"I don't want it. And I don't want to be tied up ninety days or nine."

"Have you made a dicker with any one?" queried Madden suspiciously. "Old Sothern has had you all to himself. . . . Did you tie up with him?"

"No."

"Then, can't you see, I'm the man you want to deal with?"

"I don't think so," Drennen replied thoughtfully.

"Why not?" Madden's check book was snapping against the counter as though its voice cried out with his.

"Because I think I'm going to sell to the Northwestern!"

"But," cried Madden angrily, "you just told me that Sothern hadn't . . ."

"He hasn't!" Drennen grinned. "He doesn't know it yet!"

And that was all that Charlie Madden, though he pleaded and waxed wroth, could get out of him.

Drennen, passing out, nodded pleasantly to Marc Lemarc, coming in. Lemarc stared after him wonderingly. Drennen looked up and down the street as though searching for some one. His eyes moved restlessly; his agitation was so obvious that any man, seeing him, might see it, too.

It was far too early to hope to see Ygerne. After a brief hesitation Drennen returned thoughtfully to his dugout. His door open, his pipe lighted only to die and grow cold, forgotten, he waited. Now and then when a man passed as infrequently happened, Drennen looked up quickly. He frowned each time as the man went on.

A little after nine o'clock a man did stop at his door, carrying a note in his hand. Drennen's thoughts went swiftly to Ygerne, and a quickened beating of his heart sent the blood throbbing through him. But the note was from Sothern and said briefly:

"I have gone on to Lebarge. You were not mistaken. But it is nobody's business but yours and mine. I shall expect you to come on as soon as you are able to make the trip."

The man who had brought the message had gone on up the street. Drennen sat and stared out through his door, across the river, his face set and inscrutable. The eager light in his eyes was not without its anguish. Suddenly he stood up, his gaunt form straight and rigid, his shoulders squared, his jaw thrust out, his fist clenched.

"By Heaven!" he cried aloud, as though he were going to voice the purpose gripping him. Then he broke off, an odd smile upon his lips. And the smile told nothing.



CHAPTER XV

THE TALE OF LE BEAU DIABLE

His meeting with Ygerne two hours before noon cast out from his mind all thoughts which did not have to do with her. There was a new glory about her this morning, crowning her like an aureole. Partly was this due to a greater care in her dress and the arranging of her copper-brown hair; partly to the emotions which at sight of him charged through her. She was going down to her breakfast at Joe's when he saw her. He crossed the street to her, his face brightening like a boy's. As he moved along at her side, having had only a fleeting, tantalising glimpse of the grey of her eyes from under the wide brim of her hat, he whispered:

"Do you love me, Ygerne?"

There were men on the street who, though they might not hear the words, could not misread the look. She flushed a little, sent another flashing sidelong glance at him, making him no other answer than that. He asked none other. He accompanied her to Joe's and where they had dined the other evening in the privacy of the half shut-off room, they breakfasted now. Drennen ordered another cup of coffee for himself and forgot to drink it as he had forgotten the first.

Ygerne, on the other hand, ate her meal with composure. When he sought in a lover's undertone to refer to last night she remarked evasively upon the weather. When he said, over and over, "And you do love me, Ygerne?" she turned her eyes anywhere but upon his and refused to hear. And he laughed a new laugh, so different from that of yesterday, and worshipped man fashion and man fashion yearned to have her in his arms. When at last she had paid her own score, so insistent upon it that Drennen gave over amusedly, they went out together.

"We're going down the river," he told her quite positively. "I want you to sit upon a certain old log I know while I talk to you."

For a little he thought that she would refuse. Then, a hotter flush in her cheeks, she turned with him, passing down the river bank. They drew abreast of his dugout, Ygerne glancing swiftly in at the open door. They had grown silent, even Drennen finding little to say as they moved on. But at length they came to the log, having passed around many green willowed kinks in the Little MacLeod. The girl, sitting, either consciously or through chance, took the attitude in which Drennen had come upon her with the dual fever in his blood.

Thus Drennen's idyl began. Ygerne, staring straight out before her with wide, unseeing eyes, spoke swiftly, her voice a low monotone that fitted in well with the musing eyes. She loved him; she told him so in a strangely quiet tone and Drennen, wishing to believe, believed and thrilled under her words like the strings of an instrument under a sweeping hand. She told him that while he had been unsleeping last night neither had she slept.

"I didn't know that love came this way," she said. "It was easy to find interest in you; you were wrapped in it like a cloak. Then I think I came to hate you, just as you said that you hated me . . ."

"I was mad, Ygerne!" he broke in contritely.

"Or are we mad now?" she laughed, a vague hint of trouble on her lips. "You say we don't know much of each other. It is worse than just that. What little I know of you is not pretty knowledge. What little I have told you of myself, what you have seen of my companions here, what you have guessed, is hardly the sort of thing to make you choose me, is it? You called me adventuress more than once. Are you sure now that I am not what you named me?"

"I am sure," he answered steadily, his faith in his idol strong upon him. "You are a sweet woman and a true, Ygerne. And if you weren't . . . why, just so you loved me I should not care!"

So they passed from matters vital to mere lovers' talk that was none the less vital to them. Drennen, having long lived a starving existence, his soul pent up within his own self, opened his heart to her and poured out the thoughts which not even to himself had he hitherto acknowledged. He told of his old life in the cities; of the shame and disgrace that had driven him an alien into a sterner land where the names of men meant less than the might and cunning of their right hands; of his restless life leading him up and down upon a trail of flint; of disappointment and disillusion encountered on every hand until all of the old hopes and kindly thoughts were stripped from him; of the evil days which had turned sour within him the milk of human kindness.

Two things alone he would not talk of. He laughed at her, a ringing, boyish laugh when she mentioned them, one after the other. The first was what lay back in her own life, the thing which had driven her here.

"Don't you want me to tell you of that?" she had asked, looking at him swiftly.

"No," he had answered. "Not now. When we are married, Ygerne, then if you want to tell me I want to hear."

His faith in her was perfect, that was all. He wanted her to know that it was and took this method of telling her.

The other matter was his gold.

"You haven't told me of your discovery," she reminded him, again after a brief, keen scrutiny. "Aren't you going to tell me . . . David?"

It was the first time she had called him David, and the foolish joy at the little incident drove him to take her again to his arms. But with a steady purpose he refused to tell her. He had his reason and to give the reason would thwart his purpose. He meant to go to Lebarge and attend to the routine work there in connection with a new claim. That matter settled, and another, he would return swiftly to MacLeod's Settlement. He would seek Ygerne and they two would slip away together. He would take her with him so that her eyes might be the first to see with him the golden gash in the breast of earth. He would tell her: "It is yours, Ygerne."

So he just said lightly:

"Wait a little, Ygerne. Wait until I come back from Lebarge. I'll be gone a week at most. And then . . . and then, Ygerne . . ."

He had been holding her a little away from him so that he could look into her eyes, his soul drinking deep of the wine of them. Now he broke off sharply, a swift frown driving for the instant the radiance of his joy from his face. He had forgotten that he and Ygerne Bellaire were not in truth the only two created beings upon the bosom of earth. And now, from around a bend in the river came a low voice singing, Garcia coming into view, Garcia's eternal song upon his lips:

"The perfume of roses, of little red roses; (Thou art a rose, oh, so sweet, corazon!)"

Garcia's eyes, a little glint of slumbrous fire in their midnight depths, were upon the man and the girl. He paused a moment, stared, bowed deeply with the old dramatic sweep of his hat. A hot spurt of rage flared across Drennen's brain; this was no accidental meeting. Garcia had seen them leave the Settlement and had followed. Then the burning wrath changed quickly to hard, cold, watchful anger. Through a mere whim of the little gods of chance he had seen another face in the thicket or young elms not twenty paces from Ygerne's log, a face with hard, malevolent eyes, peaked at the bottom with a coppery Vandyck beard. If Ramon Garcia had seen, certainly Sefton had both seen and heard.

When Drennen's long strides had carried him to the thicket there was only the down trodden grass to show him where Sefton had stood for perhaps ten minutes. When he had come back to Ygerne Ramon Garcia had ended his stare, had turned with his shoulders lifting, and twirling his mustaches had gone back toward the Settlement.

"Ygerne," cried Drennen harshly, "why do you travel with men like that Sefton and Lemarc?"

Her voice was cool, her eyes were cool, as she answered him.

"Marc Lemarc is my cousin. Captain Sefton is his friend. Is that reason enough?"

"No. What have the three of you in common?"

She caught up one knee between her clasped hands, once more seated, and looked up at him curiously. For a moment she seemed to hesitate; then she spoke quietly, her eyes always intent upon his.

"So, if you don't want to know what drove me from New Orleans you do want to know what brought me here? I think that perhaps you could guess if you had heard as much as other men know about my grandfather, Bellaire le Beau Diable, as men called him. It is the quest of gold, his gold, which has brought me, and with me Marc and Captain Sefton."

Drennen frowned, shaking his head slowly.

"You won't need to seek such things now, Ygerne," he said with quiet conviction in his tone. "Surely you know the type of men these two are? Will you cut loose from them, dear?"

The fine lines of her dark eyebrows curved questioningly.

"Because you have found gold, much gold," she returned, "must I come to you penniless, like a beggar?"

Before he could answer she spoke again, flushed with that quick temper which was a part of her.

"They would be glad enough, both of them, if I drew out now! But I won't do it! It is mine, all mine, and I am going to find it! They shall have their shares, as I promised them: ten per cent each. And I, Sir Midas, will not be suspected then of falling in love with you as I am doing because you are rich and I have nothing!"

"Then," said Drennen, "if you are not to be turned aside can I help? Will you tell me about it, Ygerne?"

"Yes and yes," she answered eagerly. "I'll tell you and you can help. Here is the story: When Napoleon was overthrown my grandfather, Paul Bellaire, was a boy of eighteen. But already Napoleon's eye had found him and he was Captain Bellaire. That title suited him better than his inherited one of Count. Already men called him le Beau Diable. Then Napoleon went down before Wellington and Paul Bellaire had to shift for himself under difficult circumstances. But he didn't flee from France as did so many. He twirled his young mustaches and went to Paris.

"Louis, le Desire, had at length got his desire and was King Louis XVIII. Now that the lion was in his cage Louis roared. The young Captain Bellaire, going everywhere that entertaining society was to be found, managed to keep out of Louis's hands. One night, while he was being sought in one end of the kingdom, he danced en masque in the palace of the king. The most celebrated beauty of the court was the Lady Louise de Neville. Perhaps a little because she was the beauty she was, perhaps more because she was the king's ward, Paul Bellaire paid her his court.

"The king had a husband for her but the Lady Louise had found one more to her liking. Knowing what royal displeasure might mean, and being, despite her hot heart, a cool-headed sort of person, she took precautions to put all of her estates into gold and jewels which one could carry readily in case of flight. Then she slipped away from the court and rode with her lover to the south.

"That was in the year 1820. Bellaire, though penniless after the disaster of 1815, had managed in the five years to have accumulated much. He was a born gambler and the fates turned the dice for him so that men said that he was in truth the Devil and the son of the Devil. Like the Lady Louise he had his property converted into such form that a man might carry it in his hands. It became known publicly after the flight that the Nemours diamonds and the pearls of the old prince de Chartres had found their way into Bellaire's hands across a table with a green top.

"When the honeymoon was six hours old the wrath of the testy king found them. Paul Bellaire put the Lady Louise out of a side door and upon her horse; then he unlocked the front door and bowed to his callers. They were five men and those of them whom he did not merely cripple he killed. All of France rang with it."

The girl was breathing deeply as though agitated by her own tale, her eyes having the look of one who stares at ghost figures through the dim years. In her voice there was the ringing note of pride, pride of blood, of consanguinity with such a man as her fancy pictured Paul Bellaire to have been.

"He was hurt, badly hurt," she went on. "But he found another horse and left the village, following the Lady Louise to the coast and carrying with him both her moneys and his. A ship brought them to America and they made a home in New Orleans. There they sought and found exiles of their own station, making about them a circle as brilliant as Louis's court. And here Bellaire prospered until after my father was born. Then there came other trouble, a game in Paul Bellaire's own home over which there were hot dispute and pistol shots. And once more, because he had killed a man who was not without fame, wealth and a wide reaching influence, Paul Bellaire became an exile.

"After that night the Countess Louise saw my grandfather only four times. An exile from two countries, two prices upon his head, he played daily with death. Driven from France he had come to America; now driven from America he went back to France. Louis was dead; a new government held sway; and yet he was not forgotten there. Once, even the authorities got their hands upon him. But again he slipped away, and again he came to New Orleans. He spent one night in his own home with the Countess Louise and their little son; then word of his return leaked out and once more he was a fugitive.

"In spite of all this he lived to be a man of seventy. In 1850, drawn with the tide of adventurers surging to California, he took ship to Panama, crossed the isthmus, and at last came to the Golden Gate. He lived in California for seven years, added to his wealth, and went back for the second time to New Orleans. Again he made the long trip to the West, but this time he fared further and came on into the Dominion of Canada. He was wealthy, more wealthy than most men suspected then. He brought servants with him and plunging into the wilds devoted his time to the lure of exploration and the sport of hunting big game. A third trip to New Orleans and he confided in his countess that he had found a home for both of them and their son in their old age; he would make of himself a power in a new world; his son should some day be a man for the world to reckon with.

"Coming back to Canada he brought with him the bulk of his own and the Countess Louise's wealth, converting landed property into coined gold and jewels. In 1868 he came back to New Orleans, a hale, stalwart old man, who thought to have a score of years still before him. But the law had never forgotten him and this time found him. In his own home, fighting as the young Captain Bellaire in Napoleon's cavalry had fought, he went down to an assassin's bullet."

There were tears in her eyes, tears of anger as she thought of the old man dying with his wife weeping over him and his son going sick at the sight of the spurting blood. Drennen, watching her, marvelled at the girl. He remembered her words of the other day: "We of the blood of Paul Bellaire are not shop girls!"

In a moment she went on swiftly, the eyes turned upon Drennen very bright, a flush of excitement in her cheeks.

"My grandmother died soon after Paul Bellaire. They had just the one child, my father. He was no coward; no man ever dared say that of him; but he seemed to have none of the adventuresome blood of his parents. And yet that blood has come down to me! My father inherited the New Orleans home and a position of influence. He became a merchant and prospered. When he married my mother he was a man of considerable property. It was only when both my father and mother were dead that I came to know the story which I have told you. In one breath I learned this and that during the last years of his life my father's means had been dissipated through expensive, even luxurious, living, and a series of unwise speculations. But one heritage did come down to me . . . the memorandum book of my grandfather, Paul Bellaire! And it is because of that that I am here!"

"Lemarc and Sefton?" prompted Drennen.

"Marc learned the story with me. We looked over the papers together. There was a rude cryptic sort of map; I have it. It meant nothing without a key. We searched everywhere for that key. Marc pretending to aid me, had it all of the time in his hand. When he had had time to carry it away and place it where I could not find it he came back and told me that he had it. Without it the map is useless. So I compromised with Marc, since there was no other way, and he came with me. And Captain Sefton?" She frowned and her voice was hard as she concluded: "Marc has, I think, all of the vices of our blood without its virtues. Through gambling debts and other obligations he was in a bad way. Captain Sexton has him pretty well at his mercy. So, just as I let Marc in, Marc was forced to allow Sefton to become the third member of our party."

A wild enough tale, certainly, and yet Drennen doubted no word of it. Wilder things have been true. And, perhaps, no words issuing from that red mouth of Ygerne's would have failed to ring true in her lover's ears.

"You said that I could help?"

"Yes." Again there was that glint of eagerness in her eyes; no doubt the old Bellaire fortune of minted gold and jewels in their rich settings shone in dazzling fashion before her stimulated fancy. "We have found the spot; it is in a canon not twenty miles from here. But, at some time during the last ten winters, there have been heavy landslides. The whole side of a mountain has slipped down, covering the place where, on the map, there is the little cross which spells treasure. It will take money, much money, for the excavation. And Marc and Captain Sefton and I have no money. We may dig for months, but at last . . ."

"I'll finance it," said Drennen steadily. "If you will allow me, Ygerne? I'd do so much more than just that for you! I am afraid it will have to wait until I can have sold my claim. Then you can have what you want, five thousand, ten thousand . . ."

She had sprung to her feet, her arms flung out about his neck.

"I believe you do love me, David," she said triumphantly.

Before Drennen left her it was arranged that Lemarc was to come with him to Lebarge, that Drennen was to raise the money as soon as he could, that it was to be placed in Lemarc's hands so that the work could begin. And the next morning David Drennen, bearing a heart which sang in his bosom, left the Settlement for Lebarge.

"In a week at most I'll be back, Ygerne," he had whispered to her. "On the seventh day, in the morning early, will you meet me here, Ygerne?"

And Ygerne promised.



CHAPTER XVI

THE LOST GOLDEN GIRL PAYS AN OLD DEBT

Drennen, presenting himself early upon the second morning in the offices of the Northwestern Mining Company, found that he was expected. A clerk, arranging papers of the day's work upon his desk, came forward quickly, a look of interest in his eyes.

"Mr. Drennen?" he asked.

"Yes."

"This way, sir. You come early but they are looking for you."

Drennen followed him through a second office, unoccupied, and to a glazed door upon which was the inscription, "Local Manager." The sound of voices coming through the door fell off abruptly at the clerk's discreet knock.

Drennen entered and the clerk, closing the door, went back to his own office. Fronting Drennen, at his flat-topped desk, sat old Marshall Sothern, the muscles of his face tense, his eyes grim with the purpose in them. A second man, small, square, strong-faced, a little reckless-eyed, sat close to Sothern. The third man of the group, standing fronting the two, was a young looking fellow, tall and with the carriage of a soldier, wearing the uniform of an officer of the mounted police.

