The Honor of Her People

The Honor of Her People

THE HONOR OF HER PEOPLE

"It ees not so much--What you call heem?--leegend, thees honor of the
Beeg Snows!" said Jan softly.

He had risen to his feet and gazed placidly over the crackling box-stove
into the eyes of the red-faced Englishman.

"Leegend is lie! Thees is truth!"

There was no lack of luster in the black eyes that roved inquiringly from
the Englishman's bantering grin to the others in the room. Mukee, the
half Cree, was sitting with his elbows on his knees gazing with stoic
countenance at this new curiosity who had wandered four hundred miles
northward from civilization. Williams, the Hudson's Bay man who claimed
to be all white, was staring hard at the red side of the stove, and the
factor's son looked silently at Jan. He and the half-breed noted the warm
glow in the eyes that rested casually upon the Englishman.

"It ees truth--thees honor of the Beeg Snows!" said Jan again, and his
moccasined feet fell in heavy, thumping tread to the door.

That was the first time he had spoken that evening, and not even the half
Cree, or Williams, or the factor's son guessed how the blood was racing
through his veins. Outside he stood with the pale, cold glow of the
Aurora Borealis shining upon him, and the limitless wilderness, heavy in
its burden of snow, reaching out into the ghost-gray fabric of the night.
The Englishman's laugh followed him, boisterous and grossly thick, and
Jan moved on,--wondering how much longer the half Cree and Williams and
the factor's son would listen to the things that this man was saying of
the most beautiful thing that had ever come into their lives.

"It ees truth, I swear, by dam'--thees honor of what he calls the 'Beeg
Snows!'" persisted Jan to himself, and he set his back to the factor's
office and trudged through the snow.

When he came to the black ledge of the spruce and balsam forest he
stopped and looked back. It was an hour past bedtime at the post. The
Company's store loomed up silent and lightless. The few log cabins
betrayed no signs of life. Only in the factor's office, which was the
Company's haven for the men of the wilderness, was there a waste of
kerosene, and that was because of the Englishman whom Jan was beginning
to hate. He stared back at the one glowing window with a queer thickening
in his throat and a clenching of the hands in the pockets of his
caribou-skin coat. Then he looked long and wistfully at a little cabin
which stood apart from the rest, and to himself he whispered again what
he had said to the Englishman. Until to-night--or, perhaps, until two
weeks ago--Jan had been satisfied with his world. It was a big,
passionless world, mostly of snow and ice and endless privation, but he
loved it, and there was only a fast-fading memory of another world in his
brain. It was a world of big, honest hearts kept warm within caribou
skins, of moccasined men whom endless solitude had taught to say little
and do much--a world of "Big Snows," as the Englishman had said, in which
Jan and all his people had come very close to the things which God
created. Without the steely gray flash of those mystery-lights over the
Arctic pole Jan would have been homesick; his soul would have withered
and died in anything but this wondrous land which he knew, with its
billion dazzling stars by night and its eye-blinding brilliancy by day.
For Jan, in a way, was fortunate. He had in him an infinitesimal measure
of the Cree, which made him understand what the winds sometimes whispered
in the pine-tops; and a part of him was French, which added jet to his
eyes and a twist to his tongue and made him susceptible to the beautiful,
and the rest was "just white"--the part of him that could be stirred into
such thoughts and visions as he was now thinking and dreaming of the
Englishman.

The "honor of the Beeg Snows" was a part of Jan's soul; it was his
religion, and the religion of those few others who lived with him four
hundred miles from a settlement, in a place where God's name could not be
spelled or written. It meant what civilization could not understand, and
the Englishman could not understand--freezing and slow starvation rather
than theft, and the living of the tenth commandment above all other
things. It came naturally and easily, this "honor of the Beeg Snows." It
was an unwritten law which no man cared or dared to break, and to Jan,
with his Cree and his French and his "just white" blood, it was in full
measure just what the good God meant it to be.

