He howled the refrain after the owls and beat the time in the air with the muzzle of his pistol.
For a few seconds the Indians seemed to stop breathing, and they looked at Kit like so many petrified men. They could not have understood the words. It might have been an infernal chant for all they knew. In that hushed nook of the forest the profane outburst of noise was nerve-shattering. Two or three of the Indians on the outskirts began to edge away from the cabin, and those in front heard the uneasy shuffling behind them and were quick to catch the infection.
Before Tom Salmonfish could have realized what was happening he found himself alone, confronting the mad white man who dared to taunt the fearsome owls, who could shoot like a fiend, whether he really was one or not, and who was waving his deadly pistol with a crazy disregard for those in front of it.
Tom Salmonfish might have stuck, in spite of the owls and the loony policeman, if anybody had stood behind him. But his braves had thought of something to do somewhere else. Some of them were already half way across the clearing, peering furtively over their shoulders as the owls disappeared in the black timber below the creek. The remaining two or three lingered momentarily, and then they shambled in an aimless fashion behind their comrades.
“I’d beat it,” said Kit.
Tom Salmonfish scowled after his departing friends, and then his morbid glance came back for an instant to the doorway. “We comin’ back an’ get um soon,” he threatened. “Plenty time to-morrow. Plenty more of us.”
He stalked away with dignity to overtake the last man of the file, who felt himself being crowded from behind, and stepped on the heels of the man in front of him. It was like a push given to a line of ten-pins. Those up ahead moved faster to keep out of the way of those in the rear, who moved faster to keep up. By the time the retreat began to lose itself in the underbrush on the farther side of the clearing it had begun to look like a contest to see who could go at the best walking clip, without running.
Kit closed the door and dropped the heavy draw-bar. He looked around the smoky interior, and laughed. Mrs. Mayauk Oogly stood beside him, smiling up at him, a friendly, cheerful smile. With a sudden surging of good spirits he leaned forward and kissed the Esquimau woman first on one roly-poly cheek, and then on the other.
This done, he thought there ought to be no partiality, so he turned and caught Diane Durand in his arms and firmly kissed her startled, open mouth. As the girl gasped and lithely struggled free he looked around at the man who had caused all the trouble.
“We’ve got a reprieve for you, Oogly,” he said. “You lucky stiff! Now you can be hanged decently, as you should be, by the police.”
CHAPTER XVI
THE HONORABLE MURDERER
The promise of future punishment did not bother Oogly in the least. He lived happily in his immediate moments, and anything that happened to him at a later date was something not to be worried about until that time came. Any day after to-day was too remote even to be thought about.
He gazed up in rapt admiration at the man who had chased off the Yellow Knives and laughed at their departing backs. Oogly was a humorist himself, and loved to laugh as well as anybody. His grin of appreciation included his chin, the top of his forehead and both frost-bitten ears.
Suddenly he thought of something that had been overlooked on this joyful occasion. He ran to the bunk and came back with the baby in his arms. “Uttaktuak want kissum too,” he said.
“Being female,” remarked Kit, “she would.” He bent lightly and touched his lips to the funny little sleeping face that Oogly held up to him. Then he looked around at Diane with mocking eyes.
The girl was rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand. She flushed with annoyance for an instant, and then her mood changed and she smiled caustically. “You’ve certainly given us three women a glorious Christmas,” she remarked in biting irony.
As she observed Kit from under her thick, hazel eyelashes her face suddenly grew sober. “Did you mean that?” she demanded.
“I always mean it,” said Kitchener lightly. “Just ask any of the girls—”
She shook her head impatiently. “You know what I’m asking you. What you said about Oogly?”
“What did I say about him?”
“That you’re going to arrest him, and—”
“Hang him?” Kit supplied as the girl delicately hesitated. “I would if I could. That’s part of my job. He deserves it, but I don’t just really see how it can be done. Not right away, anyhow.”
Diane’s features brightened. “You really meant what you told the Yellow Knives?”
“I’m afraid I did. You can’t prove that a murder has been committed by the murderer’s unsupported testimony. Odd as it sounds, that’s the law. Oogly’s confession isn’t worth a darn without a substantiating witness and a dead body for an inquest. A man accused of a capital crime isn’t allowed to convict himself. A nice situation, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s fine,” said Diane.
“You think it’s fine to let an admitted murderer go scot-free?” Kit scowled at her. “Maybe that’s your idea of the way a world should be run, but it’s not mine. I’ve got to try and find the dead man’s body. Then maybe I can do something about it.”
“I hope you never find it,” said Diane.
“I go ’long when you go show you best places for looking,” put in the irrepressible Oogly.
Kitchener eyed the Esquimau in perplexity. While he wore the scarlet of the police and called himself by his dead brother’s name he was conscientiously determined to acquit himself in his borrowed rôle as sincerely and honestly as though he himself had taken the oath of service. The responsibilities that once had been Jerry’s had shifted to his own shoulders. And now his first police case left him in a decided quandary. He hadn’t the faintest notion what he ought to do.
In spite of himself he secretly felt the same sympathy and liking for Oogly that Diane Durand frankly expressed. By his own lights the little Esquimau was a good man. He loved his wife and baby. He would freeze for them and starve for them and die for them calmly if need be. Men who lived always so close to death as the people of the frozen seas, naturally would put the lightest valuation on human life. The loss of a few Yellow Knives to the world could not seem a very important matter to Oogly. But if his own life were forfeit for a simple killing, that wouldn’t be so dreadful either. He had showed clearly how he felt about it. If he had done wrong, he wasn’t afraid to pay the penalty.
Kit would have arrested the man if he had had any evidence on which to found a charge. But there was none. There can be no murder trial without a coroner’s inquest, and there can be no inquest unless the coroner’s jury has a victim’s body to sit upon. Legally he couldn’t do a thing about it.
On the other hand, it was out of the question to allow an unrepentant murderer to wander at large in the forest. Oogly might take it into his queer head some day that others of the Indians were praying against him.
As Kit studied the Esquimau with a baffled frown, an idea struck him. If Oogly could be impressed with the enormity of his offense he might try to be a better man. There was nothing criminal or wicked in his flat, round face. He was looking at Kit now with an eager, dog-like friendliness in his uptilted eyes. There could be no doubt of his anxiety to please the man who had saved him. Perhaps he might be shamed into future good-behavior.
Kit stared uncertainly around the foggy room, and his glance lit on a row of shelves in the corner. During his recent absence Diane had unpacked the provisions he had left for her on his sledge and stored them neatly away in their original bags and boxes and tins.
After a brief inspection of the shelves Kit picked out a small can which was labeled “baking powder.” He took off the tin top and laid it on the table. Using his heavy-bladed knife for a cutting edge and a billet of wood as a hammer, he cut around the rim, and broke out from the center a bright disc of metal.
The others grouped themselves behind him and watched with curiosity, but nobody asked any questions.
With the point of his knife Kit began tracing printed letters across the shiny surface of tin. He worked painstakingly with his tongue in his cheek, and when he finished he had engraved the word “murderer” across the smooth-faced disc. He punched a slot in the rim of metal, removed the strap from his wrist-watch and threaded it through the hole. Then he stood up at soldierly attention and faced Oogly sternly.
