CHAPTER IX
GRANDFATHER’S RED BLANKETS
What change of plan or error of reckoning had brought Jerry into the Vermilion River country, when he should have been miles from here, heading due north, Kit at this moment was unable to imagine. He wasted no time in futile speculation. It sufficed him to know that Hell Bent and his brother were cruising on the river route, almost within rifle shot of one another, while he and Diane Durand were trailing close behind. He did not need the gift of prophecy to realize that events were rapidly shaping themselves towards some sudden crisis.
The girl had come down the river slope to look curiously at the juncture of the trails. For a moment Kitchener lifted his icy eyelashes, trying to discover from her face whether she recognized the pattern of Jerry’s raquettes. She did not enlighten him.
“Funny there’d be somebody else along here on a day like this,” was her only comment.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Kit carelessly. “Maybe some trapper finishing his rounds. You find fur-hunters’ shacks scattered here and there all through the wilderness. Come on. Let’s go.”
They took advantage of the last of twilight and hurried on after the two who had gone before. Kit had no expectancy of closing up the distance to-night, and the best he could hope was that conditions to-morrow might remain favorable for tracking. At this moment, however, the prospects were disquieting. The sleet was changing to snow—stinging, dry flakes that had begun to eddy into drifts along the exposed banks of the river. As he pushed onward he cast many dubious glances towards the northern sky, worried by the auguries that spelled heavy weather and smothered trails.
When darkness finally hid the ground underfoot he had no choice but to go into camp. This night they were lucky enough to find an overhanging bluff by the river which served both as a windbreak and a sheltering roof. By the time the tent was up and supper had been cooked, their fire was almost blotted out by flying clouds of snow. Kit shoved the smoldering fagots closer to the cliffside, and then groped his way along the cracking edges of river ice and dragged in enough down-timber and driftwood to last through the night.
Diane Durand left her tent flap open to catch the rays of heat, and Kit snuggled down by the snoring dogs, where the reflected warmth reached the wall of rock. A dozen times during the night he awakened to replenish the fire and to listen with gloomy forebodings to the wind and the rush of snow down the river levels.
At daybreak he and the girl aroused themselves in a world of swirling whiteness. The moment he had cast off his robes he wallowed through the drifts to the river bank. It was as he had feared. The landscape stretched away into ghostly backgrounds, an unbroken monotony of snow. This was to-day, and all of yesterday’s records were buried under the great downfall of the storm.
Kitchener felt reasonably certain the ex-convict and Jerry both were heading for Great Owl Run. The trails had disappeared, and there was little prospect of picking them up again. But as long as he held the guidance of the river and kept count of the branching streams there was slight danger of his going astray. Diane Durand did not seem to be much alarmed by the burying of yesterday’s tangible paths.
“Uncle Jim’ll be up there somewhere,” she said serenely, “and if we keep on the way we’re going we’ll surely find him.”
“Shouldn’t doubt it,” said Kit.
Through that brief, blustering day they struggled forward in the welter of snow, like specters in a world of death, seeing no living creature, walking in a vast blankness. They crossed the mouths of a third and a fourth creek that ended their ice-choked careers in the Vermilion River. As night closed in at the end of the ghastly daylight they struck the fifth branching stream.
On a high promontory, barely discernible in the hurly-burly of the storm, Kitchener made out a tall, gaunt fir tree that had been stripped of its middle branches and left standing above the river, a beacon for all passers-by. This was a “lobstick” which the Indians had trimmed fantastically to commemorate some noteworthy tribal event. The ancient marker, Jerry had said, would indicate Kit’s turning point. This creek must be Great Owl Run.
Whether Diane Durand knew anything of local geography Kitchener did not know. But she offered no protests when he quitted the river here and turned up the side stream.
In almost any other land Great Owl Run would have been called a river. It was thirty or forty feet wide between its sheer banks, a deep, swift-running stream coming out of the high hills in the northeast. For stretches the course was closed solidly from bank to bank, but along the narrow races the water poured out thunderously from under the ice tunnels, and would not freeze even in below-zero weather.
There was no sign of human footprints along the sheltered shores. If anybody had come this direction during the last twenty-four hours the trail was blotted out under the heavy snowfall. Kit moved furtively and as long as he could see he kept a restless lookout among the gloomy coverts. Bill Tearl and the two outlanders had met with a strange and terrible fate not many miles farther up this stream, and Kit was conscious of a haunting oppression of mind and spirit as he neared the scene of the old tragedy.
Darkness came, and he continued to grope his way up the winding watercourse. The dogs were sagging in the traces, staggering belly-deep in the snow. Behind the sledge Diane Durand stumbled and floundered in the drifts, almost at the end of her endurance. But still Kit would not halt.
As they advanced the forest grew blacker and denser. The gale still raged overhead, but in the timber-smothered depths of the creek bottoms scarcely a breath of wind reached them. Evergreens do not rustle like deciduous trees, but moan and sigh in living anguish. There are few sounds more dolorous than the wailing of a spruce forest at night.
Kitchener was groping his way through a tangle of snowy underwood, when he was conscious of a shadowy movement at his elbow. Startled, he turned his head to see a slight, wraith-like shape hurrying at his heels. It was Diane Durand. In the darkness he could just see the blur of her lifted face.
“What’s the matter?” he asked as he resumed his weary stride. There was no reason why he might not have spoken in a natural tone, but through the warning of some vague instinct he pitched his voice to a whisper.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I— How much farther must we go?”
“Not far now,” he said.
He expected her to drop back to her place with the sledge; instead she kept at his side, pressing even closer, as though something had frightened her and she was seeking the reassurance of human fellowship.
It was curious. Until this moment she had never betrayed any symptom of timidity.
“I’ve never seen it so dark anywhere,” she complained. “It isn’t like being out-of-doors, but feeling your way in a strange—” and hesitated for the word—“cavern. Everything is so—shut-in.”
Kitchener had nothing to say. He was forcing his way doggedly through the low, jungle-like thickets, when suddenly, unreasoningly, his breath was quenched in his lungs and his heart stood still.
Something soft and silent and somehow horrible, seemed to move through the air just by his head.
He was not aware of any sound, nor of actual motion. Yet without seeing or hearing he knew that something alive had passed through the darkness and stared at him.
And Diane knew, and the dogs knew. The girl’s hand was clutching the muscles of his forearm, trembling. The dog team scrambled forward to slink at Kitchener’s heels. Like the girl, the beasts also had discovered a sudden need for human companionship.
