CHAPTER XXII

In the long days and weeks which followed Peter's return to the cabin and the death of his father a change which seemed to him a little short of a miracle came over the man-hunter. The pitiless Carter, the human ferret, whose years of duty had never been tempered with mercy or conscience, was gone, and in his place was a new Carter, dragging himself a little at a time out of the paths of tragedy and misery which he had followed for so long.

Through those years Peter knew that Carter had been a Nemesis and a destroyer. He had not known pity, but only the grim exultation of achievement. Women, love, the extenuation of circumstance, even motherhood in its most beautiful sacrifice, had not stayed his hand when once the law had set him like a hound upon the scent of his victim. He had broken men and women. He had opened doors of blackness and despair to a hundred human souls. Yet the law had been always at his back, urging him on and exulting in his triumphs; he had committed no crime, no sin, and the world had applauded his exploits when it heard of them, visioning him as a splendid part of that mighty mechanism of legal force which made peace and good[298] will on earth possible among men. Yet Carter, in these strange days of his mental and spiritual transformation, knew differently.

He knew that he had served too well, and for that reason he hated himself, and called himself a fiend. It was now, after he had hunted Peter's father to his death, that his successes began to dig themselves out of their graves and reappear to him as haunting ghosts. And he prayed God to keep Peter, of all men, from hating him.

"I killed your father," he said to him frankly. "I hunted him until his mind and his body broke down and he died. And in the end he accepted me as a son, and I loved him. If I had only known! But I didn't, and my life belongs to you. I give it willingly as the price of a great mistake."

And as the sullen winter's end passed Peter found it impossible to hate Carter. Instead, there grew in him a slow and irresistible feeling of brotherhood for the man who had trailed them to their hiding-place at last, and who, in the hour of his deepest grief, had knelt with him in prayer over the frozen grave of his father. In those moments he had learned that it was not Carter who was accountable. It was the system—the law and its inalienable right to strike and kill.

Now, late in April, they were going home.

Six hundred miles behind them lay the wilderness of the Pipestone and the McFarland, where the hunt had ended and the final tragedy had been enacted.

[299]

Ahead of them, beyond four hundred miles of still deeper forests was Five Fingers.

On this night, as they sat in the yellow glow of a birchwood fire which they had built in the chill of sunset, Carter had drawn a rough map in the edge of the ash. The somber depths of a moonless night lay like a curtain of heavy velvet behind him, and against this his thin and hawk-like face was set so vividly that Peter saw the odd twitch of his lips as he said:

"One week for Jackson's Knee, another for the country of Lac St. Joe, two more for the Height of Land, and then you'll be looking down on Five Fingers! They'll all be glad to see you, Peter. And Mona——" He shrugged his shoulders and a little throb came in the pit of his throat when he spoke of Peter's sweetheart. "God knows a man should be happy with a girl like her waiting for him at the end of the trail."

"I've been away two years," replied Peter, for it was always that thought which kept pounding at his heart. "At times I am afraid of what may have happened since that night you and Aleck Curry almost got dad and me in the edge of the burned lands."

Carter made no sign that he had heard. He was staring into the deep, red embers of the fire.

"Your mother was an angel," he said, so quietly and unexpectedly that his words fell upon Peter almost with the effect of a shock. "In the last of those days when your father and I were shut up together by storm and cold in the cabin, and he was accepting me as his son in[300] his madness, he talked of her almost as if she were alive and we were going home to her."

"She has been dead twenty years," said Peter.

"I know. Dead, and yet living. I can scarcely believe that I hunted Donald McRae until I drove him mad—for doing a thing which I would have done had I stood in his shoes that day when he killed a man! It was justice, Peter. My mother I cannot remember. But your mother he made very near and real for me in those last days of—I can't call it his madness!—it was——"

"Forgetfulness," said Peter.

