF ADVENTURE TALES BY THE ENGLISH MASTER WHOSE GREATEST SUCCESS WAS REACHED IN HIS STORIES OF AMERICA’S LAST REAL FRONTIER
By Sir Gilbert Parker Author of “Pierre and His People,” “The Right of Way,” “The Weavers,” etc.
THE Young Doctor washed his hands carefully and dried them in a leisurely and reflective manner. The water in the basin he had used was deeply tinged with red. As he hung up the towel, he turned to the door of a room out of which came, searchingly, the odor of a disinfectant. His look became still more reflective and inquiring. But inquiry and reflection were, in spite of his smiling Celtic manner, habitual with him.
The figure of a young woman appeared in the doorway of the darkened room. His eyes brightened, for she had ever been pleasant to his friendly eyes. The fresh, yet rather pale, face, the deep, big, dark eyes with long lashes, the gold-brown hair, like a sheaf of wheat in the sun, and the half-quizzical smile had made her many friends and a few enemies. Among the friends none was more welcome in her sight than the Young Doctor, for he had never made love to her, and nearly every other man had, in one way or another. None was more welcome in her sight save one, but only she knew that.
As she came toward the Young Doctor now, by accident, not by design, he uttered the one name which could thrill her—and torture her, too.
“Terry Brennan—”
A soft, delicate flush mounted slowly to her gold-brown hair, but she drove it away by an effort of her will, and the Young Doctor gave no sign that he had seen. She nodded, however, at the sound of the name, as though there was a world of meaning behind the two words: and so there was—a meaning which had nothing to do with a girl’s emotions.
“He’ll have to come soon or—” The Young Doctor lifted a shoulder toward the darkened room.
“Such a strike as this—so awful,” she said painfully.
“Why did they bring him here?” He motioned toward the other room.
“It is as he wish.” She looked him steadily in the eyes. “He like to come here.”
“Because he likes you, ma’m’selle Angele.”
“Is it so strange?” she asked, lifting her head quickly. “I am young still. I laugh. I am kind.”
“No, it isn’t strange at all, at all,” was the reply; “but the journey might easily have killed him after a business like that. He bled enough to swim in.”
“Wolves!” she exclaimed angrily.
“And your cousin, Jean Charron, is the boss wolf.”
“He is like that since he was born—no good,” she rejoined with a gesture of disgust. “But wait till the Big Boss come!” Her eyes glistened.
“Well, Boss Brennan will have all he can do this time. If the men had all gone on strike it would have been easier, but the Irish wouldn’t, because Terry was Terry. And the French’ll see red.”
“They have seen red,” she answered with tightening lips, as she turned her head toward the other room.
“The French are ten to one. What is his name?” he asked.
“Conan Gary,” she answered. “Only three months he is here—a soldier once—yes, I think.”
“He was the leader of the Irish and English lot?”
“That is why he get hurt so soon. I know Jean, Charron—he would do it somehow.” Suddenly she laid her hand upon the Young Doctor’s arm. ‘Will he live?” she asked.
“Oh, if he wants to he can. There’s only a flutter of life—no more. If he doesn’t care to keep the fluttering up he’ll be off. But he likes you, ma’m’selle Angele, and—”
The Young Doctor did not smile. He meant what he said. He had seen men return from the brink at the call of something they loved. The self-loving man so often dies because he ceases to love himself at the last, and, having no one else to love, slips away.
There was a moaning in the other room. The girl left him. At that moment Jacques Charron entered covered with dust. He had ridden hard over the prairie.
“But queeck!” he said to the Young Doctor. “They fight again, the English-Irish and the French. They burn the cars, the stores—ah, the good food to eat! So much would keep my tavern here for five years.” He looked round with pride. “They burn the sheds and the tents—some of the tents, and they go to blow up the big bridge now. Ah, the beautiful bridge that cost half a million. That is why they fight now. The English-Irish, they want to safe the bridge. So. But my cousin, that Jean Charron, bagosh, he would ride over the great God. If he saw him in the way he would not stop.”
They were now outside, making ready to start.
“Is the priest of no use—Father Fontaine?” asked the Young Doctor. “Can he not quiet them?”