He moved now toward the little isolated cabin, half hidden in its drift
of snow, keeping well in the deep shadows of the spruce and balsam, and
when he stopped again he saw faintly a gleam of light falling in a wan
streak through a big hole in a curtained window. Each night, always when
the twenty-odd souls of the post were deep in slumber, Jan's heart would
come near to bursting with joy at the sight of this grow from the
snow-smothered cabin, for it told him that the most beautiful thing in
the world was safe and well. He heard, suddenly, the slamming of a door,
and the young Englishman's whistle sounded shrill and untuneful as he
went to his room in the factor's house. For a moment Jan straightened
himself rigidly, and there was a strange tenseness in the thin, dark face
that he turned straight up to where the Northern Lights were shivering in
their midnight play. When he looked again at the light in the little
cabin the passion-blood was rushing through his veins, and he fingered
the hilt of the hunting knife in his belt.

The most beautiful thing in the world had come into Jan's life, and the
other lives at the post, just two summers before. Cummins, red-headed,
lithe as a cat, big-souled as the eternal mountain of the Crees and the
best of the Company's hunters, had brought her up as his bride. Seventeen
rough hearts had welcomed them. They had assembled about that little
cabin in which the light was shining, speechless in their adoration of
this woman who had come among them, their caps in their hands, faces
shining, eyes shifting before the glorious ones that looked at them and
smiled at them as the woman shook their hands, one by one. Perhaps she
was not beautiful, as most people judge. But she was beautiful here--four
hundred miles beyond civilization. Mukee, the half-Cree, had never seen a
white woman, for even the factor's wife was part Chippewayan, and no one
of the others went down to the edge of the southern wilderness more than
once each twelve-month or so. Her hair was brown and soft, and it shone
with a sunny glory that reached away back into their conception of things
dreamed of but never seen, her eyes were as blue as the early snowflowers
that came after the spring floods, and her voice was the sweetest sound
that had ever fallen upon their ears. So these men thought when Cummins
first brought home his wife, and the masterpiece which each had painted
in his soul and brain was never changed. Each week and month added to the
deep-toned value of that picture, as the passing of a century might add
to a Raphael or a Van Dyke. The woman became more human, and less an
angel, of course, but that only made her more real, and allowed them to
become acquainted with her, to talk with her, and to love her more. There
was no thought of wrong--until the Englishman came; for the devotion of
these men who lived alone, and mostly wifeless, was a great passionless
love unhinting of sin, and Cummins and his wife accepted it, and added to
it when they could, and were the happiest pair in all that vast
Northland.

The first year brought great changes. The girl--she was scarce more than
budding into womanhood--fell happily into the ways of her new life. She
did nothing that was elementally unusual--nothing more than any pure
woman reared in the love of a God and home would have done. In her spare
hours she began to teach the half dozen wild little children about the
post, and every Sunday told them wonderful stories out of the Bible. She
ministered to the sick, for that was a part of her code of life.
Everywhere she carried her glad smile, her cheery greeting, her wistful
earnestness to brighten what seemed to her the sad and lonely lives of
these silent, worshipful men of the North. And she succeeded, not because
she was unlike other millions of her kind, but because of the difference
between the fortieth and the sixtieth degrees--the difference in the
viewpoint of men who fought themselves into moral shreds in the big game
of life and those who lived a thousand miles nearer to the dome of the
earth. At the end of this first year came the wonderful event in the
history of the Company's post, which had the Barren Lands at its back
door. One day a new life was born into the little cabin of Cummins and
his wife.

After this the silent, wordless worship of Jan and his people was filled
with something very near to pathos. Cummins' wife was a mother. She was
one of them now, a part of their indissoluble existence--a part of it as
truly as the strange lights forever hovering over the Pole, as surely as
the countless stars that never left the night skies, as surely as the
endless forests and the deep snows! There was an added value to Cummins
now. If there was a long and dangerous mission to perform it was somehow
arranged so that he was left behind. Only Jan and one or two others knew
why his traps made the best catch of fur, for more than once he had
slipped a mink of an ermine or a fox into one of Cummins' traps, knowing
that it would mean a luxury or two for the woman and the baby. And when
Cummins left the post, sometimes for a day and sometimes longer, the
mother and her child fell as a brief heritage to those who remained. The
keenest eyes would not have discovered that this was so.