Sothern rose, putting out his hand across the table.

"Good morning, Mr. Drennen," he said evenly. "I am glad that you have come so soon. This is Mr. McCall," nodding toward the strong-faced, middle-aged man with the young eyes. "You've heard of him, no doubt? Our chief over the Western Division. And this is Lieutenant Max of the Northwest Mounted, one of 'my boys.' Be seated, Mr. Drennen. And if you will pardon us a second?"

He turned toward Lieutenant Max. Drennen, having gripped Sothern's hand, having bestowed upon him a sharp look which seemed to seek to pierce through the hard shell which is the outer man and into the soul of him where the real self is hidden, acknowledged the two introductions and sat down.

"I think that that is all, isn't it, Lieutenant?" Sothern was saying as he picked up the thread of conversation which Drennen's entrance had snapped. "Those are the people you want?"

"Yes." Max's words, though very quiet and low toned, had in them something of the precision and finality of pistol shots. "They'll not get away this time, Mr. Sothern."

"He mustn't get away. But remember, Lieutenant, that the time is not ripe yet. I positively can do nothing to help your case until . . . until I am ready!"

"I'll wait."

Max lifted his hand in a sort of salute, turned and went out. Drennen, bringing his eyes back from the departing figure, found that both Marshall Sothern and McCall were studying him intently.

"Mr. Drennen," said Sothern, "I presume you are here to talk business. You have a mine you want us to look at?"

"I am here for two purposes," answered Drennen steadily, his eyes hard upon the older man's. "That is one of them."

"The other can wait. Mr. McCall and myself are at your disposal. From the specimens I have seen I am inclined to think that you have not discovered a new mine at all, but have stumbled on to the old Lost Golden Girl. If so, you are to be congratulated . . . and so are we."

Drennen nodded, waiting for Sothern to go on.

"You made a certain offer to Charlie Madden," continued Sothern. "Was that your bona fide proposition, Mr. Drennen? Or were you merely sparring for time and putting out a bluff?"

"I meant business," returned Drennen. "I know that the property is worth considerably more than I am asking. But I have a use for just that sum."

"A hundred thousand dollars, cash, I believe? And a ten per cent royalty?" put in McCall quietly.

"Exactly." Again Drennen nodded.

"You want me to look it over with you, Sothern?" demanded McCall. "It isn't necessary, you know. Not now."

"I want you to do me the favour, McCall," answered Sothern. "Mr. Drennen, yesterday the only man in the West empowered to do business for the Northwestern upon such a scale as this was Mr. McCall. But things have happened in the East. Our chief, Bruce Elwood, is dead. Mr. McCall goes to-morrow to Montreal, stepping into Mr. Elwood's place. I move on and up into Mr. McCall's."

He paused, his face inscrutable under its dark frown. Suddenly he swung about upon McCall.

"Andy," he said sharply, "you're going to do more than just look at Mr. Drennen's find with us. You're going to act upon his offer as you see fit. As a favour to me, Andy."

Both Drennen and McCall looked at him curiously. Sothern's stern face told nothing.

"As a favour to me, Andy," he repeated. "You bring me word of my promotion. Pigeonhole it until after this deal is made or rejected."

McCall, his hesitation brief, swung about upon Drennen.

"Where is this mine of yours?" he demanded curtly. "How long will it take us to get to it?"

"It's less than forty miles from Lebarge," returned Drennen. "And we can get there in five hours, if we keep on moving."

"You have filed your title, of course?"

"Yes."

"Come ahead then." McCall was upon his feet, his hat on his head and his cigar lighted all in little more than an instant.

In ten minutes the party was formed and had clattered out of Lebarge, back along the MacLeod trail. There were five men in the little group, Drennen, Sothern, McCall and two mining experts in the pay of the Northwestern. As they swept out of Lebarge, rounding into the canon where the trail twisted ahead of them, Drennen saw two men looking after them. One was Marc Lemarc who had accompanied him to Lebarge; the other Lieutenant Max.

Once in the trail the five men strung out in a line, Drennen in the lead. It was easy to see his impatience in the hot pace he set for them, and they thought that it was no less easy to understand it. But for once they followed a man who thought less of his gold mine than of a girl.

Drennen's gold mine itself plays no part in this story. He was never to see it again after this day, although it was to pour many thousands of dollars into his pockets from a distance. In the West Canadian Mining and Milling News, date of August 9, 1912, appears a column-and-a-half article upon the subject, readily accessible to any who are not already familiar with the matter which excited so wide an Interest at the time and for many months afterwards. The article is authoritative to the last detail. It explains how the Golden Girl became a lost mine in 1799, and how it happened that while David Drennen had discovered it in 1912 it had been hidden to other eyes than his. A series of earthquakes of which we have record, occurring at the beginning of the nineteenth century, bringing about heavy snowslides and landslides, had thrown the course of one of the tributaries of the Little MacLeod from its bed into a new channel where a sudden depression had sunk the golden vein of the lost mine.

Here, just before the winter of 1911-12 shut down, David Drennen had found a nugget which he had concealed, saying nothing about it. The snows came and he went back to MacLeod's Settlement to wait for the coming of springtime and passable trails. The first man to pack out of the Settlement prospecting, he had come to the spot which last year he had marked under the cliffs known locally as Hell's Lace. The trail had been rotten underfoot and he had slipped and fallen into one of the black pools. Clambering out he had found the thing he sought; where the trail had broken away was gold, much gold. In the bed of the stream itself, nicely hidden for a hundred years by the cold, black water, swept into deep pools, jammed into sunken crevices, was the old lost gold of the Golden Girl.

The West Canadian Mining and Milling News of the same date goes on to mention that the last official act of Mr. Andrew McCall as Local Agent for the Northwestern, had been the purchasing of his claim from David Drennen at the latter's figure, namely one hundred thousand dollars in cash, and an agreement of a royalty upon the mine's output.

Despite Drennen's impatience to be riding trail again it was a week before the deal was consummated. Half a mile above his claim it was possible for the engineers to throw the stream again into its old bed, a score of men and three days' work accomplishing the conditions which had obtained before the period of seismic disturbance. Then followed days of keen expert investigation. Even when they were sure these men who know as most men do not the value of caution when they are allowed to take time for caution, postponed their final verdict. But at last the thing was done and McCall, taking his train for the East, left Lebarge with a conscious glow of satisfaction over the last work done as superintendent of the Western Division.

Marshall Sothern, returning from the railroad station, found Drennen waiting for him in his private office.

"Well, Mr. Drennen," he said quietly, going about the table and to his chair, "how does it feel to be worth a cool hundred thousand?"

"It feels," cried the younger man sharply, his voice ringing with a hint of excitement which had been oddly lacking in him throughout the whole transaction, "like power! Like a power I've been hungering for for ten years! May I have your stenographer for a few moments, sir?"

Sothern touched the buzzer and the clerk came in from the outer office.

"Take Mr. Drennen's dictation," said Sothern. "I'll go into the other room. . . ."

Drennen lifted his hand.

"It's nothing private, sir," he said. "I'd rather you stayed. I'd like a word with you afterwards."

The clerk took pencil and notebook. And Drennen, his eyes never leaving Sothern's face, dictated:

"Harley W. Judson, Esq., President Eastern Mines, Inc., New York.

DEAR SIR:—In compliance with the last request of my father, John Harper Drennen, before his departure for Europe in 1901, I am forwarding draft on the Merchants' & Citizens' National Bank of New York for $40,000. John Harper Drennen's original indebtedness to your company was, you will remember, $75,000. Of this amount some $50,000 was paid from the sales of such properties belonging to him at that time. The remaining $25,000 at an interest of 6% for the ten years during which the obligation has continued, amounts to the $40,000 which I enclose.

Respectfully,"

"That is all, Mr. Drennen?" asked the clerk.

"That is all," answered Drennen. The clerk went out. Drennen turned toward the man at the desk whose stern set face had gone strangely white.

"The absconding John Harper Drennen made such a request of you?" Marshall Sothern said calmly, though the effort for control was evident.

"No. It's just a little lie told for my father . . . the only thing I have ever done for him!"

Drennen came suddenly about the table, both of his strong hands out.

"When a man is very young he judges sweepingly, he condemns bitterly. Now . . . why, now I don't give a damn what you've done or why!" His voice went hoarse, his hands shook and into the hard eyes of David Drennen, eyes grown unbelievably soft now, the tears stood. "If only you hadn't shut me out that way . . . God! I've missed you, Dad!"

The old man made no answer as his hand grew like rock about his son's. A smile ineffably sweet touched his lips and shone in his eyes. The years had been hard, merciless years to him as they had been to David Drennen. But for a moment the past was forgotten, this brief fragment of time standing supreme in the two lives. At last, in the silence, there fell upon them that little awkwardness which comes to such men when for a second they have let their souls stand naked in their eyes. Almost at the same instant each man sought his pipe, filling it with restless fingers.

