Through the long, blustering night they held their steady pace, and shortly after the crack of dawn they arrived at the police outpost of Saut Sauvage.
Constables Devon and Cross were at home. The two officers tried valiantly to hide their astonishment and welcomed their unexpected visitors with a hospitality that was warmer than the bleak quarters in which they lived.
Kit explained affairs in a few words. “This is the girl I told you about. Looking for her uncle and hasn’t found him yet. And this wilderness is no place for a child.”
He was short and brusque in his speech—a commanding officer telling a subordinate what to do. “I want you, Constable Cross, to make a patrol south and take her with you. She says she doesn’t want to go, but that’s just too bad. Technical charge of vagrancy. You can let the inspector decide what to do about it.”
Cross looked furtively at the girl, and blushed. His simple face reflected the pride he felt in being chosen for a responsibility, the joyous anticipation of a visit to civilization, and also a painful, gawking shyness at the thought of the company he would have on his way out.
“It isn’t really right for a young girl to be roamin’ about alone in this country,” he stammered. “You’ll find it’s better, miss, to be away from here.”
Diane studied the constable coolly, and then, for just an instant, a gleam of malicious amusement tinged her eyes. Kit intercepted that glance, with its sly and tantalizing humor for mischief-making, and somehow he did not envy the doughty constable his journey out of the forests.
After their night’s trip the wayfarers were glad to accept the comforts of the police shack. The rear storeroom, with its cots for guests, was turned over to Diane and Mayauk. Kit and Oogly stayed awake only long enough for breakfast. Then they crawled into the constables’ bunks and throughout the snowy daylight slept the sleep of the righteously weary.
Subdued voices, the scuffle of feet, a poker rattling in the fire-box of the stove, the faint rasp of snow falling aslant on the log walls and tar-paper roof, the savor of meat cooking—Kit awakened amid lazy sounds and pleasant smells. The frosted window square opposite him loomed opaque against the outer blackness of the night.
Constable Cross was bending over the bake oven on the stove. Devon sat in low-voiced conversation with a man whom Kit had not seen before, a broad-backed man with a bullet head, hatrack ears and a round-necked hair-cut. Diane, Mayauk and Oogly were nowhere visible.
Kit hitched himself into his clothes while lying in the bunk, and then opened the skin curtains and slid out onto the floor.
In a far corner of the room, beyond the angle of the bunk, he discovered Diane. The girl was seated on a camp stool, a lock of auburn hair tipped over one straight eyebrow, her pert nose in the pages of a big book which she held balanced on one crossed knee. She evidently had spent the snowy afternoon ransacking the outpost’s supply of literature. Old books and lop-eared magazines and tattered newspapers littered the table and the floor about her chair. She appeared as aloof from the rest of the company as if she had retired to a private apartment with a “no admittance” sign on the door.
As Kit stretched himself and sauntered across the room the stranger turned to stare at him. The man’s face, which was close shaven and unwholesomely pale, had the battered, hard-used appearance of a third-rate prize-fighter’s mug. His eyes were as protuberant and held the same metallic coldness as a frog’s eyes.
“Oh, good-evening, sergeant,” said Devon, standing up. “This man came in on us out of the storm this afternoon. His name is—um—”
“Pettijohn,” supplied the stranger. “How-da-do, sergeant.”
“Where’re you from?” inquired Kit without much interest.
“The States.”
“Yeah? You must enjoy chilly weather to be coming up here now.”
“Oh, any time’s good enough for my business,” said the man. “I’m a missioner. Our people sent me to look after the welfare of the Indians.”
Kit surveyed the stranger ironically. He wondered what sort of welfare the Yellow Knives might acquire from this ornery-looking plug-ugly. Then he turned away indifferently. What the intruder did to the Yellow Knives, or what they did to him, didn’t really seem to matter.
The kettle was humming on the stove, and Kit poured out a basinful of the first hot water he had reveled in for weeks. He scrubbed his face and neck and hands, and then paused before a wall mirror with its chained comb. He was plastering back his wet, sleek-black hair, when he heard a chair scrape on the floor. Feet stumbled across the room. A voice cried out:
“I knew it. I knew it!”
The comb dropped to swing on its chain. Kit looked around. He saw Diane under the lamp. In her hands she clutched an open book—a volume bound brightly in scarlet and gold. There was not a vestige of color left in her face. She breathed fitfully and heavily. A ruddy light glinted in her wide spaced eyes.
Every man in the room gaped at her.
“Look at this!” she said to Constable Devon. “Your police year book. The Scarlet and Gold!”
“Yes,” said Devon, puzzling his eyebrows. “Yes, it is!”
Diane’s laugh was harsh and cramped, utterly different from her real laughter. “He says he is Sergeant Buck Tearl.” For a moment her glance fixed Kit rigidly, and then she softly laid the book on the table. She tapped the open page with her finger, and stepped back.
“Here,” she said, “is a photograph of Sergeant Buck Tearl.”
CHAPTER XX
SCARLET AND GOLD
In the moment of his betrayal Kit had the ghastly sensation of a man whose lungs had been suddenly pumped empty. His heart stopped, his brain went numb, the sense of living stopped for those few shocking seconds. He felt as though he had been stripped bare and pilloried in a public place. Faces surrounded him and eyes looked at him, and the silence grew almost too acute to be endured.
The page of the open book was glossy in the lamplight. He saw the half-tone photo in the upper corner, the strong-jawed, bold-eyed likeness of his brother Jerry. Sergeant Buck Tearl, stalwart in any such crisis as this. But Jerry was gone, out of it. Kitchener and his brother looked nothing alike. Anybody could see the photo and know with certainty that Kit was not the man whose name and the record of whose deeds was printed here in the blackest of ink. And he was alone now, with no Jerry to turn to, standing at bay in the sacred scarlet.
Devon and Cross were hanging over the table looking at the book. Then both raised their heads to look at Kit. All trace of expression was wiped from their faces. The ruthless police visage—their faces might have been chopped out of the same slab of marble.
“Well?” said Devon.
Kit said nothing. What could he say? They had him. Impersonating an officer! A black crime in the police books. These men were terribly jealous of their own. Looming, hard years—a long stretch—the least punishment he could expect. Well—
There was nothing to do but face it out. His back stiffened as though he were to meet an assault. One eyebrow cocked upward. He had known that this might happen. Only it was strange the way it had been brought about. He would have gotten away with the masquerade if Jerry’s funny old picture hadn’t bobbed up to ruin him—
“What about it?” demanded Devon.
As though a command had been given, the pair of constables circled the table, one from one side, one the other. A hard, round muzzle jammed itself into Kit’s ribs. Somebody ripped open the flap of his holster, and his gun was gone. Searching hands passed skillfully up and down his person. A chain clinked, something glinted in the lamplight, steel cuffs bent themselves around his wrists and snapped fast.
