CHAPTER V
THE GIRL IN HANDCUFFS
The key was in Kitchener’s fingers, but at the moment he seemed to have no idea what its purpose might be. He bent above the sledge, gawking absurdly, utterly at loss to know what to say or to do. In the half light of dawning he saw the curve of a full, firm cheek and was aware that the woman’s mouth was drawn tensely in a fierce and bitter line. It rather increased his distress to discover that she was quite young and extremely indignant.
She tried to sit up, rattling the nickel-plated chain that swiveled one wrist close to the other. He perceived then that the handcuffs were secured by a short length of cord to one of the braces of the sledge.
“Will you,” she said in a panting fury, “kindly take these things off of me?”
“Certainly,” said Kit, who was beginning to win back his self-possession. He dropped his mittens and took her hands in one of his. Her fingers, he noticed, were warm and soft and gracefully slender. After a fumbling attempt or two he fitted the key in its apertures and shot open first one and then the other of the locking wards. The woman cast off the ugly circlets, dumped the robes overside, and flung herself from the sledge. Without a word to her deliverer, or a glance towards him, she stalked off through the snow to confront Jerry.
She was a small young woman, with a body as slim and supple and emotionally reactive as a reed in a gusty wind. She wore calf-high boots with moccasin feet, a pair of forest-green breeches, and a green camel’s hair parka with the hood thrown back. From the opened throat of her upper garment her slender neck emerged to hold high a prideful and shapely head. Her nose was slightly upturned and a shade too short; her mouth was generously wide and warmly crimson, and, at this moment, insolent. In the daytime her elongated, dark-fringed eyes were probably a clear hazel color; in the light of the birch fire they gave back ruddy, sherry-tinged glints. Her reddish hair, short and electrically unruly, flaunted its disorder in the reflection of the leaping flames.
“If it takes me the rest of my life,” she said to the policeman, “I’ll pay you for this!”
“Why, bless your heart,” said Jerry affably, “it wasn’t so much to do. Baby Bunting in the warm rabbit skins. I didn’t mind taking you bye-bye.” He had pronged a brochette of bacon strips, and was watching the grease drops fall and explode in the fire. “I hope you had a nice nap.”
“You—” The girl stopped and choked in her wrath. “You—devil!” she wound up impotently.
Jerry turned his head slowly, and for the first time paid her the tribute of looking at her. Then he shifted his glance to Kit. “This is the one, Buck,” he said. “This is Diane.”
Kit in bemusement regarded first the girl and then the man. In his brother’s lightness of speech he recognized a serious and purposeful undercurrent. Jerry had called him “Buck.” Why? He couldn’t guess. Only he realized that there was some queer and subtle game afoot. He would have to watch closely and pick up his cues.
Jerry’s eyes held him, and he caught the warning in their smiling depths. “This,” the policeman informed the girl, “is Sergeant Buck Tearl of the royal stuffs. He told me that he wanted to find you and ask you about that radio message. And here you are!”
Kit advanced a pace or two, but was careful not to reveal himself too closely in the firelight. For some incomprehensible reason Jerry was asking him to shift identities—to pretend that he was a policeman. All his life he had been playing up to his big brother’s whims, and it seemed but the normal and natural thing now to follow the lead that was offered him, whatever the hidden motives might be. There would be no difficulty in playing the part. He stood back in the shadow, and even if the girl looked at him too observantly she could learn nothing from his appearance. As far as she knew he could be wearing a police uniform under his outer garments.
“I want to know,” he said, “what you meant by sending me that stuff in the air. ‘The dead do not always die,’” he quoted. “And by the way, who’s Kablunak?”
The girl shifted her hostile stare his direction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Why did you ask WBZ to relay your message?”
“I sent no message to anybody,” she snapped.
He interrogated her with a measured frown. “Your name’s Diane?”
“Yes, it’s Diane.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“Is this supposed to be a court-martial?” she asked. “Or are you just a fresh young man?”
“She told me her last name was Durand,” put in Jerry. “Diane Durand.” He moved over a few inches on a log that he had recently brushed clean. “Won’t you sit down?”
“No,” she said.
“What are you doing here alone in the woods?” Kit asked.
The girl had turned with a malevolent impulse to Jerry. “I want to tell you something,” she declared. “You claim to be a policeman too. Well, there’s an inspector somewhere in charge of this district. When I tell him that one of his brave officers overpowered a helpless and harmless girl and handcuffed her and dragged her around through the woods on a sledge, you know what’ll happen to you. They’ll break you, my man, and throw you so far out of a decent service that the lowliest Dog Rib will be ashamed to walk in the same wilderness with you.”
Jerry stripped several crisp bacon slices from his toasting switch and arranged them neatly on a tin plate. He added a couple of pieces of buttered bannock, and offered the dish to the girl. “Won’t you eat some breakfast?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“My dear,” he informed her pleasantly, “your unsupported word won’t get you anywhere with the inspector. Inspector Bowman’s in charge just now. And you could never in your life convince him that one of his trusted, gentlemanly boys would do a vile trick such as overpowering a frail and innocent girl, and slipping the nippers on her pretty wrists, and dragging her around the woods on a sledge. He just couldn’t believe it, and that would be all of that.”
“How did you chance to wander into this part of the territory—all by yourself?” persisted Kitchener, making his voice as gentle and polite as he could possibly manage.
“Her dogs,” said Jerry, “ran away from her and left her on her own.... Her own what?” He questioned himself interlocutorily, as though he were a one-man minstrel show, at the same time inspecting the small feet in the half-knee-high boots. “Dogs,” he replied.
The girl’s mouth curled contemptuously. “The comedy,” she said, “hasn’t a laugh in it.”
Kitchener’s grave eyes wrinkled at the corners and, quite unwarrantedly, he himself laughed.
The girl looked startled, and then glanced full at him and for the first time appeared to recognize him as a fellow being. For just an instant a responsive glimmer heightened her expressive features, as though she were on the point of grinning back at him; and then the flickering brightness was gone and the look of sullen resentment had returned.
“If I hadn’t picked her up,” remarked Jerry, “she no doubt would have starved to death and frozen to death and lost her way home.”
“I wasn’t lost,” she declared furiously. “If you’d kept your hands off I’d have found the man I was looking for.”
“Who was he?” Kitchener inquired.
“My uncle,” she told him.
The coffee pot had reached a boil. Jerry tossed a handful of snow under the lid, and then poured out a steaming cupful, into which he dribbled a sticky, white fluid from a punctured can. “May I give you a cup of coffee?” he inquired of the girl.
“No,” she said.
Kitchener was watching her face with reflective curiosity. Suddenly he tried a blind shot. “Is your uncle’s name Jim?” he asked.
For a second she hesitated, and then threw up her head.
“Yes,” she said.
“Tall, stoop-shouldered party with scars on his face and head?” questioned Kit. “A burly-looking bird who shaves in blizzards and eats up the weather?”
This time she was really interested. “Yes,” she said, and her straight eyebrows drew anxiously together. “Have you seen him?”
“Jim who?” temporized Kit.
“James Durand.”
“It isn’t Sim, is it, instead of Jim?”
“What?”
“Simeon Bent?”
