PEACE, PERFECT PEACE

Feeling that on her father's return she could requite the obligation a thousandfold, Evelyn consented to remain with her party as guests of Perdu's Grand Hotel while the shack at Lost Shoe Creek was being made ready for their tenancy.

Perdu, lying on a large lake of the same name, is port of entry, and base of supplies, to the goldfields beyond. Being at that time in the third year of its existence it had a highly developed social and commercial life. For in its initial season a camp is likely to be a bedlam of frenzied maniacs shrieking, Gold, gold, gold! The second season witnesses a slump proportioned to the inflated values of its predecessor. But if it weathers to a third, then some sort of poise is attained, as steady industries develop and existence seeks a normal plane. The fancy-women who flock wherever the nuggets are thickest, now segregate themselves in a secluded quarter of the township; married men send for their families, while the unblessed bachelor whistles "The Girl I Left Behind Me," or pays attention to the schoolteacher. On all sides one sees the effort, sometimes pitiful, always human and worthy, from the harsh matrix of the wilderness to wrest a home. And then follow the petty complexities of a miscalled civilization. To Evelyn's surprise, after the first warm tender of hospitality, she encountered the same restricted social conditions in Perdu that obtain in villages on the "outside," as the world beyond the mountains in northern latitudes is termed. Women left cards on her; heads of rival cliques warned her one against the other; the wife of the principal grocer planned a tea in her honor.

On a brilliant summer morning, without cloud or shadow, mountains and valleys alike lying exposed to a broadside of sun that had been warming to its work since four hours after midnight, Evelyn set out to return the visit of the town surveyor's wife. A short cut through the clustered willow bushes brought her to the back door of their cabin, where she came upon the hostess at her washtubs, while from the doorstep the town surveyor was cleaning his teeth publicly. Wholly unembarrassed, the good people greeted their visitor with cordiality, and conducted her into the living-room, where babies, cot beds and cooking commingled with such observances of decency and taste as a woman of refinement, no matter how overworked, seems somehow generally able to contrive. In point of cultivation, so Evelyn soon discovered, her new acquaintances were fully her equal. Delighted as they professed themselves to be that her stay would be of long duration, yet to the plans she outlined for her projected improvement of the district they showed an almost marked indifference. When she dropped hints about the free library she intended to establish, Mr. Grayson began quite inappositely to brag of having made more money the previous winter by lumbering than in the way of his profession, owing to the fact that "up here, thank God! no one, man or woman, loses caste by honest labor of any sort." When she alluded to the art furniture she thought of importing for her domicile, Mrs. Grayson cautioned her to be very careful of her lamp chimneys, the commonest kind costing fifty cents at local stores, because, so the storekeepers said, of the exorbitant freight rates that prevailed. Also she advised Evelyn to start right in and do her own washing, as the local laundries charged something over four dollars for a dozen simple pieces. When Miss Durant mentioned the theatre she was arranging to have built, the opera troupe with which she already was negotiating for a series of performances to beguile the long Klondike winter, the Graysons merely said, almost with sarcasm, "How nice!" adding that the camp contrived to get up some fair entertainments of its own in the hall over the truckman's stable. Coming to the conclusion that they were jealous lest her advent should undermine the social prestige which, so Hastie had informed her, they enjoyed, Evelyn rose to take her leave and, kindly wishful to put them at their ease, admired the babies, the bearskin rugs, the horns of mountain sheep and goat upon the wall, the view, the two geraniums in pots upon the window-sill; accepted an invitation to a wild-strawberry picnic, offered to teach them bridge, and departed in a glow of self-gratulation at her tact in dealing with the envious and small-minded.

On the hotel piazza she found the minister waiting for her, and with him Scarlett. To the latter she had not spoken since the day of their difference, for such she chose to consider it, in regard to Gelly. True, more than once she had caught sight of him galloping down the road or striding by on some official errand, but never had she lifted a finger to delay him, nor he appeared conscious of her presence.

DEPARTED IN A GLOW OF SELF CONGRATULATION AT HER TACT.

Ignoring his greeting, in high good humor with herself and all the world, Evelyn opened fire. "Mr. Maclane, I wish you would tell that young man he owes me an apology."

Scarlett suppressed a gratified smile. "Mr. Maclane, will ye convey to the speaker that she'll have to prove the debt for me to pay it?"

