I	“Are You There?”
II	After Many Years
III	Dismal Trail
IV	A Ghostly Voyageur
V	The Girl in Handcuffs
VI	The Great Owl Murder
VII	In the Royal Scarlet
VIII	Follow On
IX	Grandfather’s Red Blankets
X	Always Fire First
XI	“Saut Sauvage”
XII	Sergeant in Command
XIII	Last-stand Outpost
XIV	Squatter’s Rights
XV	The Night Harriers
XVI	The Honorable Murderer
XVII	Vanishing Footprints
XVIII	The Man Hunters
XIX	Lost Loot
XX	Scarlet and Gold
XXI	Heading North
XXII	Oogly
XXIII	Brothers-in-Arms
XXIV	There Were Three
XXV	Inspector Tearl
XXVI	One Whole Man
XXVII	Hell Bent
XXVIII	Snow-blind
XXIX	Cocky-bird

CHAPTER I
“ARE YOU THERE?”

“This,” said the bland voice on the air, “is Station WBZ, Springfield, Massachusetts, broadcasting greetings from the home folks to the far-advanced outposts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I have a letter for Sergeant Buck Tearl at Port-o’-Prayer in North Saskatchewan. Good evening, Sergeant. Are you there?”

And then the message went into space on the waves of the ether. Like a ripple on a pond, widening to the shores, the voice ranged all directions to reach an audience half a world away. It was heard, no doubt, by many lonesome chaps with ear-phones clamped to their heads: trappers in snow-buried shacks, scattered over a hundred thousand miles of forest and mountain and blizzard-scourged tundra; factors and bush-rovers at the remotest fur-factories; whalers in stout ships, nipped in the polar drift; frost-bitten policemen in barrack and camp, stationed here and there in the great midnight around the curve of the arctic circle, the uttermost videttes of the northern law.

“It is a queer message,” pursued the radio announcer in his pleasantly modulated speech. “Maybe the man for whom it is meant hears me and will understand. Here it is:

“Sergeant Buck Tearl, R.C.M.P., Port-o’-Prayer.” There was a momentary pause and the voice cleared itself of a faint husk—a strangely personal and familiar sound that for a moment seemed to bring the speaker out of distance and invisibility into the very presence of the listener.

The man at the microphone went on with the letter.

“The dead do not always die,” he read. “If you can find Kablunak’s band of A-hi-ag-muit Esquimaux, who winter, they say, on Queen Maud Sea, make them tell you the truth.”

“I don’t know whether I pronounce the Esquimaux names correctly,” ended the announcer, “but anyhow, that’s the letter, and it’s signed—Diane.”

Of course the broadcaster could not know whether Sergeant Tearl had a radio receiver or was tuned-in that night on the wavelength of WBZ. Nor could he have guessed that there was another man named Tearl, who happened to be listening-in at this very moment, and in whose quiet New York apartment that cryptic message arrived like an exploding grenade to rearrange violently the whole of his future life.

Kitchener Tearl found WBZ by accident when in an idle moment he had given the radio dial a careless spin. This much was fate or coincidence, or whatever mischievous force it is that is constantly unsettling people’s nicely settled affairs. But all that happened afterwards followed as naturally and inevitably as blood follows the knife or youth after its own reckless bent or birds take the course of the southerning sun.

The greater part of the broadcasted messages in themselves were not of much interest to an eavesdropper.

“Mother sends love.” “Father’s rheumatism is better.” “Bella wonders if you remember her.” “Did you get the socks we sent last July?” “Baby Nellie, born August second, is waiting for her first glimpse of Uncle Jack.” Small, homely, intimate matters such as these were discussed in the hearing of the rest of the world and flung off into the night to end up under the crackle of the northern lights.

The messages would not have made Kitchener Tearl forget an engagement he had made for that evening; it was the visioning of the men who were receiving them. His imagination soared off to far, strange places which he had never seen, nor ever expected to see, but which were names that had been thrillingly real to him since his earliest days of boyhood.

The whirr of the elevator outside the foyer of his apartment, the rumble of traffic coming up from the pavements of Park Avenue, were lost in the sorcery of his straying thoughts in other, greater sounds: The grumble of ice-floes, the slash of sleet on cabin walls, the rabid cry of the wolf pack, the wind in the pines.

His lean, hard-kept body was sprawled motionless in his chair as he listened and stared into immeasurable distances with one keen eyebrow quizzically upcocked, seeing not the bright window-squares in the apartment building across the way, but big timber and ice barrens and mountains stacked behind mountains and the auroral glimmer on the Arctic sky.

The fascination of the northland for Kitchener Tearl was a part of the tradition of his blood and kind. One of his grandfathers long ago had been a factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he died with his moccasins on in the frozen forests of Keewatin.

William Tearl, Kitchener’s father, had followed the trails that had been broken ahead of him by Factor Jacob Tearl. He was an inspector in the old Royal Northwest Mounted Police.

The story of Inspector Bill Tearl was left a grim, unwritten chapter in the territorial records. Somewhere in the Ottawa files, after his name and service reports, was set down in fading red ink the word—“missing.” One night, more than twelve years ago, Bill Tearl had walked out from a sub-post somewhere in the then-uncharted Vermilion River country, and was never seen nor heard of again.

Tearl’s Yankee-born wife happened to be visiting in New York at the time of the inspector’s disappearance. With her were her three children, Gerald, who was sixteen years old, Kitchener, twelve, and Jane, an elfish, jewel-eyed girl of nine.

An inheritance of money from her own side of the family had enabled Mrs. Tearl to provide for the three fatherless youngsters, to send them one after another to college, and to plan for a life of future comfort. And then, the year Jerry graduated from the university, where he won renown as one of the most ferocious half-backs who ever tore cleat-marks in the Yale bowl, his charming mother was taken ill and suddenly died, and Jerry became the head of the Tearls.

