Snow-blind
spilled forth a double handful of blackish, corroded lumps like pebbles,
but which, under Kit’s tremulous knife-blade, changed magically to the
color of virgin gold.
Oogly pointed towards the stream, which, at this point, ran too swift to
freeze. “I catch um fishing an’ hook um up,” he said.
Kitchener stared breathlessly at the boiling water. The Esquimau must
have snagged the bag by accident, and after helping himself to one of
the “sinkers,” which he needed for his line, he dumped the rest on the
bank and unconcernedly went his way.
With shaking hands Kit crouched to lift the pouch. It was made of some
sort of rawhide. But instead of rotting, some chemical action of the
water had hardened and stiffened the bloated skin until it was like a
sheet of stone.
For a space Kit squatted on his heels, dribbling nuggets through his
fingers. All at once he stood up and looked down over the brook
embankment. The racing water had cut its way under a shelf of the rock.
The deep, black channel was farther out, but here it looked to be rather
shallow. For just an instant he hesitated, and then began stripping off
his clothing.
Oogly looked on wonderingly, but had nothing to say. Anything his friend
did was correct in his eyes.
Kit stood in his underwoolens, and reached for the Esquimau’s hand.
“Hang on and don’t let the current pull me out.”
He slipped over the curve of the shelf, held his breath, and then
heroically dropped into the water.
The cold was like sharp blades cutting his flesh. But it was something
that had to be borne, and he gritted his teeth with the desperate
resolution of a martyr undergoing torture. The stream level did not
quite reach his arm pits. By clinging to Oogly’s hand he moored himself
against the gurgling current.
He trampled the bottom below the shelf, and found a heaped-up slimy
mass, which he knew by the feel to be a pile of full, heavily-weighted
bags. His toe groped along a mossy, waterlogged framework--the
guard-rail, “gee” pole and upcurving runners of a long submerged
dog-sledge.
CHAPTER XIX
LOST LOOT
In that tremendous moment Kit lost all sense of the cold that chilled
and numbed him to the marrow of his bones. A tingling pulsebeat rang in
his temples and throbbed in his fevered blood. He forgot that dawn was
at hand. He forgot his lurking enemies. He took no account of his
stiffening muscles and chattering teeth. He had found the lost treasure
sledge. It had taken its final plunge over the embankment to be engulfed
for the years in Great Owl Run. This was the place. A brave woman had
died here, and men had fought and killed and vanished. Here the valiant
Bill Tearl had taken leave of the remembering world.
Scarcely realizing what he was doing, Kit ducked under the water and
came up with a bulging, slimy sack in his hand. He deposited his burden
on the shelf, and went under again for another, and for another. There
was no need to look into the swollen bullhide sacks to know what they
contained. No metal excepting raw gold could have the heft of these
bags.
He brought them up, one after another, until warning cramps forced him
out of the water. For a few minutes he ran up and down the bank, beating
himself with his arms, while Oogly trotted behind, slapping him with
stinging and resounding slaps. As soon as his blood felt the resurgence
of life Kit went back into the brook. Five times he climbed in and out
of the water and at his fifth shivering emergence he lugged with him the
last bag of gold.
That appalling job was done. He looked from the heap of sodden bags
towards the sky which, as usual after an overly bright moon, had turned
threateningly black. There was a promise of more snow to-night. If it
snowed hard enough the evidences of this morning’s work would be buried
before to-morrow.
Kit had decided what to do next. He would transport the treasure to
another pool, and he alone would know the secret of the new hiding
place. So to thwart Hell Bent. While Bent was trying to re-locate his
loot, Kit would be given the leisure for his own grim hunting. And if in
the end Bent should kill him, then at least he had struck back at the
killer with a last sardonic jest.
He told Oogly as much as was needed to enlist that amiable savage’s
assistance. A half mile farther upstream they found a spot under a sheer
bank where black ripples ran deep under a sagging ice-bridge. They were
able to carry only two of the plethoric bags apiece. These they lugged
to the marked spot and dumped them overboard.
They made a dozen trips that morning, back and forth, burdened with bags
of gold, which they jettisoned in the swift current of Great Owl Run.
Luck favored them to-day. Their enemies presumably took it for granted
that they were sleeping out the daylight, as usual, in some well-hidden
nook of the Great Owl woods. There were no snipers dogging them this
morning, no curious intruders crossing their trail. And before their
task was finished it had begun to snow.
The dreary downfall began with a misty sleet, which changed presently to
white-drifting flakes. Kit had grown sick of the snow as a man wearies
of an unremitting disease. But now he looked with satisfaction at the
fluff that had begun to fill his tracks. By this time to-morrow nobody
could know that he and Oogly had been tramping up and down the creek
bank.
He watched the dark ring of ripples as the last bag hit the water and
sank out of sight. The Great Owl treasure had found a new resting place,
where it might lie untouched for twelve or fifty or a thousand years.
Who knew?
Although Kit was soaked to the skin under his outer clothing, he felt
overheated after his heavy labor. Unless he dried out immediately he
risked pneumonia or worse. He and his companion were starting back for
the shelter of the Great Owl timber, when Oogly broke away through the
alders. Kitchener followed, to find the Esquimau scowling above a fresh
snowshoe trail that came down almost to the edge of the creek.
