CHAPTER XXIX
COCKY-BIRD
The quiet and drowsy warmth; the languid pleasure of stretching out weary legs; shadows that soothed his heavy, aching eyes; the cheery crackling of a hearth-fire and wavering of ruddy firelight: Kitchener’s reawakening senses went adrift in a spell of dreamy contentment.
He was under shelter somewhere, wrapped in a soft blanket, his head on a pillow. It seemed to him in those moments that he had never felt a keener consciousness of well-being. Something stirred gently beside him. He tried to see, and couldn’t, quite, and so he closed his eyes again.
“Who is it?” he asked.
Somebody came closer, and a hand strayed to his face, and then ran its fingers through his hair.
His heart stopped, and then swelled in mighty beating. He reached for the hand, but it was gone.
“Diane! Where are you?”
“I’m here.” The voice held him thrillingly awake.
He sat up and threw off the blanket.
“Diane! Are you all right? I was all night getting here. I was so frightened--I wanted to get to you so--and I couldn’t see--”
“It’s all right,” she told him. “You got here in time--you got here just in time.” There was something like awe in her muted voice. “I’ll never understand what it was, but--deep in me, all the time I had the strangest feeling that you were coming--that you’d get here. And you did.”
“What happened?” he asked. “I don’t quite remember.”
“You stumbled over a stump and fell and hit your head on the sill of the cabin. You’ve been lying here without knowing anything for nearly five hours.”
Kit put up his hand to feel an enormous swelling above his right eyebrow. “I don’t mean that,” he said impatiently. “That’s nothing. But before then?” He scowled in an effort to collect his faculties. “I remember the chopping, and then somebody fired at me, and I let him have it.”
“He was chopping down the door of the cabin,” Diane told him, and shivered. “He came here last night and demanded that I tell him where the--where those old bags were hidden, and I wouldn’t, and he said he’d make me. I never heard anything as frightful as his talk. He went away, and some time later he came back with an ax and started chopping down the door, and I had no gun or anything, and I was just crouching in the corner, when--when I heard the rifle and then the shotgun. And I knew it was you.”
“I guess I killed him,” said Kit.
“No, you didn’t. You must have had bird-shot in your gun. A few of the shot hit him in the forehead and temple, but they were too tiny, and only glanced. They only knocked him out for a few minutes.”
Kit started to get up and grope for his boots. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Where is he? Where is he now?”
“No. Don’t!” Diane’s flexible arm was around his shoulders, holding him. “He’s safe. As soon as I’d made sure that you hadn’t been killed, I went to him and tied him up tight. And then two or three hours later the policemen came.”
“Policemen?” he echoed.
Diane moved discreetly away before Kit had time to regain his breath. “Devon and Cross. They were searching the woods for you, and happened to pass here this morning. Cross is outside now, with a tent pitched and a handcuffed prisoner lying in it.”
“Hell Bent?”
“It was the man we met at the police shack the other night--he called himself Pettijohn.”
“Yes. I knew it. I figured that out when it was just almost too late. He’s Hell Bent.”
Kit sat straighter. “Listen!” he said. “I want to see Cross right away. I want him to go, or send, for a wounded man down in the barrens--”
“All right,” interrupted Diane. “Devon started a couple of hours ago. When I dragged you in here you muttered something about rescuing a wounded man. So Devon went as soon as I told him. He’s following your back trail. Poor Oogly. I hope he isn’t badly hurt.”
“It isn’t Oogly,” said Kit. “It’s my brother Jerry.”
“Who?” Kit was aware of the intensity of the girl’s glance.
“My brother. Sergeant Buck Tearl, the man I was pretending to be. The one who put you in handcuffs that night, long ago. It was he who put me up to the masquerading business, and sent me on the trail of Jim Durand, mistaking him for Hell Bent.”
“You--” Diane stopped in bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”
“About you and me and the muddle of everything in general.” Kit spoke decisively. “We’ve got to straighten it out. You thought I was mixed up somehow in that old tragedy here at Great Owl Run, and I thought your uncle was. See? I was after him--after the wrong man, and you thought I was some kind of a beastly scoundrel, come here to smear my hands in those rotten bags.”
“Oh, wait--wait a minute!” protested Diane. “You’re going so fast.”
“We can’t clean this up fast enough for me. Jim Durand--your uncle--he was here in that fight twelve years ago, wasn’t he--when the gold sledge was lost, and the woman--”
“My aunt,” broke in Diane softly. “I was only just a little girl, but I remember, Uncle Jim--coming home without her. She was so beautiful--”
“Remember about the man who was with your uncle?” asked Kit. “Who fought side by side with him--who disappeared and was never seen again? Inspector William Tearl, R.C.M.P.--did you ever hear of him?”
