If the man had been fervently in love with her, why had he not insisted on that fact, she asked. Could it have been because he had with the fantastic generosity, which he was evidently capable of, been willing to leave his comrade unhandicapped with an open field? That, however, seemed too much to expect from any man. Then there was the other explanation that he preferred to leave the choice wholly to her lest he should tempt her too strongly to break faith with Gregory, which brought the blood to her face as it had done already, since it suggested that he fancied he had only to urge her sufficiently and she would yield. There was, it seemed, no satisfactory explanation at all. Only the fact remained that he had made her a somewhat dispassionate offer of marriage, and had left her to decide, which she had done.
As it happened, Wyllard could not just then, at least, have made the matter very much clearer. Shrewdly practical, as he was, in some respects, there were times when he acted blindly, merely doing without reasoning what he sub-consciously felt was right. This had more than once involved him in disaster, but it is, perhaps, fortunate that there are others like him, for, after all, in the long run the failures of such men now and then prove better than the dictates of calculating wisdom.
In any case, Agatha found a momentary relief from her thoughts as she watched Hawtrey get down from his waggon and approach the house. The change in him was plainer than it had ever been, which may have been because she had now a standard of comparison. He was tall and well-favoured, and he moved with a jaunty and yet not ungraceful swing; but it almost seemed to her that this was merely the result of an empty self-sufficiency. There was, she felt, no force behind it which when the strain came would prove that jaunty bearing warranted. He was smiling, and for some reason his smile appeared a trifle inane, while there was certainly a hint of sensuousness in his face. It suggested that the man might sink into self-indulgent coarseness. She, however, remembered that she was still pledged to him, and determinedly brushed these thoughts aside, until she heard his footsteps inside the house, when she became possessed of a burning curiosity as to what Wyllard had to say to him, which, however, remained unsatisfied.
In the meanwhile, Hawtrey entered a room where Wyllard sat awaiting him with a paper in his hand.
"I asked you to drive over here because it would save time," he said. "I have to go in to the railroad at once. Here's a draft of the scheme I suggested. You had better tell me if there's anything you're not quite satisfied with."
He threw the paper on the table, and Hawtrey, who took it up, perused it.
"I'm to farm and generally manage the Range on your behalf," he said. "My percentage to be deducted after harvest. I'm empowered to sell out grain or horses as appears advisable, and to have the use of teams and implements for my own place when occasion requires it."
He looked up. "I've no fault to find with the thing, Harry. It's generous."
"Then you had better sign it, and we'll get Hastings to witness it in a minute or two. In the meanwhile there's a thing I have to ask you. How do you stand in regard to Miss Ismay?"
Hawtrey pushed his chair back noisily. "That," he said, "is a subject on which I'm naturally not disposed to give you any information. How does it concern you?
"In this way. Believing that your engagement must be broken off I asked Miss Ismay to marry me."
Hawtrey was clearly startled, but in a moment or two he smiled.
"Of course," he said, "she wouldn't. As a matter of fact, our engagement isn't broken off. It's merely extended."
They looked at each other in silence for a moment or two, and there was a curious hardness in Wyllard's eyes. Then Hawtrey spoke again.
"In view of what you have just told me why did you want to put me of all people in charge of the Range?" he said.
"I'll be candid," said Wyllard. "For one thing, you held on when I was slipping off the trestle that day in British Columbia. For another, you'll make nothing of your own holding, and if you run the Range as it ought to be run it will put a good many dollars into your pocket, besides relieving me of a big anxiety. If you're to marry Miss Ismay, I'd sooner she was made reasonably comfortable."
Hawtrey looked up with a flush in his face.
"Harry," he said, "this is extravagantly generous."
"Wait," said Wyllard; "there's a little more to be said. I can't be back before the frost, and I may be away eighteen months. While I am away you will have a clear field – and you must make the most of it. If you are not married when I come back I shall ask Miss Ismay again. Now" – and he glanced at his comrade steadily – "does this stand in the way of your going on with the arrangement we have arrived at?"
There was a rather tense silence for a moment or two, and then Hawtrey broke it.
"No," he said; "after all, there is no reason why it should do so. It has no practical bearing upon the other question."
Wyllard rose. "Well," he said, "if you will call Allen Hastings in we'll get this thing fixed up."
The document was duly signed, and a few minutes later Wyllard drove away; but Mrs. Hastings contrived to have a few words with Hawtrey before he did the same.
"I've no doubt that Harry took you into his confidence on a certain point," she said.
