The Collected Works of James Oliver Curwood (Illustrated Edition). James Oliver Curwood

His fifteen years of study and unceasing slavery to his ambition had made him naturally as taciturn as these grim men of the North, who were born to silence. But to-night there had come a change over him. He wanted to talk. He wanted to ask questions. He longed for human companionship, for some kind of mental exhilaration beyond that furnished by his own thoughts. Feeling in his pocket for a cigar he seated himself before one of the windows and proffered it to the factor from Lac Bain.

      "You smoke?" he asked companionably.

      "I was born in a wigwam," said the factor slowly, taking the cigar. "Thank you."

      "Deuced polite for a man who hasn't seen civilization for three years," thought Howland, seating himself comfortably, with his feet on the window-sill. Aloud he said, "The clerk tells me you are from Lac Bain. That's a good distance north, isn't it?"

      "Four hundred miles," replied the factor with quiet terseness. "We're on the edge of the Barren Lands."

      "Whew!" Howland shrugged his shoulders. Then he volunteered, "I'm going north myself to-morrow."

      "Post man?"

      "No; engineer. I'm putting through the Hudson Bay Railroad."

      He spoke the words quite clearly and as they fell from his lips the half-breed, partly concealed in the gloom behind him, straightened with the alert quickness of a cat. He leaned forward eagerly, his black eyes gleaming, and then rose softly from his seat. His moccasined feet made no sound as he came up behind Howland. It was the big huskie who first gave a sign of his presence. For a moment the upturned eyes of the young engineer met those of the half-breed. That look gave Howland a glimpse of a face which he could never forget--a thin, dark, sensitive face framed in shining, jet-black hair, and a pair of eyes that were the most beautiful he had ever seen in a man. Sometimes a look decides great friendship or bitter hatred between men. And something, nameless, unaccountable, passed between these two. Not until the half-breed had turned and was walking swiftly away did Howland realize that he wanted to speak to him, to grip him by the hand, to know him by name. He watched the slender form of the Northerner, as lithe and as graceful in its movement as a wild thing of the forests, until it passed from the door out into the night.

      "Who was that?" he asked, turning to the factor.

      "His name is Croisset. He comes from the Wholdaia country, beyond Lac la Ronge."

      "French?"

      "Half French, half Cree."

      The factor resumed his steady gaze out into the white distance of the night, and Howland gave up his effort at conversation. After a little his companion shoved back his chair and bade him good night. The Crees and Chippewayan followed him, and a few minutes later the two white hunters left the engineer alone before the windows.

      "Mighty funny people," he said half aloud. "Wonder if they ever talk!"

      He leaned forward, elbows on knees, his face resting in his hands, and stared to catch a sign of moving life outside. In him there was no desire for sleep. Often he had called himself a night-bird, but seldom had he been more wakeful than on this night. The elation of his triumph, of his success, had not yet worn itself down to a normal and reasoning satisfaction, and his chief longing was for the day, and the day after that, and the next day, when he would take the place of Gregson and Thorne. Every muscle in his body was vibrant in its desire for action. He looked at his watch. It was only ten o'clock. Since supper he had smoked almost ceaselessly. Now he lighted another cigar and stood up close to one of the windows.

      Faintly he caught the sound of a step on the board walk outside. It was a light, quick step, and for an instant it hesitated, just out of his vision. Then it approached, and suddenly the figure of a woman stopped in front of the window. How she was dressed Howland could not have told a moment later. All that he saw was the face, white in the white night--a face on which the shimmering starlight fell as it was lifted to his gaze, beautiful, as clear-cut as a cameo, with eyes that looked up at him half-pleadingly, half-luringly, and lips parted, as if about to speak to him. He stared, moveless in his astonishment, and in another breath the face was gone.

      With a hurried exclamation he ran across the empty room to the door and looked down the starlit street. To go from the window to the door took him but a few seconds, yet he found the street deserted--deserted except for a solitary figure three blocks away and a dog that growled at him as he thrust out his head and shoulders. He heard no sound of footsteps, no opening or closing of a door. Only there came to him that faint, hissing music of the northern skies, and once more, from the black forest beyond the Saskatchewan, the infinite sadness of the wolf-howl.

CHAPTER II

      LIPS THAT SPEAK NOT

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      Howland was not a man easily susceptible to a pair of eyes and a pretty face. The practical side of his nature was too much absorbed in its devices and schemes for the building of material things to allow the breaking in of romance. At least Howland had always complimented himself on this fact, and he laughed a little nervously as he went back to his seat near the window. He was conscious that a flush of unusual excitement had leaped into his cheeks and already the practical side of him was ashamed of that to which the romantic side had surrendered.

      "The deuce, but she was pretty!" he excused himself. "And those eyes--"

      Suddenly he checked himself. There had been more than the eyes; more than the pretty face! Why had the girl paused in front of the window? Why had she looked at him so intently, as though on the point of speech? The smile and the flush left his face as these questions came to him and he wondered if he had failed to comprehend something which she had meant him to understand. After all, might it not have been a case of mistaken identity? For a moment she had believed that she recognized him--then, seeing her mistake, had passed swiftly down the street. Under ordinary circumstances Howland would have accepted this solution of the incident. But to-night he was in an unusual mood, and it quickly occurred to him that even if his supposition were true it did not explain the pallor in the girl's face and the strange entreaty which had glowed for an instant in her eyes.

      Anyway it was none of his business, and he walked casually to the door. At the end of the street, a quarter of a mile distant, a red light burned feebly over the front of a Chinese restaurant, and in a mechanical fashion his footsteps led him in that direction.

      "I'll drop in and have a cup of tea," he assured himself, throwing away the stub of his cigar and filling his lungs with great breaths of the cold, dry air. "Lord, but it's a glorious night! I wish Van Horn could see it."

      He stopped and turned his eyes again into the North. Its myriad stars, white and unshivering, the elusive play of the mysterious lights hovering over the pole, and the black edge of the wilderness beyond the river were holding a greater and greater fascination for him. Since morning, when he had looked on that wilderness for the first time in his life, new blood had entered into him, and he rejoiced that it was this wonderful world which was to hold for him success and fortune. Never had he dreamed that the mere joy of living would appeal to him as it did now; that the act of breathing, of seeing, of looking on wonders in which his hands had taken no part in the making, would fill him with the indefinable pleasure which had suddenly become his experience. He wondered, as he still stood gazing into the infinity of that other world beyond the Saskatchewan, if romance was really quite dead in him. Always he had laughed at romance. Work--the grim reality of action, of brain fighting brain, of cleverness pitted against other men's cleverness--had almost brought him to the point of regarding romance in life as a peculiar illusion of fools--and women. But he was fair in his concessions, and to-night he acknowledged that he had enjoyed the romance of what he had seen and heard. And most of all, his blood had been stirred by the beautiful face that had looked at him from out of the night.

      The tuneless thrumming of a piano sounded behind him. As he passed through the low door of the restaurant a man and woman lurched past him and in their irresolute faces and leering stare he read the verification of his suspicions of the place. Through a second door he entered a large room filled with tables and chairs, and pregnant with