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The Courage of Marge O'Doone, a novel by James Oliver Curwood |
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Chapter 18 |
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_ CHAPTER XVIII After that quietly spoken fact that her mother was dead, David waited for Marge O'Doone to make some further explanation. He had so firmly convinced himself that the picture he had carried was the key to all that he wanted to know--first from Tavish, if he had lived, and now from the girl--that it took him a moment or two to understand what he saw in his companion's face. He realized then that his possession of the picture and the manner in which it had come into his keeping were matters of great perplexity to her, and that the woman whom he had met in the Transcontinental held no significance for her at all, although he had told her with rather marked emphasis that this woman--whom he had thought was her mother--had been searching for a man who bore her own name, O'Doone. The girl was plainly expecting him to say something, and he reiterated this fact--that the woman in the coach was very anxious to find a man whose name was O'Doone, and that it was quite reasonable to suppose that _her_ name was O'Doone, especially as she had with her this picture of a girl bearing that name. It seemed to him a powerful and utterly convincing argument. It was a combination of facts difficult to get away from without certain conclusions, but this girl who was so near to him that he could almost feel her breath did not appear fully to comprehend their significance. She was looking at him with wide-open, wondering eyes, and when he had finished she said again: "My mother is dead. And my father is dead, too. And my aunt is dead--up at the Nest. There isn't any one left but my uncle Hauck, and he is a brute. And Brokaw. He is a bigger brute. It was he who made me let him take this picture--two years ago. I have been training Tara to kill--to kill any one that touches me, when I scream." It was wonderful to watch her eyes darken, to see her pupils grow big and luminous. She did not look at the picture clutched in her hands, but straight at him. "He caught me there, near the creek. He _frightened_ me. He _made_ me let him take it. He wanted me to take off my...." A flood of wild blood rushed into her face. In her heart was a fury. "I wouldn't be afraid now--not of him alone," she cried. "I would scream--and fight, and Tara would tear him into pieces. Oh, Tara knows how to do it--_now_! I have trained him." "He compelled you to let him take the picture," urged David gently. "And then...." "I saw one of the pictures afterward. My aunt had it. I wanted to destroy it, because I hated it, and I hated him. But she said it was necessary for her to keep it. She was sick then. I loved her. She would put her arms around me every day. She used to kiss me, nights, when I went to bed. But we were afraid of Hauck--I don't call him 'uncle.' _She_ was afraid of him. Once I jumped at him and scratched his face when he swore at her, and he pulled my hair. _Ugh_, I can feel it now! After that she used to cry, and she always put her arms around me closer than ever. She died that way, holding my head down to her, and trying to say something. But I couldn't understand. I was crying. That was six months ago. Since then I've been training Tara--to kill." "And why have you trained Tara, little girl?" David took her hand. It lay warm and unresisting in his, a firm, very little hand. He could feel a slight shudder pass through her. "I heard--something," she said. "The Nest is a terrible place. Hauck is terrible. Brokaw is terrible. And Hauck sent away somewhere up there"--she pointed northward--"for Brokaw. He said--I belonged to Brokaw. What did he mean?" She turned so that she could look straight into David's eyes. She was hard to answer. If she had been a woman.... She saw the slow, gathering tenseness in David's face as he looked for a moment away from her bewildering eyes--the hardening muscles of his jaws; and her own hand tightened as it lay in his. "What did Hauck mean?" she persisted. "Why do I belong to Brokaw--that great, red brute?" The hand he had been holding he took between both his palms in a gentle, comforting way. His voice was gentle, too, but the hard lines did not leave his face. "How old are you, Marge?" he asked. "Seventeen," she said. "And I am--thirty-eight." He turned to smile at her. "See...." He raised a hand and took off his hat. "My hair is getting gray!" She looked up swiftly, and then, so suddenly that it took his breath away, her fingers were running back through his thick blond hair. "A little," she said. "But you are not old." She dropped her hand. Her whole movement had been innocent as a child's. "And yet I am _quite_ old," he assured her. "Is this man Brokaw at the Nest, Marge?" She nodded. "He has been there a month. He came after Hauck sent for him, and went away again. Then he came back." "And you are now running away from him?" "From all of them," she said. "If it were just Brokaw I wouldn't be afraid. I would let him catch me, and scream. Tara would kill him for me. But it's Hauck, too. And the others. They are worse since Nisikoos died. That is what I called her--Nisikoos--my aunt. They are all terrible, and they all frighten me, especially since they began to build a great cage for Tara. Why should they build a cage for Tara, out of small trees? Why do they want to shut him up? None of them will tell me. Hauck says it is for another bear that Brokaw is bringing down from the Yukon. But I know they are lying. It is for Tara." Suddenly her fingers clutched tightly at his hand, and for the first time he saw under her long, shimmering lashes the darkening fire of a real terror. "Why do I belong to Brokaw?" she asked again, a little tremble in her voice. "Why did Hauck say that? Can--can a man--buy a girl?" The nails of her slender fingers were pricking his flesh. David did not feel their hurt. "What do you mean?" he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. "Did that man--Hauck--sell you?" He looked away from her as he asked the question. He was afraid, just then, that something was in his face which he did not want her to see. He began to understand; at least he was beginning to picture a very horrible possibility. "I--don't--know," he heard her say, close to his shoulder. "It was night before last I heard them quarrelling, and I crept close to a door that was a little open, and looked in. Brokaw had given my uncle a bag of gold, a little sack, like the miners use, and I heard him swear at my uncle, and say: 'That's more than she is worth but I'll give in. _Now_ she's mine!' I don't know why it frightened me so. It wasn't Brokaw. I guess it was the terrible look in that man's face--my uncle's. Tara and I ran away that night. Why do you suppose they want to put Tara in a cage? Do you think Brokaw was buying _Tara_ to put into that cage? He said 'she,' not 'he'." He looked at her again. Her eyes were not so fearless now. "Was he buying Tara, or me?" she insisted. "Why do you have that thought--that he was buying _you_?" David asked. "Has anything--happened?" A second time a fury of blood leapt into her face and her lashes shadowed a pair of blazing stars. "He--that red brute--caught me in the dark two weeks ago, and held me there--and kissed me!" She fairly panted at him, springing to her feet and standing before him. "I would have screamed, but it was in the house, and Tara couldn't have come to me. I scratched him, and fought, but he bent my head back until it hurt. He tried it again the day he gave my uncle the gold, but I struck him with a stick, and got away. Oh, I _hate_ him! And he knows it. And my uncle cursed me for striking him! And that's why ... I'm running away." "I understand," said David, rising and smiling at her confidently, while in his veins his blood was running like little streams of fire. "Don't you believe, now, all that I've told you about the picture? How it tried so hard to talk to me, and tell me to hurry? It got me here just about in time, didn't it? It'll be a great joke on Brokaw, little girl. And your uncle Hauck. A great joke, eh?" He laughed. He felt like laughing, even as his blood pounded through him at fever heat. "You're a little brick, Marge--you and your bear!" It was the first time he had thought of the bear since Marge had detached herself from the big beast to come to him, and as he looked in its direction he gave a startled exclamation. Baree and the grizzly had been measuring each other for some time. To Baree this was the most amazing experience in all his life, and flattened out between the two rocks he was at a loss to comprehend why his master did not either run or shoot. He wanted to jump out, if his master showed fight, and leap straight at that ugly monster, or he wanted to run away as fast as his legs would carry him. He was shivering in indecision, waiting a signal from David to do either one or the other. And Tara was now moving slowly toward the dog! His huge head was hung low, swinging slightly from side to side in a most terrifying way; his great jaws were agape, and the nearer he came to Baree the smaller the dog seemed to grow between the rocks. At David's sudden cry the girl had turned, and he was amazed to hear her laughter, clear and sweet as a bell. It was funny, that picture of the dog and the bear, if one was in the mood to see the humour of it! "Tara won't hurt him," she hurried to say, seeing David's uneasiness. "He loves dogs. He wants to play with ... what is his name?" "Baree. And mine is David." "Baree--David. See!" Like a bird she had left his side and in an instant, it seemed, was astride the big grizzly, digging her fingers into Tara's thick coat--smiling back at him, her radiant hair about her like a cloud, filled with marvellous red-and-gold fires in the sun. "Come," she said, holding out a hand to David. "I want Tara to know you are our friend. Because"--the darkness came into her eyes again--"I have been _training him_, and I want him to know he must not hurt _you_." David went to them, little fancying the acquaintance he was about to make, until Marge slipped off her bear and put her two arms unhesitatingly about his shoulders, and drew him down with her close in front of Tara's big head and round, emotionless eyes. For a thrilling moment or two she pressed her face close to his, looking all the time straight at Tara, and talking to him steadily. David did not sense what she was saying, except that in a general way she was telling Tara that he must never hurt this man, no matter what happened. He felt the warm crush of her hair on his neck and face. It billowed on his breast for a moment. The girl's hand touched his cheek, warm and caressing. He made no movement of his own, except to rise rigidly when she unclasped her arms from about his shoulders. "There; he won't hurt you now!" she exclaimed in triumph. Her cheeks were flaming, but not with embarrassment. Her eyes were as clear as the violets he had crushed under his feet in the mountain valleys. He looked at her as she stood before him, so much like a child, and yet enough of a woman to make his own cheeks burn. And then he saw a sudden changing expression come into her face. There was something pathetic about it, something that made him see again what he had forgotten--her exhaustion, the evidences of her struggle. She was looking at