Carter bowed his head. "Yes, forgetfulness. Yet some things lived so vividly—things of the past. He made them live and breathe for me—and one picture makes me want to kill!—that picture of the little cabin in the clearing more than twenty years ago—your mother—you in her arms—Donald McRae's homecoming and the vengeance he dealt out to the snake who had come to take advantage of his absence. When I see that vision I want to choke the life out of a human beast I know—Aleck Curry!"

Peter made no answer.

"I can't undo what I've done," Carter went on. "I tracked your father until his mind broke under the strain, but I can't help that now. It is over. All I can do in the way of reparation is to help you—you and Mona Guyon. And between you two—between your happiness and hers—is one man, a slimy, conscienceless[301] serpent, waiting and watching for your return."

"You mean—Aleck Curry?"

"Yes, Aleck Curry."

Carter stood up, his tall, catlike form bathed in the fire glow, and his hard lips were tightly closed as he stared off into the darkness of the forest.

"Sounds queer—that word 'conscienceless' coming from me," he mocked bitterly. "I've never had a conscience or a heart in obeying the word of the law—but I've never thought bad of a woman in the way Aleck Curry thinks of Mona Guyon. He would sell his soul, if he had one, to possess her—even if she came to him for only an hour as the price of your safety and freedom. And you're going home—an outlaw!"

"By that you mean Curry will hold me in his power when I reach Five Fingers?"

"Yes."

"And will attempt to force from me a price——"

Peter stood looking straight into Carter's eyes.

"Yes, partly from you, but mostly from Mona. That is why I've been holding you back, a drag from the beginning. Curry's uncle has become a power politically, and Aleck was given a corporalship a year ago. I would stake my life that he is keeping his secret about you and the part you played in your father's escape two years ago. The knowledge is too precious for him to divulge. You assaulted him, almost killed him, and freed your father; you kept him—an officer of the law—a prisoner on an island; later you fired upon[302] Curry and me with the rifle which Simon McQuarrie gave you—and all this means from five to fifteen years in prison for you, and Curry knows it. The fact that your father was almost blind, and that his mind had broken down, won't help you. Law is law, especially in Canada. Our judges and juries go by the code and not by emotions. And this law, its inviolability, is why Aleck Curry is a greater menace to you now than all the dangers you have encountered since you led your father into the north.

"He is moved entirely by two passions, one his desire for Mona Guyon and the other his hatred for you. On the night when we almost caught you both in your escape from Five Fingers he offered me a thousand dollars and his uncle's influence in getting me a sergeancy if I would keep the secret of your capture, and turn our prisoners over to him. It was my humor to let him think he had bought me. And then, in the dawn of that morning, you filled our boat full of bullets—and got way. That's the story, Peter. There is no escaping the trap if you return to Five Fingers. Curry will descend upon you, demand marriage of Mona, or probably worse—and if she refuses——"

"She can visit me occasionally in prison," said Peter.

His face reflected no trace of the white heat that had mounted into Carter's; he spoke quietly and his hands had lost their clenched tenseness. For a moment Carter gazed at him in silence.

"You mean that?"

[303]

"I do. Aleck Curry holds no power over me that can in any way endanger Mona. If I owe a debt, I am willing to pay it. Neither Mona nor I have anything that we want to sell, and Aleck Curry has nothing that we want to buy."

Carter drew in a deep breath.

"If you look at it in that way——"

"There is no other way."

"But Curry and I are the only two men on earth who can swear that you have done these things. The smallest restitution I can make to you for all the wrong I have done your father is to keep my knowledge secret. Torture could not tear it from me. Now—if we can silence Curry, tie his tongue, break him——"

"None of which we can do," interrupted Peter. "He has hated me since the day we first fought over Mona when we were boys. Only one thing could stop his vengeance. I would have to kill him, and that is inconceivable. For my father I would have done that. I had even prepared myself to kill you, Carter, if such an act became necessary to save him. But for myself—no!"

