Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
He thrust the thought from him as if it were the plague itself. Isobel would live. He would make her live, If she died McTabb heard the low cry that broke from his lips. He could not keep it back. Good God, if she went, how empty the world would be!
But the baby Isobel still lived; and in the hope of finding and claiming her for his own he built other dreams for himself out of the ashes of all that had gone for him. He believed that he would find McTabb at the cabin and he would find the child there. So confident had he been that Isobel would live that he had not told McTabb of the uncle who had driven her from the old home in Montreal.
McTabb did not see the change until he came out into what remained of the day with little Isobel in his arms. Then he stared. "That blow got you bad," he said. "You look sick. Mebbe I'd better stay with you here to-night." "No, you hadn't," replied Billy, trying to throw off what he knew the other saw. "Take the kid over to the cabin. A night's sleep and I'll be as lively as a cat.
Before I have another I want to tell you what I'm up against, Rookie. My Gawd, it's a funny chance that ran me up against you just in time! Listen." He told McTabb briefly of Scottie Deane's death, of Couchée's flight from the cabin, and the present situation there. "There isn't a minute to lose," he finished, tightening his hold on McTabb's hand.
It was not the face of MacVeigh the old MacVeigh that Rookie McTabb, the ex-constable, looked into a few moments later. Days of sickness could have laid no heavier hand upon him than had those few minutes in the darkened room of the cabin. His face was white and drawn. There were tense lines at the corners of his mouth and something strange and disquieting in his eyes.
McTabb heard him whispering things, and little Isobel's arms crept tightly about his neck. After a little Billy held her out to him again, and a part of what Rookie had seen in his face was gone. "It won't hurt any more," he said, as he rubbed the vaccine point over the red spot on her arm. "You don't want to be sick, do you? And that 'll keep you from being sick. There "
"The little man isn't a beauty," said Sally McTabb, "but he shows 'race." He might be eccentric, but when you came to know him you couldn't help liking the embryo duke in him. In fact, things were going very well with Mrs. Mavick, except in her own household. There was something there that did not yield, that did not flow with her plans.
So obsessed did he become with the thought that he had a terrible dream one night, and in that dream baby Isobel's face appeared to him, a deathlike mask, white and cold and thinned by starvation. The vision decided him. He would go to Fort Churchill, and if McTabb had not been driven in he would go to his cabin, over on the Little Beaver, and learn what had become of Isobel and the little girl.
A wind had risen from out of the north and east, just enough of a wind to set the tree-tops moaning and fill the closed-in world about him with uneasy sound. He walked toward the tent where little Isobel had been, and there was something in the air that choked him. He wished that he had not sent all of the dogs with McTabb. A terrible loneliness oppressed him.
God... that kid... You don't know how I got to love her, Billy.... give her up..." McTabb had written a dozen lines after that, but all of them were a water-stained and unintelligible blur. Billy crushed the letter in his hand. The new inspector wondered what terrible news he had received as he walked out into the blinding chaos of the storm.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking