The Courage of Marge ODoone | Page 6

gone from his
cheeks, and as he stood facing the door through which David had
disappeared a smouldering fire began to burn far back in his eyes. After
a few moments this fire died out, and his face was gray and haggard as
he sat down again in his corner. His hands unclenched. With a great
sigh his head drooped forward on his chest, and for a long time he sat
thus, his eyes and face lost in shadow. One would not have known that
he was breathing.

CHAPTER II
Half a dozen times that night David had walked from end to end of the
five snowbound coaches that made up the Transcontinental. He

believed that for him it was an act of Providence that had delayed the
train. Otherwise a sleeping car would have been picked up at the next
divisional point, and he would not have unburdened himself to Father
Roland. They would not have sat up until that late hour in the smoking
compartment, and this strange little man of the forest would not have
told him the story of a lonely cabin up on the edge of the Barrens--a
story of strange pathos and human tragedy that had, in some mysterious
way, unsealed his own lips. David had kept to himself the shame and
heartbreak of his own affliction since the day he had been compelled to
tell it, coldly and without visible emotion, to gain his own freedom. He
had meant to keep it to himself always. And of a sudden it had all come
out. He was not sorry. He was glad. He was amazed at the change in
himself. That day had been a terrible day for him. He could not get her
out of his mind. Now a depressing hand seemed to have lifted itself
from his heart. He was quick to understand. His story had not fallen
upon ears eager with sensual curiosity. He had met a man, and from the
soul of that man there had reached out to him the spirit of a deep and
comforting strength. He would have revolted at compassion, and words
of pity would have shamed him. Father Roland had given voice to
neither of these. But the grip of his hand had been like the grip of an
iron man.
In the third coach David sat down in an empty seat. For the first time in
many months there was a thrill of something in his blood which he
could not analyze. What had the Little Missioner meant when, with that
wonderful grip of his knotted hand, he had said, "I've learned how a
man can find himself when he's down and out"? And what had he
meant when he added, "Will you come with me"? Go with him?
Where?
There came a sudden crash of the storm against the window, a
shrieking blast of wind and snow, and David stared into the night. He
could see nothing. It was a black chaos outside. But he could hear. He
could hear the wailing and the moaning of the wind in the trees, and he
almost fancied that it was not darkness alone that shut out his vision,
but the thick walls of the forest.

Was that what Father Roland had meant? Had he asked him to go with
him into that?
His face touched the cold glass. He stared harder. That morning Father
Roland had boarded the train at a wilderness station and had taken a
seat beside him. They had become acquainted. And later the Little
Missioner had told him how those vast forests reached without a break
for hundreds of miles into the mysterious North. He loved them, even
as they lay cold and white outside the windows. There was gladness in
his voice when he had said that he was going back into them. They
were a part of his world--a world of "mystery and savage glory" he had
called it, stretching for a thousand miles to the edge of the Arctic, and
fifteen hundred miles from Hudson's Bay to the western mountains.
And to-night he had said, "Will you come with me?"
David's pulse quickened. A thousand little snow demons beat in his
face to challenge his courage. The wind swept down, as if enraged at
the thought in his mind, and scooped up volley after volley of drifting
snow and hurled them at him. There was only the thin glass between. It
was like the defiance of a living thing. It threatened him. It dared him.
It invited him out like a great bully, with a brawling show of fists. He
had always been more or less pusillanimous in the face of winter. He
disliked cold. He hated snow. But this that beat and shrieked at him
outside the window