Motion Picture Magazine (Feb-Jul 1920)

AMOTION piCTURF Bl I M»OAIINE L then. I thought Life hadn't anything more for me," he laughed, in sheer incredulity, "and then I found you — and her! Queer, isn't it?" His face clouded. "But it seems hopeless, with nothing to go on but the photograph of a girl and an address that is dead. If we'd found Tarvish, he might have known something about her. But with the settlement of Firepan Creek in ruins and the last settler buried, I'm where I started from. Still, I shall go on tomorrow" — he set his young jaw doggedly— "and I shall find her. I know it! If I didn't, Life would be too cruel.-' Father Roland smiled faintly at the youngness of the belief that God owed David happiness and the world had been made solely for him to find it in. "I had hopes of Tarvish," he said slowly. Before David's amazed eyes his face grew oddly fixed as tho it were a mask fastened before his thoughts. "I — you see, I knew Tarvish years ago, before he went to Firepan. He was a young man then, and handsome, and I — loved him." David Raine thought of the strange scene he had witnessed a week ago when they had laid the twisting body of the man they had found hanging in the tumble-down cabin in a shallow grave, and this priest had stood over it with cold lips, refusing a prayer to the dead man. Afterward, out of sight but not of earshot, he had stood in a copse of evergreen, shaking as he listened to Father Roland speaking to the mound of clay. "I am glad you never told me, Tarvish," he had said— or had he dreamed the whole grotesque thing? "Glad, because I would have killed you and thrown away my chance of ever seeing her again after I lie where you are lying, in my grave." But his own affairs elbowed all other things out of his mind. In his breast pocket was the picture he had picked up on the train where the woman in the black veil had left it, and somewhere out in this great white country where the shadows lay blue on the snow and the fir needles gave out sharp, strong scents in the sun, somewhere out yonder was the girl of the picture, with her dark, wistful beauty as clear-cut as a cameo. Others might not have thought her beautiful, might have been carping about the cleft in her small, eager chin, the fulness of her lips that curved crimson like rose-petals in the olive oval of her face, but to David she was all perfection. It was as tho he recognized her at the first moment as some one he had been seeking thru long, lost years. Early the next morning David said gobd-by to the old priest with his secret room and his secret grudge against a dead man, and set out along the trail, "Baree" at heel. He had found the dog in Tarvish's cabin and spoken to it kindly, whereupon it had adopted him as master and sworn eternal fealty with great thumps of his bushy tail. The air was like new wine, heady, intoxicating. He strode thru the dazzle and glitter effortlessly, shoulders hack, head lifted to let the wind sweep his face. Back there, only the matter of a few nights and days away, the sky was sooty with the smoke of the city, the air stale, the sunshine shut out by towering granite walls. Back there, giant winches sang an endless song of steel, lifting great buildings toward the sky that more and still more men and women might live cramped lives above the streets of selling. Back there were little perfumed shops, restaurants, theaters, all built for the woman who had been his wife to live a painted, tinsel life of pleasure. Back there, the other man was probably taking his place. Suddenly David laughed. It was incredible, but he did not care ! The agony he had thought to carry thru the rest of his life was gone and the past seemed as unreal as a dream in a fevered night. He was young, and he would take Life by the throat and throttle it and make it yield him what he wished. It seemed to him that his search for the girl in the picture would offer no difficulties, but if it did, he would surmount them, crash thru them, leap over them. Thus David in the hopeful morning. By evening the mood of exultation had faded. He made his camp in And then, lifting his eyes, David Raine knew why he had come to the Northland. For, crossing the bed of the brawling stream ahead was a girl, small, dark with clouds of black hair all about her face and a ■ suggestion of swaying branches in the way she moved from stone to stone 1 1A££