his pack. "We haven't had anything to eat since we ran away," she said simply. "I'm hungry." He had heard children say "I'm hungry" in that same voice, with the same hopeful and entreating insistence in it; he had spoken those words himself a thousand times, to his mother, in just that same way, it seemed to him; and as she stood there, looking at his pack, he was filled with a very strong desire to crumple her close in his arms--not as a woman, but as a child. And this desire held him so still for a moment that she thought he was waiting for her to explain. "I fastened our bundle on Tara's back and we lost it in the night coming up over the mountain," she said. "It was so steep that in places I had to catch hold of Tara and let him drag me up." In another moment he was at his pack, opening it, and tossing things to right and left on the white sand, and the girl watched him, her eyes very bright with anticipation. "Coffee, bacon, bannock, and potatoes," he said, making a quick inventory of his small stock of provisions. "Potatoes!" cried the girl. "Yes--dehydrated. See? It looks like rice. One pound of this equals fourteen pounds of potatoes. And you can't tell the difference when it's cooked right. Now for a fire!" She was darting this way and that, collecting small dry sticks in the sand before he was on his feet. He could not resist standing for a moment and watching her. Her movements, even in her quick and eager quest of fuel, were the most graceful he had ever seen in a human being. And yet she was tired! She was hungry! And he believed that her feet, concealed in those rock-torn moccasins, were bruised and sore. He went down to the stream for water, and in the few moments that he was gone his mind worked swiftly. He believed that he understood, perhaps even more than the girl herself. There was something about her that was so sweetly childish--in spite of her age and her height and her amazing prettiness that was not all a child's prettiness--that he could not feel that she had realized fully the peril from which she was fleeing when he found her. He had guessed that her dread was only partly for herself and that the other part was for Tara, her bear. She had asked him in a sort of plaintive anxiety and with rather more of wonderment and perplexity in her eyes than fear, whether she belonged to Brokaw, and what it all meant, and whether a man could buy a girl. It was not a mystery to him that the "red brute" she had told him about should want her. His puzzlement was that such a thing could happen, if he had guessed right, among men. Buy her? Of course down there in the big cities such a thing had happened hundreds and thousands of times--were happening every day--but he could not easily picture it happening up here, where men lived because of their strength. There must surely be other men at the Nest than the two hated and feared by the girl--Hauck, her uncle, and Brokaw, the "red brute." She had built a little pile of sticks and dry moss ready for the touch of a match when he returned. Tara had stretched himself out lazily in the sun and Baree was still between the two rocks, eyeing him watchfully. Before David lighted the fire he spread his one blanket out on the sand and made the Girl sit down. She was close to him, and her eyes did not leave his face for an instant. Whenever he looked up she was gazing straight at him, and when he went down to the creek for another pail of water he felt that her eyes were still on him. When he turned to come back, with fifty paces between them, she smiled at him and he waved his hand at her. He asked her a great many questions while he prepared their dinner. The Nest, he learned, was a free-trading place, and Hauck was its proprietor. He was surprised when he learned that he was not on Firepan Creek after all. The Firepan was over the range, and there were a good many Indians to the north and west of it. Miners came down frequently from the Taku River country and the edge of the Yukon, she said. At least she thought they were miners, for that is what Hauck used to tell Nisikoos, her aunt. They came after whisky. Always whisky. And the Indians came for liquor, too. It was the chief article that Hauck, her uncle, traded in. He brought it from the coast, in the winter time--many sledge loads of it; and some of those "miners" who came down from the north carried away much of it. If it was summer they would take it away on pack horses. What would they do with so much liquor, she wondered? A little of it made such a beast of Hauck, and a beast of Brokaw, and it drove the Indians wild. Hauck would no longer allow the Indians to drink it at the Nest. They had to take it away with them--into the mountains. Just now there was quite a number of the "miners" down from the north, ten or twelve of them. She had not been afraid when Nisikoos, her aunt, was alive. But now there was no other woman at the Nest, except an old Indian woman who did Hauck's cooking. Hauck wanted no one there. And she was afraid of those men. They all feared Hauck, and she knew that Hauck was afraid of Brokaw. She didn't know why, but he was. And she was afraid of them all, and hated them all. She had been quite happy when Nisikoos was alive. Nisikoos had taught her to read out of books, had taught her things ever since she could remember. She could write almost as well as Nisikoos. She said this a bit proudly. But since her aunt had gone, things were terribly changed. Especially the men. They had made her more afraid, every day. "None of them is like you," she said with startling frankness, her eyes shining at him. "I would love to be with you!" He turned, then, to look at Tara dozing in the sun. _ |
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