CHAPTER VIII
DUST OF IDOLS
David Drennen's statement concerning the two powerful motivesresponsible for the presence in the North Woods of the greater portionof her hardy denizens had been essentially truthful. The shadow ofprison bars or perhaps the gaunt silhouette of the gallows, vivid in anoverstimulated fancy, has sent many a man roving; the whisper down theworld of yellow gold to be taken from the earth, transforming theblackened claw gripping it into the potent fingers of a money king, hasentered the ear of many a wanderer and drawn him to such a land asthis. An evil nature, a flare of temper, a wrong done and redressed inhot wrath and red blood, a mistake or a weakness or a wild spirit borna hundred years too late, any of these things might send a man into theNorth Woods. But Drennen, who made the statement to Ygerne Bellaire,was in himself an exception to it.
For half a score of years this land of hard trails, this far out placewhere man met man without veneer, where nature's breasts lay strippedof covering and naked, where life was the old life of things elemental,where primal laws were good laws, where there was room enough for thestrong and scant room for the weak, David Drennen had found a spaciouswalled home. Half of the year his house had the lofty, snow-cappedmountains for its only walls, the sweeping blue arch for its roof, sun,moon and stars for its lamps. There were months when he knew of noother footfall than his own throughout the vastness of his house.There had been times when, seeing the thin wisp of smoke against thedawn telling of a camp fire five miles away, he had grumbled andtrampled out his own embers and moved on, seeking solitude.
He had brought into the mountains a heart at once sore and bitter. Thesoreness had been drawn out of it in time; the bitterness had but grownthe more intense. Hard, mordacious, no man's friend . . . that was theDavid Drennen who at Pere Marquette's fete sought any quarrel to whichhe might lay his hands. The world had battled and buffeted him; it hadshowered blows and been chary of caresses; he had struck back,hard-fisted, hard-hearted, a man whom a brutal life had made brutal inits own image.
There had been a scar made in his world of men and women to mark hisleaving it, such a scar as a thorn leaves in the flesh when rudelydrawn out. A tiny cicatrix soon almost entirely lost as the nichewhich had been his was filled and the healing over was perfected. Itdoesn't take long for the grass to grow over the graves of the dead;the dew forming upon the mounded turf is less like tears than likeglistening jewels to deck the earth in the joyous time of her bridehoodin the spring; the flight of birds over it and their little bursts ofmelody are eloquent of an ecstasy which does not remember. How littletime then must pass to wipe out the memory of the passing of a DavidDrennen from the busy thoroughfares into the secluded trails?
He had been a young man, the lightest hearted of his care-free set,when the crash came. The chief component characteristics of the youngDavid Drennen of twenty were, perhaps, a careless generosity, a naturalspontaneous gaiety which accepted each day as it came, a strong thoughunanalysed faith in his fellow being. Life made music in tunefulchords upon the strings of his heart. The twin wells of love and faithwere always brimming for his friends; overflowing for the one man whoseact was to turn their waters brackish and bitter. That man was hisfather, John Harper Drennen, a man prominent enough in the financialworld to make much copy for the newspapers up and down the country andto occupy no little place in transoceanic cable messages when the storybroke.
A boy must have his hero worship. Rarely enough does he find hisAlexander the Great, his Washington or his Daniel Boone, his Spartacusor his Horatius in his own household. But the motherless David hadproved the exception and had long ago begun to shape his own life inthe picture of his father's, investing him with attributes essentiallydivine. John Harper Drennen was a great man; the boy made of him aninfallible hero who should have been a demigod in face of the crisis.And when that crisis came his demigod fled before it, routed by thevengeance seeking him.
Young Drennen had struck a man in the face for breaking the news to himand had felt a virtuous glow as he called the man "Liar!" Heexperienced a double joy upon him, the lesser one of his militantmanhood, the greater of realising that it had been granted him, even ina small way, to fight a bit of his father's battle. He had gone outupon the street and a newsboy's paper, thrust to him, offered him theglaring lie in great black letters for a penny. He had torn the thingacross, flinging it away angrily. There would be a libel suitto-morrow and such an apology as this editorial cur had never dreamedhe had it in him to write. He heard men talk of it in the subway andlaugh, and saw them turn wondering eyes to meet his glare. He madeshort his trip home, anxious to enlist under his father's standard,thrilled with the thought of gripping his father's hand.
When he found that his father, who should have returned two days agofrom a trip to Chicago had not come back, he despatched a telegram tothe lake city. The telegram was returned to him in due course of time;his father was not in Chicago and had not been there recently. Hewired Boston, Washington, Philadelphia. His father was at none of hishotels in any of these cities. The boy prepared himself in calm, coldanger to wait for his father's return. But John Harper Drennen hadnever returned.
During the week which dragged horribly, he refused to read the papers.They were filled with such lies as he had no stomach for. Only theknowledge that the older Drennen was eminently capable to cope with hisown destiny and must have his own private reasons for allowing thishideous scandal to continue unrefuted, held him back from bursting intomore than one editorial room to wreak physical, violent vengeancethere. His respect for his father was so little short of reverent awe,that he could take no step yet without John Harper's command. Quizzedby the police, questioned by the Chief, knowing himself dogged whereverhe went, feeling certain that even his mail was no longer safe fromprying eyes, he said always the same thing:
"Some of you are fools, some liars! When Dad comes back . . ."
He had choked up under the keen eyes of the Chief. And what angeredhim most was the look in the Chief's eyes. It was not incredulity; itwas merely pity.
