CHAPTER XIV

SQUATTER’S RIGHTS

Kit stared goggle-eyed, first at the girl, at the strange, dumpy figures watching him from the half-light by the smoldering fireplace and again at the small, kicking, whimpering object in the swaddling blankets. His puzzled glance finished the circuit of the room, and he saw there was nobody else. Feeling flat and foolish, he slipped his pistol back into the holster, turning his back for the moment, trying to believe that nobody had seen him take it out in the first place.

After he had surreptitiously hitched his holster back behind his hip he looked around at the girl. “Where’s your uncle?” he asked, and his manner became stiff and dignified, as it should be with a sergeant of police.

Her brilliant eyes suddenly grew stony and uncommunicative. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Has he been here?”

“No.”

“When do you expect him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you heard anything from him?”

“No.”

Kitchener’s vision gradually was accustoming itself to the dingy light in the room. The fireplace seemed to draw badly and the smoke hung like a blanket from the ceiling. He scrutinized the two shapes in the haze before him, moving closer to see them better and arching one puzzled eyebrow as his gaze shifted from one to the other.

They were a singular looking pair, not much more than five feet tall, as sturdy and rotund and solidly put together as a couple of thirty-six gallon barrels. Kit grinned at the thought. A couple of perfect thirty-sixes!

In shape and in outward appearance they were exactly alike. Both wore thick-quilted pants, long, loose shirts of dressed skins, and clumsy fur boots. Both had slant, mongol eyes set deep behind plumped-out cheekbones, both wore their slick, black hair in the same square-bobbed manner, both smiled at him blandly and confidently as a pair of amiable children. How he guessed it Kit could not have said, but by some occult system of identification he discovered that one was a man and the other a woman. He had never seen any people from the Arctic seas, as far as he remembered, but he knew at once that these two were Esquimaux.

He spoke abruptly to the masculine part of the team. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The man seemed to know something of English. “Oogly,” he promptly answered.

“Oogly?” Kitchener’s eyelids twitched slightly as he stared at the round, good-natured countenance. “You don’t mean it?”

“Yup!” The man beamed upon the stranger, apparently much pleased by this opportunity for introductions. He pointed with a stumpy thumb. “This one, my wife. Her name, Mayauk.”

The woman’s lips parted and her teeth flashed in a smile as coquettishly feminine as the most beguiling dimples of any beauty anywhere. Her features were as broad and flat as Oogly’s, yet at that moment she seemed almost pretty, while her husband, even at his best, remained always as unlovely as his name.

“The baby,” condescended Miss Durand, “is called Uttaktuak.”

Kit looked curiously at the girl. “Friends of yours?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“How long you known ’em?”

“Since yesterday morning.” Her glance strayed gently towards the compact little bundle on the bunk. “They just happened to find their way here. The baby had the croup, and they were frightened. I steamed it out and greased it up, and it’s better I think--I hope.” Her eyes turned resentfully to the intruder. “She might get well if she weren’t kept awake by axes and hob-nail boots and the big, loud voices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

Kit flushed, and then grinned deprecatingly. “I couldn’t very well know that you had a baby here--now could I?”

“While I am living here,” she said, “this is my home, my demesne. It’s my privilege to say who comes in and who stays out.”

“By what right?” he inquired mildly.

“Squatter’s rights,” she flashed back at him.

“You move fast,” he laughed. “It was my belief that it took more than a couple of days and nights to gain a squatter’s title. However, we’ll let it go at that. This is your castle and moat and grange. The police’ll stay out, unless”--his brows contracted and he looked at her pointedly--“unless they find you harboring a criminal.”

She drew a short breath and the span between her curving eyelashes lessened by a fraction. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Kitchener spoke low, so that only she could hear. “Oogly,” he said, “is wanted for murder.”

Diane’s pretty mouth sagged open, and for the next few seconds she could not seem to think of any fitting thing to say.

“Inspector Bowman radioed the _Saut Sauvage_ outpost to get busy on the case,” he informed her. “Oogly, it seems, upended a Yellow-Knife brave over a hole in the ice and shoved him through.”

“You don’t know that it’s true,” returned the girl impetuously. “Nobody saw it. Even the Indians who are trying to kill him--” Diane stopped short and bit her lip, as though she had decided that she was saying too much.

“Oh, they are?” exclaimed Kit. “I didn’t know that!” He wrinkled his brow thoughtfully. “So that’s why they won’t talk. Sort of private feud. Going to settle it themselves in the good old-fashioned way.” His glance searched the girl’s anxious face. “Who told you they were going to kill him?”

“Why, nobody--” she began uncertainly.

“Oogly himself, wasn’t it?” Kit hazarded.

Reluctantly she nodded. There was no evading the shrewdly questioning eyes that watched her so intently. “They’ve been hunting him for nearly a month--Oogly and his wife and baby,” she admitted. “They were well hidden, and they probably wouldn’t have been found--only the baby got sick, and they came out looking for help.”

Her manner and mood had changed mercurially. The cold defiance of her eyes gave way to a beseeching warmth and softness. “There is no proof,” she said--“only the accusations of a lot of irresponsible savages. Nobody saw any crime committed. You can’t arrest him, can you, on anything as flimsy as that?”

Kitchener was not thinking about Oogly’s escapades just then. He was seeing Diane with a new vision, discovering an unexpected sweetness in her glance and her tenderly curving mouth.

“I suppose not. I don’t know.” He really hadn’t much sense of what he was saying.

“I’ll let you see the baby some time,” the girl vouchsafed. “It’s got the funniest, snappiest eyes, and it says things in Esquimau. Think of it! A little baby that can talk in Esquimau! And poor Oogly! If he were taken away down south and put on trial--he’d die. You know that. In a foul, stuffy courtroom! A hunter of the wide floes who has never breathed anything but the clean, cold arctic wind! And if he dies there’s nobody to look after Mayauk and Uttaktuak, and they’d both die.”

She paused with a gulp, and Kitchener was amazed to see the sparkle of tears on her lashes. “It would be unfair. It would be cruel!” Her hand went to him and for an instant touched his sleeve. “Please! Please--you won’t, will you?”

“I can at least promise that I’ll investigate thoroughly before I--”

Kit checked himself and looked out through the open door of the cabin. A harshly quavering noise came from somewhere across the clearing, and as he lifted his head sharply he saw a great, dark object soar off against the dusky, morning sky. The thing drifted above the open ground, with a hollow, querulous cry, and a moment later disappeared in the black woods towards the south. It was one of the great, slaty-white owls, evidently going home after a night of foraging.

Diane had turned to peer over Kit’s shoulder, and he felt a tremor suddenly pass through her slender body. “I hate them,” she said in a voice of low intensity. “They cross over to the barrens at night to eat things alive, and they come back in the morning glutted. There’s not a single small creature left living in this part of the woods.”

Kit was not listening. His attention had been arrested by a movement on the edge of the clearing at the eastern side. He had left Giffard in the alders, and the trapper still waited there among the shielding branches, a peeping, skulking shadow. But he was no longer alone. Two other furtive shadows had appeared beside him.

As he watched Kit’s eyes began to bulge. Instead of two or three there were now five or six of them--stark, gray silhouettes that had emerged stealthy-footed from the underbrush.

Diane had seen his back stiffen as he edged towards the doorway. “What is it?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Stay where you are.”

Kit leaned his shoulder against the door-frame and tried to see through the pearly haze of the dawn. He counted eight now, silent, somber shapes, forming like a skirmish line along the dark edges of the thickets, and as he watched three or four others stole furtively from the woods.

As though a soundless command had been given, the group all at once began to advance towards the cabin. There were a dozen or more of them, moving forward in a ragged file that spread the full width of the clearing. They came on without haste, but with a purposeful stealth and deliberation, dodging and gliding from stump to stump, as though they expected to get close to the cabin before they were discovered.

Kit suddenly stepped into the open. “Stop!” he shouted.

The on-creeping figures froze to immobility like so many partridges in scanty cover.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

Two of the advance intruders met the challenge by standing boldly erect among the stumps. The foremost of the pair was near enough so Kit could see the man’s lean, parchment-like countenance and almost feel the intensity of the wary, watchful eyes. He held a carbine aslant across his flat-belted stomach, and Kit’s ranging glance discovered that all the others were armed. They were Indians--Yellow Knives.