Kit had pulled up short, listening, his eyes striving vainly to penetrate the stifling gloom.
There was nothing, only the sighing of the spruces and the cracking of frost-brittle branches along the hidden creek. His common sense tried to tell him that he was deluding himself with overwrought imaginings, but his high-keyed instincts knew better.
As he waited, tense and breathless, with the girl clinging to him and the dogs cowering at his feet, it came again. For an instant he fancied, or rather, felt, that a ghostly shape, blacker than the blackness of the night, had soundlessly crossed his line of vision. Similarly, he was conscious of a wavering in the darkness behind him.
Kit felt a cold tingling creep up his backbone to the base of the neck, that queer, atavistic sensation that modern men probably have inherited from furry forebears, who bristled in moments of danger and dread. The girl was standing close, her slim young body as taut as though she had suddenly passed under a mesmeric spell. Without thinking what he did, Kit’s arm slid around her waist, and she did not try to move.
Again he was aware of a shady stirring, as though a grotesque and impalpable substance had stooped his direction and brushed him by. For just that moment the dead air was disturbed and he had the impression that a soft, monstrous form had swept past his face. And all at once the awful silence was disrupted by a harsh, snicking sound—like a pair of steel scissors’ blades that had sharply clashed.
Kit caught his breath, and then his drawn muscles relaxed and he laughed feebly with the letting down of over-strained senses. “Oh, gosh!” he moaned. “What a pair of idiots we are! Scared—”
“Of what?” the girl gasped. “Oh, what?”
“Do you know the name of this place?” Kit’s voice sounded more as though it belonged to him. “Of course! I never thought!”
“This place—?” she echoed.
“Great Owl Run. There must have been a reason for the name.” He released the girl and looked shamefacedly into the darkness. “Owls!”
Something glided past them so close that they felt the fanned wake in the atmosphere.
“It’s an owl pit in here,” explained Kit, who had become his own man again. “There must be dozens of ’em. They’re just swooping to look at us—”
The girl shuddered and threw up one arm to defend her face. “How terrible!” she faltered.
“A puppy or a wolf cub would never get out of here alive,” he told her. “But a man and woman and grown dogs are perfectly safe.”
The girl strained forward as his eyes tried desperately to fathom the obscurity. “I can feel them about us,” she whispered. “They must be enormous.”
“Great Northern Owls!” he said. “I saw one once that had wandered south. He was six feet across the wings. Bloody night pirates! Fiends! This must be a fearful pocket of the woods. Where the owls live nothing else ever lives.” He touched her hand. “Let’s get on.”
Miss Durand was somewhat reassured, but the dogs did not like this place at all. Thenceforward Kit had no worries about the jaded animals keeping up with him. They were nosing his heels at every step.
As he crunched over a carpet of spruce needles, which in places was bare of snow, vague, feathery flutterings wove invisible orbits about his head. Once something croaked above him, and later one of the fearsome nightbirds sent out his hunting call, a voiceless, disembodied sound, like a despairing groan floating out of an insatiable emptiness. He knew it was only an owl, and yet his blood was chilled by the unearthliness of the cry.
He had no idea how far he followed the windings of that ill-omened creek. For hours, it seemed to him, he groped his way among shaggy tree trunks, around rotted windfalls, through tangling, flesh-tearing thickets. And then, without warning, he found nothing in front of his outreaching hand. He stopped and peered blindly, and knew only that the dense forest had abruptly come to an end and that there was open space before him.
Gingerly he moved forward again, and barked his knee on the sharp edge of a stump. There were other snags and stumps sticking up from the ground. He brushed the snow from one of the old stubs, and found the scars of ancient ax-work. Here, apparently, was a man-made clearing.
Diane Durand had pressed up behind him with one unquiet hand touching him as she tried to see past his shoulder. The dogs squatted on their haunches and sat in an uneasy line, their noses and sharp ears cocked to the fore. And then, before anybody could stop him, one of the beasts flung up his head and let forth a long, lugubrious howl.
The sudden eruption of sound in that hushed closure of the wilderness was indecent, uncanny, frightening. Kitchener caught the animal’s throat and choked off the last echoing quaver. “Shut up!” he commanded under his breath.
The girl had ventured a few paces forward, and he straightened and stole up beside her.
“I think there’s something there,” she said close to his ear. “I can just make it out—square and black.”
Kit lifted one eyebrow and stood at straining attention. Gradually a dim, dark outline took shape in the gloom. “It looks like a house,” he mused.
A mutual curiosity drew them on, and after several cautious halts, they arrived before a low-roofed, dismal-looking structure of hewn logs, that stood, apparently, in the middle of an abandoned clearing. There was no sound within, no glimmer of light; the place smelled of emptiness, desolation and decay.
Kit moved under the dank front wall, and waited with his mouth half open and his head alertly tilted. The open doorway yawned at him and the puncheon door hung on one rusted hinge that creaked faintly with the pressure of the wind. At the right and left loomed the dark squares of two broken-shuttered windows. In the faint odor of must that emanated from the interior murk he caught no scent of smoke nor savor of recent cooking. The one-time occupants of the cabin must have been a long while absent.
Kitchener’s sense told him that he might enter the place openly, and that there would be no one to deny him the right. But something more than mere instinct of caution urged him to hesitate. His hand went down to unbutton the flap of his pistol holster, and that simple, unthinking act made him bold. He shouldered aside the swaying door and stepped into the cabin.
Something squeaked and scuttled away overhead, and became silent. The old roof evidently sheltered squirrels, or rats. There was something else. It was a low, measured sound, lifting and falling, like a man breathing in the dark.
The dead air within seemed many degrees colder than the zero weather outside. Kit found himself shivering as he stared into the frigid obscurity, striving with every nerve aquiver to locate the source of that strange, breathy heaving.
Diane Durand had come into the cabin and remained a stilled shadow at his side. The dogs were cowering in their tangled traces at the doorway, snuffing audibly at whatever it was the darkness hid. It might have seemed that they were afraid to stay alone outside, and fearful of coming in.
Kitchener had his flashlight in hand, his thumb irresolute on the button. He drew a quick breath and suddenly pressed the contact. A spot of light danced on the farther wall, and he swung it in a circuit of the room.
