第5章 THE NIGHT-BORN(5)

That was in '88--eight years before the Klondike strike, and the Yukon was a howling wilderness.She was afraid of the bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the lakes, and went down the river and to all the early camps on the Lower Yukon.She wandered several years over that country and then on in to where I met her.Liked the looks of it, she said, seeing, in her own words, 'a big bull caribou knee-deep in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' She hooked up with the Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, and gradually took them in charge.She had only left that country once, and then, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot, cleaned up her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.

"'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's the most precious thing I own.'

"She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck like a locket, and opened it.And inside, wrapped in oiled silk, yellowed with age and worn and thumbed, was the original scrap of newspaper containing the quotation from Thoreau.

"'And are you happy...satisfied?' I asked her.'With a quarter of a million you wouldn't have to work down in the States.You must miss a lot.'

"'Not much,' she answered.'I wouldn't swop places with any woman down in the States.These are my people; this is where Ibelong.But there are times--and in her eyes smoldered up that hungry yearning I've mentioned--'there are times when I wish most awful bad for that Thoreau man to happen along.'

"'Why?' I asked.

"'So as I could marry him.I do get mighty lonesome at spells.

I'm just a woman--a real woman.I've heard tell of the other kind of women that gallivanted off like me and did queer things--the sort that become soldiers in armies, and sailors on ships.But those women are queer themselves.They're more like men than women; they look like men and they don't have ordinary women's needs.They don't want love, nor little children in their arms and around their knees.I'm not that sort.I leave it to you, stranger.Do I look like a man?'

"She didn't.She was a woman, a beautiful, nut-brown woman, with a sturdy, health-rounded woman's body and with wonderful deep-blue woman's eyes.

"'Ain't I woman?' she demanded.'I am.I'm 'most all woman, and then some.And the funny thing is, though I'm night-born in everything else, I'm not when it comes to mating.I reckon that kind likes its own kind best.That's the way it is with me, anyway, and has been all these years.'

"'You mean to tell me--' I began.

"'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the straightness of truth.'I had one husband, only--him I call the Ox; and I reckon he's still down in Juneau running the hash-joint.Look him up, if you ever get back, and you'll find he's rightly named.'

"And look him up I did, two years afterward.He was all she said--solid and stolid, the Ox--shuffling around and waiting on the tables.

"'You need a wife to help you,' I said.

"'I had one once,' was his answer.

"'Widower?'

"'Yep.She went loco.She always said the heat of the cooking would get her, and it did.Pulled a gun on me one day and ran away with some Siwashes in a canoe.Caught a blow up the coast and all hands drowned.'"Trefethan devoted himself to his glass and remained silent.

"But the girl?" Milner reminded him.

"You left your story just as it was getting interesting, tender.Did it?""It did," Trefethan replied."As she said herself, she was savage in everything except mating, and then she wanted her own kind.She was very nice about it, but she was straight to the point.She wanted to marry me.

"'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad.You like this sort of life or you wouldn't be here trying to cross the Rockies in fall weather.It's a likely spot.You'll find few likelier.Why not settle down! I'll make you a good wife.'

"And then it was up to me.And she waited.I don't mind confessing that I was sorely tempted.I was half in love with her as it was.You know I have never married.And I don't mind adding, looking back over my life, that she is the only woman that ever affected me that way.But it was too preposterous, the whole thing, and I lied like a gentleman.I told her I was already married.

"'Is your wife waiting for you?' she asked.

"I said yes.

"'And she loves you?'

"I said yes.

"And that was all.She never pressed her point...except once, and then she showed a bit of fire.

"'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you don't get away from here.If I give the word, you stay on...

But I ain't going to give it.I wouldn't want you if you didn't want to be wanted...and if you didn't want me.'

"She went ahead and outfitted me and started me on my way.

"'It's a darned shame, stranger," she said, at parting.'I like your looks, and I like you.If you ever change your mind, come back.'

"Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss her good-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she would take it.--I tell you I was half in love with her.But she settled it herself.

"'Kiss me,' she said.'Just something to go on and remember.'

"And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the Rockies, and I left her standing by the trail and went on after my dogs.I was six weeks in crossing over the pass and coming down to the first post on Great Slave Lake."The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf.Asteward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons.And in the silence Trefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:

"It would have been better had I stayed.Look at me."We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the puff-sacks under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy dewlap, the general tiredness and staleness and fatness, all the collapse and ruin of a man who had once been strong but who had lived too easily and too well.

"It's not too late, old man," Bardwell said, almost in a whisper.

"By God! I wish I weren't a coward!" was Trefethan's answering cry."I could go back to her.She's there, now.I could shape up and live many a long year...with her...up there.To remain here is to commit suicide.But I am an old man--forty-seven--look at me.The trouble is," he lifted his glass and glanced at it, "the trouble is that suicide of this sort is so easy.I am soft and tender.The thought of the long day's travel with the dogs appalls me; the thought of the keen frost in the morning and of the frozen sled-lashings frightens me--"Automatically the glass was creeping toward his lips.With a swift surge of anger he made as if to crash it down upon the floor.Next came hesitancy and second thought.The glass moved upward to his lips and paused.He laughed harshly and bitterly, but his words were solemn:

"Well, here's to the Night-Born.She WAS a wonder."