The girl stiffened perceptibly and the space between her eyelids narrowed ever so slightly. She seemed to swallow something in her throat. “What do you mean?”
“Is Jim Durand also Simeon Bent?”
“He is not,” she declared.
“Do you know Simeon Bent?”
She hesitated for half a breath, and then shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Where do you live?” Jerry cut in.
“New York, Philadelphia, Edmonton, Portland, Montreal, North Saskatchewan.” She rattled it off as glibly as a railroad brakeman.
“Ottawa too?” suggested Jerry. “Why discriminate against Ottawa?”
“Yes,” she answered surprisingly. “I did live in Ottawa for a while. I went to school there.”
“Recently?”
“Quite recently.”
Jerry smiled. “Do you still want to meet your uncle?” he inquired. “If you do it’s easy. We just came from his camp. All you have to do is back-track the sledge runners to the place you came from. It isn’t five miles.”
The girl regarded him suspiciously, and then glanced at Kit as though for confirmation.
“Right!” he assured her.
“Won’t you have some coffee before you go?” invited Jerry.
“No,” she said.
She walked to the sledge, picked up a pair of snowshoes, and pushed her toes into the thongs. For a moment she lingered, holding a pair of boyishly competent hands towards the fire. Then she shoved her hands into the fur mittens that dangled around her neck on a cord. Without a word or a backward glance she walked away.
They saw her for a moment moving sturdily across the snowy hillside, and then the slight figure faded in the morning gloom and was lost to sight.
CHAPTER VI
THE GREAT OWL MURDER
With a plate of beans and bannock and bacon in his lap, and a tin mug of coffee gripped in his fist, Kitchener sat down by the camp fire and faced his brother with an unwonted lack of approbation.
“I had believed,” he remarked, “that chivalry towards women was supposed to be one of the higher virtues of the honorable northern police.”
“All of that,” agreed Jerry easily. “And ‘never fire first.’ You’ve heard that one too. But strictly sub rosa—to uphold the law a police force needs a few in its ranks who walk a little roughly and who sometimes neglect to remember that women are ladies, and who are just a hair firster on the gat than the other guy.” He shrugged his shoulders. “They didn’t make me a sergeant for spreading my cloak in the mud for the village queens, or for waiting for crooks to take a crack at me, while I counted ‘one-two—it’s my turn next.’”
“What about this girl?” mused Kitchener. “She seems to me—sort of—a square-shooter.”
“She’s Hell Bent’s niece,” said Jerry.
“Tell me about her,” invited Kit after an almost imperceptible pause.
Jerry glanced at his brother’s left eyebrow, which was crooked upwards at its sharpest angle. “Hello, Cocky-bird! By the barometer I see there’s danger of muggy weather. I’d be careful.”
“Don’t you worry about me.”
“I ran into her yesterday evening—and she acted lost and strayed. She was looking for some man who was coming in from Port-o’-Prayer, and it struck me that it might be this Bent onion. Then she told me her name was Diane. I asked her if she was the WBZ Diane, and she said no. But it seemed an odd coincidence that I should pick that name off the air, and the very next woman I meet calls herself Diane. It gave me reason to pump her a little.” Jerry shook his head. “A deep well, and Heaven knows what’s at the bottom.”
“Why did you give her the wristlets?” asked Kit.
“Before I decided she was interesting I’d told her of crossing the trail of a tall, stoop-shouldered snow-plodder back a ways in the forest. She was all for going and finding him at once. That didn’t suit me. I didn’t want the tip-off to reach Bent that I was flanking him—not until I could have an understanding with you. Also I didn’t want her to see you before I did. I expected you two to be making faces at each other, and I was particularly anxious for you to know first what sort of a face yours was to be.”
Kitchener prodded the ground with the heel of his snowshoe, and said nothing.
“So when she started to go off to find her uncle,” Jerry pursued, “I told her this morning would be soon enough. She didn’t agree in the least: so what else could I do except to present her with the shining bracelets and tuck her away comfortably for the night. She had nothing to complain of. She had a snug sleep and a pleasant sleigh ride all over Saskatchewan.”
“Do you think she did radio that message?”
“I don’t know. She, perhaps—or somebody using her name—thinking I’d heard of her, and might heed it.”
“What would be the object?”
“To get me out of the country.”
Kit looked up searchingly. “What’s it all about, Jerry?”
“Dad!”
Jerry spoke the word solemnly, and just for that moment his look of grim bantering was erased from his face.
Kitchener waited with a sudden physical tensing that seemed to strain every muscle of his body.
There followed an interval of profound silence while Jerry stared off northward through the falling snow. “Kit,” he blurted out in a constricted breath, “there is a dark and horrible crime that has gone unsolved and unavenged for twelve long years!”
Still Kitchener sat without speech.
“Since I came back into this country,” Jerry went on in a slow, brooding tone, as though he had forgotten that any one else was present, “I’ve spent every day and night and thought with just one object. I’ve gone through all the department records, I’ve talked with every policeman who has traveled the old-time trails, I’ve questioned every trapper and bush-ranger and every one of the sooty-brothers, Indian and Esquimaux, that I’ve met in the wilderness. I have spent years trying to find out what happened to Inspector Bill Tearl.”
“You’ve found out—”
“Not much actually, and yet—maybe a lot.”
Jerry put down his empty coffee cup, dug in his shirt pocket, and then twisted and licked a cigarette into shape. “Did you ever know there was gold in this country?”
Kitchener shook his head, and his eyes begged his brother to get on with the story.
“I didn’t either. But there must be. Of course the color may be found almost everywhere. But what I mean is a lode or pocket or placer drift in which the raw, yellow wealth has clustered like the raisins in a pudding. Enough of it to shovel out with a scoop and load up a dog sledge.”
“And where is this fabulous hoard?” asked Kit.
Jerry shrugged indifferently. “Who knows? You’ve got ten thousand miles of territory to guess in. That part of it doesn’t mean anything in our lives. Maybe some Indian found the deposit in the first place, or perhaps it was rifled by one of those wandering, crack-brained prospectors whom you’re apt to meet almost everywhere. The loaded sledge is plenty for us to worry about. For all we know it may have been hauled half-way across a continent and passed from murderer to murderer before it reached its ultimate tragedy.
“The police,” Jerry went on, “maintain a little advance post near the edge of big timber, some few days northeast of here at a place called Saut Sauvage. At the time I am talking about a sergeant and two men were wintering at this post. Dad, as you recall, was then the inspector in charge of this district. Twelve years ago this December, Dad went out on an inspection patrol and paid a little visit to the Saut Sauvage boys. It was at that time, as you know, that he disappeared.”
“Where does the sledge-load of gold come in?” inquired Kit.
“I have this part of the story from Inspector Bowman, who, twelve years ago, was the sergeant in command at Saut Sauvage,” said Jerry. “Much of it never went into the official records, and almost all of it was hushed up by the higher officers. Even Bill Tearl’s family wasn’t told all of the facts. You’ll see why when you hear what happened.
“On the particular day I have in mind,” Jerry resumed, “when Inspector Tearl was a guest at Saut Sauvage, a man and a woman came in from the north somewhere, driving a train of huskies and a sledge. Bowman doesn’t remember what they said their names were, or even whether names were mentioned. He recalls only that the man was a lanky, rather good-looking chap around thirty or so. The woman, he introduced as his sister. She appeared to be near her brother’s age—an athletic-looking woman with an astonishing lot of golden hair—they didn’t bob it in those days. I gather from the inspector that she was a knock-out.”
The policeman pitched a couple of fresh birch logs on the fire, and then moved a foot or two farther away to escape the heat. “The stranger and his sister, it seems,” he went on, “had been up on the barrens hunting musk-ox. They had started out with guides and packers—three men, whites or breeds. What happened I don’t know. But there was some sort of trouble, and either their men left them, or they cleared out and left their men. It doesn’t matter about that. The two were alone when they arrived at the police post. They had been caught by winter and were hurrying to reach the outside before the big snow trapped them.
“One who lives in this country,” Jerry ruminated, “is apt to lose his sense of wonderment. If you told me that you had found diamond pipes in the hills yonder to rival Kimberley, I would say, ‘why not?’ There’s everything else—coal and iron and copper and platinum and gold fields, untouched as yet, and for the greater part undiscovered—waiting to be dumped into a world that’s already too fat with wealth. Oil, illuminating gas, water-power to run all the earth’s industries in high. I’ve seen a natural gas vent up on the rim of the Circle, which some passing Indian ignited, possibly a hundred years ago, which is burning to-day, and perhaps will be spouting its fifty foot jet of flame a century or two or three from now.”
Jerry sighed and shook his head. “It’s a pity to think that some day this will all be filled up with sweaty ditch diggers and shrieking machinery. Thank God, you and I will be dead.”
He looked into the darkness and stretched his arms in a wide gesture. “It still belongs to you and me, and it hasn’t changed much since the first white man found it. A wilderness bigger than the whole United States. Peopled by a few of the simple, sooty brothers and a few whites who have nerve enough to live as they damn please. An earth chockful of virgin wealth, and a few primitives prowling upon it. If they see anything they want they take it, and what the hell! Raw tastes and hungers and desires let loose in a wild and opulent land. No law worth mentioning; no restraints; every man for himself. Queer and terrible things can happen. Almost every dark stretch of the forest holds its own grisly secret—”
“What,” demanded Kit, “is all this about?”
Jerry’s hard features for a moment relaxed in a wry grin. “I was just thinking,” he remarked, “that Dad and Sergeant Bowman wouldn’t have been skeptical or even astonished when this stranger and his beautiful sister arrived at the police cabin to tell them that they had found in the woods farther north a sledge stacked with gold nuggets in rotting caribou bags, and a man’s tattered skeleton sprawled on top of it.
“These two gave the skeleton as nice a burial as they could under the circumstances, and then they hitched their own dogs to the sledge and came on south. Bowman says he himself saw the sledge, and he saw and hefted some of the nuggets. He said there must have been a quarter of a million—”
“Who was the poor devil?” interrupted Kit.
“The skeleton? Who knows? He may not have been the original digger. As I said, that sledge may have come by stages clear across from the Klondike—one man slaying the man ahead of him for its possession. The last chap, perhaps, died of the great northern illness known as ‘nothing-to-eat.’ That story is lost forever in the mists. We’re concerned only with what happened afterwards.”
Kit was somberly watching his brother’s face. “Yes?” he breathed.
“The new owners of the sledge,” said Jerry, “were a bit nervous about it. They had reason to be. Their guides, it seems, had turned out to be a bad lot, and they had parted company with them in a nasty row. These guides were loitering about somewhere in the neighborhood of Saut Sauvage. The truth was that the brother and sister were afraid to go on alone. It so happened that Inspector Bill Tearl was intending to go down to McMurray, and he volunteered to escort the sledge out of the woods. The three started off next morning in a snow storm—Dad and the two lucky finders.” Jerry paused for a moment, and his lower lip bent up under his teeth as he gazed with moody eyes beyond the crackling fire.
“They said good-by to Bowman,” he resumed quietly, “and set out for the south. And none of the three was ever seen alive afterwards.”
The sergeant glanced at the crumpled cigarette in his fingers, and for the first time seemed to remember why he had rolled it. He pulled a blazing fagot out of the fire, puffed industriously for a moment, and then settled back at ease on one elbow.
“Two weeks later,” he stated abruptly, “Sergeant Bowman made a little patrol southward. Not twenty miles below the police post, at a place called Great Owl Run, he found the woman with the lovely hair. She was lying face down in a deep drift with a .45 bullet in the back of her head. Her brother was nowhere to be found, nor Inspector Bill Tearl, nor the sledge load of caribou sacks.”
Kitchener sat straighter, his dark eyes suddenly constricted with horror. “What had happened?” he asked.
“There had been two or three snow storms before Bowman took the trail,” Jerry explained, “and there was not much left even for a schooled woodsman to read. No sledge tracks, no footprints. Between the spot where the woman lay and the high, steep bank of Great Owl Run, the underbrush had been broken and crushed down, as though a body, or perhaps two of them, had been dragged off and dumped into the creek. The stream runs deep and swift at that point, and seldom freezes over. Anything thrown into it would be swept down under the ice tunnels and probably carried all the way to the Arctic Sea.”
“And you know no more than this?” Kitchener asked in a hushed voice.
“A little more, maybe. But the rest is pure guessing.
“At about the time that Bowman was finding the dead woman,” Jerry added, “a man by the name of Simeon Bent came out of the woods at Fort McMurray. He had been in some sort of a fight a while before and had wounds about the head and face. I got wind of this man a couple of years ago and found out all about him that I could. One thing, he had been the head guide for the two musk-ox hunters.
“From McMurray this Bent bird went on down to Edmonton,” Jerry continued after a brief interval. “He went a bit wild on whiskey blanc down there. In a rumpus in a back room he killed a man and was stretched a short term for manslaughter.” The sergeant observed his brother fixedly. “He was splurging some in Edmonton, with plenty to spend, and I have it straight that his cash reserve was a bagful of gold nuggets.”
“You mean—” said Kit, and stopped.
Jerry answered with a short nod. “Sounds that way, doesn’t it? It was Bent who ambushed Dad and the two strangers. My guess it that he got the sledge, but for some reason he wasn’t able to take it down country with him. Maybe the other guides were lurking near by and he didn’t want to declare them in. He helped himself to one bagful of gold, and cleared out.
“It’s my belief that he cached that sledge in the woods somewhere in the neighborhood of Great Owl Run,” Jerry declared. “It’s probably still there where he hid it on that ugly day twelve years ago.” The sergeant tossed his cigarette into the fire and his muscular hands clenched tightly over one knee. “Bent served out his term in prison, hugging his secret. The minute they turned him loose he started for the north—”
“Carrying Dad’s old gun,” Kitchener cut in, his eyes suddenly grown as cold and murky as the wintry dawn.
“That sledge,” asserted Jerry, “is still concealed in the forest up yonder, and Hell Bent is on his way to get it.”
The sergeant raised himself to his feet and stood erect on the snowy hillside. “When Bent’s time was nearly up I asked for the Saut Sauvage assignment, and Bowman sent me to take command of the outpost up there. I’m supposed to be on my way to that place.”