The two grown-up brothers and the growing sister went on living together, a bit quarrelsomely, but with a fierce and undying loyalty. Jerry gave promise of becoming as great a man in the business world as he had been on the college gridirons. But tragedy once more stepped in to decimate the family ranks.

The ex-line-plunger was notoriously quick-tempered. Nobody had ever found out what it was all about, but he got into a fearful argument with a man on a Broadway street corner, and had three-quarters killed that man with his bare hands. A warrant of atrocious assault was issued by the nearest magistrate, but Jerry left town a couple of jumps ahead of the police. Kitchener and Jane never heard another word from him. Like his father before him, he had abruptly quitted his place in the world to be engulfed in the mystery of the passing years.

This had happened a long while ago. Kitchener was now twenty-four, the elder of the remaining Tearls. In all this time he might have lost the image of his prodigious brother in casual forgetfulness. But in his case the hero-worship that had grown in the heart of boyhood still lingered with all the sweetness of the earliest memories. The hearing of the name Tearl choked him with a surging of emotion such as he would have felt if his brother’s sinewy hand had been laid suddenly upon his shoulder.

When Kitchener’s sister came home at one o’clock that morning from some sort of a party she had been attending somewhere or other, she found the floor of the living room carpeted with her father’s old police maps, while her brother crawled over them on his hands and knees, a strange look in his dark, eager eyes.

“What the deuce, Kit?” she demanded from the doorway.

“I think I know where Jerry is,” he said.

Jane dropped the wrap from her fine arms and shoulders and came into the room. “What?” she ejaculated.

Kitchener stood up and showed her the message he had taken down on paper.

“Diane!” read Jane, womanlike, noticing first of all the woman in the case. “Who’s Diane?”

“She sent the message over the radio. I’ve never heard of her before.”

Jane wrinkled her short nose as she perused her brother’s hasty scrawl. “Who’s Buck Tearl?”

“Sounds like Jerry to me,” declared Kitchener.

“Why?” Jane had grown calm and skeptical. “Why would it be Jerry, when it’s Buck?”

“There are not many Tearls in the world,” Kitchener reminded her. “It isn’t like Smith or Einstein or O’Toole or Jones. As far as the nickname goes, a man like Jerry would be apt to pick one up wherever he went. And it just naturally ought to be ‘Buck.’

“Funny I never thought of it before,” he mused. “Knowing Jerry as I did, I can’t understand now why I never guessed it. He went back where he belonged, of course—the north and the Mounties.” Kitchener faced his sister in tense excitement, “It’s Jerry, you can bet on it. He joined up, and naturally by now he’d be a sergeant at least.”

Jane laughed, and then stopped and sighed. “We’re an odd outfit,” she said, “each of us wasting our affections on the one up ahead. Dad thought grandfather was a stupendous man, and Jerry worshiped Dad, and you adore Jerry, and here am I, the last, with nothing to do but to be simply foolish about you.”

He squeezed her graceful shoulders, and then turned away. “Don’t be an ass,” he said.

“Can I help it?” she grinned.

“Listen here!” he said soberly. “Did you get the possible meaning of that message?”

“About so-and-so’s Esquimaux?”

“No,” he returned, “the other part,” and repeated the line: “‘The dead do not always die.’ Does that by any chance make you think of Dad?”

She looked startled for an instant, and then closed her firm mouth and shook her head. “No. Why should it? You’d be crazy to get any such ideas. Dad went—mother used to say—écarté—lost, frozen in the drifts, and was never found. Or perhaps he was ambushed by some outlaw he was after. Whatever happened, it was the end.”

“Are you so sure it was the end?”

“As sure as I can ever be in this life.”

“I’m not.” Kitchener gathered up the tattered police maps, refolded them gingerly, and restored them to the keeping of the old mahogany highboy. “You don’t know everything,” he remarked over his shoulder. “For instance, you never heard of the Tearl annuity.”

“The which?” she asked.

“The year Dad was lost,” Kitchener informed her, “an express money order for five thousand dollars was delivered at our address here in town. The envelope that contained it was mailed in San Francisco, postmarked January first. There was no writing—no mark to identify the sender.”

The girl stared with a quick contraction of her jade-tinged eyes. “You mean—?” she began, and then left the rest unasked.

“I don’t know,” answered her brother. “I only know that another five thousand came the next January and the next, and so on, every year, as regularly as the months rolled around. One draft was sent from Portland, another from Sitka, one from St. Johns, Newfoundland, two from Quebec, one from Kamchatka, Siberia.”

“You’ve tried to trace the sender?”

“Mother first, then Jerry. Lately I’ve been trying. No use! If our unknown friend were a skulking criminal he could have taken no greater pains to keep his tracks covered.”

“You think it could have been—” The girl’s speech checked for an instant on a failing breath, and then she ended in a whispered word, “Dad?”

“Who knows? If he were alive and could send money he could have written to us. You were old enough to remember what he was like. It wouldn’t have been like him to duck his family. No matter what had happened to him, he surely would have sent us word. And yet—”

Kitchener took a turn the length of the room, and then came back to stand head-high above his sister. When he was in deadly earnest over something his left eyebrow had an unaccountable habit of cocking itself at the jauntiest angle, as though he had thought up something funny to say. Jerry used to tell him he looked at such moments like a wily, black-headed crow getting ready to guffaw over his sins.

Jane knew that expression of old, and she knew that whatever notion was sticking in his head, all the world could not shake it out. “Hello, Cocky-bird!” she exclaimed. “What’s up now?”

“I’m going to find Jerry,” he said.

No Tearl was ever much astonished by anything another Tearl ever decided to do. She faced him anxiously, but without the least show of surprise. “When?” was all she said.

“As soon as I can pull out.”

“But you’re by no means certain that Sergeant Buck Tearl is Jerry.”

“Yes, I am. And if by any chance he didn’t receive to-night’s message, I want to see that he gets it. And I want to see Jerry.”