At first the papers had it that John Harper Drennen had absconded withfifty thousand dollars of the Eastern Mines Company's money. Withrapid investigation came ready amplification of the first meagredetails. Drennen's affairs were looked into and it was found thatthrough unwise speculations the man had been skirting on thin ice thepool of financial ruin for a year. The deficit of fifty thousand grewunder the microscope of investigation to sixty thousand, eventually toseventy-five thousand.
When at last David Drennen got the back numbers of the papers andlocked himself up in his father's library to work his way laboriouslythrough the columns of fact and surmise he was not the same DavidDrennen who had struck a man in the face for suggesting to him that hisfather was a thief. Here was the first sign of a weakening of faith;here the first fear which strove wildly to prove itself a shadow. Butfrom shadow emerged certainty. He looked his spectre in the face andit did not dissolve into thin air. When he had done he put his faceupon his arms and sobbed. The tardy but crushing sense of his hero'sguilt had stricken him; the thought that his father had in no wayconfided in him, had left him without a word, perhaps without athought, broke his heart. He was never to be quite the same DavidDrennen again.
He remained at his father's home through the weary months during whichthe miserably sordid horror dragged on. One morning he packed into asuitcase the few little articles which he felt were his own. He wentout of the house before the others came in; he had no desire to see thehome go, as everything else had gone, to pour its handful of goldensand into the great hole which John Harper's ruin had left behind him.It had been almost a year since the first news; and upon the day onwhich David Drennen set his back to all he knew and his face towardwhat might come to him, a paper brought the last word. He read itcalmly upon the train, wondering at himself that there was such a thingas calm left to him. A man, looking over his shoulder, commented onthe news lightly. Drennen d
idn't answer. He was visualising the finalepisode dully; the great, masterful body of his own father in the Parismorgue, the ignominious grave, even the cowardly death, self-dealt.
"And he never wrote me," he muttered to himself.
There he was wrong, though he could not know it until months later whenthe brief letter, forwarded to him by the Chief, reached him. His facehad been hard, because his heart was hard, when he read the note whichat last John Harper Drennen had written and which, sodden and blurred,was found upon the dead body drawn from the Seine.
"Dear Davy," it had said. "Some day maybe you'll come to forgive me.God dealt me a hard hand to play, boy. Be a man, Davy; for yourmother's sake if not for your dad's."
Drennen a year ago would have dropped his face into his hands and wouldhave wept over this letter; now he laughed at it. And the laugh, thisfirst one, was the laugh men came to know as Dave Drennen's laugh. Itwas like a sneer and a curse and a slap in the face.
The hardest blow the fates could deal him had been deliveredmercilessly. But other relentless blows were to come after, and undertheir implacable, relentless smiting the soul of the man was hardenedand altered and made over as is the bit of iron under the blacksmith'shammer. Those characteristics which had been the essentials of thespiritual man of last year were worked over; the fine steel springs ofbuoyancy were beaten into thin knives of malignancy. That the workmight be done thoroughly there was left in him one spark which glowedlater on and grew into friendship for a man whom he met far in thenorth where the Yukon country called to such men as Drennen. Thefriendship fanned into life a lingering spark of the old generousspirit. Drennen, gambling his life lightly, had won as carelessgamblers are prone to do. He made a strike; he trusted his new friend;and his friend tricked, betrayed and robbed him. This blow and otherscame with the gaunt years. At the end of them David Drennen was theman who sought to quarrel with Kootanie George; he was a man like alone wolf, hunting alone, eating alone, making his lair alone, hisheart filled with hatred and bitterness and distrust. He came toexpect the savagery of the world which smote and smote and smote againat him, and he struck back and snarled back, each day finding him abitterer man than the preceding day had left him. Long before he hadturned back from the Yukon to the North Woods, empty handed, emptyhearted, men had come to call him "No-luck" Drennen. And as though hisill fortune were some ugly, contagious disease, they shunned him evenas invariably as he avoided them.
Men knew him in Wild Cat, two weeks hard going over an invisible trailfrom MacLeod's; they knew him at Moosejaw, two hundred and fifty mileswestward of the Settlement; wherever there was news of gold found hewas known, generally coming silently with the first handful ofventuresome, restive spirits. But while his coming and his going weremarked and while eyes followed him interestedly men had given overoffering their hands in companionship. Now and then he moved amongthem as a man must, but always was he aloof, standing stubbornly apart,offering no man his aid in time of difficulty, flaring into blazingwrath the few times on record when men showed sympathy and desire tobefriend him.
Superstition, abashed-eyed step daughter in the house of civilisation,lifts her head defiantly in the wilderness. She is born of thesolitudes, a true daughter of the silent places. Here, where men werefew and scattered broadcast by the great hand of adventure across thebroken miles of all but impassable mountains, superstition is no longermerely an incident but an essential factor in human life and destiny.And here men long ago had come to frown when their questing eyes foundthe great, gaunt form of David Drennen in the van of some mad rush tonew fields: He was unlucky; men who rubbed shoulders with him wereforedoomed to share his misfortune; the gold, glittering into theireyes from a gash in the earth, would vanish when his shadow fell acrossit.
In many things he had grown to be more like a wild beast than a man.He had hunted with the human pack and he had found selfishness andjealousy and treachery on every hand. He came to look upon these asthe essential characteristics of the human race. Even now that he waswounded he saw but one sordid motive of greed under the hesitant offersof help; even now he had been less like a wounded man than a strickenwolf. The wolf would have withdrawn to his hidden lair; he would havecontented himself with scant food; he would have licked his wound cleanand have waited for it to heal; he would have snapped and snarled atany intrusion, knowing the way of his fellows when they fall upon awounded brother. So Drennen.