Sergeant Cross pulled up a chair. “Sit down!”
Kit sat. He hadn’t tried to resist. They would have had every excuse to kill him. His self-control had come back to him. He was thinking clearly and rapidly.
“Why’d you do it?” asked Devon.
“Warn you!” put in Cross.
Kit’s head turned instinctively, seeking Diane. But the girl had withdrawn into the background, keeping out of his sight. Oogly had climbed down from the upper bunk, fully clad, and was standing with Mayauk, looking on. From the dismayed expression of his face it might have seemed that the Esquimau’s whole world had fallen apart.
Oogly’s gaze reached Kit. For just an instant his narrow eyes held a gleam that might have been mistaken for intelligence, and then his dull and stolid look returned.
“Too much hot here,” he announced abruptly. “Me an’ Uttaktuak. Going for walking.” He took the baby from Mayauk’s arms and moved across the cabin. “Nobody cares?”
Nobody did, apparently. The constables didn’t look around. Oogly opened the door and went out into the snowy night.
“You don’t have to talk—if you don’t want to,” Cross said to his handcuffed prisoner.
Kit acknowledged that remark with a rasping smile, and held his tongue. He had decided what he had to do. There had been enough scandal in the Tearl family. The ugly talk about his father; Jerry leaving home under a cloud. And now Kit. He’d be the first Tearl jail-bird.
Well, nobody had to know it. He’d keep the name out of this. Spare little Jane that shame anyhow. Nobody could make him tell who he was. It wouldn’t do a particle of good to identify himself. Even if he proved to them he was the sergeant’s brother, what of it? His offense was not lessened. If he could make them believe that he had donned the uniform at Jerry’s suggestion, it wouldn’t help him. And Jerry’s memory would be blackened....
“Where is the sergeant?” Devon suddenly shot at him.
Kit saw no reason to withhold all of the facts. “He’s dead.”
“Huh?” The muscles around the corners of Devon’s mouth stiffened visibly. “Where? How?”
“In the old cabin down at Great Owl Run. Six or seven weeks ago. You lose track of time. He was killed and dumped out of the window into the creek.”
The constable’s lips formed a soundless exclamation. “Who the hell killed him?” he snarled.
“This girl’s uncle,” said Kit quietly.
A hurried step across the room, and Diane confronted them. “It’s a lie!” she said.
“Wait a minute now. Hold on!” Devon’s steely glance shifted from Diane to settle upon Kit. He sat significantly silent for a moment, his features limned austerely in the shadow of the lamp.
“Where’d you get the uniform?” he asked abruptly.
Kit’s lips set tighter. He was in danger of entangling himself if he said too much. As Cross had said, he didn’t have to make any admissions. He’d have to think out his story and be very sure that all the parts fitted together. There’d be plenty of time for that. He wasn’t on trial now.
“Where’d you first meet this man?” Cross asked Diane.
“Down around Port-o’-Prayer.”
“Was he alone?”
“No. There was another man with him.”
“Who?”
“He was—I didn’t know at the time. But since I’ve seen this picture I think—I’m sure—he was Sergeant Tearl.”
“Yes?” said Cross sharply.
“Yes!” echoed Devon, and swung around menacingly to Kit. “Killed him yourself, didn’t you? Killed him for his uniform!”
“No,” Kit replied, meeting Devon’s gaze, steel to steel.
“Do you know if he did?” the constable jerked over his shoulder at the girl.
“No. I—I don’t know.”
“Was he wearing the uniform when you first saw him?” Diane hesitated. Kit saw her blanched face beyond the table. “I—I can’t say. If he had the scarlet tunic then it didn’t show under his outer garments. I only noticed it—after we had reached the cabin!”
“Where the murder happened?”
The girl shuddered. “There—yes.”
Kit smiled a twisted, acid smile. The girl was doing her best to convict him of murder. She wanted him taken down country out of her uncle’s way. Innuendoes and half-truths, told with a show of reluctance—she had made a grave case against him. And he would let it go at that for the present. He wasn’t sure how much of his own side of the story he wanted to tell. Anyhow, it would be useless to say anything now in his own defense. Nobody’d believe him. He had been caught in a uniform that didn’t belong to him. Almost as heinous a matter as being a spy in wartime. They’d take him to the inspector’s headquarters no matter what he said—or tried to prove—they’d hang him if they could.
Devon and Cross were already formulating plans.
“I’ll take him down,” said Devon, whose seniority gave him a slight advantage. “Starting at daybreak. He’ll talk when the inspector puts on the clam-squeezers.”
“What the deuce do you suppose his lay was?” asked Cross indignantly, discussing the prisoner as though he were not present. “Bumping off a policeman, and then coming around in sergeant’s chevrons, giving orders to you and me?”
“You leave it to the inspector,” said Devon.
“When you take me down, you’d better take this girl too,” interrupted Kit. “Whatever I’ve done she’s as bad or worse than I. Ask her to explain why she’s hanging around the Great Owl woods. Make her tell you her uncle’s right name, and then find out what he wants here.”
“When we want any more orders from you,” said Devon, “we’ll post you for a commission.”
“While I’m gone,” Devon suggested to Cross, and turned his back on Kit, “you’d better see if you can find Buck Tearl’s body. If he went into the creek he’ll be there still, or down along the Vermilion River.”
“I’m going to look,” said Cross.
“This last storm is busting up the ice. You’ll find plenty of open water and big jams all the way down. You look well. We’ve gotta have the body—”
“Ask her about the sledge-load of gold,” interrupted Kit, and shot a malicious glance at Diane. “Ask her how it came to be where it is now. Get her to tell you all about it.”
Devon faced about, winking. “What do you mean—sledge-load of gold?” His curiosity rebounded to Diane. “What does he mean?”
“Why—I—” The girl hesitated and her glance wandered uneasily towards the stranger, Pettijohn. The man was sitting with his arms hugging the back of his chair, his jutting ears as avid as a pair of funnels.
“Oh, ye-ah!” drawled Devon. “Just wait a minute.” He spoke almost too politely to the visitor. “You said you were going on down to the Yellow-Knife camp to-night.”
“Well, yes, I thought I might—”
“All right!” agreed Devon pointedly.
Pettijohn stood up, disconcerted. He didn’t want to go. That was clear. But the invitation was too plain to be missed. “Well,” he decided, “I guess I might as well be going along.”
Devon picked up the man’s steaming mackinaw and held it for him. He gave him his snowshoes and rifle and helped him to buckle on his back pack. “Sorry you gotta be going,” said Devon. “Well, so-long anyhow. Come and see us again sometime.”
“Thanks awfully!” said Pettijohn wryly. “Thanks for the dinner and everything. Well, so-long, everybody.”
A moment later he had tramped out into the night.
Devon crossed to the front window and scratched into the frost rime with his thumbnail. He applied his eye to the gouged place and then bent his ear to listen. For a minute or two he waited thus to make sure there was no eavesdropping. Then he turned back to Diane.
“All right now. What’s all this about a sledge-load—”
He never finished. The heavy door banged open, admitting a gust of snow and a white-furred figure that looked more like a shaggy, stampeding musk-ox than a man. Then the door was closed, the wavering light steadied, and they saw it was Oogly.
Kit never before had seen the Esquimau aroused from his transcendental calm. Now he was fairly exploding with excitement, horror. “Uttaktuak!” he yelled.
Everybody turned, petrified, to stare. Mayauk’s eyes had grown into dark circles of alarm. A sharp incoherency of speech was wrung from Diane’s parting lips. Kit stumbled up from his stool. The two constables stood with sagging jaws.
“What?” exclaimed Devon.
“The baby!” gasped Diane. “Uttaktuak! Something’s happened—”
“Down between ice—falling in creek!” Oogly’s voice broke through above his labored breathing. “Can’t reach ’um—drowning—”
“Where?” demanded Cross.
“In creek—ice— Oh, my gosh awful!” wailed Oogly.
Mayauk screamed and darted for the door.
“Come on! Show me!” Devon put on one mitten, and didn’t wait to grab the other. He seized Oogly’s elbow and thrust the Esquimau ahead of him out of the doorway.
Constable Cross snatched blindly at the wall pegs, got a blanket and a cap, and then he was gone after the others, banging the door behind him.
In their dash to the rescue it might have seemed that they had forgotten their prisoner. But there really was nothing for them to worry about. A handcuffed man would never get far in the wintry forests.
Kit started to follow, and then ruefully clinked his manacled wrists, and sat down again. Diane was left alone with him.
The girl had checked her first impulse to rush out into the storm. As the running footsteps faded away in the blustering darkness she turned wildly to look around the cabin. The tea-kettle. She filled the vessel afresh at the water-butt and put it on the stove to boil. If the rescuers were lucky enough to come back with a frozen morsel of human flesh in their arms, there’d be no waiting for “first-aid” treatment. Somebody had to stay behind.
She poked up the fire and crowded three fresh logs into the fire-box. Blankets were brought from the bunk and draped over chairs by the stove. She found an old door brick and put it into the oven to heat. Then she went to the back window, scraped off the pane, and tried to see out of doors.
Kit had followed her movements about the room, watching with dreamy, half closed eyes. Then, fervently, after a long silence: “I do hope they get her!”
“Yes,” agreed Diane, her nose still pressing the glass.
There was another endless lapse after that: two beings in one room, listening for the same sounds, thinking kindred thoughts, acutely conscious of one another, separated nevertheless by a barrier as heartbreakingly wide as the polar ice-pack. The clock ticked quietly on its shelf, the kettle began to hum its homely refrain, the draft whipped and lashed up the red-hot chimney; outside they heard the snow slatting across the roof, the hurry of the wind, the crack and groan of the broken ice-floes in the creek, crawling, sliding—
Diane faced about suddenly. “What a frightful night!” she said.
Kit saw her eyes, pitiful somehow, haunted with a tragic lonesomeness. He knew she was not thinking of the weather.
“You and I have done frightful things to each other,” he said.
“You forced me,” she answered dully. “You forced me to do it.”
In the flash of his smile there was a melancholy sweetness, without resentment or reproach. “We ran afoul of things that had us licked before we started. It might have been so different.”
“I know. You think I don’t?” Tears gathered and glistened for an instant on her eyelashes, and then she winked hard and flung back her head. “I’m sorry—”
Her hand gripped towards Kit, to be arrested half-lifted, half-open. “What’s that?”
A tumult of heavy sound welled out of the night: a slow rumble gaining force and momentum; a splintering and grinding; the crack and crash of small field-pieces cutting loose in furious volleys; the ground, the cabin walls trembled against a sudden violence breaking out of the darkness.
Kit and Diane were standing at the rear window, without remembering how they got there. The black head and the ruddy head were touching as they tried to see through the same window-pane. Smothering darkness without. They caught the surge and rush of big water let loose.
“Saut Sauvage!” muttered Kit. “The rapids! The ice-dam has gone out.”
“My God!” she whispered.
The battering crunch of great ice cakes, hitting and breaking up. A man shouted somewhere shrilly. A sudden swelling and mingling of all sounds in one thundering outburst. Then, as abruptly, the roar ceased. A jar and a jolt now and then, slacking to quiet. Only the wash and splash of rapid water running free.
Kit did not hear the shack door open. An indraft of snowy air hit the back of his neck. He turned his face from the window. Oogly was standing in the doorway.
Diane whirled. “The baby? Where’s the baby?”
Oogly ignored her. He came into the room and forgot to shut the door. His slyly puckered eyes brought their message for Kit alone. This, he seemed to think, was no time to bother with children or women.
“Finean’dandy!” he announced. “You an’ me go up along barren land. Sea no frozing later. Big whaling ship come along inside pack-ice. You go away on whaling ship—nobody arresting you anytime then.”
Oogly was trying to be nonchalant, but obviously he was pleased with himself. It was beginning to dawn upon Kit that the Esquimau in some mysterious manner had had a hand in the breaking-up of the creek floes. He had lured Devon and Cross out of the shack with a wild yarn about the baby. Kit studied the man’s unemotional countenance in suddenly growing alarm.
“Oogly! Where are the constables?”
For the first time the Esquimau allowed his self-appreciation to appear in a widening grin.
“Constables riding on middle water. Noum coming along back a long while now.”
CHAPTER XXI
HEADING NORTH
Kitchener felt a sickness and emptiness under his ribs. His comrade, one time a murderer, again had taken direful measures. He peered in consternation at the swarthy, round face that looked forth so genially from its ice-encrusted hood.
“Cross—Devon!” he accused furiously. “Drowned—you’ve killed them!”
A hurt, almost tearful look clouded Oogly’s soft, seal-brown eyes. “Noum!” he protested vehemently. “Sitting on ground along water middle. Can’ get off now.”
“What? They’re out there, and still alive?”
“You betchum!”
By stumbling speech and vivid gesture the Esquimau tried to explain just what had happened. In the center of the stream stood a long, narrow island, a pointed ridge of rock, like a backbone, humped up above the surface of the rapids. Ice cakes, broken from the tunnels upstream had piled up on the nose of this island, forming a big jam that reached from bank to bank.
The observant Oogly had noticed this place when they arrived at the police shack that morning. When he saw the handcuffs snapped on his friend’s wrists his fertile mind had immediately devised a plan to outwit the police.
He used poor little Uttaktuak for a bait. The constables responded humanely to his cry for help, followed at his heels across the ice to the island. While they were poking in the crevices, listening for wailing sounds of human distress, Oogly had crept under the head of the hanging floe.
As an experienced timber-driver is able by a sort of sixth sense to stick his peavy into the key-log of a log-jam, so the expert ice-man knew which block of ice it was that held back the crowding, straining mass behind it. Oogly simply and unerringly had found the critical wedge upon which the backed-up tons of ice were precariously suspended. He had chopped and pried for a minute with his spear head, and had jumped clear as the floe suddenly toppled and split apart, to go thundering and foaming downstream on both sides of the island.
So much he told in casual words, helped out by his lucid pantomime. That part of the story meant nothing to Oogly. He had made his way to the bank, leaping from one submerging ice-chunk to the next. The policemen had not been quick enough or sure-footed enough to escape as their shoreward bridge fell to pieces about them. Oogly gurgled with amusement at the huge joke he had played.
“Constables have a seat on middle rock,” he said.
Kit only wanted to be certain that this was true. He did not wish to have any drowned policemen on his conscience. Without waiting to hear more he ran out of the door and picked his way down to the embankment of the rapids.
In the welter of the falling snow he made out a smudgy shape that was just a little blacker than the darkness itself. It was the island—the tongue of rock, jutting high and dry in midstream. He heard the big cakes of ice washing by at his feet.
He raised his head and hailed the middle of the stream. “Hello! Devon? Cross?”
Yes, there was somebody. Voices—one of them shouted with rage. “Who the hell did that?”
Kitchener laughed and turned away. It was all right. The constables were unharmed, marooned in the middle of the creek. In his haste to the rescue Cross had grabbed a blanket instead of a rope. They could huddle up for warmth and there was no danger of their being swept away. In a day or so a new ice-bridge was sure to form, and then they could walk back to shore again.
Meanwhile Kit had no intention of waiting for the next freeze-up. While he didn’t precisely approve of Oogly’s methods, he at least saw no reason to be stupidly quixotic over fortune’s sending. The alternative was unthinkable. It meant a long prison term, or worse, if they took him south. The cards would all be stacked against him.
Oogly’s plan was to dash across the barrens for the Arctic Sea. The idea was inspired. The trails would be swept away by the time the constables got off their island. It was a ten to one shot that they would cast southward after their quarry. And Kit would be heading due north.
Queen Maud Sea! The chance to carry out Jerry’s unfulfilled mission. He could seek for the white man who wore a police badge under his artikis. That business could be settled, that ghost laid one way or another. Then, as Oogly suggested, the whale ship—around the point of Alaska, Frisco—New York! Nobody in this country knew who he was or where he came from. He’d be safe in New York.
Someday he could send a trusted agent to recover the sunken gold bags. He wouldn’t touch the stuff himself. But a pension fund for the R.C.M.P.—that was the idea. A memorial to Jerry. The Tearl memorial fund, sent by an anonymous donor. His heart was thumping, a thrill of excitement was in his blood, imagination ran riot. He was pulling up stakes, taking a new deal all round. He’d be on the march soon, heading north.
At the shack doorway Kitchener bumped into Oogly and his wife. Mayauk was scolding about something. As Kit came up the Esquimau turned aside to a deep snow embankment, plunged into the drift to his shoulders. Then he came up with a squirming, fur-clad bundle in his arms. It was Uttaktuak, making cheerful sounds and kicking her feet. Oogly must have dropped her there before he went out to the floe. Mayauk snatched the baby from her husband’s hands, and peace was restored.
Oogly followed Kitchener into the cabin.
“Finean’dandy!” grinned Kit, and shoved up his manacled wrists. “Can you get these things off?”
The Esquimau found an ax and indicated that his companion was to lay his hands on the doorsill. Kit complied dubiously. Unfortunately the key was on the island with the constables. To use a file was apt to prove an endless job. Kit held his right wristlet against the hammering block. Then he set his teeth and gave the word.
Oogly swung with his full strength. The butt of the ax crashed down squarely upon the arch of steel, cracking the brittle, highly-tempered metal as though it were glass. The band fell apart and Kit’s wrist was free.
He winced and looked at his hand, and then grinned up weakly at Oogly. The astonishing Esquimau had struck off the shackle without crushing the bone underneath, or even bruising the skin. More confidently this time Kit offered his other wrist, and a second blow rid him of his humiliating bonds.
He kicked the broken links aside. Diane Durand stood under the lamp, looking on uneasily.
Kit’s jawline reasserted itself as their eyes encountered. He didn’t propose to leave her behind to carry the tale of the sunken gold to her uncle. If he were unable to settle the long accounting with Hell Bent, at least he’d make sure that the man was done out of the loot.
“We’re going out by way of the Arctic Sea,” he informed the girl. “You too.”
He had expected fierce resistance. But Diane was too clever a girl to squander her courage and strength in a futile struggle. She was shaken and dazed by the turn of events, and she knew she was beaten. “After all that has happened,” she said wearily, “it doesn’t matter much where I go, or with whom, or what happens next.”
Kit and Oogly hurried their preparations for departure. The constables had Kit’s service revolver, but his rifle and Diane’s shotgun were on the sledge, and the Esquimau had kept his musket and hunting spear. They took a couple of blankets from the police store and helped themselves to such provisions as were needed to replace their own diminished supplies.
As they must travel fast, they cut their equipment down to the last possible ounce. And it was decided that Mayauk and Uttaktuak should remain behind under the protection of the police. Oogly promised to send for them when the tribes drifted south again with the coming of summer.
The three strangely-met voyageurs set forth in the night and the storm, beginning a journey that appalled the imagination. They would bridge the creek at the first opportunity, and then strike due north across the vast stretch of the wind-swept barrens. Some day, by fortune’s leave, they might reach one of the isolated whaling settlements on the ice-bound sea. For the present Kit preferred not to let his thoughts dwell upon the uncertainties of the coming weeks.
They drove their dogs down the shadowy line of the creek, Oogly running ahead, on the look-out for a favorable crossing place. The night was half gone before he finally shouted and turned the team leader. Instead of hummocks and crevices and crawling floes, he at last had come to a naturally formed bridge that was solid enough and level enough for crossing by sledge. He turned and haled the trotting dog-team on behind him. And then he stopped and crouched and peered forward under his hood.
Buzz-saw, the team leader, checked himself at the Esquimau’s heels. He threw up his head, tested the air once with his nose, and let out a warning growl. An ugly chorus, snarling and barking, answered the challenge from across the frozen stream; then, an instant later, men’s voices hailing the darkness in alien gutturals.
Without a word Kit swung the “gee” pole, while Oogly turned at a lumbering trot to break trail downstream. No need to stop for questions. The party across the way had to be Yellow Knives—a hunting band, no doubt, coming back from the barrens.
The Esquimau’s enemies, of course, had long since familiarized themselves with the peculiarities of his only pair of snowshoes; also Kit’s. They’d pick up the trail as soon as they crossed the creek and identify the tracks. Then they’d come on like wolves running a caribou herd.
Oogly’s eyes had learned to see in the great Midnights, and he led the way now, picking the best ground unerringly, cruising as fast as an ordinary woodsman cares to travel in the full sunlight. He would know that his one slender chance was to stretch out his trail so far ahead of the Indians that the friendly snowstorm would have time to bury it.
The huskies caught the infection of alarm. Danger for men means danger for dogs. They jumped after Oogly, half-galloping, with the lightly laden sledge singing over the downy new snow. And in the rear, whooping yells broke out in a significant babel to reëcho down the hidden valley of the creek.
The Yellow-Knife village was pitched on the south bank of the stream, about midway between Saut Sauvage and Great Owl Run. In the darkness the fugitives failed to make out the huddle of skin teepees and shanties until they suddenly found themselves in the midst of the sleeping encampment.
It was too late to detour. Two score of grave-like mounds in the snow exploded suddenly like bombs as buried huskies sprang to life and action. Bounding, yapping forms circled in from all directions, trying to get at Buzz-saw and his team-mates, raising a din that must arouse every comatose Indian for two miles around.
Kit closed up on the flanks of his team and beat off the charging beasts with a clubbed rifle barrel. For just a moment Oogly slackened pace. His snaky dog-whip licked out, right and left and behind him, popping like fire-crackers. The savage outcry changed suddenly to anguished yelping. Again the Esquimau plunged into his stride and went through the main street of the Yellow Knives, with Buzz-saw a jump behind him, and Kit and Diane racing for the “gee” pole.
In a moment they were out of the village, hugging the line of willows as they fled down the banks of the creek.
Bedlam had broken loose in their rear. Women shrieking, men yelling to one another and bedamning their frenzied dogs, rifles wantonly firing at nothing: the town had gone mad. It wouldn’t take the bucks long to find out who their passing visitors were, and then to hitch sledges and take the trail. Instead of a single hunting party, the fugitives in a few minutes would have half a village in pursuit.
Many weeks of snow-tramping had hardened both Kit and Diane for the physical ordeal they must face to-night. Oogly had trained with sledges on the wide Arctic tundras since the days of babyhood. In a long race he could outlast the best of the dogs. Any of the three probably was as trail-fit as the average starveling Yellow Knife. If the dogs only stood up for the night in the traces there was a chance of their wearing their way through.
Kit had kept a watchful eye on Diane, but apparently at this moment she had no desire to leave him. There was a blood-chilling savagery in the sounds behind them. For the present she had as much incentive to run as Oogly and Kit.
The events of the remaining night went by like the spinning of hazy dreams. Shadows fleeting along half-seen trails; snow and darkness and cold; the straining snap of harness thongs, the humming of sledge runners and the steady crunching of snowshoes, the pat, pat, pat of furry feet digging along: they gained the Great Owl cabin clearing, and Kit shouted to Oogly to turn.
Away to the left swung the dogs, with their forerunner a stride ahead, among the stumps and headlong into the blackness of the “haunted” forest. The sounds of pursuit had dwindled to silence. But out of hearing did not necessarily mean out of striking range. There were teams and men running the plainly marked trail. The fleeing dogs knew it, and Kit and Oogly and Diane never lost the occult feeling of being pushed hard by danger behind them.
The owls were away from home, out foraging over the frozen prairies far to the north. It was deathly quiet under the trees. Oogly was familiar with every inch of the ground here, and he cut through the owl woods, dodging low, avoiding the great trunks by some uncanny method of perception. They struck the creek again several miles farther down, near the point where Kit and Diane had first come into this country from the south. Here they found an ice-bridge crossing. They worked over to the north bank, groped their way through the stunted, wind-torn thickets on the opposite shore, and turned their faces at last towards the Arctic Sea.
There was hope now that their pursuers had been shaken off, or at least held up for a while in front of the Great Owl woods. No Yellow Knife would venture into that unhallowed pit of darkness, unless the lust of the chase had keyed him up to a fine, high point of frenzy. Then he might go anywhere, dare anything. In any event the savages might circle the forest and strike the trail where it crossed farther downstream. But this would mean a clear gain for the fugitives of an hour or two or three.
Unfortunately the wind had whipped around into the southwest some time in the night, and the promise of heavy snow had failed. It had grown colder and calmer, and the great, soft flakes had turned to a misty sleet. Oogly, the weather-wise, had announced that they might see blue sky in the morning.
There was nothing to do but to keep going, to make all the distance they could while the dogs stood up. It is astonishing how much reserve vitality the ordinary human being holds on tap if the emergency call is great enough. Earlier in the night—hours and hours ago, it seemed to them now—the three fugitives had known the torture of overtaxed hearts and lungs, an unquenchable thirst, the dry taste of blood. Then they had caught their “second wind.” A pleasant numbness seemed to drug their physical sensibilities. Legs and bodies moved automatically, without effort. Breathing became easier. Indeed it seemed almost unnecessary to breathe. It was as though they had been running and could keep on running always.
Daylight caught them far out on the frozen prairies. As a mariner loses his landfall in the night, so they had lost sight of the peopled world. A dead-level sea of snow and ice surrounded them. There was not a tree nor shrub, not a speck of color within range of straining eyes. The clouds had blown clear, and the early gray of the sky changed gradually to the flawlessness of hard, blued-steel. The sun came up, and the white monotony of the barrens became an aching, dazzling glare.
Diane was drooping again, staggering now and then as she tried to hold the killing pace. Oogly’s face looked as drawn and bloodless as smoked moosemeat. Kit was beginning to suspect that in time he might reach the end of his “second wind.” The breathing of the dogs sounded like the rattle of broken skid-chains. They stopped by mutual consent, because nobody could go much farther.
Behind them the horizon line was a scintillating glaze. Landmarks all had vanished. The Great Owl forest had been left so far in the rear that not even a smudge of color showed against the field of snow. There were no specks or dots anywhere to betray the existence of beasts or men.
At the left the Vermilion River pursued its endless course northward, held between treeless snow banks so low that the dykes of the waterway, even at a short distance, could not be distinguished from the rest of the flat, sweeping landscape.
The travelers camped on the river ice, because at least there was some slight protection behind the low embankments.
Kit unpacked their alcohol stove and started coffee boiling. “Ready for breakfast?” he asked Diane.
“No, thanks. Not hungry. Sleep. I want to go to sleep.”
He unstrapped a fur bag and spread it in the lee of an ice hummock. The girl stayed awake only long enough to pull off her boots. Then she crawled into the warm pocket, and ten seconds later was asleep, with the sun beaming into her face.
Kit and Oogly dined on chunks of cold pemmican, washed down with scalding swigs of coffee. Then the Esquimau stumbled off behind the parked sledge, rolled up in his robes and started snoring. The dogs had dropped in their tracks the instant after they were fed. Kit alone stayed awake.
He turned, squinting, to gaze back over the glistening reaches of the open tundra. No sign as yet of pursuit. But his own trail, the ruthless thread of fatality, linked him with the horizon. At any moment he might see little, evil shapes moving in the shimmer of the sun.
Sighing, he picked up a blanket and tucked his rifle beneath his arm. He seemed to have been elected unanimously to the post of responsibility. Oogly was dead to the world, with his head wrapped in a robe. Diane lay on her side, a glinting, silky wing of hair tumbled over her eye, her mouth relaxed in a faint, unwitting smile.
For just a moment Kit’s gaunt features were robbed of their guarded sternness. His glance hovered wistfully as he half leaned over her, and then, with an inexorable shrug, he turned on his heel and trudged back to the southward.
For two or three miles he walked the down trail. Then he picked a defensible spot behind the river bank, where he spread his blanket and stretched out on his stomach to watch over the line of northbound footprints.
If his enemies came out on the barrens the trail would lead them past the ambush point. He could take them on the flank, and by surprise. They wouldn’t get him for a long while. He was loaded down with cartridges, and he was covered on three sides. Oogly and Diane would hear the shots. They’d have time to run for it again. Kit was confident that he could hold the Yellow Knives long enough to give his companions a safe start. Better one than three.
All of that morning Kit lay on his blanket, keeping vigil.
The sun had come up in the southeast, and it was from that direction that his pursuers must come. He lay on his diaphragm and stared into the sun.
An endless morning. He had nothing to do but to gaze across the flat wastes and try to keep his eyelids open. It was a wearying, painful prospect, snow and ice stretching everywhere, shadowless, colorless, a vast mirror reflecting the sunlight.
A merciless sun. A silvery, frigid incandescence pouring balefully upon the world. The snow remained as hard as crystal, and flashed and sparkled like the dancing of flame.
An appalling silence. Even the wind is without noise when there is nothing to interfere with its blowing. The tick of Kit’s wrist watch, the thud of his pulse, were mighty sounds in ears attuned to an absolute vacancy. He could hear the friction of his toes when he wiggled them for warmth in his ribbed-wool socks.
A forlorn panorama. Sometimes he saw with an astonishing clarity, seemingly for miles and miles, but there was nothing to look at. The boundaries of earth and sky were so much alike that he could not tell surely where one left off and the other began.
The waves of cold on the snow-fields sometimes waver visibly like heat waves on the desert. In the flickering daylight he later began to see things. Men and dogs and sledges and shifting herds of musk-ox moved distantly before his widening gaze; then a black, bumping object, like a locomotive laboring over a rough road-bed. By that time he knew something was wrong. He studied his finger tip for a minute to bring his pupils back in focus, and when his glance ranged the far tundras again there was nothing whatever in sight.
If the Yellow Knives were coming he wished they’d come.
The queer mirages formed and faded for a while, and then a dullness stole over his vision. When he took off his mitten again to concentrate on his forefinger, the finger somehow looked bigger than it should and a trifle vague in outline. The heatless sun, strangely, felt as though it were beginning to burn his eyeballs. The muscles of his eyelids started to twitch, and he could not hold them still. And he began to notice a pin-prick of pain in the nerves behind the bridge of his nose.
For relief he allowed his eyes to close against the glaring sunlight. And he went to sleep, to awaken suddenly in a sweat of terror. He had dozed off. He had failed his companions, when he was supposed to be on watch. Nothing had happened. The silence was as intense as ever, and there were no shadows beneath the coldly blazing sun. That was nothing to his credit. He had slept.
He looked at his watch, and had no idea of the time of day. The watch dial and the hands and numerals fluttered in a kaleidoscope of changing colors. He gazed across the tundra and the colors swam off ahead of him into the horizon.
His eyes felt as though something had blown into them. Sticks or cinders. He rubbed them with the back of his hand, and then stopped because of the smarting. If the Yellow Knives were coming, please let them come while he still could see them.
In the meantime he could not endure the agony of the snowlight and the sunlight. He let his eyes close again—for just a second. His chin was propped on his forearm and his face stared insensibly across the white barrens. And the second lengthened into minutes and the minutes into hours.
What aroused him he did not know. The movement behind him was so stealthy that a man in his full waking senses might not have noticed, nor had reason to look around. But Kit sprang to his feet as suddenly as though an alarm clock had banged off by his head.
A towering, muffled shape stood over him. Twilight and cold—the sharp, calm, bitter cold of the arctic evening. His eyes were all wrong. It was as though he were trying to look through fuzz. There really was something, though—an erect figure on two feet—a face and a body and a rigid arm, and a pistol muzzle pointing at his head.
CHAPTER XXII
OOGLY
Dazed as he was, half-blind, half-awake, Kit recognized his fate. Intuition was better than eyesight. This was no Indian. It was Hell Bent. He knew that. Everything was as good as ended. There’d be a flash, and then the obliterating shock, nothing worse than that. His mouth twisted sardonically.
“What are you waiting for? Go ahead and be damned!”
Funny the man didn’t fire. All these weeks, gunning for Bent and Bent for him—
The man whirled with a snarling sound in his throat. Something had stumbled up from behind the river embankment. Kit was vaguely aware of a broad shape and heavy feet crunching the snow.
“Oogly!” he yelled. “Back! Get down!”
The stocky figure swayed on outspread legs, a heavy, two-handed spear poised above his head.
A streak of flame reached above the snow. The sound of that one shot, out of all the pistol shots Kit had ever heard, lingered in his head with a reëchoing of horror.
The spear-thrower lurched forward violently, and his spear was gone.
A second shot and a third, point-blank; the stench of gas and powder-burnt fur; a squat body on staggering legs, that still would not fall; writhing sinews and muscles in Kit’s clutch and a fist trying to pound his face: everything was dreadfully mixed in his brain, events and their sequence of happening.
He remembered the feel of the hot steel in his hand, but how he got the gun he did not remember. Afterwards he found torn flesh under his nails; but at that moment he only knew that the butt had settled down in his fist and he was looking everywhere and softly crying because he could not see well enough to shoot.
Gliding snowshoes moved off hurriedly in the dusk. Everybody in the wilderness would have heard by this time that Kit was deadly with a six-shooter; nobody could have learned as yet that anything was wrong with his eyesight. The intruder had fled. To follow would be hopeless.
Kit groped behind him and his arms circled a stumbling, furry hulk—Oogly.
“He got you, didn’t he?” said Kit, and lowered the sagging body to the snow.
The Esquimau said nothing. He was fumbling at the front of his shirt. The tufts of fur were matted together, warm and wet. But it was not that that bothered Oogly. He was pulling at the bit of tin on his chest—his medal—trying with failing fingers to unbuckle the wrist-watch strap.
“Murderem once more,” muttered Oogly.
Kit felt something come into his throat to choke him. Oogly believed he had killed another man. He had flung his spear, and did not realize that the first pistol shot had spoiled his aim and stolen the force from his stroke. By breaking a promise he had forfeited his medal.
“No, Oogly.” Kit slipped off his mitten and stilled the uneasy hands. He saw no reason to disillusionize the man. Let him think that his last spear-thrust had been magnificently delivered. “It’s a good murder this time. You saved my life. The medal’s still yours to keep. You’ve won it twice over. This time it’s something for pride. It’s yours now forever.”
“Keep um?” whispered the Esquimau.
“Nobody can ever take it away from you.”
“Thanks—thanks you—” Oogly tried to sit up, tried to laugh. But the sound died choking, and the broad body grew slack and heavy, and slipped down from Kit’s arms to lie in the snow.
Kit touched the man’s pulse and his temple, and then he stood over the quiet, baggy shape in the snow. “White men!” It was a short and savage ejaculation. “I knew a better, Oogly. The best man I ever knew was not a white man!”
His voice broke and a sudden wetness soothed the dry stinging of his eyes. Oogly had no other funeral oration.
Kit stooped and scooped handfuls of snow over the motionless body. He patted the surface down and shaped out a clean, smooth grave-mound. Oogly’s destiny always had marked him for nothing less and nothing greater than a mound in the clean, cold snow.
The sun was gone and it was growing darker. How good the darkness felt in Kit’s swollen eyes! He picked up the captured six-shooter. Yes—this was it—carved ivory butt, engraving on a silver name-plate. It was the gun he had seen Hell Bent wearing, Inspector Bill Tearl’s old service revolver. Kit shoved the weapon into his empty holster. Well, it was back in the family now. The last Tearl had three more shots on his hip.
He left Oogly and went back to camp—trudged wearily up the frozen river until he came to the place where a sledge was parked and dogs bounded forward to greet him.
“Diane?” he said.
There was no reply.
“Queer!” Then louder: “Hello—Diane?”
The dogs leaped up, pawing at him, and he trod on their back toes to keep them down. There was nobody in camp. The sleeping bag was empty. And the red Hudson’s Bay blanket seemed to be missing. Further search discovered a sheet of paper pinned to the topmost duffle-bag on the sledge.
Evidently it was a note from Diane. She was gone. Probably she had escaped as soon as darkness fell. Kit’s jaw hardened. He might have expected it. Diane would be on her way back to Great Owl Run, looking for her uncle. He shrugged unpleasantly. Well, what of it? He couldn’t stop her now. Let her go.
Kit struck a match and frowned at the sheet of paper. There was writing, but the lines wabbled and ran together when he tried to read them. He flipped out the match and gave up the effort. It didn’t matter what she wrote. What did he care? He crumpled up the paper and threw it away.
As soon as the dogs were fed, Kit went to bed. He was worn to utter exhaustion. His two or three hours sleep that afternoon meant nothing at all. If he expected to get on he could do with no less than eight or ten hours of solid, unbroken rest. Maybe his eyes would feel better by morning. If anybody came in the night it couldn’t be helped. He simply had to sleep.
But strangely he didn’t drop off in a delicious sense of forgetfulness. In fact, he couldn’t lie still. His bag didn’t fit him. One minute he felt too hot, and the next, too cold. Finally he went to the trouble of unlacing himself and crawling out of the flea-bag, a mean and undignified undertaking. He staggered around in his stocking feet, and finally found the wad of paper that he had thrown away. Then, with Diane’s note buttoned in his shirt pocket, he crept back into his fur pouch and went to sleep.
The pitiless morning sun appeared in a frosty-blue sky. For miles and miles around, the snow fields flashed and glinted and threw back the sun-rays with a blinding brilliancy. Far to the southward black figurines, no bigger than pencil strokes, moved in the undulations of light.
Kit had discovered the approaching specks the moment he awakened. He studied them briefly, and then made leisurely preparations for their reception.
In the first place he decided to stay where he was. His dogs were footsore, and, with the possible exception of Buzz-saw, none of them was fit for work. There’d be some fresh, first-rate teams in the gang that was coming across the tundra. They’d run him down in no time. And he might not find such a favorable place to dig-in farther along.
The river bank here bent at a sharp angle and rose up from the ice sheer as a breastwork. He hauled the sledge to the brink and banked up a shelf of snow on which he could stand shoulder-high and peer over the packed duffle. The niche in the river bank protected him in front and on two sides. They could circle and get him from behind. But the river was wide here and it was a long-range shot from the prairie on the other side. They’d have to burn up a lot of cartridges, perhaps.
He arranged his own shells in a neat row along the runner of the sledge—ninety-two for the Winchester and fourteen for the shotgun, which, for some reason, Diane had neglected to take with her. These were more than enough. If he lived to use half of them he wouldn’t complain.
A quart pot of strong coffee and the most extravagant breakfast his larder afforded: he fried his bacon just so and carefully browned his corn-cakes and used half the can of egg-powder and his last tin of ham to crisp a beautiful omelette. Into his coffee he dumped the entire jar of preserved cream that he had been saving for some purpose or another, he hadn’t quite known what until now. It was the best meal he had eaten in two months.
His eyes didn’t hurt much this morning. They looked inflamed in his pocket mirror and the lids were a bit puffy, but he could see what was going on. He threw a blanket over his head to shut out the light as long as he could.
But he could not long ignore the approaching figures. They were coming in a sweeping line, running up yesterday’s trail—Kit’s trail and Diane’s and Oogly’s. He didn’t bother to count. There were six dog teams and twenty or thirty men. All Yellow Knives, excepting, perhaps, the tall one who strode in the rear.
This last one was unrecognizable at such a distance. But he stood a full head above the others and he did not walk like an Indian. A white man—who else but Hell Bent? In all probability the savages had been of two minds about venturing out on the bleak barrens, until Bent returned last night and stirred them up again. Now he was showing his good generalship by letting the Indians rush into range ahead of him.
The foremost of the party caught sight of the sledge on the embankment. Kit heard the yells as the advance dozen fired a spattering volley and charged. Two or three bullets dusted the embankment, but the rest plopped short.
He slammed his rifle bolt. A .30-’06 soft nose. No caliber of bullet ever brought more woe into the world. Four-hundred and fifty yards, thereabouts. Allow for refraction. Allow for wind-drift. Two and a half from three, plus one—
This long range rifle practice was too much like surveying or dressmaking for his taste. Give him a six-inch pistol barrel and an offhand mark.
He felt the savage buck of the gunstock. One of the distant figures went down on its hands and knees, and tried to crawl, and couldn’t.
Somehow he didn’t hate these men because they were trying to kill him, but because they were forcing him to deal with such beastly arithmetic. He gritted his teeth with annoyance. Fortunately the others had stopped. No more for the present.
The devilish sun was mirrored into his face by the shining miles of snow. It was as though a billion white-burning lenses were turned full into his eyes. He tried to see across the blazing levels with his eyewinkers almost shut.
The advance squad had scattered and scrambled back for the sledges, leaving the fallen one, a blot upon the snow. Kit could see them talking, using their hands vehemently. The tall man came forward and seemed to have much to say.
For a half hour or more they held their council-of-war. Kit watched them as a basking seal watches at the edge of his diving hole, opening his eyes for five seconds and closing them for thirty. But the sun-rays seemed to bore through his naked eyelids.
The Indians at last decided what was to be done. The six sledges separated and were driven out in skirmish order, right and left from the center and fronting the river course. The dogs were unhitched and chased off into the background. Then a couple of Yellow Knives dropped prone behind each of the loaded sledges.
A nerve in Kit’s left eyeball had begun to jump and quiver, and he couldn’t control it. Yet he still was able to make out what was happening. A party of a half dozen braves detached themselves from the line and started off in a wide circle across the sun. These obviously intended to strike the river farther south and to swing back along the opposite shore to attack Kit’s ambuscade from the rear. It would take this bunch an hour or so to work into position, and for the present he dismissed them from his worries.
The real menace now was the sledges in front. He stared at them for a moment, and was under the impression that they were moving towards him. He blinked and passed his hand before his face, and looked again. Surely! Each sledge was gliding forward, propelled by the unseen men who wriggled flat in the snow behind it.
Kit now understood his enemies’ strategy, but it had been a costly business finding out. The Yellow Knives could approach with their backs to the sun that streamed like molten silver into Kit’s squinting, tortured face. The snow field was beginning to dance before him in garish colors. He dared not even think the word, but he knew what was happening to him. Trying to make out things in a quicksilver flood, with his eyes boggling in his head—
Rifle firing! Sullen thuds of sound at his left and in front of him—he listened for bullets in the air. Some of them plunged into the snow, not very close. One went above him, turning end over end, buzzing like a June-bug. Rotten rifling that wouldn’t spin a bullet properly. Something hit the sledge resoundingly a dozen inches from his nose, and one of the deck supports was sheared in two, neatly as the slicing stroke of a sharp ax.
They weren’t all using trade guns. Somebody else was doing a problem in long-distance arithmetic.
Kit tried to locate the sharp-shooter. That crisp, whip-like report meant high-power and meticulous rifling. Puffs of black powder smoke drifted above the sledges—all but one. That one stood farthest back and in the center of the line. By an exertion of will Kit forced his eyes to stay wide open long enough to concentrate his pupils on the midmost sledge. No smoke there. Anyhow, maybe not. His vision had cleared for a few seconds, and now the red and gold clouds were beginning to roll back in front of him. The middle sledge had seemed to be farther away than the others. Probably Hell Bent was sprawled behind that one. He’d be the one to have smokeless powder cartridges.
A bullet tore through the six fat duffle-bags lashed in a row on Kit’s sledge. He picked up the distant object again—a vague smudge in a spectrum of fiery colors that wouldn’t stay still. No trajectory tables or micrometer calculations were possible; just shove the butt to the shoulder, and guess, and pull the trigger. He couldn’t even see the sights.
What was the use? Damn his eyes! And the sun and the frightful, glaring snow! A trickle of syrup was running out of a punctured can over his bare right hand. He wiped his hand in disgust on the back of his shirt. His four dogs were crouching at his feet, and he absently scratched a rough, uplifted head.
“That you, Buzz-saw?” He laughed crazily. “What you sticking around here for? Why’nt you beat it?”
The firing seemed to be getting in closer. Banging explosions not only in front and to the left, but off on the right now. The bullets were dropping around him. They sounded like skate-blades cutting into crusty ice. Buzz-saw’s hot tongue was licking the rest of the sticky mess off his fingers.
He started to fire at the echo of the guns, and then changed his mind. If he missed a few times running they’d guess what was wrong with him, and jump up and come on headlong. Let ’em crawl up, thinking he was deliberately holding his fire. It would take them longer to get here, anyhow.
Not that it mattered when they came.
There was a spot in back of his nose that seemed to be the core of his troubles, a swirling and flashing, as nerve-racking as fireworks in his head. The eyesight—what a sensitive, perishable gift! Maltreat it for a few minutes, and it is gone. He couldn’t see a thing. There were nothing but shrinking nerves and agonizing colors swimming around in the places where his eyes ought to be. He was blind. He was snow-blind.
The rifle was of no more use to him than a dictionary. He chucked it away and groped for the shotgun. This was the tool for a blind man. Fourteen shells. Some held bird-shot and some buck-shot. It said which was which on the wads, if he could read them. No difference. He’d try to get them all in at the last minutes when everybody was jammed around him so close he couldn’t miss.
He tried the safety and broke the breech and snapped it shut again. A slug hit the ground by his face and spattered with the noise of an ice-pick chipping ice. Another knocked a welt of fur off his hood and ricocheted across the frozen river in two clanging jumps. He must have stuck his head up too far without knowing it. Blind and blundering!
Buzz-saw let out a terrific growl. Kit dropped his hand to feel the dog crouching with every muscle tense and his back ridge abristle. The keen, snarling muzzle was pointing north, down the river-course.
“What? What it is, boy?”
Kit suddenly flung up his gun and turned in sightless staring. Something—crunching, gliding in the hard snow below the river bank—coming towards him. He thumbed off the catch, finger crooked, sighting for the sound.
“Hello!” said a voice. “Hold it! What do you think you’re doing?”
The blood seemed to drain out of Kit’s brain. A swaying weakness overmastered him. The gun barrels wavered and sagged in his hands—too heavy to hold. He couldn’t move, or think, or speak.
Somebody strode up to him, and a big, strong, rough-sleeved arm suddenly wrapped itself about his head and squeezed his ears.
“Hello, Kit,” said the astounding voice. “Hello, Cocky-bird!”