Snow-blind
“You--” The girl stopped and choked in her wrath. “You--devil!” she
wound up impotently.
Jerry turned his head slowly, and for the first time paid her the
tribute of looking at her. Then he shifted his glance to Kit. “This is
the one, Buck,” he said. “This is Diane.”
Kit in bemusement regarded first the girl and then the man. In his
brother’s lightness of speech he recognized a serious and purposeful
undercurrent. Jerry had called him “Buck.” Why? He couldn’t guess. Only
he realized that there was some queer and subtle game afoot. He would
have to watch closely and pick up his cues.
Jerry’s eyes held him, and he caught the warning in their smiling
depths. “This,” the policeman informed the girl, “is Sergeant Buck Tearl
of the royal stuffs. He told me that he wanted to find you and ask you
about that radio message. And here you are!”
Kit advanced a pace or two, but was careful not to reveal himself too
closely in the firelight. For some incomprehensible reason Jerry was
asking him to shift identities--to pretend that he was a policeman. All
his life he had been playing up to his big brother’s whims, and it
seemed but the normal and natural thing now to follow the lead that was
offered him, whatever the hidden motives might be. There would be no
difficulty in playing the part. He stood back in the shadow, and even if
the girl looked at him too observantly she could learn nothing from his
appearance. As far as she knew he could be wearing a police uniform
under his outer garments.
“I want to know,” he said, “what you meant by sending me that stuff in
the air. ‘The dead do not always die,’” he quoted. “And by the way,
who’s Kablunak?”
The girl shifted her hostile stare his direction. “I don’t know what
you’re talking about,” she said.
“Why did you ask WBZ to relay your message?”
“I sent no message to anybody,” she snapped.
He interrogated her with a measured frown. “Your name’s Diane?”
“Yes, it’s Diane.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“Is this supposed to be a court-martial?” she asked. “Or are you just a
fresh young man?”
“She told me her last name was Durand,” put in Jerry. “Diane Durand.” He
moved over a few inches on a log that he had recently brushed clean.
“Won’t you sit down?”
“No,” she said.
“What are you doing here alone in the woods?” Kit asked.
The girl had turned with a malevolent impulse to Jerry. “I want to tell
you something,” she declared. “You claim to be a policeman too. Well,
there’s an inspector somewhere in charge of this district. When I tell
him that one of his brave officers overpowered a helpless and harmless
girl and handcuffed her and dragged her around through the woods on a
sledge, you know what’ll happen to you. They’ll break you, my man, and
throw you so far out of a decent service that the lowliest Dog Rib will
be ashamed to walk in the same wilderness with you.”
Jerry stripped several crisp bacon slices from his toasting switch and
arranged them neatly on a tin plate. He added a couple of pieces of
buttered bannock, and offered the dish to the girl. “Won’t you eat some
breakfast?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“My dear,” he informed her pleasantly, “your unsupported word won’t get
you anywhere with the inspector. Inspector Bowman’s in charge just now.
And you could never in your life convince him that one of his trusted,
gentlemanly boys would do a vile trick such as overpowering a frail and
innocent girl, and slipping the nippers on her pretty wrists, and
dragging her around the woods on a sledge. He just couldn’t believe it,
and that would be all of that.”
“How did you chance to wander into this part of the territory--all by
yourself?” persisted Kitchener, making his voice as gentle and polite as
he could possibly manage.
“Her dogs,” said Jerry, “ran away from her and left her on her own....
Her own what?” He questioned himself interlocutorily, as though he were
a one-man minstrel show, at the same time inspecting the small feet in
the half-knee-high boots. “Dogs,” he replied.
The girl’s mouth curled contemptuously. “The comedy,” she said, “hasn’t
a laugh in it.”
Kitchener’s grave eyes wrinkled at the corners and, quite unwarrantedly,
he himself laughed.
The girl looked startled, and then glanced full at him and for the first
time appeared to recognize him as a fellow being. For just an instant a
responsive glimmer heightened her expressive features, as though she
were on the point of grinning back at him; and then the flickering
brightness was gone and the look of sullen resentment had returned.
“If I hadn’t picked her up,” remarked Jerry, “she no doubt would have
starved to death and frozen to death and lost her way home.”
“I wasn’t lost,” she declared furiously. “If you’d kept your hands off
I’d have found the man I was looking for.”
“Who was he?” Kitchener inquired.
“My uncle,” she told him.
The coffee pot had reached a boil. Jerry tossed a handful of snow under
the lid, and then poured out a steaming cupful, into which he dribbled a
sticky, white fluid from a punctured can. “May I give you a cup of
coffee?” he inquired of the girl.
“No,” she said.
Kitchener was watching her face with reflective curiosity. Suddenly he
tried a blind shot. “Is your uncle’s name Jim?” he asked.
For a second she hesitated, and then threw up her head.
“Yes,” she said.
“Tall, stoop-shouldered party with scars on his face and head?”
questioned Kit. “A burly-looking bird who shaves in blizzards and eats
up the weather?”
This time she was really interested. “Yes,” she said, and her straight
eyebrows drew anxiously together. “Have you seen him?”
“Jim who?” temporized Kit.
“James Durand.”
“It isn’t Sim, is it, instead of Jim?”
“What?”
“Simeon Bent?”
The girl stiffened perceptibly and the space between her eyelids
narrowed ever so slightly. She seemed to swallow something in her
throat. “What do you mean?”
