CHAPTER IV
"GRANGE'S ANDREE."
On the next morning Dick went to church. It was not the solemnity of his late contact with death, nor the knowledge that O'Hara lay in the Roman Catholic chapel with lights at his head and feet, that disturbed him. But after he had slept and breakfasted and given in the written matter concerning that day's work to Tempest, he looked from the bunk-room window and heard the English church-bell ring, and saw a girl go by with a long coat of warm-coloured fur and copper-red hair that gleamed once under her cap. And Dick rushed himself into his outer clothes and followed her. For the flutter of a woman's dress was always a flag that blew for him, and his mind had not forgotten the dead man and the broken sled that attested to his haste to see Grange's Andree.
The church was little and bare, with a few staring Sunday-school texts on the wall. The big black stove-funnel ran its hot length down the aisle, and a handful of derelicts had drifted in for warmth, as the vagrants do in continental churches. The preacher was a young, shy man from the English Mission on the other side of Grey Wolf; Forbes, the English boy in Revillons, played the harmonium; and, scattered here and there along the funnel-line, were the half-score trader's wives and families which were all that Grey Wolf could spare to God on Sundays.
Dick felt rather than heard the little flutter caused by his entrance. It amused him, for he had no belief that the religion of the world went very deep. He chose a seat behind the girl in the long fur coat, and bent his head idly to the prayer which followed. But under his hand he was noting the thick coils of hair and the lobe of the small ear close-set to the head. The artistic temperament was strong in him, and if he had not twisted his life
70
