While the others were getting things in readiness for resuming the march the next day Tom began an investigation. He had at first thought that the mysterious noises of the night had been caused by their old enemy, but some reflection made him believe that he was mistaken.
In the first place the thief, having had the good fortune to have his trail wiped out by the snow, was not likely to be foolish enough to come back and leave a fresh one. In the second, he was probably aware that his first attempt had failed to scare the boys off his track. At any rate, his continued haste along the trail appeared to conduce to such a belief.
Tom had noticed that the white object which swooped down on old Joe, scaring him almost into a fit, was a big white owl, in all probability bewildered and blinded by the fire glow. He had observed, also, that the mysterious noises appeared to come from the old hut, and the strange “booming” sounds, as nearly as he could make out, had also emanated from the same quarter.
The hut, then, appeared to be the logical place in which to look for the origin of the series of happenings that had so alarmed the venerable and superstitious Joe Picquet.
The first thing that Tom noticed when he entered the hut was something white lying on the hearthstone of the chimney. On closer inspection this proved to be the body of an Arctic hare. It was badly mangled and torn, as if something had been eating it. Tom stooped and peered up the chimney.
“Who-oo-oo-oo!” he shouted, at the same time beating the sides of the smoke shaft with a stick that he had selected from a pile of firewood laid in by the former occupant of the ruined hut.
His voice rang up the chimney like the noise of a train in a tunnel. At the same instant there came a thunderous booming sound and the rush and roar of wings. Tom had just time to dodge back before there came flopping and scratching and squeaking down the chimney the body of a huge white owl.
Tom fell upon it, but before he could secure the bird it had dug into his arm with beak and talons, and then, with a weird shriek, blundered across the hut and out through an unglazed window into the open air.
“Gone!” exclaimed Tom as he saw this. “And,” regretfully, “it would have made a bully trophy stuffed, too. However, the mystery of the Flying Wolves is explained. That booming sound was made by the flapping of the owl’s wings in the wide chimney as it flew down there with that white hare it had caught. I’ve heard that chimney swallows make the same booming in chimneys at home as they enter and leave their nests.
“As for the screams and shrieks, the cries of that poor hare explains that easily enough. Naturally, they sounded louder and as if they were up in the air, proceeding as they did from the top of the chimney. The rest of the mystery must be laid to old Joe’s imagination, which appears to be in first-class working order.”
Tom couldn’t help giving mischievous glances at Joe as, over their breakfast, he told the others the result of his investigations. But the old man’s face was scornful as Tom proceeded. When the boy had concluded, Joe, who had patiently heard him out, had his say. It was brief and to the point.
“You only theenk. Joe Picquet know. Many men know ’bout Loups Galoups—c’est sufficient.”
Tom saw that the old man was not in the least convinced that the noises were not of supernatural origin. So hard is it to shake superstitious beliefs, especially in the case of a man like old Joe, who had been born and brought up in the wilds, and who rarely came into contact with cities or life as it was beyond the wilderness.
They came to Otter Lake a few hours after their early start. On the banks of the lake they found a party consisting of two families of Indians. They were having a sort of carouse. The bucks had had the good fortune to kill three deer the day before. As is the custom with the Indians, the occasion was being observed by a celebration.
The Indians would not move on again till all the meat had been eaten or wasted. They greeted the newcomers with unusual cordiality, and the squaws threw big lumps of raw meat to the dogs, which the mamelukes gulped down in great swallows and then yapped and barked for more.
They insisted on the party halting to eat with them and partake of the unaccustomed plenty of the camp. This Joe was the more willing to do as he guessed that from the Indians he might get some news of the fugitive. But in their present mood the Indians were giving all their time to jollity of a decidedly rough character, and Joe knew better than to offend them by talking business until the time was ripe.
While they waited to eat, the squaws bustled about collecting wood. The boys hated to see women thus employed, but they knew that they dare not offer to do it; so they sat silent while old Joe and the Indians smoked and talked. The Indians were telling of the great hunt of the three deer, enlarging, as is their custom, every little detail till the story stretched out to endless lengths.
Then they discussed dogs, a topic of endless interest in the North, where dogs are infinitely more valuable than horses, and where oftentimes a life, or many lives, may depend on their gameness and reliability. This topic exhausted, they turned to the weather.
In a land where so much depends upon its moods, the weather is a subject of vital interest. The Indians told of the big snows they had seen, and old Joe Picquet related his similar experiences, and so the chat ran along till the squaws announced that everything was ready for them to eat.
They sat about the fire in the drafty tepee, eating off bits of birch bark. That is, the white men did. The Indians used their fingers. At last the meal was finished, pipes lighted, and old Joe felt at liberty to ask the questions he was dying to put.