"Tell him the last time we met he put me in the wrong," said Evelyn, prettily, the glow of her goodness toward the envious Graysons still upon her. "He behaved as though he thought me narrow, contemptible—and the worst is, the shoe pinches, because in a tiny degree I fear it may have been true."

She waited with a charming air of penitence for contradiction, but, to her astonishment, none came.

Instead, "I'm a brute, just," Scarlett remorsefully described himself. "Who am I to hold ye up the looking-glass? I'll never be so rude again."

"Oh"—Miss Durant stiffened perceptibly—"I do not usually find the reflection unbearable to contemplate."

"I've lived so long in the open, in primitive conditions," Scarlett, unmindful of her interruption, went on, "I always blurt out whatever pops into my mind. Well, there's precedent. In Eden, Adam must have called a spade a spade."

"Ah, my young friend, but there's no record of his having called Eve a spade," observed Maclane, with a twinkle in his eye.

"Faith, I'll drop the spade, then," laughed the Irishman, "if she'll let me call her Eve!"

"Tell him," laughed Miss Durant, with heightened color, "that he goes too far."

"Tell her I'd go farther—to any lengths, for her, so long as it didn't take me from her side."

"Tell him he's kissed the blarney-stone."

"Tell her I only practiced on it to keep my hand in till she should come."

"How dare you!" cried Evelyn, feeling that she ought to be very angry.

"Come, come, my children, peace," prescribed Maclane. "Miss Durant, I am here as a petitioner. One of my dear Indians, in fact the sister-in-law of Chilkat Jo, has a baby——"

"Velly damfine Clistian baby!" interpolated the trader, who was sitting on the step near by, whittling out a toy canoe.

"Oh, Joseph!" the minister protested, "when will you learn that a damn baby cannot be a Christian baby—nor a Christian baby a damn baby. We are to baptize the little one this morning," he told Evelyn. "And I am asked to beg you to stand godmother."

"For a heathen unregenerate, miss!" Sarah put her head out of the window just behind the group. "Don't you mix yourself up with that truck!"

"I'm a bit of a heathen nowadays myself." Maclane stopped Chilkat Jo's angry outburst. "My dear Indians have converted me."

"I wonder you aren't afraid of being tried for heresy, sir," commented Sarah, "talking that loose way."

"Perhaps I should be," agreed Maclane, "in the cities across yon mountains. But here they hold us in a charmed circle, and who can escape their spell?" He pointed to the lake, brilliantly ablaze, like a vessel holding wondrous depths of color, in which the snow-capped peaks with their V-shaped crevasses lay mirrored like cameos in turquoise relief. "My Indians—in my civilized days I used to preach hell-fire to them, till they scorned me for it, crying, 'Our children when they die become birds of song. Why, then, should we give them to you Christians to be burned?' Then, again, though I knew him to be a saint, dedicated in Christ's name to the service of his fellow-men, I used to avoid my brother, the Catholic priest, because his doctrines on the surface differed from my own! Again, my Indians taught me, scoffing, 'If Christianity makes enemies of her ministers, why, we want none of it.' Yes, all that I have given the heathen have they requited me a hundredfold, making me a Christian through the Christ I try to show to them!"

"I will do what you ask me only too gladly, Mr. Machine!" cried Evelyn, understanding that this was the good minister's way of making peace between herself and Chilkat Jo. "I shall be proud of my godchild; and I promise it the finest cup from Tiffany's——"

"No, no! No presents, please," enjoined Maclane. "Only kindness, neighborliness, and an appreciation of the heathen virtues. The Sergeant here has consented to be godfather."

"The Sergeant!" involuntarily exclaimed Evelyn.

"Aye! In the short time he has been in charge, he has completely won the hearts of the tribe of Raven and Frog. No baptism complete without him."

"Oh, as a sponsor, I'm painting the town red," admitted the Irishman. "And the Claim has a regular column of feeble-minded puns upon the epidemic. Well, I only hope the Scarlett creepers won't turn to Scarlett runners, in time of battle."

"I will tell Lallah that you consent. Be ready, both, please, when you hear the chapel bell," directed the minister, going to the mission.

