The words of the song drifted to the shack in a melancholy baritone, and then the singer changed to a lugubrious minor key and repeated his dismal refrain, this time with full tremolo effects:
The crowd of huskies had charged around the barracks, flinging themselves at the stranger in a raving circle. But, whoever he was, he would not let the dogs flurry him until he had rounded off the full, last period of his song. Then he turned upon them with violent words, and the men inside heard the thud of something on hollow ribs.
The two constables stared at each other, and Devon moved towards the front entrance. But the newcomer was quicker. The latch rattled, the draw bar was pushed up, and an icy blast of weather filled the room. A muffled figure stumbled across the threshold. He was a slender, rangy, easy-moving individual, who had turned negligently to force the door shut behind him. As the latch caught he swung around to confront the occupants of the shack, and he appeared to take in every detail of the place with a single, flickering glance.
His head and shoulders were covered with drifted snow and a beading of ice had formed upon his eyelashes. The austerity of his features, the severe line of his mouth and his ascetic, high-bridged nose, was relieved by the mocking glimmer of his dark eyes and the sardonic expression of one upcrooked eyebrow. He ignored the Indians and the trappers as he curiously inspected one and then the other policeman.
“Which is Cross and which is Devon?” he asked.
Without waiting for a reply he bent flexibly at the hips and proceeded to pull his hooded parka over his black head. He dropped the white encrusted garment to the floor and stood erect, a trim, nonchalant figure clad in the royal scarlet of the Canadian police.
A glimpse of the chevrons on the tunic sleeve sufficed to wipe every vestige of expression from the faces of the two constables. They drew themselves up, stiff and soldierly, before the ranking uniform.
“I’m Cross,” said the shorter, lighter-skinned man. “You’re Sergeant Tearl.”
“Right!” The newcomer broke into the constrained moment with a quick, infectious grin. He pulled off his mitten and impulsively held out his hand. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you boys,” he said. “How are you? Merry Christmas! When do we eat?”
CHAPTER XII
SERGEANT IN COMMAND
Kitchener faced the constables in his scarlet tunic with easy confidence, swaggering a little as Jerry might have done if he had stepped in to take command of the outpost at Saut Sauvage. Inwardly he was not so sure of himself.
He watched the pair warily. Jerry had said that he was not acquainted with Devon or Cross. But there remained the danger that one or another of the constables had seen him somewhere without his knowing. Both officers must have heard of the sergeant, and possibly carried mental pictures of him. Jerry was too vivid a personality not to leave strong impressions upon the people he met.
A guilty conscience may have made Kit oversensitive. The constables studied him critically for a moment, and then exchanged sidewise glances. For an instant Kit held his breath. What thought had struck them? Did they suspect something was wrong? It was an anxious moment. To be unmasked now would be calamitous.
Whatever his secret doubts he put up his boldest front. And all at once the tense atmosphere seemed to clear. The constables grinned at him in apparent comradeship and shook hands with him. If their suspicions had been aroused they evidently wanted to be more certain of their ground before they denounced him.
“I’m looking for a man who calls himself Jim Durand,” he told his new fellows-at-arms. “He’s a six-foot husky with big, bowed shoulders, a prize-fighter’s arms and fists and a swarthy face that looks as if it had been sliced up with a knife some time or other. Anybody like that been around here recently?”
The two constables shook their heads. “Outside of these chaps and one or two bushmen we know,” said Devon, “there hasn’t been a living soul along this way in weeks.”
“I lost his trail this morning,” said Kit, “and so far haven’t found it again. He’s wearing a pair of square-webbed snowshoes that look as though they were woven over a waffle-iron. I hoped one of you might have seen his tracks.”
“What’s he wanted for?” asked Cross.
Kit had had a night and a day to think affairs out and to decide on his future course of action. He had made up his mind that in his dealings with Hell Bent he would play out the hand on his own responsibility, alone.
There were several reasons why he could not tell the constables the truth. If he let them know, for instance, that a murder had been committed in the old cabin at Great Owl Run they naturally would want to learn who the victim was, and their police-trained curiosity in that direction might lead to all kinds of embarrassing complications. They would search the river and perhaps find Jerry’s body, and in his clothing or on his person there might be some identifying mark to label him as the real Sergeant Tearl. In which event Kit would have trouble explaining why he was wearing another man’s uniform and perhaps even might be accused of his brother’s murder.
It was too late now to abandon his imposture. Diane Durand knew him as Sergeant Tearl. If he had tried to change back to private citizenship she would discover the falsity of his previous claim: and having every reason to wish him out of the way, she would not hesitate to denounce him. He had to go on being a policeman.
As long as he was not found out there were advantages in playing out the rôle. He was the boss in this part of the woods, and every human being in the neighborhood had to step to his authority. By wearing the insignia of the police he held the moral prestige at any future meeting with Hell Bent. He could arrest his man or shoot him down, and there could be nobody to interfere or to question his act. Meanwhile, if he could learn anything of the old tragedy at Great Owl Run, he could keep the information to himself or use it as he saw fit. Circumstances would decide him. But for the present there would be no outside blundering to hamper him. It was safest to work alone.
So Kit did not allow the constables to think that he was much concerned over the fugitive’s whereabouts. He said nothing about the man’s being the ex-convict, Sim Bent, and was particular to use the alternative name of Durand.
“There’s no charge against him,” he said. “I’m looking for him on account of his niece, Miss Diane Durand. She followed him into the woods and somehow missed connections, and I picked her up farther down country. She’s waiting at the old cabin down by Great Owl Run.”
“You had his trail?” asked Constable Cross.
“Yes. He had two teams of dogs, one of which he drove ahead, the other running at his heels. I wasn’t two hours behind him last night at midnight. There was no trouble following his tracks with a flashlight. But early this morning he suddenly turned east and entered that Yellow-Knife village by the long lake. That’s where I lost him.”
The two constables looked interested, but asked no questions. Apparently they hesitated to say anything that might reflect upon their superior officer’s woodcraft.
