CHAPTER XXV

INSPECTOR TEARL

Kit gripped his eyes tightly shut, and then opened them again and tried to see. He dropped and buried his hands in the muffling, snow-crusted furs. “I heard it hit,” he said.

“Right behind the ear,” whispered Jerry. “Craziest thing I ever knew. Almost the same place where the other one hit him--years ago.”

A chunk of lead threw a spurt of snow in Kit’s face. He peered about wildly, and then sprang to his feet and hauled his parked sledge down from the top of the embankment. He swung the runners about and shoved the load of baggage alongside the prone body. Then, with his head down between hunched-up shoulders, as though he were plunging into a hail storm, he ran down the slope among the strewing of dogs.

He found a short ax, and with numbed sensibilities he struck twice. The whimpering ceased. He drew his knife and slashed the traces free. Then he bent his back to the tug and started up the embankment with the second laden sledge.

Jerry caught the idea, and hurried down to help. They rushed the sledge up the terrace, lifted it with its baggage, and stood it on top of Kit’s sledge. Before the marksmen across the river had spotted their range both dodged into the protected alley between the piled-up sledges and the crest of the river bank.

For the moment they were barricaded against their enemies on either side of the stream. Jerry had dropped his rifle and was stooping low over the wounded man. At length he looked up gravely and shook his head. “He’s breathing--that’s all.”

A while ago Kit had wept over the man who came back from the years of living death. Now he was strangely unaffected. It was as though the well-springs of emotion had suddenly dried within him. Actual, physical death was not so terrible.

He stared towards Jerry for a moment, and then groped for his rifle and drew himself flat on top of the embankment. Hell Bent was over there behind the middle sledge. Bent at last had finished his incomplete job of twelve years ago. It seemed to Kit that his own life had been shaped and consecrated to this one moment. Just give him his vision long enough to mark his man and align his rifle-sights, and he would ask nothing else of fortune, ever.

He was fumbling with his rifle, gray-faced and grim, trying to pin his sight on the sledge that sheltered Bent, when Jerry grabbed his ankle. “Come down, Jackass!”

Kit kicked back in an effort to loosen his brother’s grip, and then his body went taut and a queer, shivering sensation ran up and down his spine. Somebody had shouted from under the embankment: not Jerry; a wild, unearthly voice that rang through him like a Jehovian trumpet.

Awed, shaken to the depths, he tumbled down from the bank of snow, to find Jerry locked with a struggling, bloodied figure that was trying to stand erect behind the sheltering sledges.

The miracle was not so much that the man still lived with a bullet in his brain, but that an unconquerable vitality flamed in the lean, gaunt body to endow him for those few moments with a will and lithe muscular strength to overmatch the brawny Jerry.

Bill Tearl, as he might have been a dozen years ago, his head high, his gun in his fist, a deathless valor sustaining him in his last embattled hour!

“Behind that stump!” he cried. “There’s another under the windfall! I’ll take him! Durand--over your shoulder--behind you--look out!”

Kit was staring in utter stupefaction. This was not the gentle, vaguely smiling man who had come down out of the Northland with Jerry. The lax shoulders had stiffened, indolence had kindled into a blazing resolution. He was no Esquimau, either in thought or in speech, but a determined white man at bay, fighting for his life.

“It’s Bent!” he declared. “And Bruyas! And that other little weasel--what’s his name--Giffard!” He had remembered his own tongue, and was calling to somebody in furious, hard-clipt words.

“Hold the dogs. I’ll take care of this side. They want the gold sacks. Let ’em come and get ’em!”

“My God!” said Jerry. “He thinks he’s back there that day--at Great Owl Run.”

Kitchener had stumbled to Jerry’s assistance and was trying to pinion his father’s straining arms. “Dad!” he said. “Wake up! Come out of it! It’s Kit! Listen to me!”

The old man did not seem to hear the soothing voice. He wrenched his arms free, whirled and stared at the ground behind him. “They’ve shot her from behind--murdered her!” His speech throbbed with pity and horror. “That lovely girl-- Ah, the devils!”

