CHAPTER III

DISMAL TRAIL

At the coldest and dreariest hour of the morning, in darkness and silence so intense that an early riser must feel the snow stinging his face to know that it was still snowing, Kit Tearl was out of his blankets, poking the night fire and thawing out the coffee pot.

The Indians would lie sluggishly until daybreak, but the other white man aroused himself a few minutes behind his traveling companion. Before he donned his fur parka and mittens he stood half naked outside the teepee, revolving his body in the weather, and stretching his sinewy arms, as though he took relish in the snow beating upon his skin.

The two men barely exchanged greetings, and they ate breakfast without a syllable of speech. The stranger fed and harnessed his dogs and waited in dour silence while Tearl was putting his sorry team into the traces.

When the Chippewyan curs and the huskies from Port-o’-Prayer found themselves in harness together for the first time the inevitable dog-fight took place, and ended in as many seconds as there were dogs. The leader, a red-furred Chinook cross called Buzz-saw, walked back through his team-mates and left them on their backs, howling.

The tall man stood aloof until the trouble was settled. “Men could learn something from the dogs,” he remarked. “When two or more start some place together they ought to fight it out before they take the trail. Then there’d be no future arguments.”

“As long as you know the trail, and I don’t,” said Kit, smoothly, “we don’t have to prove which is the king-pin. You lead, I’ll follow.”

Until the dull, leaden daylight seeped through the forest Kit drove his team and followed in the crunching furrow left by the vaguely seen figure that stalked ahead.

He had said nothing about the ivory-handled revolver and was careful to give no hint of last night’s discovery. Since their first meeting the stranger had inspired him with distrust and an unaccountable feeling of apprehension. To mention the fact that the gun he carried belonged to a mysteriously “lost” police officer might precipitate a show-down such as Kit was not yet prepared to meet. Common sense advised him to wait and keep his eyes open, to find out who this man was and whence he came. If he had any part in the tragedy of Inspector Tearl’s disappearance, it would be insanity to question him or put him on his guard. He could vanish permanently into the storm if he chose, or simply turn with a single shot and let the ivory-handled revolver preserve its own ancient secret.

Kit was carried along by a grim excitement as he dogged the footsteps of his laconic companion. It was an odd whimsey of fate that had brought them both on the same day into this out-of-the-way part of the wilderness. For twelve years a great force of relentless, sharp-eyed man-hunters, with every resource of experience and organization at their command, had searched ceaselessly for news of a lost comrade. The scarlet-clad brigade does not lightly abandon its own. Countless patrols had turned up, time after time, with “nothing to report.” But where a thousand seasoned bushmen had sought fruitlessly, young Kit Tearl, on his first night in the big timber, had stumbled upon a clew that perhaps might lead to the knowledge of what had happened to the missing inspector of police. His errand had suddenly changed to such grave import that he was almost afraid to look into the future. A huge responsibility had fallen upon his shoulders. Of secondary concern now was the finding of Sergeant Buck Tearl. His new mission was to hold the trail and, by hook or crook, to ferret out the history of the man with the ivory-butted gun.

The short day broke sullenly to the steady accompaniment of falling snow. Kit and his traveling mate were cruising through a dense spruce forest. There were no landmarks visible--nothing but trees and trees and trees, with the endless expanse of snow underfoot and snow-chinked ceilings of greenery above.

Men and dogs were like shadows stealing through muffled, unechoing corridors of whiteness. The only sounds to be heard were the silken whisper of sledge runners, the padding of industrious feet, the creak of raquettes sliding through the feathery drifts.

The motions of snowshoeing came naturally enough to Kit, but by the end of his first couple of hours on the march he began to feel acute little pains in his ankles and calves and thighs. Since his graduation from college his most arduous journeys had been undertaken by subway between his apartment and the law office in which he had hoped in time to become a junior partner. He was in for a few days of torment before his muscles hardened up; meanwhile he shut a stubborn jaw and held the pace.

A while before noon they halted for a breathing space and to give the dogs a drink. They picked up a cold snack and Kit’s companion squatted by his sledge, unsociable and saturnine, crunching with strong, white teeth the bannock and hard chunk of pemmican which he had produced from his pack.

The taciturnity of the man was beginning to wear upon Tearl’s nerves. If he would only say something, even to grouch at his fellow traveler! But his harsh mouth stayed shut and his eyes remained as cold and unfeeling as the wilderness that reached into mysterious silence for a thousand miles about him.

They had left the river far behind and were traveling a diagonal course across the spruce ridges. To ignore the natural guidance of the valleys and waterways is the easiest way of getting lost in the big timber. Each wooded crown or hollow looked exactly like the hills and hollows ahead or those left behind. Had Kit been alone he would have been hopelessly muddled long ago. But the stranger apparently scorned the need of route marks. He plowed on tirelessly and without hesitation, having neither sun nor compass to correct his turnings, driving his dogs through the unbroken leagues of the forest, breaking trail and never at loss in his points of direction.

Kitchener at first thought that the man’s silence was due merely to a surly and unfriendly disposition. But as they traversed the miles of solitude, it occurred to him that perhaps there were grimmer reasons for keeping so quiet. He noticed that his trail-mate continually shifted his glance, right and left, and whenever he came to an open glade in the woods, where a moving object would stand out boldly against the snowy backgrounds, he invariably skulked close to the edges of the fringing thickets. At every high ridge he paused to scan the surrounding landscape and to watch briefly over his own back-trail.