Kit shook his head ruefully. “There are a thousand tracks around that camp, of course. Snowshoes and sledges and huskies’ pads. The waffle-meshes entered on one side, and didn’t come out again. Well, when I got there I searched the camp, looked in every teepee, talked to all the Indians. No good. The trail went into the camp, but the man wasn’t there.”
“What did the Yellow Knives say?” ventured Sergeant Devon.
“Hadn’t seen him, that was all. It may have been true. He could have crossed through their camp while they were all parked in for the night. They sleep like a lot of mud-turtles. Maybe for a fact they didn’t know a thing about him.
“I circled the village several times,” Kit pursued, “but no waffle marks passing out.”
“What do you think?” asked Devon.
“There’s only one thing that could have happened. He must have had another pair of snowshoes with him, or else he stole a pair, and changed ’em after he got among the cluttered trails of the village. After that there wasn’t any way of knowing which tracks were his.
“Well, I crawled into a teepee and caught a few hours of badly needed sleep,” Kit finished. “Then I thought I might as well come on here and report.”
He turned unexpectedly to the two trappers. “When did you two get here?” he asked.
Giffard’s little eyes shifted uncomfortably before the sergeant’s scrutiny. “This evenin’—early,” he answered. “A little before dark.”
“Either of you run across a stranger to-day?”
“No, sir,” said Giffard.
“P’r’aps,” insinuated the bearded Bruyas, “if we meet dis fellow we say de sergeant he seek for him. Eh, w’at?”
“Tell him if he wishes to find his niece to get in touch with the police post.”
“It is a fonny t’ing to arrive in dis col’ country when winter she come,” Bruyas ventured to remark. “What is it he wish?”
“I understand he expects to trap a bit,” Kitchener replied.
The two natives exchanged a fleeting glance, and Bruyas scowled and showed the ugly line of his broken teeth. “If he expect to use his trap on Great Owl Run we have somethin’ to say about dat.”
“Bruyas,” explained the wizened Giffard, “runs his lines on the north side of that creek, and I on the south. There’s no room for any others.”
“What do you have—leases or something?” inquired Kit ironically.
“We have been on dose groun’ for ten year,” put in Bruyas darkly. “Dat’s plenty long time so we can say odders keep out.”
“Tell him anything you like as long as you don’t make a police case of it,” said Kit indifferently. He measured the pair with appraising eyes, and grinned at them. “After you’ve had a look at him you may not go quite so heavy on conversation.”
Constable Cross had gone over to investigate the pot on the stove. He tasted and wrinkled his nose with a fine appreciation. “It’s done,” he announced.
Devon brought out a stack of crockery bowls and began dipping out the contents of the stew-pot. Places for three policemen were set at the one table boasted by the barracks. Giffard and Bruyas were served on the top of a packing box. The Yellow Knives were handed out their Christmas Eve dinner, catch-as-catch-can, crouched on the floor in the stifling hot corner behind the stove.
“We just received a radio message for you, sergeant,” remarked Devon when Kitchener, as was the commanding officer’s right, took his seat at the head of the table, facing the door.
Kit lifted his head quickly. “Where from?”
“Edmonton—from Inspector Bowman. He wants us to look into a murder among the Yellow Knives. I don’t know just what it amounts to, if anything.”
Kitchener nodded. This, he was thinking, was a fortunate excuse to return to the Indian village, which was not far from Great Owl Run. He could prowl about that neighborhood as much as he pleased, attending to his own affairs, and working ostensibly under the orders of Inspector Bowman. “They didn’t say anything about it when I was in the village,” he remarked.
“They wouldn’t,” said Constable Cross. “You can’t cork-screw information out of those dull-blades.”
“All right,” announced Kitchener. “I’ll go back down there in the morning.”
Devon chuckled under his breath as he darted a triumphant glance at his fellow constable. He had predicted that Sergeant Tearl would turn out to be an agreeable chap. Here indeed was an officer after his own heart—a man who tackled a mean job himself instead of commanding an underling to do it.
“You tried to pump any of these three anacondas?” inquired Kit, glancing over his shoulder at the Indians, who were drinking their stew noisily out of tin pans.
“Sure,” said Cross. “They don’t know anything. But if you really want me to find out what they know, just say the word.”
“Never mind,” said Kit. “I’ll make somebody talk when I get down below.”
If the Indians knew they were the subject of conversation they gave no sign. The three continued to eat until the well-scoured bottom of the big cooking vessel came into view. This evidently was the sole purpose of their visit. When the pot was empty they wrapped themselves in their furs, stalked solemnly to the door and went out into the night without a word of thanks for the provender which the police had supplied them.
Giffard and Bruyas lingered after their meal for a couple of pipefuls of kinnikinnick mixed with tobacco. At length, however, Bruyas hoisted his bulk from the stool, upon which it might have been feared that he had become a permanent fixture.
“De leedle fox and mink will be lonesome waitin’ in traps,” he remarked. “I make my way back down. Bon soir. I see you again mebby. Merci.”
“I’ll go with you,” announced Giffard. He buttoned his cadaverous body into a bulky mackinaw coat. “Good-by, everybody.” His piggy eyes shifted Kitchener’s direction for a last squinting look, as though to make sure of remembering the sergeant if they met again.
He picked up his rifle and snowshoes, bowed his head to the blast that came through the open doorway, and followed Bruyas into the storm.
Devon, who was standing by the door, banged it shut. “If our nearest neighbors don’t drop in again before next Christmas Eve,” he remarked, “that’ll make it once too often. If I had my choice between the two trappers and those Yellow Knives, I’d take a musk-ox.”
Kitchener went to the window, scratched the thick frost with his nail, and looked out into the darkness. After a moment he turned back and started to gather up his duffle.
The constables observed him wonderingly. “What are you planning to do?” demanded Cross.
“I’m going back,” announced Kit—“down towards Great Owl Run.”
“To-night?”
“I don’t know whether you two noticed, but this Giffard had a queer look in his eyes when I mentioned a girl left alone in that cabin.” Kit scowled. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s all right. But I thought I might as well follow him back. He lives down that direction, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he does. The end of his trapping loop reaches that cabin on this side of the brook. Giffard! A measly animal. I wouldn’t trust him anywhere on the outside of a jail cell.”
“I thought not,” said Kit. “Give me a fresh battery for my flashlight, will you?”
“Listen, sergeant,” suggested Devon. “Let Cross go, or I will if you say so. There’s no sense in your bucking this nor’-easter again to-night.”
“Thanks,” said Kit. “But I had plenty of sleep this afternoon. I’ll go myself.”
“We can give you dogs and a sledge,” offered Cross.
“Don’t need ’em. I left a team down at Great Owl Run.” Kitchener slipped his arms into the parka that had been drying over the stove, and hitched his pack onto his shoulders.
“Don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” he remarked. “If I happen to need either of you boys I can send word. You go on with your usual routine until you hear from me again.”
Kitchener opened the front door and looked out into the blustering night. The trappers and the three Indians had vanished without a sound. But the line of their footprints turned westward, and presumably they were on their way home.
After a moment Kit stepped outside and kicked his toes into his snowshoe lashings. “If you see this Durand,” he said in parting, “don’t try to hold him, but keep in touch with him and let me know as soon as you can.” He glanced back into the lighted, warm barracks room, and then resolutely faced the clouds of flying snow.
“So long,” he called over his shoulder, and set forth on his return trip to Great Owl run.
CHAPTER XIII
LAST-STAND OUTPOST
In the great North the lands of “big-sticks” and “little-sticks” and the treeless arctic prairies are not divided evenly by the lines of latitude. There are no definitely marked borders of forestation. For long stretches the timber country dwindles through graduations of stunted, failing growth across the frontiers of the open barrens. But there are other places where the forests send out the massed array of their mightiest giants, like shock-forces, to wage the endless, bitter fight with the polar winds.
Great Owl Run stood at the head of one of these last-stand outposts of the great forests. A broad, sheltered valley and an unusual fertility of soil gave the trees a chance to root and grow tall and thrust their dense ranks northward in a hundred-mile fringe. Huge spruces and firs and wild, dark underwoods crowded each other in a jungle-like wilderness that reached to the southern edge of the deep-cut creek.
On the opposite bank of the stream the ground rose abruptly into a high plateau that was exposed to the furious assaults of the arctic gales. Here the forest stopped as suddenly as though the line had been cut level with axes. For a mile or so farther on a few dwarfed, wind-tortured trees struggled to hold their own, and after that there was nothing but the bare, frozen tundras reaching in a vast, appalling emptiness to the polar seas.
Kitchener Tearl came westward along the thickly wooded side of Great Owl Run as the smoky dawn was beginning to break. He had traveled all night down the creek, skirting the Indian village on the tributary lake towards the southwest, hurrying on his way because of the fear that Hell Bent might return to the cabin and leave again before Kit could intercept him. Kit was hoping at any time to cross the trail of the waffle-web snowshoes.
It had stopped snowing during the night and the wind was dying. Before the darkness paled Kit had seen patches of starlight through the scattering clouds. The storm was blowing itself out, and there was a promise of clear, below-zero weather for the holidays.
He was walking through the alders that skirted the high embankment of the ice-bound creek, scanning the ground before him, watching the shadows changing from purple to misty, twilight grays. The clearing and the cabin and the owl-infested woods, he knew, could not be far beyond.
As he peered ahead, expecting at any minute to see the break among the trees, he heard a sudden snapping sound behind him, and as he whirled to look he saw a man’s muffled figure come out from behind a neighboring windfall.
Kitchener planted his feet apart and shifted his rifle for eventualities, and then his second glance reassured him. The newcomer was short and slight in build, in no wise resembling Bent. He shuffled forward into the open, and Kit recognized Giffard, the Runt.
The little trapper looked haggard in the early morning light, and as he drew nearer Kit noticed that he was limping slightly and that there was a streak of fresh blood across his left cheekbone.
“Hello!” remarked Kit. “What happened to you?”
“Who, me?” Giffard rubbed the back of his hand across his face, and then looked tentatively at his fingers. “Why, nothin’ much, if you ask me. I just got torn a little in a bramble thicket.”
To Kit the wound did not have the appearance of a thorn scratch, but he let the statement pass. “You live around here?” he inquired.
“My shack’s down that way, about two mile in from the creek.”
Kit eyed the man curiously. His back pack was thickly encrusted with snow, and it was apparent that he had not been home since he left Saut Sauvage the night before.
“Where does Bruyas live?” asked Kit.
Giffard pointed with his mittened thumb. “North side of the creek. He hangs out mostly along the barrens.”
The little man moved closer, looked about him in a full circle, and lowered his voice confidentially. “Last night you wanted to know about an Indian murder, and I found out about one this morning. The Yellow Knives is more apt to talk to me than to a policeman. I run into a couple of ’em this A.M. and I asked ’em and they told me.”
“Yes?”
“One of their bucks was shoved into an ice-hole on Long Lake by an Esquimau.”
“I thought the Esquimaux had all gone back north by now,” said Kit.
“Yeah. That’s right. The bands come down in the summer to get wood for sleds and snowshoe frames, and they go back to the coast in the Winter for the seal hunting. But this man was taken sick an’ left behind. He’s been moochin’ around here ever since.”
“He murdered a Yellow Knife?”
“That’s the story. Picked him up by the heels and chucked him through a hole in the ice.”
“What’s his name?” asked Kit.
“Oogly,” said Giffard.
“Ugly?”
“Yeah. Only you spell it with an ‘O.’”
“Where is he now?”
“That’d be hard to tell. The Indians have been hunting him for a month and ain’t found him yet. He’s too good a hider.”
“Thanks, anyhow,” said Kit. “I’ll look into it.”
He started on his way again, and after a momentary hesitation Giffard decided that he might as well follow along. The trapper did not actually accompany Kit, but hovered aimlessly a few paces behind.
They reached the clearing in the nebulous light of daybreak. Kit halted at the edge of the alders to reconnoiter. Before him lay half an acre of stumpy ground, hemmed in on three sides by the deep forest, and flanked on the fourth side by the steep-banked creek. The cabin faced the west, and stood on the sheer brink beside the stream.
Kit had seen the place only in a pitch-black hour of horror two nights ago when he and Diane Durand had stumbled out of the woods into the blood-spattered room. His eyes had grown hard and grim as he paused under the alders, inspecting the lonely dwelling.
The cabin probably had been standing there, weathering and rotting these many seasons. The place was more forlorn and tumble-down even than he had supposed. Yet somebody had been making a few pathetic repairs. Since his visit a square of old tarpaulin had been tacked over the hole in the roof, the door was properly squared in its frame, and the broken window-panes had been replaced with rabbit pelts. A wisp of blue smoke issued from the crumbling chimney. Apparently there was somebody inside.
From the cabin Kit’s glance shifted across the dismal clearing. The snow was trampled every direction by a confusion of snowshoe prints. Perhaps they had been left there by Diane Durand, perhaps by others. He saw only that there were no waffle-web tracks. But this meant nothing. He knew now that Hell Bent was equipped with an extra, unidentified pair of raquettes. For all Kit could tell the man at this moment might be watching from one of the cabin windows.
There was nothing to do but accept the chance. Kit ventured into the open, but a hand reached after him to pluck at his sleeve.
“There’s somebody in there,” Giffard informed him in a husky whisper.
“Yes, I know. No doubt it’s the young woman I was telling the constables about.”
“There’s somebody else,” the trapper insisted. “A man. I saw his face at one of the window chinks.”
Kit looked around with a sobering expression. “Which window?”
“He ain’t there now,” said Giffard.
Kitchener faced the man with a narrowing scrutiny. “You mean you saw him a while ago? You’ve been here before?”
Giffard’s eyes dropped and he relapsed into a sullen silence.
“If you’ll take the advice of the police,” said Kit evenly, “you’ll keep away from this place in the future.” He turned on his heel and started across the clearing.
He advanced without a sound, a wary eye on the door and the window openings. So far he had passed unchallenged, but as he drew opposite the cabin the breathless quiet was assailed by a savage, barking chorus, and a pack of dogs came tearing around the corner of the building to fling themselves at the intruder.
They were Kit’s dogs. Buzz-saw, the big Chinook, charged in the fore and behind him came the tatterdemalions that Kit had purchased in the Chippewyan encampment. The four beasts caught the familiar scent at the same instant, recognized their man, and they sat down in a half circle to yowl beseechingly for breakfast.
It was too late to arrive unobtrusively as Kit had hoped to do. He strode to the door and flattened himself against the frame, to be out of range of the flanking windows. The latchstring had been pulled through its hole, and he found that the bar was down. He rapped heavily with his fist.
The answer was unexpectedly prompt. “If you don’t get away from here I’ll shoot you again, and this time you’ll get the full charge!” The voice came from behind the barred door—a woman’s voice, tingling with hostility. It was Diane Durand.
“I beg your pardon?” said Kitchener.
There was a short, uncertain interlude before the girl spoke again. “Who are you?” she asked.
“It’s Tearl.”
“Oh!” she said, and there was another pause.
“Who’d you think I was?”
“Another man,” she told him through the barrier.
“Giffard?”
“I don’t know his name. I don’t want to. A little, horrid, rat-faced thing.”
“That’s Giffard.”
“You tell him to keep away from here.”
“What did he do?” asked Kit.
“Nothing. He didn’t get a chance.”
“And you say you shot him?” demanded Kit incredulously.
“I certainly did.”
“In Heaven’s name—what for?”
“He came here and tried to give me a silver fox skin for a present. I told him I didn’t want any presents, and for him to keep out. He tried to force his way in, and I slammed the door in his face. Then he went to get an ax, saying he was going to smash down the door.”
Kit looked around at the furtive figure that still lurked at the edge of the clearing, and his left eyebrow slanted upward at an unpleasant angle. “I guessed right!” he muttered. “I thought so.”
“What?” asked the girl.
“You mean you really shot him?” Kit asked again.
“When he started back with his ax from the other side of the clearing I let him have it.”
“What with?”
“A shotgun. The one that was on your sledge.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Kit, realizing for the first time that the girl was telling the truth. There had been a double-barreled twelve-gauge among the effects that Jerry had traded him, and also a box of shells. He recalled Giffard’s limp and the furrowed streak over his cheekbone. Diane actually fired at the trapper, and a couple of the little missiles had found flesh.
“Well,” demanded the defiant voice from behind the door, “I suppose I’m not allowed to defend myself.”
Kit grinned maliciously at Giffard who, this time, was staying at a discreet distance. Noondea, the weasel, probably in the future would sell his silver fox pelts and not try to give them away to helpless-looking maidens in lonely cabins.
“Who’s in there with you?” Kit asked the girl.
There was a dead silence on the other side of the door.
“Hello!” he persisted. “Did you hear me? Are you alone?”
Again there was no answer. Kitchener’s half-smiling lips suddenly drew together in a set and rigid line. “Open that door!” he commanded.
“I’m not going to,” returned Diane. “This for the moment is my home, and I’m not going to let anybody in.”
Kitchener unslung his ax and leaned the handle against the door-frame. Then he shoved his pistol holster around to the front of his belt, and unfastened the flap. There was a stealthy movement behind the door crack and he thought he heard two people whispering.
The genial-featured Kit magically was gone, and in his place stood a hard-jawed, stern-eyed man, cool and nerveless and dangerous. There was somebody in that room with the girl, and his implacable instincts told him that that somebody must be Jerry Tearl’s murderer.
He caught up his ax, swung the blade, and drove the bit deep into the quivering door. A second crashing blow slashed a six inch chip out of the wood above the latch-hole. A gasping protest sounded from within, and as he lifted his ax a third time the bar rattled suddenly in its socket and the door was flung open.
Diane Durand confronted him in the dim opening, her head up, her eyes aflame, a shotgun gripped against her taut body.
“You keep out of here!” she warned the intruder.
Kit scarcely noticed her. Intuition told him that she would be too squeamish to fire at such close range. A more imminent peril awaited him in the gloom behind her.
He tried to peer into the thick, smoky atmosphere of the cabin, and was aware of a gliding movement on the farther side of the room. The girl was attempting recklessly to bar his way. He strode across the threshold and grabbed the barrel of the gun. A tug and a twist, and the gun was wrenched from her hands. He flung the weapon through the door, into the snow outside.