Carter thrust out his hand, but as it gripped Peter's he turned his face away. "You're a lot like your dad," he said. "I see it more every day. I'm going to bed. Good night!"

Caution and habit had made the ferret spread his blankets in the pit of gloom outside the glow of firelight. He disappeared in the darkness and a moment[304] later Peter heard him as he stretched himself out for the night.

But Carter had no idea of sleeping. For days past a thought had been building itself up slowly in his brain, and tonight he had almost revealed that thought to Peter. He watched him now, and in the firelight the drooped figure and pale, sensitive face of the man he had hunted and whose happiness he had helped to destroy tightened something at his heart until he found it hard to breathe. He had never loved a woman, and had never felt the bond of a great friendship for a man, but for Peter something more than the friendship he had known—a thing that was very close to a man's love for a man—had begun to possess him body and soul. In this one warm emotion of his cold and merciless life Carter felt a deeper thrill than in the hour of his greatest man-hunting triumph, and as he lay in stillness, strengthening that thought which was becoming a larger and more definite thing between Peter and Mona and the tragedy which threatened them, his lips parted in the grim and humorless smile which in all the years of his service had made men fear and avoid him.

And with that smile, deadly and uncompromising, Carter whispered to himself: "I guess maybe you needn't worry, Peter. I don't think Aleck Curry and the law are going to get you—not if I can help it."

With this settled, it was easier for Carter to give himself up to sleep.

For a long time Peter sat near the fire. The birch[305] logs burned down into a mass of coals, and as deeper shadows closed in about the camp he felt himself alone except for the visions which came and went in the dying embers. With a clearness that brought almost physical pain the years passed before his eyes, and when they had gone they had taken with them his boyhood, the father he had worshiped, his dreams and happiness, leaving behind in the ash of the fire only memories shadowed with the gloom of tragedy. But calmly and with a courage inspired by his own grief he was ready to accept what lay ahead of him. The fight, as a physical thing, was over—and he was going home. On that point his mind was fixed and no sense of self-preservation could move it. What was to happen to him when he reached Five Fingers was a matter which Fate should decide.

Even in these moments of his decision he felt Mona's nearness and her protest. If in defense of his father he had become an outlaw, there was still a wide world in which he could hide, and Mona would come to him. So the persistent voice of caution whispered to him, and at times that voice was Mona's.

Haggard-faced, Peter went to bed, and in the morning it was Carter, cold and mechanically efficient, who pointed out the same way to him.

But even as he pressed his reasoning home, Peter observed there was a still deeper and more mysterious change in his companion. It lay more in Carter's eyes than in his voice or the unemotional lines of his face.

[306]

"You've learned how big the woods are," he said. "Go north, into the Yukon or Alaska. I will see that Mona comes to you—safely."

Peter shook his head.

"I've also learned what it means to run from thicket to thicket, guarding a hunted thing you love. That would be Mona's share—years of it, until the end. And the end would come sometime. I'd rather pay the debt—and have free years left to me afterward."

It was Carter's last effort. From that hour he traveled steadily homeward with Peter, making no protest against this new code which had come into his life of giving, instead of taking, a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye.

The middle of May found them halfway between Lac St. Joe and the Height of Land, with Five Fingers still a hundred and eighty miles ahead of them.

"We'll make it in seven days," said Peter.

"Unless the melting snows flood the streams," said Carter.

Spring was breaking gloriously. Scents filled the air. Crushed balsam and cedar gave out a redolence that was tonic. The poplar buds were bursting. Birds were returning. On the sides of slopes where the sun struck warmly the snow was gone, grass sprang up lush green, and flowers that budded while the earth was still white began to bloom. Sap dripped from broken limbs, and the whispered breath of a wakening life, of growing things, and of matehood, hope and happiness,[307] seemed to rise between the earth and the sky, night and day.