“You know what it means, of course. The rail head doesn’t go near Port-o’-Prayer. The rivers will be frozen up there. No canoes. You haven’t been in the forests since you were twelve. You’ll have to walk, my boy!” Her smile did not quite hide the dismay that had suddenly drenched her eyes. “You’ll never make it.”

“That money,” he pursued, without looking at his sister. “We never spent any of it because we didn’t know whether it was ours to spend. Mother put it in the bank. She called it the mystery fund. She deposited five thousand every January—then Jerry—then I. I only learned about it a short while before Jerry left. Didn’t think it was anything to bother you with. But I’m telling you now. There’s sixty thousand dollars all told, plus the interest. I’ll turn the book over to you. Whatever you do about it is your own business.”

“It’s all settled, then? You’re going?”

“I don’t see any way out of it,” said Kitchener.

Jane’s hands reached up to smooth her brother’s raven-black hair. Then she stood a-tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “If you think not,” she said, “there’s no way out of it.”

CHAPTER II
AFTER MANY YEARS

When Kitchener Tearl left New York the city was basking in a spell of sultry, Indian Summer weather that had lingered into late October. As his Pullman traveled up the length of the Hudson Valley he saw robins in the orchards and flocks of belated blackbirds hovering about the meadows and fields. The hills and mountains still loomed green against the line of a soft and sunny sky.

Farther north he found notable changes in the climate and the scenery. On the other side of the border the air tingled with a frosty crispness, and the fringes of the forest were blazoned with the colors of the dying season. The people of Ottawa were wearing overcoats and keeping their hands in their pockets. On the way across Ontario the harvested acres reached sere and bleak to the chilly horizon. At Winnipeg the edges of the forked rivers were rimed in the morning with a first film of ice. Traveling from Saskatchewan into Alberta he saw long chains of wild geese, swans, and ducks in clouds, fleeing ahead of winter. Near Edmonton he caught sight of a man walking alongside a pond with a string of muskrat traps slung from his shoulder. The train going north on the branch line ran through snow flurries that increased in frequency and severity all the way to Fort McMurray.

Here he threw away his timetable and opened up his maps. From this point on his life would be regulated, not by the hours of a clock, but by the changing seasons.

He dug out of his baggage a pair of scarlet “four-point” Hudson’s Bay blankets—heirlooms that had been in his family for more than half a century—and he went to bed warmly in the unheated inn and dreamed gratefully of Grandfather Jake Tearl who for twenty years had defied the cold of Keewatin in these same red, imperishable blankets.

The trip down the river afforded him three weeks of complete idleness. The boat ran aground on all the charted shallows, and the crew of Indian stevedores would lighten ship by lightening the cargo: afloat once more, they would re-load and go hopefully northward for a few more miles, until they stuck on another bar. Kitchener had traveled up this same river on this same scraped-bottom steamer with his mother and his brother and his little sister Jane, when they undertook their fateful journey to the city, twelve years ago. He spent the short, gray days on deck, facing sleet and swirling snow, trying to pick out old landmarks as he watched the endless marching of the great spruce forest along the white streaked hills.

They cracked ice the last hundred miles, before they reached the long, black lake that is the geographical key to all the wild watercourses to the north and the west and the east. The captain of the boat hoped to go on down Mackenzie River, but his solitary passenger never learned how far he got. Kitchener had his baggage dumped on the shore near a Chippewyan encampment, and although sheet ice enclosed a part of the lake, he hired two Indians with a canoe, and crossed in a headwind and a heavy sea to his destination at the farthest lonesome harbor. So his sister Jane’s dismal prediction came to nothing. He reached Port-o’-Prayer and had not walked a step of the way.

Kitchener left his belongings on the beach and strolled up the hill towards the group of white-painted buildings that huddled at the edge of the vast forest. There was a sort of inn near the landing, a story and a half log building, with battened doors and windows and an unsmoking chimney. Nobody lived there at this season. Farther on were the company’s store houses and the residency of the store-keeper. The buildings were shuttered and silent, not even a dog was visible in the snowy compound.

In the spring and early summer, when the trappers had come in from the forests, Port-o’-Prayer looked like a populous village. Now the store-keeper was the sole remaining inhabitant. He had sent out his furs long since and had hibernated for the winter.

Kitchener routed the man out of his quarters and found him to be an untalkative, sad-featured Scotsman. He was so lacking in curiosity that he did not even show wonderment at the sight of a tenderfoot who had journeyed into the back-country while winter was beginning to close up all the routes of retreat.

He answered the newcomer’s questions with an air of pained but patient politeness. Yes—a Sergeant Buck Tearl had stopped here at the post. But he went away again, after a couple of days. This was nearly a month ago.

Where had he gone? North somewhere, into the Vermilion River country. There was a police look-out station there at Saut Sauvage, on the ground that vaguely divided the Esquimaux from the forest tribes of the Cree and Yellow Knives. The sergeant was making an Arctic patrol, presumably on the trail of evil-doers.

What was he like, this Sergeant Tearl? He was a big man, who spoke softly, and yet had a hard and dangerous-looking mouth. While he was at Port-o’-Prayer he had kept on his lynxskin capote and the store-keeper had seen only his mouth and nose and his disconcerting eyes.

Even this meager description set Kitchener’s pulses tingling. Having come this far he had no thought except to go on, as far as Saut Sauvage, if need be. This man surely was his brother Jerry.

Had Sergeant Tearl picked up a radio message sent to him on the twenty-fifth of last month? The store-keeper didn’t know. He himself had no interest in hearing things out of the air. The company had given him a receiver last year, but it was too much trouble to buy new batteries for it. If he wanted to hear voices and songs he could go sit in the Chippewyan camp up the river.

Kitchener decided to go on at once. He would need a sledge and a train of huskies. It was snowing steadily and drearily now, and the trails would lie under shrouds to-morrow. What about dogs? The store-keeper had a couple he could sell. One of them would do all right for a king-pin. The Indians probably could spare two or three others. But they would come high—a hundred dollars a dog at least. Men were feeding their draught animals again, and weren’t kicking and clubbing them away from the camps as they did in the summer. This was dog-time.

Fortunately Kitchener had no need to stint himself in money. He acquired the store-keeper’s two spare huskies, a serviceable sledge, a pair of snowshoes and a load of Hudson’s Bay company staple groceries. At daybreak next morning he hitched in the two dogs, set his face to the snow-laden wind, and was off on the river route.

Years ago young Kit Tearl had followed his brother or his father through another spruce forest on such white, blustery days as this, sturdily planting a pair of toy-sized snowshoes in the tracks of the bigger raquettes ahead. He hadn’t thought of that boy in a long while. But when he shoved his toes into the babiche thongs and started out through the powdery drifts he was surprised to discover that snowshoeing was a logical and familiar method of locomotion.

It was the same with the “gee” pole and the dog traces and the dogs. As he coursed through the thickets at the edge of the freezing river, he found himself trudging along effortlessly, managing his sledge and the tandem of trotting dogs with a subconscious facility, as though a long-forgotten part of himself had breathed the tang of the wilderness and suddenly awakened to take charge of his affairs.

The lessons of childhood may be buried deep by passing time and quite forgotten. But things well learned are never really lost. He strode forward with an easy swing of the hips, his toes pointed straight ahead, as a woodsman walks. Eyes accustomed to look placidly and rather humorously upon the world, somehow had grown sober and restlessly alert. It did not seem like a recollection of ancient teaching, but an instinct, rather, that prompted him to keep a lookout twenty paces ahead for trail signs and to pass invariably on the windward side of the denser thickets.

He would have said yesterday that he did not know a word of any Indian language. But when he pulled into the Chippewyan encampment he was amazed to discover his tongue twisting into strange clicking and grunting sounds of speech. He understood the talk of the sooty-skinned men who emerged from the huts and teepees, and it was evident that they understood him.

Yes, the tribe had a few very good, excellent sledge dogs for sale. After long dickering Kit purchased a couple of undersized, slinking starvelings, which he had to accept because his sharp-dealing hosts would not part with any others. But when he tried to obtain a guide for his northward trip, business relations promptly ceased.

The tribesmen could think up a hundred reasons why nobody wanted a job. The whitefishing at this moment was too good to be neglected. One man had promised his squaw not to leave Port-o’-Prayer, another’s moccasins hurt his feet if he walked too far, a third felt his rheumatism coming on, a fourth would have to go down to church on Christmas. Besides, the proposed journey would reach the country of the Dog-Ribs and Yellow-Knife Indians. Nobody was afraid of these bad men, the Chippewyans wanted it to be known: they simply weren’t going, that was all.

While Kitchener was engaged in his most persuasive efforts the flap of one of the teepees was jerked back and a voice spoke to him in English. He turned to face a white man who had come out to join the group by the sledge.

The newcomer fixed Kitchener with a long, measuring stare. He was a gaunt, big-boned man, slouchy and loose-knit of body, with lengthy, dangling arms hinged powerfully to the knotted muscles of his stooping shoulders. The temperature was approaching zero, but he stood unshivering in a sleeveless athletic undershirt and without any hat. There was a swipe of lather across the bulge of his hard, bluish jaw. Evidently he had been interrupted in the act of shaving. His lean, dark face was marked here and there with glaring white lines that might have been scars of knife cuts, and his close-cropped scalp likewise showed the seams of old wounds. Although Kitchener himself stood an even six feet without his pacs and snowshoes, this stranger overtopped him by a full two inches.

“North myself,” said the man. “Shoving off two hours before to-morrow’s daylight. You can come with me.”

He spoke with a sharp-clipt brevity and without any trace of accent. Kitchener should have been glad to find a man of his own language and race for a companion. But somehow he was taken aback by the abruptness of the proposal. The stranger’s deep-set eyes looked cold and calculating in the winter twilight.

Kitchener had a feeling that he would have preferred an Indian. “Where are you going?” he temporized.

“Not as far as Saut Sauvage. But I can put you on the track when you turn off.”

“What’s your name?” asked Tearl.

“Jim,” said the other. “What’s yours?”

“Kit,” answered Kitchener, and checked a smile. He could be reserved too if there was any reason for it.

“All right. You have your muts fed and ready to leave by six.”

Kitchener nodded. There was nothing further to be said. The man had overheard him appealing to the Chippewyans for a guide. He could think up no excuse for refusing the services that perhaps were offered with honest intent.

He swept the man with a speculating glance, wondering who he might be. If he were an ordinary bushman he would have been out on his trapping grounds before now, circling his lines. His high boot-pacs and his Mackinaw trousers were new and obviously of city manufacture. Nevertheless he must be a forest man or he would not be pushing off with such quiet confidence into a country that was barely known to the outer world.

Although he had removed his upper garments to shave, he had kept on a cartridge belt and a holster, from which frankly jutted the ivory handle of a heavy revolver. Outside of the police, men of the wilderness carried rifles habitually, but seldom burdened themselves with pistols.

It was a very fine weapon this stranger carried. Kitchener’s eyelashes blinked as there came to him from out of the obscurity of memory or imagination one of those dim and tantalizing flashes that try to bring back a sound or a sight or an experience, once familiar, and afterwards faded to dreamy inconsequence. The butt of the revolver was made of two pieces of old, yellow ivory, handsomely carved and scribed. Kitchener had a queer, startled feeling that he had seen it somewhere before.

He found the stranger’s formidable eyes upon him, and he looked up and said anything to cover his momentary lapse of mind. “I’ll be glad to make a deal with you.”

“Deal?” echoed the other coldly. “What do you think I am—a professional guide? I’ve asked you to go with me. Come or not, it’s all the same.”

“Thank you,” said Kitchener. “I’ll come.”

The Chippewyans gave the two white men a sleeping space in one of their skin teepees, and after taking potluck at the camp kettle, Kit rolled up in his grandfather’s red blankets and went to bed. He tried to sleep, but his thoughts kept going back to the ivory-handled revolver. It belonged somewhere in the past, either this or a gun exactly like it. Time after time the recollection almost came to him, and then escaped behind the curtains of the mind.

Four or five Indians were soddenly asleep on the farther side of the airy teepee. Jim, the stranger, was stretched out in the open space between, a relaxed and quiet shape, breathing slowly and regularly. The faint radiance of the northern night reached through the smoke hole of the lodge poles to outline his sleeping form. He had unstrapped his cartridge belt, and the ivory-handled revolver lay within reach of his right hand.

Kitchener tried to make himself comfortable, first on one side and then on the other. But he remained awake, hearing the cracking of branches and the whisper of snow on the caribou skins. After a long while he flung off his blankets and sat up. He might as well settle this thing that was destroying his night’s rest.

The stranger was obviously asleep. Kit moved forward on his knees, and the man did not budge. He reached the cartridge belt, extracted the revolver from its holster and crept across the teepee to the flapping doorway. None of the sleepers spoke or stirred.

From his shirt pocket Kitchener produced a match. He waited for a moment, and then struck a light, cupping his hands carefully to break the reflection behind him. Peering tensely, he turned the weapon in front of the match. The blued steel of the barrel bore the manufacturer’s trademark, with the patent-rights dates, and on the frame was a small, silver shield, carrying a line of fine engraving. He bent closer and read the inscription:

Kitchener went back on his hands and knees and replaced the gun in the holster. Then he drew his blankets about his shoulders and sat huddled and shivering—staring into vacancy—

He saw far back through space and time. He remembered a twelve-year-old boy seated on the steps of the barracks of the police. It was a sweet, green afternoon with the spring sun flecking the parade ground between rustling branches, while robins and red-polls and pipits flashed singing among the trees. There was a tall, soldierly figure in a scarlet coat, standing before a group of uniformed men. He recalled that one of these men—a grizzled sergeant of police—had made a sort of awkward, halting speech. In a presentation case of mahogany and velvet lay an ivory-butted revolver.

These men had assembled to say good-by to their commanding officer, who had been assigned to a far-distant post. They wished him to accept this beautiful six-shooter as a memento of their affection and esteem. The sergeant had said: “May it never fire first; may it never fire too late.” And the twelve-year-old boy had listened and swelled with the glory of the moment.

The tall officer was Kit’s father, and on that occasion they had seen each other for almost the last time. Inspector Bill Tearl had buckled on his big, new gun and voyaged away to the north.

To-night, after the long lapse of years, Kitchener had looked again at his father’s revolver, and another man was wearing it.

CHAPTER III
DISMAL TRAIL

At the coldest and dreariest hour of the morning, in darkness and silence so intense that an early riser must feel the snow stinging his face to know that it was still snowing, Kit Tearl was out of his blankets, poking the night fire and thawing out the coffee pot.

The Indians would lie sluggishly until daybreak, but the other white man aroused himself a few minutes behind his traveling companion. Before he donned his fur parka and mittens he stood half naked outside the teepee, revolving his body in the weather, and stretching his sinewy arms, as though he took relish in the snow beating upon his skin.

The two men barely exchanged greetings, and they ate breakfast without a syllable of speech. The stranger fed and harnessed his dogs and waited in dour silence while Tearl was putting his sorry team into the traces.

When the Chippewyan curs and the huskies from Port-o’-Prayer found themselves in harness together for the first time the inevitable dog-fight took place, and ended in as many seconds as there were dogs. The leader, a red-furred Chinook cross called Buzz-saw, walked back through his team-mates and left them on their backs, howling.

The tall man stood aloof until the trouble was settled. “Men could learn something from the dogs,” he remarked. “When two or more start some place together they ought to fight it out before they take the trail. Then there’d be no future arguments.”

“As long as you know the trail, and I don’t,” said Kit, smoothly, “we don’t have to prove which is the king-pin. You lead, I’ll follow.”

Until the dull, leaden daylight seeped through the forest Kit drove his team and followed in the crunching furrow left by the vaguely seen figure that stalked ahead.

He had said nothing about the ivory-handled revolver and was careful to give no hint of last night’s discovery. Since their first meeting the stranger had inspired him with distrust and an unaccountable feeling of apprehension. To mention the fact that the gun he carried belonged to a mysteriously “lost” police officer might precipitate a show-down such as Kit was not yet prepared to meet. Common sense advised him to wait and keep his eyes open, to find out who this man was and whence he came. If he had any part in the tragedy of Inspector Tearl’s disappearance, it would be insanity to question him or put him on his guard. He could vanish permanently into the storm if he chose, or simply turn with a single shot and let the ivory-handled revolver preserve its own ancient secret.

Kit was carried along by a grim excitement as he dogged the footsteps of his laconic companion. It was an odd whimsey of fate that had brought them both on the same day into this out-of-the-way part of the wilderness. For twelve years a great force of relentless, sharp-eyed man-hunters, with every resource of experience and organization at their command, had searched ceaselessly for news of a lost comrade. The scarlet-clad brigade does not lightly abandon its own. Countless patrols had turned up, time after time, with “nothing to report.” But where a thousand seasoned bushmen had sought fruitlessly, young Kit Tearl, on his first night in the big timber, had stumbled upon a clew that perhaps might lead to the knowledge of what had happened to the missing inspector of police. His errand had suddenly changed to such grave import that he was almost afraid to look into the future. A huge responsibility had fallen upon his shoulders. Of secondary concern now was the finding of Sergeant Buck Tearl. His new mission was to hold the trail and, by hook or crook, to ferret out the history of the man with the ivory-butted gun.

The short day broke sullenly to the steady accompaniment of falling snow. Kit and his traveling mate were cruising through a dense spruce forest. There were no landmarks visible—nothing but trees and trees and trees, with the endless expanse of snow underfoot and snow-chinked ceilings of greenery above.