"My boy," said the man whose name had been Marshall Sothern through so many weary years that it was now more his name than any other, "there is the tale to tell . . . sometime. I can't do it now. One of these days . . . this has been the only dream I've dreamed since I saw you last, in Manhattan, David . . . you and I are going to pack off into the mountains. We're going alone, David, and we're going far; so far that the smoke of our little camp fire will be for our eyes and nostrils alone. Then I can tell you my story. And . . . David . . ."

"Yes, Dad?"

"That forty thousand . . . You are a gentleman, David! That was like you. I . . . I thank you, my boy!"

Drennen's face, through a rush of emotions, reddened. Reddened for an unreasoning, inexplicable shame no less than for a proud sort of joy that at last he had been able to do some small thing for John Harper Drennen, his old hero.

Again there fell a silence, a little awkward. The two men, with so much to say to each other, found a thousand thoughts stopping the rush of words to be spoken. Drennen realised what his father had had in mind, or rather in that keenly sensitive, intuitive thing which is not mind but soul, when he had spoken of the two of them taking together a trail which must lead them for many days into the solitudes before they could talk to each other of the matters which counted. Something not quite shyness but akin to it was upon them both; it was a relief when the telephone of Sothern's desk rang.

It was Marc Lemarc asking for Drennen. He had hired men, bought tools and dynamite, ordered machinery from the nearest city where machinery was to be had, had spoken to a competent engineer about taking charge of the work to be done. He was quite ready to return to MacLeod's Settlement.

"It's all right, Lemarc," answered Drennen. "I have deposited the money in your name in the Lebarge Bank. You can draw out whatever you please and when you please. No, you needn't wait for me; I'll overtake you, I have no doubt. Oh, that's all right!"

Before Drennen had finished there came the second interruption. The clerk came to announce the arrival of Israel Weyeth, who, upon Sothern's promotion, was to fill the vacant position of Local Manager.

"Mr. Sothern," said Drennen while the clerk was still in the room, "I shall remember your promise of a hunting trip with me. I am going up to MacLeod's Settlement immediately. I trust to see you again very soon."

"Mr. Drennen," answered the old man quietly, "I am honoured in your friendship. You have done me a kindness beyond measure but not beyond my appreciation."

They shook hands gravely, their eyes seeking to disguise the yearning which stood in each soul. Then Drennen went out.

"There, sir," cried Sothern, and the clerk marvelled at the note in his voice which sounded so like pride of ownership, "there goes a man from whom the world shall hear one of these days. His feet are at last in the right path."

The clerk, going to usher in Israel Weyeth, did not hear the last low words:

"For which, thank God . . . and Ygerne Bellaire!"



CHAPTER XVII

THE PASSION OF ERNESTINE DUMONT

A man's life may pass for him like a slow winding stream through open meadows in gentle valley lands, its waters clear and untroubled by rapids, falls and eddies. Even a man with such a life has his vital story. But it is pastoral, idyllic, like a quiet painting done in a soft monochrome. Or a man's life may shake him with a series of shocks which, to the soul, are cataclysmic. And then the man, be his strength what it may, since he is human and it is not infinite, is caught like a dry leaf in the maelstrom of life about him and within him, and is sucked down into depths where the light does not penetrate or is flung from the mad current into a quiet cove where he may rest with the din of the angry waters in his ears.

Drennen had been over the falls; he now rested in such a cove. He had battled furiously with fury itself; now he was soothingly touched by the tide of gentler emotions. He did not think; rather he dreamed. He had looked for the light the other day and had found it everywhere. Now, most of all did it seem to be within himself. We see the outside world as we carry it within us; the eyes, rather mirrors than telescopes, reflect what is intimate rather than that which lies beyond.

To-day, riding back along the trail, Drennen saw how golden were the fresh tips of the firs; how each young tree was crowned with a star; how each budding pine lifted skyward what resembled a little cluster of wax candles. Stars and candles, celestial light and light man-kindled, glory of God and glory of man.

With a rebound, it seemed, the young soul of the David Drennen of twenty had again entered his breast. There had been a time when he had loved life, the world, the men about him; when he had looked pleasantly into the faces of friends and strangers; when he had been ready to form a new tie of comradeship and had no thought of hatred; when he had credited other men with kindly feelings and honest hearts. That time had come again.

Somewhere ahead of him Marc Lemarc was riding. Drennen did not think unkindly of him. He realised that the hatred he had felt a few days ago had been born of delirium and madness and jealousy. Ygerne sought to retrieve the long lost Bellaire fortune; Lemarc's interests jumped with hers in the matter. One had the map, the other the key; they must work together. Lemarc was riding with the jingle of Drennen's money in his pocket and Drennen was glad to think of it. He was helping Ygerne, he was not sorry to help Lemarc at the same time. This morning he had had one hundred thousand dollars! He smiled, then laughed aloud. One hundred thousand dollars! Now he had fifty thousand; already he had opened his hand and poured out fifty thousand dollars! That was the old Drennen, the headlong, generous Drennen, the Drennen who took more delight in giving than in spending, and no delight in selfishness. He had done all that he could do to help wipe the stain from his father's name; he had lifted a burden from his father's shoulders. While he could not understand everything he knew that. And he had staked Lemarc.

Another man would have called for Lemarc's bills, have gone over them, have moved slowly and with caution. That would not have been Drennen. He gave forty thousand for his father's name; he placed ten thousand where Ygerne could use it through Lemarc. He had fifty thousand left and he felt that he had not done enough, that he had kept back too much. True, the thought had flickered through his brain: "And suppose that Lemarc should take the cash and let the credit go? Suppose that he should be contented with the ten thousand dollar bird in his hand and never mind the hypothetical Bellaire treasure bird in the bush?" Well, then, it would be worth it to Ygerne; just for her to know what sort Lemarc was. Drennen had more money than he needed; he had an assured income from the newly rediscovered Golden Girl; there were still other mines in the world for the man who could find them; and he had merely done for Ygerne Bellaire the first thing she had asked of him. In Drennen's eyes, in this intoxicated mood, it seemed a very little thing.

He had bought a horse in Lebarge, the finest animal to be had in the week's search. He had supplied himself with new clothes, feeling in himself, reborn, the desire for the old garb of a gentleman. He had telegraphed two hundred miles for a great box of chocolates for Ygerne; he had sent a message twice that distance for his first bejewelled present for her. Nothing in Lebarge was to be considered; the golden bauble which came in answer to his message, a delicate necklace pendant glorious with pearls, cost him three hundred dollars and contented him.

He was happy. He opened his mind to the joy of life calling to him; he closed his thoughts to all that was not bright. Ygerne was waiting for him; John Harper Drennen was not dead, but alive and near at hand. The man who had judged hard and bitterly before, now suspended judgment. It was not his place to condemn his fellow man; certainly he was not to sit in trial on his own father and the woman who would one day be his wife! The lone wolf had come back to the pack. He wanted companionship, friendship, love.

It had been close to eleven o'clock when he rode out of Lebarge. He counted upon his horse's strength and a moonlit night to bring him back to the Settlement in time for a dawn tryst down the river at a certain fallen log. He pushed on steadily until four o'clock in the afternoon; then he stopped, resting his horse and himself, tarrying for a little food and tobacco. At five o'clock he again swung into the saddle and pushed on.

He knew that Lemarc was ahead of him. Here, where tracks were few, were those of Lemarc's horse. Drennen had not loitered and he knew that Lemarc was riding hard. Well, Lemarc, too, rode with gold in his pockets and in his heart further hope of gold. If he were running way with the money Drennen had advanced he was running the wrong way. Drennen did not break off in the little song upon his lips at the thought. . . . More than once that day he found himself humming snatches of Ramon Garcia's refrain.

"Dios! It is sweet to be young and to love!"

Fragrant dusk crept down about him, warm, sweet-scented night floated out from the dusk, a few stars shone, the moon passed up above the ridge at his right and made of the Little MacLeod's racing water alternate lustrous ebony and glistening silver, a liquid mosaic. Drennen fell silent, a deep content upon him.

Scarcely two miles from MacLeod's Settlement, and an episode offered itself which in the end seemed to have no deeper purpose than to show to the man himself how wonderful was the change wrought within him. He had crested a gentle rise, had had for a moment the glint of a light in his eyes and had wondered at it idly, knowing that not yet could he see the Settlement and that this was no hour, long after midnight, for folks to be abroad there. Then, dropping down into the copse which made black the hollow, he remembered the old, ruined cabin which had stood here so long tenantless and rotting, realising that the light he had seen came from it. Lemarc? That was his first thought as again he caught the uncertain flicker through the low branches. The man might have been thrown in the darkness, his horse could easily have caught a sprain from the uneven trail, slippery and treacherous.

"Poor devil," reflected Drennen. "To get laid up this near the end of his ride."

