CHAPTER VI

THE GREAT OWL MURDER

With a plate of beans and bannock and bacon in his lap, and a tin mug of coffee gripped in his fist, Kitchener sat down by the camp fire and faced his brother with an unwonted lack of approbation.

“I had believed,” he remarked, “that chivalry towards women was supposed to be one of the higher virtues of the honorable northern police.”

“All of that,” agreed Jerry easily. “And ‘never fire first.’ You’ve heard that one too. But strictly _sub rosa_--to uphold the law a police force needs a few in its ranks who walk a little roughly and who sometimes neglect to remember that women are ladies, and who are just a hair firster on the gat than the other guy.” He shrugged his shoulders. “They didn’t make me a sergeant for spreading my cloak in the mud for the village queens, or for waiting for crooks to take a crack at me, while I counted ‘one-two--it’s my turn next.’”

“What about this girl?” mused Kitchener. “She seems to me--sort of--a square-shooter.”

“She’s Hell Bent’s niece,” said Jerry.

“Tell me about her,” invited Kit after an almost imperceptible pause.

Jerry glanced at his brother’s left eyebrow, which was crooked upwards at its sharpest angle. “Hello, Cocky-bird! By the barometer I see there’s danger of muggy weather. I’d be careful.”

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“I ran into her yesterday evening--and she acted lost and strayed. She was looking for some man who was coming in from Port-o’-Prayer, and it struck me that it might be this Bent onion. Then she told me her name was Diane. I asked her if she was the WBZ Diane, and she said no. But it seemed an odd coincidence that I should pick that name off the air, and the very next woman I meet calls herself Diane. It gave me reason to pump her a little.” Jerry shook his head. “A deep well, and Heaven knows what’s at the bottom.”

“Why did you give her the wristlets?” asked Kit.

“Before I decided she was interesting I’d told her of crossing the trail of a tall, stoop-shouldered snow-plodder back a ways in the forest. She was all for going and finding him at once. That didn’t suit me. I didn’t want the tip-off to reach Bent that I was flanking him--not until I could have an understanding with you. Also I didn’t want her to see you before I did. I expected you two to be making faces at each other, and I was particularly anxious for you to know first what sort of a face yours was to be.”

Kitchener prodded the ground with the heel of his snowshoe, and said nothing.

“So when she started to go off to find her uncle,” Jerry pursued, “I told her this morning would be soon enough. She didn’t agree in the least: so what else could I do except to present her with the shining bracelets and tuck her away comfortably for the night. She had nothing to complain of. She had a snug sleep and a pleasant sleigh ride all over Saskatchewan.”

“Do you think she did radio that message?”

“I don’t know. She, perhaps--or somebody using her name--thinking I’d heard of her, and might heed it.”

“What would be the object?”

“To get me out of the country.”

Kit looked up searchingly. “What’s it all about, Jerry?”

“Dad!”

Jerry spoke the word solemnly, and just for that moment his look of grim bantering was erased from his face.

Kitchener waited with a sudden physical tensing that seemed to strain every muscle of his body.

There followed an interval of profound silence while Jerry stared off northward through the falling snow. “Kit,” he blurted out in a constricted breath, “there is a dark and horrible crime that has gone unsolved and unavenged for twelve long years!”

Still Kitchener sat without speech.

“Since I came back into this country,” Jerry went on in a slow, brooding tone, as though he had forgotten that any one else was present, “I’ve spent every day and night and thought with just one object. I’ve gone through all the department records, I’ve talked with every policeman who has traveled the old-time trails, I’ve questioned every trapper and bush-ranger and every one of the sooty-brothers, Indian and Esquimaux, that I’ve met in the wilderness. I have spent years trying to find out what happened to Inspector Bill Tearl.”

“You’ve found out--”

“Not much actually, and yet--maybe a lot.”

Jerry put down his empty coffee cup, dug in his shirt pocket, and then twisted and licked a cigarette into shape. “Did you ever know there was gold in this country?”

Kitchener shook his head, and his eyes begged his brother to get on with the story.

“I didn’t either. But there must be. Of course the color may be found almost everywhere. But what I mean is a lode or pocket or placer drift in which the raw, yellow wealth has clustered like the raisins in a pudding. Enough of it to shovel out with a scoop and load up a dog sledge.”

“And where is this fabulous hoard?” asked Kit.

Jerry shrugged indifferently. “Who knows? You’ve got ten thousand miles of territory to guess in. That part of it doesn’t mean anything in our lives. Maybe some Indian found the deposit in the first place, or perhaps it was rifled by one of those wandering, crack-brained prospectors whom you’re apt to meet almost everywhere. The loaded sledge is plenty for us to worry about. For all we know it may have been hauled half-way across a continent and passed from murderer to murderer before it reached its ultimate tragedy.