Once when the dogs started up a snowshoe rabbit and gave chorus excitedly, their driver sent them back to their business with a savagely curling whiplash, and within ten seconds had reduced them to whimpering obedience. On another occasion the man checked his team in mid-stride on the slant of a sheer hillside. He crouched to stare fixedly across the valley, and, with a quick, reflexive jerk, his hand reached for the rifle that rode under the lashings of his sledge. Whatever he thought he saw or heard, it failed to reveal itself. By the time Kit had scrambled across the slide, he had straightened again and was ready to send his team onward.

“What was it?” Kit asked.

The man gave him a stony look from under his wet, bristling eyebrows.

“Habit!” he explained in a voice that he was cautious to keep lowered. “It gets to be second nature to keep a lookout around you.”

“You were grabbing for your rifle,” Tearl observed.

“Thought I saw a moose,” the other returned sourly, and commanded his team to _marche_!

Kitchener followed without further comment. But he knew that the man was lying. The sledges were overloaded now, and it would be impossible for either of them to take on any extra haunches of meat. Besides, no moose would ever have allowed them to approach that close on his windward side, as this woodsman knew perfectly well. It was evident that he was on his guard against somebody or something that he feared was on his trail or ambushed in the dim coverts ahead.

The winter darkness overtook them in mid-afternoon, and they promptly made camp. In a deep little glen, screened densely by the alders, where a spring of water welled forth in a half frozen trickle from underneath an old, fallen hemlock, they erected shelter sheets and spread their blankets. Jim built a tiny fire of knots kicked off the rotting tree, and took pains to keep the flame low and well hidden in the deepest pocket of their retreat. It was not an honest fire of logs that a care-free bushman would have ignited to warm himself on a winter’s night. Obviously the man did not wish to risk the attention of spying eyes.

Kitchener was too tired to perturb himself over the significance of all these precautions. He fed his dogs, helped to drain the pot of coffee, wrapped his aching frame in the red blankets, and in ten seconds had fallen into profound sleep.

What it was that aroused him he could not have said. The wind had died during the night and the forest was invested in utter quiet. Jim had trampled out the fire before he turned in. The faint aurora of a northern white night lent a magical unreality to the muffled shapes of the surrounding forest. Great downy snowflakes sifted interminably through the weary-drooping branches. Kitchener had no idea whether it was midnight or the edge of daybreak.

A drift of snow had formed over his feet and a current of outside air had found a way in between the flaps of his blankets. He was curled up in a tight ball, cramped and shivering. With clicking teeth he sat up, intending to remake his bed.

His companion had bunked down on the opposite side of the spring. Kitchener looked sleepily in that direction, and then his eyes blinked wider and he looked harder. In the obscurity he could just make out the oblong shape of the folded robes. But they lay flat on the ground. There was nothing under them. Wonderingly, Kit crept forward to make sure that he was not deceiving himself. He pulled back the furs, and saw in the snow the deep impression of a man’s body. Jim had rolled up under his covers for a while--presumably until he was sure that the other man was safely asleep. Then he had got up again, and disappeared from camp.

At first Kitchener supposed that the man had decided to rid himself of his traveling mate and had sneaked away into the night. But a hurried glance around corrected that notion. Jim’s packed sledge still remained where he had unhitched the evening before on the other side of the brook, and on the neighboring slope, where the dogs had buried themselves in the snow, a group of little hummocks, like grave mounds, tallied in number with the count of the two teams. The man had slipped off somewhere on some benighted business of his own, but it would seem that he expected to come back.

Kit fastened his boots and picked up his rifle. The other man had taken his own gun from the sledge, and his broad-toed snowshoes also were missing. It was merely a question of casting across the brook to pick up the web-scuffled marks in the snow. Jim had climbed out of the hollow and, for some unguessed reason, had struck back over the windings of his own down-country trail.

There was no hesitation on Kit’s part. Here was a chance for discoveries. It must be a momentous errand to pull a man out of his warm robes in the middle of such a night. He noticed that his fellow traveler wore broad snowshoes with a peculiar square web packing. An inspection of the departing prints showed only a light powdering of new-fallen flakes. Presumably the man had quitted camp only a short while ago. Kit scrambled up the embankment, intending to follow.

From a distance of a half-dozen paces he could dimly make out the furrowed line that curved down through the spruces. By staying off at one side of the trail he could pursue the back-track without being betrayed later by his own footsteps.

Kit reached the top of the first terrace and there halted with a startled abruptness. He had an impression that something had stirred behind him. A bulky shadow loomed in the alder thicket. Before he had half turned a brawny arm reached suddenly forward to crook itself about his head, and an astounding voice accosted him.

“Hello, Cocky-bird!”

For an instant Kit felt as though his heart had gone dead in his chest, and then all his blood coursed through him again in a wild, warm resurgence. He knew without looking around. The low, mocking laugh, the bearlike embrace squeezing his head and pinching his ears: there was only one person in the world who ever hugged him like this, or chuckled at him with such ironic amusement. It was Gerald Tearl. It could be nobody on earth except his brother Jerry.