“Father Fontaine! Sacré, that Jean Charron, he choose the time when Père Fontaine is away at the Blackfeet Reserve. You trust that Jean Charron—he is deep like a cat. But you—you mus’ to go at once. There will be more like him—in there.” He nodded toward the darkened room. “But if they blow up the bridge it will be worse than ten men killed. That bridge is worth half a million dollars. To blow it up stop the railroad to get to Fort Patrick. That is much millions more, becos the grain up north mus’ to wait two years for another bridge. It is such a damn ijit thing. Nom de Dieu! How I wish that Terry Brennan is come here!”
“You think he could stop it?”
“When Terry sit down he not move—the earth go to move first. When Terry stan’ up something will fly. Eh, Angele, it is so, n’est ce pas?” he added, as the girl came from the house. She had not heard what he said about the bridge.
“But what is the good if M’sieu’ Terry not come?” she said in a low voice. “And one man against so many!” She shot a glance from under drooping lids at her brother, and waited to hear him say what would surely burst from him now. She was not disappointed. Jacques Charron rose to the bait.
“That man, that Terry Brennan, he is millionaire, but he is a man of the people. He is more rich as any, but he live like you or me. He does not care a damn little fig for pride. Power—that is his hobby. He want power, to do things, to do them himself. Nom de pipe! I like see a man stan’ up to Terry Brennan. Just one man he is—son of old Larry Brennan, but he not need no one else. If he do need it is a woman—sacré, that is a man for a woman! It would make no difference at him if she was a woodcutter’s girl—no, bagosh.”
If he could have seen his young sister’s eyes at that moment he would have said more, for they glistened with that feeling which not even he could mistake. But the Young Doctor saw and understood. She caught his eyes, and with a hasty nod, as he gathered up the reins, she turned and entered the house swiftly, making her way into the darkened room.
Something of it all suddenly got hold of Jacques Charron. “Nom de bapiême!” he said, “that would be damn funnee if Terry Brennan was to—ah, that Angele; as good as any, and better! She was ’most handsome as Marie ’Toinette, the queen of France. Nom de cœur—why not? But it would be damn funnee, all the same. Well, let us go queeck to Askatoon!” he added, and jumped into the Young Doctor’s buggy.
For a moment he was silent, and then he said: “But why not! Terry Brennan, he is millionaire, but my grandfather’s grandfather he was baron—grand baron. Nom de Dieu! That girl Angele—everyone it is the same. They all go like a string at her when she smile at them. Never, never is she but to smile and say the happy word; and a heart—it is too big. That man in there, Conan Gary, the first day he come here he never take his eyes away, and he come and he come. And now it is all over—eh? It is all over—for Conan Gary?”
The Young Doctor smiled. “Maybe, and maybe not. They knifed him deep, and he leaked a tubful, but—well, there’s a chance. What is the cause of the strike? Didn’t the men get wages enough—or what?”
“The strike! The strike is Jean Charron, my damn cousin—that is the strike. Once he went to Maine to work—down east to the States, and he get a friend anarch, that is the kind! It spoil him. When he come back I hear him curse his baptism, that awful thing—nom de Dieu!—and he not fall dead! He hate the Church, he hate the priest, he hate the good God—all. But he keep it quiet, so to do things, to play the wolf in the lamb’s wool. That is it—he is for make trouble everywhere—and the damn fellows, those Frenchmen like me, he has got them like that!”
He opened and shut his hand with a gesture of possession. “He is infidel, he is anarch, he say all English—that is the same as Irish—are bad, that all English hate the priest. He say it is French against English and Irish. He say lies, bagosh! The Irish are all Protestants from Ireland, except that one back there hurted. He is Catholic. This is the twelfth of July—the Orangemen’s day. That is enough out here. It is a strike for more pay, it is also because the foreman will not give holiday on saints’ days; it is because they are anarch—as Jean Charron teach them. And it is the twelfth of July. So it is altogether. It is money; it is religion; it is race; it is anarch—all.”
