Back to Gods Country and Other Stories | Page 8

cheeks
were hollowed, and there was a different sort of luster in his eyes. He
looked fifty instead of thirty-five. Her heart bled in its agony. She loved
Peter with a wonderful love.
The truth! If she told him that! She could see Peter rising up out of his
bed like a ghost. It would kill him. If he could have seen Rydal--only
an hour before--stopping her out on the deck, taking her in his arms,
and kissing her until his drunken breath and his beard sickened her!
And if he could have heard what Rydal had said! She shuddered. And
suddenly she dropped down on her knees beside Wapi and took his
great head in her arms, unafraid of him--and glad that he had come.
Then she turned to Peter. "I'm going ashore to see Blake again--now,"
she said. "Wapi will go with me, and I won't be afraid. I insist that I am
right, so please don't object any more, Peter dear."
She bent over and kissed him, and then in spite of his protest, put on

her fur coat and hood, and stood for a moment smiling down at him.
The fear was gone out of her eyes now. It was impossible for him not to
smile at her loveliness. He had always been proud of that. He reached
up a thin hand and plucked tenderly at the shining little tendrils of gold
that crept out from under her hood.
"I wish you wouldn't, dear," he pleaded.
How pathetically white, and thin, and weak he was! She kissed him
again and turned quickly to hide the mist in her eyes. At the door she
blew him a kiss from the tip of her big fur mitten, and as she went out
she heard him say in the thin, strange voice that was so unlike the old
Peter:
"Don't be long, Dolores."
She stood silently for a few moments to make sure that no one would
see her. Then she moved swiftly to the ice bridge and out into the
star-lighted ghostliness of the night. Wapi followed close behind her,
and dropping a hand to her side she called softly to him. In an instant
Wapi's muzzle was against her mitten, and his great body quivered with
joy at her direct speech to him. She saw the response in his red eyes
and stopped to stroke him with both mittened hands, and over and over
again she spoke his name. "Wapi--Wapi--Wapi." He whined. She could
feel him under her touch as if alive with an electrical force. Her eyes
shone. In the white starlight there was a new emotion in her face. She
had found a friend, the one friend she and Peter had, and it made her
braver.
At no time had she actually been afraid--for herself. It was for Peter.
And she was not afraid now. Her cheeks flushed with exertion and her
breath came quickly as she neared Blake's cabin. Twice she had made
excuses to go ashore--just because she was curious, she had said--and
she believed that she had measured up Blake pretty well. It was a case
in which her woman's intuition had failed her miserably. She was
amazed that such a man had marooned himself voluntarily on the arctic
coast. She did not, of course, understand his business--entirely. She
thought him simply a trader. And he was unlike any man aboard ship.

By his carefully clipped beard, his calm, cold manner of speech, and
the unusual correctness with which he used his words she was
convinced that at some time or another he had been part of what she
mentally thought of as "an entirely different environment."
She was right. There was a time when London and New York would
have given much to lay their hands on the man who now called himself
Blake.
Dolores, excited by the conviction that Blake would help her when he
heard her story, still did not lose her caution. Rydal had given her
another twenty-four hours, and that was all. In those twenty-four hours
she must fight out their salvation, her own and Peter's. If Blake should
fail--
Fifty paces from his cabin she stopped, slipped the big fur mitten from
her right hand and unbuttoned her coat so that she could quickly and
easily reach an inside pocket in which was Peter's revolver. She smiled
just a bit grimly, as her fingers touched the cold steel. It was to be her
last resort. And she was thinking in that flash of the days "back home"
when she was counted the best revolver shot at the Piping Rock. She
could beat Peter, and Peter was good. Her fingers twined a bit fondly
about the pearl-handled thing in her pocket. The last resort--and from
the first it had