At first the Indians shook their heads. They had seen no white man. But then one of the squaws interjected a remark. Wild Bird, another of the squaws, had seen that very morning, while gathering wood to the north, the trail of a sled. She had examined it and had found by it an odd object. She had brought that object into camp. Would she produce it? She would.
From a corner of the tepee the squaw shyly produced her find. The boys could have uttered a cry of joy as they saw what it was.
The fag end of a yellow cigarette! Assuredly, then, the trail Wild Bird had seen was that of the fugitive. It began about two miles to the north by a tall “Rampick” (dead tree), near which he had camped, judging by the remains of a fire, and from which he had hacked off some dead limbs. And then Wild Bird herself gave another bit of evidence to clinch the identification. She had remarked the man’s funny snowshoes. Never had she seen any like them.
“Boosh! Mes garçons! We have found zee trail once more! Bien!”
Old Joe’s face beamed. But although they were anxious to hurry on, they could not leave the friendly Indians hastily without a severe breach of etiquette. But at length the social code of the tribe was satisfied, and, with well-fed dogs in the traces, they got under way once more. Wild Bird and another Indian went with them part of the way, so as to be sure that they would not miss the spot at which they were to pick up the trail.
At last they reached the gaunt “Rampick,” good-byes were said, and they had the satisfaction once more of following the two familiar parallel lines in the snow and beside them the tracks of the odd-shaped snowshoes. The sky was gloomy and gray, but the Indians had said there would be no more snow.
They journeyed on through a melancholy land all that afternoon. That fall there had been a forest fire, and the blackened stumps of the trees that had not fallen stood out, etched in ebony black, against the dreary gray sky.
It was a pensive and melancholy land. But through it all, to brighten the trail like a streak of vivid scarlet, was the track of the sled, the sled on which reposed the stolen black fox skin. And beside it, as if to assure them they were on the right track, lay at intervals little yellow-wrapped rolls of tobacco.
“Zee time ees not long now,” declared old Joe, when they camped that night on the edge of a gloomy little lake tucked away between two rocky ridges.
The following morning, when they rose, the sky was cloudless. The night before the stars had shone like diamond pin points in the sky. The Northern Lights had whirled in a mad dance of shimmering radiance.
Beyond the camp stretched the white smoothness of the frozen river leading from the sad little lake. The heaped masses of piled mountains showed to the north and west, savage boundaries, bristling with defiance toward the intruders into a frozen world.
The morning was very cold and very still. It was that brooding stillness that hangs over the land of the frost-bitten suns and seems to convey a sense of something alert with enmity to mankind, hovering like a sinister cloud over the frozen snow fields. But of all this, although keen enough to such impressions at other times, the boys noticed little as they bustled about preparing for the day’s work.
It was reasonably certain now that before very long they must catch up with the thief. The dogs were fed with deer meat purchased in exchange for tobacco from the friendly Indians of the day before. The boiling hot tea and the fried cakes and deer meat put new heart into the adventurers. As for the dogs, they frisked and capered in the snow with unaccustomed playfulness after their full meal, till old Joe summoned them to the harness. Then they resumed the hang-dog air of the mameluke, which is an odd sort of blend, suggesting obstinacy and defiance and cringing servility.
Tom noticed that old Joe carefully oiled the lock of his old squirrel rifle before they started. On the benevolent face of the old man there was a new expression. It partook almost of ferocity, and Tom began to fear that in the event of their coming up with the thief they might have some difficulty in restraining the old man from violence.
As he oiled his rifle and caressed the aged weapon lovingly the boys noticed that the old trapper was humming to himself.
“You seem happy,” said Tom, as the old man knocked the ashes out of his pipe and tightened the thongs of his snowshoes, straightening up again with a grunt.
“Eh bien! I am happy. To-day I teenk the owl catch the weasel, mon enfant. Boosh! Let us be going.”
The whip cracked, the dogs yapped, the harness creaked as it tightened under the stout pull of the meat-stuffed mamelukes, and the little cavalcade dashed forward. Once more they were remorselessly upon the trail of the thief; but to-day there was a difference in their bearing. By some intuition which he would have been at a loss to explain, Tom felt that the morning’s start was the beginning of the end. Before night, if fortune favored them, they would come face to face with the man to whose track they had clung for so long.
Old Joe capered about like a boy. He sang snatches of wild French-Canadian boat songs, he snapped his fingers, and once he cut from the trail-side a thick branch, which he trimmed down like a walking-stick and then swung like a cudgel. The boys guessed that in imagination he was bestowing a sound beating upon the thief.
But Tom had resolved that there must be no work of that sort when they came up with the man, if they ever did. It was plain to see that old Joe was prepared to carry out to the letter the law of “an eye for an eye,” the only law that woodsmen North of Fifty-three know or care much about. He did not blame old Joe for his desire to bestow at least a good beating on the thief, considering the old trapper’s surroundings for many years; but he did determine firmly that there was to be nothing of the sort that old Joe too evidently contemplated.
At noon that day they overhauled the ashes of the thief’s cooking fire. They were still warm. Old Joe’s saint-like face grew grimmer than ever. His white whiskers fairly bristled.
“We are not far behind heem now, mes amis,” he chuckled. “Boosh! Before long we shall see what we will see.”
Tom was wise enough to make no comments then. Time enough for that when they came up with the man. For the present he allowed old Joe to indulge himself in all sorts of sanguinary threats. Their midday meal was despatched with what haste may be imagined. Then the dogs were urged forward at a still brisker pace than they had followed during the morning. The snowshoes flew creakingly over the hard snow.
The boys found their minds busy with conjectures as they forged forward. What manner of man was this they were overhauling? Was he some ruffian of the wilds who would put up a stiff fight that might necessitate the use of firearms in self-defense, or would he yield to the superior force opposed to him and give up peacefully his ill-gained spoils?
As the day waned and the west began to crimson, Tom decided to speak his mind out to old Joe.
“See here, Joe, what do you mean to do when we catch up with this fellow?”
“Eh? Dat man? Why, make him geev up the skeens, of course.”
“But if he won’t? If he opposes us?”
“In dat case——”
Joe said no more but patted the stock of his old squirrel rifle with a gesture that spoke volumes.
“No, we can’t have any of that sort of thing,” said Tom decisively. “If he won’t give up the skins without making trouble, we shall have to make him prisoner somehow and one of us stand guard over him while the others get some of the authorities.”
Old Joe shrugged his shoulders and looked at Tom with inexpressible astonishment. He couldn’t make out this at all. In his rough creed offenders against the code of the woods must be summarily dealt with. Rifle or rope, it was all one to him, but the idea of calling in outside forces to aid him had never entered the rough old woodsman’s head.
“Zee police?” he inquired. “You want call zee police, or zee sheriff? Pourquoi? You leave heem to me. Old Joe Picquet feex heem—bien.”
He raised his old rifle to his shoulder and squinted down the sights as if to make sure that everything was in perfect order.
It was about four o’clock when, from a thick clump of young balsam trees about a hundred yards ahead of our party, there came the sharp barking of dogs. The boys thrilled. At last the big moment had arrived; the end of their pursuit was at hand. There could be no doubt that the camp they had come upon was the camp of the thief.
If any doubt remained it was speedily removed by the sight of the roof of a small tent standing amid the dark green trees. It was a white man’s tent of the wall type, a variety that an Indian would scorn to use. From the top of it stuck a small stove-pipe, an unwonted sight in wilderness travel. A stream of smoke coming from the pipe showed that the tent was occupied.
From the camp the four dogs who had heralded the arrival of the boys and their old guide came prancing and snuffing, their tails curled and teeth shown in a snarl. But from the tent itself, beyond the smoke that curled up from the stovepipe, there came no sign of life.
They halted and held a council of war.
“Let’s go right up to the tent and demand the man to surrender to us,” suggested Jack.
But old Joe negatived this with a shake of the head.
“He is ver’ bad man,” said he, “maybe so he hide in the trees and shoot. Moost be ver’ careful.”
“He may be peering out at us now,” breathed Tom, glancing about him uneasily.
“Oui; maybe so he have us covered weez hees rifle at dees moment,” agreed old Joe, without the flicker of an eyelash. With amazing coolness he squatted down and filled his pipe.
“Moost hav’ smoke to teenk,” he explained.
For some seconds, while the boys were in an agony of suspense and the strange dogs stood with bristling hackles and snarling teeth at a respectful distance from old Joe’s team, the veteran of the northern wilds drew placidly at his old brier. To look at him no one would have imagined that the venerable-looking old man was revolving in his mind the capture of a desperate rascal, who even at that moment might have him covered from some point of vantage.
The suspense was a cruel test of the boys’ nerves. Remember that they were out in the open, affording an easy mark for anyone lurking within the shadows of the dark balsams that screened the tent with its smoking stove-pipe. For all they knew, in fact, the man might not be alone. He might be one of a gang regularly organized to raid traps and skin stores. Such organizations were not rare in that part of the country, as the boys well knew.
At length old Joe rose, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and faced the boys. They knew that he had at last decided upon a plan. It was a simple one. The wonder was that he had taken so long to arrive at a conclusion.
“I am going to call out to dees man,” said Joe. “I tell heem if he ees fool he will fight us; if he ees wise man he weel do what we say.”
Before they could stop him the old man had stepped forward, using the trunk of a balsam tree as a shield between himself and the door of the tent. A minute later someone stirred within the tent; then came a voice:
“Who’s there?”
Joe gave a little laugh.
“Someone to see you,” he said. “I ask you, please shove outside any weapon you have weez you. It ees no good for you to fight. We have caught you at last.”