"Yes," admitted Hawtrey; "he did. I was a little astonished, besides feeling rather sorry for him. There is, however, reason to believe that he'll soon get over it."
"You feel sure of that?" and Mrs. Hastings smiled.
"Isn't it evident? If he had cared much about her he certainly wouldn't have gone away."
"You mean you wouldn't?"
"No," said Hawtrey, "there's no doubt of that."
His companion smiled again. "Well," she said drily, "I would like to think you were right about Harry; it would be a relief to me."
Hawtrey, who said nothing further, presently drove away, and soon after he did so Agatha approached Mrs. Hastings.
"There's something I must ask you," she said. "Has Gregory consented to take charge of Wyllard's farm?"
"He has," said her companion in her dryest tone.
Agatha's face flushed, and there was a flash in her eyes.
"Oh," she said, "it's almost insufferable!"
Then she turned and left Mrs. Hastings without another word.
She only saw Wyllard once again, and that was when he called at the homestead early one morning. He got down from the waggon where Dampier sat, and shook hands with her and Allen and Mrs. Hastings. Very few words were spoken, and she could not remember what she said, but when he swung himself up again and the waggon jolted away into the white prairie she went back to the house with her heart beating unpleasantly fast and a very curious feeling of depression.
CHAPTER XV.
THE BEACH
For a fortnight after they reached Vancouver Wyllard and Dampier were very busy. They had various difficulties to contend with, for while they would have preferred to slip away to sea as quietly as possible a British vessel's movements are fenced about with many formalities, and they did not wish to ship a white man who could be dispensed with. Wyllard fancied there were sailormen and sealers in Vancouver and down Puget Sound who would have gone with him, but there was a certain probability of their discussing their exploits afterwards in the saloons ashore, which was about the last thing that he desired. It appeared essential that he should avoid notoriety as much as possible.
He had further trouble about obtaining provisions and general necessaries, for considerably more attention than the free-lance sealers cared about was being bestowed upon the North just then, and he did not desire to rouse the curiosity of the dealers as to why he was filling his lazaret up with Arctic stores. He obviated that difficulty by dividing his orders among the whole of them, and buying as little as possible. Dampier, however, proved an adept at the difficult business, and eventually the schooner Selache crept out from the Narrows at dusk one evening under all plain sail, painted a pale green, with her big main-boom raking at least a fathom beyond her taffrail. There were then Wyllard, Dampier, and two other white men on board her. A week later she sailed into a deep, rock-walled inlet on the western coast of Vancouver Island with a settlement at the top of it, where the storekeeper made no difficulty about selling Wyllard all his flour and canned goods at higher figures than there was any probability of his obtaining from the local ranchers.
Then the Selache slid down the inlet again, and lay for several days in a forest-shrouded arm near the mouth of it, while, when she once more dropped her anchor off a Siwash rancherie far up on the wild West coast, she was painted a dingy grey, and her sawn-off boom just topped her stern. One does not want a great main-boom in the northern seas, and a big mainsail needs men to handle it. Wyllard, however, shipped several sea-bred Indians who had made wonderful perilous voyages on the trail of the seal and halibut in open canoes. All of them had, as it happened, also sailed in sealing schooners. Their comrades sold him furs, and filled part of the hold up with redwood billets and bark for the stove, for he had not considered it advisable to load too much Wellington coal. Then he pushed out into the waste Pacific, and when once a beautiful big white mail boat reeled by him, driving with streaming bows into an easterly gale, he sent back a message to his friends upon the prairie. It duly reached them, for some three weeks afterwards Allen Hastings, opening The Colonist, which he had ordered from Victoria as soon as Wyllard sailed, read out to his wife and Agatha a paragraph in the shipping news:
"Empress of India, from Yokohama, reports having passed small grey British schooner, flying – " There followed several code letters, the latitude and longitude, and a line apparently by the water-front reporter: "No schooner belonging to this city allotted the signal in question."
Hastings smiled as he laid down the paper. "No," he said, "that signal's Wyllard's private code. Agatha, won't you reach me down my map of the Pacific? It's just behind you."
Then he looked round, and noticed the significant smile in his wife's eyes, for the girl had already turned towards the shelf where he kept the lately purchased map.
The easterly gale, however, did not last, for the wind came out of the west and north, and sank to foggy calms when it did not blow wickedly hard. This meant that the Selache's course was all to windward, and though they drove her at it unmercifully under reefed boom-foresail, main trysail, and a streaming jib or two, with the brine going over her solid forward, she had made little when each arduous day was done. They were drenched to the skin continuously, and lashed by stinging spray. Cooking except of the crudest kind was out of the question, and sleep would have been impossible to any but worn-out sailormen. Even then, they were often roused in the blackness of the night, when she lay with her lee rail under, and would not lift it out, to get another reef in, or crawl out on plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas to haul a burst jib down. It was even more trying, glad as they were of the respite in some respects, to lie rolling wildly on the big smooth undulations that hove out of the windless calm, while everything in her banged to and fro, and when the breeze came screaming through the fog or rain they sprang to make sail again.
Fate seemed dead against them, as it was certain that, if their purpose was suspected, the hand of every white man they might come across would be; but they held on over leagues of empty ocean while the season wore away, until once more the wind freshened easterly, and they ran for a week under boom-foresail and a jib, with the big grey combers curling as they foamed by high above her rail. Then the wind fell, and Dampier, who got an observation, armed his deep-sea lead, and finding shells and shoal water came aft to talk to Wyllard with the strip of Dunton's chart.
Wyllard, who was clad in oilskins, stood, a shapeless figure, by the wheel, with his face darkened and roughened by cold and stinging brine. There was an open sore upon one of his elbows, and both his wrists were raw. Forward, a white man and two Siwash were standing about the windlass, and when the bows went up a dreary stretch of slate-grey sea opened up beyond them beneath the dripping jibs. Then the bows would go down again, and all that was visible was the fore-shortened slope of deck and the breast of the big undulation that hove itself up ahead. The Selache was carrying everything and lurching over the steep swell at some four knots an hour.
Dampier stopped near the wheel, and glanced at Wyllard's oilskins.
"You'll have to take them off. It's stuffed boots and those Indian seal-gut things or furs from now on," he said. "That leather cuff's chewing up your hand."
"We'll cut that out," said Wyllard; "it's not to the point. Can't you get on?"
Dampier grinned. "We're on soundings, and they and Dunton's longitude most agree. With this wind we should pick the beach up in the next two days. Next question is, where those men were?"
"Where they are," said Wyllard.
"If they've pushed on it's probably a different thing, though if they'd food yonder I don't quite see why they'd want to push on anywhere. It wouldn't be south, anyway. They'd run up against the Russians there."
"We've decided that already."
"I'm admitting it," said the skipper. "There's the other choice that they've gone up north. It's narrower across to Alaska there, and it's quite likely they might have a notion of looking out for one of the steam whalers. The Koriaks up yonder will have boats of some kind. If they're skin ones like those the Huskies have they might sledge them on the ice."
It was a suggestion that had been made several times already, but both the men realised that there was in all probability very little to warrant it. Wyllard had wasted no time endeavouring to learn what was known about the desolation on the western shore of the Behring Sea. He had bought a schooner and set out at once. It, however, appeared almost impossible to him that any three men could haul the skin boats and supplies they would need far over hummocky ice.
"The point is that we'll have to fix on some course in the next few days," added his companion. "Say we run in to make inquiries" – and a gleam of grim amusement crept into his eyes – "what are we going to find? A beach with a roaring surf on it, and if we get a boat through, a desolate, half-frozen swamp behind it. It's quite likely there are people in the country, Koriaks or Kamtchadales, but if there are they'll probably move up and down after what they get to eat like the Huskies do, and we can't hang on and wait for them. Most any time next month we'll have the ice closing in."
Wyllard said nothing for another minute, and as he stood with hands clenched on the wheel a little puff of bitter spray splashed upon his oilskins. They had been over it all often before, weighing conjecture after conjecture, and had found nothing in any that might serve to guide them. Now, when winter was close at hand, they had leagues of surf-swept beach to search for three men who might have perished twelve months earlier.
"We'll stand in until we pick up the beach," he said at length; "then if there's no sign of them we'll push north as long as we can find open water. Now if you'll call Charly I'll let up at the wheel."
Another white man walked aft, and Wyllard, entering the little stern cabin, the top of which rose some feet above the deck, sloughed off his wet oilskins and crawled, dressed as he was, into his bunk. Evening was closing in, and for awhile he lay blinking at the swinging lamp, and wondering what the end of that search would be. The Selache was a little fore and aft schooner of some ninety-odd tons, wholly unprotected against ice-chafe or nip, and he knew that prudence dictated their driving her south under every rag of canvas now. There was, however, the possibility of finding some sheltered inlet where she could lie out the winter, frozen in, and he had, at least, blind confidence in his men. The white men were sealers who had already borne the lash of snow-laden gales, the wash of icy seas, and tremendous labour at the oar, while the Indians had been born to an unending struggle with the waters. All of them had times and times again looked the King of Terrors squarely in the face. What was as much to the purpose, they had been promised a tempting bonus if the Selache came home successful.
While Wyllard pondered upon these things he went to sleep, and slept soundly, as he did the next night, though Dampier expected to raise the beach some time next morning. His expectation also proved warranted, and when Wyllard turned out it lay before them, a dingy smear on a slate-green sea that was cut off from it by a wavy line of livid whiteness, which he knew to be a fringe of spouting surf. It had cost him in several ways more than he cared to contemplate to reach that beach, and now there was nothing that could excite any feeling except shrinking in the dreary spectacle. There was little light in the heavy sky or on the sullen heave of sea; the air was raw, the schooner's decks were sloppy, and she rolled viciously as she crept shorewards with her mainsail peak eased down. What wind there was blew dead on-shore, which was not as he would have had it.
He heard the splash of the lead as he and the white man Charly made their breakfast in the little stern cabin. Then there was a clatter of blocks, and on coming out again he found the others swinging a boat over. Charly and he and two of the Indians dropped into her, and Dampier, who had hove the schooner to, looked down on them over her rail.
"If you knock the bottom out of her put a jacket on an oar, and I'll try to bring you off," he said. "If you don't signal I'll stand off and on with a thimble-header topsail over the mainsail. You'll start back right away if you see us haul it down. When she won't stand that there'll be more surf than you'll have any use for with the wind dead on the beach."
Wyllard made a sign of comprehension, and they slid away on the back of a long sea. Others rolled up behind them, cutting off the schooner's hull so that only her grey canvas showed above dim slopes of water, but there was no curl on any and the beach rose fast. It looked very forbidding with the spray-haze drifting over it, and the long wash of the Pacific weltering among its hammered stones, and when they drew a little nearer Wyllard stood up with the big sculling oar in his hand. There was no point to offer shelter, and in only one place could he see a strip of surf-lapped sand.
"It's a little softer than the boulders, anyway; we'll try it there," he said.
The oars dipped again, and in another minute or two the sea that came up behind them hove them high and broke into a little spout of foam. The next had a hissing crest, part of which splashed on board, and they went shorewards like a toboggan down an icy slide on the shoulders of the third. To keep her straight while it seethed about them was all that they could do, but it was also essentially necessary, and for a moment their hearts were in their mouths when it left them to sink with a dizzy swing into the hollow. Then they pulled desperately as another white-topped ridge came on astern, and went up with it amidst a chaotic frothing and splashing and a haze of spray. After that there was a shock and a crash, and they sprang out knee-deep and held fast to the boat while the foam boiled into her, floundering and stumbling over sliding sand. Still, before the next sea came in they had run her up beyond its reach, and there did not seem to be much the matter with her when they hove her over. Wyllard, however, looked back at the tumbling surf.
"Dampier was right about that topsail; it won't be quite as easy getting off," he said. "You'll stand by, Charly, and watch the schooner. If the surf gets steeper you can make some sign. I'll leave one of the Siwash on the rise yonder."
Then he walked up the beach, and stopped awhile on the crest of the low rise a mile or two behind it, gazing out at what seemed to be an empty desolation. There were willows in the hollow beneath him, and upon the slope a few little stunted trees, which he fancied resembled the juniper he had seen among the ranges of British Columbia, but he could see no sign of any kind of life. What was more portentous, the mossy sod he stood upon was frozen, and there were smears of snow among the straggling firs upon a rather higher ridge. Inland, the little breeze seemed to have fallen dead away, and there was an oppressive silence which the rumble of the surf accentuated.
He left an Indian on the rise, and going on with the other scrambled through a half-frozen swamp in the hollow; but when they came back hours afterwards as the narrow horizon was drawing further in they had found nothing to show that any man had ever entered that grim, silent land. The surf seemed a little smoother, and they reeled out through it with no more than a few inches of very cold water splashing about their boots, and pulled across a long stretch of darkening sea towards the rolling schooner.
Wyllard was a little weary, and more depressed, but it was not until he sat in the stern cabin with its cheerful twinkling stove and swinging lamp that he understood how he had shrunk from that forbidding wilderness. His consultation with Dampier, who came in by and bye, was very brief.