“There will be work for me, that’s clear,” said the Young Doctor, but his mind swerved from the strike to the girl left behind in the tavern at Pardon’s Drive. Yes, certainly she had character of her own, as well as looks. Nothing except some rare magnetism could account for her power to draw men to herself. She was no coquette, despite the humor that played at her lips and in her eyes. With a revealing force the Young Doctor realized all at once that the girl might become anything, if she had the chance. Who could give her the chance? Well, Terry Brennan, the millionaire, could do so. Yet it was absurd—that. It was not in the nature of things. Why not? From whom had Terry Brennan sprung? What did the millions matter? Yet, again, Terry Brennan had a choice as wide as the world. Yes, it was manifestly absurd. Terry Brennan was a man in a million—with five million dollars!
Behind, in the darkened room, Angele sat watching the white-faced man, who was so still it seemed as though he might be dead. She had the maternal instinct. Children, animals, came to her without invitation, and men and women were confidential with her on first acquaintance. She was almost resentful now, as she looked at the sufferer, that one of the two nurses at Askatoon might presently arrive to take charge. Thoughts were crowding on her fast, one pursuing another with flaming impatience, reaching it, crowding it out of the way, only to be overtaken by a dozen others which buffeted her like great moths. This crisis had had an explosive effect upon her. Doors of her inner life had been burst open, and the casements of her peace had.been shattered. She realized that what concerned Terry Brennan concerned her, that this murderous strike was to be a great battlefield in which she must follow her leader and share his fortunes or his fate.
His fate? She smiled. After all, it was only a riot of a few hundred men with bad blood in their veins, badly led by an evil spirit. Terry Brennan would soon bring things to an end. He was a master of men who did things no one else could do. She had once seen at Quebec a great steamer gently crash a dock to splinters through a mistake of judgment in turning her. She recalled the scene now. The monster had almost lazily leaned to the dock as it were in friendliness, but its vast weight had buckled up the wooden pile like a box of matches under a hydrostatic press. That was Terry Brennan—just weight and force and power that, looking gentle, could crush, crush, crush! Crush Jean Charron! If there was one being in the world she feared and had always loathed it was this cousin from Laval who had tortured her in childhood by word and deed. And Jean Charron was the cause of all this trouble at Askatoon. Well, he must be crushed. The man who was like a leviathan must do it. How splendid he was! He had made his own great place, starting from zero. He had cut a big fortune from the world’s loaf, with all the other knives cutting between. And yet he was so simple—so simple and rough and kind!
All at once a change came over her. Her head drooped, her face swam with color, her hands clasped nervously in her lap. What did it matter to her? Terry Brennan was everything to her, everything—it had come to her like a flash of lightning when the Young Doctor was talking a. while ago—but what was she to Terry Brennan? Nothing! nothing! Because he was so big a man and because he was so rich, she could not show for him what she might modestly show to any other man she liked. What was she to Terry Brennan? She recalled the times they had met—each time with its little circumstance, its trivial detail, and the memories that followed the meetings, as though one with dyed garments from Bozrah had passed by.
No, no, there was nothing here for her, nothing except the withered flower, the sapless fruit, the ashes of the bright fire kindled in her soul. So many had come and gone—so many, and she might have married over and over again; but she had not done so because no one appeared very different from the others, and there seemed to be no reason why she should go from freedom into she knew not what. But now she knew that there was one more than any other—a hundred times more than any one; and even in her sudden misery she touched her hair deftly, then her white collar, and pushed her dress down a little over her shapely ankles, the woman in her acting almost automatically. Reaching out, also, she took a flower from the bowl on the table beside the bed, and placed it in her belt. As she did so her eyes filled with tears. She was ashamed that, even to herself, she had told her love; and she was despairing because there was in it no element of hope. Yet out of her own bitterness and pain there came a flood of sympathy—the unused surplus of her life, which would have expended itself on one, but must give itself to all the world because the one stood afar off. For the moment she was of that army of silent souls who, for a common happiness, hide their unrequited love, their unused womanhood, their power to be lost in a power which is greater.
In the rush of this sympathy she turned to where Conan Gary lay so still. As she did so a voice came trembling through the house in a French-Canadian chanson—
Where shall we betake us when the day’s work is over?