“You—” she tried to say, and stopped with a choking sound as his elbow jammed itself into her ribs. He shouldered her aside ruthlessly and strode past her.
In the dingy light he made out two upright figures standing stolid and motionless before him. Both were short and squat in build. Neither was Hell Bent. He needed only a glance to assure himself of that. With his pistol clenched for business his glance darted around the murky interior, and then checked in blinking wonderment as a squalling little human cry suddenly greeted him from the bunk.
“There!” broke in Diane Durand in a tense and furious voice. “You’ve done it! I knew it! You’ve gone and wakened him!”
Kit was staring weakly at a tiny, squirming bundle, tucked up in a blanket on the lower bunk. He was too flabbergasted to speak or to think. At that moment an enemy could have shot him dead without a flicker of resistance on his part.
Diane had rushed at him in an outburst of indignation. “You bully!” she exploded. “You brute! I told you to stay out. Oh, doggone it! After all the time we’ve had getting him asleep! You’ve waked the baby!”
CHAPTER XIV
SQUATTER’S RIGHTS
Kit stared goggle-eyed, first at the girl, at the strange, dumpy figures watching him from the half-light by the smoldering fireplace and again at the small, kicking, whimpering object in the swaddling blankets. His puzzled glance finished the circuit of the room, and he saw there was nobody else. Feeling flat and foolish, he slipped his pistol back into the holster, turning his back for the moment, trying to believe that nobody had seen him take it out in the first place.
After he had surreptitiously hitched his holster back behind his hip he looked around at the girl. “Where’s your uncle?” he asked, and his manner became stiff and dignified, as it should be with a sergeant of police.
Her brilliant eyes suddenly grew stony and uncommunicative. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Has he been here?”
“No.”
“When do you expect him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you heard anything from him?”
“No.”
Kitchener’s vision gradually was accustoming itself to the dingy light in the room. The fireplace seemed to draw badly and the smoke hung like a blanket from the ceiling. He scrutinized the two shapes in the haze before him, moving closer to see them better and arching one puzzled eyebrow as his gaze shifted from one to the other.
They were a singular looking pair, not much more than five feet tall, as sturdy and rotund and solidly put together as a couple of thirty-six gallon barrels. Kit grinned at the thought. A couple of perfect thirty-sixes!
In shape and in outward appearance they were exactly alike. Both wore thick-quilted pants, long, loose shirts of dressed skins, and clumsy fur boots. Both had slant, mongol eyes set deep behind plumped-out cheekbones, both wore their slick, black hair in the same square-bobbed manner, both smiled at him blandly and confidently as a pair of amiable children. How he guessed it Kit could not have said, but by some occult system of identification he discovered that one was a man and the other a woman. He had never seen any people from the Arctic seas, as far as he remembered, but he knew at once that these two were Esquimaux.
He spoke abruptly to the masculine part of the team. “What’s your name?” he asked.
The man seemed to know something of English. “Oogly,” he promptly answered.
“Oogly?” Kitchener’s eyelids twitched slightly as he stared at the round, good-natured countenance. “You don’t mean it?”
“Yup!” The man beamed upon the stranger, apparently much pleased by this opportunity for introductions. He pointed with a stumpy thumb. “This one, my wife. Her name, Mayauk.”
The woman’s lips parted and her teeth flashed in a smile as coquettishly feminine as the most beguiling dimples of any beauty anywhere. Her features were as broad and flat as Oogly’s, yet at that moment she seemed almost pretty, while her husband, even at his best, remained always as unlovely as his name.
“The baby,” condescended Miss Durand, “is called Uttaktuak.”
Kit looked curiously at the girl. “Friends of yours?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“How long you known ’em?”
“Since yesterday morning.” Her glance strayed gently towards the compact little bundle on the bunk. “They just happened to find their way here. The baby had the croup, and they were frightened. I steamed it out and greased it up, and it’s better I think—I hope.” Her eyes turned resentfully to the intruder. “She might get well if she weren’t kept awake by axes and hob-nail boots and the big, loud voices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
Kit flushed, and then grinned deprecatingly. “I couldn’t very well know that you had a baby here—now could I?”
“While I am living here,” she said, “this is my home, my demesne. It’s my privilege to say who comes in and who stays out.”
“By what right?” he inquired mildly.
“Squatter’s rights,” she flashed back at him.
“You move fast,” he laughed. “It was my belief that it took more than a couple of days and nights to gain a squatter’s title. However, we’ll let it go at that. This is your castle and moat and grange. The police’ll stay out, unless”—his brows contracted and he looked at her pointedly—“unless they find you harboring a criminal.”
She drew a short breath and the span between her curving eyelashes lessened by a fraction. “What do you mean?” she asked.
Kitchener spoke low, so that only she could hear. “Oogly,” he said, “is wanted for murder.”
Diane’s pretty mouth sagged open, and for the next few seconds she could not seem to think of any fitting thing to say.
“Inspector Bowman radioed the Saut Sauvage outpost to get busy on the case,” he informed her. “Oogly, it seems, upended a Yellow-Knife brave over a hole in the ice and shoved him through.”
“You don’t know that it’s true,” returned the girl impetuously. “Nobody saw it. Even the Indians who are trying to kill him—” Diane stopped short and bit her lip, as though she had decided that she was saying too much.
“Oh, they are?” exclaimed Kit. “I didn’t know that!” He wrinkled his brow thoughtfully. “So that’s why they won’t talk. Sort of private feud. Going to settle it themselves in the good old-fashioned way.” His glance searched the girl’s anxious face. “Who told you they were going to kill him?”
“Why, nobody—” she began uncertainly.
“Oogly himself, wasn’t it?” Kit hazarded.
Reluctantly she nodded. There was no evading the shrewdly questioning eyes that watched her so intently. “They’ve been hunting him for nearly a month—Oogly and his wife and baby,” she admitted. “They were well hidden, and they probably wouldn’t have been found—only the baby got sick, and they came out looking for help.”
Her manner and mood had changed mercurially. The cold defiance of her eyes gave way to a beseeching warmth and softness. “There is no proof,” she said—“only the accusations of a lot of irresponsible savages. Nobody saw any crime committed. You can’t arrest him, can you, on anything as flimsy as that?”
Kitchener was not thinking about Oogly’s escapades just then. He was seeing Diane with a new vision, discovering an unexpected sweetness in her glance and her tenderly curving mouth.
“I suppose not. I don’t know.” He really hadn’t much sense of what he was saying.
“I’ll let you see the baby some time,” the girl vouchsafed. “It’s got the funniest, snappiest eyes, and it says things in Esquimau. Think of it! A little baby that can talk in Esquimau! And poor Oogly! If he were taken away down south and put on trial—he’d die. You know that. In a foul, stuffy courtroom! A hunter of the wide floes who has never breathed anything but the clean, cold arctic wind! And if he dies there’s nobody to look after Mayauk and Uttaktuak, and they’d both die.”
She paused with a gulp, and Kitchener was amazed to see the sparkle of tears on her lashes. “It would be unfair. It would be cruel!” Her hand went to him and for an instant touched his sleeve. “Please! Please—you won’t, will you?”
“I can at least promise that I’ll investigate thoroughly before I—”
Kit checked himself and looked out through the open door of the cabin. A harshly quavering noise came from somewhere across the clearing, and as he lifted his head sharply he saw a great, dark object soar off against the dusky, morning sky. The thing drifted above the open ground, with a hollow, querulous cry, and a moment later disappeared in the black woods towards the south. It was one of the great, slaty-white owls, evidently going home after a night of foraging.
Diane had turned to peer over Kit’s shoulder, and he felt a tremor suddenly pass through her slender body. “I hate them,” she said in a voice of low intensity. “They cross over to the barrens at night to eat things alive, and they come back in the morning glutted. There’s not a single small creature left living in this part of the woods.”
Kit was not listening. His attention had been arrested by a movement on the edge of the clearing at the eastern side. He had left Giffard in the alders, and the trapper still waited there among the shielding branches, a peeping, skulking shadow. But he was no longer alone. Two other furtive shadows had appeared beside him.
As he watched Kit’s eyes began to bulge. Instead of two or three there were now five or six of them—stark, gray silhouettes that had emerged stealthy-footed from the underbrush.
Diane had seen his back stiffen as he edged towards the doorway. “What is it?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Stay where you are.”
Kit leaned his shoulder against the door-frame and tried to see through the pearly haze of the dawn. He counted eight now, silent, somber shapes, forming like a skirmish line along the dark edges of the thickets, and as he watched three or four others stole furtively from the woods.
As though a soundless command had been given, the group all at once began to advance towards the cabin. There were a dozen or more of them, moving forward in a ragged file that spread the full width of the clearing. They came on without haste, but with a purposeful stealth and deliberation, dodging and gliding from stump to stump, as though they expected to get close to the cabin before they were discovered.
Kit suddenly stepped into the open. “Stop!” he shouted.
The on-creeping figures froze to immobility like so many partridges in scanty cover.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
Two of the advance intruders met the challenge by standing boldly erect among the stumps. The foremost of the pair was near enough so Kit could see the man’s lean, parchment-like countenance and almost feel the intensity of the wary, watchful eyes. He held a carbine aslant across his flat-belted stomach, and Kit’s ranging glance discovered that all the others were armed. They were Indians—Yellow Knives.
Kitchener was certain that he had seen the leader somewhere before. He was a tall and skinny savage, all ribs and knobby bones, with a dirty and grotesquely sharp face, like the face of a gargoyle that had been left in the weather too long in a sooty city.
“You give Oogly to us.” The leader made his demand without heat, and yet there was a stolid resoluteness in his manner that would not be easily cowed.
Kit remembered the man now. He was one of the Yellow Knives who had dined last night at Saut Sauvage. The cadaverous one, he recalled, was known as Tom Salmonfish.
“What do you want with Oogly?” he temporized.
“We come get ’um,” said Salmonfish coolly. “A big lot of us come now. We take ’um along.”
“What for?” insisted Kitchener.
There was an unpleasant mutter of voices along the line, and the men on the outskirts straightened from their crouching postures and stalked over to form a group around Salmonfish. They made it quite clear that all were ready to back up their leader’s demands.
“I’m not saying Oogly is here,” Kit parried after a trenchant pause. “But if he were, why do you want him? What’s he done?”
“He killed our man!” one of the younger Indians blurted out truculently.
“How do you know he did?” asked Kit. “Did anybody see him do it?”
He was aware of a light footstep behind him, and without looking around he knew it was Diane Durand standing at his elbow, one small hand firmly touching his back. “Don’t give him up!” she whispered. “You can count on me. We’ll fight ’em if we must.”
Kit’s glance swept the pressing circle of dark, sullen faces, estimating their potentialities for trouble-making. They did not look like a crowd that would be amenable to argument or reasoning. But Kit could do no less than try to make them see the light.
“Who saw this man killed?” he asked suddenly. “You make a charge. You say your man was murdered. Who saw it done?”
There was a restless stirring of feet, a grunted word or two, but nobody answered. There was no sign of receptive intelligence in the lowering eyes that were watching him and the door behind him.
“You, Tom Salmonfish!” Kit stabbed at the man with his forefinger. “Did you see this murder done? Or you? Or you? Or you?”
The pointing finger singled out first one and then another of the Indians. “Tell me! I want to know. I’m a policeman. If Oogly is a killer I want to arrest him. I’ll take him to trial. If any of you saw the murder you’ll have to come with us. I’ll arrest you as material witnesses. You’ll be forced to stand up in open court and make your charges. If Oogly’s proven guilty we’ll hang him. Come on. I want to know. Who saw the murder?”
“We don’t want ’um hung,” said Salmonfish, his little coal eyes gleaming with maliciousness and stubbornness. “You give Oogly to us.”
Kit advanced a pace, but the threatening line did not yield an inch. The men all held carbines or rifles tightly gripped, and most of them carried knives and pistols loose in their belts. Three or four were thumbing the hammers of their guns, without even pretending to disguise the fact that the muzzles were menacing the policeman. The gang of avengers were beginning to chafe at all this parleying, and anybody could have seen that mere words would not hold them much longer in check. If their man wasn’t handed over to them very soon, they would go in and get him.
Although Kit realized that his persuasive efforts were foredoomed to failure, he was determined to stave off hostilities as long as he possibly could. He looked around the glowering circle with a bright, accusing scorn.
“If there has been a murder,” he challenged, “where is the body? Have you brought it with you? The body of the dead man? In law we call it the corpus dilecti. If nobody saw the murder done and nobody has the body of the dead to show, then there can have been no murder!”
It was a nice legal point and Kit could not help bringing it up, even though he knew in advance that the niggling little technicalities of his chosen profession could not possibly bear any weight with these surly children of the wilderness. In any event his peroration was punctured flat by an unexpected, startling voice, speaking up behind him.
“The body drowning under much ice. Nobody find um now.”
Kit turned on his heel to see the broad-beamed countenance of Oogly cheerfully grinning in the doorway.
He closed one eye meaningly, trying desperately to warn the Esquimau to keep quiet. But Oogly perhaps did not understand the white man’s method of issuing a warning with a sly eyewinker.
He pushed forward to fill the doorway with his rolling bulk and looked with good-natured triumph at the men who had come to take him away.
“Nobody find the body anymore,” he declared. “No difference. He is dead a long time sure. Oogly killed um.”
CHAPTER XV
THE NIGHT HARRIERS
It was too late to stop the Esquimau’s talking. Kit stood dumbfounded, staring at him. Oogly either had gone stark crazy, or else he was a man devoid of fear. He had forced himself into public notice, and judging by his wide, incorrigible grin he was enjoying his unique position immensely.
From the demeanor of the Yellow Knives, a person unfamiliar with the Indian temperament might have imagined that they either had failed to hear or understand. Not a man moved nor spoke, not a muscle quivered. They waited for the outlander to go on, watching him in a dead, flinty silence, like wolves watching a swimming caribou.
Oogly was more than willing to oblige. He not only admitted killing the Yellow-Knife brave, but he told all about it in picturesque detail. He seemed to think it was a piece of work that his modesty ought not to keep hidden.
“The man him praying against my fish,” he explained genially. “So drowning him had to be.”
Kit no longer tried to interfere. What was the use? The mischief was accomplished. Oogly could swear himself blue in the face with denials, but nothing that could be said after this could ever sway or stay the purpose of the savages who had come to get him.
“What do you mean,” demanded Kitchener—“praying against your fish?”
“So nobody of the fish would eat at my fishing hook,” declared Oogly.
The Esquimau had come a step beyond the open doorway, so everybody could look at him while he told his outrageous tale. In his queerly chosen words of English, helped out by vivid pantomime, he showed them exactly how and why the killing was done.
Oogly, it seemed, was fishing through a hole in the ice on Long Lake, which emptied its chilly waters into Great Owl Run. He had been catching plenty of fish—innumerable fish—if his hearers could believe the number of times he jerked his pretended line out of the imaginary hole in the ice. Then along came the Yellow-Knife fisherman.
The newcomer chopped himself a hole not far from Oogly’s splendid spot for fish. He dropped a line of his own in the water and knelt down on the ice.
The kneeling posture was the man’s undoing. The Esquimau could tell that he was praying. When the fish stopped biting on Oogly’s hook he knew that the Indian was praying against his fish. When the fish started to come wriggling and flapping out of the water at the other hole then he knew that the Indian was praying the fish onto his own hook. Oogly now was catching none, and the other man was hauling them out as fast as he could pray.
This, to the Esquimau’s simple method of thought, was a justifiable cause for homicide. He walked over to the other fisherman, upended him by the heels and pushed him down headfirst through the hole in the ice. By making little explosive sounds with his puffed-out lips, Oogly showed them how the bubbles came to the surface for a minute or two, and then stopped coming.
“Awright now,” said the Esquimau, winding up his tale. “Finean’ dandy! Oogly go back and fishing lucky once again.”
That was the story, and after its cheerful recounting Oogly leaned his squat bulk against the doorframe as he waited placidly to find out what the dead man’s friends were going to do about it.
Kitchener was aghast. He had never heard a tale so bloodthirsty and at the same time so naïve and childlike in its telling.
He looked obliquely at the Yellow Knives, and nudged Diane’s arm. “Inside!” he said under his breath.
“You come along now,” Tom Salmonfish said to Oogly.
The Indian did not raise his voice, but the glitter of his eyes was like a baneful flame. He said something to his companions, and with that soundless, gliding motion that is peculiar to all forest-born creatures, the bunched group of men spread out right and left in a line that flanked the front of the cabin.
Kitchener backed into the doorway, shoving Diane and Oogly into the cabin behind him. He reached around with the toe of his foot and pulled the door towards him, so he would be able to slam it shut with the least possible delay.
There could be no doubt about the intentions of the Yellow Knives. They had made up their minds to seize their man, drag him away, and somewhere in the dark woods mete out their own cruel, remorseless justice, which demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.
Kit was not deluding himself. These men wore store shirts and refused to labor on Sundays, but under the veneer of the missionary teachings they were still the same savages as their fierce and brutal forefathers. If he tried to save Oogly it meant a fight to the death. They were a sinister-looking crowd at this moment, and they had made it clear that they neither respected nor feared the police uniform. He could hear the click of rifle hammers up and down the line, and he knew they were all set to rush the cabin the instant their leader gave the word.
Off on the other side of the clearing Giffard, the Runt, was seated on a stump, like an ominous specter watching events. No help could be expected from him. He had met with a rebuff that morning that his shriveled and spiteful nature could never forget. So he sat tensely now and waited, and Kit knew by the look of him that anything that happened to the occupants of the cabin would be all right with Giffard. He even might have egged the Indians on, had there been any need for that.
In the middle of the clearing, moving in the heavy snow between two stumps, Kit caught sight of a tiny, gray-furred animal which was struggling through the drifts, apparently trying to gain the shelter of the nearer thickets. It was an old, whiskered house-rat. Kit recalled that there had been rats in the cabin roof, and apparently this one had been gassed out of his home by the smoking chimney.
The human mind is subject to the queerest aberrations. It was strange that at this moment when Kit should have been terribly concerned with his own troubles he could find time to think about a rat. But this little creature was in a bad plight. It would starve or freeze to death surely if it tried to live in the woods, and if it were caught in the open by the predatory monsters that dwelt in the neighborhood—
Even at that moment Kit was conscious of a shadowy flutter in the air above him, and he lifted his head in time to see one of the great, snowy owls floating across the murky sky. The sharp senses of the Indians also had caught the impalpable whisking of sound, and, without exception, they too forgot their own affairs long enough to look up into the morning dusk.
The huge, pallid night-bird flew softly above the roof of the cabin and hovered for a moment to peer downward with his stupid, golden-tinged eyes. Kit heard the Yellow Knives begin to mutter among themselves in their own, ancient speech, and he saw them stir uneasily and crowd closer towards the wall of the cabin. It was not a move of hostility, but of fear, the impulse to hunt shelter. The savage faces were suddenly stricken with awe and superstitious dread. This bird, as all Yellow Knives knew, belonged to Wetikoo, the Devil’s regions, and they did not wish him to fly above them.
The great owl was a weird apparition in the ghostly morning light. A soft, downy body, poised graciously on soundless wings, at first glance he seemed gentle and dovelike in his white-plumaged innocence. And then, at closer range, might be seen his frightful head, the diabolically hooked beak, the beautiful snowy floss of his cheeks and throat dabbled in fresh blood. He had killed and dined gluttonously many times through the night, and on his way back to the dark pits of the forest he could pause in the quiet of dawn for one more killing.
The owl saw the gray rat wallowing in the snow, and by an imperceptible movement of his expanded pinions he changed his course, slackened his silent flight. Some clairvoyance of instinct at that instant warned the rat of the stealthy form that had just skimmed the tree-tops. His sharp, twitching nose twisted upward, he spotted the monstrous thing drifting like a fog-wraith above him, and he tried to run, shrieking in terror.
For those few seconds the men in the clearing, white and Indian, lost sight of their own grim business to watch tensely this lesser drama of the wilderness.
The rat was doomed. Its tiny feet and legs sank deep in the loose packed snow and it piled a drift in front of itself as it tried to drag its body forward. The nearest thicket was a dozen yards away, and there wasn’t a chance of its gaining cover.
The feathered legs of the owl reached down stiffly and the terrible talons opened for their clutching stroke. Unhurried, unexcited the big bird swerved and dipped earthward as lightly as a wafted ball of fluff. Backed against a stump the rat turned at bay, squealing insanely.
The owl had turned his staring eyes towards the men for a moment, and then he went about his butcher’s work, as indifferent to the human spectators as though he were the unearthly spirit that the Indians believed him to be. The men of the forest were mortally afraid of the devils that owned these birds, and never dared to molest them. There was no beast of the wilderness able to cope with the giant owls. So they grew up without the instinct of fear.
Like a fleshless, disembodied thing, as aloof from the world, as quiet as death, the great owl swooped.
What prompted Kitchener’s act, he could not have said. But somehow he found his pistol butt set comfortably in the arch of his hand. His sights notched themselves in line, and his finger squeezed the trigger.
He fired—not at the swift-moving owl, which was mostly invulnerable feathers—but at the crouching rat. Nothing could have saved the little animal, and it is better to die instantaneously than to be plucked to bits alive. Kit might have missed the rushing bird, but the rat was standing still. As the report slammed across the clearing the small, gray body flopped headless in the snow, twitched once or twice, and settled quietly at rest.
The great owl, almost scooping the ground, braked his descent as his victim crumpled beneath him. The connoisseur of death recognized death at sight. He was no vulturous feeder. He took his meat alive. With a throaty, hissing sound that was not like any earthly sound, he lifted himself on his shadows of wings, and vanished between here and there like a smoke-puff dissipating in twilight.
Kitchener straightened his back and eased out a breath that was threatening to burst his lungs. He looked at the beheaded rat lying so still under its stump, he looked across the clearing at the gaping-mouthed Giffard, and then he turned to look at the Indians.
Something had happened to the Yellow Knives in that astonishing moment. Kit felt the change in their manner, he saw it in their gawking faces and in their awed, incredulous eyes. They were huddled in an irresolute group not far from the cabin door, watching him askance.
In an intuitive flash he realized that a miracle had intervened in his behalf. These were no longer the fierce, rash men who would have shot him down and burned the cabin above him. They knew nothing about the law, but they knew much about shooting. They had seen him snip off a rat’s head with his short-barreled gun at twenty paces. That sight somehow had spoiled their stomachs for fighting. That same, quick-firing gun might as readily pop off a half-dozen Yellow-Knife heads before they could stop its spitting.
It might be impossible even to down a man who dared to cheat one of the devil-birds of its prey. Such a one, who stood unsmitten afterwards and mocked at fate with one high-cocked eyebrow—it was more than possible that he also might be under the diabolical protection.
Kit read all of this in the guileless, bewildered faces, and he made the most of his advantages. He moved nonchalantly outside the doorway, keeping his pistol in his hand.
“You, Tom Salmonfish!” he said so sharply that the Indian jumped. “What do you mean by bringing your friends here? It’s a bad place. None of you may get out again.”
Salmonfish raised his anxious, squinting eyes, moistened his lips and started to say something. Then he ducked his head with a spasmodic movement and almost seemed to shrink within himself as another huge, blood-smeared owl sailed in from the barrens to cross low over the cabin roof.
Before the great, lazy-drifting bird had passed across the clearing a second and a third and a fourth hove in sight above the whited line of trees. One of them wheeled for an instant in his course, peered around below him with solemn, glaring eyes. It might have seemed for those few seconds as though he were trying to stare the watching men out of countenance, twisting his gory head from side to side while he circled and singled out individuals for his somber scrutiny.
The Yellow Knives refused to face the evil eyes looking down upon them. Their shoulders hunched up, their heads bowed, and they huddled together, looking absurdly like people who had been caught out unprotected in bad weather. Kit, who was watching them narrowly, suddenly raised his voice in a wild, singing shout: