CHAPTER XXIII
BROTHERS-IN-ARMS
Kitchener lost his shotgun as a wave of giddiness swept over him. His hands went up, incredulous, feebly groping, to cling to a pair of big, fleshly shoulders, to feel the warmth and vitality of solid human strength holding him on his feet.
“Jerry,” he said. “Jerry! My God! Jerry!”
“Who the hell did you think it was?” asked the bright, mocking voice that Kit would have known anywhere, anytime, in any world or state of existence. Jerry Tearl!
“I thought— They killed you. I thought you were killed—Jerry!”
“Who killed me? Have you gone nuts or something? What’s the shootin’— Hey—you damn fool—keep your head down!”
“Back in that cabin. The bloody old red blanket! And all over the floor and window sill. I thought they got you.”
“What cabin? What are you talking about?”
“Back at Great Owl Run. Grandfather Tearl’s old Hudson’s Bay blanket with a bullet hole in it. I thought you’d been murdered—”
“Who, me?” Jerry broke in with his scornful laugh. “I wasn’t at Great Owl Run. I went down the Vermilion, straight to the sea coast. The blanket. Oho! I’m beginning to get you. I had the blanket strapped on the back of my sledge, and some of the duffel you’d traded me. It must have come loose and fallen off. I discovered it was gone late one night when I went into camp, several miles farther down the Vermilion than the Great Owl fork. Somebody picked it up. That’s all.”
Kit was laughing while tears ran from the corners of his inflamed eyelids. “Jerry! I don’t know what to say.” His fingers contracted in his brother’s bulging biceps with bruising force. “Why, you—you doggoned old scut!”
“Steady-on there, bird!” Kit felt a pair of fingers poking experimentally into his eye-sockets. “What’s wrong with you, Crow-eye?”
“Nothing. Just a little blind—snow-blind. The cursed sun—and the snow—”
Jerry made a queer sound with his lips. “You mean to say—you been carrying-on here—and can’t see?”
“Trying to.”
“What’s it all about—?”
A chunking hunk of lead slapped a metal brace of the sledge and burst into particles around their ears.
“Pardon me,” said Jerry, “may I cut-in?”
He stirred, then steadied, and five rifle-shots rattled spitefully over the river embankment. The clip tinkled and he shoved in a fresh round. “Slaveys—Yellow Knives? What’s the racket?”
“Yellow Knives,” said Kit. “It’s a long story.”
“If I could shoot like you used to,” remarked the sergeant, “I’d have got that baby with the red cap. But I’ll bet his ear’s burning. They’re not pushing in quite so fast.”
“It’s the ones behind,” said Kit. “Where are they now?”
Jerry was silent for a moment. “Yeh!” he observed at length. “Six of ’em—making way around to the west. The bunch in front are going to hold us until the others are in our rear. The second bunch are going to be the bananas. Well, we had lots of fun when we had it.”
Kit heard a scratching sound, and a savor of strong pipe-tobacco drifted into his nostrils. Then Jerry moved off a few paces along the river, and said something in thick, rasping syllables of speech that Kit was unable to understand.
A second voice answered in heavy gutturals. Kit threw up his head with a start, his facial muscles contorted in a straining effort to see through multicolored mists. Jerry had brought a companion with him, an Esquimau, judging by the talk.
“Who’s that?” Kit demanded.
“Just a friend,” said Jerry lightly. “He came down with me from the Arctic Circle.”
Kit sighed and shook his head. One more victim in the trap. On the other hand, if this newcomer was anything like Oogly, he’d be a stout comrade for a last-hour stand.
The sergeant was giving the man some sort of instruction in the Esquimau tongue. Feet moved down the slope, and then Jerry came back to Kit.
“I’ve got him planted on the river ice to guard our rear. He’s a good man, a crack shot, but there are too many of ’em for us, and they’ll get us all before sundown. Well-o, Cocky-bird, we’ll go out of this heathenish country together!”
The rattle of rifle-fire in front of them had died away to only an occasional report. Jerry’s recent burst of shots had taught caution to the crowd behind the sledges. They’d hold their real attack, of course, until the men in the rear were in position.
“Jerry! Who do you suppose was murdered in that cabin?”
“I don’t know. How do I know? Say, how’d you get in this jam, Kit? Who started it, and why?”
“Oh, there was some trouble about a man that the Yellow Knives wanted to kill—who was shot down last night by Hell Bent. Bent’s here now, keeping ’em ribbed-up. That business back at Great Owl Run—somebody was murdered there that night. Trail of the body dragged across the floor and dumped into the river.”
“No!” ejaculated Jerry. “Oh—that’s how! I found him.”
“What?”
“Body in the river. About fifty miles north of here—on our way back. A tall, raw-boned chap with a bullet in his back. Drifted out from an ice hole and washed up on the bank. Poor devil! Must have floated all the way down under the ice—Great Owl Run into the Vermilion River. Funny thing about him—”
“Hell Bent killed him,” interrupted Kitchener. “And I thought it was you!” He blinked and dug the back of his fist into his eyes. The pain came and went in waves. But if he forced his bare eyeballs to endure the daylight he could still see something of his blurred surroundings. Jerry sat on the snow-shelf with his knee locked in his fingers and a pipe in his teeth.
“Bent’s square-meshed tracks went to the cabin,” Kit ruminated. “Why did he shoot this chap? Who do you suppose he was?”
“Keep ’em shut, Kit,” advised Jerry. “Not that it’ll do any good now, but they won’t hurt so much. The only thing that’ll cure snow-blindness is a long stretch of total darkness.” He laughed grimly. “Well, I guess we’re going to have that soon—a long, long stretch.”
“Who do you think he could be?” Kit persisted doggedly.
“The dead man? I went through him, and he didn’t have an identifying mark on him. But I’ll tell you something that he did have—in an old wallet, buttoned up with a big bunch of money. A stack of old express company and postal money order receipts for five thousand dollars each—dated in January for twelve consecutive years. In whose favor do you suppose they’d been made out, Kit?”
“I don’t know. How’d I—” Kitchener’s chin lifted sharply. “You don’t—you don’t mean—”
“Yes. The slips were all made out in the name of Mrs. William Tearl, New York City. The source of the mysterious annuity. That man, whoever he was, was the chap who has sent five thousand dollars to our family around the first of every year. He could have told us a lot of things, I guess, if we’d got to him in time. And now he’s dead.”
“But who—why?” Kit faced his brother blankly.
“Don’t know. Any guess you’d make would be only a wild shot. Maybe Dad did something for him some time, or he did something to Dad, and he’s been squaring accounts with his conscience ever since. And for some reason wanted to remain incognito. Funny he should be at the Great Owl place the night Hell Bent got there—and is murdered by him.”
“Here it is!” said Kit tensely. “This chap must have been mixed up some way in Dad’s disappearance. Maybe he felt responsible somehow for what happened. Tried to make it up to Mother the best way he could—by sending money. When Bent is released from prison this chap goes to the old cabin and waits, figuring Bent’ll come some day. Sounds as though there was an old score between them that had to be reckoned up. And Bent came and settled it for keeps by killing this other chap when he was asleep.”
“Maybe,” agreed Jerry. “But anyway you fit it together it’s guesswork.” He touched his brother’s sleeve. “By the way, I didn’t introduce you to my friend.”
“Who?”
“The man who came down with me from Queen Maud Sea.”
“Your trip up there turned out to be a bust, didn’t it? I never did pin any hope in that business.”
“My friend didn’t want to come,” pursued Jerry. “But I made him believe that I wouldn’t be able to make the return trip unless I had a good hunter with me, and I finally persuaded him to see me down as far as the police post.”
Jerry spoke to the man on the river ice. “I want you to know my brother,” he said. “I’m Jerry Tearl. This is Kit Tearl.” He stressed the name with a peculiar emphasis.
There was a momentary silence. Jerry seemed to be waiting for something. Kit at length heard him fill his lungs deeply. “His name is Kablunak,” said Jerry. “He belongs to the Ahiagmuit tribe.”
“Yes?” said Kit, and stopped with a sudden, queer breathlessness. “Kablunak! Why—that was the name—wasn’t it? You said— Kablunak! Why—why, that means ‘white man,’ doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” The fingers on Kitchener’s sleeve gripped a little tighter. “This man only talks Esquimau, but he is not an Esquimau. His own language—he’s forgotten it. He’s lost his language, his identity—everything. Everything is completely gone.”
“You—what do you mean?” gasped Kit. His blinded eyes were turned wildly towards the tall, straight-formed figure of the stranger, whom he saw as in a blurring fog.
“He was frightfully wounded a number of years ago,” said Jerry in a slow, curiously strained voice. “A bullet in his head. You could see the scar if you were able to see. That bullet snapped something in his brain—what do they call it?—aphasia—forgetfulness. He doesn’t remember a thing. He doesn’t remember who he is or where he came from or what he had been.”
Kit was breathing hard, staring tragically through the mists. “My God!” he whispered.
“A party of Esquimaux found him in the snow in the forest down yonder, apparently dying. Twelve years back. They bundled him on a sledge and took him north with them, and nursed his body back to health, but not—not his brain.”
“Who is he?” whispered Kit in agonized suspense.
“He became one of the Ahiagmuit,” stated Jerry. “In the years that he lived with them they came to accept him as their chief hunter, their leader—”
“Who?” Kit demanded hoarsely.
Jerry’s hand was a vice, clutching his brother’s arm. “He’s a lean, tall man with a white mustache and a shock of snow-white hair, a hawk’s face, and a pair of steel eyes that glow sometimes with a strange inward flame. And under his artikis he wears the badge of the royal police.”
CHAPTER XXIV
THERE WERE THREE
Kitchener was on his feet with a stabbing breath, stumbling down the embankment. In his dim-sighted, watering eyes the erect figure on the ice loomed like a specter in an unbelievable dream. He reached awe-stricken towards the stiff, unresponsive silhouette.
“Dad!” he said in a stifled voice. And again, in sudden, breaking emotion: “Dad!”
With a quiet, gentle dignity the man drew away from the hands that had touched him. Jerry hastened forward and crooked his arm about his brother’s shoulders.
“No, Kit! I’ve talked and talked with him, and he doesn’t get me. It’s no use. Save yourself the heartbreak. He knows us only as a couple of white men whom he’s just happened to meet out here on the barrens. That’s all.”
The tears that drenched Kit’s eyes were not wholly the weeping of tormented, aching nerves. His father! Inspector Tearl of the Royal Canadian Police—wearing the garb and living the life and thinking the thoughts of an Ahiagmuit Esquimau! The pathos of that stern and lonely figure—the man who had emerged out of the ghostly years, and did not even know he had come back to his own.
The old man said something in a strange tongue, and ended with a kindly laugh.
Jerry answered with an unusual gentleness of voice.
“What is it?” Kit asked with a sound that was like a sob.
“He sees what’s wrong with you, and he says that snow-blindness sometimes makes men act queerly. But he likes your looks and is glad to have made your acquaintance.”
“To make my—” Kit could not finish. He felt as though he were stifling.
“I found him on Queen Maud Sea, sitting by a seal hole with a spear in his hand,” said Jerry. “His tribesmen told me that they have not known a starvation winter since he became one of them. A white man’s brains to help them through the long midnights. They adored him.”
Kit was too choked-up to speak. He had never heard of a more complete tragedy than this. Bill Tearl, lost to the world and to himself—not knowing who he was or where he came from—spending the years in an Esquimau igloo. Death in itself is not so terrible. But to die, and still go on living! It might not have been so bad if utter forgetfulness had blotted out everything of the past. But was it possible ever for the memory to go into a total eclipse?
Life for Bill Tearl must have been a fantastic nightmare. Wandering through lonesome, six-months-long nights. Bewilderment and yearning and discontent. There must have been times when the smoldering fires of the poor, estrayed brain, the vague, vain efforts to remember, would overwhelm him like a madness.
Kit found himself fumbling at the snap of his revolver holster. If there were only some way to touch the spark that surely still lived in the darkness, to set off the lost train of recollection! He pulled out the engraved, ivory-butted revolver and offered it to the man who called himself Kablunak.
“Inspector William Tearl!” He tried desperately to speak clearly and steadily. “This is your gun. Please take it back again. It’s the old six shooter your men gave you when you left to take command of the outpost at Saut Sauvage.”
He could almost see the grizzled face of the old sergeant who had made the presentation years ago, and he recalled the little speech that accompanied the gift.
“May it never fire first,” he said; “may it never fire too late.”
The old man took the gun from Kitchener’s unsteady hand. He turned it over and examined it minutely, barrel, trigger-guard, the engraved silver name-plate, the beautifully carved butt. After a moment his hand cuddled the stock and he sighted at some imaginary target. Then he broke into a pleased, gentle laugh that snapped the awful tension like the parting of a chain.
He asked some question in the Ahiagmuit dialect, and Jerry let go a pent-up breath that was almost suffocating him. “He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t recognize it. He—he only wanted to know if you were loaning it to him.”
“Tell him it’s his—it’s his very own,” Kit said in a gulping voice.
