Motion Picture Magazine (Aug 1914-Jan 1915)

54 MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE to your quarters under arrest. This woman 's story must be investigated. ' ' Gordon saluted, turned on his heel and walked slowly from the room. His head was on fire with the suddenness of the fierce attack, and the only result could be court-martial and a broken, disgraced officer. There was no choice, he felt — it must be escape and at once. A smiling, happy-faced Captain burst in upon Alice. "Think of it," he half -shouted, "a leave of absence to take effect tonight." He started to strip off his uniform. "Come, dear heart," halftenderly, half -impatiently, "the midnight flyer for the coast is to be our honeymoon car — and then to lose ourselves in the wilds of the great unknown." Under the sheen of the Northwest skies, a second buckboard within the month made a midnight pilgrimage from the Post. This time a man and a woman were its occupants. The man's face was smiling, his words muffled and joking, but to his eyes the crescent of low-hung stars above formed a searing sword of Damocles. In Seattle the railroad terminal was plastered with maps and posters of the new North. Gordon traced their route on the map, straight into the heart of northwest Canada. "We'll go to the end of the railroad, dear, ' ' he explained, ' ' and then stage it to the Athabasca, full of rapids and the haunt of Crees and big game. ' ' Her eyes sparkled at the adventure. "We'll build our own flatboat," Gordon went on, "and drift with the rapid current into the primitive, the unknown." "And when winter comes?" she asked curiously. "When winter comes," he said gaily, "our shack of spruce will be built, and we will lie snug in the furs of our own trapping." She shuddered a bit in expectancy. "Ah, but summer," he said, with half -closed eyes, "when the deer makes the toilet of her fawn and the strawberry blossoms and wood violets carpet the forests — then we will live!" "I am ready," she said, and seeing that she was brave in her love, he smiled at his cheaply won victory. It was the dead of winter in the frozen North. The thermometer at Fond du Lac registered sixty degrees below, but that was two hundred miles from the glassy Athabasca. A white man and his wife were ' l cast up ' ' on the banks of the frozen river. For three days they had been without food, yet a winter camp of trappers lay only twenty miles to the south. The woman sat with lack-luster eyes, the shadow of her former self. The man drank freely from a bottle and scowled across the frozen waste. He had just finished speaking — a long, garbled tale about a dance-hall creature and the hell's hole she had gotten him in. The woman sat absorbed, with unbelief and horror for companions. The man's actions during the past month had presaged something unpleasant, perhaps evil, and now the hideous corpse of his past lay grinning at her feet. Suddenly Gordon got up, wrapped himself in his furs and started toward the door. "I'm going down to the Cree camp," he jerked out over his shoulder, ' ' and beg or steal food. I understand their white man is sick and can see nobody." He lunged out into the sparkling, blue-cold air, and she heard the soft crunch of his feet in the snow. By noon Gordon reached the Cree encampment, and his spirits rose high as he noticed no signs of life about their shacks. The men were off making the rounds of the traps, and his hands were free to take what food he needed. Entering the supply shack, Gordon hastily filled a gunny-sack with provisions and, slinging it over his shoulder, plunged down to the level walking on the river.