CHAPTER XXIV

THERE WERE THREE

Kitchener was on his feet with a stabbing breath, stumbling down the embankment. In his dim-sighted, watering eyes the erect figure on the ice loomed like a specter in an unbelievable dream. He reached awe-stricken towards the stiff, unresponsive silhouette.

“Dad!” he said in a stifled voice. And again, in sudden, breaking emotion: “_Dad!_”

With a quiet, gentle dignity the man drew away from the hands that had touched him. Jerry hastened forward and crooked his arm about his brother’s shoulders.

“No, Kit! I’ve talked and talked with him, and he doesn’t get me. It’s no use. Save yourself the heartbreak. He knows us only as a couple of white men whom he’s just happened to meet out here on the barrens. That’s all.”

The tears that drenched Kit’s eyes were not wholly the weeping of tormented, aching nerves. His father! Inspector Tearl of the Royal Canadian Police--wearing the garb and living the life and thinking the thoughts of an Ahiagmuit Esquimau! The pathos of that stern and lonely figure--the man who had emerged out of the ghostly years, and did not even know he had come back to his own.

The old man said something in a strange tongue, and ended with a kindly laugh.

Jerry answered with an unusual gentleness of voice.

“What is it?” Kit asked with a sound that was like a sob.

“He sees what’s wrong with you, and he says that snow-blindness sometimes makes men act queerly. But he likes your looks and is glad to have made your acquaintance.”

“To make my--” Kit could not finish. He felt as though he were stifling.

“I found him on Queen Maud Sea, sitting by a seal hole with a spear in his hand,” said Jerry. “His tribesmen told me that they have not known a starvation winter since he became one of them. A white man’s brains to help them through the long midnights. They adored him.”

Kit was too choked-up to speak. He had never heard of a more complete tragedy than this. Bill Tearl, lost to the world and to himself--not knowing who he was or where he came from--spending the years in an Esquimau igloo. Death in itself is not so terrible. But to die, and still go on living! It might not have been so bad if utter forgetfulness had blotted out everything of the past. But was it possible ever for the memory to go into a total eclipse?

Life for Bill Tearl must have been a fantastic nightmare. Wandering through lonesome, six-months-long nights. Bewilderment and yearning and discontent. There must have been times when the smoldering fires of the poor, estrayed brain, the vague, vain efforts to remember, would overwhelm him like a madness.

Kit found himself fumbling at the snap of his revolver holster. If there were only some way to touch the spark that surely still lived in the darkness, to set off the lost train of recollection! He pulled out the engraved, ivory-butted revolver and offered it to the man who called himself Kablunak.

“Inspector William Tearl!” He tried desperately to speak clearly and steadily. “This is your gun. Please take it back again. It’s the old six shooter your men gave you when you left to take command of the outpost at _Saut Sauvage_.”

He could almost see the grizzled face of the old sergeant who had made the presentation years ago, and he recalled the little speech that accompanied the gift.

“May it never fire first,” he said; “may it never fire too late.”

The old man took the gun from Kitchener’s unsteady hand. He turned it over and examined it minutely, barrel, trigger-guard, the engraved silver name-plate, the beautifully carved butt. After a moment his hand cuddled the stock and he sighted at some imaginary target. Then he broke into a pleased, gentle laugh that snapped the awful tension like the parting of a chain.

He asked some question in the Ahiagmuit dialect, and Jerry let go a pent-up breath that was almost suffocating him. “He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t recognize it. He--he only wanted to know if you were loaning it to him.”

“Tell him it’s his--it’s his very own,” Kit said in a gulping voice.

“I thought--for just a minute, there was something in his eyes. As though something was trying to remind him. And then it faded--was gone.”

“Tell him!” Kit pleaded. “Make him understand, Jerry!”

“I’ve told him--dozens of times. And it just doesn’t register.”

Jerry turned and exchanged a few sentences with the old man, and then he looked back somberly at his brother, and shook his head. “He thinks you’re giving it to him--as a gift--between comrades who are willing to fight together. That’s as much as I can make him understand.” The sergeant’s hardlimned features held a strange, boyish wistfulness. “He says it is a fine, handsome gun--to thank you very much--to tell you that if he were ever privileged to use it to protect your life, it would be a trifling return for such a splendid present.”

Kit could not trust himself to speak.

“Where did you get it?” asked Jerry.

“The gun? Grabbed it from Hell Bent--last night. If it hadn’t have been for my eyesight I’d have got Bent--”

Something screamed across the river terrace behind them and stopped with a tearing, meaty _curump_!

“Lookout! Down!” Jerry seized Kit and shouldered him back into a niche of the embankment.

Kit wrenched himself loose and squirmed about, impotently gripping his shotgun. “Jerry--who’s hit?”

“One of your dogs! Stay there! Cut him nearly in two. Dum-dums--”

Jerry snatched up his rifle, and fired, and cursed with a lilting gayety. “How can you hit ’em when you can’t see ’em?”

“The bunch in the rear?” asked Kit.

“And how! They’ve buried themselves under the snow, with nothing but peep-holes. Just a landscape to look at.”

“You hate to have to kill ’em,” said Kit. “The poor, misguided fools. If we could only get Bent, there’d be a chance.”

“Yeh,” mocked Jerry. “Hate to kill ’em! Where’s this Bent?”

The first shot was followed by others, mean, vicious sounds whipping through the sunlight. Another dog went down, got up and tried to walk, dragging his hind quarters, and crumpled gasping in the snow.

Jerry was crouching at Kit’s back, squinting into the snow-glare, trying to find a living mark. “Look!” he suddenly gasped. “Dad!”

“Huh?” exclaimed Kit, twisting around.

“He’s trying to crawl up on them--across the river. With the revolver!” He raised his voice in sharp warning. “No! They’re on this side too! Dad! Stay where you are!”

Instantly he recollected, and his English shifted into a lingo of harsh consonants, the meaning of which Kit could only surmise. But the old man paid no heed.

He was out on the river ice, sprawled flat, pushing a little breastwork of snow ahead of him, hitching his way across the stream as though he were stalking caribou. The Yellow Knives ambushed on the west side would make short shrift of the trapped defenders--unless they were quickly suppressed. So the one-time policeman had chosen that hazardous job for his own.

Heedless of the bullets that nipped the air about him, Jerry was on his feet, hurrying down the slope. The old man was more than half-way across the river, and now was shielded from the sight of his quarry by the rising embankment above him. But the opposite terrace no longer served as a buttress behind him. He had crept out into view of the men who were firing from the sledges on the eastern side.

Kit and Jerry had been partly sheltered in the rear by a break in the embankment. The old man kept himself covered with snow as he crawled ahead. Only the top of his head was showing. But the dogs were huddled out in the open. The first few rounds from the west bank were picking them off.

Evidently the attackers proposed to make certain of their victims by first destroying the means of flight. There was to be no last-minute dash for safety with the sledges. Kit’s team was wiped out in two minutes. Buzz-saw was down, back-broken. Two of the Chippewyan huskies lay stone-dead, a third was trying to walk on two feet, with his muzzle plowing the snow. Jerry’s leader was out, and numbers two and four had tumbled together in the traces, moaning and kicking feebly.

“Bent’s in back of the middle sledge!” gasped Kit. “High power and a deadly shot! Jerry! Dad! Come back!”

The bright, windless morning was filled with hard, electric cracklings--ripping, snapping sounds breaking in from both sides of the river. Two dozen or more savages were at work now, combing over the defenders from both directions with a venomous cross-fire. The heavy explosions echoed back and forth with a sullen malignity. At bay between the embankments of the wide river-bed, the three trapped men were left the grim alternative of taking it either from one shore or the other.

The pain in Kit’s eyes throbbed intermittently like a jumping toothache. 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.”