His trail led close to the tumbled down cabin. Once in the little clearing he made out quickly that a fire was burning fitfully upon the old rock hearth. He could see its flames and smoke clearly through the wall itself which was no longer a wall but the debris of rotted logs with here and there a timber still sound and hanging insecurely. He saw no one. Coming closer, still making out no human form in the circle of light or in the gloom about it, he heard a low moaning, as fitful as the uncertain firelight. And then, as he drew his horse to a standstill, he made out upon the floor near the fire and in the shadow of one of the hanging timbers, an indistinct form. For an instant the low moaning was quieted; then again it came to his ears, seeming to speak of suffering unutterable.

Dismounted, Drennen came swiftly through the yawning door to stand at the side of the prone figure. A great, unreasonable and still a natural fear sprang up in his heart; he went down upon his knees with a half sob gripping at his throat. It was a woman, her body twisting before him, and he was afraid that it was Ygerne and that she was dying. Her face was hidden, an arm was flung up, her loosened hair fell wildly about her temples and cheeks. Again the moaning ceased; the woman turned so that her cheek lay upon the loose dirt of the broken floor, her eyes wide upon him. A sigh inflated his chest and fell away like a whisper of thanks. The woman was not Ygerne, thank God!

"Go away!" She panted the words at him, venom in her glance. Then abruptly she turned her face from him.

A swift revulsion of feeling swept through him. Just now he had thanked God that this was not Ygerne; just now he had been so glad in his relief that there was no room for pity in his gladness. Now, as involuntarily his old joy surged back upon him, he felt a quick sting of shame. He had no right to be so utterly happy when there was suffering and sorrow such as this. As he had not yet fully understood, now did he grasp in a second that change which had come about within himself. There was tenderness in his eyes, there were pity and sympathy as he stooped still lower.

"Ernestine," he said softly. "What is it, Ernestine? I want to help you if I can. What is the matter, Ernestine?"

Her body, stilled while he spoke, writhed again passionately.

"Go away!" she panted out at him as she had done before, save that now she did not turn her face to look at him. "Of all men, Dave Drennen, I hate you most. Good God, how I hate you! Go away!"

There came a sob into her voice, a shudder shaking the prone body. Drennen, knowing little of the ways of women, wanting only to help her, uncertain and hesitant, knelt motionless, staring at her with troubled eyes. Over and over the questions pricked his brain: "What was she doing out here alone at this time of night? What had happened to her?"

He thought for a moment of springing to his feet, of hastening down the two miles of trail to the Settlement, of rushing aid to the stricken woman. Then another thought: "She may die while I am gone! It will take an hour to get help to her."

"Ernestine," he said again, gently, laying his hand upon her shaking shoulder. "I know you don't like me. But at times like this that doesn't matter. Tell me what has happened . . . let me help you. I want to help you if I can, Ernestine."

He was sincere in that; he wanted to help her. It didn't matter who it was suffering; he wanted to see no more suffering in his world. He wanted every one to be as happy as he was going to be. There was a new yearning upon him, that yearning which is the true first born of a man's love, a yearning to do some little good in the world that he may have this to think upon and not just the bad which he has done.

She lay very still, making him no answer. He could not guess if she were suffering from physical injury or from the other hurt which is harder to bear. He could not guess if she were growing calm or if she were losing consciousness. He could only plead with her, his voice softer than Ernestine Dumont had ever heard the voice of David Drennen, begging her to let him do something for her.

With a sudden, swift movement, she turned about, sitting up, her arms about her knees, her head with its loosened hair thrown back. For the first time he saw her face clearly. There was dirt upon it as though she had fallen upon the trail, face down. There was a smear of blood across her mouth. There was a scratch upon her forehead, and a trickle of blood had run down across her soiled brow. He saw that, while she had sobbed, no tears had come to make their glistening furrows through the dust upon her cheeks. He thought that in his time he, too, had known such tearless agony.

"Your help!" She flung the words at him passionately. "I'd die before I'd take your help, Dave Drennen. What do you care for me?"

"I'm sorry for you, Ernestine," he said gently.

She laughed at him bitterly, her body rocking back and forth.

"Why don't you go?" she cried hotly. "Go on to MacLeod's. Your little fool is waiting for you, I suppose," she sneered at him.

Dropping her head to her upgathered knees, her body rocking stormily, moaning a little, she broke off. Drennen rose to his feet.

"I'll go," he said. "Shall I send some one to you?"

When she didn't answer he turned away from her. He had done all that he could do. And, besides, he thought that the woman's physical injuries were superficial and that her distress was doubtless that of mere violent hysteria.

"Come back!" she called sharply.

He turned and again came to her side, standing over her, his hat in his hand, his face showing only the old pity for her. Once more she had flung up her head. In the eyes staring up at him was a hunger which even David Drennen could not misread.

"Tell me," she said after a little, her voice more quiet than it had been. "Do you love Ygerne Bellaire, Dave?"

"Yes," he answered quietly.

"You fool!" she cried at him. "Why is a man always blind to what another woman can see so plainly? Don't you know what she is?"

"Let's not talk of her, Ernestine," he said a little sharply.

"She's too holy for a woman like me to talk about, is she? She's a little cat, Dave Drennen! Can't you see that? Don't you know what she is after . . ."

"Ernestine!" he commanded harshly. "If I can help you, let me do it. If I can't, I'll go. In either case we'll not talk of Miss Bellaire."

She looked at him curiously, studying him, seeming for an instant to have grown quiet in mind as in body.

"She doesn't love you," she said calmly. "Not as I love you, Dave. If she did . . . nothing would matter. She's got baby eyes and a baby face . . . and she runs with men like Sefton and Lemarc!"

"I tell you," he cried sternly, "I'll not listen to you talk of her. If I can't help you . . ."

Her eyes shone hard upon his. Then her head dropped again and once more she was moaning as when he had first heard her, moaning and weeping, her body twisting. Again the man was all uncertainty.

"You would do anything for her!" she cried brokenly. "You would do nothing for me."

"I would do anything for you that you would let me and that I could do, Ernestine," he said gently.

"And," she went on, unheeding, "it is because of you that I am like this to-night!"

"Because of me?" wonderingly.

"Yes," with a fierce sob. "Because he knew I loved you. . . . I would not have shot you that night at Pere Marquette's if I hadn't loved you! . . . Do you think a woman is made like a man? . . . George has done this! If he laid hands upon her, upon your holy lady I'm not to talk about . . ."

"Tell me about it," he commanded. "Has Kootanie George done this to you?"

"Dave!" Suddenly she had flung up her arms, staring at him strangely. "Do you think I am dying? He hurt me here . . . and here . . . and here." Her hands fluttered about her body, touching her throat, her breast, her side. The hands, lowered a moment were again lifted, stretched upward toward him, her eyes pleading with him. Slowly she was sinking back; he thought that in truth the woman was dying or at the least losing consciousness.

"Can't you help me?" she moaned. "Won't you hold me . . . I am falling. . . ."

Upon his knees he slipped his arms about her. He felt a hard stiffening of the muscles of her body, then a slow relaxing. He was laying her back gently, when she shook her head.

"Hold me up," she whispered, the words faint though her lips were close to his ear. "I'd smother if I lay down. . . ."

So he held her for a long time, fearing for her, at loss for a thing to do. The flickering firelight showed his face troubled and solicitous, hers half smiling now as though she were content to suffer so long as he held her. Presently she put her head back a little further, her eyes meeting his.

"You are good, Dave," she whispered. "Good to me. I have not been good to you, have I? Would you be a little sorry for me if I died?"

"Don't talk that way, Ernestine," he besought her. "You are not going to die."

She put up one hand and pushed the hair back from his brow. He flinched a little at the intimacy of the touch but she did not seem to notice. She was smiling at him now, all hint of pain gone from her eyes for the moment.

"If you had loved me," she said gently, "we both would have been happy. Now I'll never be happy, Dave, and you'll never be happy. She won't make you happy. She'll make a fool of you and then . . ."

Again she grew silent, her lids lowered. Drennen thought that she was sinking into a quiet sleep. He did not stir as the moments slipped by. A stick on the old hearth snapping and falling drew to it Ernestine's eyes. Then they came again to Drennen. While she looked at him she seemed not to be seeing him or thinking of him. She seemed, rather, to be listening for some sound she expected to hear. Again she was very still, the firelight finding an odd smile upon her face. She had wiped much of the dust away and her pretty face, a little hard at most time, was softened by the half light. After a little she sighed. Then, swiftly, she slipped from Drennen's arms.

"I suppose you think I am a fool," she laughed strangely. "Well, I know that you are, Dave Drennen! Now, go away, will you? Or do I have to crawl away from here to get away from you? My God!" a sudden passion again breaking through the ice of her tone, "I wish I had killed you the other night. Before . . . she came!"

No other word did Drennen draw from her. She sat as she had sat a little while ago, her arms flung about her knees, her face hidden in her arms. And so, at last, he left her.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE LAW AND A MAN'S DESIRE

Drennan slept two hours that night. He awoke rested, refreshed, eager. He did not need sleep. He was Youth's own, tireless, stimulated with the golden elixir.

Ygerne must not be before him at the trysting place; she must not wait for him a short instant. It was his place to be there to welcome her. She would come with the early dawn; he must come earlier than the dawn itself.

