CHAPTER IV

A GHOSTLY VOYAGEUR

The arm in its rough, icy sleeve clutched Kit tightly, and in that breath-taking moment he neither moved nor recovered the voice to speak. It was as though time had swept backwards to rediscover the heart of an eager, small boy, whose bigger, rougher brother sometimes stalked up behind him with laughter to clench his head like this. The pain of his ruffled ears had always seemed to him a very trifling price to pay for the ecstasy of being noticed by the redoubtable Jerry. Even to-night Kitchener was conscious only of a sudden, blinding happiness in feeling himself caught in that harshly affectionate grip, in knowing that his brother had found him.

“I saw your funny old face this morning,” said the man behind him. “You stopped on a hillside and goggled your eyes my direction. And then I knew it was you, Cocky-bird.”

Kit broke the muscular hold and squirmed around. He saw a tall, deep-chested figure in duffles and furs, and wearing the royal insignia of the northern police.

“Jerry!” he gasped.

The other man grinned at him, displaying teeth as white as the snow that clung to his hood.

Jerry had matured since Kit last saw him, and seemingly had grown in stature and taken on several more inches of girth. The eyes that twinkled in the half-light were older with knowledge and experience. Even in smiling the mouth held something of the ruthless inflexibility of a wolf-trap. He looked harder and more competent than ever before, and also, Kit fancied, with a touch of misgiving, much more self-willed and reckless and devil-may-care.

“Are you Sergeant Buck Tearl?” Kit asked.

“None other. Almost demoted now and then, but still Sergeant Tearl. What are you doing here, Oakheart?”

“I intercepted a radio message for you from WBZ. It was about some Esquimaux and the dead not dying. I’ve got it written down for you. I was sure this Buck party would be you.”

Jerry laughed quietly. “The same old Cocky-bird! Would hike three thousand miles through a freeze-up of hell--if you take the notion--just to tell me you got WBZ on your radio. That would be little Kit--always. Too bad, after all your trouble, but I got the message too. I carry a small, portable set on my sledge, and I picked it out of the air the same night you did, about a month ago.”

“Then you must know--” Kit regarded him sharply. “What does it mean? Who’s Diane?”

Jerry shook his head. “I’ll tell you about that later when we have a little more time--all that I know, at least. It’s a strange story, and may bring on things still stranger before we’re through. Just now we have more immediate things to think about. How do you happen to be consorting with this egg I saw you with to-day?”

“Jim What’s-his-name? I ran into him at Port-o’-Prayer, and he offered to guide me part way to _Saut Sauvage_, where they said you had gone.”

“That’s all you know about him?”

“No,” said Kit, “that isn’t all I know about him.” He stole a glance around the thickets and dropped his speech to a whisper. “He’s got Dad’s old ivory-butted gun.”

“All right.”

Sergeant Tearl accepted the fact with a nod that might have seemed almost indifferent. “He’s the mug I thought he was. I’ve been hovering on him for several days, and of course he knows that I came in through Port-o’-Prayer, just as you knew. He thought he saw me yesterday noon, when I was watching from the opposite hill. He did, but it’s a good thing for all of us that he changed his mind and decided he didn’t. It’s too soon to kill him.”

Kit stared at his brother, chilled not so much by the remark as the matter-of-fact tone of its utterance. “Who is he?” he demanded.

“I don’t know what name he’s going by now. His real name is Simeon Bent, but the guards down at the prison in Ottawa called him ‘Hell’ Bent. You can draw your own conclusions. He just finished an eleven-year stretch, and they let him out a few weeks ago.”

Kitchener studied the dim vistas of the snowy landscape. “He told me his name was Jim. But perhaps I misunderstood. He may have said ‘Sim.’ Where’s he gone now?”

“Just took a saunter down through the forest to find me. People are so ready to accept the belief that it is easiest to murder a policeman when he is in bed asleep. You’re supposed to sleep soundest in the small hours of the morning.”

“You don’t mean--” Kit gasped.

“Why not?” observed Jerry placidly. “He knows I’m around here somewhere. He has a pretty little job afoot, but he can’t go ahead until the field is clear. He’s got to get me out of the way. I was sure he’d strike back to-night to intersect my sledge tracks. He won’t find the trail until he’s five miles up country. I detoured widely and came in here from the east instead of the south.

“Caught a little sleep about a hundred yards from here.” The sergeant pushed back his sleeve to observe the luminous dial of the watch strapped around his big-boned wrist. “One-thirty now. It’ll be three before Sim makes the circuit. That gives us time for a family reunion. How’s little Jane?”

“She’s a grown woman, Jerry. Pretty and sweet and stubborn as a mule.”

“Little Jane!” ruminated the sergeant, with the faintest break in his voice. “She’s the best of our tribe. Give her a kiss from the outcast, if you ever see her again. I’m not at all sure that you will.” Jerry measured his brother’s straight-standing figure with a critical eye. “I’ve got to use you, Mr. Stoutenberg, now that I’ve got you. Sorry!”

Jerry reached forward a mittened hand and his iron fingers clamped down for a moment on the other’s shoulder. “Did you make the varsity squad, Cocky-bird?” he asked, as he prodded his brother’s wiry muscles.

“No,” said Kit regretfully. “Not enough weight for my height. The best I could do was the cross-country team and captain of the pistol team.”

