digging, tearing, and scouring the face of nature.
Li Wan was appalled at the tremendous upheaval. “Truly, these men are
mad,” she said to Canim.
“Small wonder. The gold they dig after is a great thing,” he replied. “It is
the greatest thing in the world.”
For hours they threaded the chaos of greed, Canim eagerly intent, Li Wan
weak and listless. She knew she had been on the verge of disclosure, and
she felt that she was still on the verge of disclosure, but the nervous strain
she had undergone had tired her, and she passively waited for the thing,
she knew not what, to happen. From every hand her senses snatched up
and conveyed to her innumerable impressions, each of which became a
dull excitation to her jaded imagination. Somewhere within her,
responsive notes were answering to the things without, forgotten and
undreamed-of correspondences were being renewed; and she was aware of
it in an incurious way, and her soul was troubled, but she was not equal to
the mental exultation necessary to transmute and understand. So she
plodded wearily on at the heels of her lord, content to wait for that which
she knew, somewhere, somehow, must happen.
After undergoing the mad bondage of man, the creek finally returned to its
ancient ways, all soiled and smirched from its toil, and coiled lazily among
the broad flats and timbered spaces where the valley widened to its mouth.
Here the “pay” ran out, and men were loth to loiter with the lure yet
beyond. And here, as Li Wan paused to prod Olo with her staff, she heard
the mellow silver of a woman’s laughter.
Before a cabin sat a woman, fair of skin and rosy as a child, dimpling with
glee at the words of another woman in the doorway. But the woman who
sat shook about her great masses of dark, wet hair which yielded up its
dampness to the warm caresses of the sun.
For an instant Li Wan stood transfixed. Then she was aware of a blinding
flash, and a snap, as though something gave way; and the woman before
the cabin vanished, and the cabin and the tall spruce timber, and the
jagged sky-line, and Li Wan saw another woman, in the shine of another
sun, brushing great masses of black hair, and singing as she brushed. And
Li Wan heard the words of the song, and understood, and was a child
again. She was smitten with a vision, wherein all the troublesome dreams
merged and became one, and shapes and shadows took up their
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accustomed round, and all was clear and plain and real. Many pictures
jostled past, strange scenes, and trees, and flowers, and people; and she
saw them and knew them all.
“When you were a little bird, a little moose-bird,” Canim said, his eyes
upon her and burning into her.
“When I was a little moose-bird,” she whispered, so faint and low he
scarcely heard. And she knew she lied, as she bent her head to the strap
and took the swing of the trail.
And such was the strangeness of it, the real now became unreal. The mile
tramp and the pitching of camp by the edge of the stream seemed like a
passage in a nightmare. She cooked the meat, fed the dogs, and unlashed
the packs as in a dream, and it was not until Canim began to sketch his
next wandering that she became herself again.
“The Klondike runs into the Yukon,” he was saying; “a mighty river,
mightier than the Mackenzie, of which you know. So we go, you and I,
down to Fort o’ Yukon. With dogs, in time of winter, it is twenty sleeps.
Then we follow the Yukon away into the west—one hundred sleeps, two
hundred—I have never heard. It is very far. And then we come to the sea.
You know nothing of the sea, so let me tell you. As the lake is to the
island, so the sea is to the land; all the rivers run to it, and it is without
end. I have seen it at Hudson Bay; I have yet to see * in Alaska. And then
we may take a great canoe upon the sea, you and I, Li Wan, or we may
follow the land into the south many a hundred sleeps. And after that I do
not know, save that I am Canim, the Canoe, wanderer and far-journeyer
over the earth!”
She sat and listened, and fear ate into her heart as she pondered over this
plunge into the illimitable wilderness. “It is a weary way,” was all she
said, head bowed on knee in resignation.
Then it was a splendid thought came to her, and at the wonder of it she
was all aglow. She went down to the stream and washed the dried clay
from her face. When the ripples died away, she stared long at her mirrored
features; but sun and weather-beat had done their work, and, what of
roughness and bronze, her skin was not soft and dimpled as a child’s. But
the thought was still splendid and the glow unabated as she crept in beside
her husband under the sleeping-robe.
She lay awake, staring up at the blue of the sky and waiting for Canim to
sink into the first deep sleep. When this came about, she wormed slowly
and carefully away, tucked the robe around him, and stood up. At her
second step, Bash growled savagely. She whispered persuasively to him
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and glanced at the man. Canim was snoring profoundly. Then she turned,
and with swift, noiseless feet sped up the back trail.
Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck was just preparing for bed. Bored by the duties
put upon her by society, her wealth, and widowed blessedness, she had
journeyed into the Northland and gone to housekeeping in a cosy cabin on
the edge of the diggings. Here, aided and abetted by her friend and
companion, Myrtle Giddings, she played at living close to the soil, and
cultivated the primitive with refined abandon.
She strove to get away from the generations of culture and parlor
selection, and sought the earth-grip her ancestors had forfeited. Likewise
she induced mental states which she fondly believed to approximate those
of the stone-folk, and just now, as she put up her hair for the pillow, she
was indulging her fancy with a Paleolithic wooing. The de- tails consisted
principally of cave-dwellings and cracked marrow-bones, intersprinkled
with fierce carnivora, hairy mammoths, and combats with rude flaked
knives of flint; but the sensations were delicious. And as Evelyn Van
Wyck fled through the sombre forest aisles before the too arduous
advances of her slant-browed, skin-clad wooer, the door of the cabin
opened, without the courtesy of a knock, and a skin-clad woman, savage
and primitive, came in.
“Mercy!”
With a leap that would have done credit to a cave-woman, Miss Giddings
landed in safety behind the table. But Mrs. Van Wyck held her ground.
She noticed that the intruder was laboring under a strong excitement, and
cast a swift glance backward to assure herself that the way was clear to the
bunk, where the big Colt’s revolver lay beneath a pillow.
“Greeting, O Woman of the Wondrous Hair,” said Li Wan.
But she said it in her own tongue, the tongue spoken in but a little corner
of the earth, and the women did not understand.
“Shall I go for help?” Miss Giddings quavered.
“The poor creature is harmless, I think,” Mrs. Van Wyck replied. “And
just look at her skin-clothes, ragged and trail-worn and all that. They are
certainly unique. I shall buy them for my collection. Get my sack, Myrtle,
please, and set up the scales.”
Li Wan followed the shaping of the lips, but the words were unintelligible,
and then, and for the first time, she realized, in a moment of suspense and
indecision, that there was no medium of communication between them.
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And at the passion of her dumbness she cried out, with arms stretched
wide apart, “O Woman, thou art sister of mine!”
The tears coursed down her cheeks as she yearned toward them, and the
break in her voice carried the sorrow she could not utter. But Miss
Giddings was trembling, and even Mrs. Van Wyck was disturbed.
“I would live as you live. Thy ways are my ways, and our ways be one.
My husband is Canim, the Canoe, and he is big and strange, and I am
afraid. His trail is all the world and never ends, and I am weary. My
mother was like you, and her hair was as shine, and her eyes. And life was
soft to me then, and the sun warm.”
She knelt humbly, and bent her head at Mrs. Van Wyck’s feet. But Mrs.
Van Wyck drew away, frightened at her vehemence.
Li Wan stood up, panting for speech. Her dumb lips could not articulate