Scarlett lingered, but as Evelyn took no notice of him, "Thankee for the pressing invitation," he remarked, drawing up a chair and seating himself beside her. "And are ye beginning to feel acclimated among us savages?"

"Oh, you are doing your best!" Evelyn assured him. "Though I must say, even for the wilderness, the ideas of social distinction seem curiously lax. Why, as his head waiter is off on a spree, Mr. Hastie has offered me the place—three hundred dollars a month and tips!"

"Good pay," commented Scarlett. "Why don't ye take it? I'd ask no better for my own sister, if I had one."

Evelyn tossed her head. "To pass dishes to unwashed barbarians in corduroys who gobble off their knives and drink from their saucers. Even for your own sister," she could not forbear asking, "wouldn't you consider the situation rather primitive?"

"I should, and that's the situation's saving grace," he promptly replied, "since primitive man is woman's best friend, once she makes him realize she will not let him be her enemy."

Against her will, Evelyn looked at the speaker with reluctant admiration, forced to recognize that however ignorant of class distinctions the poor young man might be, his was certainly no ordinary mentality. Accordingly, woman-like, she harked back to personalities, hoping in shallow waters to take him, through his very superiority, at a disadvantage. "Oh, we have nothing to complain of on the score of friendliness," she laughed. "Our matrimonial opportunities seem limited only by the number of single men within proposing radius. No, Sergeant, I am not the belle. That proud position is disputed by Sarah and the plainest orphan, who also is the most muscular, because they frankly tell us, in a land where hired labor is not to be had a man must marry to get some one to cook and wash for him. However, such few score of proposals as have come my way, I honestly can brag, are for myself, since I am not considered a specially useful 'household proposition,' and oddly enough my great wealth seems not to impress these poverty-stricken millionaires in the least degree."

"Oh, I tell ye, in a mining camp one gets down to first principles, or lack of them," commented the soldier. "It's chaos, till man and woman together evolve a paradise."

Evelyn waited, hoping he also would propose to her in order that she might refuse him, not kindly, with the consideration she had shown the other poor victims who had laid their hearts at her feet, but with scathing denunciation of his insolence. Instead of improving his opportunity, however, the soldier rose. "Ye'll bid me to the wedding, Miss Durant?"

"In what capacity—officially, or as a guest?"

"Not as a mourner, that I swear."

"I may decide to elope."

"Impossible! In my bally those that want a marriage license have to come to me."

"I've always had a leaning toward the nobility," remarked Evelyn, rather maliciously. "Are there no men of title in the camp?"

"A handful or so of younger sons," Scarlett informed her, "and a pathetic lot in the main they are. 'Remittance Men,' we call them, because they are on allowance to stay away from home, avowedly that in a new country they may turn over a new leaf, but in reality that their families may be spared the shame of witnessing their final disintegration. Be good to such when ye come across them, Miss Durant, for the sake of what they ought to be, but don't marry them, for the whole lot of them together wouldn't make one decent man."

Evelyn laughed, but her face crimsoned. "Dear, dear! And suppose, after all, you disapprove my choice?"

"Faith, I'll exercise my official prerogative and take ye in charge myself! Meanwhile, I must turn my attention toward yonder suspect." He indicated a person with the deportment of a personage, who, dressed in the height of fashion, was strolling, tourist-wise, kodak in hand, down the village street.

"Why, who can that be?" Evelyn leaned forward with interest.

"That's my own question. He travels under the name of the Count St. Hilaire."

"There's something very familiar about his appearance. I wonder if I mayn't have met him at Newport, or Washington. If so, bring him here that I may renew the acquaintance, Sergeant, please."

"I'll search his title first." Scarlett ran down the veranda steps. "Now look out for trouble," he muttered to himself, seeing the stranger pause opposite a cottage in the Indian quarter, and level his camera at the totem-pole in front of it.

A crowd of angry Indians who had been squatting on mats in the sunshine, making moccasins and weaving baskets, instantly rose and swarmed about him, vehemently protesting in Chinook against this insult to their sacred emblems, Chilkat Jo acting as interpreter.

"Shame, shame, cursed shame to photoglaph the Laven and the Flog!" he cried, alluding to the totem's tribal device. "Velly godam Clistian shame!"

"Hold on!" cried Scarlett, impartially, interposing his tall form between the evidently frightened foreigner and the avenging group.