(Ah, red is the rose-bush in the lane.)
Happy is the maid that knows the footstep of her lover—
(Sing the song, the Eden song, again.)
Who shall listen to us when black sorrow comes a-reaping?
(See the young lark falling from the sky.)
Happy is the man that has a true heart in his keeping—
True hearts flourish when the roses die.
It was the voice of Grandmother Charron, who had had ten children, not one of whom had left the working world, whose grandchildren were legion, and who had kept the oldest song of the world in her heart even when she seemed to laugh at lovers most, and at all others. She had been away at Cowrie and had just returned, unaware of the tragedy which was come to rest in the tavern at Pardon’s Drive. The song seemed to rouse the sleeper. He stirred, he moaned, he tossed a hand over the coverlet. The girl took it, held it warmly. The old woman’s voice rose quaveringly, fell, and stole away into silence.
The man opened his eyes wide. “‘Black sorrow comes a-reaping,’” he faltered. “Shure, ’tis that!” Then he looked at the girl. “Oh, ’tis you, ’tis you,” he added. Then he seemed to gather himself together. “Sit down, will ye not?” he whispered.
She sat down. “You are better,” she murmured, and pressed his hand.
He flushed at the pressure. “Oh, ’tis no matter about me. But the trouble, the black trouble yander! Charron, that Jean Charron, ’tis a terrible thing he means to do.”
Her heart stood still. Did he mean to kill Terry Brennan, maybe?
“What is it he means to do, that Jean?” she asked painfully.
“To blow up the new bridge with dynamite, that’s it. He’s an anarchist, one that’s got the divil in him. There’s no end to what he’ll go. The bridge, the fine, tall bridge that cost so much, and all the people waitin’ for it—all the farmers north wantin’ it so bad. I wisht I was there again. I'd stop that Charron, curse him!”
“How would you stop him?”
Suddenly a light came into his blanched face. “’Tis you, not me, can stop him,” he exclaimed. “You as well as me—as well as me, or a thousan’.”
“Tell me then, and I will stop him,” she replied huskily. “Tell me—oh, quick!”
Was God then going to answer her prayer? Was he going to let her do something for Terry Brennan which no one else could do?
“It must be done. If the bridge goes it means war—a fight with the police, the troops maybe, and that Jean Charron, he’ll stop at nothing. He’d knife Terry Brennan as quick as look at him.”
“Oh, that!” she said with sudden pride. “'M’sieu’ Brennan can take care of himself.”
“When he has warning—shure. But when there’s no warning. As a puma leaps out of a tree on your neck!”
“Go on. Tell me. What is there to be done?”
His voice was weak, and it sank to a low whisper. “Here, then,” he said. “In Quebec, there at St. Martin. The priest, Father Vaudry! It was him—Jean Charron—that stole all the money—a thousand dollars, and the chalices, and beat the poor priest with the poker till he near went to his grave. ’Twas Jean Charron that done it. Never mind how I know. I’ve kept my tongue to myself, for I’ve been wanted in my time, too—but not that, God knows, not that! Not to rob God’s priest and beat him with iron rods, not that for me. But I’ll not spare Jean Charron now. There’s another that knows—Pierre Plançon, away at Cowrie. He knows. If I go from the knifing I’ve had there’s Pierre. Find him. He knows—the proofs he has, too. D’ye see?”
“Yes, yes, I understand. I will go at once. They would kill him—the Catholics—if they knew. They will kill him when they know.” She covered her face with her hands for a moment. “If it is the only way, then that must be, too, but I will warn him first. Get him to stop the strike, and save the bridge—that’s it. If he will not, then—”
“Acushla, go at once,” he urged, “and if I never see ye again may the black hand of sorrow never reach ye as ye pass. May ye have the best man in the world to fight for ye. Shure, I'll be all right. The ould grandmother will look after me—there’s little to do,” he said with a catch in his throat.
She stooped and kissed his forehead, and in a moment she was gone astride her big gray mare which was well known in all the prairie side.
