Snow-blind
eyes. “This frozen world becomes a part of you, and you a part of it. It
blinds you to all save its own harsh, wild enchantments. You want to go
out, but you can’t stay out. You love it and hate it. You can’t be happy
anywhere else, and you can’t be happy here.”
He ended with a shortened breath and looked away, as though in
embarrassment. “Finish your business here, Kit, and get out fast. One of
us is enough.”
Abruptly he changed the subject. “Take your time with Bent. After last
night’s stroll he won’t travel far to-day. A man softened by prison.
Cross the back lots as I told you and you’ll strike his trail again
somewhere along the Vermilion River. After that stick close. He’ll be
watching for you. Look out! But don’t let him unearth that sledge
without your being on hand to jump him. Got it all straight?”
“Perfectly,” Kit reassured him.
“You’d better get some sleep then. If you and your dogs cork off for a
few hours now you’ll travel farther and faster in the end.”
“When do you leave?” asked Kit.
Jerry had gone back to his sledge and he was stooping with his back
turned. He did not look around. “When you’re ready to go,” he mumbled.
Kitchener unrolled the blankets of the service issue which, in the
future, were to be his own. As he passed the sledges on his way to pick
a sleeping place in the lee of the rocks, Jerry stood up and without
warning clamped his brawny right arm around his brother’s head.
“It was good to see you once more, old pioneer,” he said in a thick,
gruff voice.
Kitchener waited motionless, feeling a lump come into his throat and
almost choke him. There were a thousand things he wanted to say, but he
was abashed by his own sentimental longings, and he stood tonguetied,
and said nothing.
“Remember the last time we changed clothes?” asked Jerry--“the day I
induced you to put the kitten’s collar on the little black and white
striped animal, which the scientists call _mephitis mephitica_, and the
Indians call _Sikak_ the skunk? And Dad made me wear your clothes and
sleep out in the woods.”
Jerry laughed gently. “Go to sleep, Cocky-bird. It’ll all come out right
in the end.”
“See you later, Jerry,” said Kit. He stumbled off behind the rocks,
rolled up in his blankets in the gray, snowy dawn, and within three
minutes was soundly slumbering.
The snowfall had almost ceased when Kit awakened. It was a dull, sodden
day, windless and utterly quiet. The clouds were hanging low over the
forest, black and ominous, overcasting the wilderness with a strange,
uncanny twilight. For a minute or two after his eyes were open Kitchener
lay in warmth and drowsy comfort. But all at once it occurred to him
that there was something foreboding in the complete absence of sound.
His body went taut in the middle of his langorous stretching, and he
threw off the blanket and sat up. The campfire was still smoldering, and
somebody was bending over it.
“Hello, Jerry--” he said, and then stopped short. The figure in the
smoke had turned, and he saw that it was not a man. He scrambled to his
feet, rubbing his eyes, staring in astonishment. The fire-tender was a
woman--Diane Durand.
“Good morning,” said the girl coolly. She emerged from the suffocating
haze of the fire, which she evidently did not understand how to manage,
coughing and shaking her head as though to rid herself of the smoke.
In the daylight he noticed that her touseled hair was not the flaming
red the fire reflections had imparted last night, but verged into softer
tints of bronze. The eyes which regarded him steadily were deep and
luminous and flecked with a golden brightness. There was something
impudent and unflattering in the way she looked at him.
He regained his breath and faced her suspiciously. “What are you doing
here?” he demanded.
“It’s not my fault,” she returned. “I came back because I had to. Blame
your friend’s high-handed interfering. By the time I had reached my
uncle’s camp he was gone.”
“Gone where?” exclaimed Kit.
“On northward. Without dogs I can’t hope to overtake him. You’re going
up that direction, aren’t you, sergeant?”
Unwittingly Kitchener’s shoulders straightened. It gave him a queer,
uplifting sensation to have her think that he was an officer of the
Royal Canadian Police.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m going north.”
“Then you’ll have to take me with you,” she announced calmly. “When we
catch my uncle you can get rid of me.”
Kit looked around uneasily. “Where’s my--my friend?” he asked.
“He’s gone,” said the girl.
“What?”
She fumbled in the pocket of her mackinaw and brought out a folded slip
of paper, which she handed to Kitchener. “Here’s a note he left for you.
I picked it up and read it.”
With a sense of impending evil he opened the sheet and found a few lines
of pencil-script in Jerry’s careless scrawl. He read:
Dear Kit:
Don’t forget there are a million of ’em as pretty as this
Diane. I saw a funny look in your eye this morning. I’m just
warning you, that’s all. Don’t let her make a sap out of you
and I have no fear about anything else. So long, old crow.
The things I like least about life are its repetitions. You
get your hair cut or mow your lawn or paint a house or cook
breakfast or shave or wash a shirt or kiss a girl, and it’s
all to be done over again to-morrow or next week or a year
from now. The only thing I know that stays done is to have
your teeth pulled. Cheerio, Cocky-bird. Always exit on a laugh.
Jerry.
With eyes grown suddenly misty Kitchener turned and gazed around the
glade of evergreens. On the opposite hillslope he found the trail left
by sledge runners and trotting dogs’ feet and a pair of big, slashing
snowshoes. The tracks ran straight north and apparently were several
hours old. Jerry was well on his way towards the dreadful darkness of
Queen Maud Sea.