"Mais—ze Klondike barber-pole—I no steal him; je vous jure, gendarme! I make ze photographie!"

"Yes, but unless you pay them for it to show your good will, the Indians think you are marking them for death," the Sergeant instructed him. "All right, honest Injun," he in turn assured the crowd. "Only sun-picture. Big man pay you big money."

"Why," exclaimed Evelyn's astonished voice at Scarlett's elbow, "it is my courier, Alphonse—he has let his beard grow! That is the kodak he stole from me!"

"SacrÉ papier, ze mademoiselle!" shrieked the man, recognizing her; and off he set as fast as his trembling limbs could carry him, Scarlett, reinforced by the children of the Raven and the Frog, in hot pursuit.

"It's only what you might have expected, miss," remarked Sarah, consolingly, as in mortified silence Evelyn returned to the veranda. "The French is a deceitful nation. They always have to talk in a foreign language so you can't understand 'em."

"It's all right!" Flushed and breathless, Scarlett came up. "He ran plump into Barney's arms. Here's your camera, Miss Durant. Later I'll get you to appear against the Count—just a formality, you know."

"I shall do nothing of the sort!" declared Evelyn loftily. "Instead, you can fine me any amount you please for contempt of court. You doubtless will enjoy doing it! As for the kodak, you can give it back to Alphonse. I shall never touch it again!"

"Miss, you are ungrateful," Sarah reproved her, "and the young man wounded in the fracas!"

"Wounded!" cried Evelyn, in dismay.

"Oh," disclaimed Scarlett, who was shaking his fingers as if to cast a pain from them, "it's nothing. Only in protecting the Count's beauty from an irate populace I gave my wrist a twist."

"Oh, a sprained wrist is nothing to boast of," derided Miss Durant.

"That's why I wasn't boasting of it." Scarlett turned to go.

"Nevertheless"—Evelyn put a detaining hand lightly on his arm—"I took a course in First Aid to the Injured to fit myself for this life, and I know that a sprain ought to be treated with something, for fear something or other should set in. Sarah," she asked in a whisper, "what treatment does one give a sprain?"

"Fermentation," prompted the maid, sagaciously.

"That's it: fomentation! Please, Sarah, go fetch me—whatever one needs for fomentation."

"Believe me, it is not necessary." Scarlett gave his hand another shake. "It soon will be all right."

"Sit here!" Evelyn motioned him, peremptorily, to a chair beside her. "No, on this side. A soldier's first duty should be to obey."

"Ah, well, my arms are ever at your service, even in times of peace." Scarlet leaned back, luxuriously, as she rolled up his sleeve.

"Of course, you understand I should do this for anybody," observed Evelyn, sponging his wrist with the warm water Sarah had provided.

"Of course, ye understand I should fight in defence of anybody's property," he matched her. "'Tis for that I draw my pay."

"Is it tender?" inquired Evelyn, pillowing his hand upon her lap and dabbing it softly with a towel.

"Tender's not half the word for it." The patient turned his face aside. "It's the limit of tenderness, and has to be treated on the homeopathic principle."

"Miss, he makes light of it!" cried Sarah, who, under a harsh exterior, was, by nature, kind. "But his poor brow is simply wrung with anguish." She mopped the beads of perspiration that stifled mirth had brought upon the Sergeant's comely forehead.

"Let us talk of other things to distract him," ordained Evelyn. "Come, Sergeant, tell us all about yourself. Begin at the very beginning."

"Faith, like most babies," he complied, "I began by being the child of my parents."

"Poor but honest folk, no doubt. Go on!"

"They died before my remembrance of them. I infer the honesty and inherit the poverty. I was brought up by an aunt and uncle, who didn't want me. One time when I came home from school for the holidays my aunt just looked up from her novel and remarked, 'Oh, Jerry, how dirty you are!' So I ran away to make my fortune."

"Which consists of something over a dollar a day and your keep."

"And the prospect of a pension for my widow."

"Your widow!" Evelyn dropped the hand she was engaged in bandaging. "I didn't know——"

"Oh, I haven't got one yet," Scarlett hastened to assure her. "But I shall, please God, if I live long enough."

"Sergeant, you are talking nonsense," said Evelyn. "Pain has made you flighty."

