The leader of the wolves, a great, gaunt beast, leaped at the boy.
Panting, almost at the limit of his strength, with torn hands and rent garments, the lad clambered upward among the rocks. They had seemed large at a distance. Now they appeared to be veritable mountains of boulders. But they were rough and afforded a fair foothold, except where windblown snow had obscured their surfaces and made them slippery and treacherous.
After five minutes of climbing, Sandy rested for a time and paused to look down below him. The wolves were apparently taken aback by his successful evasion of their fangs. The leaders were seated on their gaunt haunches gazing hungrily up at him, while behind them the rest of the pack moved uneasily about. The boy could see the steam of their hot breaths as they panted, their red tongues lolling far out and their sharp, tiger-like teeth exposed.
Their wicked little yellow eyes were fixed steadfastly upon the boy, who looked down upon them from the shoulder of a great rock. He was safe for the time being, and Sandy took advantage of the respite to rally his faculties.
Although he was temporarily secure from the pack, his position was still about as bad as it could be. He was practically marooned on the rocky island in the snows until the pack should see fit to withdraw, or until some other game drew their attention from him.
Without letting his eyes stray from the wolves for more than a second at a time, Sandy took stock. He had his rifle, hunting knife and some twenty cartridges, besides those in the magazine of his rifle, twelve in number. Of his lunch there was left some baking powder bread, a small quantity of cold deer meat and some salt and pepper.
It was little enough for the protracted siege that he might have to stand on the rocky pile, but scanty though the provision was, he was glad of the foresight that had made him save it for a snack on his way home. Besides the articles mentioned, the boy had his matches and a compass, and that was all.
But the next minute he realized that even his matches were gone. In his frantic climb, the nickel, water-proof case in which the precious lucifers were carried had dropped from his pocket. Looking down after the discovery of his loss, he saw the glint of the little metal cylinder lying on the snow at the foot of his haven of refuge.
To recover it was out of the question. The wolves grimly stood guard over it as if fully understanding its value to the human creature on the rocks. As Sandy looked at the wolves, the great snow rangers stared straight back at him with an uncanny steadiness. He seemed to read their message in their flaming yellow orbs.
“There is no hurry. We can wait. As well to-morrow as now.”
Sandy clambered yet higher. At his first move the leaders, as if by concerted action, flung themselves tooth and nail at the rocky escarpment confronting them.
The pack, snarling and yapping with chagrin, were hurled back from the stony fortress like waves from a pier. Sandy observed this with satisfaction. His place of refuge appeared to be impregnable. The wolves’ only chance lay in starving him out. And with a bitter pang Sandy realized that unless help arrived or he was able to frighten them off, the creatures stood a good chance of accomplishing this.
It was odd that the emergency which might have unmanned much stronger minds than Sandy’s should not have had the effect of reducing him to despair. But this was not so. The Scotch lad possessed in him a strain of indomitable blood. Like his ancestors, who sought refuge in the rocks and caves of the highlands during the stormy periods of Scotland’s history, the boy, terrible though his position was and fraught with menace, yet kept up his sturdy courage.
In fact, the danger of his position appeared to lend him nerve which he might have lacked under less trying conditions. It is often so. Human nature has a habit of rising to emergencies. Dangers and difficulties are often the anvils upon which men and boys are tried to see if they be of the true metal.
The wolves, with supernatural patience, resumed their positions of waiting, following their futile attack on the rocky wall that faced them. But Sandy saw that although they appeared indifferent to him, they yet had an eye to his every movement.
He tried the experiment of raising an arm or swinging a leg as if he were about to move again. Instantly every sharp-nosed head was raised in an attitude of deep attention. To those wolves there was but one interesting object in the whole of that dreary expanse of snow, and that was Sandy McTavish.
“I’ve got to do something,” thought Sandy desperately. “Before long it will be getting dusk.”
He couldn’t help giving a shudder as he thought of this. The idea of spending a night in the freezing cold with those silent, tireless watchers below him shook his courage badly. He concluded to try the effect of a few shots among the pack. Possibly, if he could kill the leaders, the rest might become alarmed and leave him.
He raised his rifle and singled out the great, gray wolf that appeared to be commander-in-chief of the creatures. This was a huge animal with bristling hackles who was covered with wounds and scars received no doubt in defending his title of leader of the pack.
Sandy took careful aim between the wolf’s blazing yellow eyes that shone in the gathering dusk like signal lamps. He pulled the trigger and a blaze and a sharp crack followed. Mingled with them was the death cry of the big gray wolf.
He leaped fully four feet into the air and came down with a crash. Before the breath was out of his gaunt body the pack was upon him, tearing, rending and fighting. When the mass of struggling, famine-stricken wolves surged apart again, Sandy saw that a few bloodstains on the snow and some bones in the mouths of the stronger of the wolves were all that remained of the leader of the pack.
A king among them when alive, the dead wolf had been to his followers nothing more than so much meat. Their cannibal feast being disposed of, except that here and there a wolf crunched a bone, the animals resumed their vigil.
Twice, three times more, did Sandy fire; but each time with the same result.
He dared not waste more ammunition. He must conserve what he had left for emergencies, in case it came down to a fight for his very life.
For the first time since he had gained a place of comparative safety the boy gave way utterly. He sank his head in his hands and despair rushed over him like a wave.
It is now time to return to Tom, Jack and their companion, old Joe Picquet. It will be recalled that we left them in a most precarious and startling situation.
From a man apparently sick unto death, the gray, pitiable figure on the cot had been suddenly changed to a vicious, spiteful enemy, as vindictive and apparently as dangerous as a rattlesnake. The very swiftness of the change had taken them so utterly by surprise that, as the rifles of his three followers were trained upon them, our trio of friends were deprived of speech.
Old Joe was the first to recover his faculties. With his eyes blazing furiously from his weather-beaten face, he emitted a roar of rage.
The vials of his wrath were directed against the small gray man—Peabody Dolittle, as he had called himself.
“Boosh! You beeg ras-cal!” he cried. “You beeg liar as well as teef, eh? What you wan’ us do now—eh?”
“Nothing but to give up those skins you took from me and then vamoose,” came the quiet rejoinder from the little gray man, who had lost his Yankee dialect and drawl and who was now on his feet fully dressed except for a coat.
“And if we won’t?” exclaimed Tom, retaining a firm grip on the black fox skin.
He was resolved to keep it at all hazards.
“Why, then,” rejoined the other, with a vindictive snarl, “we shall have to adopt harsh measures. You may consider yourselves my prisoners.”
“Non! Not by a whole lot!”
The angry, half choked cry was from old Joe Picquet. Beside himself with fury at the thought of the cunning fraud the man had worked upon them, he flung himself forward as if he meant to tear him to pieces.
Tom’s arm jerked him back.
“Don’t do anything like that, Joe,” he counseled; and then to the gray man, “I suppose your sickness was just a dodge to keep us here till your companions could arrive.”
“Just what it was, my young friend,” amiably agreed the rascal. “As a guesser of motives you are very good—very good, indeed.”
One of the new arrivals stepped forward and whispered something to his leader, who nodded. Then he spoke:
“Of course, I shall have to ask you to give up your weapons,” he said.
Old Joe Picquet fumed and fussed, but there was nothing for it but to obey. In the presence of such a force, and with the disadvantage under which they labored, there was nothing else to be done. With the best grace they could, they gave up their weapons, which the little gray man, with a smile of satisfaction, took into his possession.
“Pity you didn’t heed the ghostly warning I gave you,” said he to the boys, with a grin, “you’d be in a better position than you are now. But after all, it will teach you never again to interfere with the Wolf.”
They had nothing to reply to this speech; but at the rascal’s next words their anger broke out afresh.
“Are you going to give up those skins, or do we have to take them from you?”
As he spoke he did a significant thing. He lightly tapped with his finger tips the rifle stock of the man next to him. It was a quiet hint, yet a sufficient one.
“We are in your power right now; but perhaps before long the tables will be turned,” said Tom. “Take the skin that you stole, and——”
“Say no more, my young friend. You are wise beyond your years. Flem,” this to a squat-figured, evil-looking fellow with a shack of sandy hair, who was one of the trio whose arrival had caused our friends so much trouble, “Flem, hand me that black fox skin. I went to some trouble to secure it. I propose to keep it.”
“As long as you can, you ought to add,” muttered Jack, under his breath.
As for Picquet, he, like Tom, remained silent. There was really nothing to be said. Without a word he booted the skins he had recovered from the fur robber’s loot across the floor. One of the Wolf’s men picked them up.
By this time it was almost dark within the tent. But from the red-hot stove there emanated quite a glow which showed up the evil countenances of the boys’ captors in striking relief. Except for their leader, the Wolf, whose soft tones and retiring manners would have made anyone pick him out for anything but what he was, they were a repulsive looking crew.
It was clear enough to Tom now that they were in the power of men who made a regular business of fur robbing, and a thoroughly prosperous one, too. He felt an intense disgust for them. Knowing as he did the hardships of a trapper’s life, the long tramps through the freezing snows, the isolation and the loneliness of the existence, he thought, with angry contempt, of the meanness of men who would rob the rightful owners of such hard-earned trophies.
“Feel pretty sore at me, don’t you?” asked the Wolf, who had been eying the boy narrowly.
“Not so sore as disgusted,” shot out Tom. “I’ve seen some mean wretches in my time, but a man who will deliberately——”
“Be careful there, young fellow. Don’t get too fresh,” warned one of the Wolf’s men.
“I consider that you have got off pretty easily,” rejoined the Wolf, seemingly unruffled. His tones were as calm and retiring as ever. “I might have sent your dog team scurrying off into the wilderness without you, and then left you to get back as best you could without provisions or blankets. Instead of that, I’m going to do you a kindness. I shall set you free with your sled.”
“And our rifles?” asked old Joe.
“I’m afraid I must keep them. You are altogether too capable to be trusted with such weapons.”
“I know who I’d like to make a target of,” muttered Jack.
“So I shall have to retain your rifles. They are fine weapons and I am glad to have them. And now, gentlemen, under those terms we shall bid you good night.”
“We’ll see you again some time—Boosh!—an’ when we do—nom d’un nom d’un chien!” exclaimed Joe, shaking his fist toward the heavens.
“I hardly think it likely that you will ever see me again,” was the little gray man’s rejoinder. “We have made enough to leave the Yukon for good and all——”
“For the good of all, I guess you mean,” muttered the sharp-tongued Jack under his breath.
Luckily for him, perhaps, the other did not hear him, or appeared not to. Half an hour later, inwardly raging, but without the means to act on their impulses, the two boys and the old man were out on the snow crust harnessing up the dog-team.
Over them stood the Wolf’s henchmen. As they “hit the trail” in the same direction as that whence they had come, they heard a harsh laugh and a shouted good night.
Both sounds came from the Wolf’s tent, the Wolf who had tricked and trapped them as a climax to their long pursuit.
As the shades of night began to close in upon him, Sandy found himself still in the same position. From time to time one or another of the pack would hurl itself against the rocky islet in the snow waste, only to be remorselessly thrown back by the impact.
But for the most part the creatures sat silent and motionless, content to watch and wait for the harvest that they seemed sure would come to them in time.
After his fit of despair Sandy had once more rallied his energies and devoted his really active and brave mind to devising some means of passing the night, that it now appeared certain he must spend on the great rock pile.
Above him, growing in a rift, were the remains of some stunted balsams, the seeds of which had probably blown thither from the woods whence the wolves had issued. He stared at the melancholy, twisted, dried-up stumps of vegetation for some time before any idea concerning them came into his head. Then all at once he realized that here at least was the means for fire and warmth.
But hardly had this idea occurred to him, when he recollected something that made his heart sink to a lower level than before. He had no matches. The little nickeled box that held them lay at the foot of the rocks too well guarded by the wolves for him to make an effort to reach it. And yet he knew that he must have fire in the night or perish.
It was quite a while before a retentive memory helped him out. Then he recalled having heard some time before from an old trapper a method of fire-making without matches. The operation was simplicity itself and yet Sandy doubted if he could make it succeed.
The plan was simply this: to remove from a cartridge the bullet and part of the powder; then to place the cartridge in the gun as usual and fire into a pile of dry kindling. The sparks and flame from the powder were supposed to furnish the necessary start to the blaze, which could then be enlarged by blowing.
“At any rate, I might try it,” thought Sandy. “If I don’t make it go I stand a good chance of freezing. But if I do——”
He stopped short. While he had been turning these matters over in his mind he had climbed up to the ridge on which grew the withered, dead balsams.
Now that he had gained it, he saw that beyond the gnarled, wind-twisted stumps was a considerable rift in the rocks. How far in it went he did not, of course, know. But it appeared that it ought to make a snug refuge from the rigors of the almost arctic cold.
Further exploration showed that the rift was quite a cave. It was not very high, but appeared to run back a considerable distance. Sandy hailed its discovery with joy. If he could light a fire back within the rift it would be practicable to keep it warm.
