Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police | Page 2

be different.
But it is a new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is life lurking in
the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the pitch-weighted logs
plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in the brainless
cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old passion, stirred
into spirit life by the very madness of this night. A hundred times I
have been sorry that I kept the thing, but never more so than now.
How the wind howls and the pines screech above me! A pailful of snow,
plunging down my chimney, sends the chills up my spine as if it were
the very devil himself, and the steam of it surges out and upward and
hides the skull. It is absurd to go to bed, to make an effort to sleep, for I
know what my dreams would be. To-night they would be filled with
this skull--and with visions of a face, a woman's face--
Thus far had Steele written, when with a nervous laugh he sprang from
his chair, and with something that sounded very near to an oath, in the
wild tumult of the storm, crumpled the paper in his hand and flung it
among the blazing logs he had described but a few moments before.
"Confound it, this will never do!" he exclaimed, falling into his own
peculiar habit of communing with himself. "I say it won't do, Phil
Steele; deuce take it if it will! You're getting nervous, sentimental,
almost homesick. Ugh, what a beast of a night!"
He turned to the rude stone fireplace again as another blast of snow
plunged down the chimney.

"Wish I'd built a fire in the stove instead of there," he went on, filling
his pipe. "Thought it would be a little more cheerful, you know. Lord
preserve us, listen to that!"
He began walking up and down the hewn log floor of the cabin, his
hands deep in his pockets, puffing out voluminous clouds of smoke. It
was not often that Philip Steele's face was unpleasant to look upon, but
to-night it wore anything but its natural good humor. It was a strong,
thin face, set off by a square jaw, and with clear, steel-gray eyes in
which just now there shone a strange glitter, as they rested for a
moment upon the white skull over the fire. From his scrutiny of the
skull Steele turned to a rough board table, lighted by a twisted bit of
cotton cloth, three-quarters submerged in a shallow tin of caribou
grease. In the dim light of this improvised lamp there were two letters,
opened and soiled, which an Indian had brought up to him from Nelson
House the day before. One of them was short and to the point. It was an
official note from headquarters ordering him to join a certain Buck
Nome at Lac Bain, a hundred miles farther north.
It was the second letter which Steele took in his hands for the twentieth
time since it had come to him here, three hundred miles into the
wilderness. There were half-a-dozen pages of it, written in a woman's
hand, and from it there rose to his nostrils the faint, sweet perfume of
hyacinth. It was this odor that troubled him--that had troubled him
since yesterday, and that made him restless and almost homesick
to-night. It took him back to things--to the days of not so very long ago
when he had been a part of the life from which the letter came, and
when the world had seemed to hold for him all that one could wish. In a
retrospective flash there passed before him a vision of those days, when
he, Mr. Philip Steele, son of a multimillionaire banker, was one of the
favored few in the social life of a great city; when fashionable clubs
opened their doors to him, and beautiful women smiled upon him, and
when, among others, this girl of the hyacinth letter held out to him the
tempting lure of her heart. Her heart? Or was it the tempting of his own
wealth? Steele laughed, and his strong white teeth gleamed in a
half-contemptuous smile as he turned again toward the fire.

He sat down, with the letter still in his hands, and thought of some of
those others whom he had known. What had become of Jack Moody,
he wondered--the good old Jack of his college days, who had loved this
girl of the hyacinth with the whole of his big, honest heart, but who
hadn't been given half a show because of his poverty? And where was
Whittemore, the young broker whose hopes had fallen with his own
financial ruin; and Fordney, who would have cut off ten years of his
life for