“Do you know who I am?” he demanded.
The Esquimau nodded. “Yup. You oneguy shoot-like-hell.”
“I’m the police,” said Kitchener severely. He tapped his chest, and then swept out his arms in a gesture that was meant to take in a hundred thousand miles of territory. “When I say anything it is the law everywhere. It goes! You get that?”
Again Oogly nodded. He accepted the statement. He could readily believe all of that.
“Look at me!” thundered Kit. “Straight! This is awful! This is a terrible thing! I’m looking into the eyes of a murderer—a common murderer who ought to be hanged!”
The Esquimau seemed to understand this too. He was watching Kit with grave intensity, and by the pained screwing-up of his face he showed how sorry and remorseful he was beginning to feel. His underlip hung out tremulously, as though he were a little, penitent child who was suddenly overcome by its own fearful wickedness.
Kitchener hastened on with the arraignment. “I hate to do this to you, Oogly,” he said sadly. “But I’ve got to do it. You’re a pariah, an outcast, a no-good man. People must know you for what you are. When they meet you in the forest or on the barrens they’ll shrink from you, they’ll shun you, they’ll hurry the other direction. They’ll be afraid to speak to you, because they’ll know they’re looking at a scoundrel.
“Come here!” Kit crooked a relentless forefinger.
After an instant’s hesitation Oogly advanced a pace and waited uneasily.
Kitchener reached forward suddenly, and with the point of his knife cut two narrow slits in the Esquimau’s skin shirt. He thrust the wrist-watch strap through the opening and fastened the buckle. Then he stepped back and regarded the man with judicial severity.
“If you can read,” he said, “you will see that the word ‘murderer’ is written upon it. It is my order that you wear this all the time, whatever you are doing, wherever you go. So that all men may be warned and recognize you for what you are. It is the mark of crime, it is your badge of shame.”
Oogly bent his head to look. Gingerly he raised his hand to finger the dangling, mirror-like bit of tin. After a moment he looked up with shy, anxious eyes. “Fo’ me?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“For you, Oogly.”
“This make people umfraid?”
“It’ll make them afraid. They’ll be filled with horror at the very sight of you.”
“I keep um all time?”
“You’re never to take it off.”
Oogly turned to gaze at his wife, he glanced around towards the little bundle that he had just put back in the bunk, and then he revolved slowly to face Kit again. The look of respectful admiration that Kit had read in the man’s eyes a moment ago had mellowed into rapt, slavish devotion. Oogly’s head went up, the chest that wore the murderer’s medal expanded by inches, an expression of pride and sheer happiness overspread his wrinkled face.
“Thanks you!” he said fervidly.
“What?” Kitchener stared at the man with wilting features. “What do you mean?”
He heard a snickering sound behind him and turned sharply to see Diane Durand standing with a hand pressing against her ribs, almost doubled up by the effort to keep her laughter to herself.
“Keep quiet!” he snapped.
“Your psychology is great,” said the girl, and stopped for an instant to choke. “You had the right idea,” she finished, “only something went awfully wrong with the psychology.”
“Will you kindly keep out of this?” he commanded, and gave her an ugly look.
Instead of being dismayed Diane moved suddenly towards him, and before he could move his head aside she put up an audacious forefinger to touch his fiercely crooked eyebrow. “Hello, Cocky-bird!” she said demurely. “Honestly—I think it’s cute.”
Kit tried to erase the scowl, and found himself scowling worse than before. He was on the point of saying something disagreeable, but at that instant he caught sight of Oogly’s strutting figure and honest, beaming face. The ludicrousness of the affair struck him, and he was forced to clutch suddenly at his own ribs and turn his back on the Esquimau. Somehow his eyes encountered Diane’s elfish eyes, and before he quite knew what had happened he was grinning at her.
“My gosh!” he gasped. “What have I done?”
“You’ve given out a decoration,” she said—“‘pour valeur’.”
“The poor idiot couldn’t be any more pleased if the King had come from Windsor to pin him with the V.C.,” Kit groaned.
“You’d better do something about it,” said the girl seriously.
“Yes. I know.” Kitchener whirled abruptly to tower stiff and erect above the Esquimau.
“Listen to me, Oogly!” he said crisply. “I don’t want to have any misunderstanding. That medal is for only one murder. No more.”
The little Esquimau blinked and waited with flattering attentiveness.
“Do you get me?” demanded Kit. “If I hear of anybody else being killed—good-by medal. I’ll take it away from you!”
Oogly was startled and worried. “Noum else?” he faltered.
“No. No one else. It’s only good for one. So please be careful. I wouldn’t want to tell you that you can’t wear it any more. But that’s what I’ll have to do if I hear of your killing another man. If you kill another person I’ll take the medal and throw it in the creek and I’ll never give you another one.”
Oogly’s mouth was twitching and for a moment it seemed almost as though he were on the verge of tears. He was slow to think things out, but as Kit waited uneasily he saw the bland, contented smile gradually reassert itself. “Oright,” Oogly suddenly agreed. He touched his badge with renewed satisfaction. “People see um an’ find out Oogly a good-murderer. Get umfraid an’ no more come aroun’ for bothering. Nobody hav’ be killed no more.”
“That’s exactly the idea,” agreed Kit, and breathed his relief. “But don’t forget—if you ever lay a hand on a Yellow Knife, or anybody else—you lose the medal.”
With a feeling that he had muddled through somehow, Kitchener dismissed Oogly from his immediate worries. He went to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out through the clearing. The silvery reflection of the cold, wintry sun was beginning to lighten the sky above the gloom of the forest. There were no Indians in sight, no sign of Giffard; the owls had gone to roost.
Diane came to the door to observe the melancholy Christmas morning. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said.
“Laugh all you like.” Kit closed and barred the door, and smiled wearily. “If you can find anything funny in this heart-breaking hole, in Heaven’s name laugh!”
“I was laughing,” she told him, “just at the dum-foolness of things. I could have cried just as easily.
“If you want to know what I think,” she went on gravely, “I think you’re doggone clever. You pulled a couple of fast ones this morning.”
“Laugh or cry, and think what you please,” he said ungraciously. “We’re just where we started in the first place.”
“Mrs. Oogly and I,” said the girl, “wish to invite you to Christmas dinner.” She made him a mocking little bow. “We hope you accept.”
“Sure. Thanks. I’ve got to stay until dark, anyhow. If Oogly or I step out of here in the daylight, there’s an excellent chance of our being popped off. I suspect those Yellow Knives have only taken a little recess.”
The Esquimau family had arrived at the cabin well supplied with provisions, the fruits of Oogly’s prowess with his fishing hooks and iron-headed spear. They had brought with them a haunch of tender young caribou, a dozen brace of ptarmigan, lots of frozen salmon and whitefish, caught presumably during a lull in the Yellow-Knife praying, and quantities of blueberries, which Mayauk had dried and compressed into hard, black bricks.