In the second year, with the beginning of trapping, fell the second and
third great events. Cummins disappeared. Then came the Englishman. For a
time the first of these two overshadowed everything else at the post.
Cummins had gone to prospect a new trap-line, and was to sleep out the
first night. The second night he was still gone. On the third day came
the "Beeg Snow." It began at dawn, thickened as the day went, and
continued to thicken until it became that soft, silent deluge of white in
which no man dared venture a thousand yards from his door. The Aurora was
hidden. There were no stars in the sky at night. Day was weighted with a
strange, noiseless gloom. In all that wilderness there was not a creature
that moved. Sixty hours later, when visible life was resumed again, the
caribou, the wolf and the fox dug themselves up out of six feet of snow,
and found the world changed.

It was at the beginning of the "Beeg Snow" that Jan went to the woman's
cabin. He tapped upon her door with the timidity of a child, and when she
opened it, her great eyes glowing at him in wild questioning, her face
white with a terrible fear, there was a chill at his heart which choked
back what he had come to say. He walked in dumbly and stood with the snow
falling off him in piles, and when Cummins' wife saw neither hope nor
foreboding in his dark, set face she buried her face in her arms upon the
little table and sobbed softly in her despair. Jan strove to speak, but
the Cree in him drove back what was French and "just white," and he stood
in mute, trembling torture. "Ah, the Great God!" his soul was crying.
"What can I do?"

Upon its little cot the woman's child was asleep. Beside the stove there
were a few sticks of wood. He stretched himself until his neck creaked to
see if there was water in the barrel near the door. Then he looked again
at the bowed head and the shivering form at the table. In that moment
Jan's resolution soared very near to the terrible.

"Mees Cummin, I go hunt for heem!" he cried. "I go hunt for heem--an'
fin' heem!"

He waited another moment, and then backed softly toward the door.

"I hunt for heem!" he repeated, fearing that she had not heard.

She lifted her face, and the beating of Jan's heart sounded to him like
the distant thrumming of partridge wings. Ah, the Great God--would he
ever forget that look! She was coming to him, a new glory in her eyes,
her arms reaching out, her lips parted! Jan knew how the Great Spirit had
once appeared to Mukee, the half-Cree, and how a white mist, like a snow
veil, had come between the half-breed's eyes and the wondrous thing he
beheld. And that same snow veil drifted between Jan and the woman. Like
in a vision he saw her glorious face so near to him that his blood was
frightened into a strange, wonderful sensation that it had never known
before. He felt the touch of her sweet breath, he heard her passionate
prayer, he knew that one of his rough hands was clasped in both her
own--and he knew, too, that their soft, thrilling warmth would remain
with him until he died, and still go into Paradise with him.

When he trudged back into the snow, knee-deep now, he sought Mukee, the
half-breed. Mukee had suffered a lynx bite that went deep into the bone,
and Cummins' wife had saved his hand. After that the savage in him was
enslaved to her like an invisible spirit, and when Jan slipped on his
snowshoes to set out into the deadly chaos of the "Beeg Storm" Mukee was
ready to follow. A trail through the spruce forest led them to the lake
across which Jan knew that Cummins had intended to go. Beyond that, a
matter of six miles or so, there was a deep and lonely break between two
mountainous ridges in which Cummins believed he might find lynx. Indian
instinct guided the two across the lake. There they separated, Jan going
as nearly as he could guess into the northwest, Mukee trailing swiftly
and hopelessly into the south, both inspired in the face of death by the
thought of a woman with sunny hair, and with lips and eyes that had sent
many a shaft of hope and gladness into their desolate hearts.

It was no great sacrifice for Jan, this struggle with the "Beeg Snows"
for the woman's sake. What it was to Mukee, the half-Cree, no man ever
guessed or knew, for it was not until the late spring snows had gone that
they found what the foxes and the wolves had left of him, far to the
south.

A hand, soft and gentle, guided Jan. He felt the warmth of it and the
thrill of it, and neither the warmth nor the thrill grew less as the
hours passed and the snow fell deeper. His soul was burning with a joy
that it had never known. Beautiful visions danced in his brain, and
always he heard the woman's voice praying to him in the little cabin, saw
her eyes upon him through that white snow veil! Ah, what would he not
give if he could find the man, if he could take Cummins back to his wife,
and stand for one moment more with her hands clasping his, her joy
flooding him with a sweetness that would last for all time! He plunged
fearlessly into the white world beyond the lake, his wide snowshoes
sinking ankle-deep at every step. There was neither rock nor tree to
guide him, for everywhere was the heavy ghost-raiment of the Indian God.
The balsams were bending under it, the spruces were breaking into
hunchback forms, the whole world was twisted in noiseless torture under
its increasing weight, and out through the still terror of it all Jan's
voice went in wild echoing shouts. Now and then he fired his rifle, and
always he listened long and intently. The echoes came back to him,
laughing, taunting, and then each time fell the mirthless silence of the
storm. Night came, a little darker than the day, and Jan stopped to build
a fire and eat sparingly of his food, and to sleep. It was still night
when he aroused himself and stumbled on. Never did he take the weight of
his rifle from his right hand or shoulder, for he knew this weight would
shorten the distance traveled at each step by his right foot, and would
make him go in a circle that would bring him back to the lake. But it was
a long circle. The day passed. A second night fell upon him, and his hope
of finding Cummins was gone. A chill crept in where his heart had been so
warm, and somehow that soft pressure of a woman's hand upon his seemed to
become less and less real to him. The woman's prayers were following him,
her heart was throbbing with its hope in him--and he had failed! On the
third day, when the storm was over, Jan staggered hopelessly into the
post. He went straight to the woman, disgraced, heartbroken. When he came
out of the little cabin he seemed to have gone mad. A wondrously strange
thing had happened. He had spoken not a word, but his failure and his
sufferings were written in his face, and when Cummins' wife saw and
understood she went as white as the underside of a poplar leaf in a
clouded sun. But that was not all. She came to him, and clasped one of
his half-frozen hands to her bosom, and he heard her say, "God bless you
forever, Jan! You have done the best you could!" The Great God--was that
not reward for the risking of a miserable, worthless life such as his? He
went to his shack and slept long, and dreamed, sometimes of the woman,
and of Cummins and Mukee, the half-Cree.

On the first crust of the new snow came the Englishman up from Fort
Churchill, on Hudson's Bay. He came behind six dogs, and was driven by an
Indian, and he bore letters to the factor which proclaimed him something
of considerable importance at the home office of the Company, in London.
As such he was given the best bed in the factor's rude home. On the
second day he saw Cummins' wife at the Company's store, and very soon
learned the history of Cummins' disappearance.

That was the beginning of the real tragedy at the post. The wilderness is
a grim oppressor of life. To those who survive in it the going out of
life is but an incident, an irresistible and natural thing, unpleasant
but without horror. So it was with the passing of Cummins. But the
Englishman brought with him something new, as the woman had brought
something new, only in this instance it was an element of life which Jan
and his people could not understand, an element which had never found a
place, and never could, in the hearts and souls of the post. On the other
hand, it promised to be but an incident to the Englishman, a passing
adventure in pleasure common to the high and glorious civilization from
which he had come. Here again was that difference of viewpoint, the
eternity of difference between the middle and the end of the earth. As
the days passed, and the crust grew deeper upon the "Beeg Snows," the
tragedy progressed rapidly toward finality. At first Jan did not
understand. The others did not understand. When the worm of the
Englishman's sin revealed itself it struck them with a dumb, terrible
fear.

