"Miss O'Malley asks that you'll excuse her, sergeant," was his formal report.
Seymour was too dazed for his pride to come into action. To be turned away without a word didn't seem fair. What's more, it wasn't at all like Moira O'Malley. Surely he had the right to know his fault--his crime?
"Thunderin' icebergs, Luke Morrow! Tell me what I've done to be treated like this?" he demanded.
The sky-pilot shook his head. "Moira has not mentioned your name to either of us since the last evening you spent here." He hesitated a moment. "She does know at last that her brother was murdered--that such was the accident of the Arctic we reported to her."
"Then she thinks I'm responsible for trying to soften that ordeal?" Even as he asked, however, he felt certain that there must be something more of a misunderstanding than that.
"I took full responsibility for our not telling her the full details," said Morrow. "You'll remember I first suggested----"
He did not finish, but flung himself out the door. Before the missionary could utter a word of caution or advise moderation, Sergeant Seymour was plowing the trail for the Arctic's establishment.
If it is true, as Kipling says, that "single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints," it is doubly true of the same in lonely detachment shacks of the Royal Mounted scattered about the Arctic foreshore. Living week upon week with the thermometer at the breaking point, with the momentary sun blackened out for days in swirling snow, with a sameness of grub that fairly gnaws the appetite, the wonder is that they carry through with even members of their own outfit.
Suddenly mix in with this condition of life an attractive, unattached, unexpected white woman and you have a yeast more potent than dynamite. Let some outsider stir the mixture with the ladle of false witness and surely the dough overflows the pan.
As he descended upon the trading post and the tricky factor, Russell Seymour was scarcely a staff non-com of the Royal Mounted. For the moment he was simply a he-man who happened to be encased in the king's scarlet. Even as he was accustomed to express regard for the rights of others, so was he ready to defend his own. A dangerous man for the time being and one with an initial advantage over Karmack, for Seymour's nerve was backed by morality and right.