there was no more sleep through what was left of the night, and scarcely more of talk. standing piled his fire high, and, unmindful of his discarded rifle, went out for more wood; lynette dropped down on the blanket in her corner and named herself a silly fool. he came back, carefully relocking his door; kept his fire blazing, and made his coffee and smoked his pipe. and then, in that great golden voice of his, he began singing. and, through its wild rhythm, she knew the song for the same as that which she had heard for the first time when he had hurled himself both into big pine and into her life. his voice rose and swelled and filled the poor cabin to overflowing, and must have filtered through chinks and cracks and spilled out through the forest land, and for great distances through the quiet solitudes. and, at the end, in a sudden upgathering into all that tremendous resounding volume of sound of which his magnificent voice was capable, came that unforgettable wolf cry. if she required any reminding, here she had it, that she was housed in the same cabin with timber-wolf! a fierce outcry, to go resounding and echoing across miles and miles of forest lands, meant, as she was quick to realize, to carry both defiance and challenge to his enemies.
"you have had your choice, girl!" he shouted at her. "you could have gone free! i gave you your freedom. but you would not go. and that was because it was in the cards, in the fates, in the stars, if you like, that you and i are not to part yet! the door is locked; i stand between you and it. so, you stay here with me!"
[pg 244]
for the first time she was truly and deeply afraid of him. but he went back to his place by the fire, and sat on the old stump seat, and filled his pipe again with hard, nervous fingers and glared at the fire. for a little he seemed to have forgotten that she was there. and then at last, when she saw that he was going to speak again, she forestalled him, saying swiftly:
"i am tired and sleepy. i am going to sleep."
he checked his speech, saving whatever he had to say to her. she lay back on her blankets, and, though she had had no such intention, soon drifted off to sleep. and he, with pipe grown cold, sat and glowered over his fire, and put to himself many a question, growing fierce over his inability to answer any one of them. but, at least, in his groping he forgot the pain of his wounds.
"you are not asleep," he said after a very long time. "i know that; i can tell. you are pretending. and you are thinking, thinking hard and fast! and so am i thinking! as i never did before now. you might as well save yourself the labor of struggling with your problems, since i am doing the planning for both of us right now; since everything is in my hands and i mean to keep it there."
she heard but gave no sign of hearing; she kept her face averted from him so that he could not see whether her eyes were open or shut. open they were, and the man appeared to know it.
"am i wise man or fool?" he cried. "he only is wise who knows what he knows and steers his craft by the one steady star in his sky!"
she would not answer him when he spoke; she could not just now. she lay still, as if asleep. he relapsed into a long silence, his eyes now on her, now on his fire.
"this neck o' the woods is getting all cluttered up with folks!" he muttered abruptly, with such
[pg 245]
suddenness that he startled her. "i've a notion to run the whole crowd in for trespassing!... or better, girl, you and i move on. where there's elbow room; room to talk in. we've got to quarry out our own blocks of stone and build up our own lives, and we want a bit of the world to ourselves. what's more, we're going to have it!"
she knew, as every girl knows when that mighty moment comes ... and her girl-heart beat hard and fast ... that after his own fashion bruce standing, timber-wolf, was making love to her.
"dawn!" he said, and she understood that he spoke with himself as much as with her. "that's all we're waiting for, the first streak of dawn. then we move on. where? i know where, and no other man knows!"
he began impatiently stalking up and down; he seemed to have forgotten his wounds, and yet, stealing her swift glances at him, she could see that his face had lost little of its whiteness and that his whole left side was stiff. again, bestowing mentally a strange epithet upon him, she regarded the man as "inevitable." could anything stop him or divert his career into any channel but that of his own choosing? she was afraid of him.
"you told me that i might go! where i pleased, when i pleased!"
he swung about and turned on her a face of whose expression in that dim, flickering light she could make nothing.
"you had your choice! you came back! now i know something which i did not know before."
he began pacing up and down again, making the cabin's smallness further dwarfed by his great strides. he fascinated her; she watched him, and her fear, formless and nameless, grew until it seemed that it would choke her.
[pg 246]
there was a boarded-up window. a thin slit of light showed.
"we breakfast and go," he told her.
"and if i refuse to go with you?"
"i have my chain and my good right arm!"
then, as once before, tingling with anger born of foreseen humiliation, she cried out:
"i hate you, brute that you are!"
"not brute, but man," he told her sternly. "and, ever since the world was young, men, when they were men, claimed their mates and took and held them!"
again for a long time he was silent. and then, on his feet, his arms thrown out, he cried in a strange voice:
"i love you!"
he made strange mad music in her soul. she tried again to cry out: "i hate you!" she knew that still she was afraid of him, more afraid than ever. yet he strode up and down and looked a young valiant god, and his golden voice found singing echoes within her soul and his wild extravagances awoke throbbing extravagances in her.... what can one know? what misdoubt? we are like babes in the dark. of what can one be sure? of the stars above?... our hopes are like stars....
"i am no poet, though next to a strong fighting man i'd rather be a true poet than anything else god ever created! were i a poet i'd build a song for you, girl! a song to ring through the eternal ages; going back to the roots of things when you and i were first you and i! it would be a song like one of the old troubadours', telling of great deeds and great loves only ... for you and i have never been the ones for cowardly littlenesses! i'd make a song to hang about the world's memory of you like a golden chain. and i'd carry on, having the poet's soul and vision, into ten thousand lives to come;
[pg 247]
down to the end of time when eternity is only at its beginnings!... but i am only plain bruce standing, a simple fighting man, and no poet; one who at best can but mouth the voicings of the true poets. so i can only pour all my heart and soul, girl, into my brief poem: i love you. i have always loved you! always and always i shall love you!... and i'll crack any man's skull that so much as looks at you!"
she was not sure of his sanity; not certain that a fever, bred of his wounds, was not burning into his marrow. and yet——
"it's dawn, i tell you! we boil our coffee, we pick up a mouthful of food. and then we move on! and why? because we're sure to have callers here in another day or so, and just now i don't want other people; i want you, girl, and only you and the rest of the world can go to pot!... and now we go!"