The Englishman came from among women. For months he had been in a torment
of desolation. Cummins' wife was to him like a flower suddenly come to
relieve the tantalizing barrenness of a desert, and with the wiles and
soft speech of his kind he sought to breathe its fragrance. In the weeks
that followed the flower seemed to come nearer to him, and this was
because Jan and his people had not as yet fully measured the heart of the
woman, and because the Englishman had not measured Jan and his people he
talked a great deal when enthused by the warmth of the box stove and his
thoughts. So human passions were set at play. Because the woman knew
nothing of what was said about the box stove she continued in the even
course of her pure life, neither resisting nor encouraging the newcomer,
yet ever tempting him with that sweetness which she gave to all alike,
and still praying in the still hours of night that Cummins would return
to her. As yet there was no suspicion in her soul. She accepted the
Englishman's friendship. His sympathy for her won him a place in her
recognition of things good and true. She did not hear the false note, she
saw no step that promised evil. Only Jan and his people saw and
understood the one-sided struggle, and shivered at the monstrous evil of
it. At least they thought they saw and understood, which was enough. Like
so many faithful beasts they were ready to spring, to rend flesh, to tear
life out of him who threatened the desecration of all that was good and
pure and beautiful to them, and yet, dumb in their devotion and faith,
they waited and watched for a sign from the woman. The blue eyes of
Cummins' wife, the words of her gentle lips, the touch of her hands had
made law at the post. She, herself, had become the omniscience of all
that was law to them, and if she smiled upon the Englishman, and talked
with him, and was pleased with him, that was only one other law that she
had made for them to respect. So they were quiet, evaded the Englishman
as much as possible, and watched--always watch ed.

These were days when something worse than disease was eating at the few
big honest hearts that made up the life at the post. The search for
Cummins never ceased, and always the woman was receiving hope. Now it was
Williams who went far into the South, and brought back word that a
strange white man had been seen among the Indians; then it was Thoreau,
the Frenchman, who skirted the edge of the Barren Lands three days into
the West, and said that he had found the signs of strange campfires. And
always Jan was on the move, to the South, the North, the East and the
West. The days began to lengthen. It was dawn now at eight o'clock
instead of nine, the silvery white of the sun was turning day by day more
into the glow of fire, and for a few minutes at midday the snow softened
and water dripped from the roofs.

Jan knew what it meant. Very soon the thick crust of the "Beeg Snow"
would drop in, and they would find Cummins. They would bring what was
left of him back to the post. And then--what would happen then?

Every day or two Jan found some pretext that took him to the little log
cabin. Now it was to convey to the woman a haunch of a caribou he had
slain. Again it was to bring her child a strange plaything from the
forest. More frequently it was to do the work that Cummins would have
done. He seldom went within the low door, but stood outside, speaking a
few words, while Cummins' wife talked to him. But one morning, when the
sun was shining down with the first promising warmth of spring, the woman
stepped hack from the door and asked him in.

"I want to tell you something, Jan," she said softly. "I have been
thinking about it for a long time. I must find some work to do. I must do
something--to earn--money."

Jan's eyes leaped straight to hers in sudden horror.

"Work!"

The word fell from him as if in its utterance there was something of
crime. Then he stood speechless, awed by the look in her eyes, the hard
gray pallor that came into her face.

"May God bless you for all you have done, Jan, and may God bless the
others! I want you to take that word to them from me. But he will never
come back, Jan--never. Tell the men that I love them as brothers, and
always shall love them, but now that I know he is dead I can no longer
live as a drone among them. I will do anything. I will make your coats,
do your washing and mend your moccasins. To-morrow I begin my first
work--for money."

He heard what she said after that as if in a dream. When he went out into
the day again, with her word to his people, he knew that in some way
which he could not understand this big, cold world had changed for him.
To-morrow Cummins' wife was to begin writing letters for the Englishman!
His eyes glittered, his hands clenched themselves upon his breast, and
all the blood in him submerged itself in one wild resistless impulse. An
hour later Jan and his four dogs were speeding swiftly into the South.

The next day the Englishman went to the woman's cabin. He did not return
in the afternoon. And that same afternoon, when Cummins' wife came into
the Company's store, a quick flush shot into her cheeks and the glitter
of blue diamonds into her eyes when she saw the Englishman standing
there. The man's red face grew redder, and he shifted his gaze. When
Cummins' wife passed him she drew her skirt close to her, and there was
the poise of a queen in her head, the glory of mother and wife and
womanhood, the living, breathing essence of all that was beautiful in
Jan's "honor of the Beeg Snows." But Jan, twenty miles to the south, did
not know.