When he came to the old fallen log the smile upon his lips, in his eyes, bespoke a deep, sweet tenderness. He had brought with him the two gifts for her. He put the box of candy in the grass, covering it, planning to have her search for it. He felt like a boy; she must join with him in a childplay. The pendant necklace, its pearls as pure and soft as tears, he placed upon the log itself, in a little hollow, covering it with a piece of bark. Then he found her note.

It was very short; he read it at a sweeping glance. His brain caught the words; his mind refused to grasp their meaning. And yet Ygerne had written clearly:

"Dear Mr. Drennen: The greetings of Ygerne, Countess of Bellaire, to the Son of a Thief! Thank you for a new kind of summer flirtation. May your next one be as pleasant. A man of such wonderful generosity deserves great happiness. Good-bye. YGERNE."

Simple enough. And yet the words meant nothing to him. By his foot was a square box of chocolates peeping out at him. He had telegraphed . . . where was it? . . . to Edmontville for them. They were for Ygerne. There on the log, right where she had sat, under the little chip of bark, was her necklace of pearls. She was coming for it in a moment, coming like Aurora's own sweet self through the dawn. He had telegraphed for that, too. It was his first present for her.

The Son of a Thief! The Countess of Bellaire! That meant David Drennen, son of John Harper Drennen; it meant Ygerne, the girl-woman who had come into David Drennen's life before it was too late, who had made of him another man.

He sat down on the log and filled his pipe. The note he let lie, half folded, upon his knee. His eyes went thoughtfully across the thin mist hanging like gauze above the river; then turned expectantly toward the Settlement. She would come in a moment. And the glory of her! The eternal quivering, throbbing glory of the woman a man loves! She would come and he would gather her into his arms. . . . For that the world had been made, for that he had lived until now. . . .

He had lighted his pipe and was puffing at it slowly, each little cloud of smoke coming at the regular interval from its brethren. And he did not know that he was smoking. He was not thinking. For the moment he was scarcely experiencing an emotion. He knew that Marshall Sothern was John Harper Drennen; he knew that the Golden Girl had been sold; he knew that a box of candy and a pearl necklace were waiting for Ygerne; he knew that there was a note upon his knee which purported to be from her. Each of these things was quite clear and separate in his mind; the strange thing about them was that they had in some way lost significance to him.

Presently, with a start, he took his pipe from his lips and ran a hand across his forehead. What was he sitting here like a fool for? Either Ygerne had written that note or she had not. If she had written it she had done so either in jest or seriously. He turned back toward the Settlement. He did not think of the jewelled thing hidden under a bit of bark or the cardboard box in its nest in the grass.

He went swiftly. The town was sleeping, would not awake for another hour. His eyes were upon Marquette's house as soon as the rambling building came into view. There were no fires; window shades were drawn, doors closed.

He came to Ygerne's window. It, too, was closed. Here, also, the shade was down. He tapped softly. When there was no answer he tapped again. Then he went to Marquette's door and knocked sharply.

"Nom de nom." It was Pere Marquette's voice, sleepy and irritable. The old man was fumbling with the bar or the lock or whatever it was that fastened his door. He seemed an eternity in getting the thing done. Then his towsled head and blinking eyes appeared abruptly.

"Where is Miss Bellaire?" said Drennen quietly. "I want a word with her."

"Mees Bellaire? Hein?"

"Yes," answered Drennen a trifle impatiently, though he was holding himself well in hand. "Miss Bellaire. I know it is early, but . . ."

Pere Marquette blinked at him curiously with brightening, birdlike eyes. He didn't like Drennen; God knows he had little enough reason to see any good in this gaunt, wolf-like man. There was a dry cackle in the old man's voice as he spoke again, the door closing slowly so that only half of his face with one bright eye looked out.

"Early? Mais, non, m'sieu! It is late! M'am'selle, she is gone il y a quelques heures, already! Pouf! Like that, in a hurry."

"Gone?" demanded Drennen. "Where? When?"

"Where? Who knows? When?" He shrugged. "Two, t'ree, four hours, peutetre six."

"Who was with her?"

"Ho," cackled the old man so that Drennen's hands itched to be at the withered throat, "where she go, there are men to follow! Me, when I am yo'ng, before Mamma Jeanne make me happy, I . . ."

"Damn you and your Mamma Jeanne!" cried Drennen. "Tell me about this girl. Who went with her?"

"Not so many," muttered Marquette, "because she go quiet, in the dark. In the day the whole Settlement would follow, non? But Marc Lemarc, he go; an' M'sieu Sefton, he go; an' M'sieu Ramon, he go. . . ."

"I'll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me which way they went!" broke in Drennen crisply. "I'll give you five hundred if you can tell me why?"

"Qui sait?" grumbled Marquette. "They go, they go In the dark, they go with horses runnin' like hell. M'am'selle sleep; then come Lemarc, fas', to knock on her window. I hear. She dress damn fas', too, or she don't dress at all; in one minute she's outside with Lemarc. I hear Sefton; I hear Ramon Garcia, a little song in his throat. I hear horses. I hear M'am'selle Ygerne laugh like it's fon! Then she wake me an' she pay me; I see Lemarc give her money, gol' money, to pay. Me, I go back to bed an' Mamma Jeanne suspec' it might be I flirt with the M'am'selle by dark!"

He chuckled again and closed the door as Drennen turned abruptly and went back down the street towards his dugout.

Marc Lemarc had robbed him of the ten thousand dollars. He began there, strangely cool-thoughted. That didn't matter. He had half expected it all along. He knew now, clearly, that, more than that, he had half hoped for it. The money meant less than nothing to him; the theft of it, he had thought, would show Ygerne just what sort of man Lemarc was, would separate her from her companions, would draw her even closer to him. But Ygerne, too, had gone with the money and with Lemarc. Marquette had seen him hand her the gold that she might pay her reckoning. Here was a contingency upon which he had not counted.

As soon as Lemarc had returned she had gone. Sefton had gone with them. Ramon Garcia, too. Why Garcia?

A scene he had not forgotten, which now he could never forget, occupied his mind so vividly that he did not see the material things among which he was walking: Ramon Garcia at Ygerne's window, the gift of a few field flowers, the kissing of a white hand.

Men who had known Drennen for years and who would have been surprised at what was in the man's face yesterday, saw nothing new to note in him to-day. He went his own way, he was silent, his face was hard and not to be read. All day he was about the Settlement, in his own dugout a large part of the time, going to his meals regularly at Joe's. It was rumoured that he had sold his claim; men began to doubt it. He wasn't scattering money as men had always done when they had made a fortune at a turn of the wheel; he wasn't getting drunk which was the customary thing; he wasn't even looking for a game of cards or dice. There was no sign of any new purpose in the man.

And yet the purpose was there, taken swiftly, to be acted upon with a cold leisure. Drennen was not hurrying now. There was no other horse like Major, his recently purchased four-year-old, and Drennen knew it. He had ridden Major hard yesterday; to-day the brute must rest and be ready for more hard riding.

One thing only did Drennen do which excited mild interest, though the reason for the act was naturally misunderstood. He went to Joe and bought from him two heavy revolvers. Drennen had never been a gun man, had ever relied upon his own hands in time of trouble. But now, Joe figured the matter out, he had money and he meant to guard against a hold-up.

Entire lack of haste was the only thing remarkable about David Drennen to-day and through the days which followed. There was no hesitation, no doubt, no being torn two ways. He had made up his mind what he was going to do. It was settled and not to be reconsidered. But he would not hurry. The very coolness with which his purpose was taken steadied him to a strange deliberateness. He knew that it was folly to expect to come up with Ygerne and the men with her immediately. It would take time; they had fled hastily and they were in a country where pursuit was necessarily slow. Was that not the reason why such people came here? And he told himself grimly that it was an equal folly to desire to come upon them too soon. The punishment he would mete out would be the harder if their flight had seemed crowned with security.

Upon the second day he rode in widening circles about MacLeod's Settlement. He hardly hoped to pick up a trail here where questing hundreds in search of his gold had cut the soft spring ground into a jumble of indecipherable tracks. But, beginning his own quest with a painstaking thoroughness which omitted no chance however remote, he spent the day in seeking.

At night he came again into camp. He saw to the Major's wants before his own. He ate his meal at Joe's and having passed no word with any man came back to his dugout.

The supreme blow which his destiny could give him had been smitten relentlessly. He had received it like the slave who has been beaten so many times that he no longer cries out or strikes back prematurely. Like the tortured bond-man who makes no useless protest but hides in his bosom the knife which one day he will plunge into his master's throat, Drennen merely bided his time.

