Snow-blind
features limned austerely in the shadow of the lamp.
“Where’d you get the uniform?” he asked abruptly.
Kit’s lips set tighter. He was in danger of entangling himself if he
said too much. As Cross had said, he didn’t have to make any admissions.
He’d have to think out his story and be very sure that all the parts
fitted together. There’d be plenty of time for that. He wasn’t on trial
now.
“Where’d you first meet this man?” Cross asked Diane.
“Down around Port-o’-Prayer.”
“Was he alone?”
“No. There was another man with him.”
“Who?”
“He was--I didn’t know at the time. But since I’ve seen this picture I
think--I’m sure--he was Sergeant Tearl.”
“Yes?” said Cross sharply.
“Yes!” echoed Devon, and swung around menacingly to Kit. “Killed him
yourself, didn’t you? Killed him for his uniform!”
“No,” Kit replied, meeting Devon’s gaze, steel to steel.
“Do you know if he did?” the constable jerked over his shoulder at the
girl.
“No. I--I don’t know.”
“Was he wearing the uniform when you first saw him?” Diane hesitated.
Kit saw her blanched face beyond the table. “I--I can’t say. If he had
the scarlet tunic then it didn’t show under his outer garments. I only
noticed it--after we had reached the cabin!”
“Where the murder happened?”
The girl shuddered. “There--yes.”
Kit smiled a twisted, acid smile. The girl was doing her best to convict
him of murder. She wanted him taken down country out of her uncle’s way.
Innuendoes and half-truths, told with a show of reluctance--she had made
a grave case against him. And he would let it go at that for the
present. He wasn’t sure how much of his own side of the story he wanted
to tell. Anyhow, it would be useless to say anything now in his own
defense. Nobody’d believe him. He had been caught in a uniform that
didn’t belong to him. Almost as heinous a matter as being a spy in
wartime. They’d take him to the inspector’s headquarters no matter what
he said--or tried to prove--they’d hang him if they could.
Devon and Cross were already formulating plans.
“I’ll take him down,” said Devon, whose seniority gave him a slight
advantage. “Starting at daybreak. He’ll talk when the inspector puts on
the clam-squeezers.”
“What the deuce do you suppose his lay was?” asked Cross indignantly,
discussing the prisoner as though he were not present. “Bumping off a
policeman, and then coming around in sergeant’s chevrons, giving orders
to you and me?”
“You leave it to the inspector,” said Devon.
“When you take me down, you’d better take this girl too,” interrupted
Kit. “Whatever I’ve done she’s as bad or worse than I. Ask her to
explain why she’s hanging around the Great Owl woods. Make her tell you
her uncle’s right name, and then find out what he wants here.”
“When we want any more orders from you,” said Devon, “we’ll post you for
a commission.”
“While I’m gone,” Devon suggested to Cross, and turned his back on Kit,
“you’d better see if you can find Buck Tearl’s body. If he went into the
creek he’ll be there still, or down along the Vermilion River.”
“I’m going to look,” said Cross.
“This last storm is busting up the ice. You’ll find plenty of open water
and big jams all the way down. You look well. We’ve gotta have the
body--”
“Ask her about the sledge-load of gold,” interrupted Kit, and shot a
malicious glance at Diane. “Ask her how it came to be where it is now.
Get her to tell you all about it.”
Devon faced about, winking. “What do you mean--sledge-load of gold?” His
curiosity rebounded to Diane. “What does he mean?”
“Why--I--” The girl hesitated and her glance wandered uneasily towards
the stranger, Pettijohn. The man was sitting with his arms hugging the
back of his chair, his jutting ears as avid as a pair of funnels.
“Oh, ye-ah!” drawled Devon. “Just wait a minute.” He spoke almost too
politely to the visitor. “You said you were going on down to the
Yellow-Knife camp to-night.”
“Well, yes, I thought I might--”
“All right!” agreed Devon pointedly.
Pettijohn stood up, disconcerted. He didn’t want to go. That was clear.
But the invitation was too plain to be missed. “Well,” he decided, “I
guess I might as well be going along.”
Devon picked up the man’s steaming mackinaw and held it for him. He gave
him his snowshoes and rifle and helped him to buckle on his back pack.
“Sorry you gotta be going,” said Devon. “Well, so-long anyhow. Come and
see us again sometime.”
“Thanks awfully!” said Pettijohn wryly. “Thanks for the dinner and
everything. Well, so-long, everybody.”
A moment later he had tramped out into the night.
Devon crossed to the front window and scratched into the frost rime with
his thumbnail. He applied his eye to the gouged place and then bent his
ear to listen. For a minute or two he waited thus to make sure there was
no eavesdropping. Then he turned back to Diane.
“All right now. What’s all this about a sledge-load--”
He never finished. The heavy door banged open, admitting a gust of snow
and a white-furred figure that looked more like a shaggy, stampeding
musk-ox than a man. Then the door was closed, the wavering light
steadied, and they saw it was Oogly.
Kit never before had seen the Esquimau aroused from his transcendental
calm. Now he was fairly exploding with excitement, horror.
“_Uttaktuak!_” he yelled.
Everybody turned, petrified, to stare. Mayauk’s eyes had grown into dark
circles of alarm. A sharp incoherency of speech was wrung from Diane’s
parting lips. Kit stumbled up from his stool. The two constables stood
with sagging jaws.
“What?” exclaimed Devon.
“The baby!” gasped Diane. “Uttaktuak! Something’s happened--”
“Down between ice--falling in creek!” Oogly’s voice broke through above
his labored breathing. “Can’t reach ’um--drowning--”
“Where?” demanded Cross.
“In creek--ice-- Oh, my gosh awful!” wailed Oogly.
Mayauk screamed and darted for the door.
“Come on! Show me!” Devon put on one mitten, and didn’t wait to grab the
other. He seized Oogly’s elbow and thrust the Esquimau ahead of him out
of the doorway.
Constable Cross snatched blindly at the wall pegs, got a blanket and a
cap, and then he was gone after the others, banging the door behind him.
In their dash to the rescue it might have seemed that they had forgotten
their prisoner. But there really was nothing for them to worry about. A
handcuffed man would never get far in the wintry forests.
Kit started to follow, and then ruefully clinked his manacled wrists,
and sat down again. Diane was left alone with him.
The girl had checked her first impulse to rush out into the storm. As
the running footsteps faded away in the blustering darkness she turned
wildly to look around the cabin. The tea-kettle. She filled the vessel
afresh at the water-butt and put it on the stove to boil. If the
rescuers were lucky enough to come back with a frozen morsel of human
flesh in their arms, there’d be no waiting for “first-aid” treatment.
Somebody had to stay behind.
She poked up the fire and crowded three fresh logs into the fire-box.
Blankets were brought from the bunk and draped over chairs by the stove.
She found an old door brick and put it into the oven to heat. Then she
went to the back window, scraped off the pane, and tried to see out of
doors.
Kit had followed her movements about the room, watching with dreamy,
half closed eyes. Then, fervently, after a long silence: “I do hope they
get her!”
“Yes,” agreed Diane, her nose still pressing the glass.
There was another endless lapse after that: two beings in one room,
listening for the same sounds, thinking kindred thoughts, acutely
conscious of one another, separated nevertheless by a barrier as
heartbreakingly wide as the polar ice-pack. The clock ticked quietly on
its shelf, the kettle began to hum its homely refrain, the draft whipped
and lashed up the red-hot chimney; outside they heard the snow slatting
across the roof, the hurry of the wind, the crack and groan of the
broken ice-floes in the creek, crawling, sliding--
Diane faced about suddenly. “What a frightful night!” she said.
Kit saw her eyes, pitiful somehow, haunted with a tragic lonesomeness.
He knew she was not thinking of the weather.
“You and I have done frightful things to each other,” he said.
“You forced me,” she answered dully. “You forced me to do it.”
In the flash of his smile there was a melancholy sweetness, without
resentment or reproach. “We ran afoul of things that had us licked
before we started. It might have been so different.”
“I know. You think I don’t?” Tears gathered and glistened for an instant
on her eyelashes, and then she winked hard and flung back her head. “I’m
sorry--”
Her hand gripped towards Kit, to be arrested half-lifted, half-open.
“What’s that?”
A tumult of heavy sound welled out of the night: a slow rumble gaining
force and momentum; a splintering and grinding; the crack and crash of
small field-pieces cutting loose in furious volleys; the ground, the
cabin walls trembled against a sudden violence breaking out of the
darkness.
Kit and Diane were standing at the rear window, without remembering how
they got there. The black head and the ruddy head were touching as they
tried to see through the same window-pane. Smothering darkness without.
They caught the surge and rush of big water let loose.
“_Saut Sauvage!_” muttered Kit. “The rapids! The ice-dam has gone out.”
“My God!” she whispered.
The battering crunch of great ice cakes, hitting and breaking up. A man
shouted somewhere shrilly. A sudden swelling and mingling of all sounds
in one thundering outburst. Then, as abruptly, the roar ceased. A jar
and a jolt now and then, slacking to quiet. Only the wash and splash of
rapid water running free.
Kit did not hear the shack door open. An indraft of snowy air hit the
back of his neck. He turned his face from the window. Oogly was standing
in the doorway.
Diane whirled. “The baby? Where’s the baby?”
Oogly ignored her. He came into the room and forgot to shut the door.
His slyly puckered eyes brought their message for Kit alone. This, he
seemed to think, was no time to bother with children or women.
“Finean’dandy!” he announced. “You an’ me go up along barren land. Sea
no frozing later. Big whaling ship come along inside pack-ice. You go
away on whaling ship--nobody arresting you anytime then.”
Oogly was trying to be nonchalant, but obviously he was pleased with
himself. It was beginning to dawn upon Kit that the Esquimau in some
mysterious manner had had a hand in the breaking-up of the creek floes.
He had lured Devon and Cross out of the shack with a wild yarn about the
baby. Kit studied the man’s unemotional countenance in suddenly growing
alarm.
“Oogly! Where are the constables?”
For the first time the Esquimau allowed his self-appreciation to appear
in a widening grin.
“Constables riding on middle water. Noum coming along back a long while
now.”
CHAPTER XXI
HEADING NORTH
Kitchener felt a sickness and emptiness under his ribs. His comrade, one
time a murderer, again had taken direful measures. He peered in
consternation at the swarthy, round face that looked forth so genially
from its ice-encrusted hood.
“Cross--Devon!” he accused furiously. “Drowned--you’ve killed them!”
A hurt, almost tearful look clouded Oogly’s soft, seal-brown eyes.
“Noum!” he protested vehemently. “Sitting on ground along water middle.
Can’ get off now.”
“What? They’re out there, and still alive?”
“You betchum!”
By stumbling speech and vivid gesture the Esquimau tried to explain just
what had happened. In the center of the stream stood a long, narrow
island, a pointed ridge of rock, like a backbone, humped up above the
surface of the rapids. Ice cakes, broken from the tunnels upstream had