Books: Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police
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James Oliver Curwood >> Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police
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11 Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police
by James Oliver Curwood
New York 1911
Philip Steele
Chapter I. The Hyacinth Letter
Philip Steele's pencil drove steadily over the paper, as if the mere
writing of a letter he might never mail in some way lessened the
loneliness.
The wind is blowing a furious gale outside. From off the lake come
volleys of sleet, like shot from guns, and all the wild demons of this
black night in the wilderness seem bent on tearing apart the huge
end-locked logs that form my cabin home. In truth, it is a terrible
night to be afar from human companionship, with naught but this roaring
desolation about and the air above filled with screeching terrors. Even
through thick log walls I can hear the surf roaring among the rocks and
beating the white driftwood like a thousand battering-rams, almost at my
door. It is a night to make one shiver, and in the lulls of the storm
the tall pines above me whistle and wail mournfully as they straighten
their twisted heads after the blasts.
To-morrow this will be a desolation of snow. There will be snow from
here to Hudson's Bay, from the Bay to the Arctic, and where now there is
all this fury and strife of wind and sleet there will be unending
quiet--the stillness which breeds our tongueless people of the North.
But this is small comfort for tonight. Yesterday I caught a little mouse
in my flour and killed him. I am sorry now, for surely all this trouble
and thunder in the night would have driven him out from his home in the
wall to keep me company.
It would not be so bad if it were not for the skull. Three times in the
last half-hour I have started to take it down from its shelf over my
crude stone fireplace, where pine logs are blazing. But each time I have
fallen back, shivering, into the bed-like chair I have made for myself
out of saplings and caribou skin. It is a human skull. Only a short time
ago it was a living man, with a voice, and eyes, and brain--and that is
what makes me uncomfortable. If it were an old skull, it would be
different. But it is a new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is
life lurking in the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the
pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in
the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old
passion, stirred into spirit life by the very madness of this night. A
hundred times I have been sorry that I kept the thing, but never more so
than now.
How the wind howls and the pines screech above me! A pailful of snow,
plunging down my chimney, sends the chills up my spine as if it were the
very devil himself, and the steam of it surges out and upward and hides
the skull. It is absurd to go to bed, to make an effort to sleep, for I
know what my dreams would be. To-night they would be filled with this
skull--and with visions of a face, a woman's face--
Thus far had Steele written, when with a nervous laugh he sprang from
his chair, and with something that sounded very near to an oath, in the
wild tumult of the storm, crumpled the paper in his hand and flung it
among the blazing logs he had described but a few moments before.
"Confound it, this will never do!" he exclaimed, falling into his own
peculiar habit of communing with himself. "I say it won't do, Phil
Steele; deuce take it if it will! You're getting nervous, sentimental,
almost homesick. Ugh, what a beast of a night!"
He turned to the rude stone fireplace again as another blast of snow
plunged down the chimney.
"Wish I'd built a fire in the stove instead of there," he went on,
filling his pipe. "Thought it would be a little more cheerful, you know.
Lord preserve us, listen to that!"
He began walking up and down the hewn log floor of the cabin, his hands
deep in his pockets, puffing out voluminous clouds of smoke. It was not
often that Philip Steele's face was unpleasant to look upon, but
to-night it wore anything but its natural good humor. It was a strong,
thin face, set off by a square jaw, and with clear, steel-gray eyes in
which just now there shone a strange glitter, as they rested for a
moment upon the white skull over the fire. From his scrutiny of the
skull Steele turned to a rough board table, lighted by a twisted bit of
cotton cloth, three-quarters submerged in a shallow tin of caribou
grease. In the dim light of this improvised lamp there were two letters,
opened and soiled, which an Indian had brought up to him from Nelson
House the day before. One of them was short and to the point. It was an
official note from headquarters ordering him to join a certain Buck Nome
at Lac Bain, a hundred miles farther north.
