第15章

"What a man he is to be sure!" she cried scornfully."And what nonsense is this he writes.With all his men and officers he must come for my husband! What is HE doing? And all the others? It's just his own stupid stubbornness.He always did object to our marriage."The Inspector was silent.Cameron was silent too.His boyish face, for he was but a lad, seemed to have grown old in those few minutes.The Inspector wore an ashamed look, as if detected in a crime.

"And because he is not clever enough to catch this man they must come for my husband to do it for them.He is not a Policeman.He has nothing to do with the Force."And still the Inspector sat silent, as if convicted of both crime and folly.

At length Cameron spoke.

"It is quite impossible, Inspector.I can't do it.You quite see how impossible it is.""Most certainly you can't," eagerly agreed the Inspector."I knew from the first it was a piece of--sheer absurdity--in fact brutal inhumanity.I told the Commissioner so.""It isn't as if I was really needed, you know.The Superintendent's idea is, as you say, quite absurd."The Inspector gravely nodded.

"You don't think for a moment," continued Cameron, "there is any need--any real need I mean--for me to--" Cameron's voice died away.

The Inspector hesitated and cleared his throat."Well--of course, we are desperately short-handed, you know.Every man is overworked.

Every reserve has to be closely patroled.Every trail ought to be watched.Runners are coming in every day.We ought to have a thousand men instead of five hundred, this very minute.Of course one can never tell.The chances are this will all blow over.""Certainly," said Cameron."We've heard these rumors for the past year.""Of course," agreed the Inspector cheerfully.

"But if it does not," asked Mandy, suddenly facing the Inspector, "what then?""If it does not?"

"If it does not?" she insisted.

The Inspector appeared to turn the matter over in his mind.

"Well," he said slowly and thoughtfully, "if it does not there will be a deuce of an ugly time.""What do you mean?"

The Inspector shrugged his shoulders.But Mandy waited, her eyes fixed on his face demanding answer.

"Well, there are some hundreds of settlers and their families scattered over this country, and we can hardly protect them all.

But," he added cheerfully, as if dismissing the subject, "we have a trick of worrying through."Mandy shuddered.One phrase in the Superintendent's letter to the Commissioner which she had just read kept hammering upon her brain, "Cameron is the man and the only man for the job."They turned the talk to other things, but the subject would not be dismissed.Like the ghost at the feast it kept ever returning.

The Inspector retailed the most recent rumors, and together he and his host weighed their worth.The Inspector disclosed the Commissioner's plans as far as he knew them.These, too, were discussed with approval or condemnation.The consequences of an Indian uprising were hinted at, but quickly dropped.The probabilities of such an uprising were touched upon and pronounced somewhat slight.

But somehow to the woman listening as in a maze this pronouncement and all the reassuring talk rang hollow.She sat staring at the Inspector with eyes that saw him not.What she did see was a picture out of an old book of Indian war days which she had read when a child, a smoking cabin, with mangled forms of women and children lying in the blackened embers.By degrees, slow, painful, but relentlessly progressive, certain impressions, at first vague and passionately resisted, were wrought into convictions in her soul.First, the Inspector, in spite of his light talk, was undeniably anxious, and in this anxiety her husband shared.Then, the Force was clearly inadequate to the duty required of it.At this her indignation burned.Why should it be that a Government should ask of brave men what they must know to be impossible? Hard upon this conviction came the words of the Superintendent, "Cameron is the man and the only man for the job." Finally, the Inspector was apologizing for her husband.It roused a hot resentment in her to hear him.That thing she could not and would not bear.Never should it be said that her husband had needed a friend to apologize for him.

As these convictions grew in clearness she found herself brought suddenly and sharply to face the issue.With a swift contraction of the heart she realized that she must send her husband on this perilous duty.Ah! Could she do it? It was as if a cold hand were steadily squeezing drop by drop the life-blood from her heart.

In contrast, and as if with one flash of light, the long happy days of the last six months passed before her mind.How could she give him up? Her breathing came in short gasps, her lips became dry, her eyes fixed and staring.She was fighting for what was dearer to her than life.Suddenly she flung her hands to her face and groaned aloud.

"What is it, Mandy?" cried her husband, starting from his place.

His words seemed to recall her.The agonizing agitation passed from her and a great quiet fell upon her soul.The struggle was done.She had made the ancient sacrifice demanded of women since ever the first man went forth to war.It remained only to complete with fitting ritual this ancient sacrifice.She rose from her seat and faced her husband.

"Allan," she said, and her voice was of indescribable sweetness, "you must go."Her husband took her in his arms without a word, then brokenly he said:

"My girl! My own brave girl! I knew you must send me.""Yes," she replied, gazing into his face with a wan smile, "I knew it too, because I knew you would expect me to."The Inspector had risen from his chair at her first cry and was standing with bent head, as if in the presence of a scene too sacred to witness.Then he came to her, and, with old time and courtly grace of the fine gentleman he was, he took her hand and raised it to his lips.