He returned on the fourth night and went quietly to his little shack in
the edge of the balsam forest. In the glow of the oil lamp which he
lighted he rolled up his treasure of winter-caught furs into a small
pack. Then he opened his door and walked straight and fearlessly toward
the cabin of Cummins' wife. It was a pale, glorious night, and Jan lifted
his face to its starry skies and filled his lungs near to bursting with
its pure air, and when he was within a few steps of the woman's door he
burst into a wild snatch of triumphant forest song. For this was a new
Jan who was returning to her, a man who had gone out into the solitudes
and fought a great battle with the elementary things in him, and who,
because of his triumph over these things, was filled with the strength
and courage to live a great lie. The woman heard his voice, and
recognized it. The door swung open, wide and brimful of light, and in it
stood Cummins' wife, her child hugged close in her arms.

Jan crowed close up out of the starry gloom.

"I fin' heem, Mees Cummins--I fin' heem nint' miles back in Cree
wigwam--with broke leg. He come home soon--he sen' great love--an'
THESE!"

And he dropped his furs at the woman's feet....

"Ah, the Great God!" cried Jan's tortured soul when it was all over. "At
least she shall not work for the dirty Englishman."

First he awoke the factor, and told him what he had done. Then he went to
Williams, and after that, one by one, these three visited the four other
white and part white men at the post. They lived very near to the earth,
these seven, and the spirit of the golden rule was as natural to their
living as green sap to the trees. So they stood shoulder to shoulder to
Jan in a scheme that appalled them, and in the very first day of this
scheme they saw the woman blossoming forth in her old beauty and joy, and
at times fleeting visions of the old happiness at the post came to these
lonely men who were searing their souls for her. But to Jan one vision
came to destroy all others, and as the old light returned to the woman's
eyes, the glad smile to her lips, the sweetness of thankfulness and faith
into her voice, this vision hurt him until he rolled and tossed in agony
at night, and by day his feet were never still. His search for Cummins
now had something of madness in it. It was his one hope--where to the
other six there was no hope. And one day this spark went out of him. The
crust was gone. The snow was settling. Beyond the lake he found the chasm
between the two mountains, and, miles of this chasm, robbed to the bones
of flesh, he found Cummins. The bones, and Cummins' gun, and all that was
left of him, he buried in a crevasse.

He waited until night to return to the post. Only one light was burning
when he came out into the clearing, and that was the light in the woman's
cabin. In the edge of the balsams he sat down to watch it, as he had
watched it a hundred nights before. Suddenly something came between him
and the light. Against the cabin he saw the shadow of a human form, and
as silently as the steely flash of the Aurora over his head, as swiftly
as a lean deer, he sped through the gloom of the forest's edge and came
up behind the home of the woman and her child. With the caution of a
lynx, his head close to the snow, he peered around the end of the logs.
It was the Englishman who stood looking through the tear in the curtained
window! Jan's moccasined feet made no sound. His hand fell as gently as a
child's upon the Englishman's arm.

"Thees is not the honor of the Beeg Snows!" he whispered. "Come."

A sickly pallor filled the Englishman's face. But Jan's voice was soft
and dispassionate, his touch was velvety in its hint, and he went with
the guiding hand away from the curtained window, smiling in a
companionable way. Jan's teeth gleamed back. The Englishman chuckled.
Then Jan's hands changed. They flew to the thick reddening throat of the
man from civilization, and without a sound the two sank together upon the
snow. It was many minutes before Jan rose to his feet. The next day
Williams set out for Fort Churchill with word for the Company's home
office that the Englishman had died in the "Beeg Snow," which was true.

The end was not far away now. Jan was expecting it day by day, hour by
hour. But it came in a way that he did not expect. A month had gone, and
Cummins had not come up from among the Crees. At times there was a
strange light in the woman's eyes as she questioned the men at the post.
Then, one day, the factor's son told Jan that she wanted to see him in
the little cabin at the other end of the clearing.