His swift reconnoitering disclosed nothing immediately alarming. The brilliant bull’s-eye flicked from wall to wall, illuminating bare, peeled logs, warped and moldy and showing wide cracks at places where the chinking had crumbled. The first hurried survey revealed a clay fireplace choked with stale kitchen litter, a greasy iron pot hanging on a crane, a broken-legged table covered with tattered oilcloth, a slab bench, a trash heap of empty tins and battered cooking utensils, a sheet-iron stove and stove-pipe flaked red with rust, a disused ax driven to the hilt into one of the sill-logs, and a double-decked bunk made of poles and stuffed with withered balsam branches and frowsy-looking bed clothing.
The single, four-square room held no visible habitant, and yet, deliberate and rhythmic as tick-tocks, the breathing sounds continued. Kitchener felt his eyes growing bigger as he switched his light back to the bunk. There was something in the lower section, a shapeless bulge hidden by a red blanket.
For lengthening seconds he watched and listened so particularly to the other breathing that he himself forgot to breathe. At first he thought the blanket had shifted slightly, but as he eyed it closely he changed his mind and decided that nothing had moved. But still the strange, bellows-like pulsations filled and expired, lifted and died again.
Slowly his glance turned upward, and then he shot his light towards the ceiling beams. There was a gaping hole in the roof, where a patch of shakes had rotted through; and one of the rafters had loosened at the eaves. A current of air sucked through the door and drew out through the vent overhead, causing the sagging roof to billow at intervals like a tent-top in a wind. It was the cabin that was breathing.
Kitchener should have been relieved when he traced the source of disturbing sound. But he wasn’t. There was something wrong about this place. He felt it. He knew it. He felt it in the air, in the chilling darkness, in his blood and nerves and in the marrow of his bones. The light flickered back to the bunk. He looked, took a couple of steps forward, and looked harder.
The red blanket was an old Hudson’s Bay Company four pointer. He saw the marking stripes at the corner that hung off the edge of the bunk, and also he saw a charred spot in the fabric, down near the border. A spark had hopped out of the camp fire his first night in the woods and scorched that hole in the wool. It was Grandfather Tearl’s old red blanket. There was no mistaking it. He had given it to Jerry when they traded clothes and equipment, two days ago. Jerry was here, or had been here.
With misgivings that he could never have explained, Kit moved to the bunk and pulled at the edge of the blanket. He tugged tentatively, and then jerked it to the floor. In the middle of the bunk was a crumpled garment—a gray stag shirt—and nothing else.
Kitchener stood like a torpid man, staring senselessly at his own bare hand. His fingers were wet and sticky. He turned the light towards himself and felt weak and sick. The blanket had left a gory smear across his palm.
As though he had suddenly aroused himself from a stupor he snatched up the shirt from the mattress of browse. He looked at the label under the neck band. It was the shirt he himself had purchased not long ago at a New York store of outfitters. His brother had it when they last saw each other.
In an access of horror Kit spread wide the garment and brought his lamp to bear. And then his eyes shut as though with an anguish that was almost too great to bear. In the center of the back, where the cloth would stretch over the wearer’s shoulder blades, he found a small, round hole, soggy to the touch and stained an ugly crimson.
“Jerry!” The name stuck in his throat, choking him.
He whirled with his light to see Diane Durand standing behind him, her lips apart, her eyes wildly gleaming as she stared at the bunk. “What is it?” she gasped.
Kit said nothing. His spot-light was a will-o’-the-wisp, darting about the room. A bare floor of hard-packed earth; bare, log walls; naked timber-rafters supporting the roof: there was no hiding-place here. He heard nothing except the thumping of his heart, the sighing of the old cabin, the horrible sniffing of the dogs in the doorway.
The snow had swirled down through the hole in the roof, whitening the floor in the middle of the room. In the snow Kit discovered the pattern of a man’s boot-sole fouled with red. The light blazed a path through the darkness as he moved forward, crouching almost to his knees. There were other bloodspots on the floor, a spattering trail leading to the broken window at the far end of the cabin.
On the floor beneath the casement there was an ugly, dark pool and the windowsill was similarly bedabbled. He stood up, looked into the outer darkness. Shrinking from contact with the red-stained sill, he thrust his head out of doors and turned his lamp downward. His breath stopped short as he peered after the piercing light beam.
The cabin, he discovered, had been erected on the brink of Great Owl Run. The embankment descended in a sheer drop, straight down to the stream, twenty or thirty feet below. In the flash of his lamp he caught the gleam of black, open water racing under a yawning ice-tunnel a little farther downstream.
He turned away, his eyes in a stinging mist, conjuring the image of his lusty brother: the dauntless Jerry who had started with such supreme self-confidence on his journey to Queen Maud Sea.
Kit needed to search no farther. He knew what had happened. Jerry must have been in the lead, traveling down the Vermilion River and up the course of Great Owl Run with Hell Bent only a mile or so, a couple of hours, behind. Jerry could have had no warning that he was being followed. Tired out after bucking the blizzard all day he had crept into the bunk with his clothes on, rolled up in Grandfather Tearl’s blankets, and slept.
It did not take a morbid imagination to visualize the rest. The second man arrived stealthily under the cover of the storm. He would have paused outside for a moment to remove his waffle-meshed snowshoes. Then he tiptoed into the gloomy cabin, pausing to listen and searched out the location of the bunk.
Probably the rats squeaked and scuttled away in the rafters. Silence after that, save for the sighing of the cabin and the breathing of the sleeping man. A furtive approach; a shot fired at close range. Utter quiet then. Only the wind drawing softly through the cabin roof.
The valiant, resourceful Jerry had been caught asleep with his boots on.
Kit could visualize only too vividly the subsequent horrors: the stripping off of blanket and shirt, the search of pockets; a limp shape toppled off the bunk, dragged across the snowy floor, boosted to the window sill and dumped overside. A plummet-like drop, a cold splash in the darkness below.
Kitchener’s gun was in his hand, but he was not thinking of himself or of lurking dangers. He was staring in direful fascination at the black window opening, hearing only the swirl and gurgle of Great Owl Run, the downpouring waters that ran under ice to empty their flotsam at last into the frozen wastes of Queen Maud Sea.
CHAPTER X
ALWAYS FIRE FIRST
The soft stirring of footsteps jarred Kitchener out of his hideous reverie. Diane Durand had stolen past him in the darkness, and with reaching hands she leaned forward to look out the window. He grabbed her and flung her backwards so violently that she cried aloud, clutching at the finger-marks on her wrist.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, amazed and angry.
“Keep away from that window!”
“What for?”
“There’s blood on it. It’s everywhere.”
He had switched off his light and was unable to see her face, but he heard her draw a shuddering breath and felt her dynamic glance fixed upon him. “It’s—what?” she said in a small, muted voice.
“It’s murder,” he said, wondering what made his own speech sound so strange. “That’s all. Just a nicely planned shooting in the back.”
“Who?” gasped the girl. “Who?”
“My—” Kit stopped so abruptly that he bit his tongue. “An old friend of mine. He was worn out and trying to get a little sleep. I guess he didn’t know that it happened. I—I hope he never knew.”
“You—what makes you so sure?” she asked in a chilled whisper.
“I’m as sure as though I’d seen it.” His short, ugly laugh did not have quite the ring of sanity. “His shirt with a bullet hole in the back, all smeared. The blankets he died in. The dripping across the floor—right there—right at your feet. A body lugged to the window. Overboard and into the creek. That’s how it was done. A pretty little job. A neat piece of work from behind. Your uncle Sim or Jim or whatever you call him. A straight-shooter—a straight-shooter-in-the-back! A nice, sweet boy he is!”
There was a dead silence for a space, and then a harsh, choking sound in the darkness. Then Diane Durand’s voice, icy and level and dangerously restrained: “I can’t believe I understood you. Will you say that again?”
Kitchener was so stunned by the tragedy that he was unable at present to think clearly or rationally. All that could matter to him was the aching certainty that Jerry was gone. Funny old Jerry! He had been done out of life and disposed of like a trapped, helpless animal. Stalked in his sleep and brutally killed! The numbing realization left Kit without any sense of discretion. He wasn’t caring about anything now, what he did or said or what happened next.
“I said that your uncle came in here and stood over him while he slept and put a bullet into his body.”
He felt the girl flinch, and he was conscious of her eyes staring at him. “That’s a lie!” she panted.
“Killed him with the old ivory-butted gun!” Kit laughed insanely. “Of course! The beautiful, engraved six-shooter that stood for law and order! How things work out! God, what a joke everything is!”
The girl turned on him in a flash of savagery. “What a beast you are! You don’t know. You make a wild and wicked guess, and accuse a man of murder. With nothing whatever to go on except your own crazy notions of what might be—of what you seem to want it to be. You policemen! No wonder people are afraid of you. That’s your idea: get somebody, no matter whom. It doesn’t matter whether he’s guilty or innocent. Get him! Frame him! Bring him in! Swear his life away! Get your man—any man—”
“Listen, baby!” Kit cut in fiercely. “I don’t need your advice—or criticism. That sort of talk isn’t helping any. I’ve seen what I’ve seen. That’s plenty. The waffle-mesh tracks we followed down the river. You know who those belong to. Stalking the two-bar shoes through the storm, right to this place. Don’t think I don’t know the ins and outs of this business. I know whom to look for, and I know he can’t be far from here right now—”
“You haven’t a shred of real evidence!” she interrupted passionately. “And to say what you’ve said, without being sure—it’s cruel, it’s criminal!”
“Yes?” he retorted. “Well, let me tell you—I’m going out and find the bloody prints. There’ll be tracks somewhere around here. And they’ll show the waffle marks. I’m just that sure of that. If they shouldn’t I’ll apologize. I’ll beg your pardon on my hands and knees. You can’t ask anything fairer than that.”
Kit swung around to face the open doorway. It was snowing heavily outside and the wind still moaned through the firs. In the black forest farther down stream the frightful cry of a giant owl quavered in the night—a hideous, hungering sound. He couldn’t forget the name of this place. Great Owl Run. His father had been finished here twelve years ago. And now his brother! A fateful spot for the Tearls. It wasn’t just coincidence—it was kismet. This place had haunted his imagination since childhood. Now he had found it for himself. And Bill was gone and Jerry was gone, and only Kitchener was left.
Perhaps Kitchener would go next in turn. That would be consistent. And he didn’t particularly care. Little Jane would carry on. It was queer how his thoughts kept going back to Jane now, and he could smile tenderly to himself, thinking of her. She was the best of the lot. It didn’t matter about himself. He wasn’t afraid of the owls or the mysterious forest or the red-handed murderer who undoubtedly was skulking somewhere in the neighborhood.
His pulse had slowed to a sober, steady beat, the fever of his blood had simmered down to an ominous coolness. There was something he had to do, and he was ruthless and reckless in the zest to see it through. Whatever happened, he asked only that it might be swift and decisive.
He started towards the door, but a hand reached in the darkness to grab his sleeve. “What are you going to do?” asked Diane Durand in sudden panic.
“Find him, and arrest him—if he doesn’t try to resist.”
“Oh, no!” The girl’s tone had changed. She was frightened and desperate. There was frantic appeal in her voice. “No! Wait! You’ve got to wait! Something terrible will happen! Don’t. Please don’t!”
“You seem to think he will resist.” Kitchener’s laugh sounded unfamiliar in his own ears. “Well, he probably will.”
He shook off her hand and started again to leave the cabin. But at the doorway he changed his mind and halted. He thought he caught a sound behind him—not where the girl stood, a little to the left—but straight back, over near the fireplace. He had thoroughly searched the room. Nothing was there. And yet—
Again he heard it. Unquestionably! A soft, whisking sound—higher up—near the roof—like snow sliding. He turned, and his pocket light again found its way into the hand. He didn’t touch the button, but was ready to shoot on the flash at an instant’s notice.
In his loosely gripped fist the butt of his pistol rested comfortably. The expert marksman gave no conscious thought to the weapon. It was as much a part of himself as the hand that held it. The safety slipped off with the reflex of the thumb. His whole attention was centered towards the ceiling beside the chimney, where he knew there was a wide hole opening through the roof.
It was too dark within and without to differentiate between the solid part of the roof and the open sky. But a prescience more astute, more sensitive than mere eyesight, appraised him that something was blocking the gap above, staring into the cabin.
All was still now, save the slow, gentle shifting of the rafters, but Kit was positive that somebody or something had climbed onto the roof—that a face was peering down.
He was waiting with every faculty straining to catch the least hint of sound or movement, when, as sudden as lightning, a white, blinding ray flashed downward to cut the darkness like a shining blade and hit the farther wall in a dazzling bullseye.
Kitchener’s reactions were as spontaneous as it is to live or to breathe or to fight back from a corner. He saw the hard, round spot of light at the upper end of the shaft—the focus point of the searching beam. The light was swinging his direction—reaching for him—
There was no volition on his part. It was as though his pistol lifted and sighted itself and went off on its own responsibility, regardless of his own will or intention.
Flame spurted, the butt kicked back in his fist, the log walls were jarred as though by a sledge-hammer blow. At the same instant the light winked out, and some broken, clinking object dropped and struck the hard clay floor below.
The room was still filled with the first explosion, when a fiery streak stabbed down at Kitchener from the darkness of the eaves. A chunk of lead hit the wall just behind his neck and plunged deep into one of the logs. The man on the roof had fired at the flash of Kit’s gun, and missed him by inches.
As the report of the return shot jarred in his ears, Kitchener side-stepped and ducked towards the floor. His bullet had shattered the lense of the intruder’s lamp. He was safe enough, as long as he kept his thumb off his own switch-button.
But Kit was not playing for safety. This blind-man’s work irritated him. On the roof crouched the man who had assassinated his brother Jerry, and who also must have had a hand in the ambushing of Inspector Tearl. Kitchener was troubled by no scruples of chivalry. He grinned dourly to himself in the darkness as he realized how he had met his first test in police uniform. He hadn’t even thought of the traditions of the service, but fired instinctively and beat his man to the shot. So Jerry undoubtedly would have done in his place. There was no sense in dealing politely with a dangerous criminal who knew no code.
At this moment Kit’s only regret was that he had shot too accurately. He had sighted for the man’s electric lamp and smashed it. If his bullet had only been a little off the line he might not be crouching in the darkness now, with a live murderer at the roof hole, ready to plug him the instant he revealed his whereabouts.
The sweetly pungent reek of picric acid was a familiar scent in Kit’s nostrils. It reminded him of the target gallery where he used to put in an hour every afternoon following the dismissal of the class on torts. In law a tort is an evil or injury done one man by another, and the professor had taught his students that the wronged party was entitled to complete redress. Kitchener was thankful to-night that he had learned something in college beyond the theories of books. If he caught a single glimpse of his man no court of law would ever need to settle this affair.
He turned his light-stick upward and pushed the button. A luminous streak splashed to the ceiling, limning brilliantly the jagged hole in the roof-shakes. In the opening he saw a bulky shoulder and an arm and a man’s big fist clenching a revolver. His own gun went up. Eyes and finger synchronized to their business, but in the fractional second required to make sure of his aim, a living, gasping weight landed on him from behind.
Kitchener had no warning of the attack. The shock sent him down on one knee and his flashlight was knocked out of his hand and went flying across the room in a twisting, white arc. He was unable to check the pressure of his forefinger in time. A jolt of sound hit his eardrums as his pistol exploded haphazard to send a bullet on a ricocheting course from the chimney to the side wall and across the splintering door-slabs.
His assailant was Diane Durand. He had forgotten her in those few seconds and had allowed her to get behind him. And now she had both arms around him, clutching his pistol-hand, clinging to him with an amazing strength.
Kit had often heard the phrase about female deadliness, but he never thought it really meant anything—not until now. Under their silken softness her muscles were almost as strong as his, and at that moment she seemed twice as agile. He regained his feet and tried to wrench his arm free, but small fingers and sharp nails were digging into his wrist with the force of desperation.
The girl was hanging on his back, and whichever way he turned he swung her with him. Her face was pressing his neck and he could feel the breath come and go harshly from her open mouth. “Let go!” he muttered, and tore furiously at her hands.
On the roof overhead he heard a slipping, sliding sound, followed by a heavy thump in the snow behind the cabin. The man outside evidently was dissatisfied with his peek hole, and had dropped to the ground. Either he had decided to run away or had started around for the cabin door.
Kit was in too tight a situation to hold any false punctilios in the distinction of sex. Courtesy towards women is a nice trait, but it was absurd to be gallant with his life at stake. The beautiful gestures of life are outmoded. There are no gentle disciples of Gautama left in the world to feed themselves to female tigers.
This girl was fighting him like a man. He locked his fingers under hers and wrenched backwards with his full strength. Her breath grew short and sharp and he felt her supple tendons cramp themselves convulsively. He was hurting her badly, but she still clung to him, trying to plow her nails deeper into his flesh. Fiercely he tore her grip away, and whirled to fling her from him.
But she was a shade the quicker. One slim, tenacious arm crooked itself around his neck and tightened under his chin to choke back his breathing. The second hand darted around to clutch him across the mouth, trying to twist his head off his shoulders.
“Drop that gun!” a voice sobbed in his ear. “I—I’ll make him quit if—if you’ll—quit!”
“Quit!” Kit laughed truculently against the warm hand that was stifling him. “Quit, Hell!” He jerked his head aside at the price of a furrow of skin gouged from his upper lip. Then, with a contortionist’s movement he dropped to one knee, taking the girl with him and attempting to fling her in front of him.
His pistol was in his fist and he did not dare to put it away or drop it. At any minute the expected footsteps might cross the threshold from without. He only had the use of one hand, and his attacker was as active and lithe and stubborn as a pouncing cat. He almost threw her by the unexpectedness of his ruse, but not quite. She recovered her advantage with a surprising shift of her wiry body, tumbled across his shoulders, twisted a rounded leg behind his knee, and wrapped both flexible arms in a tightening strangle-hold against his wind-pipe.
Both were panting in the darkness, and Kit could taste a warm salty trickle on his lips. He was furious. It stung him to the depths of his masculine complacency to realize that this slender, boyish-built girl was quite as able-bodied as he. At that moment, if his thumbs had been able to reach her pretty throat, he could have throttled her cheerfully.
But she was like a leech, a fierce little incubus, hag—riding his back. He set his teeth and, with a sudden effort of exasperation, he heaved himself erect, wrenched his shoulder around and threw back his head.
His skull hit something soft and yielding with an impact sufficient to hurt through the hardness of his cranium. He heard a broken little cry behind him, and the girl’s tense body relaxed a trifle, and for an instant her arms loosened their clutch. She tried to grab him again, but this time he evaded her hands and tore himself free.
He did not linger to find out what had happened. He felt the draught of the open doorway, and turned leftward to plunge out into the snowy night. Groping blindly, he sprang through the door, stumbled over something that yelped and snapped at his leg. He tumbled sprawling into the middle of a shrieking, struggling heap of dogs.
His team of huskies had been sitting in an uneasy circle at the cabin entrance. It was too dark to see, and he had completely forgotten them. The reminder was so sudden that he did not quite know what had happened until he found himself flat on his stomach in the snow, the center of the writhing, howling pack. A wet, furry body fell backwards and sat on his head. A second shape bounded across him, tangling him in the sledge traces. One of the beasts snarled in fright, and something slashed his pants and nipped the flesh of his calf.
Fighting with both hands, he warded off the milling shadows, and managed to lift himself to his knees. A set of sharp teeth clicked in his face, and as he threw out his arm to protect himself his pistol slipped from his grasp and went spinning away into a snow drift. He righted himself somehow, and scrambled to his feet. Kicking the dogs away, he disentangled himself from the twisted harness lines and stooped forward to plunge his arm shoulder deep into the nearest snow bank.
Frantically he groped about with his bare, chilled fingers, and gasped with relief as his hand closed over the icy butt of his lost gun. This was sheer good luck. He might have spent an hour in futile search for the weapon. He examined the gun critically to make sure that the action was not clogged, and then stole around the cabin, closely hugging the walls.
There was nobody in sight. He wedged himself into the angle of the chimney and waited with every sense keyed to hair-trigger alertness. The dogs were raising such bedlam in front of the shack it was impossible to hear any other sound. He gaped right and left in the darkness. The man on the roof had jumped down on this side, but there was nobody here now. Perhaps he was ambushed in the neighboring timber; perhaps he had fled.
Kit ventured out of his sheltering nook and pushed around to the side of the cabin overlooking the high embankment of the brook. Still he saw nothing, heard nothing except the gurgle of water and the raving of the dogs around in front. He retraced his steps, waded through the animals, and looked in at the doorway. His electric lamp was still blazing in the corner of the room where it had fallen. All the rest of the interior was shrouded in darkness. He did not see the girl and did not stop to search for her. In three strides he crossed the room, snatched up his lamp, and again ran out of doors.
His light cast strange, ghostly patterns among the sheeted stumps and along the ragged, white fringe of the forest. The higher plumes of the firs swayed and moaned in the wind, but everything was deathly still in the underwoods below. He made his way around the cabin, boring the darkness in all directions with his flashlight, steeling himself for the crashing shock of a bullet.
He reached the rear of the cabin, and nothing interrupted his wary advance. The lamp was brought to bear, and he paused to read the story in the snow. Here were a pair of big boot prints. The intruder had removed his snowshoes at this spot and climbed to the roof. The eaves were only hands’-reach high, and he had boosted himself upward from a convenient windowsill. Farther out were two deeper bootmarks. This was where he had jumped off the roof. There was a circle of scuffled tracks at this point. He had donned his snowshoes here.
Kit flashed his light outward and saw a line of webbed tracks, heading across the clearing to the forest. Great, long strides—almost running. The murderer evidently hadn’t cared for his enemy’s marksmanship and decided that he had had enough.
There was nothing else that Kitchener needed to see. He switched off his light and returned to the cabin doorway.
“Hello!” he said to the darkness.
There was no response.
“You there, Diane?” he demanded. “You might as well know it. The waffle-mesh snowshoes. Your lovely uncle! He was here and took a crack at me, and beat it, and left you to the wolves.”
“You fired first!” an unsteady voice spoke out from the shadows. “And nobody left me. He didn’t know I was here. I was careful that he shouldn’t. If he had he’d have come in and got me. You may not know it, but I saved you—”
“Or him,” interrupted Kit. His sore lip yielded to a battered grin. Somehow he bore no malice towards the girl. Nobody could blame her for fighting for her own. That was the sort of blind, unreasoning loyalty that he himself understood only too well. He turned on his lamp again and switched the light around until he found the slight figure standing lonely in the middle of the room. She faced him unflinchingly, and apparently was trying to check her labored breathing.
As he looked at her he felt a queer catch in his breath. Her shirt was torn at the collar, her ruddy hair was flying at wild ends, a bruised, bare arm emerged from a sleeve ripped to the shoulder. But her pert nose was the worst. It looked a couple of sizes larger than he remembered it, and was frankly bloodied.
“Ah, gee!” he exclaimed contritely. “I’m sorry. Honestly, I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Is it bad?” she asked, and crooked her arm across her face.
Kit hastily dug a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to her. “Gosh!” he muttered. “I never hurt a girl before in my life.”
“I don’t think it’s broken,” she assured him through the crumpled handkerchief. “What did I do to you?”
“You skinned my wrist and half ripped off my lip, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s something, anyhow!” Her dark eyes brightened with satisfaction. “That makes us quits, doesn’t it?”
Kit drew a deep breath of relief. It was wonderful of her to take it that way. “You’re a good sport!” he ejaculated. “Darned if you aren’t! The Dianes! Hellcats, maybe. But that’s all right. I hope I always have a Diane for an enemy.”
“You will,” she returned evenly.
He cast a sharp glance at her, started to say something, but changed his mind and turned away. From his pocket he produced a match and ignited the litter in the fireplace. “Might as well make it comfortable here,” he said as a cheerful blaze crackled up in the darkness. “I hate to leave you alone, but there’s no way out of it.”
“You—where are you going?” she faltered.
Kit did not answer. His thoughts were out in the dark forest, pursuing the trail of the waffle-webbed snowshoes. In a few minutes he would be on the march again. The other man would be very tired too. Wherever he went fresh his trail would be easily followed. He couldn’t stay on his feet forever. Kit could keep going as long as the other man did, and he had no intention of being shaken off now.
“I’m going with you,” the girl announced.
“You!” he countered. “What chance would you stand? I’m traveling to-night. I’d leave you miles behind.”
She started towards him, tottered uncertainly, and caught at the table. “I’m all in!” she said piteously.
“Of course you are,” he assured her. “You stay here and get some sleep and rest. I’ll come back for you when I can.”
Kit went outside, unharnessed and fed the dogs and turned them loose to find their own sleeping places. An ax, two blankets, matches and a few packages of provisions were strapped together into a small back-pack. The remainder of his equipment he carried into the cabin. He dragged in several armloads of down-wood and stacked it in a pile by the fireplace. Then he drew the old ax out of the cabin sill, spiked the door back on its hinges and refastened the shutters over the broken windows.
The girl had watched him in gloomy silence, knowing it would be useless to try to dissuade him from his plans.
“I’ve fixed you up as well as I can,” he said. He shouldered his pack-sack and picked up his rifle. “Good night, Diane.”
The girl was standing by the fireplace, dejectedly. “I hope—” she began, and stopped.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said drearily. “Good-by.”
Without a backward glance Kit passed out of the cabin and strode off alone into the blustering night.
CHAPTER XI
/SAUT SAUVAGE/
The police shack at Saut Sauvage was buried in the snows of the remote wilderness. A fitful storm of sleet was lashing southward from the arctic barrens. It was December 24, a squally, gusty evening, bitterly cold. The wind was many things that night: a child sniffing and sobbing outside the batten door; a scolding old woman; frightened puppies whimpering in the darkness; a pack of wolves raging howling around the ice-banked walls; a gang of bad boys, laughing and throwing missiles against the rattling windows.
Inside the plank and tar-paper building the confined air was close and oppressively hot. The sheet iron stove, big enough to take a pine stump at a gulp, was stoked until its round sides looked like a red apple and its tin chimney shot a column of sparks above the drooping, stunted trees without.
Constable Joe Cross was at home, spending Christmas Eve in his most civilized manner. He had combed his sandy hair and trimmed his stiff, blond beard and put on his best necktie and the clean flannel shirt that he had washed and mended for this occasion. At the present moment he sat astraddle a slab stool before a packing-box table, which held three dry-batteries and a small radio receiver. He held a pencil in his huge fist and a pair of ear-phones were clipped over his crimson, frost-bitten ears. A lantern, hanging overhead, helped the glowing stove to furnish the light for his writing.
The great radio stations at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Lincoln, Nebraska, both were ranging the continent to-night with Christmas messages for the boys of the Arctic Patrol. Constable Cross was switching the dials first from one wave length to the other, waiting breathless and expectant for his own name to come out of the stormy night.
Meanwhile he was picking off the greetings intended for luckier men. Sometimes he would jot down a line or two to be read over again to-morrow, sighing with vicarious satisfaction in the knowledge that Corporal Somebody’s sweetheart still loved him or that Constable Some One-else’s family was thinking of him somewhere at this very instant.
A couple of trappers, Jean Bruyas and Giffard the Runt, who kept hunting shacks somewhere in the neighborhood, had wound up their circles at the police post where they knew the radio would be working and a Christmas Eve mulligan would be stewing on the stove.
Bruyas was a great tree of a man, black and hairy, slow and thick of body and wits, unsmiling, unfriendly, utterly fearless, with remorseless slits for eyes and a loose-lipped mouth from which half the front teeth were missing. In contrast Giffard was small and wizened and active as a sparrow. At times he was overly talkative and too ready with his laughter, and again he went into long spells of sulky, touchy silences. The Chippewyans called him Giffard Noondea, which in their language meant “the weasel,” and was not a complimentary nickname. It was suspected that he would sometimes lift a fur from another man’s trap if he were absolutely certain that the other man was nowhere about.
Giffard and Bruyas had been running their trap line along separate branches of Great Owl Creek for a decade or more. They were well acquainted and kept out of each other’s way as much as possible.
Earlier in the evening three Yellow-Knife Indians had walked into the post. The Indians, as a rule, avoided the police when they could. But these three were civilized and Christianized, and wore neckties. They were known severally as Tom Salmonfish, Athu, which was short for Athulejeray, the musk-ox, and Pete Tomorrow. Salmonfish and Athu had been converted to two religions apiece, besides still keeping their faith in the old tribal gods. All of which, Constable Cross had remarked, should make them good enough to die young, and he hoped they would.
The three of them squatted together on a corner of the floor, uneasy and furtive in the presence of the law, muttering mysteriously to one another, while they waited for a hand-out.
At eight o’clock in the evening Constable Mark Devon returned from a short patrol he had undertaken during the last few days into the Slavey hunting grounds. Devon blew in with the storm, enveloped in a gust of snow that battered its way into the room as he opened the door and hastily shut it behind him.
It was impossible to see anything of Devon because of the sleety snow that clothed him from head to foot. He looked more like an icicle than a man.
“Well, boys, we’re going to have a white Christmas!” he announced as he limped to a stool in the corner and sat down to tug off his frozen boot-pacs. “Ain’t it nice for the kiddies?”
Constable Cross turned momentarily from his radio. “‘It snows!’ cried the schoolboy,” he sang out boisterously. “‘Hooray!’”
“Froze my foot again this morning,” remarked Devon as he tenderly peeled down his thick-ribbed sock. “Same as a year ago. I always lose a couple of toes for Christmas.”
“Are you maybe hangin’ your stockin’ to-night for Santa Claus?” inquired Jean Bruyas with his twisted, broken-toothed grin.
“Nope,” answered Devon. “I’m through. I hung it last Christmas and all I found in it next morning was the two toes that had come off with the sock.”
Cross started to make some remark, and then checked himself, raising his head and listening intently in the ear phones. Slowly his startled, incredulous expression yielded to a look of utter beatitude.
“It’s for me!” the others heard him gasp.
His pencil was feverishly writing on the paper. Presently he stopped, swept off his head clamps and stood up to flourish the scribbled sheet. “From my sister!” he announced breathlessly.
“Yeah?” said Devon.
“Two or three thousand miles through sleet and darkness,” the first constable declared proudly. “Can you beat it? And think of all the people who must have heard my name mentioned!”
“After that one big experience,” remarked Devon, “anything else that comes over the radio to all those people will just be a lot of applesauce.” The tall policeman was very cutting about his comrade’s Christmas message, but he could not quite hide his envious look as he eyed the slip of paper. “Well,” he asked grudgingly, “what’d your sister say?”
Constable Cross threw out his chest and moved closer to the lantern. Wrinkling his forehead over his own scribbling, he read in a loud voice:
Constable Joseph C. Cross,
Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
Saut Sauvage, Saskatchewan, Canada.Dear Joe: We are all well and hope your health is good too. Wish you were to be with us at our big turkey dinner to-morrow.
Your affectionate sister,Eleanor.
“Humph!” said Devon. “Is that all?”
“That’s enough, ain’t it?” said Cross contentedly. “It’s just supposed to be a greeting.”
“Seems to me like they’re sort of ritzing us with their turkey.” Devon sniffed the savory atmosphere of the police shack. “What are we having?” he demanded.
“Ptarmigan and moosemeat all mix’ togedder,” said Bruyas.
“No rabbits?” asked Devon with a suspicious glance towards the singing pot.
“On Christmas Eve!” exclaimed Cross. “Rabbits?”
Constable Devon pulled off his steaming parka, and then turned back expansively to face the other men. “Turkey!” he snorted contemptuously. “Can you imagine anybody wasting radio juice to blow about a turkey, and here we got moose and ptarmigan and no rabbits!”
Giffard the Runt had sidled over to the packing-box seat the moment Cross vacated it, and was listening in the ear phones. Suddenly he looked around with a wry expression. “I don’t hear no voices,” he declared. “It sounds more like mosquitoes in a muskeg.”
“Mosquitoes?” Constable Cross turned questioningly.
“Maybe somebody’s cut in with a key,” suggested Devon. “It might be C.W. stuff from Edmonton.”
Cross pushed Giffard off the box and resumed his place at the receiver. “It is!” he said after a moment, and turned his dial knobs. “Edmonton official calling for somebody. From Inspector Bowman.” He cocked his head on one side, and those who were watching saw his eyes blink. “It’s for us!” he cried.
Constable Devon hurried across the room and shoved a pad and pencil under his comrade’s fist.
Cross was able to read code if the sending did not come too fast. He was writing painstakingly, with his tongue stuck in the corner of his mouth. The message was coming through slowly, and from the look of his face the news must have been somewhat disconcerting. Once he frowned and shook his head.
“What is it?” demanded Devon when the pencil finally stopped moving.
Constable Cross pushed away from the receiver and looked uneasily at his comrade. “It was sent,” he declared, “to Sergeant Buck Tearl, Saut Sauvage.”
“What?” demanded the other.
“It must mean he’s on his way here to take command,” said Cross limply.
“Gosh!” mourned Devon. “Why can’t they let us alone?”
“What did you expect?” returned Cross. “That they’d let two bum constables loaf here through the winter without sending somebody to boss ’em?”
The pair exchanged a sobered glance. It was no light matter for two men to be snowed-in together through long months of blackness; and the arrival of a third man would multiply the dangers of friction and discord: particularly when the newcomer held the authority to make the lives of the first two as disagreeable as he pleased.
“What’s he like?” groaned Devon.
“Tearl? I don’t know. He was on this side when I was in Alaska, and when I was in Alaska he had been sent somewhere else. It just happened that way. So far we haven’t run across one another.”
“I have heard o’ dis Sergean’ Tearl,” put in the bearded Bruyas. “Dey say he is wan bad feesh.”
“Everybody’s heard of Tearl,” said Cross.
Giffard’s squinty eyes turned maliciously from one policeman to the other. “They say he’s a devil,” he remarked.
Constable Devon silenced the runt with a lengthy stare. “I’ve heard myself that he’s bad medicine for trap thieves and whiskey blanc peddlers and other little slinking ferrets of the woods.” He turned back casually to Cross. “On the other hand,” he added consolingly, “he may not be so bad. You know Jimmie Poe? Poe says he’s all right.”
“Weren’t they up at Herschell together a couple of winters ago?” asked Cross reflectively.
“Yes. The two got caught in a storm and had to coop-up in an igloo for three weeks. Each had a quarter’s pay in his pocket and nothing much else. They were eating mittens before they got out, and on top of it all, Jimmie Poe had gone snow-blind.”
Devon grinned. “But Buck Tearl kept him entertained. The sergeant—he was a corporal then—had found a walrus tusk somewhere, and he carved out a set of ivory dice. And the two spent three weeks in a snow-hut shooting craps by the light of a blubber lamp—”
“And Poe was snow-blind?” interjected Cross. “You mean he couldn’t see anything?”
“Nothing at all. He couldn’t see Tearl or his own bank roll or the dice or the spots on ’em. Maybe Tearl didn’t even bother to draw the spots on ’em. Maybe he left his dice blanks. I don’t know. What I’m getting at is to show you what a good guy he was.”
Cross licked his lips meditatively. “I’d have liked to have been in that game.”
“Sure you would,” returned Devon. “You’d have made your killin’ in about fifteen tosses. But not Buck Tearl. He’d call out the numbers that Jimmie couldn’t see. ‘Seven’, ‘eleven’, ‘big-Dick’, ‘box-cars’, ‘little Jodie’, and sometimes they’d roll up right for Jimmie.
“Now if it had been you,” mused Devon, “you’d have forgot Jimmy was playing too. Then he would have had nothing but time left on his hands for three weeks.”
“You don’t mean,” broke in Cross, “that Jimmie won?”
Devon ignored the interruption. “For twenty-one days Corporal Buck Tearl sat there helping Jimmie to amuse himself. In the end, just before the storm broke and they were able to travel again, Tearl had a phenomenal run of luck and made forty-two passes and cleaned Jimmie for the works. But where another man would have mopped up in an hour Tearl squatted patiently and let Jimmie have his three weeks of fun. That’s the kind of a pal Buck Tearl was.”
Devon lifted the pot lid to peer into its bubbling interior, sniffed once or twice, and turned back to Cross. “What was that message about?” he suddenly remembered to ask.
“About a Yellow Knife up yonder being murdered a while back. The word must have gone down the other direction through Fort Resolution and Simpson, and finally reached the inspector. He was just telling Sergeant Tearl to send somebody to investigate.”
“Is that all?” said Devon. “And I suppose Tearl’ll be sending you or me up through a blizzard to make notes on a dead Boogie.”
Cross looked resentfully towards the three Yellow Knives in the corner of the room. “Any of you know about a murder up your way?” he asked.
The Indians exchanged solemn glances and said nothing.
“You, Tom Salmonfish!” exploded the constable. “You know anybody who was murdered?”
“Nop,” said Salmonfish indifferently.
Cross dropped his head menacingly and was about to start the tortuous process of extracting information from an Indian, when something arrested his attention. He raised his head and looked towards the frosted window, listening.
For five seconds he held motionless with one ear tilted upward. His companions likewise had frozen to silence and were watching Cross. There were no audible sounds save the howling of the wind outside and the bubbling of the kettle on the stove within. But the constable’s companions waited expectantly, knowing that his woodsman’s instincts had apprised him of some unusual note in the bellowing of the storm.
All at once Cross’ alertness was backed up by a dog coming to life and sending a challenging bark through the outer darkness. The first husky was joined by a bass-throated friend, by a dozen, by forty savage, yelling brutes that aroused themselves from their nests in the lee of the barracks wall to fill the night with their frenzied babel.
“Wolves?” suggested Devon.
“Don’t think so—” Cross stopped his speech and lifted a silencing finger.
In the other direction, from somewhere to the southward, they heard something breaking its way through the underbrush. Then, for a full minute, the wind sank fitfully and almost died. In that brief lull the sounds of a man’s voice reached the shack. He was crossing the clearing in the storm. And then they heard him raise his tones higher, and a queer, sing-song tune came to them out of the night: