CHAPTER V

THE GIRL IN HANDCUFFS

The key was in Kitchener’s fingers, but at the moment he seemed to have no idea what its purpose might be. He bent above the sledge, gawking absurdly, utterly at loss to know what to say or to do. In the half light of dawning he saw the curve of a full, firm cheek and was aware that the woman’s mouth was drawn tensely in a fierce and bitter line. It rather increased his distress to discover that she was quite young and extremely indignant.

She tried to sit up, rattling the nickel-plated chain that swiveled one wrist close to the other. He perceived then that the handcuffs were secured by a short length of cord to one of the braces of the sledge.

“Will you,” she said in a panting fury, “kindly take these things off of me?”

“Certainly,” said Kit, who was beginning to win back his self-possession. He dropped his mittens and took her hands in one of his. Her fingers, he noticed, were warm and soft and gracefully slender. After a fumbling attempt or two he fitted the key in its apertures and shot open first one and then the other of the locking wards. The woman cast off the ugly circlets, dumped the robes overside, and flung herself from the sledge. Without a word to her deliverer, or a glance towards him, she stalked off through the snow to confront Jerry.

She was a small young woman, with a body as slim and supple and emotionally reactive as a reed in a gusty wind. She wore calf-high boots with moccasin feet, a pair of forest-green breeches, and a green camel’s hair parka with the hood thrown back. From the opened throat of her upper garment her slender neck emerged to hold high a prideful and shapely head. Her nose was slightly upturned and a shade too short; her mouth was generously wide and warmly crimson, and, at this moment, insolent. In the daytime her elongated, dark-fringed eyes were probably a clear hazel color; in the light of the birch fire they gave back ruddy, sherry-tinged glints. Her reddish hair, short and electrically unruly, flaunted its disorder in the reflection of the leaping flames.

“If it takes me the rest of my life,” she said to the policeman, “I’ll pay you for this!”

“Why, bless your heart,” said Jerry affably, “it wasn’t so much to do. Baby Bunting in the warm rabbit skins. I didn’t mind taking you bye-bye.” He had pronged a brochette of bacon strips, and was watching the grease drops fall and explode in the fire. “I hope you had a nice nap.”

“You--” The girl stopped and choked in her wrath. “You--devil!” she wound up impotently.

Jerry turned his head slowly, and for the first time paid her the tribute of looking at her. Then he shifted his glance to Kit. “This is the one, Buck,” he said. “This is Diane.”

Kit in bemusement regarded first the girl and then the man. In his brother’s lightness of speech he recognized a serious and purposeful undercurrent. Jerry had called him “Buck.” Why? He couldn’t guess. Only he realized that there was some queer and subtle game afoot. He would have to watch closely and pick up his cues.

Jerry’s eyes held him, and he caught the warning in their smiling depths. “This,” the policeman informed the girl, “is Sergeant Buck Tearl of the royal stuffs. He told me that he wanted to find you and ask you about that radio message. And here you are!”

Kit advanced a pace or two, but was careful not to reveal himself too closely in the firelight. For some incomprehensible reason Jerry was asking him to shift identities--to pretend that he was a policeman. All his life he had been playing up to his big brother’s whims, and it seemed but the normal and natural thing now to follow the lead that was offered him, whatever the hidden motives might be. There would be no difficulty in playing the part. He stood back in the shadow, and even if the girl looked at him too observantly she could learn nothing from his appearance. As far as she knew he could be wearing a police uniform under his outer garments.

“I want to know,” he said, “what you meant by sending me that stuff in the air. ‘The dead do not always die,’” he quoted. “And by the way, who’s Kablunak?”

The girl shifted her hostile stare his direction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Why did you ask WBZ to relay your message?”

“I sent no message to anybody,” she snapped.

He interrogated her with a measured frown. “Your name’s Diane?”

“Yes, it’s Diane.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“Is this supposed to be a court-martial?” she asked. “Or are you just a fresh young man?”

“She told me her last name was Durand,” put in Jerry. “Diane Durand.” He moved over a few inches on a log that he had recently brushed clean. “Won’t you sit down?”

“No,” she said.

“What are you doing here alone in the woods?” Kit asked.