“I understand now,” said Kit, “why he’ll kill you if he can.”
“Of course,” said Jerry carelessly. “I want to nail him when he gets that sledge, and he knows it.” The policeman knitted his brows darkly. “The trouble is,” he reflected, “I can’t keep the assignment. Something else has turned up.”
He contemplated his brother with shrewd eyes for a moment, and then faintly nodded his head as though he had made up his mind about something.
“Kit,” he declared, “it’s the luckiest thing in the world that you turned up when you did. I needed you frightfully. But you were always like that—an on-the-spot Johnny. You ready to carry on, Cocky-bird?”
“You know I am.”
“Good! It’s an outrageous and extremely hazardous business I’m wishing on you. But I have no choice. You’re to go up there instead of me, and stick tight to this Bent, and get him.”
“All right,” said Kitchener. “I’d like to.”
“I’m not going to report at all, Crowfeathers. I’ve got something else to do. But I don’t want to be let out of the service for going A.W.O.L.—heading off on my own. I’ve disgraced you plenty as it is.”
Kit watched his brother uneasily. “What are you going to do?”
“You and I don’t look a lot alike,” Jerry temporized. “I’m a darned sight better-looking guy than you, if it comes to that. But at the same time you approximate me enough to get by. Luckily the two constables up at Saut Sauvage have never seen me.”
“What—?” Kit stopped, his startled eyes dilating as he began to gather the drift of Jerry’s plans. “You don’t mean—”
“That’s why I introduced you to Diane as Buck Tearl,” Jerry assured him with a bland smile. “The idea was beginning to ferment even then. I can’t take the patrol, you understand, so somebody will have to go in my place. I’ll put you in my uniform and give you my credentials, and you go north and tell ’em you’re Sergeant Buck Tearl of the royal police. You’ll take command of the outpost at Saut Sauvage.”
CHAPTER VII
IN THE ROYAL SCARLET
As though his doubts and difficulties were completely settled, Sergeant Tearl moved serenely to his sledge and began dumping blankets and duffle bags off into the snow. Kitchener scrambled to his feet.
“Hold on!” protested the younger brother. “You’re crazy!”
“You’ll have no trouble,” Jerry reassured him. “Constables Devon and Cross are holding down the Saut Sauvage trick, and they know me only by reputation.” He turned with a deprecating laugh. “Just heckle them a bit and they’ll never dream that you’re not the sergeant.”
“But, Jerry, the whole idea is absolutely preposterous.”
“As for knowing police business,” said the older brother smoothly, “you could have qualified for a sergeancy when you were nine years old.” He came back to the fire, his features changed to an unwonted gravity. “You know I wouldn’t ask you to do this, Kit, if I could see any way out of it.”
“And you know I wouldn’t hesitate,” returned Kitchener, “if I really thought I could get away with it.”
“That part’s easy. Inspector Bowman isn’t apt to come up this way this winter. You ought to get friendly enough with Cross and Devon to persuade them to keep their mouths shut if I come back in the spring and resume my job. If I don’t come back all you need do is to slip quietly out of the picture, and the police can write another disappearance case in the records of the missing.”
Kitchener looked sharply at his brother. “Where are you going?” he demanded.
“You remember the name of the Esquimau mentioned in the WBZ message?” Jerry asked.
“Kablunak, wasn’t it? Kablunak’s band of Ahiagmuit.”
“Do you know what Kablunak means in the Ahiagmuit lingo?”
“No.”
“White man,” said Jerry.
“Well?” said Kit, and then caught his breath as he felt a peculiar significance in the other’s manner. “What white man?”
“I wouldn’t ordinarily pay any attention to a message like that, sent by nobody knows whom,” said Jerry. “But it so happens that my own inquiries have brought facts to light that practically substantiate this information from WBZ. It came to me in a roundabout way from a Cree Indian, who had it from a Dog Rib, who had it from a Yellow Knife, who had it from a Bathurst Inlet Esquimau. It’s funny, but you can almost always believe the stories that reach you by moccasin telegraph. According to this yarn, which really is more definite than mere rumor, there is a tribe of Ahiagmuit up on the shore of Queen Maud Sea, whose chief man is a white.
“This man,” the sergeant added slowly and deliberatively, “is tall and lean, they say, and he has an eagle’s nose and a snowy-white mustache, and terrible gleaming eyes, and under his artikis he wears a shining metal shield which, from its description, is the badge of the royal police.”
“My God!” said Kitchener’s lips, but his voice was suffocated.
“I don’t know,” said Jerry. “It may turn out to be a wild-goose chase. But I’ve got to go.”
“But Jerry—” Kit was staring at his brother with awe-stricken eyes. “You don’t think—you don’t believe it possible—?”
“Who can say?” Jerry’s weather-beaten face at that moment was tragic with wistfulness. “Most frightfully unbelievable things can happen to a man in the wilderness. It might be that this has happened.”
“Wait!” gasped Kit. “You said that a body was dragged through the brush and dumped into the creek—”
“I said it looked as though that had been done,” said the sergeant. “But we don’t know whose body it was.”
“You don’t mean—you think there’s a chance—?” Kit checked himself and faced his brother in a daze.
“Dad!” said Jerry. “Sounds improbable, doesn’t it? But I know I’ll never have a decent night’s sleep again until I go and find out.”
“It’s impossible!” Kitchener burst out. “A white man living for twelve years with a tribe of Esquimaux! What conceivable reason could he have? Why would he go away up there in the first place? Or if he did go, why would he stay? Why would he hide from his family? Why never a word from him?”
Jerry laid a quieting hand on his brother’s wet coat sleeve. “I can’t answer any of your questions, Kit. Only this much I do know: there has been evil talk and sly, vile whispering—going the rounds.” The sergeant’s eyes were stony and expressionless in the reflecting firelight. “The woman was shot with a .45 bullet, which is the gun the police carry. Her brother may have been shot and thrown into the brook. Inspector Bill Tearl disappeared. The sledge-load of gold disappeared. And as you know, and others have found out, Bill Tearl’s family have received from some anonymous source every January for twelve years an express draught for five thousand dollars.”
“Jerry!” The cry was wrenched from Kit in an agonized gasp as the full, dreadful import of his brother’s speech flamed into his brain.
“You know you could turn gold nuggets into an express draught if you wanted to.” The sergeant’s fingers closed tightly into the muscles of Kitchener’s forearm, but his voice was restrained and very quiet.
“If anybody so much as hinted any of this to me, I would kill him. They’re careful to keep their mouths shut when I’m near. But I know what has been said. Bowman and the other officers who used to know Bill Tearl—who knew what a clean, sweet, straight-shooting gentleman he always was—none of them has ever listened or allowed himself to believe anything except that a dark mystery was staged that day in the Great Owl woods. But others have had things to say. And none of us really knows what took place on that creek.”
Jerry dropped his brother’s arm, moved off restlessly for a few paces, and then came back again. “You know now, Kit, why one of us has to trail Simeon Bent and throttle the truth out of him if need be, while the other goes to Queen Maud Sea, where the white man with the police badge lives.”
“Yes,” said Kitchener. “Of course.” He raised his head impulsively. “But why change jobs? You have your own assignment. Why not see it through yourself? Bent’s going your direction. You stick with him. Let me find Kablunak’s tribe.”
Jerry regarded the younger man affectionately. “You’re a great man, Old Crow, but what chance would you stand on the far northern tundras? In mid-winter. Living off the country. Did you ever stalk a caribou or run with the dogs for a thousand miles in the seven months’ night? I’m an arctic man, my boy, and you—” He punched Kit in the chest with his thumb. “Our little five-mile breather almost did you in this morning.”
Kit looked sheepish and ashamed. “Try me a week from now,” he suggested.
“I’ll be two hundred miles north of here a week from now,” said Jerry, and unfastened the tie string of his parka. He pulled off his outer garment and started to unbutton his police tunic. “Strip!” he commanded.
Kitchener hesitated for just a second, and then with a wry grin he began taking off his clothes. It was so foolish of him to balk at his elder brother’s decisions. He always gave in, and Jerry was always right.
“Will you be able to make it?” he asked as he shed his stag shirt.
“Ought to.” Jerry’s coat was in the snow and he was hauling his uniform shirt over his head. “There’s only one thing can stop me. That would be the lack of meat. If I run across a caribou now and then I’ll come back.”
Kit had kicked out of his trousers and stood in his undergarments—a straight-backed, lean-shanked figure silhouetted against the curtain of falling snow.
“I’ll give you all my police equipment,” Jerry said—“sledge, blankets, guns—everything excepting the dogs. Those muts of yours would crumple up like paper, out on the barrens.”
Kitchener drew on his brother’s beautifully tailored shirt, stepped into the thick, warm trousers, and buckled the belt. With a feeling almost of reverence he slipped his arms into the scarlet tunic. He strapped on his side arm and stepped back to the fire. The coat was a trifle too roomy under the sleeves, yet Kit squared his shoulders with a sprightly sense of ease and self-confidence. Belted tight at the waist, the tunic seemed actually to fit, and with a queer, thrilling emotion he felt somehow that he belonged in it.
Jerry’s eyes were full of mockery, but when he spoke there was a faint choking in his throat. He stiffened, and his hand went up in salute.
“Officer,” he said, “may you never miss your man!”
His manner changed, and he curtly motioned his brother to sit down again. He squatted cross-legged and, with a stick in his hand, he began tracing a network of lines on the snow-covered ground.
“We’ll say that this is our present position,” and made a cross. “Strike northeast three days’ march across the ridges, and you’ll run into the Vermilion River. A swift stream, bowlders and rapids. Way back in the spruce hills. Follow it down past the mouths of one, two, three, four, five tributary creeks. The sixth will be Great Owl Run. It comes in from the northeast between two steep, granite banks. There’ll be a tall, pine lobstick on the opposite shore that you can’t miss. Travel up this creek about seven miles, and you’ll reach the scene of the old tragedy. Twenty miles farther on is the police barracks at Saut Sauvage. Devon and Cross will probably be there. You go in and tell ’em the sergeant has arrived. You got it straight?”
He got up again and beckoned Kit to help him unpack the sledges. They exchanged almost all of their luggage, and reloaded and fastened down the lashings. They traded sledges, but each kept his own dog traces. Kit was driving tandem. Jerry used the fan hitch, which gave the huskies greater freedom on the open arctic prairies, and which was more easily slipped if a polar bear attempted to pounce upon the animals.
The older brother chuckled as he caught sight of the old, red, Hudson’s Bay blankets. “Shades of the ancient mariner,” he exclaimed—“I’m darned if you didn’t bring granddad’s last testaments with you. I’ll sleep with a ghost to-night.”
He looked around to make sure that nothing was forgotten, and then faced Kit with a troubled scowl. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?” For the first time he seemed to have misgivings.
“I’ll be all right.”
“I mean, take care of yourself.”
“I hope you take your own advice,” returned Kitchener.
“Don’t stay long enough to go snow-blind,” said Jerry. “I don’t mean the eyes, but the soul.”
Kit looked up alertly, on guard against one of his brother’s flippancies. But this time he found no sign of laughter in the hard-lined face.
“Down in your country,” Jerry resumed, “they call dope, ‘snow.’ Up here the snow is the dope. They get you the same way. There’s something about the dazzling white country that worms into you and creeps around you and enslaves your heart and your brain like an insidious drug. We northern men are all of us a little cuckoo. You can come up here for a year and go back and forget. You can stay two years and still keep the will-power to break away. Three years, and you’re lost.
“I call it going snow-blind.” The policeman’s voice was quiet and impersonal, but the corners of his mouth were drawn in jaded furrows and in that moment his depth of feeling was betrayed by his haggard, haunted eyes. “This frozen world becomes a part of you, and you a part of it. It blinds you to all save its own harsh, wild enchantments. You want to go out, but you can’t stay out. You love it and hate it. You can’t be happy anywhere else, and you can’t be happy here.”
He ended with a shortened breath and looked away, as though in embarrassment. “Finish your business here, Kit, and get out fast. One of us is enough.”
Abruptly he changed the subject. “Take your time with Bent. After last night’s stroll he won’t travel far to-day. A man softened by prison. Cross the back lots as I told you and you’ll strike his trail again somewhere along the Vermilion River. After that stick close. He’ll be watching for you. Look out! But don’t let him unearth that sledge without your being on hand to jump him. Got it all straight?”
“Perfectly,” Kit reassured him.
“You’d better get some sleep then. If you and your dogs cork off for a few hours now you’ll travel farther and faster in the end.”
“When do you leave?” asked Kit.
Jerry had gone back to his sledge and he was stooping with his back turned. He did not look around. “When you’re ready to go,” he mumbled.
Kitchener unrolled the blankets of the service issue which, in the future, were to be his own. As he passed the sledges on his way to pick a sleeping place in the lee of the rocks, Jerry stood up and without warning clamped his brawny right arm around his brother’s head.
“It was good to see you once more, old pioneer,” he said in a thick, gruff voice.
Kitchener waited motionless, feeling a lump come into his throat and almost choke him. There were a thousand things he wanted to say, but he was abashed by his own sentimental longings, and he stood tonguetied, and said nothing.
“Remember the last time we changed clothes?” asked Jerry—“the day I induced you to put the kitten’s collar on the little black and white striped animal, which the scientists call mephitis mephitica, and the Indians call Sikak the skunk? And Dad made me wear your clothes and sleep out in the woods.”
Jerry laughed gently. “Go to sleep, Cocky-bird. It’ll all come out right in the end.”
“See you later, Jerry,” said Kit. He stumbled off behind the rocks, rolled up in his blankets in the gray, snowy dawn, and within three minutes was soundly slumbering.
The snowfall had almost ceased when Kit awakened. It was a dull, sodden day, windless and utterly quiet. The clouds were hanging low over the forest, black and ominous, overcasting the wilderness with a strange, uncanny twilight. For a minute or two after his eyes were open Kitchener lay in warmth and drowsy comfort. But all at once it occurred to him that there was something foreboding in the complete absence of sound.
