CHAPTER XIX

LOST LOOT

In that tremendous moment Kit lost all sense of the cold that chilled and numbed him to the marrow of his bones. A tingling pulsebeat rang in his temples and throbbed in his fevered blood. He forgot that dawn was at hand. He forgot his lurking enemies. He took no account of his stiffening muscles and chattering teeth. He had found the lost treasure sledge. It had taken its final plunge over the embankment to be engulfed for the years in Great Owl Run. This was the place. A brave woman had died here, and men had fought and killed and vanished. Here the valiant Bill Tearl had taken leave of the remembering world.

Scarcely realizing what he was doing, Kit ducked under the water and came up with a bulging, slimy sack in his hand. He deposited his burden on the shelf, and went under again for another, and for another. There was no need to look into the swollen bullhide sacks to know what they contained. No metal excepting raw gold could have the heft of these bags.

He brought them up, one after another, until warning cramps forced him out of the water. For a few minutes he ran up and down the bank, beating himself with his arms, while Oogly trotted behind, slapping him with stinging and resounding slaps. As soon as his blood felt the resurgence of life Kit went back into the brook. Five times he climbed in and out of the water and at his fifth shivering emergence he lugged with him the last bag of gold.

That appalling job was done. He looked from the heap of sodden bags towards the sky which, as usual after an overly bright moon, had turned threateningly black. There was a promise of more snow to-night. If it snowed hard enough the evidences of this morning’s work would be buried before to-morrow.

Kit had decided what to do next. He would transport the treasure to another pool, and he alone would know the secret of the new hiding place. So to thwart Hell Bent. While Bent was trying to re-locate his loot, Kit would be given the leisure for his own grim hunting. And if in the end Bent should kill him, then at least he had struck back at the killer with a last sardonic jest.

He told Oogly as much as was needed to enlist that amiable savage’s assistance. A half mile farther upstream they found a spot under a sheer bank where black ripples ran deep under a sagging ice-bridge. They were able to carry only two of the plethoric bags apiece. These they lugged to the marked spot and dumped them overboard.

They made a dozen trips that morning, back and forth, burdened with bags of gold, which they jettisoned in the swift current of Great Owl Run. Luck favored them to-day. Their enemies presumably took it for granted that they were sleeping out the daylight, as usual, in some well-hidden nook of the Great Owl woods. There were no snipers dogging them this morning, no curious intruders crossing their trail. And before their task was finished it had begun to snow.

The dreary downfall began with a misty sleet, which changed presently to white-drifting flakes. Kit had grown sick of the snow as a man wearies of an unremitting disease. But now he looked with satisfaction at the fluff that had begun to fill his tracks. By this time to-morrow nobody could know that he and Oogly had been tramping up and down the creek bank.

He watched the dark ring of ripples as the last bag hit the water and sank out of sight. The Great Owl treasure had found a new resting place, where it might lie untouched for twelve or fifty or a thousand years. Who knew?

Although Kit was soaked to the skin under his outer clothing, he felt overheated after his heavy labor. Unless he dried out immediately he risked pneumonia or worse. He and his companion were starting back for the shelter of the Great Owl timber, when Oogly broke away through the alders. Kitchener followed, to find the Esquimau scowling above a fresh snowshoe trail that came down almost to the edge of the creek.

The two men peered into the thicket. The tracks were not half an hour old. Their maker obviously had been standing in concealment, looking down at the creek. With sinking heart Kit realized that some one had watched him while he toiled up and down the stream.

There was no sound save the whisper of snow in the frost-hard branches of the alders and willows. The intruder must have fled at his approach. He examined the tracks again. They were not the narrow, skiing prints of the Yellow Knives, nor Hell Bent’s waffle-webs. But he knew whose they were. A pair of rounded Chippewyan squaw raquettes, too light in build for a man’s weight. He had seen these same tracks too often to be mistaken. The trail maker was Diane Durand.

So the morning’s work was wasted: unless he gave the quietus to Diane. The watchful Oogly may have noticed the sudden dour molding of his face and jaw, that sinister Tearl look which meant that one of the tribe had solved a knotty problem to some one’s else disadvantage. He turned curtly.

“You go to the cabin,” he said, “and stay there to-day with Mayauk. If the white girl leaves or anybody comes to see her, you come to me at our camp, right away.”

Oogly’s squinty eyes held the same look that a malamute’s eyes hold for the man he trusts. Kit took his leave without any misgivings, confident that the Esquimau would never fail him.

He retraced his steps to the Great Owl woods, chanced a small fire to dry his underwear, and later turned into his bag and slept the day through. When he awakened in the early evening he found himself in a welter of snow-filled darkness.

All of Oogly’s worldly belongings, combined with his own, formed such a meager kit that he was able to bundle everything into one pack, which he toted through the woods and across the clearing to the cabin door.

Diane admitted him without protest when he knocked. “Hello!” said the girl, and there was nothing in her voice or manner to betray any guilty consciousness of her morning’s activities.

Kit looked at the ground before tramping into the doorway. The afternoon’s snowfall had covered the old trails, and there were no fresher tracks arriving or departing. He shut the door and thumped down his pack.

“Get ready to pull out,” he commanded. “All of us are traveling to the police outpost to-night.”

The calm announcement produced a silence, which Diane broke into at last with a brittle laugh. “Anybody may go who wishes,” she said. “Which leaves me out, because I don’t wish to.”

Kit did not raise his voice. “We want to start at once. Please hurry.”

He saw the girl’s silhouette grow taut in the reflecting firelight. “Are you by any chance,” she asked carefully--“in earnest?”

Kit didn’t think it necessary to answer. “Oogly,” he suggested, “will you call the dogs and hitch ’em in? Everything we’ve got we can carry on the one sledge.”

“Because if you are,” put in Diane, “you’ll have to get over it. I’m not going!”

Kitchener faced her unsmiling, maddeningly supercilious. “Mayauk will help you to pack. If not, I will. Only hurry. And this time we leave off the ‘please.’”

“Why, you--” She stopped and glared at him. The Diane of the moonlight was gone. This one was resentful and bitter and untouchable, yet he never felt an allure more poignant than the beauty of her sultry and stormy eyes.

He was utterly cold at this moment, because it would have been so easy to be otherwise. “Oh, very well,” he cut in. “If you force me--I arrest you.”

“What?” she shrieked.

“If you want the whole formula: I warn you. In the name of the king--”

“What for?” she cried. “By what right?”

“Vagrancy!” he said.

Diane’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. She was so outraged that for those seconds she was unable to speak or even breathe. “Why--why--you--what do you mean?” she finally managed to gasp.

“The word has only one meaning. A vagrant is a sort of a hobo without visible means of support.”

“You’re calling _me_--” It was too humiliating to say. She ripped open the throat of her shirt with a gesture so violent that one of the buttons flew across the room. From beneath the open collar she jerked a string and a chamois bag. The bag was torn wide and she pulled out a roll of yellow-backed currency so thick that her fist was barely able to close around it.

“And you say I have no means of support!” she taunted him furiously.

“What’s that?” he asked mildly.

“It’s money! I haven’t counted it: but I guess there’s a couple of thousand or more!”

“What’s it for?” inquired Kit.

“What’s what for? Money?” Her pretty mouth attempted to sneer. “Why, my dear sir. Money is to spend. To buy things with.”

“What things?”

“Anything! Anything you want!”

“Where?”

She blinked and looked at him a trifle uncertainly. “At the stores,” she finally said.

“What stores? I haven’t seen you buying anything. The flour you eat, the salt, sugar, bacon, beans--I gave you. You’re using my matches and my shotgun. You don’t even own the blankets you sleep in. Yet you say I have no right to arrest you for vagrancy. Well, you’re under arrest.”

The girl’s face changed from red to white, and then went red again. “I’ll pay you for anything of yours I ever had,” she informed him. “What’s the price?”

“I’m not in business,” he told her. “You’ll find the nearest store-keeper at Edmonton, or maybe McPherson. When you get down there you can buy anything you fancy. Here we don’t recognize money, because there’s nothing for it to buy. That’s why I’m transporting you to Edmonton. You won’t be a vagrant there.”

“You’re not--” Diane was almost crying with mortification and rage. “I won’t go!”

“Remember the first morning I met you?” inquired Kit. “You were trussed up with a pair of handcuffs, riding on a policeman’s sledge. I’ve got those same handcuffs, and I’ve got a sledge.”

“Oh you--you rotter!” she said with a vitriolic intensity.

“So was the other bird. And you had to travel with him. Ready?”

Diane stood stock-still, her great eyes searching his face with a helpless, hunted look. Her impassioned resolution seemed to waver. Two tears trickled from her lashes and glistened on her cheeks. “What can I do,” she moaned, “when a bully and a brute--so much bigger and stronger--and I’m just a girl--”

“Certainly you are,” said Kit.

He turned away to spare her his smile. He should have done this before, he was thinking. She had worried and hampered him more than he would have admitted. But now he soon would have her off his hands, out of his sight and, he hoped, out of his mind. She knew where he had sunk the gold. But that no longer mattered. It would be months before she could see her uncle again. Long before that time Kit should have settled up his score with Hell Bent.

With Diane sitting by in sullen hostility, the other three soon gathered up their belongings and loaded up the dog sledge. They closed the cabin and started eastward in a swirling storm, Oogly breaking trail, the baby riding in a nest behind the dogs, Mayauk handling the “gee” pole, and Kit and Diane trudging speechless in the rear.

Through the long, blustering night they held their steady pace, and shortly after the crack of dawn they arrived at the police outpost of _Saut Sauvage_.

Constables Devon and Cross were at home. The two officers tried valiantly to hide their astonishment and welcomed their unexpected visitors with a hospitality that was warmer than the bleak quarters in which they lived.

Kit explained affairs in a few words. “This is the girl I told you about. Looking for her uncle and hasn’t found him yet. And this wilderness is no place for a child.”

He was short and brusque in his speech--a commanding officer telling a subordinate what to do. “I want you, Constable Cross, to make a patrol south and take her with you. She says she doesn’t want to go, but that’s just too bad. Technical charge of vagrancy. You can let the inspector decide what to do about it.”

Cross looked furtively at the girl, and blushed. His simple face reflected the pride he felt in being chosen for a responsibility, the joyous anticipation of a visit to civilization, and also a painful, gawking shyness at the thought of the company he would have on his way out.

“It isn’t really right for a young girl to be roamin’ about alone in this country,” he stammered. “You’ll find it’s better, miss, to be away from here.”

Diane studied the constable coolly, and then, for just an instant, a gleam of malicious amusement tinged her eyes. Kit intercepted that glance, with its sly and tantalizing humor for mischief-making, and somehow he did not envy the doughty constable his journey out of the forests.

After their night’s trip the wayfarers were glad to accept the comforts of the police shack. The rear storeroom, with its cots for guests, was turned over to Diane and Mayauk. Kit and Oogly stayed awake only long enough for breakfast. Then they crawled into the constables’ bunks and throughout the snowy daylight slept the sleep of the righteously weary.

Subdued voices, the scuffle of feet, a poker rattling in the fire-box of the stove, the faint rasp of snow falling aslant on the log walls and tar-paper roof, the savor of meat cooking--Kit awakened amid lazy sounds and pleasant smells. The frosted window square opposite him loomed opaque against the outer blackness of the night.

Constable Cross was bending over the bake oven on the stove. Devon sat in low-voiced conversation with a man whom Kit had not seen before, a broad-backed man with a bullet head, hatrack ears and a round-necked hair-cut. Diane, Mayauk and Oogly were nowhere visible.

Kit hitched himself into his clothes while lying in the bunk, and then opened the skin curtains and slid out onto the floor.

In a far corner of the room, beyond the angle of the bunk, he discovered Diane. The girl was seated on a camp stool, a lock of auburn hair tipped over one straight eyebrow, her pert nose in the pages of a big book which she held balanced on one crossed knee. She evidently had spent the snowy afternoon ransacking the outpost’s supply of literature. Old books and lop-eared magazines and tattered newspapers littered the table and the floor about her chair. She appeared as aloof from the rest of the company as if she had retired to a private apartment with a “no admittance” sign on the door.

As Kit stretched himself and sauntered across the room the stranger turned to stare at him. The man’s face, which was close shaven and unwholesomely pale, had the battered, hard-used appearance of a third-rate prize-fighter’s mug. His eyes were as protuberant and held the same metallic coldness as a frog’s eyes.

“Oh, good-evening, sergeant,” said Devon, standing up. “This man came in on us out of the storm this afternoon. His name is--_um_--”

“Pettijohn,” supplied the stranger. “How-da-do, sergeant.”

“Where’re you from?” inquired Kit without much interest.

“The States.”

“Yeah? You must enjoy chilly weather to be coming up here now.”

“Oh, any time’s good enough for my business,” said the man. “I’m a missioner. Our people sent me to look after the welfare of the Indians.”

Kit surveyed the stranger ironically. He wondered what sort of welfare the Yellow Knives might acquire from this ornery-looking plug-ugly. Then he turned away indifferently. What the intruder did to the Yellow Knives, or what they did to him, didn’t really seem to matter.

The kettle was humming on the stove, and Kit poured out a basinful of the first hot water he had reveled in for weeks. He scrubbed his face and neck and hands, and then paused before a wall mirror with its chained comb. He was plastering back his wet, sleek-black hair, when he heard a chair scrape on the floor. Feet stumbled across the room. A voice cried out:

“I knew it. I knew it!”

The comb dropped to swing on its chain. Kit looked around. He saw Diane under the lamp. In her hands she clutched an open book--a volume bound brightly in scarlet and gold. There was not a vestige of color left in her face. She breathed fitfully and heavily. A ruddy light glinted in her wide spaced eyes.

Every man in the room gaped at her.

“Look at this!” she said to Constable Devon. “Your police year book. The _Scarlet and Gold_!”

“Yes,” said Devon, puzzling his eyebrows. “Yes, it is!”

Diane’s laugh was harsh and cramped, utterly different from her real laughter. “He says he is Sergeant Buck Tearl.” For a moment her glance fixed Kit rigidly, and then she softly laid the book on the table. She tapped the open page with her finger, and stepped back.

“Here,” she said, “is a photograph of Sergeant Buck Tearl.”