o
tears.
"Be good to him," she cried. "Be good to him."
Then she slipped half down the face of the bank, called back "Good-by,"
and dropped into the boat amidships. Pierre followed her and cast off.
He shoved the steering oar into place and gave the signal. Le Goire
lifted an old French _chanson_; the men, like a row of ghosts in the dim
starlight, bent their backs to the tow line; the steering oar cut the
black current sharply, and the boat swept out into the night.
WHICH MAKE MEN REMEMBER
Fortune La Pearle crushed his way through the snow, sobbing, straining,
cursing his luck, Alaska, Nome, the cards, and the man who had felt his
knife. The hot blood was freezing on his hands, and the scene yet bright
in his eyes,--the man, clutching the table and sinking slowly to the
floor; the rolling counters and the scattered deck; the swift shiver
throughout the room, and the pause; the game-keepers no longer calling,
and the clatter of the chips dying away; the startled faces; the infinite
instant of silence; and then the great blood-roar and the tide of
vengeance which lapped his heels and turned the town mad behind him.
"All hell's broke loose," he sneered, turning aside in the darkness and
heading for the beach. Lights were flashing from open doors, and tent,
cabin, and dance-hall let slip their denizens upon the chase. The clamor
of men and howling of dogs smote his ears and quickened his feet. He ran
on and on. The sounds grew dim, and the pursuit dissipated itself in
vain rage and aimless groping. But a flitting shadow clung to him. Head
thrust over shoulder, he caught glimpses of it, now taking vague shape on
an open expanse of snow, how merging into the deeper shadows of some
darkened cabin or beach-listed craft.
Fortune La Pearle swore like a woman, weakly, with the hint of tears that
comes of exhaustion, and plunged deeper into the maze of heaped ice,
tents, and prospect holes. He stumbled over taut hawsers and piles of
dunnage, tripped on crazy guy-ropes and insanely planted pegs, and fell
again and again upon frozen dumps and mounds of hoarded driftwood. At
times, when he deemed he had drawn clear, his head dizzy with the painful
pounding of his heart and the suffocating intake of his breath, he
slackened down; and ever the shadow leaped out of the gloom and forced
him on in heart-breaking flight. A swift intuition lashed upon him,
leaving in its trail the cold chill of superstition.
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