By some necromancy of her own Mayauk persuaded the fireplace to stop smoking, and, with the white girl acting as cook’s assistant, she achieved a Christmas dinner which was palatable, although somewhat greasy, and plentiful enough for famishing men. Diane’s personal contribution was a great, soggy plum-pudding, made of white flour and sugar and raisins and blueberries and caribou suet.
When Kitchener was invited to take his place at the table he could not help wondering if anybody else in the world might be eating such an outlandish Christmas dinner to-day with such strangely found companions. He rather imagined that the championship for oddness went to this table.
He and Diane Durand called a truce for the afternoon. Kit tried to forget that his sole object in life at present was to hunt the girl’s criminal uncle, and she did her pathetic best to be amiable and cheerful and to hide the harried look of anxiety that always came back to haunt her restless eyes. Of the four Oogly and Mayauk alone joined with honest good-will and untroubled laughter in a festive occasion which, to these two pagans, was not really an occasion at all, but just another bounteous meal to eat and another day of contentment to live.
Several times during the course of the dinner Kit excused himself to saunter to the door and peek out across the sun-glistening clearing.
“As soon as it’s dark,” he remarked, “Oogly and I are going to make camp down woods in the owlery. I don’t think it likely that any Yellow Knife will go in there to look for us.”
“What about Mayauk and Uttaktuak?” asked Diane.
“Let ’em stay here with you. The Indians won’t bother them. They’re after Oogly, and nobody else. And he’ll be as safe living with the owls as he would be in jail.” Kit turned to the Esquimau. “You afraid to sleep where the night birds roost?” he asked.
Oogly shook his head scornfully. “Hellno!” he declared.
“You expecting to stay around here?” the girl asked in a tone that was almost too careless.
“Sure,” said Kit. “I’ve got to try to find the body of Oogly’s victim.”
Diane looked at him somberly. She knew perfectly well that his staying had nothing to do with the dead Yellow Knife. Her eyes measured him with a challenging hardness.
“I may not see you again,” she informed him. “If a chance comes along to get out of this country, I’m going. This place is getting on my nerves frightfully.”
Kitchener regarded her skeptically. She wasn’t likely to leave until she could get into touch with her uncle, and the two of them had recovered the hidden gold-sledge. That’s what she was here for. And Kit had seen enough of her inflexible will to feel certain that she would not run away and leave her errand unaccomplished. He would meet her again, undoubtedly, and their next encounter was not apt to be so agreeable for either of them.
He shrugged his shoulders. “If you need me for anything in the meantime you’ll know where to find me.”
“If I ever want anything from you,” she told him stiffly, “it’ll be on account of Mayauk or the baby.”
“Send if you want me,” he repeated.
The short-lived December day reached its noontide and waned as the pallid, heatless sun crossed the short arc and set beneath the white-topped forest. There followed the brief, breathless moments of the gloaming; then the stars broke with electric brilliancy through the frozen night, a thin, wan moon sailed into the sky, and savage, prowling life began to awaken among the dark coverts and underwoods.
Kit and Oogly made back packs of the few belongings that necessity advised them to take, they said good-by to the women, and quietly left the cabin.
The forest was full of noises, ice-stiff branches cracking of their own weight, the babble of the brook between the rifts of ice, the groan and strain of floes piling up under pressure, the long-drawn howl of a distant wolf, the horribly plaintive cries of owls arousing themselves after heavy sleep. There were other sounds, small, furtive stirrings, not so easily identified, that might have meant anything. For all Kit knew there might be twenty Yellow Knives hidden around the clearing.
He kept close to the brook, and Oogly followed in the silence of his fur boots. In a few seconds the two men reached the woods. No hostile shadows rose up to intercept them. They plunged into the nearest thicket and worked their way into the deepest tangles of the Great Owl woods.
Along the creek and at the edges of the clearing the glimmering of the moon touched the great columns of the firs, but in the denser woods not a ray of light penetrated the interlacing of snow-sheeted branches. But they did not need the power of sight to know when they stood under the roosting places of the owls. The dead, rank air about them pulsated with soft, feathery movements, and without seeing they knew that seeing eyes were looking down at them.
In a hollow of ground between two enormous tree stubs they dropped their meager equipment and made preparations for the night. It promised to turn extremely cold before morning, and they would need a fire. Kit didn’t think there was a chance in the world that any Indian would venture into this owl-haunted pit in the darkness, or even in the daytime for that matter. Oogly gathered a few sticks of down-wood and some dry twigs for kindling. Kitchener struck a match and applied the light.
He was on his knees as the fire ignited and leaped into flame. Shadows and shapes emerged in the gloom and wavered drunkenly around the dancing firelight. One of the owls scooped past his head so close that he felt the rustle of pinions, and was gone again as mysteriously as though it had dissolved in the air. Kit was about to stand up and stretch his tired muscles to the warmth, and then he changed his mind.
There was a sound behind him like a hatchet driven into a block of wood. He looked around slowly, and then tumbled and rolled away on all fours in his haste to get outside the range of the firelight. A two-pronged fishing-head spear was sticking in the tree behind the fire, quivering there in arrested flight.
Kitchener bumped into Oogly and carried the Esquimau with him, tumbling through the brush and into a hole where an uprooted tree had once stood. It was a good crater to hide in, and they crouched together and peered back towards the mounting fire.
Somebody had hurled the fishing spear at Kit. He could see the double prongs buried almost to the haft in the trunk of the old fir. The shaft was pointed towards the brook. It must have come from that direction. Thrown with greater strength and ill-will than accuracy. A few inches lower and Kit would have been pinned to the tree like a beetle to a cork.
The intended assassin had moved as quietly as the owls. Kit had had no inkling of another presence in the jungle of trees. And now, if he hadn’t seen the spear, he never would have dreamed that anybody was hidden near by.
He reacted with anger. “You go that way, Oogly,” he whispered and pointed towards the brook. “I’ll circle around. We’ll get him.”
Oogly had said himself that he was a good man in an affray. Kit could have asked none better. The Esquimau was not flurried, and he was not afraid. He owned a trade gun, but for close-in work he preferred his short, heavy hunting spear. He reached the weapon and drifted away as unobtrusively as the smoke from the fire.
Kit slipped behind the nearest tree and stole around from the opposite direction. He moved with utmost stealth, down through the alders that lined the edge of the brook. And then he stopped. The snow had been shaken off the branches near his head and a furrow was piled up underfoot. Somebody had crept through the underwood at this point. For a moment he waited. There was nobody in sight now, no alarming sound.
He pulled off his mitten and blew his breath on his chilly fingers. Then he screwed up his courage and snapped the button of his flash lamp. There was a snowshoe trail in the fresh snow. Instantly he doused the light. He had seen enough to drop him crouching, with every nerve at quivering tension. The raquette prints were waffle-webbed.
CHAPTER XVII
VANISHING FOOTPRINTS
Kitchener recognized the snowshoe tracks with a shock of surprise. A spear is not a white man’s weapon, and he had supposed of course that one of the disgruntled Yellow Knives had thrown it. It hadn’t occurred to him that his attacker might be Hell Bent.
For the first time Kit was brought to a full appreciation of his own danger. This Bent was a subtle and crafty man. He had outwitted the wily Jerry, and he had just missed his present attack by inches. It was an artful scheme. He must have been hanging on the outskirts of the clearing when Kit drove off the Indians. When Kit and Oogly left the cabin he probably trailed along close at their heels. He had obtained a native fishing spear somewhere, and he used it instead of a rifle. If he had spiked his victim to the tree the police would have hunted for a Yellow Knife, never suspecting that the killer might be a white man. Kit had escaped this time only by the merest good luck.
He realized that if he hoped to go on living he would have to move in the future with the utmost caution. Death might be lurking in ambush almost anywhere in the dark wilderness, at any moment.
The man had faded away into the gloom, but he could not escape from the betraying line of snowshoe tracks. Kit did not dare to use his lamp again, but by feeling the snow with his bare fingers it was easy enough to follow the departing prints. Patiently he groped his way along the trail, which curved out of the denser forest through clumps of snow-sheeted alders and willows, and ended finally at the top of the steep creek embankment.
The moon cast a cold, sickly radiance along the wooded shore opposite, but on this side a deep shadow hid the ice-bound stream. Bent must have dropped over the edge of the sheer embankment, but whether he had followed the ledges upstream or downstream, or was hiding below at the bottom of the slope, Kit had no means of knowing. This might be a trap.
As he hesitated he saw something rise up on the bank to blot out the face of the low-riding moon. A short, stumpy figure silhouetted boldly against the sky—Kit’s reflex towards his gun checked as he scrutinized the apparition. Nobody but Oogly could be shaped like that.
Watching, he saw the figure suddenly start up in an erect posture. Two hands grasping a spear flung themselves above the man’s head, and for twenty seconds he stood thus, stark and motionless, like the statue of some mythological figure posed in a battle scene. His glance was fixed rigidly on something in the brook course below him. Kit’s lips were gripped in his teeth. He expected any instant to see the spear go. But for some reason it never left the warrior’s hands.
Slowly the tense figure relaxed, the upraised arms dropped and lowered the weapon. Oogly turned his head and saw Kit. He looked hard for a moment, and then tucked the spear under his arm and sauntered back along the embankment to meet his companion.
“Did’n’ kill um,” he announced as Kit moved towards him.
“What?”
Oogly’s wrinkled smile was visible in the moonlight. “Man he come along down by me,” he explained. “No goin’ murderum anybody.” He inflated his chest on which proudly glinted the tin “murder medal.” “Let um going on past along the water.”
Kit regarded the Esquimau quizzically for a space, and then he returned Oogly’s grin. Evidently Bent had passed up the creek within spearing range of the Esquimau hunter, who for just that moment was tempted to let fly. Then he remembered his promise and restrained himself. He hadn’t wanted to lose his badge. So Hell Bent was still a living menace instead of a dead man with a spear in his ribs.
On the night of Jerry’s killing Kit would have shot Bent down at sight. But that hour of madness had passed. He wanted his man alive. Later he might exact the full measure for his brother’s death, but first he wanted the truth about that bloody day years ago. Bent probably was the only one left who could tell the story. If Kit got his hands on the man he would have it out of him. He’d wring him out like a sponge.
“You’ve done well,” he told Oogly. “No more murders.”
The Esquimau swelled visibly. He had been a good boy.
“Did he see you?” asked Kit.
Oogly shook his head and pointed upstream. Bent had hurried on his way without knowing how closely death had brushed him by.
The old cabin stood on the creek bank up that direction. The white man and the Esquimau went forward, hugging the line of alders. Not far ahead they struck a place along the embankment where the new snow had been disturbed. Man tracks ascending from the creek bottom. Waffle-webs had climbed out.
The trail turned through the creek brakes directly towards the clearing. They followed as carefully as cats in a burr patch. Across the clearing, among the stumps, straight to the cabin—the waffle-meshes had left their ominous marks before the closed door. The frozen moon gave just enough light to see by. Kit’s breathing had grown painfully sharp. It looked as though he had his man if he were able to take him.
It was dark inside, quiet. Kit spoke to Oogly. “Knock. Tell ’em you want to see Mayauk.” His voice was just audible.
The obedient Oogly thumped with his fur-mittened fist.
At first nobody answered, and then a voice in high-pitched alarm. “Who’s there?”
“Nobody, just Oogly. Coming see Mayauk please.”
“You, Oogly?” It was Diane Durand. She sounded somehow relieved. “It’s a funny time to want to see Mayauk. Wait a minute.” A soft footstep came to the entrance and the door was unwarily opened. “Come in if you must.”
Kit had flatted himself against the log wall. For that moment he was unseen. Diane showed herself for an instant in the moonlight, her slimness hidden under the dragging folds of a huge, crimson Hudson’s Bay blanket. “Come in, Oogly.”
Her voice sounded very sleepy. Kit saw her face in the softening moonlight, the eloquent dark eyes, the shadow of the drooping eyelashes. Queer that her beauty should affect him in those seconds with a pang of sadness. The seigniors of France who won this country had such women for their wives—the Durantayes, the Demonvilles, the Frontenacs—lovely, dauntless, gently bred women who went where their men went. What it must have meant to come home out of the night and the storm to find love and loyalty and sweetness waiting in the doorway! Diane might have been fit to be a pioneer’s wife. It was a pity. She might have been so fine.
The girl drew her crimson robe closer at her throat. It was Grandfather Tearl’s old four pointer. She was sensible not to have scruples. To-night was bitterly cold, and she had no other blanket. Yet Kit could not help wondering if it had been laundered since the other night. He thought of Jerry and Bill Tearl and Hell Bent and his heart was hardened.
Diane admitted Oogly, and then she disappeared after him, neglecting to bar the door. Kit pushed the door softly and slipped into the room. He heard voices talking by the still-smoldering fireplace—Diane and Oogly, and then Mayauk’s drowsy greeting. Somebody threw a pine log on the fire, and almost at once the bright, resinous flame blazed up.
Nobody had seen Kit come in. He shoved the door shut with his foot and edged along the wall. The firelight danced around three figures, the Esquimau man and wife, and Diane. But he saw nobody else.
Kitchener’s quick glance went around the room. There were no angles or ingle nooks where any one could hide. Only the bunk, and he knew the baby was sleeping there. He blotted himself in the shadow as he stole along the wall, ready at any instant for anything to happen.
The bunk was barely visible in the darkness. Kit approached breathlessly. Hell Bent was contemptible enough to ambush himself in bed with a baby and fight from behind an infant body. Kit reached the bunk and groped back into the gloom. He found only a wee shape under the fur robe. Cautiously he felt into the upper section, and then along the floor underneath. Nobody was there.
He stood up, realizing that he had made another false move. Bent was not in the cabin. He must have eluded his tracker by the same trick he had employed at the Yellow Knife encampment, switching snowshoes and mixing up his trail with a confusion of other prints. He had come only as far as the outer doorway, where the Indians had trampled the snow, and now he probably had followed them off into the woods, carrying the waffle-mesh raquettes on his back.
Unluckily Kit had disturbed the baby and the little thing began to whimper in the darkness. Diane turned and saw the shape by the bunk. She advanced a pace and stared.
“You!” she exclaimed. “How’d you get here?”
“Came in with Oogly. Didn’t you see me?” From previous experience Kit knew how useless it would be to question her. Bent may have spoken to her, or he may have hurried on without her knowing. It didn’t matter.
“What do you want?” Diane demanded.
Kitchener coolly circled the room and came back to the door. “Oogly forgot his toothbrush,” he told her without a smile. “Found it, Oogly? Well, let’s get on.”
The Esquimau lingered only to bid a second good-by to the baby, and then he followed Kit out of the cabin.
There was no use trying to unravel Bent’s trail. He had taken off his identifying snowshoes, and the tracks he left now would be indistinguishable from the dozen other sets of tracks that turned away from the cabin. Kit had begun to suspect that the man had reached some sort of understanding with the local Yellow Knives. If not he would be clever enough to win them over. They naturally would have only the bitterest feelings towards the policeman who had refused to give up Oogly to them. This was their own country. They knew the secret paths and byways of the wilderness, and they would have eyes and ears everywhere. With a shrewd and unscrupulous white man to stir them up their capacity for devilment had no limit.
Kit and Oogly went back to the Great Owl woods and re-built their night fire. Then they lugged their robes a hundred yards deeper into the timber, bedded-down under an uprooted hemlock, and slept fireless and shivering through the night.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MAN HUNTERS
That evening was to begin the harrowing days and weeks of peril and hardship through which Kitchener lived in an incredulous daze, like a sleeper in the throes of a bad dream.
Kit and Oogly slept “cold” every night, and they never slept in the same place twice. The Great Owl woods was their refuge from the Indians, but there was a chance at any moment of Hell Bent’s creeping up and sticking a spear or knife into their fur bags. Asleep or awake the menace lurked behind them. Like a pair of homeless rabbits they dug-in under windfalls and brush piles, wriggled into hollow logs, or spent the frigid night huddled against some shaggy tree-trunk, where unseemly eyes glared down and giant wings fluttered in the eerie stillness.
Daytimes they skulked and dodged through the woods and paid the price of life with a vigilance that never gave them a second’s surcease. They were hunters, and at the same time they were ceaselessly hunted. Kit’s every waking hour was given over to a single, undeviating purpose—to find Hell Bent and take him alive. But the man was gifted with an uncanny elusiveness.
The ex-convict seemed to take an infernal delight in tantalizing his enemy. Kit often crossed the trail of the waffle-meshed snowshoes. He would follow with extreme caution, casting back and forth in half-circles to avoid the dangers of a deliberately planted ambush. But he never once caught a glimpse of the trail-maker. The waffle-webs always ended blindly in some well-traveled pathway, where the wearer shifted to his spare snowshoes and mingled his footprints with those of other passers-by.
So far the ex-convict apparently had made no attempt to recover the hidden sledge-load of loot. Presumably he was afraid to make any definite move while a policeman was on patrol in the neighborhood. Unhampered, he was able to evade his Nemesis. It would be another matter to attempt the long trip southward, dragging a heavily laden sledge through the deep snow. Before he could safely go ahead with his original errand he would have to dispose of Kit as he had dealt with Jerry.
Kitchener seldom left the Great Owl woods in the daylight, and he never showed himself in the open. Yet he was shot at mysteriously on several occasions. He would hear a bullet tearing through the thicket that he had thought was screening him, and an instant later the dry report of a rifle echoed somewhere through the rift in the trees. He would duck and scramble for a deeper cover, and later would maneuver around from the rear to find a departing trail at a place where a man had stood and a gun had rested for a moment in the snowy crotch of a sapling.
These wanton snipings he was inclined to lay at the door of Oogly’s enemies. He had seen their tracks criss-crossing the forest along the outskirts of the owl pits, and knew that some of them were always prowling in the neighborhood, waiting with a deadly patience for the Esquimau to come out. And their hostility towards Oogly naturally included Kit.
The Yellow Knives were good stalkers, but notoriously bad shots. The snipers so far had missed their mark, and that was one reason why he had blamed the Indians for these furtive attacks. He had a feeling that if Hell Bent ever glimpsed him over rifle sights it would be the end.
At least once every day Kitchener made it a duty to creep to the edge of the clearing and assure himself that the cabin door was shut and that smoke was still curling out of the chimney. Diane and Mayauk had not been molested.
So Kitchener was justified in his first belief that the occupants of the cabin would be ignored. The Yellow Knives would know that two armed and resolute women at loop holes might wreak havoc among an attacking party. They would know further that Mayauk would never let herself be taken alive. To kill her would be worse than futile. Mayauk and the baby were the anchors that held Oogly in this section of the wilderness. Let them die, and he would pack up his scanty belongings and vanish northward over night into the trackless barrens, where the Yellow-Knife vengeance could never find him. It was to the interest of Oogly’s enemies to allow his wife and baby to dwell unharmed in the cabin on Great Owl Run.
The January moon waned and black nights of storm and sleet and frightful cold set in, and the wilderness lay in death under the white scourge of winter. By craft and by stealth Oogly and Kit contrived somehow to eat and to sleep and to evade their enemies. And Kit hunted his man, and failed, so far, to get him.
The sun all but disappeared over the southern bulge of the world, and then gradually began to come north again, a hazy, pallid ball, lacking warmth and the power of giving life. Sometimes Kitchener encountered the two local trappers in the woods. He would gossip with them briefly, and then go his way, liking neither the sneaky-eyed Giffard nor the sullen, black-bearded Bruyas.
On one occasion Constable Devon made a patrol downstream to find out if all was well with the sergeant. Kit did not want police interference in an affair that was decidedly his own. He told Devon that he was still investigating the Yellow-Knife murder, assured the constable that he was in no need of help, and sent him back about his business.
Kitchener had not talked with Diane Durand in weeks, but one night, after the return of a full moon, he met the girl while roving the banks of the creek.
He was working his way downstream, hidden by the shadows of the willows, when there appeared above a snowy knoll a slender graceful figure in a hooded mackinaw and calf-length breeches.
The girl of necessity had become a huntswoman. A brace of partridges and two or three rabbits hung at her belt, and she carried a shotgun in the crook of her arm.
Kit held his position in the thicket, waiting for her to come opposite him. The moon-rays touched the curves of her cheeks and lips and her small, firm chin, giving her face an expression of childlike wistfulness. She looked thin and tired and most unhappy.
As Kit observed her calm and pensive features it struck him that nobody but a monstrous cynic could ever believe that she was actively involved in her uncle’s murderous schemes. Bent might have told her anything about the gold-sledge, but Kit would not let himself think that she knew the whole truth. If she were as bad as that, then nothing in the world ever could be right, and he would be glad to pass out of it. If, like her uncle, she looked on Kit as an obstacle that had to be put out of the way, here was her opportunity. She had her shotgun. He stepped suddenly before her with his hands in his pockets.
The girl halted as the tall, gaunt shape loomed in her path. She peered fearfully for a moment, and then her tense shoulders relaxed and she drew a long breath.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s you. Hello.”
She moved a pace nearer and her glance swept to his face. He had shaved that morning with ice water, but nevertheless he felt that he was not a very presentable object. His clothing had grown a bit seedy and he knew that his face must have taken on a few haggard and care-worn lines since he saw her last.
Diane seemed kindlier than he remembered her and just for a moment he thought he caught a trace of pity in her lovely eyes. “How are you and Oogly?” she asked.
“All right. We’re getting along.” He did not think it worth while telling her that they had spent every hour and minute of the last few weeks in the shadow of imminent death.
“Mayauk and Uttaktuak are well,” she informed him. “Particularly the baby. It does you good to see what a little husky he’s getting to be.”
“How’s Diane?” asked Kit.
The girl lifted one shoulder in a curt and reckless movement. “Well enough,” she said.
She pulled off her mittens and put her cupped hands to her mouth. Then she wriggled her fingers and beat them together, trying to restore the circulation. They were strongly shaped, competent little hands, chapped and rather grimy, more like a boy’s hands than a girl’s.
Without thought or actual intention Kit took one of them into his, and doubled her fingers under his warm palm. “I guess you’re not used to this sort of business,” he remarked.
“No.” For a moment or two she allowed her fist to lie quiet, as though she gathered comfort from the touch. “You can get used to anything, though,” she added sturdily.
Then she raised her eyes level with his. “Have you seen my uncle?” she asked with a directness that startled him. She released her hand and put it back in its mitten.
“No,” he said.
She looked around the thicket that sparkled in the moonlight in white, lacy designs. Her straight eyebrows met in a troubled pucker. “If he’s anywhere in this part of the world he should have heard that I’m here. And then he should come and find me. I don’t know why he doesn’t come.”
Kitchener faced her with a smile that had grown a bit acrid these days. She didn’t fool him. He not only believed that she had seen and talked with her uncle, but he rather imagined that she would know about where to find him at this minute. What was she trying to put over, he wondered? Probably fishing to find out how much he knew. His face had grown stony. She wouldn’t learn anything from him.
“Maybe he’s gone back south,” he suggested.
“I don’t know what’s happened.” Diane shook her head. “It’s funny I haven’t heard anything from him. It’s darned funny!”
Kit sat down on the edge of a snow terrace and brooded grimly upon the icy world. “I thought you were going back yourself,” he said after a moment.
“It’s easier to come in,” she told him, “than it is to get out.”
“I offered to help you out,” he reminded her. “But it isn’t too late. I’ll order one of the constables to escort you down to the rail head.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’m in no hurry to leave.”
She moved to the snow-bank, hesitated for an instant, and then sat down beside him, crossing one booted ankle over her knee and clasping her leg between her hands. “This is a wonderful place!” she sighed.
“Wonderful for what?”
“For me.” She pushed off her hood, shook her ruddy hair in the moonlight, and gave him a full, close-up view of her darkly shimmering eyes. “Do you know, I’ve always had somebody to cook things for me and bring ’em in on a tray and clean up afterwards. I don’t believe I’ve ever washed a dish before in my life. And now—” Her mouth crooked ironically. “I shoot my own rabbits and clean ’em myself and scorch ’em without anybody else to blame, and eat ’em to the last scrap, and scour up the pans afterwards.”
“Is that supposed to be wonderful?”
“Isn’t it? I thought it taught you to be self-reliant and unselfish and a little humble. Everybody says so. If I ever get back, I thought I might be a better girl.” She turned to him appealingly. “Do you think maybe I might?”
Kit didn’t know whether she was laughing at herself or at him, or was really half in earnest. She was the most enigmatical woman he had ever met. There was no way of guessing the thoughts that kindled those deep eyes, with their singular trick of being serious and humorous at the same time.
“You’re a pretty good girl now, aren’t you?” he said, and stirred uneasily. He wished she wouldn’t sit so close and look at him so intimately. And then he began to despise himself for a fool, because he realized with a sudden shock that he wanted fearfully to feel her tangled hair under his fingers, to bring her face even closer and to find out the meaning of her disturbing eyes. In that moment he knew that if he ever lost his grip on himself, he was gone.
But he was watching himself to-night. He didn’t want any recollection of a foolish weakness and a softly moonlit evening to make life cruder by contrast and more unbearable. He stood up abruptly and looked away somberly into the thickets. Hell Bent might be creeping up even at this instant. “If shooting and cooking rabbits makes people good,” he said, “Oogly is a saint on earth.”
Diane half stretched her hand towards him, as though to invite him to come back, and then dropped it listlessly. “Well, I’m not,” she declared with a sudden harshness of voice. “If anybody wanted to know, I’m bad.”
Kit measured her quizzically. She sounded as though she were passionately ashamed of something, and yet she watched him with a queer glow of defiance.
“Not in any way you’d ever think,” she added morosely. “It’s not so much badness as—as just being idiotic.”
“We’re all of us a bit of that,” he said, and faced her wryly. “Just what form does yours take?”
“Think I’d tell you?” she flashed at him.
Kit started to open his mouth, and then shut it. Through the silvery night there ranged a queer, unearthly sound—something between a sigh and a croak and a hiss—a voice that was horrible because it lacked reality.
The girl started up to her feet and then sank down in the bank of snow. Kit saw her shiver, and he himself felt an electric chill running down his spine.
“It’s only one of the owls,” he told her, wondering why he never could get used to these ghostly disturbances in the upper air. This one in particular startled him every time he heard it. He had never seen the bird, but he knew it by its voice, which was hoarser and croakier than any of the others. Oogly told him once that this one was a spirit that had caught a cold on its way out of hell.
“I know it’s an owl,” said Diane. “And I know who he is. It’s Shedim. And I hate him worse than all the rest of them.”
Kit contemplated her face gravely. It was strange that she too knew this bird and had given him a name.
The voice crossed invisible above them, passed over the brook, and faded away somewhere in the north.
“They’re my bad thoughts,” said the girl at the end of long silence.
Kit peered down at her. She never had seemed more in earnest.
“Whenever I think something bad,” she pursued, “one of the owls comes. It always happens. As though they were something that had just been released out of my head.” She was not looking at Kit and he had a feeling that she had forgotten he could hear her.
“It’s the oddest thing,” she mused. “My bad thoughts are owls. And the night I thought the very worst thing I could think of, this one came for the first time. His name was Shedim. And I’ve heard him every night since, croaking in the sky.”
She raised her head and found Kit staring at her. “Honestly,” she said, “I almost half believe such truck.” She smiled somewhat grimly. “Maybe I’m going a little goofy from lonesomeness.”
“I’d kill him,” Kit advised.
“I can’t,” she said mournfully.
“You’ve got a shotgun. I’d wait up until daylight, and when Shedim comes back from the red hunting I’d let him have both barrels.”
“You can’t kill a bad thought with a shotgun,” Diane said.
“I can,” Kit told her soberly. “You lend me that gun and there won’t be any Shedim around here after to-morrow morning.”
She shook her head. “Suppose I don’t want him killed?”
“Why wouldn’t you? If I had a bad thought flying around in the air I’d knock him for a row of feathers.”
“No! The thing’s born and alive, and all the killing in the world won’t kill it. And what’s worse I wouldn’t want it killed—I couldn’t bear it—”
“Diane!” Kit sat down again and tried to see into her eyes. She was no longer the girl he had known—the competent, self-possessed Diane. She was beginning to sound hysterical.
“What’s this awfully bad thought about?” he demanded.
“Do you think I’d want you to know?”
“I do know!” he shot at her.
“You don’t. You couldn’t!”
“It’s about me,” said Kit.
Her lips parted and wild alarm showed itself in her eyes.
“I guess you can’t help hating me like that,” he said drearily.
“Hate you!” She turned to him and he heard her choking breath and felt the potency of her eyes, brought close and recklessly seeking his. “If I did—” She laughed crazily. “Oh, my God!”
Suddenly she was on her feet, standing over him. “What’s the use of our talking?” she said measuredly. “You and I have nothing to say to one another—ever.” Her high tone changed to something suspiciously like a sob. “If you ever meet me again, don’t stop me. Let me alone!”
She picked up the shotgun, pulled her hood down over her head, and before Kit had recovered from his astonishment she was gone.
He stumbled erect and stood with his left eyebrow perched at its highest attainable angle, gazing after her. He started forward as though to follow, and then he changed his mind and his feet anchored themselves in the snow. For an interval he waited, irresolute and dejected. He sighed and shook his head sadly. Then he turned decisively and strode back to camp.
During these recent moonlight nights Kit and his Esquimau companion had borrowed the habits of the owls that lived about them. They slept days and did their hunting under the cover of night. But this night Kit turned in early. He tossed and twisted in his sleeping bag and was unable to close his eyes until dawn. And then, just as he finally dropped off into a doze, Oogly came back from his night’s fishing.
The Esquimau brought four or five fish and a coiled line, which he dropped under Kit’s windbreak, while he yawned and sat down to pull off his frozen boots.
Kit opened one eye, started to shut it again, and then opened both. Fastened to the fishing line, a few inches above the hook, he noticed a battered slug of metal that glinted yellow in the early morning light. He suddenly sat up in his bag and snatched up the coil of line.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
Oogly looked around. “A sinking,” he explained.
Kit hefted the slug and turned it in his fingers. Oogly had split the hunk of metal with his knife and pinched it around his line for a sinker. It was soft, and heavier than lead, and there was no mistaking its glinting color. To weight his line the Esquimau had used a chunk of pure, raw gold.
“Where’d you find it?” exclaimed Kit. In one movement he was out of his bag and on his feet.
Oogly winked his slits of eyes. He saw no reason for excitement, and remained his placid self. “Fishing along fast bottom, hook ’em up. Plenty lots more.”
“Where?” cried Kit.
“You want to see ’um?”
“You’re darned tootin’. Come along and show me.”
Oogly was perfectly willing. He conducted his comrade through the thick timber to the bank of Great Owl Run. The two men made their way upstream through the thickets, and the Esquimau halted presently on the overhanging brink, not far from the cabin where the two women lived.
This was the place. In the snow lay a moss-covered pouch, from which spilled forth a double handful of blackish, corroded lumps like pebbles, but which, under Kit’s tremulous knife-blade, changed magically to the color of virgin gold.
Oogly pointed towards the stream, which, at this point, ran too swift to freeze. “I catch um fishing an’ hook um up,” he said.
Kitchener stared breathlessly at the boiling water. The Esquimau must have snagged the bag by accident, and after helping himself to one of the “sinkers,” which he needed for his line, he dumped the rest on the bank and unconcernedly went his way.
With shaking hands Kit crouched to lift the pouch. It was made of some sort of rawhide. But instead of rotting, some chemical action of the water had hardened and stiffened the bloated skin until it was like a sheet of stone.
For a space Kit squatted on his heels, dribbling nuggets through his fingers. All at once he stood up and looked down over the brook embankment. The racing water had cut its way under a shelf of the rock. The deep, black channel was farther out, but here it looked to be rather shallow. For just an instant he hesitated, and then began stripping off his clothing.
Oogly looked on wonderingly, but had nothing to say. Anything his friend did was correct in his eyes.
Kit stood in his underwoolens, and reached for the Esquimau’s hand. “Hang on and don’t let the current pull me out.”
He slipped over the curve of the shelf, held his breath, and then heroically dropped into the water.
The cold was like sharp blades cutting his flesh. But it was something that had to be borne, and he gritted his teeth with the desperate resolution of a martyr undergoing torture. The stream level did not quite reach his arm pits. By clinging to Oogly’s hand he moored himself against the gurgling current.
He trampled the bottom below the shelf, and found a heaped-up slimy mass, which he knew by the feel to be a pile of full, heavily-weighted bags. His toe groped along a mossy, waterlogged framework—the guard-rail, “gee” pole and upcurving runners of a long submerged dog-sledge.
CHAPTER XIX
LOST LOOT
In that tremendous moment Kit lost all sense of the cold that chilled and numbed him to the marrow of his bones. A tingling pulsebeat rang in his temples and throbbed in his fevered blood. He forgot that dawn was at hand. He forgot his lurking enemies. He took no account of his stiffening muscles and chattering teeth. He had found the lost treasure sledge. It had taken its final plunge over the embankment to be engulfed for the years in Great Owl Run. This was the place. A brave woman had died here, and men had fought and killed and vanished. Here the valiant Bill Tearl had taken leave of the remembering world.
Scarcely realizing what he was doing, Kit ducked under the water and came up with a bulging, slimy sack in his hand. He deposited his burden on the shelf, and went under again for another, and for another. There was no need to look into the swollen bullhide sacks to know what they contained. No metal excepting raw gold could have the heft of these bags.
He brought them up, one after another, until warning cramps forced him out of the water. For a few minutes he ran up and down the bank, beating himself with his arms, while Oogly trotted behind, slapping him with stinging and resounding slaps. As soon as his blood felt the resurgence of life Kit went back into the brook. Five times he climbed in and out of the water and at his fifth shivering emergence he lugged with him the last bag of gold.
That appalling job was done. He looked from the heap of sodden bags towards the sky which, as usual after an overly bright moon, had turned threateningly black. There was a promise of more snow to-night. If it snowed hard enough the evidences of this morning’s work would be buried before to-morrow.
Kit had decided what to do next. He would transport the treasure to another pool, and he alone would know the secret of the new hiding place. So to thwart Hell Bent. While Bent was trying to re-locate his loot, Kit would be given the leisure for his own grim hunting. And if in the end Bent should kill him, then at least he had struck back at the killer with a last sardonic jest.
He told Oogly as much as was needed to enlist that amiable savage’s assistance. A half mile farther upstream they found a spot under a sheer bank where black ripples ran deep under a sagging ice-bridge. They were able to carry only two of the plethoric bags apiece. These they lugged to the marked spot and dumped them overboard.
They made a dozen trips that morning, back and forth, burdened with bags of gold, which they jettisoned in the swift current of Great Owl Run. Luck favored them to-day. Their enemies presumably took it for granted that they were sleeping out the daylight, as usual, in some well-hidden nook of the Great Owl woods. There were no snipers dogging them this morning, no curious intruders crossing their trail. And before their task was finished it had begun to snow.
The dreary downfall began with a misty sleet, which changed presently to white-drifting flakes. Kit had grown sick of the snow as a man wearies of an unremitting disease. But now he looked with satisfaction at the fluff that had begun to fill his tracks. By this time to-morrow nobody could know that he and Oogly had been tramping up and down the creek bank.
He watched the dark ring of ripples as the last bag hit the water and sank out of sight. The Great Owl treasure had found a new resting place, where it might lie untouched for twelve or fifty or a thousand years. Who knew?
Although Kit was soaked to the skin under his outer clothing, he felt overheated after his heavy labor. Unless he dried out immediately he risked pneumonia or worse. He and his companion were starting back for the shelter of the Great Owl timber, when Oogly broke away through the alders. Kitchener followed, to find the Esquimau scowling above a fresh snowshoe trail that came down almost to the edge of the creek.
The two men peered into the thicket. The tracks were not half an hour old. Their maker obviously had been standing in concealment, looking down at the creek. With sinking heart Kit realized that some one had watched him while he toiled up and down the stream.
There was no sound save the whisper of snow in the frost-hard branches of the alders and willows. The intruder must have fled at his approach. He examined the tracks again. They were not the narrow, skiing prints of the Yellow Knives, nor Hell Bent’s waffle-webs. But he knew whose they were. A pair of rounded Chippewyan squaw raquettes, too light in build for a man’s weight. He had seen these same tracks too often to be mistaken. The trail maker was Diane Durand.
So the morning’s work was wasted: unless he gave the quietus to Diane. The watchful Oogly may have noticed the sudden dour molding of his face and jaw, that sinister Tearl look which meant that one of the tribe had solved a knotty problem to some one’s else disadvantage. He turned curtly.
“You go to the cabin,” he said, “and stay there to-day with Mayauk. If the white girl leaves or anybody comes to see her, you come to me at our camp, right away.”
Oogly’s squinty eyes held the same look that a malamute’s eyes hold for the man he trusts. Kit took his leave without any misgivings, confident that the Esquimau would never fail him.
He retraced his steps to the Great Owl woods, chanced a small fire to dry his underwear, and later turned into his bag and slept the day through. When he awakened in the early evening he found himself in a welter of snow-filled darkness.
All of Oogly’s worldly belongings, combined with his own, formed such a meager kit that he was able to bundle everything into one pack, which he toted through the woods and across the clearing to the cabin door.
Diane admitted him without protest when he knocked. “Hello!” said the girl, and there was nothing in her voice or manner to betray any guilty consciousness of her morning’s activities.
Kit looked at the ground before tramping into the doorway. The afternoon’s snowfall had covered the old trails, and there were no fresher tracks arriving or departing. He shut the door and thumped down his pack.
“Get ready to pull out,” he commanded. “All of us are traveling to the police outpost to-night.”
The calm announcement produced a silence, which Diane broke into at last with a brittle laugh. “Anybody may go who wishes,” she said. “Which leaves me out, because I don’t wish to.”
Kit did not raise his voice. “We want to start at once. Please hurry.”
He saw the girl’s silhouette grow taut in the reflecting firelight. “Are you by any chance,” she asked carefully—“in earnest?”
Kit didn’t think it necessary to answer. “Oogly,” he suggested, “will you call the dogs and hitch ’em in? Everything we’ve got we can carry on the one sledge.”
“Because if you are,” put in Diane, “you’ll have to get over it. I’m not going!”
Kitchener faced her unsmiling, maddeningly supercilious. “Mayauk will help you to pack. If not, I will. Only hurry. And this time we leave off the ‘please.’”
“Why, you—” She stopped and glared at him. The Diane of the moonlight was gone. This one was resentful and bitter and untouchable, yet he never felt an allure more poignant than the beauty of her sultry and stormy eyes.
He was utterly cold at this moment, because it would have been so easy to be otherwise. “Oh, very well,” he cut in. “If you force me—I arrest you.”
“What?” she shrieked.
“If you want the whole formula: I warn you. In the name of the king—”
“What for?” she cried. “By what right?”
“Vagrancy!” he said.
Diane’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. She was so outraged that for those seconds she was unable to speak or even breathe. “Why—why—you—what do you mean?” she finally managed to gasp.
“The word has only one meaning. A vagrant is a sort of a hobo without visible means of support.”
“You’re calling me—” It was too humiliating to say. She ripped open the throat of her shirt with a gesture so violent that one of the buttons flew across the room. From beneath the open collar she jerked a string and a chamois bag. The bag was torn wide and she pulled out a roll of yellow-backed currency so thick that her fist was barely able to close around it.
“And you say I have no means of support!” she taunted him furiously.
“What’s that?” he asked mildly.
“It’s money! I haven’t counted it: but I guess there’s a couple of thousand or more!”
“What’s it for?” inquired Kit.
“What’s what for? Money?” Her pretty mouth attempted to sneer. “Why, my dear sir. Money is to spend. To buy things with.”
“What things?”
“Anything! Anything you want!”
“Where?”
She blinked and looked at him a trifle uncertainly. “At the stores,” she finally said.
“What stores? I haven’t seen you buying anything. The flour you eat, the salt, sugar, bacon, beans—I gave you. You’re using my matches and my shotgun. You don’t even own the blankets you sleep in. Yet you say I have no right to arrest you for vagrancy. Well, you’re under arrest.”
The girl’s face changed from red to white, and then went red again. “I’ll pay you for anything of yours I ever had,” she informed him. “What’s the price?”
“I’m not in business,” he told her. “You’ll find the nearest store-keeper at Edmonton, or maybe McPherson. When you get down there you can buy anything you fancy. Here we don’t recognize money, because there’s nothing for it to buy. That’s why I’m transporting you to Edmonton. You won’t be a vagrant there.”
“You’re not—” Diane was almost crying with mortification and rage. “I won’t go!”
“Remember the first morning I met you?” inquired Kit. “You were trussed up with a pair of handcuffs, riding on a policeman’s sledge. I’ve got those same handcuffs, and I’ve got a sledge.”
“Oh you—you rotter!” she said with a vitriolic intensity.
“So was the other bird. And you had to travel with him. Ready?”
Diane stood stock-still, her great eyes searching his face with a helpless, hunted look. Her impassioned resolution seemed to waver. Two tears trickled from her lashes and glistened on her cheeks. “What can I do,” she moaned, “when a bully and a brute—so much bigger and stronger—and I’m just a girl—”
“Certainly you are,” said Kit.
He turned away to spare her his smile. He should have done this before, he was thinking. She had worried and hampered him more than he would have admitted. But now he soon would have her off his hands, out of his sight and, he hoped, out of his mind. She knew where he had sunk the gold. But that no longer mattered. It would be months before she could see her uncle again. Long before that time Kit should have settled up his score with Hell Bent.
With Diane sitting by in sullen hostility, the other three soon gathered up their belongings and loaded up the dog sledge. They closed the cabin and started eastward in a swirling storm, Oogly breaking trail, the baby riding in a nest behind the dogs, Mayauk handling the “gee” pole, and Kit and Diane trudging speechless in the rear.