“it's all for the good of yourself and the service.”
Fear had gone from Nome's face. It was filled now with a hatred so intense that his teeth shone like the fangs of a snarling animal.
“To hell with you,” he said, “and to hell with the service; but remember, Philip Steele, remember that some day we'll meet again.”
“Some day,” laughed Philip. “Good-by, Bucky Nome—deserter!”
The door closed and Nome was gone.
“Now, M'sieur Janette, it's our turn,” cried Steele, smiling companionably upon the skull and loading his pipe. “It's our turn.”
He laughed aloud, and for some time puffed out luxurious clouds of smoke in silence.
“It's the best day's work I've done in my life,” he continued, with his eyes still upon the skull. “The very best, and it would be complete, M'sieur, if I could send you down to the woman who helped to kill you.”
He stopped, and his eyes leaped with a sudden fire. “By George!” he exclaimed, under his breath. His pipe went out; for many minutes he stared with set face at the skull, as if it had spoken to him and its voice had transfixed him where he stood. Then he tossed his pipe upon the table, collected his service equipment and strapped it in his pack. After that he returned to the table with a pad of paper and a pencil and sat down. His face was strangely white as he took the skull in his hands.
“I'll do it, so help me all the gods, I'll do it!” he breathed excitedly. “M'sieur, a woman killed you—as much as Bucky Nome, a woman did it. You couldn't do her any good—but you might—another. I'm going to send you to her, M'sieur. You're a terrible lesson, and I may be a beast; but you're preaching a powerful sermon, and I guess—perhaps—you may do her good. I'll tell her your story, old man, and the story of the woman who made you so nice and white and clean. Perhaps she'll see the moral, M'sieur. Eh? Perhaps!”
For a long time he wrote, and when he had done he sealed the writing, put the envelope and the skull together in a box, and tied the whole with babiche string. On the outside he fastened another note to Breed, the factor, in which he explained that he and Bucky Nome had found it necessary to leave that very night for the West. And he heavily underscored the lines in which he directed the factor to see that the box was delivered to Mrs. Colonel Becker, and that, as he valued the honor and the friendship of the service, and especially of Philip Steele, all knowledge of it should be kept from the colonel himself.
It was eight o'clock when he went out into the night with his pack upon his back. He grunted approval when he found it was snowing, for the track of himself and Nome would be covered. Through the thickening gloom the two or three lights in the factor's home gleamed like distant stars. One of them was brighter than the others, and he knew that it came from the rooms which Breed had fitted up for the colonel and his wife. As Philip halted for a moment, his eyes drawn by a haunting fascination to that window, the light grew clearer and brighter, and he fancied that he saw a face looking out into the night—toward his cabin. A moment later he knew that it was the woman's face. Then a door opened, and a figure hurried across the open. He stepped back into the gloom of his own cabin and waited. It was the colonel. Three times he knocked loudly at the cabin door.
“I'd like to go out and shake his hand,” muttered Steele. “I'd like to tell him that he isn't the only man who's had an idol broken, and that Mrs. B.'s little flirtation isn't a circumstance—to what might have happened.”
Instead, he moved silently away, and turned his face into the thin trail that buried itself in the black forests of the West.
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