A shiver went through him as he came to the door. It was more than a
spirit of unrest in Jan to-day, more than suspicion, more than his old
dread of that final moment of the tragedy he was playing, which would
condemn him to everlasting perdition in the woman's eyes. It was pain,
poignant, terrible--something which he could not name, something upon
which he could place his hand, and yet which filled him with a desire to
throw himself upon his face in the snow and sob out his grief as he had
seen the little children do. It was not dread, but the torment of
reality, that gripped him now, and when he faced the woman he knew why.
There had come a terrible change, but a quiet change, in Cummins' wife.
The luster had gone from her eyes. There was a dead whiteness in her face
that went to the roots of her shimmering hair, and as she spoke to Jan
she clutched one hand upon her bosom, which rose and fell as Jan had seen
the breast of a mother lynx rise and fall in the last torture of its
death.

"Jan," she panted, "Jan--you have lied to me!"

Jan's head dropped. The worn caribou skin of his coat crumpled upon his
breast. His heart died. And yet he found voice, soft, low, simple.

"Yes, me lie!"

"You--you lied to me!"

"Yes--me--lie--"

His head dropped lower. He heard the sobbing breath of the woman, and
gently his arm crooked itself, and his fingers rose slowly, very slowly,
toward the hilt of his hunting knife.

"Yes--Mees Cummins--me lie--"

There came a sudden swift, sobbing movement, and the woman was at Jan's
feet, clasping his hand to her bosom as she had clasped it once before
when he had gone out to face death for her. But this time the snow veil
was very thick before Jan's eyes, and he did not see her face. Only he
heard.

"Bless you, dear Jan, and may God bless you evermore! For you have been
good to me, Jan--so good--to me--"

And he went out into the day again a few moments later, leaving her alone
in her great grief, for Jan was a man in the wild and mannerless ways of
a savage world, and he knew not how to comfort in the fashion of that
other world which had other conceptions and another understanding of what
was to him the "honor of the Beeg Snows." A week later the woman
announced her intention of returning to her people, for the dome of the
earth had grown sad and lonely and desolate to her now that Cummins was
forever gone. Sometimes the death of a beloved friend brings with it the
sadness that spread like a pall over Jan and those others who had lived
very near to contentment and happiness for nearly two years, only each
knew that this grief of his would be as enduring as life itself. For a
brief space the sweetest of all God's things had come among them, a pure
woman who brought with her the gentleness and beauty and hallowed
thoughts of civilization in place of its iniquities, and the pictures in
their hearts were imperishable.

The parting was as simple and as quiet as when the woman had come. They
went to the little cabin where the sledge dogs stood harnessed. Hatless,
silent, crowding back their grief behind grim and lonely countenances,
they waited for Cummins' wife to say good-bye. The woman did not speak.
She held up her child for each man to kiss, and the baby babbled
meaningless things into the bearded faces that it had come to know and
love, and when it came to Williams' turn he whispered, "Be a good baby,
be a good baby." And when it was all over the woman crushed the child to
her breast and dropped sobbing upon the sledge, and Jan cracked his whip
and shouted hoarsely to the dogs, for it was Jan who was to drive her to
civilization. Long after they had disappeared beyond the clearing those
who remained stood looking at the cabin; and then, with a dry, strange
sob in his throat, Williams led the way inside. When they came out
Williams brought a hammer with him, and nailed the door tight.

"Mebby she'll come back some day," he said.

That was all, but the others understood.

For nine days Jan raced his dogs into the South. On the tenth they came
to Le Pas. It was night when they stopped before the little log hotel,
and the gloom hid the twitching in Jan's face.

"You will stay here--to-night?" asked the woman.

"Me go back--now," said Jan.

Cummins' wife came very close to him. She did not urge, for she, too, was
suffering the torture of this last parting with the "honor of the Beeg
Snows." It was not the baby's face that came to Jan's now, but the
woman's. He felt the soft touch of her lips, and his soul burst forth in
a low, agonized cry.

"The good God bless you, and keep you, and care for you evermore, Jan,"
she whispered. "Some day we will meet again."

And she kissed him again, and lifted the child to him, and Jan turned his
tired dogs back into the grim desolation of the North, where the Aurora
was lighting his way feebly, and beckoning to him, and telling him that
the old life of centuries and centuries ago was waiting for him there.

-THE END-
James Oliver Curwood's short story: The Honor of Her People

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