Over all the land of the Kootenai the sun of early June was shining. Trees of wild fruits were white with blossoms, as if from far above on the mountains the snows had blown down and settled here and there on the new twigs of green.
And high up above the camp of the Twin Springs, Overton and Harris sat looking over the wide stretches of forest, and the younger man looked troubled.
"I think your fear is all an empty affair," he said, in an argumentative tone. "You eat well and sleep well. What gives you the idea you are to be called in soon?"
"Several things," said the other, slowly, and his speech was yet indistinct; "but most of all the feel of my feet and legs. A week ago my feet turned cold; this week the coldness is up to my knees, and it won't go away. I know what it means. When it gets as high as my heart I'll be done for. That won't take long, Dan; and I want to see her first."
"She can't help you."
"Yes, she can, too. You don't know. Dan, send for her."
"Things are all different with her now," protested the other. "She's with friends who are not of the diggings or the ranges, Joe. She is going to marry Max Lyster; and, altogether, is not the same little girl who made our coffee for us down there in the flat. You must not expect that she will change all her new, happy life to run back here just because you want to talk to her."
"She'll come if you telegraph I want her," insisted Harris. "I know her better than you do, Dan. The fine life will never spoil her. She would be happier here to-day in a canoe than she would be on a throne. I know her best."
"She wasn't very happy before she left here."
"No," he agreed; "but there were reasons, Dan. Why are you so set against her coming back?"
"Set against it? Oh, no."
"Yes, you are. Mrs. Huzzard and all the camp would be only too glad to see her; but you--you say no. What's your reason?"
"Joe, not many months ago you tried to make me suspicious of her," said Overton, not moving his eyes from a distant blue peak of the hills. "You remember the day you fell in a heap? Well, I've never asked you your reasons for that; though I've thought of it considerably. You changed your mind about her afterward, and trusted her with the plan of this gold field down here. Now, you had reasons for that, too; but I never have asked you what they are. Do the same for me, will you?"
The other man did not answer for a little while, but he watched Dan's moody face with a great deal of kindness in his own.
"You won't tell me?" he said at last. "Well, that's all right. But one of the reasons I want her back is to make clear to you all the unexplained things of last summer. There were things you should have been told--that would have made you two better friends, would have broken down the wall there always seemed to be between you--or nearly always. (She wouldn't tell you, and I couldn't.) It left her always under a cloud to you, and she felt it. Many a time, Dan, she has knelt beside me and cried over her troubles to me--and they were troubles, too!--telling them all to me just because I couldn't speak and tell them again. And I won't, unless she lets me. But I don't want to go over the range and know that you two, all your lives, will be apart and cold to each other on account of suspicions I could clear away."
"Suspicions? No, I have no suspicions against her."
"But you have had many a troubled hour because of that man found dead in her room, and his visit to her the night before, and that money she asked for that he was after. All such things that you could not clear her of in your own mind, when you cleared her of murder--they are things I want straightened out before I leave, Dan. You have both been good friends to me, and I don't want any bar between you."
"What does all that matter now, Joe? She is out of our lives, and in a happier one some one else is making for her. I am not likely ever to see her again. She won't come back here."
"I know her best; she will come if she is needed. I need her for once; and if you don't send for her, I will, Dan. Will you send?"
But Overton got up and walked away without answering. Harris thought he would turn back after a little while, but he did not. He watched him out of sight, and he was still going higher up in the hills.
"Trying to walk away from his desire for her," thought Joe, sadly. "Well, he never will. He thinks I don't know. Poor Dan!"
Then he whistled to a man down below him, and the man came and helped him down to camp, for his feet had grown helpless again in that strange chill of which he had spoken.
Mrs. Huzzard met him at the door of a sitting room, gorgeous as an apartment could well be in the Northern wilderness. All the luxuries obtainable were there; for, as Harris had to live so much of his time indoors, Overton seemed determined that he should get benefit from his new fortune in some way. The finest of furs and of weavings furnished the room, and a dainty little stand held a tea service of shell-pink china, from which the steam floated cheerily.
And Lorena Jane herself partook of the general air of prosperity, as she drew forward a great cushioned chair for the invalid and brought him a cup of fragrant tea.
"I just knew you was tired the minute I saw you coming down that hill," she said, filling a cup herself and sitting down to enjoy it. "I knew a cup of tea would do you good, for you ain't quite so brisk as you was a few weeks ago."
"No," he agreed, and gulped down the beverage with a dubious expression on his face. He very much preferred whisky as a tonic; but as Mrs. Huzzard was bound to use that new tea service every day for his benefit, he submitted without a protest and enjoyed most the number of cups she disposed of.
"I suppose, now, you got sight from up there on the hill of the two young folks going boat riding?" she remarked, with attempted indifference; and he looked at her questioningly.
"Oh, I mean Lavina and the captain! Yes, he did get up ambition enough to paddle a boat and ask her to ride in it; and away they went, giddy as you please!"
"I thought you had a high regard for the captain?" remarked Harris.
"Who? Me? Well, as Mr. Overton's relation, of course I show him respect," and her tone was almost as pompous as that of the captain used to be. "But I must say, sir, that to admire a man--for me to admire a man--he must have a certain lot of push and ambition. He must be a real American, who don't depend on the record of his dead relations to tell you how great he is--a man who will dig either gold or potatoes if he needs them, and not be afraid of spoiling his hands."
"Somebody like this new lucky man, McCoy," suggested Harris, and she smiled complacently but did not answer.
And out on the little creek, sure enough, Lavina and the captain were gliding with the current, and the current had got them into dangerous waters.
"And you won't say yes, Lavina?" he asked, and she tapped her foot impatiently on the bottom of the boat.
"I told you yes twenty-five years ago, Alf Leek," she answered.
He sighed helplessly. His old aggressive manner was all gone. The tactics he would adopt for any other woman were useless with this one. She knew him like a book. She had him completely cowed and miserable. No longer did he regale admiring friends with tales of the late war, and incidentally allow himself to be thought a hero. One look from Lavina would freeze the story of the hottest battle that ever was fought.
To be sure, she had as yet refrained from using words against him; but how long would she refrain? That question he had asked himself until, in despair, a loop-hole from her quiet vengeance had occurred to him, and he had asked her to marry him.
"You never could--would marry any one else," he said, pleadingly.
"Oh, couldn't I?"
"And I couldn't, either, Lavina," he continued, looking at her sentimentally. But Lavina knew better.
"You would, if anybody would have you," she retorted. "I know I reached here just in time to keep poor Lorena Jane from being made a victim of. You would have been a tyrant over her, with your great pretensions, if I hadn't stopped it. You always were tyrannical, Alf Leek; and the only time you're humble as you ought to be is when you meet some one who can tyrannize over you. You are one of the sort that needs it."
"That's why I asked you to marry me," he remarked, meekly.
And after a moment she said:
"Well, thinking of it from that point of view, I guess I will."
Far up on the heights, a man lying there alone saw the canoe with the man and the woman in it, and it brought back to him keen rushes of memory from the summer time that had been. It was only a year ago that 'Tana had stepped into his canoe, and gone with him to the new life of the settlement. How brave she had been! how daring! He liked best to remember her as she had been then, with all the storms and sunshine of her face. He liked to remember that she had said she would be cook for him, but for no other man. Of course her words were a child's words, soon forgotten by her. But all her words and looks and their journeys made him love the land he had known her in. They were all the treasures he had with which to comfort his loneliness.
And when in the twilight he descended to the camp, Joe--or his own longings--had won.
"I will send the telegram for you, old fellow," he said, and that was all.