There was a silence inside the tent. Then the boys saw the flap raised and a rifle thrust out. Old Joe’s face beamed. This was going to be easier than he had imagined. He beckoned to the boys, and, as they joined him, he flung open the flap and stepped inside the tent.
Stretched out on the ground right across the doorway was a small, wizened looking man covered with a shabby blanket made of mangy-looking skins. His head and shoulders were propped up on a couple of filled packs.
Even in the dim light within the tent it could be seen that his cheeks were drawn and gray and that pain had etched lines of suffering on them. The boys stood amazed just at old Joe’s elbow.
Was it possible that this little gray man with the look of pain on his face was the robber whom they had pictured during the long days and nights of the pursuit as a savage, truculent fellow ready to give them a fight rather than yield up the stolen skins? They actually felt pity as they looked at the little wasted form on the ground.
As for Joe, he appeared to be equally dumfounded, but he soon recovered his faculties.
“And so, mon ami, we have found you at zee last, eh?”
“Real pleased you come, too! Real pleased,” was the answer the little gray man gave in a high, piping treble.
The boys took in the details of the tent. The small sheet-iron stove with its pipe going through the roof, the queer-looking snowshoes, and the pile of duffle left in a corner just as it had been thrown from the sled. Old Joe looked more taken aback than ever. He had come prepared to fight some rascal who would put up a desperate resistance. Instead, he found a little wasted man who had nothing to say but that he was glad to see them.
There was a pause while Joe reconstructed things. It was broken in upon by another piping up of the thin voice of the man on the ground.
“See that sack over thar, stranger?” said the little man, indicating a partially filled pack-bag in one corner of the tent.
“Oui! I see heem,” rejoined Joe in a dazed voice.
“Wa’al, thar’s fish in thar. I’d take it real kind in yer ef yer’d jes’ feed my dorgs, mister. They ain’t hed much ter sot their teeth in lately, me being hurried like along the trail.”
The boys exchanged glances. They had met with many strange experiences, but this appeared to be the cap-sheaf of them all. Old Joe simply shrugged his shoulders; he was bereft of speech. In the face of this astonishing end to their long, grim chase, he was, for the time being, incapable of finding words.
He crossed over to the sack and began pulling out fish, but in the midst of the operation he found his voice again.
“Say, you, what’s zee matter weez you, anyhow?”
“I’m sick,” responded the man under the shabby blanket, “right sick.”
“I see you seeck, all right,” said Joe, “but what ails you? Boosh!” he concluded, puffing out his sun-burned cheeks.
“I don’t rightly know,” rejoined the other; “it’s a sorter pain all over.”
He moved uneasily under the shabby blanket and the boys saw his hands, which lay outside the covering, clench and unclench, as if he were suffering a sudden spasm of pain.
Outside the tent there came a sound of plaintive yapping and howling. The little man’s mamelukes had smelled the fish.
“Reckon they’re hungry, poor beasts,” said the little man.
Joe did not reply, but moved to the door of the tent. He threw out the fish. The dogs sprang upon it ravenously, tearing it as if they had fasted for days. Joe watched them for a minute with an odd look on his bearded face. Then he turned to the man again.
“What your name, anyhow?”
“Dolittle—Peabody Dolittle,” said the man, “but somehow folks mostly call me Pod.”
Pod! The boys, despite the situation, could almost have laughed at the name.
Here was a bold thief who, by all the rules of fiction, should have borne some name that would fit with his supposedly desperate character, and instead of that he told them that he was “mostly called Pod.”
As for Joe, he could only gasp and shrug his shoulders helplessly.
“Boosh!” he exclaimed after an interval. “Pod, you an’ me and dese garçon got to have some talk, Pod.”
“Go right ahead, mister,” said Pod.
Old Joe was fairly stumped. So were the boys. The little gray man was sick, feeble and apologetic, and yet they knew that he had stolen those furs and he must be made to give them up.
“Guess we’ll leave this thing to Joe,” whispered Jack to Tom.
“The only thing to do. I don’t like this at all. I’d almost rather he’d put up a fight.”
“Say, there’s no more wood by that stove,” said Jack; “guess he was too sick to cut any more. We’d better go and get some ourselves. What do you say?”
“All right. Let Joe do the talking. I’d feel like a ruffian myself to cross-question a sick man, even if he is a thief.”
The two boys drew Joe aside. Then they left the tent. As they went, their talk ran upon the strangeness of the twist of circumstances that had made them become ministers to the comfort of a man who had wronged them and led them a long, hard chase through the frozen lands to recover their own.
As they chopped wood, they stopped every now and then and looked at each other.
“This beats our experience with the two crazy miners,” said Tom, during one of these pauses.
“Beats it! I should say so. I thought that was about the limit of queer adventures, but this is an odder one still.”
“How a sick man could have gone through all that Pod has, I can’t imagine,” said Tom.
“And he’s pretty sick, too, I guess,” commented Jack. “Well, let’s get ahead with our wood chopping and go back and find out what Joe has learned.”
In the meantime old Joe was almost equally at a loss. He needed time to adjust himself to circumstances so utterly different from those that he had imagined would await them at the end of the long trail. At last, however, he found words:
“Say you, Pod, or what’ev’ yo’ name ees,” he began, “you know what for me, Joe Picquet, an’ zee two garçons come here, eh?”
“I kin guess,” was the response, accompanied by a mild smile.
Old Joe smoked furiously. Here was a man he had come prepared to fight over the stolen skins, and the man smiled at him.
“Ah ha! You can guess!” he burst out at last. “You bet my life you guess. You guess bien dat you one beeg teef, eh? You guess dat? Boosh!”
There was no answer from the man lying under the shabby skin rug.
Old Joe began to find his task becoming more and more difficult. If only the man would say something, make some aggressive move, he would have no difficulty in letting loose his long bottled-up rage. But as it was, he felt almost as helpless as the recumbent figure on the ground.
“Why you no answer, you—you Pod!” he exclaimed. “I want know. Comprenez-vous? Joe Picquet wan’ know wha’ for you break in his skeen keg an’ take un-deux-trois nice skeen?”
Again there was silence. Old Joe rose and came close to the man. This time he shook a finger in his face.
“Attendez, you leetle coyote! You do worse as zees. You steal from two garçons one black fox skeen. Where dose skeens? We come to get dem.”
The little man blinked as the finger was shaken in his face, but he made no other sign that he had heard. Old Joe’s eyes began to blaze. This was sheer obstinacy.
“You answer pret’ queeck or we load you on sled an’ take you Red Fox trading pos’. Have you give up to zee jail. Now you talk.”
The little man made a peevish face and waved his arms about feebly. “I dunno nuthin’ 'bout yer skins,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”
This time it was Joe who did not answer. Near the head of the man, half under the sacks that served him as pillows, Joe had seen some skins sticking out. With scant regard for “Pod’s” comfort, he began pulling at these.
For the first time, Pod began to grow restless.
“Them’s all mine,” he insisted, “t’aint no use your lookin’. Ain’t none of yours thar, mister.”
“Where are dey, den? Where is dat black fox skeen you take from les garçons on zee Porc’pine Riviere?”
“I dunno, I’m telling you. I ain’t never been near the Porcupine River. Dunno whar’ it is.”
“You don’t, eh? Boosh! Let me tell you, mon ami, you tell one beeg story! Zee two garçons, dey trail you all zee way from dere, you beeg teef. You’ snowshoes make different track, an’ see zee cigareette stumps!” Several of the yellow paper wrappings were littered about the tent. “Now do you say you are not zee same man?”
“Stranger, honest to mackerel, I dunno what yer talkin’ erbout.”
Joe turned to the pile of skins once more.
“We search every corner dees tent, den,” he said, with finality.
But as he was stooping over the skins, throwing them out one by one, and scanning the pile the while with eager eyes for his own and the boys’ property, some subtle sixth sense made him suddenly wheel.
Out of the corner of his eye he had seen the little man’s hands make a sudden move. He was on him with a bound. In a flash he had both the little gray man’s hands pinioned in his own powerful grip, one over and one under the shabby covering.
Then, with a swift movement, he yanked the skin blanket down. He disclosed a hand holding a wicked looking revolver of heavy caliber. It was fully loaded and cocked.
Pod was not the harmless individual he had appeared to be.
“Boosh! So you would try keel me, eh, mon brave?” puffed old Joe, wresting the weapon from the hand of the little gray man and hurling it across the room. “Vous etes one fine fellow, n’est-ce pas?”
Leaving him for an instant, old Joe fairly slid across the tent and did something which, but for his excitement, he would have accomplished in the first place. He “broke” the pistol and extracted the six cartridges.
The little man under the tattered blanket watched with glittering eyes. Then Joe Picquet turned to him once more.
“Where ees zee black fox skeen, you beeg rascal?”
The old trapper felt like pouncing upon the other and shaking the truth out of him, especially following his discovery of the little man’s weapon. But the fellow appeared to be genuinely sick and he throttled down his anger.
The man remained silent. Old Joe thought he resembled a little glittering-eyed weasel as he lay there watching the old trapper with furtive eyes, that though they appeared averted followed old Joe’s every move. But he did not speak in rejoinder to Joe’s direct command. He merely grinned in a sickly fashion, showing a double row of yellow, uneven teeth. Seen thus, he looked more like some little wicked animal than ever. The sympathy that Joe had felt for him began to evaporate.
“See here, you, you no play ’possum weez old Joe Picquet,” he said roughly, putting on an appearance of ferocity. “He no stand for monkey-doodle business. Non, mon ami.”
The man lay in silence for a space. Then he moved and spoke.
“Look in that sack yonder,” he said, indicating a bulging gunny-bag in a corner near the sled.
Old Joe lost no time in ripping open the deerskin fastenings of the bag and dragging out its contents. These he dumped in a heap on the floor. There were marten skins, ermine skins and weasel skins galore, but none of his skins nor so much as a hair of a black fox pelt.
Joe turned angrily on the other.
“I geev you one chance,” he said; “you fool me no more. You tell me where dat skeen ees or les garçons go to Red Fox for zee autarkies.”
The sick man grinned again, showing his yellow molars, that looked like stumps protruding from the sands at low tide.
“I tole yer, yer wouldn’t find it, Frenchy,” said he, “an’ I reckon you won’t. I ain’t got it, an’ that’s the truth.”
Joe’s jaw closed with a click. His teeth clenched and his old eyes flashed.
“Ver’ well den, mon ami. I search your blankets.”
It might have been fancy, but Joe thought that he saw the man on the ground turn a shade paler. Old Joe approached the bed. In the dim light his face looked as ferocious as the countenance of a wolf. Perhaps something warned Peabody Dolittle that it was no use to evade the question of his guilt any longer.
“It’s under the lower blanket,” he said weakly.
Old Joe thrust his hand under and then, for the second time, he looked up just in the nick of opportunity. As he stooped low, the sick man had raised himself on his bed, and now had a knife poised above the old French-Canadian’s back.
With a shout of rage, the trapper struck the upraised arm and sent the blade halfway across the tent. It fell ringingly to the ground. At the same instant, the boys, who had heard Joe’s shout, came running into the tent, their arms full of wood.
“Aloons, mes enfants!” cried the angry old man. “Do not give good wood to such as dis man. Twice he try to keel me. Once weez pistol, once weez knife. Let heem freeze in zee snows if he weel. We weel help heem no more.”
He thrust a hand under the man’s blankets where the latter had indicated. Then, with a shout of triumph, he drew out a beautiful skin. A black fox pelt, shimmering, glossy, beautiful!
The boys gave a cry. It was theirs beyond a doubt, the skin of the fine black fox that they had last seen barking and howling for his liberty, and whom the two partners in the fox-raising enterprise had set such store by. They were still looking at the skin, petrified, when old Joe uttered another cry of triumph.
This time, from beneath the blankets he drew out the skins the thief had filched from his own cabin. His rage knew no bounds. He appeared angrier now that he had found the skins than he was before. He shook his fist at the sick man and upbraided him unmercifully.
“You are one skunk! One homme mechant!” he roared. “You first rob and den try to keel. Above all, you lie. Boosh! I have for you no use.”
“Well, you’ve got yer skins now, ain’t ye?” asked the man on the ground, in a feeble voice. “What more d’ye want?”
“A good deal more,” struck in Tom. “How did you come to know of the foxes on the Porcupine River?”
“I overhearn two fellers at the tradin’ post talkin’ about ’em,” whimpered the crest-fallen Pod.
“You did, eh?” exclaimed Jack. “What sort of looking fellows?”
The man lying stretched out there with an abject, fawning look on his face turned a beseeching glance on them. But they knew of the cowardly crime he had tried to perpetrate and hardened themselves toward him. In his high-pitched, plaintive voice, Pod gave a description of the two men he had declared were responsible for his knowledge of the fox kennels on the Porcupine.
When he concluded his description Tom and Jack exchanged astonished glances.
“Uncle Dacre!” cried Jack.
“Mr. Chillingworth!” cried Tom. “I’ll bet they were talking business and this fellow here crept up and listened.”
Although they were both very angry, somehow the thought that they had succeeded in the hard task they had set out to accomplish, made them less disturbed than they might have been.
“What did you do it for?” asked Tom.
“I can’t tell yer now,” was the rejoinder. “It was fer many reasons. Some day perhaps you’ll know. Now I can’t say nothin’.”
“At least, tell us if it was you that tried to frighten us by howling through a birch-bark megaphone?” asked Tom.
The little man grinned.
“Yes, I did it, all right,” he said, with the same soft, foolish smile. “I calcerlated to shake you off’n my trail. But I didn’t do it. It was jes’ a plum foolish joke, that’s all, and——”
“Stand right where you are!”
The order came from a voice behind the boys and old Joe, who had been bending over the stricken little gray fellow.
They all wheeled like a flash. In the doorway stood three figures—tall, rough-looking men dressed in the ordinary garb of the trail. All three were armed and each had assigned himself to “take care of” one of our adventurers.
The “sick” man broke into a shrill laugh.
“He! he! he! Thought you’d fooled Wolf Ericsen, didn’t you? Well, by the eternal, you’ve got another guess coming, I reckon. Dick! Sarsen! Flem! keep ’em covered while I get up.”
The day following the departure of Tom and Jack from the camp of the Yukon Rover, Sandy decided that he would take a stroll along the trap line for some little distance to see if any of the smaller traps, interspersed with the big box traps for catching the live foxes, had caught anything. Before he departed he carefully fed the animals in the “kennels.”
This done, he wrapped himself up as warmly as possible in a thick parkee, heavy lumbermen’s boots and a cap that came down over his ears. Before leaving he took care to write a note and leave it on the table in the cabin, informing the two partners briefly where he had gone and what had taken place during their absence, in case they should return before he got back again.
When all this had been attended to, Sandy filled a haversack with food and packed a small aluminum kettle and set out on snowshoes on his solitary travels. He wondered what his companions were doing and what success they had had in their pursuit of the thief. The boy felt lonesome without his chums, but as he made his way over the crunching snow the keen air brightened him up and raised his spirits considerably.
Since Tom and Jack had left, nothing to cause alarm had occurred, and although Sandy had passed an anxious night, he had seen nothing to indicate that any further harm was meditated to the valuable live things now left in his sole care.
The traps were strung in a regular line, whose general direction was marked by blazed trees and here and there some piled rocks. Near to the Yukon Rover’s mooring place there were no box traps. These were stationed far back in the remoter districts, for the valuable foxes they were after were wild, shy creatures, seldom coming within miles of a spot where they could detect the presence of human kind.
At the first trap Sandy found a white weasel. The bait, the head of a hare, was intact. The luckless weasel had not even had the satisfaction of a meal.
Sandy placed the little creature in his pocket, not without disappointment. The Bungalow Boys’ traps, the steel ones, that is, were set for food, such as hares and rabbits. They did not care to capture weasels and ermine particularly, although red foxes, which have a habit of scaring away the more valuable varieties, were welcome to their traps.
Tom and Jack, as we know, had already encountered the track of a wolverine. It was now Sandy’s turn to come across the funny, bear-like imprints of one of these destructive creatures.
“Whist!” he exclaimed, as he saw it, “no more animals in the traps the noo! A wolverine has a bigger appetite than a cormorant. They’re the real game hogs, all right.”
As he had expected, the next trap showed plentiful evidences of the wolverine’s visit. All that was left of the marten that had been caught in it was some bits of skin and about an inch of the tail. Bloodstains on the snow around the trap showed where the wolverine had enjoyed a meal at the expense of the young trappers.
“Pretty expensive feeder,” mused Sandy to himself. “So far this glutton’s meals have cost about thirty dollars in the value of skins destroyed. Nothing cheap about him.”
The boy trudged along over the snow, the creaking of his shoes as he advanced being the only sound that broke the oppressive stillness of the frozen wilderness. In spite of himself the boy felt the vast silence and loneliness like a weight laid upon his mind. So far as he knew, he was the only human being within miles. It made him feel very tiny, almost ant-like, to think of the minute speck his body must make as he toiled onward amidst the white desolation spread all about him.
At noon he paused, and seating himself under a tall “Rampick” that upreared its gaunt form blackly against the snow, he ate the lunch he had brought with him. Then he resumed his journey, intending to turn back again and make for camp after about an hour’s more travel. He figured that this would bring him back to the camp by nightfall.
As he followed up the traps he noticed that beside the ravages of the wolverine other tracks began to appear in the snow, telling of the presence of animals only less welcome.
Tracks that the boy recognized as the footprints of wolves were plentiful about the traps devastated by the wolverine, or perhaps by the wolves themselves.
The sight sent a thrill through him in spite of himself. Sandy had never gotten over his dread of wolves. He would never forget his first sight of the gaunt, gray creatures that he had seen hunting in a pack some weeks before. Even in dreams he could still see their foamy fangs, gaunt flanks and lean, active bodies with their sharp, avid heads and blazing yellow eyes.
At the sight of the tracks, which were apparently recent, an uneasy feeling possessed him. The wolves were abroad, possibly in his immediate vicinity. He glanced around him. About half a mile away, at the summit of a snow-covered rise, was a big pile of rocks heaped up as if they had been some giant’s playthings left in jumbled confusion. Beyond lay a dark little wood of balsam and fir. Sandy was still looking at this latter and meditating whether or not to visit the traps he knew were set in under the shadows of the somber-looking trees, when his ear was arrested by a sudden sound.
It rang through the silence like a clarion. He recognized it instantly and his nerves thrilled as he heard.
It was the cry of a wolf pack coming from the timber patch. Sandy half turned, uncertain whether to keep on or make a retreat.
As he hesitated, from the wood there issued several lean-flanked, gray creatures, whose forms he knew only too well.
They were the leaders of the pack. Behind them, helter-skelter, came a tumbling, racing-mass of open-fanged creatures.
The leaders spied the boy, halted an instant and then, with fierce, short barks, headed straight for him.