He saw no good in a world which had had no good to offer him. He no longer looked for the light. New shoots of faith, bursting upward under Ygerne's influence from the dry roots of the old, were in an instant shrivelled and killed. He came to see that in an old world there was no basic law but that law which had held from the first day in the new world. There was no good; bad was only a term coined for fools by other fools. Each man had his life given to him, and he could do with it as he saw fit. Each wild thing in the depths of the North Woods had its life given to it to do with as it saw fit. Each created being, were it not maudlin, strove for itself alone. It took its own food where it could get it, rending it with bared teeth and bloody jaws from the weaker creature that had preyed upon a still weaker. It made its lair where it chose, crushing under its careless body those other still lesser things which had not sense enough or the opportunity to slip out from under it. Love, as man looked upon it or pretended to look upon it, was no real emotion but a poetical illusion. Nor was it so much as truly poetical, since poetry is truth and this thing was a lie. There was no love but the old, primal love of life, a blind, unreasoning instinct. He did not love Ygerne; he had never loved Ygerne because, in the nature of nature, there could be no such thing as such a love.

But hatred was another matter. That was nature. A man, with all of his bluster, cannot get away from nature. Don't the winters freeze and kill him? Doesn't water drown him, fire burn him? Love had no place in nature; hatred was a part of the one law, the primal law. The wolf kills the rabbit in hot rage; the black ant tears down the soft-bodied caterpillar not so much in hunger as in wrath.

The lower order of created beings seemed to Drennen to be the truly higher order. For they did not philosophise; they killed their prey. They did not reason and thus follow a blind goddess; they moved as their swift instincts dictated and made no mistake. Now he did not need to bolster up his purpose with seeking to wander through the thousand lanes of reason's labyrinth; he did not need to seek the fallacies of logic to tell him why he hated Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc and Sefton and the Mexican. He hated them. There the fact began and ended. One by one he would kill them until he came to Ygerne. And if in her eyes he saw that the terror of death was greater than the terror of the suffering he could inflict upon her living, then he would kill her.

At first he thought only of these four. But after a while in his thoughts there was room for another. . . . John Harper Drennen, masquerading as Marshall Sothern. Drennen sneered at his old hero. The old man was a fool like so many other fools. He had committed what the world calls a crime and the weight of it had shown upon him. Drennen's sneer was not for the wrong done but for the weakness of allowing suffering to come afterward. The old man had seemed glad, touched almost to tears, when his son had paid off the old score. . . . And now Drennen's sneer was for himself. Why had he not kept that forty thousand dollars? Money meant power and power was all that he wanted. Power to crush men who would have crushed him had they been able; power to seek his prey where he would and to pull it down.

Ygerne's note he never read the second time. He had had no need to. He burned the paper and washed his hands free of the ashes which he had crumpled in his palm.

The third day he rose early, saddled Major and left the Settlement, riding slowly toward Lebarge. He had an idea that they might have gone there to take the train. When half way to the railroad he met a man who was pushing on strongly toward the north. The man stopped and accosted him. It was the mounted police officer, Lieutenant Max.

"Mr. Drennen," said the lieutenant bruskly coming straight to the business in hand after his way; "you come from MacLeod's?"

"Yes."

"You know two men named Sefton and Lemarc? And a girl named Bellaire?"

"Yes."

"Were they in MacLeod's when you left?"

"Why do you ask?" countered Drennen sharply.

"The law wants them," replied the lieutenant.

Drennen laughed.

"So do I!" he cried as he spurred his horse out of the trail, turning eastward now, heading at random for Fanning instead of Lebarge.

As he forded the Little MacLeod he was cursing Max.

"Damn him," he muttered. "Are there not enough cheap law breakers? Why must he seek to do my work for me?"

So began Drennen's quest for three men and one girl with grey eyes and a sweet body that was like a song, a girl who had awakened the old, dormant good in him and then had driven him so deep into the black chasm that no light entered where he was.



CHAPTER XIX

THE LONG TRAIL

Each day that passed set its seal deeper into the heart and soul of David Drennen. His eyes grew harder, his mouth sterner. There came into his face the lines of his relentless hatred. Sinister and morose and implacable, biding his time and nursing his purpose, he grew to be more than ever before the lone wolf. His lips which had long ago forgotten how to smile were constantly set in an ugly snarl. His purpose possessed him so completely that it had grown into an obsession. It became little less than maniacal.

He seemed a man whose emotions were gone, swallowed up in a cool determination. There came no flush to his face, no quickened beating of his heart when the trail seemed hot before him, no evidence of disappointment when again and again he learned that he had followed a false scent and that he was no nearer his prey than he had been at the beginning. He was still unhurrying as when he had ridden out of MacLeod's Settlement. He would find what he sought to-day or ten years from to-day. His vengeance would lose nothing through delay. On the other hand, it would fall the heavier. Of late he had become endowed with an infinite patience.

The last thought in his brain at night was the first thought when he woke. It was unchanging day after day, week after week, month after month. If he must wait even longer it would remain unaltered year after year.

His eyes had grown to be keener than knives, restless, watchful, bright with suspicion. Nowhere throughout the breadth of the land did he have a friend. What he felt for others was paid back to him in his own currency: distrust, dislike, silence.

But, through whatever far distances he went, he was generally known by repute and inspired interest. Men stood aloof but they watched him and spoke of him among themselves. No longer did they call him No-luck Drennen. He came to be known as Lucky Drennen. Word had gone about that it was indeed true that he had rediscovered the old, lost Golden Girl and that he had made a fortune from its sale to the Northwestern people. The mine was operating already; experts said that it was greater than the Duchess which electrified the mining world in 1897 when Copworth and Kennely brought it into prominence; and the Golden Girl was paying a royalty to David Drennen. Drennen himself did not know how his account at the Lebarge bank took upon itself new importance every third month when Marshall Sothern deposited the tenth share of the net receipts.

Seeking Ygerne Bellaire and those with her, Drennen had gone from Fanning into Whirlwind Valley, across the Pass and into the forests beyond Neuve Patrie. He had followed rumours of three men and a woman and after six or seven weeks came upon them, trappers and the wife of one of them. He showed nothing of his emotions as he stared at them with cold, hard eyes. He went back to Fanning, crossed the MacLeod to Brunswick Towers and to the new village of Qu' Appelle. Spring had passed into summer and he had had no clue which was not a lie like the first. In all seeming the earth had opened to receive those whom he followed.

Since he so seldom spoke, since when he did it was to ask concerning three men and a woman, those who knew anything of him at all knew that he was seeking Sefton, Lemarc, Garcia and a girl whom those who had heard of her from the men of MacLeod's Settlement, called "the Princess." A figure of interest already, Drennen gained double interest now.

"He'll find them one day, mes chers," grunted the big blacksmith at St. Anne's. "He'll do anything, that man. Le bon Diable is his papa. Hein? Voyez, mon petit stupide! Last week, because he needs no more and because the devil likes him, he finds gold again in the Nez Casse! Nom d'un gros porc! But who has dreamed to find gold in the Nez Casse? Oho! Some day he comes up with three man and la princesse. And then . . ."

He broke off, plunging his hot iron into his tub of water, so that the hissing of the heated metal and the angry puff of steam might conclude in fitting eloquence the thing he had in mind.

Once, just after Drennen had for the second time in six months found gold, he heard the new epithet which had been given him: Lucky Drennen. He turned and stared at the man who had spoken the name so that the fellow fell back, flushing and paling under the terrible eyes. Then, with his snarling laugh, Drennen passed on.

Until the winter came to lock the gateways into the mountains he was everywhere the adventurous were pushing in the land of the North Woods. He was the last man to take the trail from Gabrielle to the open.

But though winter lifted a frozen hand to drive him back he did not for a single day give over his search. He went then down to the railroads. Banff knew him and came to know just as much of his story as it could guess from the eternal question in his heart and now and then on his lips, and from the fact that he had money. Vancouver knew him, coming and going where a man might search such quarry as his, in gambling halls, high and low, in cafes, at hotels. For he had had a hint that perhaps Ygerne and the men with her had gone on to Vancouver.

In January he drew heavily against his account in the bank of Lebarge. The money, or at least a great part of it, went to a detective agency in Vancouver, another in Victoria, another even as far east as Quebec. Money went also to New Orleans and brought him no little information of the earlier lives of Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc, together with the assurance that neither of them had returned to the South.

Thus he learned the story which he had refused to hear from her own lips, the reason of her flight from New Orleans. Having no parents living, she had lived in the household of her guardian, a merchant named Jules Bondaine. She had had trouble with Bondaine, the cause of the affair not being clearly understood except by Bondaine himself, the girl and, perhaps, Marc Lemarc, her cousin. The confidential agency in the southern city to which Drennen had turned apprised him of these facts and let him draw his own deductions: It was known that Lemarc was a suitor for the girl's hand; that Bondaine had seemed very strongly to favour Lemarc; that Bondaine was high-handed, Ygerne Bellaire high-tempered; that, at a time when Mme. Bondaine and her two daughters were away from home over night, Bondaine and the girl had a hot dispute; that that night, while in the library, Ygerne Bellaire shot her guardian; that he would in all probability have died had it not been for the opportune presence of Marc Lemarc, even the household servants being out; that that night Ygerne Bellaire left New Orleans and had not been heard of since by Bondaine or the authorities.

