Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/239

Rh sight as he drove on was of the two strolling back, close together, to the red fires and the brown wagons and the dark forest which made their home.

The forest had been Dick's home so many times. She was the breath of the North-West; the door of Life; the lover who called men; flattered them; played with them, and who stood against them in her austerity the long winter through with face changed and aloof and unconcerned. Dick loved her best in her latter moods, when he met her as he had ever done, with set teeth and fingers crooked to tear from her that which was necessary for his bare life. He loved her then because of the pain she gave him; because her very sternness made him more of a man; because she paid him in self-respect for all she took from him. And self-respect was not the usual coin of Dick's exchange.

The sun dropped big and crimson behind the dark pine-trees ranks. The bird-songs frayed into tender silence, and the pink flush died out of the sky and the blue shadows darkened and thickened. Where pot-holes and tree-boles made alike black blots on the trail and the buckboard bumped out of one to bump over the other, Dick's keen eyes saw the little low log cabin half-hid among the swaying blue-grass just where the lip of the forest fell away to the open downs. Dick hitched the chestnut to the broken snake-fence; brushed through the tall grass to the door, and pushed it wide. A cool scent of hemlock boughs and water came to his heated face. Then something moved in the dusky shadows; took a slush-light from beside the stove, and showed as a woman, wrinkled and worn, with a white shawl on the slender, straight shoulders. Dick stepped back, embarrassed and amazed.

"I—I beg your pardon," he said. "I was told—isn't there a Galician sick in this shack? I was told he was alone."

She answered him in French; the old-world French of Normany and Touraine.

"There is a Frenchman here—my husband. He was seeking work, and he fell ill."

"The Indian said he was a Galician. I hope he is not very sick, madame?"