“You always were an ugly shot with a gun,” remarked Jerry. “And there may be times when that’ll get an alumnus farther than a Phi Beta Kappa key.”

“Jerry,” demanded the younger brother abruptly, “why did you run out on us the way you did? I know you got yourself into a mess, and all of that, but there was no reason why you couldn’t have written. It was rotten never to send any word to Jane and me.”

“Maybe,” agreed the other. “But I’d thought it all out and I never was going to. It was fairer not.” He laughed heavily and ended with a sigh. “That man I smashed--I’ve almost forgotten who he was and what it was about. There was a girl mixed up in it somewhere--as unimportant as that. I went off my chump, and might easily have killed the poor devil.”

“He recovered, though,” Kit said. “You could go back and square it up and be yourself again. There’s no need of burying yourself alive for life.”

“I am myself,” Jerry returned somberly, “and there’s a beastly streak in me. What happened once can happen again. I’m not going to risk another chance of disgracing you and Jane, or keeping you in a nervous stew over my running amok again. I’m better off forgotten.”

“That’s fool talk,” the younger brother protested.

“If I turn violent any time now,” grinned Jerry, “I’m acting in the name of the law. This is the right job for me.”

Kitchener regarded him curiously. “Do you like it?”

“It’s my job,” the sergeant reiterated briefly, and changed the subject. “Hitch your dogs,” he ordered. “You’re coming with me.”

It was characteristic that Kit should accept unquestioningly his older brother’s decisions. He roused the sleeping huskies from their nests under the snow, pitched them a fish apiece, and then hustled them into the sledge traces.

Jerry looked on without offering to help. “You’ll find as you go along that you remember things you thought you never knew,” he remarked as the younger brother smartly swung his leader into line. “You and I cut our milk teeth on the butt of a dog whip, and took our first bath in a snow drift. I’m glad you’re here, Crow-eye.”

“What about Sim?” asked Kit as he packed up his bed.

“Let him find you gone. He’ll see I’ve been here and that we’ve gone off together. Let him think what he pleases. I’m going to pass him along later to the captain of the varsity pistol team.” Jerry finished with an ironic laugh. “Ready?”

As he approached the neighboring hillside a half dozen animated bundles sprang yapping from the drift to claw and leap at Jerry for a moment, and then to round in a wolf-like pack upon the strange huskies. The sergeant booted his own beasts back into their traces, and within ten seconds had quelled the riot. Then he gave the command and the team launched forward into the night.

Kit had thought that his companion of the first day’s march was a snow-traveler, but he was to learn what it really means to cruise. His dogs were forced to stretch their gaunt bodies to the utmost to hold the pace of the police malemutes and the lusty sergeant who broke trail for them.

Years pass and seasons change and men grow older. Times there had been when a short-legged, anxious-faced little chap used to tag after his elder brother, taking two steps for one, stumbling and breathless, yet keeping up somehow. To-night it seemed to Kit as though a ghostly young familiar were running with him, sharing his distress as the miles lengthened and his wind gave out and his aching legs grew heavier, but pushing onward, nevertheless, hanging on in spite of everything, not once losing sight of the big hurrying shape ahead of him.

An hour or so on the shadowy side of daybreak Jerry at last decided mercifully that they had come far enough. He halted his team in the darkness of a wooded ravine at the head of a tiny, ice-bound brook. Then with a crooked grin he turned to look back as his brother kicked out of his snowshoes and sank down upon the ground.

“Same old Kit!” he said. “Cheerio! You’ll toughen up.”

He disappeared in the thicket with an ax, and for a few minutes the morning stillness was broken by a cheerful ringing of steel. Presently he returned with an armful of white birch billets and started a brisk fire.

“You and I must have an understanding before we split directions,” he remarked. “I’ve got my job to do, and you’ll have yours. We’ll breakfast first. Meanwhile, let’s see what Diane has on her mind.”

“Diane?” echoed Kit, staring blankly.

“See if she’s asleep, will you?” Jerry nodded casually towards the sledge. “Maybe she’d like something to eat.”

“To eat--? Diane?” Kit regarded his brother slantwise, as though he were in momentary doubt of the other’s sobriety, or sanity. The policeman was absorbed in measuring coffee from a muslin bag into a tin pot, and he did not look up.

Kitchener stood up and paused uncertainly. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“Here’s the key,” said Jerry. He fished in his pocket and handed his brother a tiny, metal object that glinted in the firelight.

Young Tearl held the key between his fingers, looking at it vacuously. “What am I to do with this?”

“Let her come to breakfast, if she wants any,” said Jerry, and turned his back again.

Kit stood irresolute for a moment, and then, with a bewildered glance at the policeman, he moved over towards the sledge. He halted to gaze in sagging-jawed wonderment.

Jerry’s sledge was bedded deep with duffle and blankets and soft, warm furs. In the cozy nest thus formed he made out the contours of a slight figure, and saw the oval of a feminine face and a pair of dark, living eyes glowering up at him.

As he stood awkward and unreasoningly embarrassed, a pettish, slightly husky voice spoke sharply from the smothering furs. “Unfasten these!”

The robes were lifted and thrown back, and two hands stretched themselves towards Kit. He was aghast to discover that the woman’s wrists were held together by the steel links of handcuffs.