Men and dogs were like shadows stealing through muffled, unechoing corridors of whiteness. The only sounds to be heard were the silken whisper of sledge runners, the padding of industrious feet, the creak of raquettes sliding through the feathery drifts.

The motions of snowshoeing came naturally enough to Kit, but by the end of his first couple of hours on the march he began to feel acute little pains in his ankles and calves and thighs. Since his graduation from college his most arduous journeys had been undertaken by subway between his apartment and the law office in which he had hoped in time to become a junior partner. He was in for a few days of torment before his muscles hardened up; meanwhile he shut a stubborn jaw and held the pace.

A while before noon they halted for a breathing space and to give the dogs a drink. They picked up a cold snack and Kit’s companion squatted by his sledge, unsociable and saturnine, crunching with strong, white teeth the bannock and hard chunk of pemmican which he had produced from his pack.

The taciturnity of the man was beginning to wear upon Tearl’s nerves. If he would only say something, even to grouch at his fellow traveler! But his harsh mouth stayed shut and his eyes remained as cold and unfeeling as the wilderness that reached into mysterious silence for a thousand miles about him.

They had left the river far behind and were traveling a diagonal course across the spruce ridges. To ignore the natural guidance of the valleys and waterways is the easiest way of getting lost in the big timber. Each wooded crown or hollow looked exactly like the hills and hollows ahead or those left behind. Had Kit been alone he would have been hopelessly muddled long ago. But the stranger apparently scorned the need of route marks. He plowed on tirelessly and without hesitation, having neither sun nor compass to correct his turnings, driving his dogs through the unbroken leagues of the forest, breaking trail and never at loss in his points of direction.

Kitchener at first thought that the man’s silence was due merely to a surly and unfriendly disposition. But as they traversed the miles of solitude, it occurred to him that perhaps there were grimmer reasons for keeping so quiet. He noticed that his trail-mate continually shifted his glance, right and left, and whenever he came to an open glade in the woods, where a moving object would stand out boldly against the snowy backgrounds, he invariably skulked close to the edges of the fringing thickets. At every high ridge he paused to scan the surrounding landscape and to watch briefly over his own back-trail.

Once when the dogs started up a snowshoe rabbit and gave chorus excitedly, their driver sent them back to their business with a savagely curling whiplash, and within ten seconds had reduced them to whimpering obedience. On another occasion the man checked his team in mid-stride on the slant of a sheer hillside. He crouched to stare fixedly across the valley, and, with a quick, reflexive jerk, his hand reached for the rifle that rode under the lashings of his sledge. Whatever he thought he saw or heard, it failed to reveal itself. By the time Kit had scrambled across the slide, he had straightened again and was ready to send his team onward.

“What was it?” Kit asked.

The man gave him a stony look from under his wet, bristling eyebrows.

“Habit!” he explained in a voice that he was cautious to keep lowered. “It gets to be second nature to keep a lookout around you.”

“You were grabbing for your rifle,” Tearl observed.

“Thought I saw a moose,” the other returned sourly, and commanded his team to marche!

Kitchener followed without further comment. But he knew that the man was lying. The sledges were overloaded now, and it would be impossible for either of them to take on any extra haunches of meat. Besides, no moose would ever have allowed them to approach that close on his windward side, as this woodsman knew perfectly well. It was evident that he was on his guard against somebody or something that he feared was on his trail or ambushed in the dim coverts ahead.

The winter darkness overtook them in mid-afternoon, and they promptly made camp. In a deep little glen, screened densely by the alders, where a spring of water welled forth in a half frozen trickle from underneath an old, fallen hemlock, they erected shelter sheets and spread their blankets. Jim built a tiny fire of knots kicked off the rotting tree, and took pains to keep the flame low and well hidden in the deepest pocket of their retreat. It was not an honest fire of logs that a care-free bushman would have ignited to warm himself on a winter’s night. Obviously the man did not wish to risk the attention of spying eyes.

Kitchener was too tired to perturb himself over the significance of all these precautions. He fed his dogs, helped to drain the pot of coffee, wrapped his aching frame in the red blankets, and in ten seconds had fallen into profound sleep.

What it was that aroused him he could not have said. The wind had died during the night and the forest was invested in utter quiet. Jim had trampled out the fire before he turned in. The faint aurora of a northern white night lent a magical unreality to the muffled shapes of the surrounding forest. Great downy snowflakes sifted interminably through the weary-drooping branches. Kitchener had no idea whether it was midnight or the edge of daybreak.

A drift of snow had formed over his feet and a current of outside air had found a way in between the flaps of his blankets. He was curled up in a tight ball, cramped and shivering. With clicking teeth he sat up, intending to remake his bed.

His companion had bunked down on the opposite side of the spring. Kitchener looked sleepily in that direction, and then his eyes blinked wider and he looked harder. In the obscurity he could just make out the oblong shape of the folded robes. But they lay flat on the ground. There was nothing under them. Wonderingly, Kit crept forward to make sure that he was not deceiving himself. He pulled back the furs, and saw in the snow the deep impression of a man’s body. Jim had rolled up under his covers for a while—presumably until he was sure that the other man was safely asleep. Then he had got up again, and disappeared from camp.

At first Kitchener supposed that the man had decided to rid himself of his traveling mate and had sneaked away into the night. But a hurried glance around corrected that notion. Jim’s packed sledge still remained where he had unhitched the evening before on the other side of the brook, and on the neighboring slope, where the dogs had buried themselves in the snow, a group of little hummocks, like grave mounds, tallied in number with the count of the two teams. The man had slipped off somewhere on some benighted business of his own, but it would seem that he expected to come back.

Kit fastened his boots and picked up his rifle. The other man had taken his own gun from the sledge, and his broad-toed snowshoes also were missing. It was merely a question of casting across the brook to pick up the web-scuffled marks in the snow. Jim had climbed out of the hollow and, for some unguessed reason, had struck back over the windings of his own down-country trail.

