The Rivers End | Page 8

flames.
The fire leaping and crackling before his eyes was like a powerful
medicine. It stirred things that had lain dormant within him. It
consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and
brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had
dragged itself on like a century. All at once he seemed unburdened of
shackles that had weighted him down to the point of madness. Every
fiber in his body responded to that glorious roar of the fire; a thing
seemed to snap in his head, freeing it of an oppressive bondage, and in
the heart of the flames he saw home, and hope, and life--the things
familiar and precious long ago, which the scourge of the north had
almost beaten dead in his memory. He saw the broad Saskatchewan
shimmering its way through the yellow plains, banked in by the
foothills and the golden mists of morning dawn; he saw his home town
clinging to its shore on one side and with its back against the purple
wilderness on the other; he heard the rhythmic chug, chug, chug of the
old gold dredge and the rattle of its chains as it devoured its tons of
sand for a few grains of treasure; over him there were lacy clouds in a
blue heaven again, he heard the sound of voices, the tread of feet,
laughter--life. His soul reborn, he rose to his feet and stretched his arms
until the muscles snapped. No, they would not know him back
there--now! He laughed softly as he thought of the old John
Keith--"Johnny" they used to call him up and down the few
balsam-scented streets--his father's right-hand man mentally but a little
off feed, as his chum, Reddy McTabb, used to say, when it came to the
matter of muscle and brawn. He could look back on things without
excitement now. Even hatred had burned itself out, and he found
himself wondering if old Judge Kirkstone's house looked the same on
the top of the hill, and if Miriam Kirkstone had come back to live there
after that terrible night when he had returned to avenge his father.

Four years! It was not so very long, though the years had seemed like a
lifetime to him. There would not be many changes. Everything would
be the same--everything--except--the old home. That home he and his
father had planned, and they had overseen the building of it, a chateau
of logs a little distance from the town, with the Saskatchewan sweeping
below it and the forest at its doors. Masterless, it must have seen
changes in those four years. Fumbling in his pocket, his fingers touched
Conniston's watch. He drew it out and let the firelight play on the open
dial. It was ten o'clock. In the back of the premier half of the case
Conniston had at some time or another pasted a picture. It must have
been a long time ago, for the face was faded and indistinct. The eyes
alone were undimmed, and in the flash of the fire they took on a living
glow as they looked at Keith. It was the face of a young girl--a
schoolgirl, Keith thought, of ten or twelve. Yet the eyes seemed older;
they seemed pleading with someone, speaking a message that had come
spontaneously out of the soul of the child. Keith closed the watch. Its
tick, tick, tick rose louder to his ears. He dropped it in his pocket. He
could still hear it.
A pitch-filled spruce knot exploded with the startling vividness of a star
bomb, and with it came a dull sort of mental shock to Keith. He was
sure that for an instant he had seen Conniston's face and that the
Englishman's eyes were looking at him as the eyes had looked at him
out of the face in the watch. The deception was so real that it sent him
back a step, staring, and then, his eyes striving to catch the illusion
again, there fell upon him a realization of the tremendous strain he had
been under for many hours. It had been days since he had slept soundly.
Yet he was not sleepy now; he scarcely felt fatigue. The instinct of
self-preservation made him arrange his sleeping-bag on a carpet of
spruce boughs in the tent and go to bed.
Even then, for a long time, he lay in the grip of a harrowing
wakefulness. He closed his eyes, but it was impossible for him to hold
them closed. The sounds of the night came to him with painful
distinctness--the crackling of the fire, the serpent-like hiss of the
flaming pitch, the whispering of the tree tops, and the steady tick, tick,
tick of Conniston's watch. And out on the barren, through the