“I thought—for just a minute, there was something in his eyes. As though something was trying to remind him. And then it faded—was gone.”
“Tell him!” Kit pleaded. “Make him understand, Jerry!”
“I’ve told him—dozens of times. And it just doesn’t register.”
Jerry turned and exchanged a few sentences with the old man, and then he looked back somberly at his brother, and shook his head. “He thinks you’re giving it to him—as a gift—between comrades who are willing to fight together. That’s as much as I can make him understand.” The sergeant’s hardlimned features held a strange, boyish wistfulness. “He says it is a fine, handsome gun—to thank you very much—to tell you that if he were ever privileged to use it to protect your life, it would be a trifling return for such a splendid present.”
Kit could not trust himself to speak.
“Where did you get it?” asked Jerry.
“The gun? Grabbed it from Hell Bent—last night. If it hadn’t have been for my eyesight I’d have got Bent—”
Something screamed across the river terrace behind them and stopped with a tearing, meaty curump!
“Lookout! Down!” Jerry seized Kit and shouldered him back into a niche of the embankment.
Kit wrenched himself loose and squirmed about, impotently gripping his shotgun. “Jerry—who’s hit?”
“One of your dogs! Stay there! Cut him nearly in two. Dum-dums—”
Jerry snatched up his rifle, and fired, and cursed with a lilting gayety. “How can you hit ’em when you can’t see ’em?”
“The bunch in the rear?” asked Kit.
“And how! They’ve buried themselves under the snow, with nothing but peep-holes. Just a landscape to look at.”
“You hate to have to kill ’em,” said Kit. “The poor, misguided fools. If we could only get Bent, there’d be a chance.”
“Yeh,” mocked Jerry. “Hate to kill ’em! Where’s this Bent?”
The first shot was followed by others, mean, vicious sounds whipping through the sunlight. Another dog went down, got up and tried to walk, dragging his hind quarters, and crumpled gasping in the snow.
Jerry was crouching at Kit’s back, squinting into the snow-glare, trying to find a living mark. “Look!” he suddenly gasped. “Dad!”
“Huh?” exclaimed Kit, twisting around.
“He’s trying to crawl up on them—across the river. With the revolver!” He raised his voice in sharp warning. “No! They’re on this side too! Dad! Stay where you are!”
Instantly he recollected, and his English shifted into a lingo of harsh consonants, the meaning of which Kit could only surmise. But the old man paid no heed.
He was out on the river ice, sprawled flat, pushing a little breastwork of snow ahead of him, hitching his way across the stream as though he were stalking caribou. The Yellow Knives ambushed on the west side would make short shrift of the trapped defenders—unless they were quickly suppressed. So the one-time policeman had chosen that hazardous job for his own.
Heedless of the bullets that nipped the air about him, Jerry was on his feet, hurrying down the slope. The old man was more than half-way across the river, and now was shielded from the sight of his quarry by the rising embankment above him. But the opposite terrace no longer served as a buttress behind him. He had crept out into view of the men who were firing from the sledges on the eastern side.
Kit and Jerry had been partly sheltered in the rear by a break in the embankment. The old man kept himself covered with snow as he crawled ahead. Only the top of his head was showing. But the dogs were huddled out in the open. The first few rounds from the west bank were picking them off.
Evidently the attackers proposed to make certain of their victims by first destroying the means of flight. There was to be no last-minute dash for safety with the sledges. Kit’s team was wiped out in two minutes. Buzz-saw was down, back-broken. Two of the Chippewyan huskies lay stone-dead, a third was trying to walk on two feet, with his muzzle plowing the snow. Jerry’s leader was out, and numbers two and four had tumbled together in the traces, moaning and kicking feebly.
“Bent’s in back of the middle sledge!” gasped Kit. “High power and a deadly shot! Jerry! Dad! Come back!”
The bright, windless morning was filled with hard, electric cracklings—ripping, snapping sounds breaking in from both sides of the river. Two dozen or more savages were at work now, combing over the defenders from both directions with a venomous cross-fire. The heavy explosions echoed back and forth with a sullen malignity. At bay between the embankments of the wide river-bed, the three trapped men were left the grim alternative of taking it either from one shore or the other.
The pain in Kit’s eyes throbbed intermittently like a jumping toothache. Sometimes a fire spectrum wavered before him, or again the colors washed out in white blankness, as though a bucket of snow-white paint had been dumped over his head. At intervals his eyesight was restored briefly, so he could see things through a weaving film.
He made out a dull, dark shape on the river ice, crawling doggedly; and Jerry, stooping, moving down the embankment....
Through the snow glare there rushed a high-pitched wail of sound, faster, shriller, more hideous somehow, and overriding all other sounds.
It reached the river and stopped horribly with a soggy thump.
For a moment Kit was overcome by a ghastly sickness. He heard the clean report of a small-caliber rifle whip back above the line of sledges, and at the same instant he heard Jerry’s anguished cry.
“Dad!”
Jerry was down in the middle of the stream, bending over a snow-shrouded shape that did not move. He went on his knees and stood up again with a limply dragging object in his arms. Up the embankment he staggered, clutching his burden, breathing thickly through his teeth. Unhurried by the bullets that cut the air about him he crossed the open ground to the eastward terrace and laid the fur-clad form at his brother’s feet.
“Dad!” he said, and trailed off in a dull monotone. “They got him for keeps this time.”
CHAPTER XXV
INSPECTOR TEARL
Kit gripped his eyes tightly shut, and then opened them again and tried to see. He dropped and buried his hands in the muffling, snow-crusted furs. “I heard it hit,” he said.
“Right behind the ear,” whispered Jerry. “Craziest thing I ever knew. Almost the same place where the other one hit him—years ago.”
A chunk of lead threw a spurt of snow in Kit’s face. He peered about wildly, and then sprang to his feet and hauled his parked sledge down from the top of the embankment. He swung the runners about and shoved the load of baggage alongside the prone body. Then, with his head down between hunched-up shoulders, as though he were plunging into a hail storm, he ran down the slope among the strewing of dogs.
He found a short ax, and with numbed sensibilities he struck twice. The whimpering ceased. He drew his knife and slashed the traces free. Then he bent his back to the tug and started up the embankment with the second laden sledge.
Jerry caught the idea, and hurried down to help. They rushed the sledge up the terrace, lifted it with its baggage, and stood it on top of Kit’s sledge. Before the marksmen across the river had spotted their range both dodged into the protected alley between the piled-up sledges and the crest of the river bank.
For the moment they were barricaded against their enemies on either side of the stream. Jerry had dropped his rifle and was stooping low over the wounded man. At length he looked up gravely and shook his head. “He’s breathing—that’s all.”
