Snow-blind
head on one side, and those who were watching saw his eyes blink. “It’s
for us!” he cried.
Constable Devon hurried across the room and shoved a pad and pencil
under his comrade’s fist.
Cross was able to read code if the sending did not come too fast. He was
writing painstakingly, with his tongue stuck in the corner of his mouth.
The message was coming through slowly, and from the look of his face the
news must have been somewhat disconcerting. Once he frowned and shook
his head.
“What is it?” demanded Devon when the pencil finally stopped moving.
Constable Cross pushed away from the receiver and looked uneasily at his
comrade. “It was sent,” he declared, “to Sergeant Buck Tearl, _Saut
Sauvage_.”
“What?” demanded the other.
“It must mean he’s on his way here to take command,” said Cross limply.
“Gosh!” mourned Devon. “Why can’t they let us alone?”
“What did you expect?” returned Cross. “That they’d let two bum
constables loaf here through the winter without sending somebody to boss
’em?”
The pair exchanged a sobered glance. It was no light matter for two men
to be snowed-in together through long months of blackness; and the
arrival of a third man would multiply the dangers of friction and
discord: particularly when the newcomer held the authority to make the
lives of the first two as disagreeable as he pleased.
“What’s he like?” groaned Devon.
“Tearl? I don’t know. He was on this side when I was in Alaska, and when
I was in Alaska he had been sent somewhere else. It just happened that
way. So far we haven’t run across one another.”
“I have heard o’ dis Sergean’ Tearl,” put in the bearded Bruyas. “Dey
say he is wan bad feesh.”
“Everybody’s heard of Tearl,” said Cross.
Giffard’s squinty eyes turned maliciously from one policeman to the
other. “They say he’s a devil,” he remarked.
Constable Devon silenced the runt with a lengthy stare. “I’ve heard
myself that he’s bad medicine for trap thieves and whiskey blanc
peddlers and other little slinking ferrets of the woods.” He turned back
casually to Cross. “On the other hand,” he added consolingly, “he may
not be so bad. You know Jimmie Poe? Poe says he’s all right.”
“Weren’t they up at Herschell together a couple of winters ago?” asked
Cross reflectively.
“Yes. The two got caught in a storm and had to coop-up in an igloo for
three weeks. Each had a quarter’s pay in his pocket and nothing much
else. They were eating mittens before they got out, and on top of it
all, Jimmie Poe had gone snow-blind.”
Devon grinned. “But Buck Tearl kept him entertained. The sergeant--he
was a corporal then--had found a walrus tusk somewhere, and he carved
out a set of ivory dice. And the two spent three weeks in a snow-hut
shooting craps by the light of a blubber lamp--”
“And Poe was snow-blind?” interjected Cross. “You mean he couldn’t see
anything?”
“Nothing at all. He couldn’t see Tearl or his own bank roll or the dice
or the spots on ’em. Maybe Tearl didn’t even bother to draw the spots on
’em. Maybe he left his dice blanks. I don’t know. What I’m getting at is
to show you what a good guy he was.”
Cross licked his lips meditatively. “I’d have liked to have been in that
game.”
“Sure you would,” returned Devon. “You’d have made your killin’ in about
fifteen tosses. But not Buck Tearl. He’d call out the numbers that
Jimmie couldn’t see. ‘Seven’, ‘eleven’, ‘big-Dick’, ‘box-cars’, ‘little
Jodie’, and sometimes they’d roll up right for Jimmie.
“Now if it had been you,” mused Devon, “you’d have forgot Jimmy was
playing too. Then he would have had nothing but time left on his hands
for three weeks.”
“You don’t mean,” broke in Cross, “that Jimmie won?”
Devon ignored the interruption. “For twenty-one days Corporal Buck Tearl
sat there helping Jimmie to amuse himself. In the end, just before the
storm broke and they were able to travel again, Tearl had a phenomenal
run of luck and made forty-two passes and cleaned Jimmie for the works.
But where another man would have mopped up in an hour Tearl squatted
patiently and let Jimmie have his three weeks of fun. That’s the kind of
a pal Buck Tearl was.”
Devon lifted the pot lid to peer into its bubbling interior, sniffed
once or twice, and turned back to Cross. “What was that message about?”
he suddenly remembered to ask.
“About a Yellow Knife up yonder being murdered a while back. The word
must have gone down the other direction through Fort Resolution and
Simpson, and finally reached the inspector. He was just telling Sergeant
Tearl to send somebody to investigate.”
“Is that all?” said Devon. “And I suppose Tearl’ll be sending you or me
up through a blizzard to make notes on a dead Boogie.”
Cross looked resentfully towards the three Yellow Knives in the corner
of the room. “Any of you know about a murder up your way?” he asked.
The Indians exchanged solemn glances and said nothing.
“You, Tom Salmonfish!” exploded the constable. “You know anybody who was
murdered?”
“Nop,” said Salmonfish indifferently.
Cross dropped his head menacingly and was about to start the tortuous
process of extracting information from an Indian, when something
arrested his attention. He raised his head and looked towards the
frosted window, listening.
For five seconds he held motionless with one ear tilted upward. His
companions likewise had frozen to silence and were watching Cross. There
were no audible sounds save the howling of the wind outside and the
bubbling of the kettle on the stove within. But the constable’s
companions waited expectantly, knowing that his woodsman’s instincts had
apprised him of some unusual note in the bellowing of the storm.
All at once Cross’ alertness was backed up by a dog coming to life and
sending a challenging bark through the outer darkness. The first husky
was joined by a bass-throated friend, by a dozen, by forty savage,
yelling brutes that aroused themselves from their nests in the lee of
the barracks wall to fill the night with their frenzied babel.
“Wolves?” suggested Devon.
“Don’t think so--” Cross stopped his speech and lifted a silencing
finger.
In the other direction, from somewhere to the southward, they heard
something breaking its way through the underbrush. Then, for a full
minute, the wind sank fitfully and almost died. In that brief lull the
sounds of a man’s voice reached the shack. He was crossing the clearing
in the storm. And then they heard him raise his tones higher, and a
queer, sing-song tune came to them out of the night:
“Down in the woods lived a squaw and her old Injun.
Their only blankets were the cold frost and snow--”
The words of the song drifted to the shack in a melancholy baritone, and
then the singer changed to a lugubrious minor key and repeated his
dismal refrain, this time with full tremolo effects:
“Down i-hin the woods li-hived a squaw and her old In-jun.
Their o-honly blankets we-here the coooooold frost and snooow.”
The crowd of huskies had charged around the barracks, flinging
themselves at the stranger in a raving circle. But, whoever he was, he
would not let the dogs flurry him until he had rounded off the full,
last period of his song. Then he turned upon them with violent words,
and the men inside heard the thud of something on hollow ribs.
The two constables stared at each other, and Devon moved towards the
front entrance. But the newcomer was quicker. The latch rattled, the
draw bar was pushed up, and an icy blast of weather filled the room. A
muffled figure stumbled across the threshold. He was a slender, rangy,
easy-moving individual, who had turned negligently to force the door
shut behind him. As the latch caught he swung around to confront the
occupants of the shack, and he appeared to take in every detail of the
place with a single, flickering glance.
His head and shoulders were covered with drifted snow and a beading of
ice had formed upon his eyelashes. The austerity of his features, the
severe line of his mouth and his ascetic, high-bridged nose, was
relieved by the mocking glimmer of his dark eyes and the sardonic
expression of one upcrooked eyebrow. He ignored the Indians and the
trappers as he curiously inspected one and then the other policeman.
“Which is Cross and which is Devon?” he asked.
Without waiting for a reply he bent flexibly at the hips and proceeded
to pull his hooded parka over his black head. He dropped the white
encrusted garment to the floor and stood erect, a trim, nonchalant
figure clad in the royal scarlet of the Canadian police.
A glimpse of the chevrons on the tunic sleeve sufficed to wipe every
vestige of expression from the faces of the two constables. They drew
themselves up, stiff and soldierly, before the ranking uniform.
“I’m Cross,” said the shorter, lighter-skinned man. “You’re Sergeant
Tearl.”
“Right!” The newcomer broke into the constrained moment with a quick,
infectious grin. He pulled off his mitten and impulsively held out his
hand. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you boys,” he said. “How are
you? Merry Christmas! When do we eat?”
CHAPTER XII
SERGEANT IN COMMAND
Kitchener faced the constables in his scarlet tunic with easy
confidence, swaggering a little as Jerry might have done if he had
stepped in to take command of the outpost at _Saut Sauvage_. Inwardly he
was not so sure of himself.
He watched the pair warily. Jerry had said that he was not acquainted
with Devon or Cross. But there remained the danger that one or another
of the constables had seen him somewhere without his knowing. Both
officers must have heard of the sergeant, and possibly carried mental
pictures of him. Jerry was too vivid a personality not to leave strong
impressions upon the people he met.
A guilty conscience may have made Kit oversensitive. The constables
studied him critically for a moment, and then exchanged sidewise
glances. For an instant Kit held his breath. What thought had struck
them? Did they suspect something was wrong? It was an anxious moment. To
be unmasked now would be calamitous.
Whatever his secret doubts he put up his boldest front. And all at once
the tense atmosphere seemed to clear. The constables grinned at him in
apparent comradeship and shook hands with him. If their suspicions had
been aroused they evidently wanted to be more certain of their ground
before they denounced him.
“I’m looking for a man who calls himself Jim Durand,” he told his new
fellows-at-arms. “He’s a six-foot husky with big, bowed shoulders, a
prize-fighter’s arms and fists and a swarthy face that looks as if it
had been sliced up with a knife some time or other. Anybody like that
been around here recently?”
The two constables shook their heads. “Outside of these chaps and one or
two bushmen we know,” said Devon, “there hasn’t been a living soul along
this way in weeks.”
“I lost his trail this morning,” said Kit, “and so far haven’t found it
again. He’s wearing a pair of square-webbed snowshoes that look as
though they were woven over a waffle-iron. I hoped one of you might have
seen his tracks.”
“What’s he wanted for?” asked Cross.
Kit had had a night and a day to think affairs out and to decide on his
future course of action. He had made up his mind that in his dealings
with Hell Bent he would play out the hand on his own responsibility,
alone.
There were several reasons why he could not tell the constables the
truth. If he let them know, for instance, that a murder had been
committed in the old cabin at Great Owl Run they naturally would want to
learn who the victim was, and their police-trained curiosity in that
direction might lead to all kinds of embarrassing complications. They
would search the river and perhaps find Jerry’s body, and in his