The thought of warmth, light and a good fire was comforting, even though for the present it existed only in the imagination. Sandy set to work on the withered balsams with his hunting knife. The wood was dry and dead and cut easily. Soon he had quite a pile of it dragged back into the rift.
As he worked he almost forgot the perils of his situation. For the present the biting cold which, as the sun grew lower, was more and more penetrating, turned his thoughts from his present miseries to the delights to come of warmth and comfort.
Having collected his pile and stacked it till it almost reached the roof of the rift, Sandy thought it was time to see if there was any merit in the old trapper’s recipe for starting a fire in the wilderness without matches. With his blade he stripped off patches of dry bark from the dead timber and shredded it until it was an easily inflammable mass, like excelsior.
Having done this, he collected his kindling and then piled the sticks crosswise in the form of a tower, so that when his fire was started he would be sure of a good draft. Then, with his knife, he extracted a bullet from a cartridge, poured a little of the powder upon the kindling and then slipped the half emptied shell into his rifle.
When this much of his preparations had been completed he was ready for the final test. He aimed the rifle carefully at his kindling pile, selecting a place where he had previously sprinkled the grains of powder. Then he pulled the trigger.
A muffled report and a shower of sparks from the muzzle followed, but to the boy’s disappointment, the kindling did not catch fire. The only result of his experiment, so far, was a suffocating smell of gunpowder.
But Sandy did not come of a stock that gives in easily.
“I must try it again,” he said to himself, thinking of his great countryman, Robert Bruce, and perhaps likening himself in the cave besieged by his enemies to that national hero.
Only in Sandy’s case there was no spider, as in the legend, to give him an example of perseverance. It was far too cold for spiders, as the boy reflected, with a rueful grin; and then he doubted if even Bruce’s foes were more remorseless or deadly than the ones awaiting him outside the rock masses, piled in the snow desert like an island in a vast ocean of white.
He prepared another cartridge, sprinkling more powder on his kindling. This time there arose a puff of flame and smoke from the pile as soon as he fired the rifle. Casting his weapon aside, Sandy threw himself down on his knees by the fire.
He began puffing vigorously at the smoldering place where the burning powder had landed.
A tiny flame crept up, licked at the kindling, grew brighter and seized upon some of the larger sticks piled above.
Five minutes later Sandy was warming himself at a satisfying blaze. As the smoke rolled out of the rift and upward in the darkening gloom the patient watchers outside set up a savage howl.
“Ah, howl away, you gloomeroons,” muttered Sandy, in the cheerful glow inside the rift. “I’ve got you beaten for a time, anyhow. And noo let’s hae a bite o’ supper.”
With a plucky grimace, as though to defy fate, Sandy spread out on the rock floor his stock of food. It looked scanty, pitifully so, when considered as the sole provision against starvation that the boy had with him in his rock prison—for such it might be fitly called.
“'Tis nae banquet,” and the Scotch lad wagged his head solemnly. “It would make a grand feed for a canary bird.”
He paused a minute, and then:
“But be glad you hae it, Sandy McTavish, you ungrateful carlin. You’re lucky not to have to make a supper off scenery; and, after all, you are nae sae hungry as yon wolves, judging by their voices.”
It was a dispirited enough party that, under the stars, retraced its way from the camp of the little gray man, who at first, seeming so harmless and helpless, had turned out to be so venomous and vindictive. Tom and Jack had little to say.
The case was different with old Joe Picquet. He cried out aloud to the stars for vengeance on the Wolf. He abused his name in English, French and every one of half a dozen Indian dialects.
“Oh, what’s the use,” said Tom at length, interrupting a diatribe. “The fellow had the whip hand of us from the moment we let ourselves be taken in by believing he really was sick and helpless.”
“Think of that wood we chopped,” muttered Jack, with a groan.
Jack was not a lover of that form of exercise which is taken with the assistance of an axe. He felt like joining old Joe’s lamentations as he thought of the vigor with which he had worked to relieve the seemingly sick man’s necessities.
“It is a good lesson to us,” went on Tom, “although it has been a mighty costly one. If we hadn’t shilly-shallied about that tent we would have been well on our way with the stolen skins by this time.”
“No use crying over spilt milk,” counseled Jack. “It is done now and can’t be undone. Wonder if we will ever see those rascals again?”
“Impossible to say. If only we could get to a trading post or a station we might raise a posse and take after them. In this part of the country it is a mighty bad offense to steal skins.”
“What do they do with such fellows?” asked Jack.
“Hang dem!” burst out old Joe.
“Oh, not quite as bad as that!” exclaimed Tom.
“Boosh! To hang, it ees too good for dem.”
They journeyed on for some time in silence. Then Joe told them that he was building his hopes on finding some of his Indian friends, from whom they could get meat of some kind. For they had no rifles and no means of procuring food, and their supply, except for flour and salt, was running low.
He hoped, he said, to make an Indian encampment, possibly the one where they had last stopped, before the next night. About midnight they paused near one of the numerous, small, unnamed lakes that are frequent in that part of the country. At one place in it was a hole which the Indians had chopped to spear fish. This was skimmed over with ice which, however, Joe surmised could be easily broken through.
The old trapper had in one of his numerous pockets the head of a fish spear. Cutting a stick, he soon fitted a handle to this head and Jack, with the lantern to act as a lure and make the fish rise, was despatched to the ice hole to catch all he could. It was important that the dogs should be fed without delay, for they were getting hungry, the fish at the Wolf’s camp having been sufficient only for his own mamelukes.
Spearing fish is work that calls for an adept hand. But the boys had had plenty of practice at their own camp, for the silver foxes had not lost their appetites with captivity and would greedily eat all that they could get. This had kept the boys busy securing fish and they were all experts at the work. Jack, especially, liked it, and was exceptionally good at it.
After he had fished less than half an hour he had speared a good number of fine fresh fish. The dogs, who appeared to guess what was going forward, barked shrilly and appealingly as he started back toward the spot where the sled had been halted.
“Got any?” hailed Tom, as he saw the lantern Jack carried come bobbing toward him.
“I should say I had.”
“Good ones?”
“They’ll stuff the dogs full and give us a meal besides.”
“That’s the stuff, the mamelukes are very hungry.”
“So they are saying.”
“We’ll have to hurry up and feed them while Joe gets something to eat.”
“I guess we are as famished as they are. I know I——”
Jack, who had been hurrying forward with his fish, uttered a sharp cry of pain and fell to the ground.
At the same time Tom heard a clicking sound not unlike the sliding back of a rifle magazine, only louder. He rushed forward to where Jack lay upon the ground.
The boy was writhing with pain and Tom could not make out what had happened.
“Jack! Jack, old fellow, what is it?” he cried.
“I—I don’t know. Something gripped my foot—as I was hurrying back.”
“It’s got hold of it now?”
“Yes.” Jack’s voice was very faint. It was apparent that he was suffering great pain. But he tried to bear up manfully and steady his voice while Tom bent over him.
“Can’t you move?”
“No, I’m caught fast.”
“Let me look. Great Scott, no wonder!”
Tom’s voice was vibrant with sympathy. The next instant he set up a shout.
“Joe! Oh, Joe!”
“Oui, mon garçon! What ees mattaire?” came Joe’s voice.
“Come here, quick. It’s Jack!”
“Wha’s happen heem?” cried old Joe, dropping what he was doing and running through the snow toward the boys.
“His foot. It’s—it’s caught in an old trap, and—and, Joe, I’m afraid that it has bitten to the bone!”
“Sacre nom!”
But of all this Jack heard nothing. He had fainted under the excruciating pain of the pressure of the steel jaws that gripped him fast like a helpless animal.
As the ruddy glow of the flames lighted up the rift in Sandy’s rock castle, the boy looked about him curiously before he began work on his scant stock of food. The place was about forty feet in length and not more than five in height, sloping down at each end like the roof in an old-fashioned farm bedroom.
He noted with some satisfaction that near the entrance there were masses of dead and dried up bushes, from which he thought he could contrive a mattress later on. But for the present he devoted himself to his meal.
Luckily, he had brought along a pannikin, and in this, when he had melted some snow for water, he made tea, without a small package of which the true adventurer of the northern wilds never travels. The hot liquid did him almost as much good as the food, and, as Sandy remarked as he gulped it down, it was “main filling.”
His supper disposed of, Sandy sat for some little time in front of the fire.
“Heaven be praised, there are no dishes to wash,” he said to himself in his whimsical way.
The time was a favorable one for thinking, and many thoughts ran through Sandy’s mind as he sat watching the flames. His chums, what were they doing? How little they imagined his predicament at that particular moment. Sandy found himself wondering whether he would ever see them again. The warmth of the fire circulated pleasantly through his veins. A delightful glow crept over him.
He was just about dozing off when a noise near the cave mouth startled him.
He looked up, but could see nothing. He thought, however, that in the darkness he could detect the sound of a furtive footfall.
It was creeping away as if in fear of him.
Sandy came back into the warmth and fire-glow of the rift and lay down at full length in front of the blaze. How long he lay there before he was again disturbed he had no means of knowing.
But suddenly he was attracted to the mouth of the rift once more by a recurrence of the noise. Once more he hastened to investigate, but with the same results as before.
He began to grow nervous. Although he could see nothing, he was sure that he had heard some mysterious sounds out there in the darkness. But when he got up to look nothing was to be seen. It was very perplexing and, considering his situation, not a little alarming. Lying down again by his fire, the boy made a determined effort to compose his nerves. But try as he would, he found his mind focused upon one subject, and one only: the wolves.
From time to time the night was tortured by their howls. It was as if they were trying to show the boy that although he was in hiding they had not forgotten him; that they would wait until he was forced to come off the rocks and make a final dash for freedom before they devoured him.
The soft footfalls that he was sure he had heard outside the rift, he was now almost certain had been made by the wolves. Some of the stronger of the pack had scrambled up on the rocks and were waiting outside his place of refuge till a favorable moment presented itself for an attack.
Sandy clutched his rifle nervously. He was determined when the moment came to sell his life as dearly as possible. How many in number his foes would be he had no means of telling. But he knew full well that his cartridges were all too few.
With his weapon gripped ready for instant action, Sandy waited the next move on the part of his implacable foes. But minute succeeded minute and the sounds from without the rift were not repeated.
The boy began to think that he might have been mistaken. Perhaps, after all, it was his excited imagination that had conjured up the sounds.
He rose and looked outside once more. It was a clear, starlit night. The rocks towered up blackly like some giant’s castle amidst the bluish-whiteness of surrounding snow wastes. A sensation of terrible loneliness ran through Sandy as he reflected that he was the only human being for miles and miles in that immense solitude. Probably the party in search of the thief were the nearest of his own kind within a great distance.
It was small wonder that the boy trembled a little as out there under the stars he revolved the situation. There was no use evading it, if help did not arrive, or the wolves retreat, he was doomed either to die by starvation on the rocks, or be rent by the teeth of the pack in the event of his attempting to escape.
Seasoned men of the northland might well have been dazed by such a prospect. There did not appear to be one chance in a hundred for the boy. Sandy looked the question fairly and squarely in the face. It is to his credit that by a supreme effort of pluck and grit he averted a second breakdown and retained a grip upon his nerves and courage.
As he stood there, the pack below him rent the air with their wild hunting cry. The sound chilled him to the marrow, and trembling despite himself, he crept back into the rift and sought the companionship of the fire.
About five minutes later there came a sort of scraping noise from the mouth of the rift. Sandy gazed up, and there, confronting him, with hungrily gaping jaws, and great, yellow, signal-lamps of eyes that flashed evilly in the firelight, were three huge wolves—the leaders of the pack. With a wild cry, Sandy sprang up with his rifle in his hand. He was ready for the fight.
The wolves dashed forward, and as he aimed and fired——!
The rifle turned into a stick of firewood. The wolves into three black rocks piled at the mouth of the rift.
Sandy had been dreaming. But it was a dream that might come true, as he realized with a sensation of helplessness.
Jack lay upon the snow with the ground about him dyed red from a badly crushed ankle. Tom and old Joe Picquet bent over him doing what they could to ease his pain, for he had now regained consciousness.
It was a wolf trap that the boy had blundered into; a cruel, ponderous affair with massive steel jaws, from whose grip it had been hard to release him.
“Is the ankle broken, do you think?” asked Tom of old Joe.
“Tiens! I can no say now. But I teenk not. Zee trap was old, zee spring was weak. Dat is good. Eef eet had been new, eet would have broken zee bone lak you break zee pipe stem. Voila!”
“How do you feel now, Jack?” asked Tom.
Jack made a brave effort to disguise his pain.
“I’ll soon be all right, I guess,” he said, “but, Tom, I’ll tell you one thing.”
“What is that?”
“I’ll never set another trap for a wild animal as long as I live. I know now how they must suffer.”
After a brief consultation, Tom and old Joe lifted the suffering boy and carried him back to the sled. A “snow-camp” had already been devised and Jack was made as comfortable as possible in this.
By the firelight old Joe examined his injury. The flesh was badly crushed and bruised, but so far as the old trapper could see there were no bones broken.
“Sacre! I weesh dat eet was summer!” breathed the old man. “In summer grow many herbs are good for heal. Zee Indians teach me many. But in winter dere ees notheeng lak dat. Moost use what we can.”
With bandages made out of a flour sack, which, luckily, was almost empty, old Joe dressed Jack’s injury after carefully bathing it. The boy declared that he felt better almost at once after Joe had completed his woodland surgery.
“It’s too bad that I should be giving all this trouble, especially right now,” muttered Jack as he lay back.
“Say, if you say anything like that again, I’ll forget you are sick and punch your head,” said Tom, with a look of affection, however, that belied his words.
After supper old Joe announced that he had decided on a plan that he thought would fit the exigencies of the situation. About ten miles from where they then were a friend of his, Pierre La Roche, like himself a trapper, had a hut. They must make their way there as quickly as possible and leave Jack in La Roche’s care till he was fit to travel, which might not be for some time. This done, they would go back to the camp of the Yukon Rover, tell what had happened, and seek the advice of Mr. Dacre and Mr. Chillingworth.
Tom felt that this was the best plan that could be evolved. After all, they had done all they could to recover the skins, and if he was blamed for not maintaining a better watch on the fox kennels, why he must face the music. Jack, too, thought the plan a good one, so that they were all satisfied, and, despite Jack’s injury, he slept as well that night as his two companions.
The next morning dawned bright and clear. They were up and about early, and Tom caught a good meal of fish for the dogs through the hole in the ice. When he returned to the camp he carried with him the old rusty trap that had caused Jack’s injury.
“Thought you might like this bit of jewelry for a souvenir,” he said dryly.
“So far as I am concerned you can throw it into the next county,” was the rejoinder.
No time was lost in despatching breakfast and getting an early start. The way to La Roche’s cabin was what is known as a “bad trail.” In fact, it would be necessary to break a path for a great part of the way. Jack was made as snug as possible on the top of the sled, and when old Joe’s whip cracked, he declared that he felt as luxurious as if he were riding in his own automobile.
Not long after leaving the night camp the party found themselves beginning to climb a steep and stony trail. It lay on the weather side of a small range of hills remarkable for their ruggedness, and in places where the wind had swept the snow clear, jagged masses of rock peeped blackly out of the prevailing whiteness.
It was rough traveling, with a vengeance. From time to time they had to stop and rest the dogs. By noon they had hardly made five miles and, according to old Joe, the worst still lay before them. However, bad as the trail was, it was preferable to taking Jack all the way back to Yukon Rover camp. That, in fact, would have been impossible, for the extra weight on the sled was already telling on the mamelukes. They went forward with drooping tails and sagging flanks.
But over that cruel road they showed how well old Joe’s faith in them was justified. Fagged as they were, they did not falter, and when they slacked pace a little the crack of old Joe’s whip in the frosty air never failed to send them forward once more at their ordinary pace.
Tom began to have an immense respect for the mameluke. He understood how it was that men paid large sums for such capable beasts. Savage, intractable, and, as a rule, responding to none but the harshest treatment, the mameluke dog is faithful unto death in only too many instances. A halt was made at midday to eat a hasty snack and to feed and rest the dogs. Then the journey was resumed once more.
It was not so cold as it had been, and in places the snow had softened, affording only a treacherous foothold for the animals. Now and then, too, the boys observed old Joe glancing upward at the precipitous walls that began to tower above the trail.
At length his observations grew so frequent that Tom had to ask him what it was that interested him so on the precipitous heights that overhung their path.
Old Joe shook his head.
“Zee snow, he soft. Dat plenty bad. Snow soften, rocks loosen. Bimeby maybe, one beeg rock come toomble down.”
“Gracious, one of those big fellows up there?” And Tom’s eyes roved upward to where huge black rocks, shaped in some instances like monstrous animals, could be seen sticking out of the snow field.
“Yes; eef no watch, one of dem might heet us when zee soft snow loosens zee earth,” declared Joe, without any more concern in his voice than if he were speaking of what they would have for supper.
“Well, if one of those ever struck this outfit, it would be the last of it,” declared Tom, alarmed at the prospect.
“Weezout doubt,” rejoined old Joe, with a shrug of his shoulders, “but for dat we moost watch all zee time. Dat ees zee law of zee north, to watch always.”
“To watch always!”
Old Joe’s words echoed in Tom’s mind. Yes, that was the law of the northland, and in some parts of it all the law that there was. Constant watchfulness was necessary to life itself in the frozen regions.
Tom’s cheeks flushed as he thought that if constant watchfulness had been observed at Camp Yukon Rover there would have been no necessity for their journey and all that it had led to.
The trail wound upward into country that grew more and more gloomy and dispiriting. There was something about the great rock masses poised above the trail, the slaty, leaden sky and the occasional gusts of wind-blown snow that struck a chill to Tom’s heart.
There was little to break the monotony of precipice and sky on the one side, while beside the trail on the other was a deep crevasse, and beyond another wall of rock. Tom peered over into the depths from time to time and thought, with a shudder, of the consequences of a fall. And that possibility was by no means remote. One slip on the treacherous foothold of the path that hung on the mountainside like an eyebrow on a face, and the victim of the accident would go sliding and plunging down the slippery slopes into that forbidding pit.
It was not a thought to inspire cheerfulness, and Tom refrained from speaking of it to his companions. But it might have been noticed that he kept to the inside of the trail. The mameluke dogs, too, by instinct avoided the outer edge and kept hugging the inside wall of the trail as far as possible from the gaping chasm.
It must have been toward mid-afternoon, as time is reckoned in those latitudes, that old Joe paused with a worried look on his face.
“Attendez!” he cried, holding up one finger.
The mamelukes stopped, their red tongues lolling out and their breath coming in long heaves. They were glad of the respite, whatever had caused it.
Tom halted behind the sled, and Jack turned his eyes on old Joe, whose face betokened the most eager attention. His body was tense with concentrated energy, as if he were putting every fiber of his being into what he was doing, which was listening.
Tom thought of the old man’s watchword, “To watch always.”
For some minutes they stood like this, and then old Joe signified that all was well and they went forward again. But ever and anon the old man cast an uneasy eye about him. It was plain that he was worried and wished the long trail were at an end.
In that gloomy canyon between the beetling walls that rose on either side seemingly straight up to the gray sky, the old trapper’s voice rang stridently as he called to his dogs or cracked his whip with loud words of encouragement.
“Courage, mes enfants!” he would cry to his struggling team. “Soon we be at Pierre La Roche’s; den plentee feesh for you—bien—Boosh! En avant!”
His words always had a magical effect on the drooping mamelukes. With stubborn determination they bent again to their task, their flagging spirits revivified by the cries of their owner.
Jack turned to Tom after one of these intervals.
“Gee whiz! but I feel like a useless log,” he exclaimed, “lolling here on a pile of soft blankets while those poor beasts are pulling me along at the expense of almost all their strength.”
“It can’t be helped,” rejoined Tom briefly. “No one supposes that you walked into that trap deliberately.”
“It’s just one of those accidents that have been happening to us right along,” rejoined Jack irritably. “We have had nothing but bad luck so far on this trip. It is too bad.”
“I agree with you,” rejoined Tom, “but, after all, whose fault is it?”
“Nobody’s, that I can see.”
“Think again.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Just this, that it all comes from our not having forced ourselves, to use Joe’s words, ‘to watch always.’”
“Great Scott! we couldn’t have sat up all night to watch those foxes!”
“One of us could. We might have taken it in turns. However, it is too late to worry about that now. But we will have to face the music when we meet Uncle Chisholm and Mr. Chillingworth. I fancy they will have something to say on the subject.”
“Ouch! The thought of that hurts me worse than my foot,” exclaimed Jack. “I don’t much care about the idea of the explanations that will be up to us to make.”
“Yet they have to be made.”
“Er-huh,” gloomily.
“I fancy that is just the usual result of neglected duty,” responded Tom. “It is part of the price you have to pay for not being on the job.”
“Goodness, are you turning into a moralizer?”
“No. I’ve just been thinking things over. Somehow this canyon——”
Above them there was a sudden sharp crackling sound, like the trampling of a thicket full of twigs. It was followed, or rather accompanied, by a yell from old Joe.
“Back! Get back!”
The next instant Tom echoed his cry.
Simultaneously old Joe sprang forward and tried to turn the mamelukes, but they, maddened by fright, plunged forward.
From above, loosened from its foundation by the softened snow, a huge rock was bounding down upon them. Had the mamelukes stopped where they were they might have been saved. As it was, their plunge forward had brought them directly in the path of the great boulder. The destruction of the sled appeared certain.
And on the sled was Jack, crippled and unable to make a move to save himself from the impending doom.