It was the second letter which Steele took in his hands for the
twentieth time since it had come to him here, three hundred miles into
the wilderness. There were half-a-dozen pages of it, written in a
woman's hand, and from it there rose to his nostrils the faint, sweet
perfume of hyacinth. It was this odor that troubled him--that had
troubled him since yesterday, and that made him restless and almost
homesick to-night. It took him back to things--to the days of not so
very long ago when he had been a part of the life from which the letter
came, and when the world had seemed to hold for him all that one could
wish. In a retrospective flash there passed before him a vision of those
days, when he, Mr. Philip Steele, son of a multimillionaire banker, was
one of the favored few in the social life of a great city; when
fashionable clubs opened their doors to him, and beautiful women smiled
upon him, and when, among others, this girl of the hyacinth letter held
out to him the tempting lure of her heart. Her heart? Or was it the
tempting of his own wealth? Steele laughed, and his strong white teeth
gleamed in a half-contemptuous smile as he turned again toward the fire.
He sat down, with the letter still in his hands, and thought of some of
those others whom he had known. What had become of Jack Moody, he
wondered--the good old Jack of his college days, who had loved this girl
of the hyacinth with the whole of his big, honest heart, but who hadn't
been given half a show because of his poverty? And where was Whittemore,
the young broker whose hopes had fallen with his own financial ruin; and
Fordney, who would have cut off ten years of his life for her--and
half-a-dozen others he might name?
Her heart! Steele laughed softly as he lifted the letter so that the
sweet perfume of it came to him more strongly. How she had tempted him
for a time! Almost--that night of the Hawkins' ball--he had surrendered
to her. He half-closed his eyes, and as the logs crackled in the
fireplace and the wind roared outside, he saw her again as he had seen
her that night--gloriously beautiful; memory of the witchery of her
voice, her hair, her eyes firing his blood like strong wine. And this
beauty might have been for him, was still his, if he chose. A word from
out of the wilderness, a few lines that he might write to-night--
With a sudden jerk Steele sat bolt upright. One after another he
crumpled the sheets of paper in his hand and tossed all but the
signature page into the fire. The last sheet he kept, studied it for a
little--as if her name were the answer to a problem--then laid it aside.
For a few moments there remained still the haunting sweetness of the
hyacinth. When it was gone, he gave a last searching sniff, rose to his
feet with a laugh in which there was some return of his old spirit, hid
that final page of her letter in his traveling kit and proceeded to
refill his pipe.
More than once Philip Steele had told himself that he was born a century
or two after his time. He had admitted this much to a few of his
friends, and they had laughed at him. One evening he had opened his
heart a little to the girl of the hyacinth letter, and after that she
had called him eccentric. Within himself he knew that he was unlike
other men, that the blood in him was calling back to almost forgotten
generations, when strong hearts and steady hands counted for manhood
rather than stocks and bonds, and when romance and adventure were not
quite dead. At college he took civil engineering, because it seemed to
him to breathe the spirit of outdoors; and when he had finished he
incurred the wrath of those at home by burying himself for a whole year
with a surveying expedition in Central America.
It was this expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele. He
came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an
Aztec--a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which
he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father's
millions as though they had never been. He possessed a fortune in his
own right, but as yet he had found no use for the income that was piling
up. A second expedition, this time to Brazil, and then he came back--to
meet the girl of the hyacinth letter. And after that, after he had
broken from the bondage which held Moody, and Fordney, and Whittemore,
he went back to his many adventures.
It was the North that held him. In the unending desolations of snow and
forest and plain, between Hudson's Bay and the wild country of the
Athabasca, he found the few people and the mystery and romance which
carried him back, and linked him to the dust-covered generations he had
lost. One day a slender, athletically built young man enlisted at Regina
for service in the Northwest Mounted Police. Within six months he had
made several records for himself, and succeeded in having himself
detailed to service in the extreme North, where man-hunting became the
thrilling game of One against One in an empty and voiceless world. And
no one, not even the girl of the hyacinth letter, would have dreamed
that the man who was officially listed as "Private Phil Steele, of the
N.W.M.P.," was Philip Steele, millionaire and gentleman adventurer.
None appreciated the humor of this fact more than Steele himself, and he
fell again into his wholesome laugh as he placed a fresh pine log on the
fire, wondering what his aristocratic friends--and especially the girl
of the hyacinth letter--would say if they could see him and his
environment just at the present moment. In a slow, chuckling survey he
took in the heavy German socks which he had hung to dry close to the
fire; his worn shoe-packs, shining in a thick coat of caribou grease,
and his single suit of steaming underwear that he had washed after
supper, and which hung suspended from the ceiling, looking for all the
world, in the half dusk of the cabin, like a very thin and headless man.
In this gloom, indeed, but one thing shone out white and distinct--the
skull on the little shelf above the fire. As his eyes rested on it,
Steele's lips tightened and his face grew dark. With a sudden movement
he reached up and took it in his hands, holding it for a moment so that
the light from the fire flashed full upon it. In the left side, on a
line with the eyeless socket and above the ear, was a hole as large as a
small egg.
"So I'm ordered up to join Nome, the man who did this, eh?" he muttered,
fingering the ragged edge. "I could kill him for what happened down
there at Nelson House, M'sieur Janette. Some day--I may."
He balanced the skull on his finger tips, level with his chin.
"Nice sort of a chap for a Hamlet, I am," he went on, whimsically. "I
believe I'll chuck you into the fire, M'sieur Janette. You're getting on
my nerves."
He stopped suddenly and lowered the skull to the table.
"No, I won't burn you," he continued, "I've brought you this far and
I'll pack you up to Lac Bain with me. Some morning I'll give you to
Bucky Nome for breakfast. And then, M'sieur--then we shall see what we
shall see."
Later that night he wrote a few words on a slip of paper and tacked the
paper to the inside of his door. To any who might follow in his
footsteps it conveyed this information and advice:
NOTICE!
This cabin and what's in it are quasheed by me. Fill your gizzard but
not your pockets.
Steele, Northwest Mounted.
Chapter II. A Face Out Of The Night
Steele came up to the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Lac Bain on the
seventh day after the big storm, and Breed, the factor, confided two
important bits of information to him while he was thawing out before the
big box-stove in the company's deserted and supply-stripped store. The
first was that a certain Colonel Becker and his wife had left Fort
Churchill, on Hudson's Bay, to make a visit at Lac Bain; the second,
that Buck Nome had gone westward a week before and had not returned.
Breed was worried, not over Nome's prolonged absence, but over the
anticipated arrival of the other two. According to the letter which had
come to him from the Churchill factor. Colonel Becker and his wife had
come over on the last supply ship from London, and the colonel was a
high official in the company's service. Also, he was an old gentleman.
Ostensibly he had no business at Lac Bain, but was merely on a vacation,
and wished to see a bit of real life in the wilderness.
Breed's grizzled face was miserable.
"Why don't they send 'em down to York Factory or Nelson House?" he
demanded of Steele. "They've got duck feathers, three women, and a
civilized factor at the Nelson, and there ain't any of 'em here--not
even a woman!"
Steele shrugged his shoulders as Breed mentioned the three women at
Nelson.
"There are only two women there now," he replied. "Since a certain Bucky
Nome passed that way, one of them has gone into the South."
"Well, two, then," said Breed, who had not caught the flash of fire in
the other's eyes. "But I tell you there ain't a one here, Steele, not
even an Indian--and that dirty Cree, Jack, is doing the cooking. Blessed
Saints, I caught him mixing biscuit dough in the wash basin the other
day, and I've been eating those biscuits ever since our people went out
to their traplines! There's you, and Nome, two Crees, a 'half' and
myself--and that's every soul there'll be at Lac Bain until the
mid-winter run of fur. Now, what in Heaven's name is the poor old Mrs.
Colonel going to do?"
"Got a bed for her?"
"A bunk--hard as nails!"
"Good grub?"
"Rotten!" groaned the factor. "Every trapper's son of them took out big
supplies this fall and we're stripped. Beans, flour, sugar'n'prunes--and
caribou until I feel like turning inside out every time I smell it. I'd
give a month's commission for a pound of pork. Look here! If this letter
ain't 'quality' you can cut me into jiggers. Bet the Mrs. Colonel wrote
it for her hubby."
From an inside pocket Breed drew forth a square white envelope with a
broken seal of red wax, and from it extracted a folded sheet of
cream-tinted paper. Scarcely had Steele taken the note in his hands when
a quick thrill passed through him. Before he had read the first line he
was conscious again of that haunting sweetness in the air he
breathed--the perfume of hyacinth. There was not only this perfume, but
the same paper, the same delicately pretty writing of the letter he had
burned more than a week before. He made no effort to suppress the
exclamation of astonishment that broke from his lips. Breed was staring
at him when he lifted his eyes.
"This is a mighty strange coincidence, Breed," he said, regaining his
composure. "I could almost swear that I know this writing, and yet of
course such a thing is impossible. Still, it's mighty queer. Will you
let me keep the letter until to-night? I'd like to take it over to the
cabin and compare it--"
"Needn't return it at all," interrupted the factor. "Hope you find
something interesting to tell me at supper--five sharp. It will be a
blessing if you know 'em."
Ten minutes later Steele was in the little cabin which he and Nome
occupied while at Lac Bain. Jack, the Cree, had built a rousing fire in
the long sheet-iron stove, and as Steele opened its furnace-like door, a
flood of light poured out into the gathering gloom of early evening.
Drawing a chair full into the light, he again opened the letter. Line
for line and word for word he scrutinized the writing, and with each
breath that he drew he found himself more deeply thrilled by a curious
mental excitement which it was impossible for him to explain. According
to the letter. Colonel and Mrs. Becker had arrived at Churchill aboard
the London ship a little over a month previously. He remembered that the
date on the letter from the girl was six weeks old. At the time it was
written, Colonel Becker and his wife were either in London or Liverpool,
or crossing the Atlantic. No matter how similar the two letters appeared
to him, he realized that, under the circumstances, the same person could
not have written them both. For many minutes he sat back in his chair,
with his eyes half-closed, absorbing the comforting heat of the fire.
Again the old vision returned to him. In a subconscious sort of way he
found himself fighting against it, as he had struggled a score of times
to throw off its presence, since the girl's letter had come to him. And
this time, as before, his effort was futile. He saw her again--and
always as on that night of the Hawkins' ball, eyes and lips smiling at
him, the light shining gloriously in the deep red gold of her hair.
With an effort Steele aroused himself and looked at his watch. It was a
quarter of five. He stooped to close the stove door, and stopped
suddenly, his hand reaching out, head and shoulders hunched over. Across
his knee, shining in the firelight, like a thread of spun gold, lay a
single filament of a woman's hair.
He rose slowly, holding the hair between him and the light. His fingers
trembled, his breath came quickly. The hair had fallen upon his knee
from the letter--or the envelope, and it was wonderfully like HER hair!
From the direction of the factor's quarters came the deep bellowing of
Breed's moose-horn, calling him to supper. Before he responded to it,
Steele wound the silken thread of gold about his ringer, then placed it
carefully among the papers and cards which he carried in his leather
wallet. His face was flushed when he joined the factor. Not since the
night at the Hawkins' ball, when he had felt the touch of a beautiful
woman's hands, the warmth of her breath, the soft sweep of her hair
against his lips as he had leaned over her in his half-surrender, had
thought of woman stirred him as he felt himself stirred now. He was glad
that Breed was too much absorbed in his own troubles to observe any
possible change in himself or to ask questions about the letter.
"I tell you, it may mean the short birch for me, Steele," said the
factor gloomily. "Lac Bain is just now the emptiest, most
fallen-to-pieces, unbusiness-like post between the Athabasca and the
Bay. We've had two bad seasons running, and everything has gone wrong.
Colonel Becker is a big one with the company. Ain't no doubt about that,
and ten to one he'll think it's a new man that's wanted here."
"Nonsense!" exclaimed Steele. A sudden flash shot into his face as he
looked hard at Breed. "See here, how would you like to have me go out to
meet them?" he asked. "Sort of a welcoming committee of one, you know.
Before they got here I could casually give 'em to understand what Lac
Bain has been up against during the last two seasons."
Breed's face brightened in an instant.
"That might save us, Steele. Will you do it?"
"With pleasure."
Philip was conscious of an increasing warmth in his face as he bent over
his plate. "You're sure--they're elderly people?" he asked.
"That is what MacVeigh wrote me from Churchill; at least he said the
colonel was an old man."
"And his wife?"
"Has got her nerve," growled Breed irreverently. "It wouldn't be so bad
if it was only the colonel. But an old woman--ugh! What he doesn't think
of she'll remind him of, you can depend on that."
Steele thought of his mother, who looked at things through a magnifying
lorgnette, and laughed a little cheerlessly.
"I'll go out and meet them, anyway," he comforted. "Have Jack fix me up
for the hike in the morning, Breed. I'll start after breakfast."