“Is Jim Durand also Simeon Bent?”
“He is not,” she declared.
“Do you know Simeon Bent?”
She hesitated for half a breath, and then shook her head. “No,” she
said.
“Where do you live?” Jerry cut in.
“New York, Philadelphia, Edmonton, Portland, Montreal, North
Saskatchewan.” She rattled it off as glibly as a railroad brakeman.
“Ottawa too?” suggested Jerry. “Why discriminate against Ottawa?”
“Yes,” she answered surprisingly. “I did live in Ottawa for a while. I
went to school there.”
“Recently?”
“Quite recently.”
Jerry smiled. “Do you still want to meet your uncle?” he inquired. “If
you do it’s easy. We just came from his camp. All you have to do is
back-track the sledge runners to the place you came from. It isn’t five
miles.”
The girl regarded him suspiciously, and then glanced at Kit as though
for confirmation.
“Right!” he assured her.
“Won’t you have some coffee before you go?” invited Jerry.
“No,” she said.
She walked to the sledge, picked up a pair of snowshoes, and pushed her
toes into the thongs. For a moment she lingered, holding a pair of
boyishly competent hands towards the fire. Then she shoved her hands
into the fur mittens that dangled around her neck on a cord. Without a
word or a backward glance she walked away.
They saw her for a moment moving sturdily across the snowy hillside, and
then the slight figure faded in the morning gloom and was lost to sight.
CHAPTER VI
THE GREAT OWL MURDER
With a plate of beans and bannock and bacon in his lap, and a tin mug of
coffee gripped in his fist, Kitchener sat down by the camp fire and
faced his brother with an unwonted lack of approbation.
“I had believed,” he remarked, “that chivalry towards women was supposed
to be one of the higher virtues of the honorable northern police.”
“All of that,” agreed Jerry easily. “And ‘never fire first.’ You’ve
heard that one too. But strictly _sub rosa_--to uphold the law a police
force needs a few in its ranks who walk a little roughly and who
sometimes neglect to remember that women are ladies, and who are just a
hair firster on the gat than the other guy.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“They didn’t make me a sergeant for spreading my cloak in the mud for
the village queens, or for waiting for crooks to take a crack at me,
while I counted ‘one-two--it’s my turn next.’”
“What about this girl?” mused Kitchener. “She seems to me--sort of--a
square-shooter.”
“She’s Hell Bent’s niece,” said Jerry.
“Tell me about her,” invited Kit after an almost imperceptible pause.
Jerry glanced at his brother’s left eyebrow, which was crooked upwards
at its sharpest angle. “Hello, Cocky-bird! By the barometer I see
there’s danger of muggy weather. I’d be careful.”
“Don’t you worry about me.”
“I ran into her yesterday evening--and she acted lost and strayed. She
was looking for some man who was coming in from Port-o’-Prayer, and it
struck me that it might be this Bent onion. Then she told me her name
was Diane. I asked her if she was the WBZ Diane, and she said no. But it
seemed an odd coincidence that I should pick that name off the air, and
the very next woman I meet calls herself Diane. It gave me reason to
pump her a little.” Jerry shook his head. “A deep well, and Heaven knows
what’s at the bottom.”
“Why did you give her the wristlets?” asked Kit.
“Before I decided she was interesting I’d told her of crossing the trail
of a tall, stoop-shouldered snow-plodder back a ways in the forest. She
was all for going and finding him at once. That didn’t suit me. I didn’t
want the tip-off to reach Bent that I was flanking him--not until I
could have an understanding with you. Also I didn’t want her to see you
before I did. I expected you two to be making faces at each other, and I
was particularly anxious for you to know first what sort of a face yours
was to be.”
Kitchener prodded the ground with the heel of his snowshoe, and said
nothing.
“So when she started to go off to find her uncle,” Jerry pursued, “I
told her this morning would be soon enough. She didn’t agree in the
least: so what else could I do except to present her with the shining
bracelets and tuck her away comfortably for the night. She had nothing
to complain of. She had a snug sleep and a pleasant sleigh ride all over
Saskatchewan.”
“Do you think she did radio that message?”
“I don’t know. She, perhaps--or somebody using her name--thinking I’d
heard of her, and might heed it.”
“What would be the object?”
“To get me out of the country.”
Kit looked up searchingly. “What’s it all about, Jerry?”
“Dad!”
Jerry spoke the word solemnly, and just for that moment his look of grim
bantering was erased from his face.
Kitchener waited with a sudden physical tensing that seemed to strain
every muscle of his body.
There followed an interval of profound silence while Jerry stared off
northward through the falling snow. “Kit,” he blurted out in a
constricted breath, “there is a dark and horrible crime that has gone
unsolved and unavenged for twelve long years!”
Still Kitchener sat without speech.
“Since I came back into this country,” Jerry went on in a slow, brooding
tone, as though he had forgotten that any one else was present, “I’ve
spent every day and night and thought with just one object. I’ve gone
through all the department records, I’ve talked with every policeman who
has traveled the old-time trails, I’ve questioned every trapper and
bush-ranger and every one of the sooty-brothers, Indian and Esquimaux,
that I’ve met in the wilderness. I have spent years trying to find out
what happened to Inspector Bill Tearl.”
“You’ve found out--”
“Not much actually, and yet--maybe a lot.”
Jerry put down his empty coffee cup, dug in his shirt pocket, and then
twisted and licked a cigarette into shape. “Did you ever know there was
gold in this country?”