Snow-blind
could have told him that one of the dreaded northeast storms was
gathering forces to sweep down from the polar regions. It was nearly the
end of the year, three days before Christmas.
He raked up the dying embers of the fire, fed on new fuel, and started
breakfast. Then he shook the tent flap and awakened Miss Durand.
The girl pushed a reluctant head out into the cold, glanced heavy-eyed
about her, and yawned impolitely in Kitchener’s face. “What time is it?”
she demanded.
“It’s an unearthly hour,” he said.
“I haven’t had half enough sleep,” she protested.
“Neither have I,” he returned unfeelingly. “Get up. I’m pulling out of
here in twenty minutes and taking the tent with me.”
They were both too drowsy and too cross even to pretend to be
good-humored, and they ate breakfast without talk, and then struck camp
and reloaded the sledge like a pair of automatons. While the girl was
pulling on her green parka and mittens, Kit served the dogs their fishy
portion and hustled them into the traces. The man and woman then slipped
into their snowshoes, fumbled at the lashings with numbed fingers, and
started the day’s march as the sullen dawn was beginning to break.
They traveled as they did yesterday, Kitchener acting as pioneer, and
the girl tramping behind at the “gee” pole of the sledge. The new light
revealed the partly obliterated trail of the man who had proceeded them
down the river.
Kit followed with his head bowed to the cutting sleet, pushing on
remorselessly, and not always remembering the slender, frost-whitened
figure that trudged at his heels. Some time in the morning he came to a
sheltered place where the remnants of a campfire had been snowed under,
not many hours earlier. The ex-convict had spent the night here, and had
gone on again, probably at daybreak.
From this point the trail was fresher and, for the present, very easily
distinguished. The man was staying with the river. He had crossed the
ice of a tributary creek and still continued down the course of the main
stream. This creek was the first of the branches that Jerry had
mentioned. The fifth would be Great Owl Run.
Kit did not wish to overtake his man until after he had turned into the
Great Owl country. Late in the morning he discovered that the tracks of
snowshoes and sledge runners had a cleaner demarcation at the edges, and
he realized that he was closing up the gap too quickly. Thereafter he
moved more leisurely and kept a sharper look-out ahead.
He and the girl halted at noon for lunch, and later they again stopped
for a few minutes to give the dogs a breathing spell. The afternoon was
beginning to fade when they reached the second of the creeks that flowed
from the east into the Vermilion River.
The small stream entered the larger waterway between sloping, timbered
banks. Kit descended through the willows at the head of his dogs,
started across the thick ice, and then stopped as short as though an
alarming voice had challenged him. In the snow along the north margin of
the creek he saw a new trail--dog tracks, the twin grooves of a
heavy-laden sledge, and a pair of big raquettes crushing through the
snow.
Kitchener brought his team to a standstill and curtly signaled Miss
Durand to halt. He strode forward to investigate, and then stood in
wondering silence.
The newcomer evidently was a heavily built and energetic man. His
snowshoes were of the two-bar type, remarkably broad at the toes, but in
spite of their sustaining spread they sank deeply under his
hard-cruising weight. The webbing of the right shoe had been torn, and
afterwards roughly repaired. The imprints were too familiar to leave any
possibility of doubt. Kit yesterday had examined a line of tracks that
were identical with these, and he knew that he could not be mistaken.
The new arrival was Jerry Tearl.
Kit beckoned on his companion and crossed the brook to regain the
embankment of the main stream. The broad-toed prints ranged down to the
river’s edge, and there turned northward to meet and run parallel with
the trail that Kit had been following all that day. Jerry and the
ex-convict were traveling the same direction, and by the recent
appearance of the two trails they could not be many minutes apart.
It was incredible that the pair had actually encountered one another and
were cruising in each other’s company. One must be following the other,
with not more than a couple of miles separating them. Kit anxiously
inspected first one snowshoe depression and then another, trying to
decide which held the deepest film of sleet. To his untrained eyes there
was no appreciable difference in the trails. One man probably was a
little ahead of the other, but which was the pursuer and which the
pursued, Kit was unable to determine.
CHAPTER IX
GRANDFATHER’S RED BLANKETS
What change of plan or error of reckoning had brought Jerry into the
Vermilion River country, when he should have been miles from here,
heading due north, Kit at this moment was unable to imagine. He wasted
no time in futile speculation. It sufficed him to know that Hell Bent
and his brother were cruising on the river route, almost within rifle
shot of one another, while he and Diane Durand were trailing close
behind. He did not need the gift of prophecy to realize that events were
rapidly shaping themselves towards some sudden crisis.
The girl had come down the river slope to look curiously at the juncture
of the trails. For a moment Kitchener lifted his icy eyelashes, trying
to discover from her face whether she recognized the pattern of Jerry’s
raquettes. She did not enlighten him.
“Funny there’d be somebody else along here on a day like this,” was her
only comment.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Kit carelessly. “Maybe some trapper finishing
his rounds. You find fur-hunters’ shacks scattered here and there all
through the wilderness. Come on. Let’s go.”
They took advantage of the last of twilight and hurried on after the two
who had gone before. Kit had no expectancy of closing up the distance
to-night, and the best he could hope was that conditions to-morrow might
remain favorable for tracking. At this moment, however, the prospects
were disquieting. The sleet was changing to snow--stinging, dry flakes
that had begun to eddy into drifts along the exposed banks of the river.
As he pushed onward he cast many dubious glances towards the northern
sky, worried by the auguries that spelled heavy weather and smothered
trails.
When darkness finally hid the ground underfoot he had no choice but to
go into camp. This night they were lucky enough to find an overhanging
bluff by the river which served both as a windbreak and a sheltering
roof. By the time the tent was up and supper had been cooked, their fire
was almost blotted out by flying clouds of snow. Kit shoved the
smoldering fagots closer to the cliffside, and then groped his way along
the cracking edges of river ice and dragged in enough down-timber and
driftwood to last through the night.
Diane Durand left her tent flap open to catch the rays of heat, and Kit
snuggled down by the snoring dogs, where the reflected warmth reached
the wall of rock. A dozen times during the night he awakened to
replenish the fire and to listen with gloomy forebodings to the wind and
the rush of snow down the river levels.
At daybreak he and the girl aroused themselves in a world of swirling
whiteness. The moment he had cast off his robes he wallowed through the
drifts to the river bank. It was as he had feared. The landscape
stretched away into ghostly backgrounds, an unbroken monotony of snow.
This was to-day, and all of yesterday’s records were buried under the
great downfall of the storm.
Kitchener felt reasonably certain the ex-convict and Jerry both were
heading for Great Owl Run. The trails had disappeared, and there was
little prospect of picking them up again. But as long as he held the
guidance of the river and kept count of the branching streams there was
slight danger of his going astray. Diane Durand did not seem to be much
alarmed by the burying of yesterday’s tangible paths.
“Uncle Jim’ll be up there somewhere,” she said serenely, “and if we keep
on the way we’re going we’ll surely find him.”
“Shouldn’t doubt it,” said Kit.
Through that brief, blustering day they struggled forward in the welter
of snow, like specters in a world of death, seeing no living creature,
walking in a vast blankness. They crossed the mouths of a third and a
fourth creek that ended their ice-choked careers in the Vermilion River.
As night closed in at the end of the ghastly daylight they struck the
fifth branching stream.
On a high promontory, barely discernible in the hurly-burly of the
storm, Kitchener made out a tall, gaunt fir tree that had been stripped
of its middle branches and left standing above the river, a beacon for
all passers-by. This was a “lobstick” which the Indians had trimmed
fantastically to commemorate some noteworthy tribal event. The ancient
marker, Jerry had said, would indicate Kit’s turning point. This creek
must be Great Owl Run.
Whether Diane Durand knew anything of local geography Kitchener did not
know. But she offered no protests when he quitted the river here and
turned up the side stream.
In almost any other land Great Owl Run would have been called a river.
It was thirty or forty feet wide between its sheer banks, a deep,
swift-running stream coming out of the high hills in the northeast. For
stretches the course was closed solidly from bank to bank, but along the
narrow races the water poured out thunderously from under the ice
tunnels, and would not freeze even in below-zero weather.
There was no sign of human footprints along the sheltered shores. If
anybody had come this direction during the last twenty-four hours the
trail was blotted out under the heavy snowfall. Kit moved furtively and
as long as he could see he kept a restless lookout among the gloomy
coverts. Bill Tearl and the two outlanders had met with a strange and
terrible fate not many miles farther up this stream, and Kit was
conscious of a haunting oppression of mind and spirit as he neared the
scene of the old tragedy.
Darkness came, and he continued to grope his way up the winding
watercourse. The dogs were sagging in the traces, staggering belly-deep
in the snow. Behind the sledge Diane Durand stumbled and floundered in
the drifts, almost at the end of her endurance. But still Kit would not
halt.
As they advanced the forest grew blacker and denser. The gale still
raged overhead, but in the timber-smothered depths of the creek bottoms
scarcely a breath of wind reached them. Evergreens do not rustle like
deciduous trees, but moan and sigh in living anguish. There are few
sounds more dolorous than the wailing of a spruce forest at night.
Kitchener was groping his way through a tangle of snowy underwood, when
he was conscious of a shadowy movement at his elbow. Startled, he turned
his head to see a slight, wraith-like shape hurrying at his heels. It
was Diane Durand. In the darkness he could just see the blur of her
lifted face.
“What’s the matter?” he asked as he resumed his weary stride. There was
no reason why he might not have spoken in a natural tone, but through
the warning of some vague instinct he pitched his voice to a whisper.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I-- How much farther must we go?”
“Not far now,” he said.
He expected her to drop back to her place with the sledge; instead she
kept at his side, pressing even closer, as though something had
frightened her and she was seeking the reassurance of human fellowship.
It was curious. Until this moment she had never betrayed any symptom of
timidity.
“I’ve never seen it so dark anywhere,” she complained. “It isn’t like