Snow-blind
gingerly, and restored them to the keeping of the old mahogany highboy.
“You don’t know everything,” he remarked over his shoulder. “For
instance, you never heard of the Tearl annuity.”
“The which?” she asked.
“The year Dad was lost,” Kitchener informed her, “an express money order
for five thousand dollars was delivered at our address here in town. The
envelope that contained it was mailed in San Francisco, postmarked
January first. There was no writing--no mark to identify the sender.”
The girl stared with a quick contraction of her jade-tinged eyes. “You
mean--?” she began, and then left the rest unasked.
“I don’t know,” answered her brother. “I only know that another five
thousand came the next January and the next, and so on, every year, as
regularly as the months rolled around. One draft was sent from Portland,
another from Sitka, one from St. Johns, Newfoundland, two from Quebec,
one from Kamchatka, Siberia.”
“You’ve tried to trace the sender?”
“Mother first, then Jerry. Lately I’ve been trying. No use! If our
unknown friend were a skulking criminal he could have taken no greater
pains to keep his tracks covered.”
“You think it could have been--” The girl’s speech checked for an
instant on a failing breath, and then she ended in a whispered word,
“Dad?”
“Who knows? If he were alive and could send money he could have written
to us. You were old enough to remember what he was like. It wouldn’t
have been like him to duck his family. No matter what had happened to
him, he surely would have sent us word. And yet--”
Kitchener took a turn the length of the room, and then came back to
stand head-high above his sister. When he was in deadly earnest over
something his left eyebrow had an unaccountable habit of cocking itself
at the jauntiest angle, as though he had thought up something funny to
say. Jerry used to tell him he looked at such moments like a wily,
black-headed crow getting ready to guffaw over his sins.
Jane knew that expression of old, and she knew that whatever notion was
sticking in his head, all the world could not shake it out. “Hello,
Cocky-bird!” she exclaimed. “What’s up now?”
“I’m going to find Jerry,” he said.
No Tearl was ever much astonished by anything another Tearl ever decided
to do. She faced him anxiously, but without the least show of surprise.
“When?” was all she said.
“As soon as I can pull out.”
“But you’re by no means certain that Sergeant Buck Tearl is Jerry.”
“Yes, I am. And if by any chance he didn’t receive to-night’s message, I
want to see that he gets it. And I want to see Jerry.”
“You know what it means, of course. The rail head doesn’t go near
Port-o’-Prayer. The rivers will be frozen up there. No canoes. You
haven’t been in the forests since you were twelve. You’ll have to walk,
my boy!” Her smile did not quite hide the dismay that had suddenly
drenched her eyes. “You’ll never make it.”
“That money,” he pursued, without looking at his sister. “We never spent
any of it because we didn’t know whether it was ours to spend. Mother
put it in the bank. She called it the mystery fund. She deposited five
thousand every January--then Jerry--then I. I only learned about it a
short while before Jerry left. Didn’t think it was anything to bother
you with. But I’m telling you now. There’s sixty thousand dollars all
told, plus the interest. I’ll turn the book over to you. Whatever you do
about it is your own business.”
“It’s all settled, then? You’re going?”
“I don’t see any way out of it,” said Kitchener.
Jane’s hands reached up to smooth her brother’s raven-black hair. Then
she stood a-tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “If you think not,” she said,
“there’s no way out of it.”
CHAPTER II
AFTER MANY YEARS
When Kitchener Tearl left New York the city was basking in a spell of
sultry, Indian Summer weather that had lingered into late October. As
his Pullman traveled up the length of the Hudson Valley he saw robins in
the orchards and flocks of belated blackbirds hovering about the meadows
and fields. The hills and mountains still loomed green against the line
of a soft and sunny sky.
Farther north he found notable changes in the climate and the scenery.
On the other side of the border the air tingled with a frosty crispness,
and the fringes of the forest were blazoned with the colors of the dying
season. The people of Ottawa were wearing overcoats and keeping their
hands in their pockets. On the way across Ontario the harvested acres
reached sere and bleak to the chilly horizon. At Winnipeg the edges of
the forked rivers were rimed in the morning with a first film of ice.
Traveling from Saskatchewan into Alberta he saw long chains of wild
geese, swans, and ducks in clouds, fleeing ahead of winter. Near
Edmonton he caught sight of a man walking alongside a pond with a string
of muskrat traps slung from his shoulder. The train going north on the
branch line ran through snow flurries that increased in frequency and
severity all the way to Fort McMurray.
Here he threw away his timetable and opened up his maps. From this point
on his life would be regulated, not by the hours of a clock, but by the
changing seasons.
He dug out of his baggage a pair of scarlet “four-point” Hudson’s Bay
blankets--heirlooms that had been in his family for more than half a
century--and he went to bed warmly in the unheated inn and dreamed
gratefully of Grandfather Jake Tearl who for twenty years had defied the
cold of Keewatin in these same red, imperishable blankets.
The trip down the river afforded him three weeks of complete idleness.
The boat ran aground on all the charted shallows, and the crew of Indian
stevedores would lighten ship by lightening the cargo: afloat once more,
they would re-load and go hopefully northward for a few more miles,
until they stuck on another bar. Kitchener had traveled up this same
river on this same scraped-bottom steamer with his mother and his
brother and his little sister Jane, when they undertook their fateful
journey to the city, twelve years ago. He spent the short, gray days on
deck, facing sleet and swirling snow, trying to pick out old landmarks
as he watched the endless marching of the great spruce forest along the
white streaked hills.
They cracked ice the last hundred miles, before they reached the long,
black lake that is the geographical key to all the wild watercourses to
the north and the west and the east. The captain of the boat hoped to go
on down Mackenzie River, but his solitary passenger never learned how
far he got. Kitchener had his baggage dumped on the shore near a
Chippewyan encampment, and although sheet ice enclosed a part of the
lake, he hired two Indians with a canoe, and crossed in a headwind and a
heavy sea to his destination at the farthest lonesome harbor. So his
sister Jane’s dismal prediction came to nothing. He reached
Port-o’-Prayer and had not walked a step of the way.
Kitchener left his belongings on the beach and strolled up the hill
towards the group of white-painted buildings that huddled at the edge of
the vast forest. There was a sort of inn near the landing, a story and a
half log building, with battened doors and windows and an unsmoking
chimney. Nobody lived there at this season. Farther on were the
company’s store houses and the residency of the store-keeper. The
buildings were shuttered and silent, not even a dog was visible in the
snowy compound.
In the spring and early summer, when the trappers had come in from the
forests, Port-o’-Prayer looked like a populous village. Now the
store-keeper was the sole remaining inhabitant. He had sent out his furs
long since and had hibernated for the winter.
Kitchener routed the man out of his quarters and found him to be an
untalkative, sad-featured Scotsman. He was so lacking in curiosity that
he did not even show wonderment at the sight of a tenderfoot who had
journeyed into the back-country while winter was beginning to close up
all the routes of retreat.
He answered the newcomer’s questions with an air of pained but patient
politeness. Yes--a Sergeant Buck Tearl had stopped here at the post. But
he went away again, after a couple of days. This was nearly a month ago.
Where had he gone? North somewhere, into the Vermilion River country.
There was a police look-out station there at _Saut Sauvage_, on the
ground that vaguely divided the Esquimaux from the forest tribes of the
Cree and Yellow Knives. The sergeant was making an Arctic patrol,
presumably on the trail of evil-doers.
What was he like, this Sergeant Tearl? He was a big man, who spoke
softly, and yet had a hard and dangerous-looking mouth. While he was at
Port-o’-Prayer he had kept on his lynxskin capote and the store-keeper
had seen only his mouth and nose and his disconcerting eyes.
Even this meager description set Kitchener’s pulses tingling. Having
come this far he had no thought except to go on, as far as _Saut
Sauvage_, if need be. This man surely was his brother Jerry.
Had Sergeant Tearl picked up a radio message sent to him on the
twenty-fifth of last month? The store-keeper didn’t know. He himself had
no interest in hearing things out of the air. The company had given him
a receiver last year, but it was too much trouble to buy new batteries
for it. If he wanted to hear voices and songs he could go sit in the
Chippewyan camp up the river.
Kitchener decided to go on at once. He would need a sledge and a train
of huskies. It was snowing steadily and drearily now, and the trails
would lie under shrouds to-morrow. What about dogs? The store-keeper had
a couple he could sell. One of them would do all right for a king-pin.
The Indians probably could spare two or three others. But they would
come high--a hundred dollars a dog at least. Men were feeding their
draught animals again, and weren’t kicking and clubbing them away from
the camps as they did in the summer. This was dog-time.
Fortunately Kitchener had no need to stint himself in money. He acquired
the store-keeper’s two spare huskies, a serviceable sledge, a pair of
snowshoes and a load of Hudson’s Bay company staple groceries. At
daybreak next morning he hitched in the two dogs, set his face to the
snow-laden wind, and was off on the river route.
Years ago young Kit Tearl had followed his brother or his father through
another spruce forest on such white, blustery days as this, sturdily
planting a pair of toy-sized snowshoes in the tracks of the bigger
raquettes ahead. He hadn’t thought of that boy in a long while. But when
he shoved his toes into the _babiche_ thongs and started out through the
powdery drifts he was surprised to discover that snowshoeing was a
logical and familiar method of locomotion.
It was the same with the “gee” pole and the dog traces and the dogs. As
he coursed through the thickets at the edge of the freezing river, he
found himself trudging along effortlessly, managing his sledge and the
tandem of trotting dogs with a subconscious facility, as though a
long-forgotten part of himself had breathed the tang of the wilderness
and suddenly awakened to take charge of his affairs.
The lessons of childhood may be buried deep by passing time and quite
forgotten. But things well learned are never really lost. He strode
forward with an easy swing of the hips, his toes pointed straight ahead,
as a woodsman walks. Eyes accustomed to look placidly and rather
humorously upon the world, somehow had grown sober and restlessly alert.
It did not seem like a recollection of ancient teaching, but an
instinct, rather, that prompted him to keep a lookout twenty paces ahead
for trail signs and to pass invariably on the windward side of the
denser thickets.
He would have said yesterday that he did not know a word of any Indian