Both Peter and Carter sensed the thrill of these things, yet neither felt their joy. The floods held them back, so that at first their loss was in hours, and then in days. Carter was glad, but he gave no betrayal of that fact. His face in these last weeks had grown quietly and splendidly different from the old Carter's. It was cold, deeply lined, austere, but its sharpness was mellowed and there was no longer the ferret-like gleam in his eyes or the grim hardness in his lips and chin. Not a day passed that his hand did not rest on Peter's shoulder or arm, and in his touch was a gentleness that at times was reflected in the look of his eyes. But in the secrecy of his own thoughts was a dread of the day they would arrive at Five Fingers. Dread—and yet not fear.

Peter did not reveal his own fears except as they became a part of his face and eyes in certain moments which a man like Carter could not fail to observe. These fears were not inspired by visions of personal danger, for in adjusting his mind to the necessity of paying his debt to the law he had eliminated the menace of Aleck Curry in so far as it could possibly affect the future of Mona or himself.

What he dreaded were the changes which nearly two years might have brought to Five Fingers, and the evil which Aleck Curry could have accomplished in that time. Just what outrage his enemy could have successfully[308] consummated he had no definite idea. Yet the thought seized upon him at times and held him under a dark and oppressive apprehension.

On the last day before crossing the Height of Land Carter spoke of what he knew to be in Peter's mind.

"You will find Mona safe and well, and as true as the day you left her," he said. "And lovelier, too, Peter, for she needed these two years to round out her glorious womanhood. I'm not worrying about her. I'm putting all my faith in another gamble."

"And that?"

Carter gave his thin shoulders a suggestive shrug.

"Has it occurred to you how nice it will be if—in these two years of change you have anticipated—something has happened to Curry? Death, for instance?"

Peter looked at his companion to see if he was joking. Carter's face was set and unsmiling.

"Why not?" he argued. "Aleck, although a brother of the Devil, isn't calamity-proof. With him under six feet of good, honest dirt, or mysteriously missing, or kicked out of the force by an authority greater than his uncle—you would be a free man, and Father Albanel could ring the wedding bell the day you reach Five Fingers. Maybe it's only a dream I've had—but I seem to see Aleck Curry safely out of your way, now or very soon. If he has tried to take advantage of Mona Guyon during your absence——"

"Simon McQuarrie or Pierre Gourdon would kill him!"

[309]

"Exactly!" And Carter lighted his pipe and said no more, nor did he raise his eyes to see the strained look which he knew was in Peter's face.

That night they slept on the northward slope of the ridge that separated the waterways of a continent.

Two days later, on the first of June, they crossed the southern line of rail and camped in the deep wilderness between it and Lake Superior.

Carter made his bed with more than usual care.

"Our last night," he said. "Tomorrow we should pass the high ridge country before dark and reach Five Fingers in the early light of the moon. Are you a little excited?"

"I should like to go on," said Peter.

Carter smiled a bit wistfully. Now and then this flash of gentleness had crept into his face of late. "I'd be willing to give up the rest of my life if for a few hours I could have someone waiting for me as Mona Guyon is waiting for you," he answered in a low voice. "Strange that I've let all the years go by without thinking of that, isn't it? But I'm thinking now. And I'm sorry—for a lot of things."

"You say you are going to resign from the police as soon as you can," said Peter, looking into the darkness that lay between him and home. "When you do that—come to Five Fingers. Simon McQuarrie and Pierre Gourdon and Joe and Father Albanel and all the others will make it home for you. And Mona and Marie Antoinette and Josette will love you because you were[310] four-square and helped us. And after that—somewhere—maybe at Five Fingers—there will be a girl——"

A cough came from the gloom behind Peter, a thick and husky cough as if Carter were choking something back that was in his throat. "One of the few things I remember from years ago is a song called 'The City Four-Square,'" he said. "And when you, of all men, call me four-square—why——" Darkness hid his face. "Good night, Peter!"

"Good night," said Peter.