“The police,” Jerry went on, “maintain a little advance post near the edge of big timber, some few days northeast of here at a place called _Saut Sauvage_. At the time I am talking about a sergeant and two men were wintering at this post. Dad, as you recall, was then the inspector in charge of this district. Twelve years ago this December, Dad went out on an inspection patrol and paid a little visit to the _Saut Sauvage_ boys. It was at that time, as you know, that he disappeared.”

“Where does the sledge-load of gold come in?” inquired Kit.

“I have this part of the story from Inspector Bowman, who, twelve years ago, was the sergeant in command at _Saut Sauvage_,” said Jerry. “Much of it never went into the official records, and almost all of it was hushed up by the higher officers. Even Bill Tearl’s family wasn’t told all of the facts. You’ll see why when you hear what happened.

“On the particular day I have in mind,” Jerry resumed, “when Inspector Tearl was a guest at _Saut Sauvage_, a man and a woman came in from the north somewhere, driving a train of huskies and a sledge. Bowman doesn’t remember what they said their names were, or even whether names were mentioned. He recalls only that the man was a lanky, rather good-looking chap around thirty or so. The woman, he introduced as his sister. She appeared to be near her brother’s age--an athletic-looking woman with an astonishing lot of golden hair--they didn’t bob it in those days. I gather from the inspector that she was a knock-out.”

The policeman pitched a couple of fresh birch logs on the fire, and then moved a foot or two farther away to escape the heat. “The stranger and his sister, it seems,” he went on, “had been up on the barrens hunting musk-ox. They had started out with guides and packers--three men, whites or breeds. What happened I don’t know. But there was some sort of trouble, and either their men left them, or they cleared out and left their men. It doesn’t matter about that. The two were alone when they arrived at the police post. They had been caught by winter and were hurrying to reach the outside before the big snow trapped them.

“One who lives in this country,” Jerry ruminated, “is apt to lose his sense of wonderment. If you told me that you had found diamond pipes in the hills yonder to rival Kimberley, I would say, ‘why not?’ There’s everything else--coal and iron and copper and platinum and gold fields, untouched as yet, and for the greater part undiscovered--waiting to be dumped into a world that’s already too fat with wealth. Oil, illuminating gas, water-power to run all the earth’s industries in high. I’ve seen a natural gas vent up on the rim of the Circle, which some passing Indian ignited, possibly a hundred years ago, which is burning to-day, and perhaps will be spouting its fifty foot jet of flame a century or two or three from now.”

Jerry sighed and shook his head. “It’s a pity to think that some day this will all be filled up with sweaty ditch diggers and shrieking machinery. Thank God, you and I will be dead.”

He looked into the darkness and stretched his arms in a wide gesture. “It still belongs to you and me, and it hasn’t changed much since the first white man found it. A wilderness bigger than the whole United States. Peopled by a few of the simple, sooty brothers and a few whites who have nerve enough to live as they damn please. An earth chockful of virgin wealth, and a few primitives prowling upon it. If they see anything they want they take it, and what the hell! Raw tastes and hungers and desires let loose in a wild and opulent land. No law worth mentioning; no restraints; every man for himself. Queer and terrible things can happen. Almost every dark stretch of the forest holds its own grisly secret--”

“What,” demanded Kit, “is all this about?”

Jerry’s hard features for a moment relaxed in a wry grin. “I was just thinking,” he remarked, “that Dad and Sergeant Bowman wouldn’t have been skeptical or even astonished when this stranger and his beautiful sister arrived at the police cabin to tell them that they had found in the woods farther north a sledge stacked with gold nuggets in rotting caribou bags, and a man’s tattered skeleton sprawled on top of it.

“These two gave the skeleton as nice a burial as they could under the circumstances, and then they hitched their own dogs to the sledge and came on south. Bowman says he himself saw the sledge, and he saw and hefted some of the nuggets. He said there must have been a quarter of a million--”

“Who was the poor devil?” interrupted Kit.

“The skeleton? Who knows? He may not have been the original digger. As I said, that sledge may have come by stages clear across from the Klondike--one man slaying the man ahead of him for its possession. The last chap, perhaps, died of the great northern illness known as ‘nothing-to-eat.’ That story is lost forever in the mists. We’re concerned only with what happened afterwards.”

Kit was somberly watching his brother’s face. “Yes?” he breathed.

“The new owners of the sledge,” said Jerry, “were a bit nervous about it. They had reason to be. Their guides, it seems, had turned out to be a bad lot, and they had parted company with them in a nasty row. These guides were loitering about somewhere in the neighborhood of _Saut Sauvage_. The truth was that the brother and sister were afraid to go on alone. It so happened that Inspector Bill Tearl was intending to go down to McMurray, and he volunteered to escort the sledge out of the woods. The three started off next morning in a snow storm--Dad and the two lucky finders.” Jerry paused for a moment, and his lower lip bent up under his teeth as he gazed with moody eyes beyond the crackling fire.

“They said good-by to Bowman,” he resumed quietly, “and set out for the south. And none of the three was ever seen alive afterwards.”