"'Way up in the seventh heaven," assented Scarlett. "Don't be so cruel as to call me down."

"There!" Having stuck a final pin in the handkerchief she had bound about the wrist, Evelyn folded the soldier's arm across his breast. "Sarah, go fetch me another sash, will you? I'm going to use this one for a sling."

"Which color shall I get you, miss?" asked the maid, preparing to obey.

Evelyn shrugged her shoulders with indifference. "I don't care—though I should think your own taste would lead you to see that blue goes best with this frock. There, Sergeant"—having made a creditable cradle of the ribbon for the soldier's arm and knotted it behind his neck, she came in front of him and surveyed her work admiringly—"that will do, I think. Now, remember, it must not be unbound for four and twenty hours. Promise! I wish you would stop laughing in that silly way and tell me if it feels all right, really."

"Joyous, beyond words," Scarlett affirmed. "I only wish I were that chap in the mythology with a hundred hands—and every blessed one of them in need of fomentation."

"I suppose you say these inane things to me because you think me incapable of appreciating sense," commented Miss Durant. "Just because all my poor little efforts to do good up here have seemed superfluous. Oh, yes"—she checked the protest that rose to his lips—"you all have been kindness personified, but I do not think you quite understand me," she complained, with the injured quaver of one who at heart knows herself to be understood only too well. "I'm really not such an overbearing, ill-natured girl; only, I acknowledge, a wee bit spoiled. You see, after my mother died, when I was still a very small child, in Colorado, my father sent me to a fashionable school in San Francisco, and there I began to feel that in Colorado we had been quite savage. Then, in my early 'teens I was put at another still more fashionable school in Chicago, where I was made to feel that in San Francisco I had been hopelessly Western. Next, I moved on to an ultra-fashionable school in New York, where it was tacitly impressed on me that in Chicago we had been positively vulgar. After this came a course of Dresden, Vienna, London, Paris, by which I realized that in New York I had been provincial, crude. On my return I felt myself cosmopolitan, a finished product. Yet, in this short space up here you all have made me wonder if, after all, all the time, I have not been a bit of a snob. Yes, you can't contradict me. I know. A thoroughbred would have taken things as she found them—would be at home anywhere, while I——" Having amazed herself far more even than her hearer by this unexpected burst of confidence, Miss Durant amazed herself still more by an unexpected burst of tears.

"Poor child!" Scarlett compassionated her, while liking her thoroughly for her candor. "Dear, dear little Evelyn, it's libelling yourself you are, although it's true, and that's the sweetest part of it. Here, take mine!" As she was hunting, between inconsolable sniffs, for the handkerchief with which she herself had bandaged him, he tendered her his own.

"Oh, the sprain—your wrist!" cried Evelyn, in alarm.

"That's all right," Scarlett reassured her, while drying her eyes with the hand he had removed for the purpose from the sling. "It was the other one that got the twist."

Evelyn drew back. "You mean you dared let me bind up the wrong one?"

"Ye made your own selection," Scarlett reminded her, in tones he vainly tried to render penitent.

"That you did, miss," corroborated Sarah, coming from the hotel with the blue sash and tying it about Evelyn's slender waist.

"Give me back my ribbon, my handkerchief!" demanded Evelyn of Scarlett, furiously.

"Not for four and twenty hours," he answered. "Not even for you would I break a promise to a lady."

"Never, never, never will I speak to you again!" cried Miss Durant.

Just then the chapel bell began to ring merrily, and at the same moment Maclane hurried toward them from the mission, an open hymnal in hand. "Come, my children, we march in, singing," he explained, pointing toward the Indians, who were forming in a procession by the chapel door. "As I am short of hymnals, you and the Sergeant will have to share one, Miss Durant. Hymn 674. 'Peace, Perfect Peace.'"

Evelyn stood still. "I absolutely decline to be associated in any way whatever with Sergeant Scarlett."

"Oh, my children!" remonstrated the minister. "How can we talk of missionizing the heathen when the Gentiles so wrangle among themselves! Ready, please! Fall into line!" Striking up the tune, he led the way.

And, somehow, in despite of her protest, Miss Durant found herself following, side by side with the hated young soldier, sharing the same hymnal, moreover, and joining her sweet voice with his manly one in praise of "Peace, Perfect Peace."

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