Sandy’s first impulse was to run. Then he recalled what he had heard an old woodsman say, that to flee from a wolf pack is to invite almost certainly pursuit. Yet what other course was there for him to pursue? He had his rifle and some cartridges, but the pack was a large one and there was something in their appearance, even at that distance, that was strikingly sinister in its suggestion of unloosed savagery.
Behind the hesitating boy lay stretched a level snowfield without a tree or a rock showing above its surface for some distance. Ahead of him, and a little to his right, was the big rock pile already mentioned. The wolves were racing diagonally across the snow. If he did not act quickly the only refuge in sight, the heaped up pile of rocks, would be lost to him.
Hesitating no longer, Sandy put out every effort that was in him and started for the rocks. But as he flew over the snow with his heart beating as if it would burst his sides, he knew that if he won the race it would be only by a very narrow margin.
His feet felt leaden. Although he put forth every ounce of strength he possessed, it appeared to him that he hardly moved. He had experienced the same sensation in nightmares, when he seemed to be in the grip of peril without the power of crying out or moving a limb.
“I must make it! I must!” he kept saying to himself as he pushed forward.
But the space between himself and the wolves, who had seen his move and apparently divined the object of it, was growing terribly small. Racing at an angle to his line of progress, the creatures were swiftly closing up the gap which gave the boy his margin of safety.
The rocks, which he must reach to have even a fighting chance against the famished pack, appeared to his bursting eyes to be almost as far off as they had been when he started on his race for life. He saw that they were immense boulders with big, snow-filled crevasses between them. If only he could reach them he did not doubt but that there were innumerable natural fortresses among them from which he could safely defy the wolves.
But could he make it?
Life and death hinged on that question now, for there could be no doubt remaining but that he was the wolves’ quarry, the prey that they sought with dripping fangs and eager, blazing eyes.
The thought flashed through Sandy’s mind that the hunting must have been bad for the pack to make them pursue a human being, something which the savage but cowardly creatures rarely do unless driven to desperation by ferocious pangs of appetite. Hunger, as with most animals, will convert wolves, ordinarily despised by the northern woodsman, into beasts as dangerous as tigers.
Sandy had heard tales of the northern wolves when feed is scarce and the snow lies on the land. He was under no delusions as to his danger. But, strange to say, as he ran onward a sort of fierce pleasure in the race came over him.
At school Sandy had made some notable records on the track. But never had he had such an incentive to speed as now confronted him. He felt a savage determination to beat out those gray-flanked, drip-fanged creatures, if the life within him held out in the cruel test of speed and staying power.
The rocks loomed larger. He had crossed the line the pack was pursuing. A savage chorus of yelps arose as the leaders saw what had happened and swung their cohorts on a new tack.
And now the haven of refuge he was struggling for loomed up larger and closer. Only a few feet more and——
A rock concealed under the snow, an outcropping no doubt of the large, castle-like pile, caught Sandy’s foot. He plunged headlong into the snow. As he fell he could hear behind him the yelps of the pack. They thought that now the race was over beyond a doubt; that in a few seconds more their teeth would be tearing the helpless boy.
But Sandy, half stunned by the violence of his fall, managed to struggle to his feet in the nick of time. He could almost feel the breath of the leaders of the yapping pack at his neck when he found himself, he hardly knew how, on his legs once more and struggling with the last remaining ounces of his strength to reach the rocky cliffs, which alone held out a promise of safety.
Many things raced through his mind as he drove on. Thoughts of Tom and Jack, of his old school fellows and of his parents far away in Scotland, memories of old grudges and repented wrongs. Sandy had read of drowning people whose whole lives race before them in a dazzling film of realism in their last moments. He wondered if it was his end that was presaged by the vivid panorama of his career that was mirrored in his mind as he ran.
Behind him there arose a savage howl of disappointment. Cheated of their prey just when it appeared certain that it was within their grasp, the pack was giving vent to its feelings. The big, gaunt leaders gave forth a baying note, the hunting call of the pack.
Sandy set his teeth.
“I’ll beat you yet, you gloomeroons!” he muttered savagely.
He stumbled again; recovered his balance; went plunging half blindly on. His mind was now a blank to all but one thought: those rocks in front of him. He must reach them, he must, he must.
He stretched out his arms as if to try to grasp with his finger tips the rough surface of the foremost of the huge boulders. The wolves’ howls sounded more loudly behind him. His strength began to falter at their cries.
But by an effort he rallied his nerve and put forth another burst of speed.
The next instant he felt his hands touch the rocks in front of him. Almost simultaneously the leader of the wolves, a great, gaunt beast, fully shoulder high among his brethren, leaped at the boy.
But the jump fell short. With a savage snarl of disappointment, the great gray wolf fell back, while Sandy, with the strength of desperation, clambered upward among the rocks.