The Night-Born | Page 9

don't have ordinary women's needs. They don't want love, nor
little children in their arms and around their knees. I'm not that sort. I
leave it to you, stranger. Do I look like a man?'
"She didn't. She was a woman, a beautiful, nut-brown woman, with a
sturdy, health-rounded woman's body and with wonderful deep-blue
woman's eyes.

"'Ain't I woman?' she demanded. 'I am. I'm 'most all woman, and then
some. And the funny thing is, though I'm night-born in everything else,
I'm not when it comes to mating. I reckon that kind likes its own kind
best. That's the way it is with me, anyway, and has been all these years.'
"'You mean to tell me--' I began.
"'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the straightness
of truth. 'I had one husband, only--him I call the Ox; and I reckon he's
still down in Juneau running the hash-joint. Look him up, if you ever
get back, and you'll find he's rightly named.'
"And look him up I did, two years afterward. He was all she said--solid
and stolid, the Ox--shuffling around and waiting on the tables.
"'You need a wife to help you,' I said.
"'I had one once,' was his answer.
"'Widower?'
"'Yep. She went loco. She always said the heat of the cooking would
get her, and it did. Pulled a gun on me one day and ran away with some
Siwashes in a canoe. Caught a blow up the coast and all hands
drowned.'"
Trefethan devoted himself to his glass and remained silent.
"But the girl?" Milner reminded him.
"You left your story just as it was getting interesting, tender. Did it?"
"It did," Trefethan replied. "As she said herself, she was savage in
everything except mating, and then she wanted her own kind. She was
very nice about it, but she was straight to the point. She wanted to
marry me.
"'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad. You like this sort of life or you
wouldn't be here trying to cross the Rockies in fall weather. It's a likely

spot. You'll find few likelier. Why not settle down! I'll make you a
good wife.'
"And then it was up to me. And she waited. I don't mind confessing
that I was sorely tempted. I was half in love with her as it was. You
know I have never married. And I don't mind adding, looking back over
my life, that she is the only woman that ever affected me that way. But
it was too preposterous, the whole thing, and I lied like a gentleman. I
told her I was already married.
"'Is your wife waiting for you?' she asked.
"I said yes.
"'And she loves you?'
"I said yes.
"And that was all. She never pressed her point. . . except once, and then
she showed a bit of fire.
"'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you don't get
away from here. If I give the word, you stay on. . . But I ain't going to
give it. I wouldn't want you if you didn't want to be wanted. . . and if
you didn't want me.'
"She went ahead and outfitted me and started me on my way.
"'It's a darned shame, stranger," she said, at parting. 'I like your looks,
and I like you. If you ever change your mind, come back.'
"Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss her
good-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she would take
it.--I tell you I was half in love with her. But she settled it herself.
"'Kiss me,' she said. 'Just something to go on and remember.'
"And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the Rockies, and I
left her standing by the trail and went on after my dogs. I was six weeks

in crossing over the pass and coming down to the first post on Great
Slave Lake."
The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. A steward,
moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons. And in the silence
Trefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:
"It would have been better had I stayed. Look at me."
We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the puff-sacks
under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy dewlap, the general
tiredness and staleness and fatness, all the collapse and ruin of a man
who had once been strong but who had lived too easily and too well.
"It's not too late, old man," Bardwell said, almost in a whisper.
"By God! I wish I weren't a coward!" was Trefethan's answering cry. "I
could go back to her. She's there, now. I