The two men peered into the thicket. The tracks were not half an hour
old. Their maker obviously had been standing in concealment, looking
down at the creek. With sinking heart Kit realized that some one had
watched him while he toiled up and down the stream.
There was no sound save the whisper of snow in the frost-hard branches
of the alders and willows. The intruder must have fled at his approach.
He examined the tracks again. They were not the narrow, skiing prints of
the Yellow Knives, nor Hell Bent’s waffle-webs. But he knew whose they
were. A pair of rounded Chippewyan squaw raquettes, too light in build
for a man’s weight. He had seen these same tracks too often to be
mistaken. The trail maker was Diane Durand.
So the morning’s work was wasted: unless he gave the quietus to Diane.
The watchful Oogly may have noticed the sudden dour molding of his face
and jaw, that sinister Tearl look which meant that one of the tribe had
solved a knotty problem to some one’s else disadvantage. He turned
curtly.
“You go to the cabin,” he said, “and stay there to-day with Mayauk. If
the white girl leaves or anybody comes to see her, you come to me at our
camp, right away.”
Oogly’s squinty eyes held the same look that a malamute’s eyes hold for
the man he trusts. Kit took his leave without any misgivings, confident
that the Esquimau would never fail him.
He retraced his steps to the Great Owl woods, chanced a small fire to
dry his underwear, and later turned into his bag and slept the day
through. When he awakened in the early evening he found himself in a
welter of snow-filled darkness.
All of Oogly’s worldly belongings, combined with his own, formed such a
meager kit that he was able to bundle everything into one pack, which he
toted through the woods and across the clearing to the cabin door.
Diane admitted him without protest when he knocked. “Hello!” said the
girl, and there was nothing in her voice or manner to betray any guilty
consciousness of her morning’s activities.
Kit looked at the ground before tramping into the doorway. The
afternoon’s snowfall had covered the old trails, and there were no
fresher tracks arriving or departing. He shut the door and thumped down
his pack.
“Get ready to pull out,” he commanded. “All of us are traveling to the
police outpost to-night.”
The calm announcement produced a silence, which Diane broke into at last
with a brittle laugh. “Anybody may go who wishes,” she said. “Which
leaves me out, because I don’t wish to.”
Kit did not raise his voice. “We want to start at once. Please hurry.”
He saw the girl’s silhouette grow taut in the reflecting firelight. “Are
you by any chance,” she asked carefully--“in earnest?”
Kit didn’t think it necessary to answer. “Oogly,” he suggested, “will
you call the dogs and hitch ’em in? Everything we’ve got we can carry on
the one sledge.”
“Because if you are,” put in Diane, “you’ll have to get over it. I’m not
going!”
Kitchener faced her unsmiling, maddeningly supercilious. “Mayauk will
help you to pack. If not, I will. Only hurry. And this time we leave off
the ‘please.’”
“Why, you--” She stopped and glared at him. The Diane of the moonlight
was gone. This one was resentful and bitter and untouchable, yet he
never felt an allure more poignant than the beauty of her sultry and
stormy eyes.
He was utterly cold at this moment, because it would have been so easy
to be otherwise. “Oh, very well,” he cut in. “If you force me--I arrest
you.”
“What?” she shrieked.
“If you want the whole formula: I warn you. In the name of the king--”
“What for?” she cried. “By what right?”
“Vagrancy!” he said.
Diane’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. She was so outraged
that for those seconds she was unable to speak or even breathe.
“Why--why--you--what do you mean?” she finally managed to gasp.
“The word has only one meaning. A vagrant is a sort of a hobo without
visible means of support.”
“You’re calling _me_--” It was too humiliating to say. She ripped open
the throat of her shirt with a gesture so violent that one of the
buttons flew across the room. From beneath the open collar she jerked a
string and a chamois bag. The bag was torn wide and she pulled out a
roll of yellow-backed currency so thick that her fist was barely able to
close around it.
“And you say I have no means of support!” she taunted him furiously.
“What’s that?” he asked mildly.
“It’s money! I haven’t counted it: but I guess there’s a couple of
thousand or more!”
“What’s it for?” inquired Kit.
“What’s what for? Money?” Her pretty mouth attempted to sneer. “Why, my
dear sir. Money is to spend. To buy things with.”
“What things?”
“Anything! Anything you want!”
“Where?”
She blinked and looked at him a trifle uncertainly. “At the stores,” she
finally said.
“What stores? I haven’t seen you buying anything. The flour you eat, the
salt, sugar, bacon, beans--I gave you. You’re using my matches and my
shotgun. You don’t even own the blankets you sleep in. Yet you say I
have no right to arrest you for vagrancy. Well, you’re under arrest.”
The girl’s face changed from red to white, and then went red again.
“I’ll pay you for anything of yours I ever had,” she informed him.
“What’s the price?”
“I’m not in business,” he told her. “You’ll find the nearest
store-keeper at Edmonton, or maybe McPherson. When you get down there
you can buy anything you fancy. Here we don’t recognize money, because
there’s nothing for it to buy. That’s why I’m transporting you to
Edmonton. You won’t be a vagrant there.”
“You’re not--” Diane was almost crying with mortification and rage. “I
won’t go!”
“Remember the first morning I met you?” inquired Kit. “You were trussed