A wild river swollen by recent rains, beside which ran the new railway; the prairie, brown and gold, stretching for many a mile; and, here and there, living, moving workers of the great farms in a center of rising clouds—the dust of conquest, the sign of man’s triumph over matter—the waste which the vast threshing-machines threw out. But only here and there those circles, where the Titans tossed up the refuse of the harvest to the transports of the air; for men from all quarters had gone to watch the great strike, the first this West had known—a dark evil which seemed to blacken the air, as it were; to represent the demoniacal forces let loose from the soil which, in all the ages, had never known the plow till now.
The faces of men were gloomy, and the gloomiest men were those kept back by a big cordon of strikers from their camp beside the bridge above the tumbling waters. There had been no train for twenty-four hours, and for miles the track had been torn up to prevent a train approaching. Yet men still kept hoping that Terry Brennan would come in time. To their minds he alone could put things right; he alone could avert the disaster which the ruin of the bridge would bring. Never had the West been dishonored by such a spirit of disorder and destruction.
A detachment of the Mounted Police was also due from the east—the Riders of the Plains. But the strikers were armed—mostly rough French-Canadians, they were men who had spent their years chiefly in the winter lumber-camps and running the river in the summer with their pike-poles, their cribs and rafts and vast drives of logs. Nomads, without the binding influences of settled communities, they had been laws unto themselves mostly—obeying the harsh customs of the camp and the river, lawless when among the settled folk, yet not debased or degraded at heart. Naturally resentful of discipline, eager to find a case against the limits which ordered settlement placed upon them, they had listened to Jean Charron at first, predisposed to believe that civilization was getting the better of them and robbing them of their rights. But they had also the unquenchable prejudice of their religion and race, for they were Catholic, and they were ready to make war blindly if the flag of race and the Church was raised. And at last that had been done by Charron, the anarchist.
Blood had been shed, but as yet no lives had been lost when the Young Doctor and Jacques Charron came together on the scene. Jacques Charron had as much influence upon his cousin Jean as a fly upon a wheel, and no warnings availed, for the anarchist had tasted power, had drawn blood, and a savage pride in striking a blow for anarchy was on him. Jacques Charron was escorted outside the cordon of strikers less roughly than would have been the case if he had not been so popular. The Young Doctor was detained to look after the wounded.
There was nothing to do now save to wait for Terry Brennan and the Mounted Police. And that would be too late, for the dynamite had been placed, and the order had gone forth from Jean Charron to destroy the bridge. The fuse was laid and would be lighted presently.
Then it was, near sunset, that the gray horse from Pardon’s Drive came galloping down upon the strikers, and plunged through the cordon, its rider calling out the name of Jean Charron.
Already the men had been drawn back from the doomed bridge, to be clear of flying débris, when Angele faced her cousin, Jean Charron. His eyes were bloodshot with excitement, his black hair tossed on his shoulders as he shouted his orders; his red shirt—the natural dress of the lumberman and the anarchist—was open at the throat, showing the neck of a bull and the chest of a gladiator.
“What the holy hell you want with me?” he shouted at the girl as the gray horse stopped beside him.
“Please speak quiet,” said the girl, with fearless command in her face. Then she leaned over the neck of the horse toward him. “Come here,” she said in a low voice. He came close, for there was that in her face and voice which drew him. She struck straight at his crime.
“Father Vaudry—shall I tell them it was you that tried to beat him to death? The money and the chalices and the poker! Eh, shall I tell, or will you listen?”
His face turned ashen. This same crowd of maddened men whom he had inflamed would not much heed if he was a victim of their violence as well as the bridge or any other man or thing. Elemental savagery was raised. They were down in the abyss. The skin of civilization was scratched, and behold the Caliban in multiple! Something had been roused which would have its price.
“All ready!” shouted a man running from the river.
“Down with the bridge!” cried a hundred voices.
Men crowded near. The sacrifice was beside the altar of labor—now for the knife!
The huge bulk of the anarchist shivered like a vessel that strikes a rock, and for a moment he appeared to clutch at something for support. His brain throbbed unmanageably, his senses were in confusion. But the first thought was that Conan Gary had betrayed him. Conan Gary who himself once had—
“That Gary, he!” he said with a guttural fear.