The girl had turned with a malevolent impulse to Jerry. “I want to tell you something,” she declared. “You claim to be a policeman too. Well, there’s an inspector somewhere in charge of this district. When I tell him that one of his brave officers overpowered a helpless and harmless girl and handcuffed her and dragged her around through the woods on a sledge, you know what’ll happen to you. They’ll break you, my man, and throw you so far out of a decent service that the lowliest Dog Rib will be ashamed to walk in the same wilderness with you.”

Jerry stripped several crisp bacon slices from his toasting switch and arranged them neatly on a tin plate. He added a couple of pieces of buttered bannock, and offered the dish to the girl. “Won’t you eat some breakfast?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“My dear,” he informed her pleasantly, “your unsupported word won’t get you anywhere with the inspector. Inspector Bowman’s in charge just now. And you could never in your life convince him that one of his trusted, gentlemanly boys would do a vile trick such as overpowering a frail and innocent girl, and slipping the nippers on her pretty wrists, and dragging her around the woods on a sledge. He just couldn’t believe it, and that would be all of that.”

“How did you chance to wander into this part of the territory--all by yourself?” persisted Kitchener, making his voice as gentle and polite as he could possibly manage.

“Her dogs,” said Jerry, “ran away from her and left her on her own.... Her own what?” He questioned himself interlocutorily, as though he were a one-man minstrel show, at the same time inspecting the small feet in the half-knee-high boots. “Dogs,” he replied.

The girl’s mouth curled contemptuously. “The comedy,” she said, “hasn’t a laugh in it.”

Kitchener’s grave eyes wrinkled at the corners and, quite unwarrantedly, he himself laughed.

The girl looked startled, and then glanced full at him and for the first time appeared to recognize him as a fellow being. For just an instant a responsive glimmer heightened her expressive features, as though she were on the point of grinning back at him; and then the flickering brightness was gone and the look of sullen resentment had returned.

“If I hadn’t picked her up,” remarked Jerry, “she no doubt would have starved to death and frozen to death and lost her way home.”

“I wasn’t lost,” she declared furiously. “If you’d kept your hands off I’d have found the man I was looking for.”

“Who was he?” Kitchener inquired.

“My uncle,” she told him.

The coffee pot had reached a boil. Jerry tossed a handful of snow under the lid, and then poured out a steaming cupful, into which he dribbled a sticky, white fluid from a punctured can. “May I give you a cup of coffee?” he inquired of the girl.

“No,” she said.

Kitchener was watching her face with reflective curiosity. Suddenly he tried a blind shot. “Is your uncle’s name Jim?” he asked.

For a second she hesitated, and then threw up her head.

“Yes,” she said.

“Tall, stoop-shouldered party with scars on his face and head?” questioned Kit. “A burly-looking bird who shaves in blizzards and eats up the weather?”

This time she was really interested. “Yes,” she said, and her straight eyebrows drew anxiously together. “Have you seen him?”

“Jim who?” temporized Kit.

“James Durand.”

“It isn’t Sim, is it, instead of Jim?”

“What?”

“Simeon Bent?”

The girl stiffened perceptibly and the space between her eyelids narrowed ever so slightly. She seemed to swallow something in her throat. “What do you mean?”

“Is Jim Durand also Simeon Bent?”

“He is not,” she declared.

“Do you know Simeon Bent?”

She hesitated for half a breath, and then shook her head. “No,” she said.

“Where do you live?” Jerry cut in.

“New York, Philadelphia, Edmonton, Portland, Montreal, North Saskatchewan.” She rattled it off as glibly as a railroad brakeman.

“Ottawa too?” suggested Jerry. “Why discriminate against Ottawa?”

“Yes,” she answered surprisingly. “I did live in Ottawa for a while. I went to school there.”

“Recently?”

“Quite recently.”

Jerry smiled. “Do you still want to meet your uncle?” he inquired. “If you do it’s easy. We just came from his camp. All you have to do is back-track the sledge runners to the place you came from. It isn’t five miles.”

The girl regarded him suspiciously, and then glanced at Kit as though for confirmation.

“Right!” he assured her.

“Won’t you have some coffee before you go?” invited Jerry.

“No,” she said.

She walked to the sledge, picked up a pair of snowshoes, and pushed her toes into the thongs. For a moment she lingered, holding a pair of boyishly competent hands towards the fire. Then she shoved her hands into the fur mittens that dangled around her neck on a cord. Without a word or a backward glance she walked away.

They saw her for a moment moving sturdily across the snowy hillside, and then the slight figure faded in the morning gloom and was lost to sight.