"We'll head north for a couple of days, and try again," he said.
He crawled into his berth early, and it was some time after midnight when he was awakened by being rudely flung out of it. That fact, and the slant of deck and sounds above, suggested that the schooner had been hove down by a sudden gale. He had, however, grown more or less accustomed to occurrences of this kind and to sleeping fully dressed, and in another moment or two he was out of the deck-house. Then a wind that seemed sharp as steel drove stinging flakes of snow into his face. It was very dark, but he fancied that the schooner's rail was in the sea, which was washing over her to weather, and that some of the others were struggling to get the mainsail off her. Then a man whom he supposed to be Charly ran into him.
"Better come for'ard. Got to haul outer jib down before it blows away," he said.
Wyllard staggered after him up to his knees in water, and made out by the mad banging that some of them had already cast the peak of the boom-foresail loose. Then he reached the windlass, and clutched it as a sea that took him to the waist frothed in over the weather rail. The bows lurched out of it viciously, hurling another icy flood back on him, and he could see a dim white chaos about and beneath them. Over it rose the black wedge of the jibs.
He did not want to get out along the bowsprit to stop one of them down. Indeed his whole physical nature shrank from it, but there are many things flesh and blood shrink from which must be faced at sea. Then he made out that a Siwash was fumbling at the down-haul made fast near his side, and when his companion's shadowy figure rose up against the whiteness of the foam he made a jump forward. Then he was on the bowsprit, lying upon it while he felt for the foot-rope slung beneath. He found it, and was cautiously lowering himself when the man in front of him called out harshly, and he saw a white sea range up ahead. It broke short over with a rush and roar, and he clung with hands and feet for his life as the schooner's dipping bows rammed the seething mass.
She went into it to the windlass. He was smothered in an icy flood that seemed bent on wrenching him from his hold, but that was only for a moment or two, and then he was swung, gasping and streaming with water, high above the sea again. It was bad enough merely to hold on, but that was a very small share of his task, for the big black sail that cut the higher darkness came rattling down its stay and fell upon him and his companion bodily. As it dropped the wind took hold of the folds of it and buffeted them cruelly. This was a thing he had once been accustomed to, but as he clutched at the canvas it seemed to him incredible that he had not already been flung off headlong from the reeling spar. Still, that banging, thrashing canvas must be mastered somehow, though it was snow-soaked and almost unyielding, and he clawed at it furiously with bleeding hands while twice the bowsprit raked a sea and dipped him waist-deep in. At length the other man flung him the end of the gasket, and they worked back carefully, leaving the sail lashed down, and scrambled aft to help the others who were making the big main-boom fast. When this was done Wyllard fell against Dampier and clutched at him.
"How's the wind?" he roared.
"North-east," said the skipper.
They could scarcely hear each other, though the schooner was lurching over it more easily now with shortened canvas, and Wyllard only made Dampier understand that he wished to speak to him by thrusting him towards the deck-house door. They went in together, and stood clutching at the table with the lamplight on their tense, wet faces and the brine that ran from them making pools upon the deck.
"It's hauled round," said the skipper, "the wrong way."
Wyllard made a savage gesture. "We've had it from the last quarter we wanted ever since we sailed, and we sailed nearly three months too late. We're too close in to the beach for you to heave her to?"
"A sure thing," said the other. "I was driving her to work off it with the sea getting up when the breeze burst on us. She put her rail right under, and we had to let go most everything before she'd pick it up. She's pointing somewhere north, jammed right up on the starboard tack just now, but I can't stand on."
This was evident to Wyllard, and he closed one hand tight. He wanted to stand on as long as possible before the ice closed in, but he realised that to do so would put the schooner ashore.
"Well?" he said sharply.
Dampier made a grimace. "I'm going out to heave her round. If we'd any sense in us we'd square off the boom then, and leg it away across the Pacific for Vancouver."
"In that case," said Wyllard, "somebody would lose his bonus."
Dampier swung round on him with a flash in his eyes.
"The bonus!" he said. "Who was it came for you with two dollars in his pocket after he'd bought his ticket from Vancouver?"
Wyllard smiled at him. "If you took that up the wrong way I'm sorry. She ought to work off on the port tack, and when we've open water to leeward you can heave her to. When it moderates we can pick up the beach again."
"That's just what I mean to do."
Then Dampier went out on deck, while Wyllard, flinging off his dripping clothing, crawled into his bunk and went quietly to sleep.