Snow-blind
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