He was glad when supper was over and he was back in his own cabin
smoking his pipe. It was almost with a feeling of shame that he took the
golden hair from his wallet and held it once more so that it shone
before his eyes in the firelight.
"You're crazy, Phil Steele," he assured himself. "You're an unalloyed
idiot. What the deuce has Colonel Becker's wife got to do with you--even
if she has golden hair and uses cream-tinted paper soaked in hyacinth?
Confound it--there!" and he released the shining hair from his fingers
so that the air currents sent it floating back into the deeper gloom of
the cabin.
It was midnight before he went to bed. He was up with the first cold
gray of dawn. All that day he strode steadily eastward on snowshoes,
over the company's trail to the bay. Two hours before dusk he put up his
light tent, gathered balsam for a bed, and built a fire of dry spruce
against the face of a huge rock in front of his shelter. It was still
light when he wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down on the balsam,
with his feet stretched out to the reflected heat of the big rock. It
seemed to Steele that there was an unnatural stillness in the air, as
the night thickened beyond the rim of firelight, and, as the gloom grew
still deeper, blotting out his vision in inky blackness, there crept
over him slowly a feeling of loneliness. It was a new sensation to
Steele, and he shivered as he sat up and faced the fire. It was this
same quiet, this same unending mystery of voiceless desolation that had
won him to the North. Until to-night he had loved it. But now there was
something oppressive about it, something that made him strain his eyes
to see beyond the rock and the fire, and set his ears in tense listening
for sounds which did not exist. He knew that in this hour he was longing
for companionship--not that of Breed, nor of men with whom he hunted
men, but of men and women whom he had once known and in whose lives he
had played a part--ages ago, it seemed to him. He knew, as he sat with
clenched hands and staring eyes, that chiefly he was longing for a
woman--a woman whose eyes and lips and sunny hair haunted him after
months of forgetfulness, and whose face smiled at him luringly, now,
from out the leaping flashes of fire--tempting him, calling him over a
thousand miles of space. And if he yielded--
The thought sent his nails biting into the flesh of his palms and he
sank back with a curse that held more of misery than blasphemy. Physical
exhaustion rather than desire for sleep closed his eyes, at last, in
half-slumber, and after that the face seemed nearer and more real to
him, until it was close at his side, and was speaking to him. He heard
again the soft, rippling laugh, girlishly sweet, that had fascinated him
at Hawkins' ball; he heard the distant hum and chatter of other voices,
and then one loud and close--that of Chesbro, who had unwittingly
interrupted them, and saved him, just in the nick of time.
Steele moved restlessly; after a moment wriggled to his elbow and looked
toward the fire. He seemed to hear Chesbro's voice again as he awoke,
and a thrill as keen as an electric shock set his nerves tingling when
he heard once more the laughing voice of his dream, hushed and low. In
amazement he sat bolt upright and stared. Was he still dreaming? The
fire was burning brightly and he was aware that he had scarce fallen
into sleep.
A movement--a sound of feet crunching softly in the snow, and a figure
came between him and the fire.
It was a woman.
He choked back the cry that rose to his lips and sat motionless and
without sound. The figure approached a step nearer, peering into the
deep gloom of the tent. He caught the silver glint in the firelight on
heavy fur, the whiteness of a hand touching lightly the flap of his
tent, and then for an instant he saw a face. In that instant he sat as
rigid as if he had stopped the beat of his own life. A pair of dark eyes
laughing in at him, a flash of laughing teeth, a low titter that was
scarce more than a rippling throat-note, and the face was gone, leaving
him still staring into the blank space where it had been.
With a cough to give warning of his wakefulness, Steele flung off his
blanket and drew himself through the low opening of the tent. On the
extreme right of the fire stood a man and woman, warming themselves over
the coals. They straightened from their leaning posture as he appeared.
"This is too bad, too bad, Mr. Steele," exclaimed the man, advancing
quickly. "I was afraid we'd make a blunder and awaken you. We were about
to camp on a mountain back there when we saw your fire and drove on to
it. I'm sorry--"
"Wouldn't have had you miss me for anything," interrupted Steele,
gripping the other's proffered hand. "You see, I'm out from Lac Bain to
meet Colonel and Mrs. Becker, and--" He hesitated purposely, his white
teeth gleaming in the frank smile which made people like him immensely,
from the first.
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