The bullets were whining and snapping overhead, but if Bill Tearl heard them he thought they were the bullets of another bloody day, long ago. The missile that had hit him a few minutes before must have re-opened the lead-scarred brain-cells and let in remembrance. Recollection had come to him, and with it, delirium. His mind was back in the Great Owl forest, re-living the tragic scene of his last rational hour. A sleeper who had awakened at the place where his long sleep began.

“Hell Bent did that,” he avowed. “If you don’t kill him, Durand, I’m going to.”

He turned and looked squarely at Kit with eyes that evidently saw another man. “Here! The chamber’s full. Take this one!” He reversed the ivory-handled gun and shoved the butt into Kit’s hand. “Listen, I’ll keep ’em busy here by this poor girl. Leave your rifle. He’s under the windfall. If you can work around behind you can nail him.”

Kit thrust the revolver into his holster, and curved his arm about the old man’s shoulders. The bullets were singing around them with the pertinacity of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. It might have seemed for just those few moments that a derisive fate was protecting them.

“Dad!” Kit beseeched. “Please! Let’s get under cover.”

Strangely, the old man yielded. The tense figure relaxed in his arms and he lowered the sagging weight behind the shelter of the sledges.

“Who--who’s there?” asked the inspector in a wandering voice.

“It’s I--it’s Kitchener.”

“Who? Little Kit?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s that with you?”

“Why, it’s Gerald.”

“Jerry?”

“Yes.” Kit felt as though something had been stuffed in his throat to shut off his breathing. “It’s--it’s Kit and Jerry.”

His father’s hand groped upward to touch his face, and then strayed over his shoulder and down his arm to clutch at his hand. For an instant the sinewy fingers gripped him tightly, and then he felt them slipping, growing weaker.

“What are you two boys doing here?” Bill Tearl asked with a sudden severity.

“We--we came to find you.”

“What do you want? Why did you leave home?”

Jerry was down beside them, his hand on his brother’s knee. “He’s gone all the way back now,” he whispered. “He knows us now and he thinks we’re a couple of little kids.”

The hearing of the dying man was astonishingly alert. “What did you think you were,” he demanded--“men? Now listen to me, you boys. I don’t want you tagging after me. I’ve got a job to do, and this is no place for you.

“I want you to go back to your mother,” the inspector commanded, while the brothers knelt over him with heads mutely bowed. “Tell her I’ve got some business to attend to, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll be home shortly.”

“Yes, Dad,” Kit assented in a breaking voice.

He thought it was the end, and was taken unawares when, with a sudden, uncanny resurging of vitality, the dying man twisted out of his arms and stumbled up in the red-spattered snow.

The old inspector yelled with a frightful incoherency. “The gold bags! The dogs--broken loose. Runaway! Hey--Durand--stay there. I’ll stop ’em--”

He was on his feet, swaying, staring with excitement across the barrens. Before the brothers could interfere he stooped and snatched up a rifle.

“Look out there, you!” he shouted. “The fool dogs. They’ll go over the creek bluff! Whoa! Haw, you fools! They’ve gone. The sledge. Drowning, the poor brutes. And the sledge!” He laughed with a grim mockery. “Snowing! Trail soon blotted. Murder for gold bags, and the bags are gone. Who’ll find ’em? Funny world. Murder for nothing--”

He snapped off his speech to glower across the river embankment. “Hell Bent! You know where they went overboard, do you? Followed, eh?” The white mustache lifted in a ferocious smile. “All right! See if you live to salvage ’em!”

He broke away from Kit’s detaining hand, and with a spasmodic strength that was not to be denied, he flung himself against the river bank and scrambled up over the mound of snow. Against the white, shadowless tundra he stood in stark outline, an erect, straight-poised figure, advancing towards the sledges with a rifle in his hands.

The guns were blazing away in a furious concentration, up and down the line in front, and from the other side of the river. Three or four powdery snow puffs spatted out of the old man’s clothing like dust out of a beaten rug. Inspector Bill Tearl tried to advance on his weaving legs, and then toppled and went down slowly and solemnly as a crumbling tree-trunk, and lay still with his face towards the midmost sledge.