Snow-blind
At first nobody answered, and then a voice in high-pitched alarm. “Who’s
there?”
“Nobody, just Oogly. Coming see Mayauk please.”
“You, Oogly?” It was Diane Durand. She sounded somehow relieved. “It’s a
funny time to want to see Mayauk. Wait a minute.” A soft footstep came
to the entrance and the door was unwarily opened. “Come in if you must.”
Kit had flatted himself against the log wall. For that moment he was
unseen. Diane showed herself for an instant in the moonlight, her
slimness hidden under the dragging folds of a huge, crimson Hudson’s Bay
blanket. “Come in, Oogly.”
Her voice sounded very sleepy. Kit saw her face in the softening
moonlight, the eloquent dark eyes, the shadow of the drooping eyelashes.
Queer that her beauty should affect him in those seconds with a pang of
sadness. The seigniors of France who won this country had such women for
their wives--the Durantayes, the Demonvilles, the Frontenacs--lovely,
dauntless, gently bred women who went where their men went. What it must
have meant to come home out of the night and the storm to find love and
loyalty and sweetness waiting in the doorway! Diane might have been fit
to be a pioneer’s wife. It was a pity. She might have been so fine.
The girl drew her crimson robe closer at her throat. It was Grandfather
Tearl’s old four pointer. She was sensible not to have scruples.
To-night was bitterly cold, and she had no other blanket. Yet Kit could
not help wondering if it had been laundered since the other night. He
thought of Jerry and Bill Tearl and Hell Bent and his heart was
hardened.
Diane admitted Oogly, and then she disappeared after him, neglecting to
bar the door. Kit pushed the door softly and slipped into the room. He
heard voices talking by the still-smoldering fireplace--Diane and Oogly,
and then Mayauk’s drowsy greeting. Somebody threw a pine log on the
fire, and almost at once the bright, resinous flame blazed up.
Nobody had seen Kit come in. He shoved the door shut with his foot and
edged along the wall. The firelight danced around three figures, the
Esquimau man and wife, and Diane. But he saw nobody else.
Kitchener’s quick glance went around the room. There were no angles or
ingle nooks where any one could hide. Only the bunk, and he knew the
baby was sleeping there. He blotted himself in the shadow as he stole
along the wall, ready at any instant for anything to happen.
The bunk was barely visible in the darkness. Kit approached
breathlessly. Hell Bent was contemptible enough to ambush himself in bed
with a baby and fight from behind an infant body. Kit reached the bunk
and groped back into the gloom. He found only a wee shape under the fur
robe. Cautiously he felt into the upper section, and then along the
floor underneath. Nobody was there.
He stood up, realizing that he had made another false move. Bent was not
in the cabin. He must have eluded his tracker by the same trick he had
employed at the Yellow Knife encampment, switching snowshoes and mixing
up his trail with a confusion of other prints. He had come only as far
as the outer doorway, where the Indians had trampled the snow, and now
he probably had followed them off into the woods, carrying the
waffle-mesh raquettes on his back.
Unluckily Kit had disturbed the baby and the little thing began to
whimper in the darkness. Diane turned and saw the shape by the bunk. She
advanced a pace and stared.
“You!” she exclaimed. “How’d you get here?”
“Came in with Oogly. Didn’t you see me?” From previous experience Kit
knew how useless it would be to question her. Bent may have spoken to
her, or he may have hurried on without her knowing. It didn’t matter.
“What do you want?” Diane demanded.
Kitchener coolly circled the room and came back to the door. “Oogly
forgot his toothbrush,” he told her without a smile. “Found it, Oogly?
Well, let’s get on.”
The Esquimau lingered only to bid a second good-by to the baby, and then
he followed Kit out of the cabin.
There was no use trying to unravel Bent’s trail. He had taken off his
identifying snowshoes, and the tracks he left now would be
indistinguishable from the dozen other sets of tracks that turned away
from the cabin. Kit had begun to suspect that the man had reached some
sort of understanding with the local Yellow Knives. If not he would be
clever enough to win them over. They naturally would have only the
bitterest feelings towards the policeman who had refused to give up
Oogly to them. This was their own country. They knew the secret paths
and byways of the wilderness, and they would have eyes and ears
everywhere. With a shrewd and unscrupulous white man to stir them up
their capacity for devilment had no limit.
Kit and Oogly went back to the Great Owl woods and re-built their night
fire. Then they lugged their robes a hundred yards deeper into the
timber, bedded-down under an uprooted hemlock, and slept fireless and
shivering through the night.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MAN HUNTERS
That evening was to begin the harrowing days and weeks of peril and
hardship through which Kitchener lived in an incredulous daze, like a
sleeper in the throes of a bad dream.
Kit and Oogly slept “cold” every night, and they never slept in the same
place twice. The Great Owl woods was their refuge from the Indians, but
there was a chance at any moment of Hell Bent’s creeping up and sticking
a spear or knife into their fur bags. Asleep or awake the menace lurked
behind them. Like a pair of homeless rabbits they dug-in under windfalls
and brush piles, wriggled into hollow logs, or spent the frigid night
huddled against some shaggy tree-trunk, where unseemly eyes glared down
and giant wings fluttered in the eerie stillness.
Daytimes they skulked and dodged through the woods and paid the price of
life with a vigilance that never gave them a second’s surcease. They
were hunters, and at the same time they were ceaselessly hunted. Kit’s
every waking hour was given over to a single, undeviating purpose--to
find Hell Bent and take him alive. But the man was gifted with an
uncanny elusiveness.
The ex-convict seemed to take an infernal delight in tantalizing his
enemy. Kit often crossed the trail of the waffle-meshed snowshoes. He
would follow with extreme caution, casting back and forth in
half-circles to avoid the dangers of a deliberately planted ambush. But
he never once caught a glimpse of the trail-maker. The waffle-webs
always ended blindly in some well-traveled pathway, where the wearer
shifted to his spare snowshoes and mingled his footprints with those of
other passers-by.
So far the ex-convict apparently had made no attempt to recover the
hidden sledge-load of loot. Presumably he was afraid to make any
definite move while a policeman was on patrol in the neighborhood.
Unhampered, he was able to evade his Nemesis. It would be another matter
to attempt the long trip southward, dragging a heavily laden sledge
through the deep snow. Before he could safely go ahead with his original
errand he would have to dispose of Kit as he had dealt with Jerry.
Kitchener seldom left the Great Owl woods in the daylight, and he never
showed himself in the open. Yet he was shot at mysteriously on several
occasions. He would hear a bullet tearing through the thicket that he
had thought was screening him, and an instant later the dry report of a
rifle echoed somewhere through the rift in the trees. He would duck and
scramble for a deeper cover, and later would maneuver around from the
rear to find a departing trail at a place where a man had stood and a
gun had rested for a moment in the snowy crotch of a sapling.
These wanton snipings he was inclined to lay at the door of Oogly’s
enemies. He had seen their tracks criss-crossing the forest along the
outskirts of the owl pits, and knew that some of them were always
prowling in the neighborhood, waiting with a deadly patience for the
Esquimau to come out. And their hostility towards Oogly naturally
included Kit.
The Yellow Knives were good stalkers, but notoriously bad shots. The
snipers so far had missed their mark, and that was one reason why he had
blamed the Indians for these furtive attacks. He had a feeling that if
Hell Bent ever glimpsed him over rifle sights it would be the end.
At least once every day Kitchener made it a duty to creep to the edge of
the clearing and assure himself that the cabin door was shut and that
smoke was still curling out of the chimney. Diane and Mayauk had not
been molested.
So Kitchener was justified in his first belief that the occupants of the
cabin would be ignored. The Yellow Knives would know that two armed and
resolute women at loop holes might wreak havoc among an attacking party.
They would know further that Mayauk would never let herself be taken
alive. To kill her would be worse than futile. Mayauk and the baby were
the anchors that held Oogly in this section of the wilderness. Let them
die, and he would pack up his scanty belongings and vanish northward
over night into the trackless barrens, where the Yellow-Knife vengeance
could never find him. It was to the interest of Oogly’s enemies to allow
his wife and baby to dwell unharmed in the cabin on Great Owl Run.
The January moon waned and black nights of storm and sleet and frightful
cold set in, and the wilderness lay in death under the white scourge of
winter. By craft and by stealth Oogly and Kit contrived somehow to eat
and to sleep and to evade their enemies. And Kit hunted his man, and
failed, so far, to get him.
The sun all but disappeared over the southern bulge of the world, and
then gradually began to come north again, a hazy, pallid ball, lacking
warmth and the power of giving life. Sometimes Kitchener encountered the
two local trappers in the woods. He would gossip with them briefly, and
then go his way, liking neither the sneaky-eyed Giffard nor the sullen,
black-bearded Bruyas.
On one occasion Constable Devon made a patrol downstream to find out if
all was well with the sergeant. Kit did not want police interference in
an affair that was decidedly his own. He told Devon that he was still
investigating the Yellow-Knife murder, assured the constable that he was
in no need of help, and sent him back about his business.
Kitchener had not talked with Diane Durand in weeks, but one night,
after the return of a full moon, he met the girl while roving the banks
of the creek.
He was working his way downstream, hidden by the shadows of the willows,
when there appeared above a snowy knoll a slender graceful figure in a
hooded mackinaw and calf-length breeches.
The girl of necessity had become a huntswoman. A brace of partridges and
two or three rabbits hung at her belt, and she carried a shotgun in the
crook of her arm.
Kit held his position in the thicket, waiting for her to come opposite
him. The moon-rays touched the curves of her cheeks and lips and her
small, firm chin, giving her face an expression of childlike
wistfulness. She looked thin and tired and most unhappy.
As Kit observed her calm and pensive features it struck him that nobody
but a monstrous cynic could ever believe that she was actively involved
in her uncle’s murderous schemes. Bent might have told her anything
about the gold-sledge, but Kit would not let himself think that she knew
the whole truth. If she were as bad as that, then nothing in the world
ever could be right, and he would be glad to pass out of it. If, like
her uncle, she looked on Kit as an obstacle that had to be put out of
the way, here was her opportunity. She had her shotgun. He stepped
suddenly before her with his hands in his pockets.
The girl halted as the tall, gaunt shape loomed in her path. She peered
fearfully for a moment, and then her tense shoulders relaxed and she
drew a long breath.