A while ago Kit had wept over the man who came back from the years of living death. Now he was strangely unaffected. It was as though the well-springs of emotion had suddenly dried within him. Actual, physical death was not so terrible.
He stared towards Jerry for a moment, and then groped for his rifle and drew himself flat on top of the embankment. Hell Bent was over there behind the middle sledge. Bent at last had finished his incomplete job of twelve years ago. It seemed to Kit that his own life had been shaped and consecrated to this one moment. Just give him his vision long enough to mark his man and align his rifle-sights, and he would ask nothing else of fortune, ever.
He was fumbling with his rifle, gray-faced and grim, trying to pin his sight on the sledge that sheltered Bent, when Jerry grabbed his ankle. “Come down, Jackass!”
Kit kicked back in an effort to loosen his brother’s grip, and then his body went taut and a queer, shivering sensation ran up and down his spine. Somebody had shouted from under the embankment: not Jerry; a wild, unearthly voice that rang through him like a Jehovian trumpet.
Awed, shaken to the depths, he tumbled down from the bank of snow, to find Jerry locked with a struggling, bloodied figure that was trying to stand erect behind the sheltering sledges.
The miracle was not so much that the man still lived with a bullet in his brain, but that an unconquerable vitality flamed in the lean, gaunt body to endow him for those few moments with a will and lithe muscular strength to overmatch the brawny Jerry.
Bill Tearl, as he might have been a dozen years ago, his head high, his gun in his fist, a deathless valor sustaining him in his last embattled hour!
“Behind that stump!” he cried. “There’s another under the windfall! I’ll take him! Durand—over your shoulder—behind you—look out!”
Kit was staring in utter stupefaction. This was not the gentle, vaguely smiling man who had come down out of the Northland with Jerry. The lax shoulders had stiffened, indolence had kindled into a blazing resolution. He was no Esquimau, either in thought or in speech, but a determined white man at bay, fighting for his life.
“It’s Bent!” he declared. “And Bruyas! And that other little weasel—what’s his name—Giffard!” He had remembered his own tongue, and was calling to somebody in furious, hard-clipt words.
“Hold the dogs. I’ll take care of this side. They want the gold sacks. Let ’em come and get ’em!”
“My God!” said Jerry. “He thinks he’s back there that day—at Great Owl Run.”
Kitchener had stumbled to Jerry’s assistance and was trying to pinion his father’s straining arms. “Dad!” he said. “Wake up! Come out of it! It’s Kit! Listen to me!”
The old man did not seem to hear the soothing voice. He wrenched his arms free, whirled and stared at the ground behind him. “They’ve shot her from behind—murdered her!” His speech throbbed with pity and horror. “That lovely girl— Ah, the devils!”
The bullets were whining and snapping overhead, but if Bill Tearl heard them he thought they were the bullets of another bloody day, long ago. The missile that had hit him a few minutes before must have re-opened the lead-scarred brain-cells and let in remembrance. Recollection had come to him, and with it, delirium. His mind was back in the Great Owl forest, re-living the tragic scene of his last rational hour. A sleeper who had awakened at the place where his long sleep began.
“Hell Bent did that,” he avowed. “If you don’t kill him, Durand, I’m going to.”
He turned and looked squarely at Kit with eyes that evidently saw another man. “Here! The chamber’s full. Take this one!” He reversed the ivory-handled gun and shoved the butt into Kit’s hand. “Listen, I’ll keep ’em busy here by this poor girl. Leave your rifle. He’s under the windfall. If you can work around behind you can nail him.”
Kit thrust the revolver into his holster, and curved his arm about the old man’s shoulders. The bullets were singing around them with the pertinacity of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. It might have seemed for just those few moments that a derisive fate was protecting them.
“Dad!” Kit beseeched. “Please! Let’s get under cover.”
Strangely, the old man yielded. The tense figure relaxed in his arms and he lowered the sagging weight behind the shelter of the sledges.
“Who—who’s there?” asked the inspector in a wandering voice.
“It’s I—it’s Kitchener.”
“Who? Little Kit?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s that with you?”
“Why, it’s Gerald.”
“Jerry?”
“Yes.” Kit felt as though something had been stuffed in his throat to shut off his breathing. “It’s—it’s Kit and Jerry.”
His father’s hand groped upward to touch his face, and then strayed over his shoulder and down his arm to clutch at his hand. For an instant the sinewy fingers gripped him tightly, and then he felt them slipping, growing weaker.
“What are you two boys doing here?” Bill Tearl asked with a sudden severity.
“We—we came to find you.”
“What do you want? Why did you leave home?”
Jerry was down beside them, his hand on his brother’s knee. “He’s gone all the way back now,” he whispered. “He knows us now and he thinks we’re a couple of little kids.”
The hearing of the dying man was astonishingly alert. “What did you think you were,” he demanded—“men? Now listen to me, you boys. I don’t want you tagging after me. I’ve got a job to do, and this is no place for you.
“I want you to go back to your mother,” the inspector commanded, while the brothers knelt over him with heads mutely bowed. “Tell her I’ve got some business to attend to, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll be home shortly.”
“Yes, Dad,” Kit assented in a breaking voice.
He thought it was the end, and was taken unawares when, with a sudden, uncanny resurging of vitality, the dying man twisted out of his arms and stumbled up in the red-spattered snow.
The old inspector yelled with a frightful incoherency. “The gold bags! The dogs—broken loose. Runaway! Hey—Durand—stay there. I’ll stop ’em—”
He was on his feet, swaying, staring with excitement across the barrens. Before the brothers could interfere he stooped and snatched up a rifle.
“Look out there, you!” he shouted. “The fool dogs. They’ll go over the creek bluff! Whoa! Haw, you fools! They’ve gone. The sledge. Drowning, the poor brutes. And the sledge!” He laughed with a grim mockery. “Snowing! Trail soon blotted. Murder for gold bags, and the bags are gone. Who’ll find ’em? Funny world. Murder for nothing—”
He snapped off his speech to glower across the river embankment. “Hell Bent! You know where they went overboard, do you? Followed, eh?” The white mustache lifted in a ferocious smile. “All right! See if you live to salvage ’em!”
He broke away from Kit’s detaining hand, and with a spasmodic strength that was not to be denied, he flung himself against the river bank and scrambled up over the mound of snow. Against the white, shadowless tundra he stood in stark outline, an erect, straight-poised figure, advancing towards the sledges with a rifle in his hands.
The guns were blazing away in a furious concentration, up and down the line in front, and from the other side of the river. Three or four powdery snow puffs spatted out of the old man’s clothing like dust out of a beaten rug. Inspector Bill Tearl tried to advance on his weaving legs, and then toppled and went down slowly and solemnly as a crumbling tree-trunk, and lay still with his face towards the midmost sledge.
CHAPTER XXVI
ONE WHOLE MAN
The two brothers were both over the bank, crawling in the scuffled snow. Kit scarcely noticed the buzzing bullets. He shook his head in petty irritation, as though he were annoyed by a swarm of gnats. Jerry had reached the fallen man, and grasped one of the limp ankles. Kit caught hold of the other leg. They wriggled backwards and dragged the body with them over the terrace and down into the shallow trench behind the sledges.
Kit spoke with a curious, measured calmness. “It’s a lot better to remember and die,” he said, “than to forget and go on living.”
Then his voice thrilled with a swelling emotion. “They had to kill him—not once—but three times!”
Jerry said nothing. He was giggling like a girl in a most amazing falsetto.
Kit turned to him blankly. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Fun-ny bone,” exclaimed Jerry, and tried to stop his spasmodic gasping. He moved half way around to exhibit his right forearm, which hung from his elbow like an old, fagged rope-end. “One of the dum-dums—smashed the bone. It—it’s not so darned funny as—as it sounds.”
Kitchener grasped his brother’s hairy, dangling wrist and explored with his fingers up under the dripping sleeve. “Gee, that’s rotten, Jerry.” It gave him a pang to feel the magnificent muscles changed in a moment to numbed and useless flesh. “When was it?”
“Just as we came back over the bank.” Jerry was in control of his fretted nerves again. He laughed ruefully in his own deep voice. “Doggone ’em, Cocky-bird. They’ve got us winging. You’ve got no eyes to speak of and they’ve turned me into a port-sider. Well, there’s still one whole Tearl left if we combine our good points.”
Kit had ripped the puckering string out of his hood. He pushed up the sleeve and wound a tourniquet above the broken elbow. This was as much as he could do for the present.
Jerry dug into his pocket for a pipe and tobacco pouch, and stuffed the bowl full with one hand. Then he struck a light and inhaled with a gusty sigh.
For the moment Kit was bending in gentle abstraction over the body stretched alongside the sledge. He took off his mitten and his warm fingers touched the upstaring face. With a caressing lightness he traced the line of the rugged features, the high, bulging brow, the keen, hawk-like nose, the straight-formed mouth compressed in death, and the square and dogged chin. Then he softly folded together the flaps of the rudely made Ahiagmuit hood.
“Did you hear what he said, Jerry?”
“Umph. He fought that old fight all over again.”
“You can fill in the gaps without much trouble and know about what happened back there that day.”
“He and the two musk-ox hunters, the brother and sister, were traveling south in a heavy snow storm with the gold sledge,” suggested Jerry. “They were ambushed somewhere near Great Owl Run by Hell Bent and some chaps named Buya—what was it?”
“Bruyas. Bruyas and Giffard. Those two!” The muscles of Kitchener’s mouth contracted. “I might have suspected before. As ornery a pair as you ever want to see. They’re still living down there—trapping. They must have been a couple of the guides that came back from the musk-ox country, along with Hell Bent. It’s certain now that they were in the bunch that attacked Dad’s party. He evidently saw them at the time, and knew them.”
“The girl in the party,” mused Jerry—“she must have gone down at the first few shots. From then on it was a free-for-all. Dad and this other man—battling from behind the sledge of gold bags. And the dogs got scared in the midst of it all and bolted.”
“And ran for a few miles,” put in Kit—“with Dad after ’em. And Hell Bent after Dad.”
“The other two,” supplemented Jerry—“what’s their names—stayed behind to fight it out with Dad’s friend. That chap, standing over his dead sister’s body! After seeing what he had seen I guess he wouldn’t give much of a damn what happened to him. Probably just went shootin’ crazy. My guess would be that he ran those two scuts clear out of the woods.”
“Meantime,” pursued Kit, “the frightened dogs must have reached the bluff that runs along with Great Owl Run. Swung in too close, lost their footing on the slippery incline, and went down into the creek, dragging the sledge with them.”
“My gosh!” Jerry checked his pipe-stem as he was about to put it between his teeth. “Why, it must—maybe it’s there still!”
“It is. I found the bags, and shifted them.”
“You what?”
“Found ’em—at the place where the sledge dumped off the bluff, years ago. I dived for the gold bags, brought them up and jettisoned them farther up stream, where Bent won’t easily locate them.”
Jerry stared for a moment. “Smart boy!” he declared finally.
Kit wrinkled his forehead reflectively. “Here’s what happened. Dad saw the dogs take their last plunge. Hell Bent was chasing close behind, and he also saw it. These two were the only ones who knew what had become of that sledge of gold.”
“They faced each other in the snow storm on the brink of Great Owl Run,” Kit ruminated. “They shot it out, and Bent fired first.”
“That’s it, of course,” assented Jerry. “Left Dad there for dead, helped himself to one bag of nuggets, and went his way. Meant to come back after his pals had passed out of the picture and salvage the rest.”
“Those other two,” said Kit—“Bruyas and Giffard—they must have made a shrewd guess at the truth. Knew the treasure was still around here somewhere. Sticking in the neighborhood all these years. Living by their trapping, and hunting for the lost sledge.”
“Yep. And waiting for Bent to come back. Probably they heard he was in the jug. But they’d know that as soon as he got out he’d come back here, and they were sitting tight waiting for him to betray himself to them.”
Jerry knocked the ashes out of his pipe and lifted his head cautiously to peer over the top of the river embankment. The shooting had almost ceased in the last two or three minutes, and the continued quiet was beginning to grow ominous.
“The two middle sledges have pushed in close together,” he remarked casually. “They’re holding a pow-wow.” He glanced across at the waning sun. “The daylight won’t last much longer, and they’re probably thinking they ought to do something about it pretty soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if they rushed us anytime.”
Kit was strangely unconcerned over the war councils of the Yellow Knives. When they decided to come on they’d do it, and worrying wouldn’t stop them. For the moment he was much more disturbed by the revelation of past events.
“Jerry!” he broke in sharply. “The murdered man you found with money-order receipts—what did he look like?”
“Why, he’d been a pretty tall guy I’d say—six feet or more.” Jerry faced his brother curiously. “Dark, keen-featured chap, black hair shot with gray, clean-shaven, couple of welts across his cheek like old knife or bullet scars. He had on a tannish mackinaw—”
“Jerry!” Kit sprang to his feet, forgetting that the top of his head offered an inviting target for any of the Indian marksmen who happened to be looking that direction. “Do you know who he was?”
The elder brother looked startled. “Why, yes,” he said after a moment. “Sure! The man who was in the fight with Dad. The brother of the murdered woman.”
“Of course!” he ejaculated after a briefest pause.
“Funny I never thought of that before! That would explain the money orders. He dragged Dad into that mess. After Dad disappeared he felt that he owed the family something, and started sending the annuity—”
“Wait!” interrupted Kit. “That isn’t what I’m getting at. Do you know who he really was?”
“Huh?”
“You heard the name, didn’t you? The man who stood fighting over his dead sister?”
“It was—” Jerry scowled in an effort of recollection.
“Durand,” said Kit.
“That was it. I remember now—” Jerry stopped as he caught the expression of his brother’s face.
“The man I met down at the Chippewyan village, weeks and weeks ago!” burst out Kit. “He tallies in every detail with your description of the body in the river. Unquestionably he’s the man who was murdered in that cabin. Diane’s uncle. She told us his name was Durand—Jim Durand. And we didn’t believe her. You said he was Hell Bent!”
“I thought he was,” Jerry started to say, but Kitchener stopped him.
“You put me on his trail, made me think he was a scoundrel. And he was Dad’s friend, and ours! We might have gotten together, if we’d only known. And now he’s dead, and we aren’t much better off ourselves.” Kit’s voice rose in sharp accusation. “Jerry! How’d you ever make a dumb bull like that?”
“Now hold on!” protested the sergeant. “Take it easy. I supposed he was Bent. Gosh! He came into the wilderness at the time and place I was expecting Bent. I didn’t get a close look at him, and when I saw him through the thickets he was wearing a hood. And remember—you told me yourself he was carrying the old ivory-butted .45 that had belonged to the inspector.”
“Yes. And you saw a few minutes ago how he got it. Dad himself handed the gun to him in the thick of the scrap. And he carried it ever after, up until the day somebody killed him at the Great Owl cabin.”
Kit scowled at his brother. “I thought it was you who had been killed that day, and that Bent did the job. But Durand was the victim. Who do you suppose the murderer was?”
“If you must be oratorical,” said Jerry pleasantly, “don’t bob your head around up there where a bullet can knock it off.” He reached up with his useful hand and pulled his brother down behind the embankment. “How do I know who that particular gunman was? Maybe it was the real Bent himself, or maybe Bruyas or this other trapper.”
“These two trappers probably had kept tabs on Bent,” Jerry pursued. “They would have known that when he got out of the cooler he’d be coming up to recover the hidden sledge. They’d be laying for him, and for anybody else that butted into the proceedings.”
“The man who disposed of Durand took the gun and his snowshoes,” Kit ruminated. “A pair of waffle-webbed snowshoes that I’d followed down the Vermilion River to Great Owl Run. The murderer, whoever he was, put them on instead of his own when he fled from the cabin. That’s what brought about the confusion of identities. Afterwards he used those same raquettes to mislead me. And all the time I took it for granted that he was the same man I’d trailed through the wilderness from Port-o’-Prayer.
“All this while I thought Jim Durand was Bent,” Kit went on bitterly. “And Diane! Because he was Diane’s uncle, I suspected her of the evilest things. Why, I treated her as though she were some criminal. And she hated me—”
Jerry had not forgotten to watch the Yellow Knives. Every minute or two he had hoisted himself to peer over the terrace. His warning grip suddenly closed over Kit’s arm. “Now!” he interrupted coolly. “You save the shotgun until they’re in close. I’ll try to chime in with a left fistful of .45s.” He laughed devil-may-care. “Well-o, Cocky-bird, we were a good family while we lasted.”
A babel of yells breaking out suddenly along the east shore were flung back in a whooping chorus from the other side of the river. Pieces of lead clipped the air in a gust and knocked up the snow crust in flying chunks.
Kit crept against the rampart beside his brother. He pushed up his head warily, with no more than a hand’s-span of his skull risking itself above the embankment.
“They saw Dad go down, and they’ve about figured out how wabbly we are,” muttered Jerry. “They’ll whoop it up a minute, and then one’ll get reckless enough to start, and they’ll all come.”
Kitchener was trying to distinguish substance in the milky haze that seemed to have flooded the barrens. He felt as though inflated bags had been sewed into his eye-sockets. Wavering, uncertain things loomed vaguely and distantly—men or dogs or sledges—they were shapeless and unreal and wouldn’t stay still.
“Half of ’em are up, testing us out,” Jerry informed him. “And there’s a white man, waving them on.”
“What’s he like?”
“Big lookin’ zob with a black beard.”
“Sounds as though he might be— He’s the one who picked Dad off—and poor Oogly.”
“He’s crouching with his rifle now, trying for a crack at us. If I only had my right arm!” Jerry groaned impotently. “Nice, easy shot around four hundred. We could pay off the hands—”
“Jerry! You’ve got it!” Kit’s voice was so fiercely exultant that his brother turned to stare. “Are they still where they were?”
“They are now. But they won’t be long. Any second—”
“Where’s my gun?” Kit cut in. “The sights are set at the correct range, windage and everything. All you need to do is to notch ’em point blank.”
“Yeah! And then what?”
“I’ll pull the trigger for you. I’ll squeeze it so gently you won’t even feel it.”
“My gosh!” For an instant Jerry surveyed his brother with glowing approval. “Why—why, you blood-thirsty little gnat.”
With his hand reaching behind him he stooped and came up with Kit’s rifle. He chucked the butt to his shoulder and leaned his weight against the terrace.
Kitchener stepped behind and circled the sergeant’s broad back with his arms. He pulled the firing-bolt pin, and dug his chin firmly into the hollow of his brother’s neck. Then he crooked his forefinger under the trigger-guard.
“Look out!” grunted Jerry. “Here they come!”
Without actually seeing, Kit’s instinct told him that the line of men had surged forward. The yelling swelled into an appalling savagery, he caught the distant crunch of oncoming feet. Bullets were plowing around his face.
Jerry’s brawny bulk settled, stiffened. His breathing stopped. He became rock-like in his transcendental calm. Kitchener waited in readiness. Seconds passed—minutes, it seemed to him. He could hear the advancing snowshoes cutting through the snow. The suspense was growing unbearable.
“Jerry!” he whispered. “What’s the matter? Can’t you line ’em?”
“A second!” soothed the sergeant. “He’s kneeling to fire. It’s hard to hold a rifle with one hand. Easy now! I’ll say ‘go.’”
The back muscles hardened to steel—the physical rigidity of the cool marksman inexorably engrossed.
“Ready!” said Jerry crisply.
Kit’s trigger-finger clenched to the steel—put on all but the final ounce of pressure.
“Go!”
CHAPTER XXVII
HELL BENT
The curt voice and the rifle report cracked out together as a unity. Kit felt his brother’s shoulder yield with the kick-back of the heavy discharge. He grabbed the rifle and shoved another cartridge under the bolt. Jerry was straining forward, breathless, staring.
“Hit!” Jerry’s cry rang jubilant, and then checked lamely. “No....”
Kitchener gawked at the snowy barrens. His throbbing, visionless eyes overtaxed themselves in feverish uncertainty. He desperately wanted to see, and he couldn’t.
“Yes!” The grimness of Jerry’s speech sent a shiver through Kit. “Yes!”
The racket along the river had choked off as abruptly as though unseen hands had gripped a score of wildly shrieking throats. The senseless outburst of firing dwindled, almost ceased. Kit was aware of a sudden lagging of footsteps up and down the line of advance.
“He stood against it for a few seconds,” explained Jerry. “I thought we’d missed.”
Jerry spoke in a casual, chatty tone. The tension had lifted. He was his carefree, natural self again. “But he buckled up finally, as though he had the gripes, and rooted his nose in the tundra. He’s lying out there like something that the dog fetched. The brother act was the hit of the piece.”
Kit at that moment was not sorry that his eyes were spared the need of seeing. He was not squeamish. But also he was without morbid curiosity. Jerry’s description did not sound pretty.
A few minutes ago Kit would have given his eyesight permanently for a fair shot at the man who had killed Inspector Bill Tearl. But now that it was over his wrath had simmered down and left him cold. His conscience did not disturb him. He knew that he would never feel the slightest twinge of remorse. It was as though he had merely helped to execute the decree of a higher judgment. The dead man had been one of the world’s ugly liabilities, and they had simply wiped him off the debit column. Kit was thankful only that Jerry shared the responsibility with him, fifty-fifty.
The quiet was a bit disconcerting after the recent hubbub. Evidently it was the white man who had incited the Yellow Knives to the pitch of daring that brought them out from their cover. But the white man was down, and Kit sensed the wavering in the line of attack. These Yellow Knives knew him. He had bluffed them once before....
With the Winchester at a menacing slant he planted his knee on the embankment and scrambled to the top. He stood boldly erect and faced the tribesmen. Two or three bullets, hastily fired, whanged past him.
“Come down, you idiot!” gasped Jerry.
Kit’s blinded gaze moved slowly, unflinching, across the invisible arc of the prairie. “Stop!” he shouted, and threw up his hand.
“Are you fools?” He queried them cheerfully in a voice only loud enough to reach across that narrow area of snow. “You know me! And my brother shoots straighter than I do. You’ve seen what happens. We’ll kill ten of you before you get here, and the few who live now will be hanged by the police later on.”
“You tell ’em, Cocky-bird!” he heard Jerry chuckling behind him. “Gad! They’re half wilting right now.”
“Tom Salmonfish!” Kitchener called. “And you, Athu! You needn’t hide behind the others. I see you’re there. Come forward a little way. I want to talk to you. You needn’t be afraid.” He spoke with disarming friendliness. “The man who shot one of us and made fools of you is dead. There can now be peace among us.”
No shots had been fired in the last minute or so. These men at least had accepted the truce long enough to hear what he had to say. He caught a creaking of snowshoes as somebody stirred restlessly off at his right. “We come get Oogly,” one of them announced, dispassionate and stubborn.
“Oogly!” Kit echoed the name with apparent amazement. “He’s not here. Didn’t you know? Oogly’s dead!”
There was quiet for a few seconds after that, a hushed and incredulous interval.
“I’m telling the truth!” Kit broke in sharply. He pointed southward with his finger. “Down the river, three or four miles from here—go look for a mound of snow and a spear sticking in it. Dig in that mound, and you’ll find Oogly.”
The silence of the next moment or two was nerve-racking. Kit was just able to distinguish a few blurred shapes confronting him in a gloomy, watchful immobility.
“Oogly’s not here I tell you!” Kitchener insisted earnestly. “Salmonfish and Athu—come and see for yourselves.” With a splendidly magnanimous gesture he tossed aside the rifle, which he was unable to aim anyhow, and exhibited his defenseless hands. “You two come on.” He smiled benignly. “You needn’t be afraid.
“Show yourself,” he said over his shoulder. “Let ’em see you’re unarmed.”
“Right behind you!” said Jerry.
“You needn’t worry about anything that happens afterwards,” Kit reassured the Yellow Knives. “You can go your way and everything will be forgotten.”
For a dozen seconds, perhaps, the issue hung in the balance. But from the hesitation of the tribesmen it was clear enough that Kit’s talk had made an impression. He had long since taught them a wholesome respect for his marksmanship. Although he had dropped his rifle, anybody could see an ivory pistol butt sticking out of his holster. There was no foreseeing how many of the tribesmen might go down before that deadly gun if hostilities were suddenly renewed. And at Kit’s back stood the hard-jowled Jerry, whose potentialities as a fighter still must be reckoned with. Probably also a few of the more reflective minds had begun to ponder dubiously about the white man’s law, which, in its own manner, at its own leisure, was capable of reaching a merciless arm even into the remotest wilderness.
Besides, they just wanted Oogly. They had no real quarrel with anybody else.
Kit suddenly was aware that two of the men had stepped out ahead of the line and were coming towards him warily.
He waited with apparent indifference. The advancing Indians finally ventured to the river’s edge, and he allowed them to look over the embankment.
“You see,” he said, “there were only three of us. My brother and I and—the man who was shot.”
There was an uncomfortable pause. “What you do after we go away?” one of the Indians finally blurted out.
“Nothing,” said Kit. “The white man was to blame, not you. You killed our dogs, but we will forget that. If you leave now, nothing will ever be done to you. You have my promise.”
“Oogly dead?” temporized the tribal spokesman.
“I said so. You search where I told you and you’ll know that I’m telling the truth. Oogly is dead.”
“Good!” said the man heartily.
He said something in his harsh jargon to the nearest group of his comrades, and then flung up his arm to signal to those across the river. It seemed to be a pacific gesture.
Jerry had been watching suspiciously, with his left hand tucked under his parka. He relaxed with a twisted smile. “You’ve got ’em on the run, Crow-eye. They’re going to call it a day.”
The two Indians had turned on their heels to stalk away, but Kit motioned them to halt. “Just a minute,” he commanded. “Who was the man who told you you’d find Oogly here?”
“Bruyas,” one of the men informed him.
“Is that Bruyas lying off there by the sledges?”