“I heard--I knew there was a policeman. I may have been told the name. If they told me, I’ve forgotten.”
“He was my father,” said Kit.
Kit felt the girl move abruptly, and he did not need his own vision to feel the potency of her eyes looking at him in the shadows. “I didn’t know,” she whispered. “You say he was--then you--then you’re not--”
“I’m not anything excepting just Kitchener Tearl, who came here to help Jerry and to find Bill Tearl.”
“But why--why the imposture?” Diane demanded in a shaken voice. “Why did you impersonate somebody else? Explain please. I’ve got to know--I’ve got to know the truth.”
“Bill Tearl was lost, and Jerry had to go hunt him, that’s why,” Kit told her. “And somebody had to stay around here and watch for that devil--for Hell Bent. We thought it would be better if I was in uniform. So I traded clothes with Jerry, and he went north and I stayed here. That’s all there was to that.”
“Oh, God!” Diane was beside the bunk on a box. Her face had suddenly buried itself in her hands and she was sobbing. “Then you--oh, how could I have thought for a minute that anything was wrong! Of course not! I might have known!”
“I might have known too,” said Kit. “Taking Jerry’s word, like a darned fool. Well, I’ve learned something. I’ve learned only to believe what I see with my eyes and feel in my heart.”
Diane had straightened on her box, and somehow seemed to have regained her self-control.
“What a frightful thing it all has been,” she gasped. “I can remember when Uncle Jim came home, so long ago. He’d been traveling all over, from city to city, crazed with grief and horror, after he’d seen his sister’s death.”
“Did he know what had become of Hell Bent?” Kitchener asked.
“He found out some way that one of the men--the worst of the lot--had gone to prison. And so Uncle Jim waited. He knew that the man would come back here to the woods as soon as he was freed, and so he waited--with one idea, with one fixed purpose.”
“I don’t blame him,” said Kit.
“Oh, I know. Of course not. But it was so terrible. Uncle Jim, the sweetest man that ever lived, but a stubborn and dangerous one, brooding over one thing, living his life for just one end. He kept away from the police. He didn’t want anybody to interfere. He wanted to do it with his own hands--here in the woods.
“He was so restless,” Diane went on in a musing voice. “He spent most of his time wandering over the world, just--just marking time until the day. Sometimes he took me with him. I am the only thing on earth he cares for. But he would never talk to me about what had happened here--just kept his mouth shut, with that terrifying look of his.
“And one day,” she said, “he left me in Ottawa and told me to wait there for him. After he was gone I guessed--intuition told me. I found out that he had started for the north--and I came after him. I thought--I hoped--if I could catch him in time I might be able to prevent a second tragedy. That was why I followed.
“But I never found him.” Diane sighed heavily. “Uncle Jim! I don’t know what ever happened to him.”
Kit’s teeth closed in his lips. He didn’t want to tell her now of the body that Jerry had found in the river. “I wonder,” he said, “if it wasn’t your uncle who sent the radio to Jerry about the white man who was living on the north sea, who--it has turned out--was Dad?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it is possible. He probably did.”
“But it was signed, ‘Diane.’ Why would he use your name?”
“I suppose he didn’t want to use his own. So he just signed anything--the first one that came into his mind. And the first name Uncle Jim would think of, always, would be ‘Diane.’”
“Me too!” said Kit.
“What?” He heard the box scrape on the floor.
“Diane! Come here!”
“No.” And then, after a briefest pause. “What for?”
“I want you.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
There was a lingering silence after that, until a log on the fireplace suddenly broke in two and a shower of sparks sizzled in the chimney. Kit put one foot on the floor and strove with hungering eyes to see the shadowy figure that stood so quiet in the dusk. He could hear Diane’s breathing, but nobody moved and nobody spoke.
“Do you remember Shedim?” Kit asked at length, with a little, husky laugh.
Still Diane said nothing.
“Last night when I was out there on the barrens--snow-blind--knowing I had to come to you, and not knowing which way to turn--Shedim flew over me, and I heard him, and he led me here. I wouldn’t have got here if it hadn’t been for the owl. Your bad thought that you couldn’t kill--”
“And didn’t want to!” she declared defiantly. “And never would have--never!”
His forehead was screwed up in a straining effort to visualize the shadowy face that always seemed to elude him. And suddenly he heard faint laughter, and something reached to him and gently poked his left eyebrow.
“Hello, Cocky-bird!”
“Diane! Please!” Kit’s arms reached forward vacantly. “I can’t see you. I can’t find you!”
“Need you see?”
And Diane was in his arms then, and her young, warm body was clinging to him, and her lips were feeling their way to his. “You don’t need to find me--not while I can find you.”
THE END
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