There was no hesitation on Kit’s part. Here was a chance for discoveries. It must be a momentous errand to pull a man out of his warm robes in the middle of such a night. He noticed that his fellow traveler wore broad snowshoes with a peculiar square web packing. An inspection of the departing prints showed only a light powdering of new-fallen flakes. Presumably the man had quitted camp only a short while ago. Kit scrambled up the embankment, intending to follow.

From a distance of a half-dozen paces he could dimly make out the furrowed line that curved down through the spruces. By staying off at one side of the trail he could pursue the back-track without being betrayed later by his own footsteps.

Kit reached the top of the first terrace and there halted with a startled abruptness. He had an impression that something had stirred behind him. A bulky shadow loomed in the alder thicket. Before he had half turned a brawny arm reached suddenly forward to crook itself about his head, and an astounding voice accosted him.

“Hello, Cocky-bird!”

For an instant Kit felt as though his heart had gone dead in his chest, and then all his blood coursed through him again in a wild, warm resurgence. He knew without looking around. The low, mocking laugh, the bearlike embrace squeezing his head and pinching his ears: there was only one person in the world who ever hugged him like this, or chuckled at him with such ironic amusement. It was Gerald Tearl. It could be nobody on earth except his brother Jerry.

CHAPTER IV
A GHOSTLY VOYAGEUR

The arm in its rough, icy sleeve clutched Kit tightly, and in that breath-taking moment he neither moved nor recovered the voice to speak. It was as though time had swept backwards to rediscover the heart of an eager, small boy, whose bigger, rougher brother sometimes stalked up behind him with laughter to clench his head like this. The pain of his ruffled ears had always seemed to him a very trifling price to pay for the ecstasy of being noticed by the redoubtable Jerry. Even to-night Kitchener was conscious only of a sudden, blinding happiness in feeling himself caught in that harshly affectionate grip, in knowing that his brother had found him.

“I saw your funny old face this morning,” said the man behind him. “You stopped on a hillside and goggled your eyes my direction. And then I knew it was you, Cocky-bird.”

Kit broke the muscular hold and squirmed around. He saw a tall, deep-chested figure in duffles and furs, and wearing the royal insignia of the northern police.

“Jerry!” he gasped.

The other man grinned at him, displaying teeth as white as the snow that clung to his hood.

Jerry had matured since Kit last saw him, and seemingly had grown in stature and taken on several more inches of girth. The eyes that twinkled in the half-light were older with knowledge and experience. Even in smiling the mouth held something of the ruthless inflexibility of a wolf-trap. He looked harder and more competent than ever before, and also, Kit fancied, with a touch of misgiving, much more self-willed and reckless and devil-may-care.

“Are you Sergeant Buck Tearl?” Kit asked.

“None other. Almost demoted now and then, but still Sergeant Tearl. What are you doing here, Oakheart?”

“I intercepted a radio message for you from WBZ. It was about some Esquimaux and the dead not dying. I’ve got it written down for you. I was sure this Buck party would be you.”

Jerry laughed quietly. “The same old Cocky-bird! Would hike three thousand miles through a freeze-up of hell—if you take the notion—just to tell me you got WBZ on your radio. That would be little Kit—always. Too bad, after all your trouble, but I got the message too. I carry a small, portable set on my sledge, and I picked it out of the air the same night you did, about a month ago.”

“Then you must know—” Kit regarded him sharply. “What does it mean? Who’s Diane?”

Jerry shook his head. “I’ll tell you about that later when we have a little more time—all that I know, at least. It’s a strange story, and may bring on things still stranger before we’re through. Just now we have more immediate things to think about. How do you happen to be consorting with this egg I saw you with to-day?”

“Jim What’s-his-name? I ran into him at Port-o’-Prayer, and he offered to guide me part way to Saut Sauvage, where they said you had gone.”

“That’s all you know about him?”

“No,” said Kit, “that isn’t all I know about him.” He stole a glance around the thickets and dropped his speech to a whisper. “He’s got Dad’s old ivory-butted gun.”

“All right.”

Sergeant Tearl accepted the fact with a nod that might have seemed almost indifferent. “He’s the mug I thought he was. I’ve been hovering on him for several days, and of course he knows that I came in through Port-o’-Prayer, just as you knew. He thought he saw me yesterday noon, when I was watching from the opposite hill. He did, but it’s a good thing for all of us that he changed his mind and decided he didn’t. It’s too soon to kill him.”

Kit stared at his brother, chilled not so much by the remark as the matter-of-fact tone of its utterance. “Who is he?” he demanded.

“I don’t know what name he’s going by now. His real name is Simeon Bent, but the guards down at the prison in Ottawa called him ‘Hell’ Bent. You can draw your own conclusions. He just finished an eleven-year stretch, and they let him out a few weeks ago.”

Kitchener studied the dim vistas of the snowy landscape. “He told me his name was Jim. But perhaps I misunderstood. He may have said ‘Sim.’ Where’s he gone now?”

“Just took a saunter down through the forest to find me. People are so ready to accept the belief that it is easiest to murder a policeman when he is in bed asleep. You’re supposed to sleep soundest in the small hours of the morning.”

“You don’t mean—” Kit gasped.

“Why not?” observed Jerry placidly. “He knows I’m around here somewhere. He has a pretty little job afoot, but he can’t go ahead until the field is clear. He’s got to get me out of the way. I was sure he’d strike back to-night to intersect my sledge tracks. He won’t find the trail until he’s five miles up country. I detoured widely and came in here from the east instead of the south.

“Caught a little sleep about a hundred yards from here.” The sergeant pushed back his sleeve to observe the luminous dial of the watch strapped around his big-boned wrist. “One-thirty now. It’ll be three before Sim makes the circuit. That gives us time for a family reunion. How’s little Jane?”

“She’s a grown woman, Jerry. Pretty and sweet and stubborn as a mule.”