“Yup!” said the Yellow Knife carelessly.
“All right. You may go now.”
Kitchener picked up his rifle and dropped down beside his brother. “Bruyas!” he mused. “I’m beginning to think that he was behind most of our troubles. Bruyas, and probably Giffard. I shouldn’t doubt if one of them was Durand’s assassin. And they guessed, of course, why I was hanging around the Great Owl forest. Figured I knew too much and thought they’d better put me out too. They wanted a clear field for Hell Bent when he arrived. The only thing I don’t understand is why he bothered to follow me into the barrens.”
“It’s quite likely,” Jerry suggested, “that they’d heard the same rumors we did about the mysterious white man at Queen Maud Sea, who might turn out to be the lost Inspector Tearl. You were posing around as Sergeant Tearl. When you suddenly struck north it would be natural for them to suppose that you were off to hunt for the old man. His return would be fatal to them. They grabbed the chance to stop you before you started by sicking a crowd of irresponsible smokies on you.”
Jerry was leaning against the terrace, eyeing the Indians. “It looks as though they’re leaving us,” he remarked. “They’re hitching in the dogs. As soon as they pull out we’ll be getting on ourselves.”
Kit faced his brother in startled recollection. “Say!” he exclaimed. “I’m under arrest—a fugitive from the police. I’d darned near forgotten. They spotted me a couple of days ago—impersonating an officer—”
“Who did?” interrupted the sergeant.
“Devon and Cross.” Kit grinned ruefully. “Murder too. They think I made away with you.”
“Really?” Jerry was amused by the notion. “Good! You’ll have to take good care of me if you want to clear yourself of the murder charge.” He laughed calmly. “I guess it’ll be all right. If Cross and Devon are like the usual run of the mounties they’ll be a couple of four-square chaps whom we can tell the truth to and trust to keep their mouths shut afterwards.”
The Yellow Knives were moving away. Kit heard the cracking whips and the shouts of the dog drivers. The tribesmen had started down the river to look for Oogly, to find out if the blood-debt were really paid.
As soon as the last of the creaking sledges had drawn off out of range Kit climbed the embankment again and walked out on the prairie. The Yellow Knives, with cynical unconcern, had left their white companion as he had fallen. It needed but a moment’s investigation to establish the fact of death. Here at least was one who never again would trouble the crown’s lawful forces.
At that moment Kit’s stinging eyes saw as much as he cared to have them see. The broad, bearded face, with the missing front teeth—the man undeniably was Bruyas. Kit lingered only to unlace the upturned snowshoes, and he carried them under his arm back to Jerry.
“Jim Durand’s square-webbed snowshoes!” he remarked. “We guessed right. It was Bruyas who killed him and dumped him out of the cabin window, who found use for the snowshoes, who helped himself to Dad’s old service gun. Bruyas—who tracked me into the barrens, and shot Oogly—
“It’s funny,” he puzzled after an interval of silence. “Durand evidently timed his return to this country to coincide with Hell Bent’s release from prison. His idea must have been the same as yours. He must have expected Bent to come back after the hidden gold sledge, just as you were sure that he would. Like you, I gather that he intended to ambush himself in the Great Owl woods so that he might catch Bent red-handed when he tried to recover his loot.”
“It would seem so,” agreed Jerry. “And this Durand would have even a blacker account to settle with Bent than you and I. We thought that Bent had something to do with Dad’s disappearance. But Durand knew! He was an eye-witness. He’d seen his sister shot down. You can guess what he meant to do!”
“The woman.” Kit’s half-seeing eyes turned broodingly towards the south. “If she was Durand’s sister and Diane his niece, then she either was Diane’s aunt or her mother.”
Jerry tilted his head sidewise to regard his brother searchingly. “You call her ‘Diane’ now, do you?”
Kitchener wasn’t listening. He fumbled in his shirt pocket and brought out a fragment of paper that had been crumpled and then carefully smoothed afterwards. “Here’s a note she wrote when she left me yesterday. I haven’t been able to read it.”
Without comment Jerry took the sheet and spread it open in his left palm. In a faintly mocking tone he read aloud:
Dear Cocky-bird:
I don’t know any other name for you, and I guess maybe it’s better that I don’t. I’m leaving you because I don’t want to go north, and anyhow I’d be a hindrance to you. You and Oogly’ll travel faster without me. You may believe me—I’ll never hint to the police which direction you went.
You remember the bad thought I had, that gave birth to Shedim, the owl? And I couldn’t tell you what it was. But now that we’ll never see each other again I think I’d be not quite so unhappy in the years to come if I knew you knew.
From the very first I guessed that you were no policeman. I don’t quite know how you fit into the horrible crimes at Great Owl Run, but I know that you do, somewhere, somehow. When I see you and talk with you it’s something that is utterly impossible to believe. But I’ve had to force myself to believe it.
I ought to hate you, and I don’t and can’t. And my bad thought is simply this: that it is filled, days and nights, with nothing in the world but you. Good-by. I’m praying that I’ll never see you again.
Diane.
Jerry folded up the paper and bent a brotherly grin at Kitchener. “A demon with the girls!” he remarked. “How do you do it, Oakheart?”
Kit took the note back and tucked it into his pocket and buttoned the flap.
“I can see where she might mistake you for an old crow,” remarked Jerry, “but an owl—”
“Shut up!” Kit broke in fiercely.
“It’s turned out to be the craziest mess that anybody ever heard of,” ruminated Jerry in a sobering voice. “Everybody ramming and bulling around at cross-purposes. We picked Durand out for Hell Bent. And you thought Diane was a crook, and she thinks you’re one.”
“Diane has gone back to Great Owl Run to wait for Durand,” said Kit, and softly shook his head. “And he’ll never come.”
“It’s odd,” reflected Jerry, “the way everybody’s scuttling all over the place waiting for this Bent bird to get out of prison. He’s been out now for two or three months, and none of us has seen him or heard a thing of him yet.” His forehead creased perplexedly. “What I’d like to know is where the deuce is Hell Bent?”
“How do I know—” Kit started to say, and then stopped with his mouth open.
“There was a man at the police post the other night!” he burst out. “A big, ugly-looking cuss with a scarred face. His excuse for being in the woods in mid-winter sounded phony to me. But I didn’t give it much thought until this minute—
“He heard me say I’d moved the gold bags, and that Diane knows where I hid them.” Kit’s face looked ghastly in the dying sunlight. “Diane is alone at the Great Owl cabin, and this man is loose in the woods.
“Jerry!” It was a stricken cry. “He must be Bent. I know it! As sure as the devil it’s Hell Bent!”