“And Pierre Plançon, he knows also!”
The shouting increased: “Down with the bridge! To hell with the bridge!”
There was no time to rave, but Jean Charron had not command of himself. “I’ll kill him, that—”
The foulest name a man can be called came from his swollen lips, and a black flood swept away the ashen look in his face.
“It is no use. He is dying now. Save the bridge, stop this strike or—Father Fontaine will be here to-night! A word from him, and it will be the end of all for you. Quick—speak!”
They were now in a circle of wild men clamoring for the word to fire the dynamite. Now or never was the moment.
“Speak,” urged the girl again. “It is your only chance.”
There was a brief instant of murderous reflection, and then the anarchist wavered, obeyed. His brain worked slowly; it had been so used to going blindly that it was ill fitted for a crisis like this. Obedience was the natural resource, the first habit. He threw back from revolution and spoliation upon primal submission to the higher intelligence—and to fear.
He raised both hands at the crowd. “Not yet, not yet!” he shouted. He wished to gain time, to try to think.
There was a roar of dissent, then, after a moment, one man raised a rough cry of execration, which the rioters savagely approved.
“Speak again,” said the girl. “Say ‘Not till sunset.’”
By sunset, perhaps, Terry Brennan and the Mounted Police would arrive. Every moment gained was vital.
“Not till sundown, my brothers! It shall go down with the sun!” he shouted.
It was no use. As suddenly as he had got leadership and control he lost it. They suspected treachery. Since the girl had come he had changed his tune. They would not wait for leadership now. The dark game was afoot, and it would not be stayed. A little, wiry native of Gaspé, whose life had been a combination of smuggling, wrecking, and roguery, and in whose yellow, evil face was the passion for crime, cried out: “Down with it! I will blow it up!” and with a cry of devilish delight he turned, and ran toward the bridge.
A smothered cry broke from Angele Charron’s lips, and in an instant the gray mare was galloping to the bridge. Past the little yellow man she flew. Arrived at the bridge, Angele dropped from her horse, sprang upon the gaping floorway of the unfinished structure, ran fifty yards out upon it, and then turned upon the crowd.
“If the bridge goes, I go with it,” she cried, and drew a revolver from her dress.
Already the little yellow man had lighted the fuse, but a dozen men sprang down, caught him away, and put out the fire. Mad with excitement as they were, wild to do the work of destruction before any force could prevent them, they were unprepared for a situation like this. Scores of them knew the girl, and some of them had received kindness at her hands. They would have rent Jean Charron limb from limb without a qualm, but this was different; it dismayed them, as the girl had dismayed the anarchist. They were brought to a standstill.
Her revolver threatened them. None dared approach her against her will. Her fearlessness confounded them. She had taken terrible chances, for when men are seeing red and have got the lust of destruction in their veins a life may be lost as easily as a child is caught in the confusion of the street and crushed beneath the wheels of traffic. Her mind had been made up as swiftly as a released spring flies back into rest, and she had done the only thing which could save the bridge. Men were awed by a determination which took no account of personal consequences. They stood still, and watched.
The Young Doctor, at first thunderstruck, comforted her brother Jacques Charron, “She will do the trick,” he said. “It’s all right.”
An hour passed. Alone, deaf to all entreaties, and threatening with her weapon, the girl kept the bridge for Terry Brennan and law and order. The Young Doctor and Jacques Charron and the little band of English and Irish would have intervened to help her, but that would have meant disaster. The girl, alone, was better and safer than fifty men.
Not two hundred yards from the bridge was a little hut which held the contractor’s telegraph apparatus; but the instrument had been silent for two days—the lines had been cut, and the telegraphist had taken refuge with the English-Irish faction.
Among many things the Young Doctor knew was telegraphy. He could take messages easily by sound—it had amused him to learn the art in odd hours, from an old instrument and a home-made battery. Just as the sun was crimsoning the hills, while he was passing the telegraph hut, he heard the ticking of the needle making the local call. Entering, he opened the key, and answered. The line had been repaired, and he heard what brought a flush to his cheek and a light to his troubled eyes.