The sergeant glanced at the crumpled cigarette in his fingers, and for the first time seemed to remember why he had rolled it. He pulled a blazing fagot out of the fire, puffed industriously for a moment, and then settled back at ease on one elbow.

“Two weeks later,” he stated abruptly, “Sergeant Bowman made a little patrol southward. Not twenty miles below the police post, at a place called Great Owl Run, he found the woman with the lovely hair. She was lying face down in a deep drift with a .45 bullet in the back of her head. Her brother was nowhere to be found, nor Inspector Bill Tearl, nor the sledge load of caribou sacks.”

Kitchener sat straighter, his dark eyes suddenly constricted with horror. “What had happened?” he asked.

“There had been two or three snow storms before Bowman took the trail,” Jerry explained, “and there was not much left even for a schooled woodsman to read. No sledge tracks, no footprints. Between the spot where the woman lay and the high, steep bank of Great Owl Run, the underbrush had been broken and crushed down, as though a body, or perhaps two of them, had been dragged off and dumped into the creek. The stream runs deep and swift at that point, and seldom freezes over. Anything thrown into it would be swept down under the ice tunnels and probably carried all the way to the Arctic Sea.”

“And you know no more than this?” Kitchener asked in a hushed voice.

“A little more, maybe. But the rest is pure guessing.

“At about the time that Bowman was finding the dead woman,” Jerry added, “a man by the name of Simeon Bent came out of the woods at Fort McMurray. He had been in some sort of a fight a while before and had wounds about the head and face. I got wind of this man a couple of years ago and found out all about him that I could. One thing, he had been the head guide for the two musk-ox hunters.

“From McMurray this Bent bird went on down to Edmonton,” Jerry continued after a brief interval. “He went a bit wild on whiskey blanc down there. In a rumpus in a back room he killed a man and was stretched a short term for manslaughter.” The sergeant observed his brother fixedly. “He was splurging some in Edmonton, with plenty to spend, and I have it straight that his cash reserve was a bagful of gold nuggets.”

“You mean--” said Kit, and stopped.

Jerry answered with a short nod. “Sounds that way, doesn’t it? It was Bent who ambushed Dad and the two strangers. My guess it that he got the sledge, but for some reason he wasn’t able to take it down country with him. Maybe the other guides were lurking near by and he didn’t want to declare them in. He helped himself to one bagful of gold, and cleared out.

“It’s my belief that he cached that sledge in the woods somewhere in the neighborhood of Great Owl Run,” Jerry declared. “It’s probably still there where he hid it on that ugly day twelve years ago.” The sergeant tossed his cigarette into the fire and his muscular hands clenched tightly over one knee. “Bent served out his term in prison, hugging his secret. The minute they turned him loose he started for the north--”

“Carrying Dad’s old gun,” Kitchener cut in, his eyes suddenly grown as cold and murky as the wintry dawn.

“That sledge,” asserted Jerry, “is still concealed in the forest up yonder, and Hell Bent is on his way to get it.”

The sergeant raised himself to his feet and stood erect on the snowy hillside. “When Bent’s time was nearly up I asked for the _Saut Sauvage_ assignment, and Bowman sent me to take command of the outpost up there. I’m supposed to be on my way to that place.”

“I understand now,” said Kit, “why he’ll kill you if he can.”

“Of course,” said Jerry carelessly. “I want to nail him when he gets that sledge, and he knows it.” The policeman knitted his brows darkly. “The trouble is,” he reflected, “I can’t keep the assignment. Something else has turned up.”

He contemplated his brother with shrewd eyes for a moment, and then faintly nodded his head as though he had made up his mind about something.

“Kit,” he declared, “it’s the luckiest thing in the world that you turned up when you did. I needed you frightfully. But you were always like that--an on-the-spot Johnny. You ready to carry on, Cocky-bird?”

“You know I am.”

“Good! It’s an outrageous and extremely hazardous business I’m wishing on you. But I have no choice. You’re to go up there instead of me, and stick tight to this Bent, and get him.”

“All right,” said Kitchener. “I’d like to.”

“I’m not going to report at all, Crowfeathers. I’ve got something else to do. But I don’t want to be let out of the service for going A.W.O.L.--heading off on my own. I’ve disgraced you plenty as it is.”

Kit watched his brother uneasily. “What are you going to do?”

“You and I don’t look a lot alike,” Jerry temporized. “I’m a darned sight better-looking guy than you, if it comes to that. But at the same time you approximate me enough to get by. Luckily the two constables up at _Saut Sauvage_ have never seen me.”

“What--?” Kit stopped, his startled eyes dilating as he began to gather the drift of Jerry’s plans. “You don’t mean--”

“That’s why I introduced you to Diane as Buck Tearl,” Jerry assured him with a bland smile. “The idea was beginning to ferment even then. I can’t take the patrol, you understand, so somebody will have to go in my place. I’ll put you in my uniform and give you my credentials, and you go north and tell ’em you’re Sergeant Buck Tearl of the royal police. You’ll take command of the outpost at _Saut Sauvage_.”