XIII
The stranger's voice was deep and full, so far-carrying, so masterful, that it might have been the articulation of the raw elements among which he lived, rather than the utterance of human vocal chords. It held all his listeners; it wakened Lenore from the apathy brought by cold and exposure. They had wondered, at first, that a member of the white race should make his home on this remote and desolate isle, but after they had heard his voice they knew that this was his fitting environment. If any man's home should be here, in this lost and snowy desert, here was the man.
The background of the North was reflected in his voice. It was as if he had caught its tone from the sea and the wild, through long acquaintance with them. It was commanding, passionate, and yet, to a man of rare sensitiveness, it would have had an unmistakable quality of beauty; at least, something that is like beauty and which can be heard in many of Nature's voices: the chant of the wolf pack on the ridge, or even certain sounds of beating waves. The explanation was simply that he had lived so long in the North, he was so intrinsically its child in nature and temperament, that it had begun to mold him after its own raw forces. The fact that his voice had a deeply sardonic note was wholly in character. The North, too, has a cruel, grim humor that breaks men's hearts.
His accent was plainly not that of an American. He had not been born to the English tongue; very plainly he had learned it, thoroughly and laboriously. His own tongue still echoed faintly in the way he mouthed some of his vowels, and in a distinct purring note, as of a giant cat, in his softer sounds.
Ned observed these things more in an inner mind, rather than with his conscious intelligence. Outwardly he was simply listening to what the man said. The note of dimness and unreality was wholly gone now. The voice was indescribably vivid; the man himself was compellingly vivid too. It was no longer to be wondered at that he had appeared of such gigantic proportions when they had seen him across the snow. In reality he was a giant of a man, about six feet and a half in height, huge of body, mighty of arm and limb, weighing, stripped down to muscle and sinew, practically three hundred pounds. Beside him, Knutsen no longer gave the image of strength.
Even in his own city, surrounded by the civilization that he loved, Ned couldn't have passed this man by with a casual glance. In the first place there is something irresistibly compelling about mere physical strength. The strength of this man beside the sea seemed resistless. It was to be seen in his lithe motions; his great, long-fingered, big-knuckled hands; in the lurch of his shoulders; in his great thighs and long, powerful arms. He was plainly, as far as age went, at the apex of his strength,—not over forty-one, not less than thirty-eight. He drew up the boat with one hand, reaching the other to help Lenore out on to the shore.
It came about, because he reached it toward Lenore, that Ned noticed his hand before ever he really took time to study his face. It was a mighty, muscular hand,—a reaching, clasping, clenching, killing hand. It crushed the lives from things that its owner didn't like. On the back and extending almost to the great, purple nails was blond, coarse hair.
But it wasn't mere brute strength that made him the compelling personality that he was. There was also the strength of an iron purpose, a self-confidence gained by battle with and conquest of the raw forces of his island home. Here was a man who knew no law but his own. And he was as remorseless as the snow that sifted down upon him.
If Lenore's thought processes had been the same as when she had left her city home, she would have been stirred to envy by his garb. There was little about him that suggested intercourse with the outside world. He was dressed from head to foot in furs and skins of the most rare and beautiful kinds. His jacket and trousers seemed to be of lynx, his cap was unmistakably silver fox. But it came about that neither she nor Ned did more than casually notice his garb: both were held and darkly fascinated by the great, bearded face.
The blond hair grew in a great mat about his lips and jowls. His nose was straight, his eyebrows heavy, all his features remarkably even and well-proportioned. But none of these lesser features could be noticed because of the compelling attraction of his gray, vivid eyes.
Ned didn't know why he was startled, so carried out of himself when he looked at them. In the first place they were the index of what was once, and perhaps still, a lively and penetrating intelligence. This island man, however mad he might be, was not a mere physical hulk,—an ox with dull nerves and stupid brain. The vivid orbs indicated a nervous system that was highly developed and sensitive, though heaven knew what slant, what paths from the normal, the development took. They were not the eyes of a man blind to beauty, dull to art. He was likely fully sensitive to the dreadful, eerie beauty of his own northern home; if anything, it got home to him too deeply and invoked in him its own terrible mood. They were sardonic eyes too,—the eyes of a man who, secure in his own strength, knew men's weaknesses and knew how to make use of them.
Yet none of these traits got down to the real soul of the man. They didn't even explain the wild and piercing glitter in the gray orbs. Whatever his creed was, he was a fanatic in it. An inhuman zeal marked every word, every glance. There is a proper balance to maintain in life, a quietude, most of all a temperance in all things; and to lose it means to pass beyond the pale. This island man was irremediably steeped in some ghastly philosophy of his own; a dreadful code of life outside the laws of heaven and earth. Some evil disease, not named in any work on medicine, had distilled its dire toxin into his heart.
There is no law of God or man north of sixty-three,—and the thing held good with him. But there is devil's law; and it was the law on which his life was bent.
It was the most evil, the most terrible face that any one of these four had ever seen. The art that touched him was never true art, the art of the soul and the heart, but something diseased, something uncanny and diabolical, beyond the pale of life. His genius was an evil genius: they saw it in every motion, in every line of his wicked face.
There was no kindly warmth, no sympathy, no human understanding either in his voice or his face. Plainly he was as remorseless as the remorseless land in which he lived. Now, as they looked, his hairy hands might have been the rending paws of a beast.
Perhaps it was madness, perhaps some weird abnormality that only a great psychologist could trace, perhaps merely wickedness without redemption, but whatever the nature of the disease that was upon him it had had a ghastly and inhuman influence. The heart in his breast had lost the high, human attributes of mercy and sympathy. They knew in one glance that here was a man that knew no restraints other than those prompted by his own desires. In him the self-will and resolution that carries so many men into power or crime was developed to the nth power; he was a fitting child of the savage powers of nature among which he lived.
“Pardon me for not making myself known sooner,” he began in his deep, sardonic voice. “My name is Doomsdorf—trapper, and seemingly owner of this island. At least I'm the only living man on it, except yourselves.” His speech, though careless and queerly accented, had no mark of ignorance or ill-breeding. “I told you the island's name—believe me, it fits it perfectly. Welcome to it”
Ned straightened, white-faced. “Mr. Doomsdorf, these girls are chilled through—one of them is near to collapse from exposure. Will you save that till later and help me get them to a fire?”
For all the creeping terror that was possessing his veins, Ned made a brave effort to hold his voice steady. The man looked down at him, his lip curling. “Pardon my negligence,” he replied easily. “Of course she isn't used to the cold yet—but that will come in time.” He bowed slightly to the shivering girl on the shore. “If you follow my tracks up to the wood, you'll find my shack—and there's a fire in the stove.” He looked familiarly into her face. “You're not really cold, you know—you just think you are. Walk fast, and it will warm you up.”
Ned bent, seized an armful of blankets from the boat, then stepped to Lenore's side. “The captain will help you, Miss Gilbert,” he said to Bess. Then he and the golden-haired girl he loved started together through the six-inch snowfall toward the woods. Bess, stricken and appalled, but yet not knowing which way to turn, took the trail behind them. But Knutsen still waited on the shore, beside the boat.
He came of a strong breed, and he was known in his own world as a strong man. It was part of the teaching of that world, and always the instinct of such men as he to look fate in the face, never to evade it, never to seek shelter in false hope. He knew the world better than any of the three who had come with him; the menace that they sensed but dimly but which dismayed and oppressed them was only too real to him. Even now, out of his sight, Ned was trying to make himself believe that the man was likely but a simple trapper, distorted into a demon by the delirium brought on by the dreadful night just passed; but Knutsen made no such at tempt. He saw in Doomsdorf a perfect embodiment of the utter ruthlessness and brutality that the Far North sometimes bestows on its sons.
Knutsen knew this north country. He knew of what it was capable,—the queer, uncanny quirks that it put in the souls of men. Doomsdorf, incredible to Ned and Bess, was wholly plausible to him. He feared him to the depths of his heart, yet in some measure, at least, these three were in his charge, and if worst came to worst, he must stand between them and this island devil with his own life. He had stayed on the shore after the others had gone so that he might find out the truth.
He was not long in learning. Through some innate, vague, almost inexplicable desire to shelter his three charges and to spare them the truth, he wanted to wait until all three of them had disappeared in the wood; but even this was denied him. Lenore and Ned, it is true, had already vanished into the patch of forest; but Bess seemed to be walking slowly, waiting for him. Doomsdorf was bent, now, unloading the stores and remaining blankets from the canoe; but suddenly, with one motion, he showed Knutsen where he stood.
With one great lurch of his shoulders he turned over the empty boat and shoved it off into the sea. The first wave, catching it, drove it out of reach. “You won't need that again,” he said.
With a half-uttered, sobbing gasp that no man had heard from his lips before, Knutsen sprang to rescue it. It was the greatest error of his life. Even he did not realize the full might and remorselessness of the foe that opposed him, or he would never have wasted precious seconds, put himself at a disadvantage by entering the water, in trying to retrieve the boat. He would have struck instantly, in one absolute, desperate attempt to wipe the danger forever from his path. But in the instant of need, his brain did not work true. He could not exclude from his thought the disastrous fallacy that all hope, all chances to escape from hell lay only in this flimsy craft, floating a few feet from him in shallow water.
In an instant he had seized it, and standing hip-deep in the icy water, he turned to face the blond man on the shore. The latter roared once with savage mirth, a sound that carried far abroad the snowy desolation; then he sobered, watching with glittering eyes.
“Let it go,” he ordered simply. His right arm lifted slowly, as if in inadvertence, and rested almost limp across his breast. His blond beard hid the contemptuous curl of his lips.
“Damn you, I won't!” Knutsen answered. “You can't keep us here”
“Let it go, I say. You are the one that's damned. And you fool, you don't know the words that are written over the gates of the hell you've come to—'Abandon hope, ye who enter here!' You and your crowd will never leave this island till you die!”
Knutsen's hand moved toward his hip. In the days of the gun fights, in the old North, it had never moved more swiftly. In this second of need he had remembered his pistol.
But he remembered it too late. And his hand, though fast, was infinitely slow. The great arm that lay across Doomsdorf's breast suddenly flashed out and up. The blue steel of a revolver barrel streaked in the air, and a shot cracked over the sea.
Knutsen was already loosed from the bonds that held him. Deliverance had come quickly. His face, black before with wrath, grew blank; and for a long instant he groped impotently, open hands reaching. But the lead had gone straight home; and there was no need of a second shot. The late captain of the Charon swayed, then pitched forward into the gray waters.