His body went taut in the middle of his langorous stretching, and he threw off the blanket and sat up. The campfire was still smoldering, and somebody was bending over it.
“Hello, Jerry—” he said, and then stopped short. The figure in the smoke had turned, and he saw that it was not a man. He scrambled to his feet, rubbing his eyes, staring in astonishment. The fire-tender was a woman—Diane Durand.
“Good morning,” said the girl coolly. She emerged from the suffocating haze of the fire, which she evidently did not understand how to manage, coughing and shaking her head as though to rid herself of the smoke.
In the daylight he noticed that her touseled hair was not the flaming red the fire reflections had imparted last night, but verged into softer tints of bronze. The eyes which regarded him steadily were deep and luminous and flecked with a golden brightness. There was something impudent and unflattering in the way she looked at him.
He regained his breath and faced her suspiciously. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“It’s not my fault,” she returned. “I came back because I had to. Blame your friend’s high-handed interfering. By the time I had reached my uncle’s camp he was gone.”
“Gone where?” exclaimed Kit.
“On northward. Without dogs I can’t hope to overtake him. You’re going up that direction, aren’t you, sergeant?”
Unwittingly Kitchener’s shoulders straightened. It gave him a queer, uplifting sensation to have her think that he was an officer of the Royal Canadian Police.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m going north.”
“Then you’ll have to take me with you,” she announced calmly. “When we catch my uncle you can get rid of me.”
Kit looked around uneasily. “Where’s my—my friend?” he asked.
“He’s gone,” said the girl.
“What?”
She fumbled in the pocket of her mackinaw and brought out a folded slip of paper, which she handed to Kitchener. “Here’s a note he left for you. I picked it up and read it.”
With a sense of impending evil he opened the sheet and found a few lines of pencil-script in Jerry’s careless scrawl. He read:
Dear Kit:
Don’t forget there are a million of ’em as pretty as this Diane. I saw a funny look in your eye this morning. I’m just warning you, that’s all. Don’t let her make a sap out of you and I have no fear about anything else. So long, old crow. The things I like least about life are its repetitions. You get your hair cut or mow your lawn or paint a house or cook breakfast or shave or wash a shirt or kiss a girl, and it’s all to be done over again to-morrow or next week or a year from now. The only thing I know that stays done is to have your teeth pulled. Cheerio, Cocky-bird. Always exit on a laugh.
Jerry.
With eyes grown suddenly misty Kitchener turned and gazed around the glade of evergreens. On the opposite hillslope he found the trail left by sledge runners and trotting dogs’ feet and a pair of big, slashing snowshoes. The tracks ran straight north and apparently were several hours old. Jerry was well on his way towards the dreadful darkness of Queen Maud Sea.
CHAPTER VIII
FOLLOW ON
It was like Jerry to vanish lightheartedly as though he were dropping off somewhere for a frivolous week-end, instead of undertaking a journey that would have appalled the most hardened voyageur. His comings and goings had always been thus casual and unexpected. He hated to say “good-by.” Kit had found his astonishing brother once more, only to lose him. They might meet in a year, or in ten years, or perhaps never again.
As Kit turned the paper over his finger he was stricken by a sudden recollection. He glanced sharply at Miss Durand.
“You say,” he asked, “that you read this note?”
She nodded her auburn head. “Uhuh!”
In spite of himself Kit felt an uncomfortable warming of blood under the skin of his face. “I wouldn’t pay any attention—he doesn’t mean anything—” He caught his breath in embarrassment. “He’s a lunatic.”
“He must be a good friend of yours to give you so much good advice,” said Miss Durand.
“He’s an old friend, anyhow,” agreed Kit uneasily. “We’ve known each other for years. Just the same, he’s an idiot.”
“Anything else you want to call him—why, yes,” she returned mildly. “But he’s no idiot. I think it was very smart of him to warn you.”
Kitchener shifted his feet. “I don’t know what he was talking about. Warn me about what?”
“Against anybody named Diane,” said the girl serenely. “Look at Diane d’Angoulême and Diane de Poitiers, just to mention a couple. There were a lot of ’em in history, and they all were sly and tricky and full of the old Nick. It pays to be careful in your dealings with the Dianes.”
“Those two are dead,” remarked Kitchener. “And I don’t need Jerry to tell me what to do about their successors.”
The girl moved to avoid the drifting smoke from the camp fire, and then tilted her head sidewise as she examined him impersonally from under the curve of her hazel eyelashes. “What was the funny look in your eye your friend Jerry noticed?” she asked.
Kitchener stared at her. The audacity of her asking him that! There was an impish suggestion about her mouth and lips that did not quite approach a smile. He found himself feeling bitterly resentful towards Jerry. He might at least have left the nonsense out of his note.
“Does it look funny now?” he asked stiffly.
“Well—no,” she answered judgmatically, and half closed one of her own bright eyes, as though to see him better with the other. “Not noticeably.”
“What Jerry meant,” he remarked, “is that I might fall for you because you’re so pretty. You are, you know.” He was trying to appear as nonchalant about it as the girl herself. “But he also said there were a million of ’em. So what does that amount to?”
“Not a thing,” she said.
“Certainly not. I’ve met a good many of the million myself—Daphnes and Delilahs and Dulcys, and maybe even a Diane or two. Darned pretty, some of ’em—but what of it?”
“We haven’t anything to worry about,” she assured him—“anyhow you haven’t. I can see you’re too well insulated.” She looked at him demurely. “I know now,” she suddenly declared, “why he calls you Cocky-bird. When you push up your left eyebrow, it makes you—you’re just like that.”
He hastily drew his eyebrows straight, and scowled at her.
“I think it’s cute,” she said, and the smile grew definite, and wicked.
He confronted her furiously. “Listen here!” he said: “I suppose you expect to go along with me?”
“I sort of took it for granted.”
“Why don’t you go down to Port-o’-Prayer and get the old Scotch factor to ship you out? It isn’t far from here.”
“Because I don’t want to. I came to find my Uncle Jim, and I’m going to find him. If you won’t take me with you I’ll tag on your trail. Anyhow I will until I freeze to death or die of hunger.” The girl extended her empty hands for his inspection. “I haven’t any outfit or anything.”
“You wouldn’t be able to keep up with me,” he objected.
She tossed back her head and her face looked childishly bewitching under the tousel of ruddy hair. “I’ll keep up,” she promised. “I’ve snowshoed a lot,” she said—“for sport. Saranac and Banff and St. Moritz.”
“How the deuce did you happen to lose your uncle in the first place?” he asked her ungraciously.
“I didn’t exactly lose him,” she replied. “I was visiting friends in Ottawa, when he wrote me that he had decided to spend the winter in this country. I thought it would be nice to be with him, and telegraphed him to wait for me. But he was gone before my message reached him. However, I supposed I might overtake him, so I caught the next to last boat down the Slave River and went ashore at Fort Smith. But for some reason Uncle Jim had changed his mind and struck off from farther down country.”
“Yeah?” said Kitchener. “What does he want up here?”
“He thought he’d spend the winter trapping,” she answered as glibly as though she had learned a formula by heart. “His lungs are not good and the doctor ordered him to spend a few months in the open.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kit expressionlessly. “This is a good place for the lungs.”
“While I was marooned at Fort Smith, wondering what to do next,” the girl went on regretfully, “a couple of Indians told me of a man who had outfitted at Port-o’-Prayer for a trip north. From their description I knew it was Uncle Jim. I thought there was still time to intercept him, and I persuaded these Indians to guide me east from Fort Smith to cross the trails above Port-o’-Prayer. They brought me safely as far as the Dog-Rib country, and then got frightened about something and said they were going back. They were stubborn about it, so I had to let them go, and came on the rest of the way alone.”
Kitchener was watching the girl sidewise. Her manner was so innocent and confiding that it was hard to disbelieve her. But he was certain that in most of its details the yarn was pure fiction. According to Jerry Tearl—and Jerry usually knew what he was talking about—the uncle’s name was not Jim Durand, but Sim Bent. At the time he was supposed to have written to his niece and started into the woods he was still serving time in the Ottawa prison.
The girl’s excuse for entering the wilderness was unbelievable. A woman so obviously fastidious in tastes and habits certainly would never submit voluntarily to the rigors and hardships of an arctic winter, unless she were actuated by exceptional motives. Kit felt sure that she was acting with Durand, or Bent, in an attempt to sledge a load of stolen gold nuggets out of the forests. Her story of being “lost” was probably only a pretext to bring her into contact with the police of the district, so that she might spy upon their movements and attempt to throw them off her companion’s trail. She was clever enough and daring enough to hoodwink the entire force of the mounted.
Kit turned suddenly to rescue a skillet of beans, which the girl had appropriated from his pack while he slept, and set on the fire to burn.
“Sorry!” she exclaimed. “I just simply forgot ’em.”
As he glanced around at her lovely, contrite face the line of Kitchener’s jaw molded unconsciously into a harder line. The notion had struck him that it would be a good idea to keep her with him. If she were playing a subtle game at his expense, it would be a good job to have her where he could watch her. He felt a strange premonition that through Diane he eventually would be brought to his reckoning with the man who brazenly carried his father’s service revolver.
“You might have known about Indian guides,” he remarked to hide his inward thoughts. “Unless you arrange ahead of time for regular, listed men, you’re out of luck. You pick up these fly-by-nights of the bush and they’re sure to ditch you at the first hard portage.”
“I’d have been all right,” she said, “if my dogs hadn’t chased a rabbit and run away with my sledge and everything I owned. And then your friend Jerry came along with his high-handed performance.”
Her manner changed and she grew wistful and dangerously appealing. “You owe me something if you’re his friend. You’re going to take me with you, aren’t you?”
“I’ll take you,” Kit consented.
They lunched on what Inspector Bill Tearl used to call the “ABC’s” of the wilderness, ashes, beans and coffee. Then, as soon as they had cleaned up and repacked, Kit harnessed-in his dogs, and they started off together upon the northward trail.
It was a gloomy day, with only a few hours of the short daylight left. The snow had stopped falling, but the clouds that they saw through an occasional rift in the spruces were black and low-riding, portentous of trouble.
For a little distance Kitchener followed Jerry’s plainly marked trail. Jerry was wearing a pair of big, broad-toed Chippewyan snowshoes. At one place he had plowed unawares over a sharp root hidden under the snow, and by the subsequent tracks it was seen that the webbing of the right raquette had been torn. The small mishap had not halted him. He had kept onward with enormous energy, and apparently would not bother to make repairs until darkness forced him into camp.
It somehow was comforting to know that Jerry was not many hours ahead and that the future and the past were still tethered together by a visible line of footprints. As long as he clung to the trail Kit was warmed by a feeling that some part of his big brother still lingered companionably with him. But he had reached the time of final parting. After a few hundred yards he resolutely turned leftward, and would not look back at the forking of the trails. He set his eyes on the clean, new snow ahead, which, to his misty vision, was like a freshly turned page that had been assigned to him alone. Jerry had crossed out of his life again, and he was left on his own resources.
Kitchener’s attention was fixed on the snowy aisles of the forest in front of him and the compass that he wore on his wrist like a watch. Jerry had given him the compass with the injunction: “Read it often and believe it absolutely, even though you know it lies.”
Presumably Miss Durand was trudging behind the sledge. Kit did not glance around. He felt a malicious satisfaction in imagining that she was having difficulty in keeping up. Although he was rather sore from yesterday’s travels, he was beginning, nevertheless, to find his snow-legs. He fancied he was setting a stiff pace.
There is nothing so deathly quiet as the deep woods in winter. In the lull between storms the trees stood lifeless as pillars supporting a roof thatched solidly with snow. The chinking was constantly slipping, falling as softly as feathers on heads below. There seemed to be a complete absence of life. Through long stretches of the darker valleys not a tiny, clawed footprint disturbed the white surface of the ground. Even the shy, wild things of the forest shun the places of the deepest gloom.
Early in the afternoon Kit emerged suddenly from thick cover to skirt the edge of a frozen swamp. He lifted his head to look at the open sky and breathed more freely, feeling that a great oppression had been lifted momentarily.
Among the sedges that stood like broken spears in the swamp there were millions of rabbit tracks. Where rabbits make their homes their hunters likewise live. The padded prints of mink and otter and fox were seen on all sides. The muskegs of the wilderness are bloody carnival grounds. But to-day there was a strange brooding quiet everywhere. Not even a jay or a whiskey-jack flew down to mock at the travelers.
Kit traveled on to the northwest and trusted in his compass. And a while before the breathless twilight set in he crossed the base of a long, timbered slope and came out on the banks of a river. At the place where he struck the stream it was sheathed solidly in ice, but farther down he saw ugly rocks and caught the mutter of wild, white water. From Jerry’s description he knew that this must be the Vermilion River.
Miss Durand left her place behind the sledge and came forward among the panting dogs. Her hand was pressed against her ribs, as though to hide her rapid breathing. She grinned cheerfully at her fellow traveler. “You can take it faster if you feel like it,” she remarked.
Kit laughed ironically. This was simply bravado. She probably knew that he couldn’t go much faster, even as he was aware that she never could hold the pace if he did.
Along the curve of the river bank ran a scuffled trail. A sledge and dogs and a solitary man had passed here sometime during the day. Kit called the girl’s attention to the peculiarities of the snowshoe tracks, their waffle-mesh packing, the wide-spread gait, the deep drag of the heels. These same snowshoes had broken the path for him yesterday, and there was no question of their wearer’s identity.
“It’s your uncle,” he said.
She descended the sloping embankment to look with quickened interest.
“How long ago?” she asked.
“Since the snow stopped falling. He can’t be many hours ahead.”
Kitchener hied-on his drooping dogs and the sledge once more got underway. Night was approaching under a lowering sky and the reaches of the river valley and the spreading hills of spruce had begun to fade into a purple-stained haziness. Again Kit moved on in the advance, his eyes strained ahead as he made use of that last half hour of twilight.
He was a hunter pursuing a human quarry. In the dim miles somewhere ahead a tall, furtive figure was moving along with a train of dogs, crowding a little more distance on the end of a hard day’s march. If Jerry had guessed correctly, this man held in his guilty keeping the secret of the old tragedy on Great Owl Run. Presumably he was on his way now to regain the spoils of an earlier crime. The sledge with its fatal lading undoubtedly had been cached near the place where the woman was shot and her brother and Inspector Bill Tearl had vanished—one, perhaps two days farther north.