"Appearances would indicate," ran a little initialled note at the end of the report, "that Bondaine and Lemarc had been in some way trying to coerce Miss Bellaire and that she had shot her way out of the discussion. It is to be inferred, however, that she made up with her cousin, as he disappeared the same night and (merely rumoured) was seen with her upon the night train out of Baton Rouge."

Throughout the winter Drennen pressed the search as his instinct or some chance hint directed. No small part of his plan was to keep in touch with the movements of Lieutenant Max of the Northwest Mounted. He knew that the young officer was almost as single purposed and determined as himself; he learned that as the winter went by Max had met with no success. From Max himself, encountered in February in Revelstoke, he learned why the law wanted Sefton and Lemarc. There were in all five complaints lodged against them, four of them being the same thing, namely, the obtaining of large sums of money under false pretences. The fourth of these complaints had been lodged by no less a person than big Kootanie George.

"They came to George with a cock and bull story about buried treasure," grunted Max. "A gag as old as the moon and as easy to see on a clear night! It's rather strange," and he set his keen eyes searchingly upon Drennen's impassive face, "that they didn't take a chance on you."

"I'm called Lucky Drennen nowadays," answered Drennen coolly. "Maybe my luck was just beginning then."

The fifth charge lay against Sefton. He had brought an unsavory reputation with him from the States, and there would be other charges against him from that quarter. He had mixed with a bad crowd in Vancouver, had gotten into a gambling concern, "on the right side of the table," and had "slit his own pardner's throat, both figuratively and literally, making away with the boodle."

"Ten years ago they might have got away with this sort of thing," said Max. "It's too late now. The law's come and come to stay. I'm going to get them, and I'm going to do it before snow flies again."

Drennen shrugged. Max wouldn't get them at all; he, David Drennen, was going to see to that. This was just a part of Max's duty; it was the supreme desire of Drennen's life.

Although, during the cold, white months, Drennen was much back and forth along the railroad, he avoided Fort Wayland which was now the headquarters of the western division of the Northwestern Mining Company. Since the late spring day when he had left Lebarge to return to MacLeod's Settlement, he had not seen Marshall Sothern. Once, in the late autumn, he had found a letter from Sothern waiting for him at the bank In Lebarge. He left a brief answer to be forwarded, saying simply:

"I want to see you, but not now. After I have finished the work which I have to do, perhaps when next spring comes, we can take our hunting trip."

When the spring came it brought Drennen with it into the North Woods. He knew that the three whom he sought, the four counting Garcia whom he had not forgotten, might have slipped down across the border and into the States. But he did not believe that they had done so. The law was looking for them there, too, and they would stay here until the law had had time to forget them a little.

Again came long, monotonous months of seeking which were to end as they had begun. He pushed further north than he had been before, taking long trails stubbornly, his muscles grown like iron as he drove them to new tasks. He skirted the Bad Water country, made his way through Ste. Marie, St. Stephen, Bois du Lac, Haut Verre, Louise la Reine, and dipped into the unknown region of Sasnokee-keewan. He caught a false rumour and turned back, threading the Forest d'Enfer, coming again through Bois du Lac and into Sasnokee-keewan late in August. Disappointment again, and again he turned toward the Nine Lakes. At Belle Fortune, the first stop, the last village he would see for many days, he met Marshall Sothern.

Sothern was standing in front of the village inn, his hand upon the lead-rope of a sturdy pack mule. The two men looked at each other intently, Drennen showing no surprise, Sothern experiencing none. It was the older man who first put out his hand.

"I've been looking for you, Dave," he said quietly. "I'm taking my vacation, the first in seven years. I've followed you from the railroad. We're going to take our trip together now."

Drennen nodded.

"I'm glad to see you, sir," he answered quietly.

"Which way are you headed now?" asked Sothern.

"It doesn't matter. I am in no hurry. I was going toward the Nine Lakes, but . . ."

"You think that they have gone that way?"

Again Drennen nodded; again he failed to manifest any surprise.

"I am not sure," he said. "But the only way to be sure is to go and find out."

So together father and son packed out of Belle Fortune, headed toward the Nine Lakes in the heart of the unknown land of Sasnokee-keewan. Unknown because it is a land of short summers and long, hard winters; because no man had ever found the precious metals here; because there is little game such as trappers venture into the far out places to get; because it is broken, rough, inhospitable. But, for a thousandth time, a vague rumour had come to Drennen that those whom he sought had pushed on here ahead of him and methodically he was running down each rumour.

Perhaps not a hundred men in a hundred years had come here before them. The forests, tall and black and filled with gloom, were about them everywhere. Their trail they made, and there were days when from sunrise to sunset they did not progress five miles. Their two pack animals found insecure footing; death awaited them hourly upon many a day at the bottom of some sheer walled cliff. They climbed with the sharp slopes on the mountains, they dropped down into the narrow, flinty canons, they heard only the swish of tree tops and the quarrelling of streams lost to their eyes in the depths below them. And they came in two weeks to Blue Lake having seen no other man or other trail than their own.

They were silent days. Neither man asked a question of the other and neither referred to what lay deepest in his own breast. There was sympathy between them, and it grew stronger day by day, but it was a sympathy akin to that of the solitudes, none the less eloquent because it was wordless. Sothern informed Drennen once, out of the customary silence about the evening camp fire, that he was taking an indefinite vacation; that there was a man in his place with the Northwestern who was amply qualified to remain there permanently if Sothern did not come back at all.

They sought to water at Blue Lake, so little known then and now already one of the curiosities of the North and found its waters both luke warm and salty. Although the lake is less than a quarter of a mile long they were two hours in reaching the head. The mountains come down steeply on all sides, the timber stands thick, boulders are scattered everywhere, and it was already dark.

This is the first of the Nine Lakes when one approaches from the south. Less than a hundred yards further north, its surface a third of that distance above the level of Blue Lake, is Lake Wachong. It has no visible connection with Blue Lake except when, with the heavy spring thaw, there is a thin trickle of water down the boulders. Here they camped for the night.

"We would have seen a trail if they had gone ahead of us this year, Dave," Sothern remarked, referring for the first time in many days to the matter which was always in Drennen's mind.

"There's another way in," Drennen told him. "They'd have gone that way. It's north of here and easier. But we save forty or fifty miles this way."

There had been a recent discovery of gold at a little place called Ruminoff Shanty, newly named Gold River. This, lying still eighty miles to the north, was Drennen's objective point. The old rumour had come to him a shade more definite this time. In the crowd pushing northward had been three men and a woman, one of the men looked like a Mexican and the woman was young and of rare beauty. But that had not been all. A man named Kootanie George with another man wearing the uniform of the Royal Northwest Mounted had followed them. These had all gone by the beaten trail; Drennen saw that if he came before Kootanie George and Max to the four he sought he must take his chances with the short cut.

The next night they camped at the upper end of the fourth of the string of little lakes. And that evening they saw, far off to the westward, the faint hint of smoke against the early stars, the up-flying sparks, which spoke of another campfire upon the crest of the ridge.

The old man bent his penetrating gaze upon his son. Drennen's face, as usual, was impassive.

"My boy," said Sothern very gently, "you are sure that you have made no mistake? The girl is no better than her companions?"

"They merely kill a man for his gold," returned Drennen steadily. "She plays with a man's soul and kills it when she has done."

There were deep lines of sadness about Sothern's mouth; the eyes which forsook Drennen's face and turned to the glitter of the stars were unutterably sad.

"The sins of the father . . ." he muttered. Then suddenly, an electric change in the man, he flung himself to his feet, his hands thrown out toward his son.

"By God! Dave," he cried harshly; "they're not worth it! Let them go! We can turn off here where the world is good because men haven't come into it. The mountains can draw the poison out of a man's heart, Dave. There is room for the two of us, boy, for you and me on a trail of our own. Leave them for Max and Kootanie George. . . . Come with me. Do you hear me, Dave, boy? We don't need the world now we've . . . we've got each other!"

Drennen shook his head.

"I've got my work to do," he said quietly. "I think it'll be done soon now. And then . . . then we'll go away together, Dad. Just the two of us."



CHAPTER XX

THE FIRES WHICH PURIFY

The camp fire which the two men had seen had not been that of Ygerne and her companions. Upon the afternoon of the second day Drennen and Sothern, still working northward along the chain of lakes, came to unmistakable signs of a fresh trail, made by two men, turning in from the westward. In the wet sand of a rivulet were the tracks. One was of an unusually large boot, the other of a smaller boot with a higher heel that had sunk deep.

"Kootanie George and Lieutenant Max, I think," announced Drennen. "It's a fair bet, since they're both somewhere in the neighbourhood and may well enough be travelling together. They've gone on ahead. . . ."

They travelled late that afternoon, Drennen setting a hard pace, seemingly forgetful of the man who followed. Drennen's eyes had grown bright as with fever; for the first time he showed a hint of excitement through the stern mask of his face. He felt strangely assured that he had come close to the end of a long trail. But that was not the thought which caused his excitement. It was the fear that perhaps Kootanie George and Max might first come up with the quarry.