Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/330

328 Among the crowding Indians stood the fat priest with rusty cassock and kindly, flabby face. Tempest took the baby from the girl's arms, starting with all a man's alarm as it began to cry. Hastily he thrust it into the priest's hands, giving his own name with it, and the child screamed strongly as the water sprayed over it from the priest's hot fingers.

Then the mother took it again; Gillington, relaxing the corners of his mouth with evident relief, made a careless joke, and insisted on Tempest himself placing the five dollars in the soft dark fingers of Neil Fraser Tempest the younger.

Dick got up and walked hurriedly down to the canoes on the Lake shore. Was this brown, greasy baby the only one who was to carry on Tempest's name when the man's work was done and that alert, breezy step stilled for ever? Dick guessed that it almost surely would be so. There was a lonely life before Tempest now: a lonely life and his work, supposing that this crust of quiet dignity behind which he had withdrawn himself hid living fires and not burnt-out ash. Dick would have given all he had, except a certain little oil-painting, to know what lay beneath that crust. He could have borne with Tempest for an outspoken enemy, or he could have abased himself and asked forgiveness for the first time in his life. But this rigid, outward calm maddened him; and yet, here again because Tempest was the stronger, he could not break through it.

He went down to the Lake where the canoes lay; loaded and ready for their long unknown journey to the East. The other two policemen of the Patrol were there, packing in their own dunnage, and joking with the few white men who stood round. The mosquitoes hummed in swarms across the low swamp-land, and Myers, the stocky little Corporal detailed from work on the Yukon, was swearing in Cockney English as he puffed his briar pipe and beat the air right and left. The bowman of Dick's canoe was a tall, melancholy French-Canadian, with drooping moustache and drooping shoulders and muscles of springy steel. He looked at Myers with his dark, sad eyes.

"Parblieu! You are too fat," he said. "They will eat