“Little Jane!” ruminated the sergeant, with the faintest break in his voice. “She’s the best of our tribe. Give her a kiss from the outcast, if you ever see her again. I’m not at all sure that you will.” Jerry measured his brother’s straight-standing figure with a critical eye. “I’ve got to use you, Mr. Stoutenberg, now that I’ve got you. Sorry!”

Jerry reached forward a mittened hand and his iron fingers clamped down for a moment on the other’s shoulder. “Did you make the varsity squad, Cocky-bird?” he asked, as he prodded his brother’s wiry muscles.

“No,” said Kit regretfully. “Not enough weight for my height. The best I could do was the cross-country team and captain of the pistol team.”

“You always were an ugly shot with a gun,” remarked Jerry. “And there may be times when that’ll get an alumnus farther than a Phi Beta Kappa key.”

“Jerry,” demanded the younger brother abruptly, “why did you run out on us the way you did? I know you got yourself into a mess, and all of that, but there was no reason why you couldn’t have written. It was rotten never to send any word to Jane and me.”

“Maybe,” agreed the other. “But I’d thought it all out and I never was going to. It was fairer not.” He laughed heavily and ended with a sigh. “That man I smashed—I’ve almost forgotten who he was and what it was about. There was a girl mixed up in it somewhere—as unimportant as that. I went off my chump, and might easily have killed the poor devil.”

“He recovered, though,” Kit said. “You could go back and square it up and be yourself again. There’s no need of burying yourself alive for life.”

“I am myself,” Jerry returned somberly, “and there’s a beastly streak in me. What happened once can happen again. I’m not going to risk another chance of disgracing you and Jane, or keeping you in a nervous stew over my running amok again. I’m better off forgotten.”

“That’s fool talk,” the younger brother protested.

“If I turn violent any time now,” grinned Jerry, “I’m acting in the name of the law. This is the right job for me.”

Kitchener regarded him curiously. “Do you like it?”

“It’s my job,” the sergeant reiterated briefly, and changed the subject. “Hitch your dogs,” he ordered. “You’re coming with me.”

It was characteristic that Kit should accept unquestioningly his older brother’s decisions. He roused the sleeping huskies from their nests under the snow, pitched them a fish apiece, and then hustled them into the sledge traces.

Jerry looked on without offering to help. “You’ll find as you go along that you remember things you thought you never knew,” he remarked as the younger brother smartly swung his leader into line. “You and I cut our milk teeth on the butt of a dog whip, and took our first bath in a snow drift. I’m glad you’re here, Crow-eye.”

“What about Sim?” asked Kit as he packed up his bed.

“Let him find you gone. He’ll see I’ve been here and that we’ve gone off together. Let him think what he pleases. I’m going to pass him along later to the captain of the varsity pistol team.” Jerry finished with an ironic laugh. “Ready?”

As he approached the neighboring hillside a half dozen animated bundles sprang yapping from the drift to claw and leap at Jerry for a moment, and then to round in a wolf-like pack upon the strange huskies. The sergeant booted his own beasts back into their traces, and within ten seconds had quelled the riot. Then he gave the command and the team launched forward into the night.

Kit had thought that his companion of the first day’s march was a snow-traveler, but he was to learn what it really means to cruise. His dogs were forced to stretch their gaunt bodies to the utmost to hold the pace of the police malemutes and the lusty sergeant who broke trail for them.

Years pass and seasons change and men grow older. Times there had been when a short-legged, anxious-faced little chap used to tag after his elder brother, taking two steps for one, stumbling and breathless, yet keeping up somehow. To-night it seemed to Kit as though a ghostly young familiar were running with him, sharing his distress as the miles lengthened and his wind gave out and his aching legs grew heavier, but pushing onward, nevertheless, hanging on in spite of everything, not once losing sight of the big hurrying shape ahead of him.

An hour or so on the shadowy side of daybreak Jerry at last decided mercifully that they had come far enough. He halted his team in the darkness of a wooded ravine at the head of a tiny, ice-bound brook. Then with a crooked grin he turned to look back as his brother kicked out of his snowshoes and sank down upon the ground.

“Same old Kit!” he said. “Cheerio! You’ll toughen up.”

He disappeared in the thicket with an ax, and for a few minutes the morning stillness was broken by a cheerful ringing of steel. Presently he returned with an armful of white birch billets and started a brisk fire.

“You and I must have an understanding before we split directions,” he remarked. “I’ve got my job to do, and you’ll have yours. We’ll breakfast first. Meanwhile, let’s see what Diane has on her mind.”

“Diane?” echoed Kit, staring blankly.

“See if she’s asleep, will you?” Jerry nodded casually towards the sledge. “Maybe she’d like something to eat.”

“To eat—? Diane?” Kit regarded his brother slantwise, as though he were in momentary doubt of the other’s sobriety, or sanity. The policeman was absorbed in measuring coffee from a muslin bag into a tin pot, and he did not look up.

Kitchener stood up and paused uncertainly. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“Here’s the key,” said Jerry. He fished in his pocket and handed his brother a tiny, metal object that glinted in the firelight.

Young Tearl held the key between his fingers, looking at it vacuously. “What am I to do with this?”

“Let her come to breakfast, if she wants any,” said Jerry, and turned his back again.

Kit stood irresolute for a moment, and then, with a bewildered glance at the policeman, he moved over towards the sledge. He halted to gaze in sagging-jawed wonderment.

Jerry’s sledge was bedded deep with duffle and blankets and soft, warm furs. In the cozy nest thus formed he made out the contours of a slight figure, and saw the oval of a feminine face and a pair of dark, living eyes glowering up at him.

As he stood awkward and unreasoningly embarrassed, a pettish, slightly husky voice spoke sharply from the smothering furs. “Unfasten these!”

The robes were lifted and thrown back, and two hands stretched themselves towards Kit. He was aghast to discover that the woman’s wrists were held together by the steel links of handcuffs.