Snow-blind
Sometimes a fire spectrum wavered before him, or again the colors washed
out in white blankness, as though a bucket of snow-white paint had been
dumped over his head. At intervals his eyesight was restored briefly, so
he could see things through a weaving film.
He made out a dull, dark shape on the river ice, crawling doggedly; and
Jerry, stooping, moving down the embankment....
Through the snow glare there rushed a high-pitched wail of sound,
faster, shriller, more hideous somehow, and overriding all other sounds.
It reached the river and stopped horribly with a soggy thump.
For a moment Kit was overcome by a ghastly sickness. He heard the clean
report of a small-caliber rifle whip back above the line of sledges, and
at the same instant he heard Jerry’s anguished cry.
“Dad!”
Jerry was down in the middle of the stream, bending over a snow-shrouded
shape that did not move. He went on his knees and stood up again with a
limply dragging object in his arms. Up the embankment he staggered,
clutching his burden, breathing thickly through his teeth. Unhurried by
the bullets that cut the air about him he crossed the open ground to the
eastward terrace and laid the fur-clad form at his brother’s feet.
“Dad!” he said, and trailed off in a dull monotone. “They got him for
keeps this time.”
CHAPTER XXV
INSPECTOR TEARL
Kit gripped his eyes tightly shut, and then opened them again and tried
to see. He dropped and buried his hands in the muffling, snow-crusted
furs. “I heard it hit,” he said.
“Right behind the ear,” whispered Jerry. “Craziest thing I ever knew.
Almost the same place where the other one hit him--years ago.”
A chunk of lead threw a spurt of snow in Kit’s face. He peered about
wildly, and then sprang to his feet and hauled his parked sledge down
from the top of the embankment. He swung the runners about and shoved
the load of baggage alongside the prone body. Then, with his head down
between hunched-up shoulders, as though he were plunging into a hail
storm, he ran down the slope among the strewing of dogs.
He found a short ax, and with numbed sensibilities he struck twice. The
whimpering ceased. He drew his knife and slashed the traces free. Then
he bent his back to the tug and started up the embankment with the
second laden sledge.
Jerry caught the idea, and hurried down to help. They rushed the sledge
up the terrace, lifted it with its baggage, and stood it on top of Kit’s
sledge. Before the marksmen across the river had spotted their range
both dodged into the protected alley between the piled-up sledges and
the crest of the river bank.
For the moment they were barricaded against their enemies on either side
of the stream. Jerry had dropped his rifle and was stooping low over the
wounded man. At length he looked up gravely and shook his head. “He’s
breathing--that’s all.”
A while ago Kit had wept over the man who came back from the years of
living death. Now he was strangely unaffected. It was as though the
well-springs of emotion had suddenly dried within him. Actual, physical
death was not so terrible.
He stared towards Jerry for a moment, and then groped for his rifle and
drew himself flat on top of the embankment. Hell Bent was over there
behind the middle sledge. Bent at last had finished his incomplete job
of twelve years ago. It seemed to Kit that his own life had been shaped
and consecrated to this one moment. Just give him his vision long enough
to mark his man and align his rifle-sights, and he would ask nothing
else of fortune, ever.
He was fumbling with his rifle, gray-faced and grim, trying to pin his
sight on the sledge that sheltered Bent, when Jerry grabbed his ankle.
“Come down, Jackass!”
Kit kicked back in an effort to loosen his brother’s grip, and then his
body went taut and a queer, shivering sensation ran up and down his
spine. Somebody had shouted from under the embankment: not Jerry; a
wild, unearthly voice that rang through him like a Jehovian trumpet.
Awed, shaken to the depths, he tumbled down from the bank of snow, to
find Jerry locked with a struggling, bloodied figure that was trying to
stand erect behind the sheltering sledges.
The miracle was not so much that the man still lived with a bullet in
his brain, but that an unconquerable vitality flamed in the lean, gaunt
body to endow him for those few moments with a will and lithe muscular
strength to overmatch the brawny Jerry.
Bill Tearl, as he might have been a dozen years ago, his head high, his
gun in his fist, a deathless valor sustaining him in his last embattled
hour!
“Behind that stump!” he cried. “There’s another under the windfall! I’ll
take him! Durand--over your shoulder--behind you--look out!”
Kit was staring in utter stupefaction. This was not the gentle, vaguely
smiling man who had come down out of the Northland with Jerry. The lax
shoulders had stiffened, indolence had kindled into a blazing
resolution. He was no Esquimau, either in thought or in speech, but a
determined white man at bay, fighting for his life.
“It’s Bent!” he declared. “And Bruyas! And that other little
weasel--what’s his name--Giffard!” He had remembered his own tongue, and
was calling to somebody in furious, hard-clipt words.
“Hold the dogs. I’ll take care of this side. They want the gold sacks.
Let ’em come and get ’em!”
“My God!” said Jerry. “He thinks he’s back there that day--at Great Owl
Run.”
Kitchener had stumbled to Jerry’s assistance and was trying to pinion
his father’s straining arms. “Dad!” he said. “Wake up! Come out of it!
It’s Kit! Listen to me!”
The old man did not seem to hear the soothing voice. He wrenched his
arms free, whirled and stared at the ground behind him. “They’ve shot
her from behind--murdered her!” His speech throbbed with pity and
horror. “That lovely girl-- Ah, the devils!”
The bullets were whining and snapping overhead, but if Bill Tearl heard
them he thought they were the bullets of another bloody day, long ago.
The missile that had hit him a few minutes before must have re-opened
the lead-scarred brain-cells and let in remembrance. Recollection had
come to him, and with it, delirium. His mind was back in the Great Owl
forest, re-living the tragic scene of his last rational hour. A sleeper
who had awakened at the place where his long sleep began.
“Hell Bent did that,” he avowed. “If you don’t kill him, Durand, I’m
going to.”
He turned and looked squarely at Kit with eyes that evidently saw
another man. “Here! The chamber’s full. Take this one!” He reversed the
ivory-handled gun and shoved the butt into Kit’s hand. “Listen, I’ll
keep ’em busy here by this poor girl. Leave your rifle. He’s under the
windfall. If you can work around behind you can nail him.”
Kit thrust the revolver into his holster, and curved his arm about the
old man’s shoulders. The bullets were singing around them with the
pertinacity of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. It might have seemed for just
those few moments that a derisive fate was protecting them.
“Dad!” Kit beseeched. “Please! Let’s get under cover.”
Strangely, the old man yielded. The tense figure relaxed in his arms and
he lowered the sagging weight behind the shelter of the sledges.
“Who--who’s there?” asked the inspector in a wandering voice.
“It’s I--it’s Kitchener.”
“Who? Little Kit?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s that with you?”
“Why, it’s Gerald.”
“Jerry?”
“Yes.” Kit felt as though something had been stuffed in his throat to
shut off his breathing. “It’s--it’s Kit and Jerry.”
His father’s hand groped upward to touch his face, and then strayed over
his shoulder and down his arm to clutch at his hand. For an instant the
sinewy fingers gripped him tightly, and then he felt them slipping,
growing weaker.
“What are you two boys doing here?” Bill Tearl asked with a sudden
severity.
“We--we came to find you.”
“What do you want? Why did you leave home?”
Jerry was down beside them, his hand on his brother’s knee. “He’s gone
all the way back now,” he whispered. “He knows us now and he thinks
we’re a couple of little kids.”
The hearing of the dying man was astonishingly alert. “What did you
think you were,” he demanded--“men? Now listen to me, you boys. I don’t
want you tagging after me. I’ve got a job to do, and this is no place
for you.
“I want you to go back to your mother,” the inspector commanded, while
the brothers knelt over him with heads mutely bowed. “Tell her I’ve got
some business to attend to, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll be
home shortly.”
“Yes, Dad,” Kit assented in a breaking voice.
He thought it was the end, and was taken unawares when, with a sudden,
uncanny resurging of vitality, the dying man twisted out of his arms and
stumbled up in the red-spattered snow.
The old inspector yelled with a frightful incoherency. “The gold bags!
The dogs--broken loose. Runaway! Hey--Durand--stay there. I’ll stop
’em--”
He was on his feet, swaying, staring with excitement across the barrens.
Before the brothers could interfere he stooped and snatched up a rifle.
“Look out there, you!” he shouted. “The fool dogs. They’ll go over the
creek bluff! Whoa! Haw, you fools! They’ve gone. The sledge. Drowning,
the poor brutes. And the sledge!” He laughed with a grim mockery.
“Snowing! Trail soon blotted. Murder for gold bags, and the bags are
gone. Who’ll find ’em? Funny world. Murder for nothing--”
He snapped off his speech to glower across the river embankment. “Hell
Bent! You know where they went overboard, do you? Followed, eh?” The
white mustache lifted in a ferocious smile. “All right! See if you live
to salvage ’em!”
He broke away from Kit’s detaining hand, and with a spasmodic strength
that was not to be denied, he flung himself against the river bank and
scrambled up over the mound of snow. Against the white, shadowless
tundra he stood in stark outline, an erect, straight-poised figure,
advancing towards the sledges with a rifle in his hands.
The guns were blazing away in a furious concentration, up and down the
line in front, and from the other side of the river. Three or four
powdery snow puffs spatted out of the old man’s clothing like dust out
of a beaten rug. Inspector Bill Tearl tried to advance on his weaving
legs, and then toppled and went down slowly and solemnly as a crumbling
tree-trunk, and lay still with his face towards the midmost sledge.
CHAPTER XXVI
ONE WHOLE MAN
The two brothers were both over the bank, crawling in the scuffled snow.
Kit scarcely noticed the buzzing bullets. He shook his head in petty
irritation, as though he were annoyed by a swarm of gnats. Jerry had
reached the fallen man, and grasped one of the limp ankles. Kit caught
hold of the other leg. They wriggled backwards and dragged the body with
them over the terrace and down into the shallow trench behind the
sledges.
Kit spoke with a curious, measured calmness. “It’s a lot better to
remember and die,” he said, “than to forget and go on living.”
Then his voice thrilled with a swelling emotion. “They had to kill
him--not once--but three times!”
Jerry said nothing. He was giggling like a girl in a most amazing
falsetto.
Kit turned to him blankly. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Fun-ny bone,” exclaimed Jerry, and tried to stop his spasmodic gasping.
He moved half way around to exhibit his right forearm, which hung from
his elbow like an old, fagged rope-end. “One of the dum-dums--smashed
the bone. It--it’s not so darned funny as--as it sounds.”
Kitchener grasped his brother’s hairy, dangling wrist and explored with
his fingers up under the dripping sleeve. “Gee, that’s rotten, Jerry.”
It gave him a pang to feel the magnificent muscles changed in a moment
to numbed and useless flesh. “When was it?”