Kit hoped to be on hand when that rotted sledge was unearthed. He had the trail now, and he would hang on, wherever it led him. By the freshness of the prints he estimated that at this moment his man could not be more than ten miles farther down the river. After this evening he must be wary, neither lagging too far behind, nor closing-in too soon. Above all else the man must not be allowed to suspect that a pursuer was following the river route.
Beyond his anxiety to surprise the ex-convict red-handed in possession of the long-lost sledge, Kit’s plans were still somewhat indefinite. He probably would arrest his man, and, posing as Sergeant Buck Tearl, hand his prisoner over to the police at Saut Sauvage. With the new material evidence backing the circumstantial facts that Jerry had gathered, it might be possible to convict the man of an ancient crime. For one thing he would be hard pressed to explain how he happened to be armed with a revolver that at one time had belonged to the missing inspector of police. Even if conviction failed, there still would be a chance of forcing out the truth concerning Bill Tearl’s disappearance and hushing the scandalous rumors that had sullied his memory.
For the immediate future Kitchener held no misgivings. He wore a policeman’s coat and carried a policeman’s gun, and unless somebody discovered that he was an impostor, he held the authority of the law in this gloomy neck of the woods. If his man showed fight the former intercollegiate pistol champion would have no need of begging quarter.
His present doubts concerned only Diane Durand. She perplexed him and worried him more than he admitted even to himself. She was a vivid young woman, fearless and humorous and intensely human, with a queer strain of sweetness underlying the dominant qualities of recklessness and willfulness. He liked her in spite of himself. There was danger of his liking her much too well if he failed to heed his saner judgments.
Luckily, he had been forewarned. She was associated with the scar-faced man, towards whom Kit was beginning to feel a strong personal enmity. In the final reckoning, she too would be his enemy. And a perverse, highly organized woman is so often more bitterly implacable than the ugliest tempered man. He feared her, almost as he feared himself and his own sentimental weakness. For that reason he had set his face and his heart against her. His brother had trusted him, and whatever else he might do on earth, he could not fail Jerry.
He drove his weary dogs down river until darkness finally hid the trail of the sledge that had gone before him. Then he called a halt for the night. The lee side of a great spruce windfall served well enough for a campsite. He unhitched and tossed each of the dogs his evening’s portion of ice-stiff fish. Then he pitched the Burberry tent, which he had inherited as a part of Jerry’s luggage. He built a tiny fire screened behind the river bluff, and, with the girl’s help, he scrambled together a hot supper.
They kept awake only long enough to eat. Then with a faint, tired “good night” the girl crept into the tent.
“’Night,” said Kit curtly. He rolled up by the fire in the spare fur robes and was asleep before the dogs had finished burying themselves in the snow bank beside him.
At the hour exclusive to milkmen and the rounders of night clubs in milder lands farther south, Kit aroused himself in the frigid darkness. A stiff breeze had sprung up in the north and sleet was rattling among the gaunt branches of the willows and alders that hedged the riverside. There was something in the wild sound of the wind and the feel of the raw, tingling air that filled him with unpleasant foreboding. A native could have told him that one of the dreaded northeast storms was gathering forces to sweep down from the polar regions. It was nearly the end of the year, three days before Christmas.
He raked up the dying embers of the fire, fed on new fuel, and started breakfast. Then he shook the tent flap and awakened Miss Durand.
The girl pushed a reluctant head out into the cold, glanced heavy-eyed about her, and yawned impolitely in Kitchener’s face. “What time is it?” she demanded.
“It’s an unearthly hour,” he said.
“I haven’t had half enough sleep,” she protested.
“Neither have I,” he returned unfeelingly. “Get up. I’m pulling out of here in twenty minutes and taking the tent with me.”
They were both too drowsy and too cross even to pretend to be good-humored, and they ate breakfast without talk, and then struck camp and reloaded the sledge like a pair of automatons. While the girl was pulling on her green parka and mittens, Kit served the dogs their fishy portion and hustled them into the traces. The man and woman then slipped into their snowshoes, fumbled at the lashings with numbed fingers, and started the day’s march as the sullen dawn was beginning to break.
They traveled as they did yesterday, Kitchener acting as pioneer, and the girl tramping behind at the “gee” pole of the sledge. The new light revealed the partly obliterated trail of the man who had proceeded them down the river.
Kit followed with his head bowed to the cutting sleet, pushing on remorselessly, and not always remembering the slender, frost-whitened figure that trudged at his heels. Some time in the morning he came to a sheltered place where the remnants of a campfire had been snowed under, not many hours earlier. The ex-convict had spent the night here, and had gone on again, probably at daybreak.
From this point the trail was fresher and, for the present, very easily distinguished. The man was staying with the river. He had crossed the ice of a tributary creek and still continued down the course of the main stream. This creek was the first of the branches that Jerry had mentioned. The fifth would be Great Owl Run.
Kit did not wish to overtake his man until after he had turned into the Great Owl country. Late in the morning he discovered that the tracks of snowshoes and sledge runners had a cleaner demarcation at the edges, and he realized that he was closing up the gap too quickly. Thereafter he moved more leisurely and kept a sharper look-out ahead.
He and the girl halted at noon for lunch, and later they again stopped for a few minutes to give the dogs a breathing spell. The afternoon was beginning to fade when they reached the second of the creeks that flowed from the east into the Vermilion River.
The small stream entered the larger waterway between sloping, timbered banks. Kit descended through the willows at the head of his dogs, started across the thick ice, and then stopped as short as though an alarming voice had challenged him. In the snow along the north margin of the creek he saw a new trail—dog tracks, the twin grooves of a heavy-laden sledge, and a pair of big raquettes crushing through the snow.
Kitchener brought his team to a standstill and curtly signaled Miss Durand to halt. He strode forward to investigate, and then stood in wondering silence.
The newcomer evidently was a heavily built and energetic man. His snowshoes were of the two-bar type, remarkably broad at the toes, but in spite of their sustaining spread they sank deeply under his hard-cruising weight. The webbing of the right shoe had been torn, and afterwards roughly repaired. The imprints were too familiar to leave any possibility of doubt. Kit yesterday had examined a line of tracks that were identical with these, and he knew that he could not be mistaken. The new arrival was Jerry Tearl.
Kit beckoned on his companion and crossed the brook to regain the embankment of the main stream. The broad-toed prints ranged down to the river’s edge, and there turned northward to meet and run parallel with the trail that Kit had been following all that day. Jerry and the ex-convict were traveling the same direction, and by the recent appearance of the two trails they could not be many minutes apart.
It was incredible that the pair had actually encountered one another and were cruising in each other’s company. One must be following the other, with not more than a couple of miles separating them. Kit anxiously inspected first one snowshoe depression and then another, trying to decide which held the deepest film of sleet. To his untrained eyes there was no appreciable difference in the trails. One man probably was a little ahead of the other, but which was the pursuer and which the pursued, Kit was unable to determine.