Then the instrument went silent again, and he stole out toward the bridge. Against the southern light the girl’s figure stood out in a soft flame, taller and larger than she actually was. She seemed not to move—only to watch, with a finger on the trigger of her pistol. In a few moments the night would be on them, and who could tell what devilry the darkness might not beget!
But before night fell there came gliding over the ridge to the eastward forces of rescue: not a troop of Mounted Police, not an armored train, but a hand-car, on which were two men only, who worked it as though they were navvies.
A wave of excitement swept over the strikers. The girl saw the hand-car, by instinct knew whom it carried, and her heart beat harder. The Young Doctor and Jacques Charron divined who it was, and laughed. What a railway train could not do, with a line torn up, a light hand-car could do—and the Big Boss was coming!
Down the incline came the car, down into the midst of the strikers, and off leaped Terry Brennan, the millionaire. With him was Pierre Plançon—two men against hundreds. Not two, but one man, against hundreds; for whatever was to do must be done by the Big Boss alone.
He strode into the midst of the strikers. “What’s all this about, mes amis?” he shouted. “What is it you want? Nightingales for supper, or a damn good hiding from the Riders of the Plains? What’s all this devilment?”
“It’s the holidays the good God gives us, and the rest,” cried a voice from the crowd.
Terry suddenly drew his hands from his trousers pockets, dragging with them the bare linen. “Do you think I carry holidays in my pockets?” he asked sneeringly. Then, suddenly, he stepped forward. “Who’s at the bottom of this? Where’s the man that set it going?”
A score of voices shouted. Out of the tangle of discords the story came to him in flashes—Jean Charron, the bridge, the girl.
With a grim oath he pushed forward as they made way for him. There, upon the bridge, was Angele Charron, still keeping guard.
“My God!” he cried. “But why—why?”
Then, out of the recesses of his inner mind, there leaped the spirit of knowledge. He knew as the first man knew who had none behind to teach him, neither heredity, nor tradition, nor the “strain of the ages.”
“My bridge—she saved it!” he said, and moved forward swiftly toward the bridge and the girl.
But another moved more swiftly forward. From a group of the worst elements in the crowd, Jean Charron broke forth. Savage, demoniacal hate possessed him. The Big Boss would conquer, and the girl had done it for him. The girl had his secret. His safety, perhaps his life, was in her hands, Ungovernable passion, the lust for revenge, for blood, came on him. To tear down men and things, to leave nothing standing that order and progress had set up, to produce chaos—it all resolved itself into one deed, this bridge and the life upon it! To do what he had set out to do! To fulfil himself as the reptile fulfils itself in the slime! He rushed forward toward the bridge, toward the mine, with wild laughter, which made the Young Doctor’s blood run cold.
A cry of terror went up, and the great strike evaporated in that cry.
The bridge, the mine, the girl!
With a stroke of his knife, Jean Charron cut the fuse near up to the dynamite, and stooped to do the last awful thing. That he would go with the bridge into space did not matter now. He would be revenged. He would be so much an anarch. But at the dreadful juncture three shots rang out almost simultaneously, and the anarchist fell in a heap beside the mine.
The girl had fired from the bridge, Terry Brennan had fired his pistol, also, and a rifle shot had rung out. In the body of the anarchist were two wounds—one made by a rifle bullet, another by a revolver bullet.
The man who had come with Terry Brennan on the hand-car—Pierre Plancgon—had fired the rifle, but a revolver bullet had also played its part. Whose was it, Angele’s or Terry Brennan’s? Terry Brennan said it was his, but he had reasons for that not far to seek.
All that he said when he met Angele were these words, “My bridge—my girl Angele!”
That was all the wooing there was before they understood that they two must hold the pass of life and love together. With him the awakening, the realization, came as a door in deep darkness suddenly opens upon a flame of fire.
The Mounted Police, the Riders of the Plains, were disappointed when they arrived next morning that there was no work for them to do, for the great strike had ended in a sermon and a benediction by Father Fontaine; and with increased wages instead of holidays to commemorate the saints.
The men kept one great holiday a month after, however. Every woman likes to be the cause of such a holiday at least once in her life, and to set the bells a-ringing!
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1932, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 91 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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