CHAPTER VIII
FOLLOW ON
It was like Jerry to vanish lightheartedly as though he were dropping
off somewhere for a frivolous week-end, instead of undertaking a journey
that would have appalled the most hardened _voyageur_. His comings and
goings had always been thus casual and unexpected. He hated to say
“good-by.” Kit had found his astonishing brother once more, only to lose
him. They might meet in a year, or in ten years, or perhaps never again.
As Kit turned the paper over his finger he was stricken by a sudden
recollection. He glanced sharply at Miss Durand.
“You say,” he asked, “that you read this note?”
She nodded her auburn head. “_Uhuh!_”
In spite of himself Kit felt an uncomfortable warming of blood under the
skin of his face. “I wouldn’t pay any attention--he doesn’t mean
anything--” He caught his breath in embarrassment. “He’s a lunatic.”
“He must be a good friend of yours to give you so much good advice,”
said Miss Durand.
“He’s an old friend, anyhow,” agreed Kit uneasily. “We’ve known each
other for years. Just the same, he’s an idiot.”
“Anything else you want to call him--why, yes,” she returned mildly.
“But he’s no idiot. I think it was very smart of him to warn you.”
Kitchener shifted his feet. “I don’t know what he was talking about.
Warn me about what?”
“Against anybody named Diane,” said the girl serenely. “Look at Diane
d’Angoulême and Diane de Poitiers, just to mention a couple. There were
a lot of ’em in history, and they all were sly and tricky and full of
the old Nick. It pays to be careful in your dealings with the Dianes.”
“Those two are dead,” remarked Kitchener. “And I don’t need Jerry to
tell me what to do about their successors.”
The girl moved to avoid the drifting smoke from the camp fire, and then
tilted her head sidewise as she examined him impersonally from under the
curve of her hazel eyelashes. “What was the funny look in your eye your
friend Jerry noticed?” she asked.
Kitchener stared at her. The audacity of her asking him that! There was
an impish suggestion about her mouth and lips that did not quite
approach a smile. He found himself feeling bitterly resentful towards
Jerry. He might at least have left the nonsense out of his note.
“Does it look funny now?” he asked stiffly.
“Well--no,” she answered judgmatically, and half closed one of her own
bright eyes, as though to see him better with the other. “Not
noticeably.”
“What Jerry meant,” he remarked, “is that I might fall for you because
you’re so pretty. You are, you know.” He was trying to appear as
nonchalant about it as the girl herself. “But he also said there were a
million of ’em. So what does that amount to?”
“Not a thing,” she said.
“Certainly not. I’ve met a good many of the million myself--Daphnes and
Delilahs and Dulcys, and maybe even a Diane or two. Darned pretty, some
of ’em--but what of it?”
“We haven’t anything to worry about,” she assured him--“anyhow you
haven’t. I can see you’re too well insulated.” She looked at him
demurely. “I know now,” she suddenly declared, “why he calls you
Cocky-bird. When you push up your left eyebrow, it makes you--you’re
just like that.”
He hastily drew his eyebrows straight, and scowled at her.
“I think it’s cute,” she said, and the smile grew definite, and wicked.
He confronted her furiously. “Listen here!” he said: “I suppose you
expect to go along with me?”
“I sort of took it for granted.”
“Why don’t you go down to Port-o’-Prayer and get the old Scotch factor
to ship you out? It isn’t far from here.”
“Because I don’t want to. I came to find my Uncle Jim, and I’m going to
find him. If you won’t take me with you I’ll tag on your trail. Anyhow I
will until I freeze to death or die of hunger.” The girl extended her
empty hands for his inspection. “I haven’t any outfit or anything.”
“You wouldn’t be able to keep up with me,” he objected.
She tossed back her head and her face looked childishly bewitching under
the tousel of ruddy hair. “I’ll keep up,” she promised. “I’ve snowshoed
a lot,” she said--“for sport. Saranac and Banff and St. Moritz.”
“How the deuce did you happen to lose your uncle in the first place?” he
asked her ungraciously.
“I didn’t exactly lose him,” she replied. “I was visiting friends in
Ottawa, when he wrote me that he had decided to spend the winter in this
country. I thought it would be nice to be with him, and telegraphed him
to wait for me. But he was gone before my message reached him. However,
I supposed I might overtake him, so I caught the next to last boat down
the Slave River and went ashore at Fort Smith. But for some reason Uncle
Jim had changed his mind and struck off from farther down country.”
“Yeah?” said Kitchener. “What does he want up here?”
“He thought he’d spend the winter trapping,” she answered as glibly as
though she had learned a formula by heart. “His lungs are not good and
the doctor ordered him to spend a few months in the open.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kit expressionlessly. “This is a good place for the
lungs.”
“While I was marooned at Fort Smith, wondering what to do next,” the
girl went on regretfully, “a couple of Indians told me of a man who had
outfitted at Port-o’-Prayer for a trip north. From their description I
knew it was Uncle Jim. I thought there was still time to intercept him,
and I persuaded these Indians to guide me east from Fort Smith to cross
the trails above Port-o’-Prayer. They brought me safely as far as the
Dog-Rib country, and then got frightened about something and said they
were going back. They were stubborn about it, so I had to let them go,
and came on the rest of the way alone.”
Kitchener was watching the girl sidewise. Her manner was so innocent and
confiding that it was hard to disbelieve her. But he was certain that in