Kitchener was certain that he had seen the leader somewhere before. He was a tall and skinny savage, all ribs and knobby bones, with a dirty and grotesquely sharp face, like the face of a gargoyle that had been left in the weather too long in a sooty city.

“You give Oogly to us.” The leader made his demand without heat, and yet there was a stolid resoluteness in his manner that would not be easily cowed.

Kit remembered the man now. He was one of the Yellow Knives who had dined last night at _Saut Sauvage_. The cadaverous one, he recalled, was known as Tom Salmonfish.

“What do you want with Oogly?” he temporized.

“We come get ’um,” said Salmonfish coolly. “A big lot of us come now. We take ’um along.”

“What for?” insisted Kitchener.

There was an unpleasant mutter of voices along the line, and the men on the outskirts straightened from their crouching postures and stalked over to form a group around Salmonfish. They made it quite clear that all were ready to back up their leader’s demands.

“I’m not saying Oogly is here,” Kit parried after a trenchant pause. “But if he were, why do you want him? What’s he done?”

“He killed our man!” one of the younger Indians blurted out truculently.

“How do you know he did?” asked Kit. “Did anybody see him do it?”

He was aware of a light footstep behind him, and without looking around he knew it was Diane Durand standing at his elbow, one small hand firmly touching his back. “Don’t give him up!” she whispered. “You can count on me. We’ll fight ’em if we must.”

Kit’s glance swept the pressing circle of dark, sullen faces, estimating their potentialities for trouble-making. They did not look like a crowd that would be amenable to argument or reasoning. But Kit could do no less than try to make them see the light.

“Who saw this man killed?” he asked suddenly. “You make a charge. You say your man was murdered. Who saw it done?”

There was a restless stirring of feet, a grunted word or two, but nobody answered. There was no sign of receptive intelligence in the lowering eyes that were watching him and the door behind him.

“You, Tom Salmonfish!” Kit stabbed at the man with his forefinger. “Did you see this murder done? Or you? Or you? Or you?”

The pointing finger singled out first one and then another of the Indians. “Tell me! I want to know. I’m a policeman. If Oogly is a killer I want to arrest him. I’ll take him to trial. If any of you saw the murder you’ll have to come with us. I’ll arrest you as material witnesses. You’ll be forced to stand up in open court and make your charges. If Oogly’s proven guilty we’ll hang him. Come on. I want to know. Who saw the murder?”

“We don’t want ’um hung,” said Salmonfish, his little coal eyes gleaming with maliciousness and stubbornness. “You give Oogly to us.”

Kit advanced a pace, but the threatening line did not yield an inch. The men all held carbines or rifles tightly gripped, and most of them carried knives and pistols loose in their belts. Three or four were thumbing the hammers of their guns, without even pretending to disguise the fact that the muzzles were menacing the policeman. The gang of avengers were beginning to chafe at all this parleying, and anybody could have seen that mere words would not hold them much longer in check. If their man wasn’t handed over to them very soon, they would go in and get him.

Although Kit realized that his persuasive efforts were foredoomed to failure, he was determined to stave off hostilities as long as he possibly could. He looked around the glowering circle with a bright, accusing scorn.

“If there has been a murder,” he challenged, “where is the body? Have you brought it with you? The body of the dead man? In law we call it the _corpus dilecti_. If nobody saw the murder done and nobody has the body of the dead to show, then there can have been no murder!”

It was a nice legal point and Kit could not help bringing it up, even though he knew in advance that the niggling little technicalities of his chosen profession could not possibly bear any weight with these surly children of the wilderness. In any event his peroration was punctured flat by an unexpected, startling voice, speaking up behind him.

“The body drowning under much ice. Nobody find um now.”

Kit turned on his heel to see the broad-beamed countenance of Oogly cheerfully grinning in the doorway.

He closed one eye meaningly, trying desperately to warn the Esquimau to keep quiet. But Oogly perhaps did not understand the white man’s method of issuing a warning with a sly eyewinker.

He pushed forward to fill the doorway with his rolling bulk and looked with good-natured triumph at the men who had come to take him away.

“Nobody find the body anymore,” he declared. “No difference. He is dead a long time sure. Oogly killed um.”