Snow-blind
over to form a group around Salmonfish. They made it quite clear that
all were ready to back up their leader’s demands.
“I’m not saying Oogly is here,” Kit parried after a trenchant pause.
“But if he were, why do you want him? What’s he done?”
“He killed our man!” one of the younger Indians blurted out truculently.
“How do you know he did?” asked Kit. “Did anybody see him do it?”
He was aware of a light footstep behind him, and without looking around
he knew it was Diane Durand standing at his elbow, one small hand firmly
touching his back. “Don’t give him up!” she whispered. “You can count on
me. We’ll fight ’em if we must.”
Kit’s glance swept the pressing circle of dark, sullen faces, estimating
their potentialities for trouble-making. They did not look like a crowd
that would be amenable to argument or reasoning. But Kit could do no
less than try to make them see the light.
“Who saw this man killed?” he asked suddenly. “You make a charge. You
say your man was murdered. Who saw it done?”
There was a restless stirring of feet, a grunted word or two, but nobody
answered. There was no sign of receptive intelligence in the lowering
eyes that were watching him and the door behind him.
“You, Tom Salmonfish!” Kit stabbed at the man with his forefinger. “Did
you see this murder done? Or you? Or you? Or you?”
The pointing finger singled out first one and then another of the
Indians. “Tell me! I want to know. I’m a policeman. If Oogly is a killer
I want to arrest him. I’ll take him to trial. If any of you saw the
murder you’ll have to come with us. I’ll arrest you as material
witnesses. You’ll be forced to stand up in open court and make your
charges. If Oogly’s proven guilty we’ll hang him. Come on. I want to
know. Who saw the murder?”
“We don’t want ’um hung,” said Salmonfish, his little coal eyes gleaming
with maliciousness and stubbornness. “You give Oogly to us.”
Kit advanced a pace, but the threatening line did not yield an inch. The
men all held carbines or rifles tightly gripped, and most of them
carried knives and pistols loose in their belts. Three or four were
thumbing the hammers of their guns, without even pretending to disguise
the fact that the muzzles were menacing the policeman. The gang of
avengers were beginning to chafe at all this parleying, and anybody
could have seen that mere words would not hold them much longer in
check. If their man wasn’t handed over to them very soon, they would go
in and get him.
Although Kit realized that his persuasive efforts were foredoomed to
failure, he was determined to stave off hostilities as long as he
possibly could. He looked around the glowering circle with a bright,
accusing scorn.
“If there has been a murder,” he challenged, “where is the body? Have
you brought it with you? The body of the dead man? In law we call it the
_corpus dilecti_. If nobody saw the murder done and nobody has the body
of the dead to show, then there can have been no murder!”
It was a nice legal point and Kit could not help bringing it up, even
though he knew in advance that the niggling little technicalities of his
chosen profession could not possibly bear any weight with these surly
children of the wilderness. In any event his peroration was punctured
flat by an unexpected, startling voice, speaking up behind him.
“The body drowning under much ice. Nobody find um now.”
Kit turned on his heel to see the broad-beamed countenance of Oogly
cheerfully grinning in the doorway.
He closed one eye meaningly, trying desperately to warn the Esquimau to
keep quiet. But Oogly perhaps did not understand the white man’s method
of issuing a warning with a sly eyewinker.
He pushed forward to fill the doorway with his rolling bulk and looked
with good-natured triumph at the men who had come to take him away.
“Nobody find the body anymore,” he declared. “No difference. He is dead
a long time sure. Oogly killed um.”
CHAPTER XV
THE NIGHT HARRIERS
It was too late to stop the Esquimau’s talking. Kit stood dumbfounded,
staring at him. Oogly either had gone stark crazy, or else he was a man
devoid of fear. He had forced himself into public notice, and judging by
his wide, incorrigible grin he was enjoying his unique position
immensely.
From the demeanor of the Yellow Knives, a person unfamiliar with the
Indian temperament might have imagined that they either had failed to
hear or understand. Not a man moved nor spoke, not a muscle quivered.
They waited for the outlander to go on, watching him in a dead, flinty
silence, like wolves watching a swimming caribou.
Oogly was more than willing to oblige. He not only admitted killing the
Yellow-Knife brave, but he told all about it in picturesque detail. He
seemed to think it was a piece of work that his modesty ought not to
keep hidden.
“The man him praying against my fish,” he explained genially. “So
drowning him had to be.”
Kit no longer tried to interfere. What was the use? The mischief was
accomplished. Oogly could swear himself blue in the face with denials,
but nothing that could be said after this could ever sway or stay the
purpose of the savages who had come to get him.
“What do you mean,” demanded Kitchener--“praying against your fish?”
“So nobody of the fish would eat at my fishing hook,” declared Oogly.
The Esquimau had come a step beyond the open doorway, so everybody could
look at him while he told his outrageous tale. In his queerly chosen
words of English, helped out by vivid pantomime, he showed them exactly
how and why the killing was done.
Oogly, it seemed, was fishing through a hole in the ice on Long Lake,
which emptied its chilly waters into Great Owl Run. He had been catching
plenty of fish--innumerable fish--if his hearers could believe the
number of times he jerked his pretended line out of the imaginary hole
in the ice. Then along came the Yellow-Knife fisherman.
The newcomer chopped himself a hole not far from Oogly’s splendid spot
for fish. He dropped a line of his own in the water and knelt down on
the ice.
The kneeling posture was the man’s undoing. The Esquimau could tell that
he was praying. When the fish stopped biting on Oogly’s hook he knew
that the Indian was praying against his fish. When the fish started to
come wriggling and flapping out of the water at the other hole then he
knew that the Indian was praying the fish onto his own hook. Oogly now
was catching none, and the other man was hauling them out as fast as he
could pray.
This, to the Esquimau’s simple method of thought, was a justifiable
cause for homicide. He walked over to the other fisherman, upended him
by the heels and pushed him down headfirst through the hole in the ice.
By making little explosive sounds with his puffed-out lips, Oogly showed
them how the bubbles came to the surface for a minute or two, and then
stopped coming.
“Awright now,” said the Esquimau, winding up his tale. “Finean’ dandy!
Oogly go back and fishing lucky once again.”
That was the story, and after its cheerful recounting Oogly leaned his
squat bulk against the doorframe as he waited placidly to find out what
the dead man’s friends were going to do about it.
Kitchener was aghast. He had never heard a tale so bloodthirsty and at
the same time so naïve and childlike in its telling.
He looked obliquely at the Yellow Knives, and nudged Diane’s arm.
“Inside!” he said under his breath.
“You come along now,” Tom Salmonfish said to Oogly.
The Indian did not raise his voice, but the glitter of his eyes was like
a baneful flame. He said something to his companions, and with that
soundless, gliding motion that is peculiar to all forest-born creatures,
the bunched group of men spread out right and left in a line that
flanked the front of the cabin.
Kitchener backed into the doorway, shoving Diane and Oogly into the
cabin behind him. He reached around with the toe of his foot and pulled
the door towards him, so he would be able to slam it shut with the least
possible delay.
There could be no doubt about the intentions of the Yellow Knives. They
had made up their minds to seize their man, drag him away, and somewhere
in the dark woods mete out their own cruel, remorseless justice, which
demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.
Kit was not deluding himself. These men wore store shirts and refused to
labor on Sundays, but under the veneer of the missionary teachings they
were still the same savages as their fierce and brutal forefathers. If
he tried to save Oogly it meant a fight to the death. They were a
sinister-looking crowd at this moment, and they had made it clear that
they neither respected nor feared the police uniform. He could hear the
click of rifle hammers up and down the line, and he knew they were all
set to rush the cabin the instant their leader gave the word.
Off on the other side of the clearing Giffard, the Runt, was seated on a
stump, like an ominous specter watching events. No help could be
expected from him. He had met with a rebuff that morning that his
shriveled and spiteful nature could never forget. So he sat tensely now
and waited, and Kit knew by the look of him that anything that happened
to the occupants of the cabin would be all right with Giffard. He even
might have egged the Indians on, had there been any need for that.
In the middle of the clearing, moving in the heavy snow between two
stumps, Kit caught sight of a tiny, gray-furred animal which was
struggling through the drifts, apparently trying to gain the shelter of
the nearer thickets. It was an old, whiskered house-rat. Kit recalled
that there had been rats in the cabin roof, and apparently this one had
been gassed out of his home by the smoking chimney.
The human mind is subject to the queerest aberrations. It was strange
that at this moment when Kit should have been terribly concerned with
his own troubles he could find time to think about a rat. But this
little creature was in a bad plight. It would starve or freeze to death
surely if it tried to live in the woods, and if it were caught in the
open by the predatory monsters that dwelt in the neighborhood--
Even at that moment Kit was conscious of a shadowy flutter in the air
above him, and he lifted his head in time to see one of the great, snowy
owls floating across the murky sky. The sharp senses of the Indians also
had caught the impalpable whisking of sound, and, without exception,
they too forgot their own affairs long enough to look up into the
morning dusk.
The huge, pallid night-bird flew softly above the roof of the cabin and
hovered for a moment to peer downward with his stupid, golden-tinged
eyes. Kit heard the Yellow Knives begin to mutter among themselves in
their own, ancient speech, and he saw them stir uneasily and crowd
closer towards the wall of the cabin. It was not a move of hostility,
but of fear, the impulse to hunt shelter. The savage faces were suddenly
stricken with awe and superstitious dread. This bird, as all Yellow
Knives knew, belonged to _Wetikoo_, the Devil’s regions, and they did
not wish him to fly above them.
The great owl was a weird apparition in the ghostly morning light. A
soft, downy body, poised graciously on soundless wings, at first glance
he seemed gentle and dovelike in his white-plumaged innocence. And then,
at closer range, might be seen his frightful head, the diabolically
hooked beak, the beautiful snowy floss of his cheeks and throat dabbled
in fresh blood. He had killed and dined gluttonously many times through
the night, and on his way back to the dark pits of the forest he could
pause in the quiet of dawn for one more killing.
The owl saw the gray rat wallowing in the snow, and by an imperceptible