CHAPTER VIII

FOLLOW ON

It was like Jerry to vanish lightheartedly as though he were dropping off somewhere for a frivolous week-end, instead of undertaking a journey that would have appalled the most hardened _voyageur_. His comings and goings had always been thus casual and unexpected. He hated to say “good-by.” Kit had found his astonishing brother once more, only to lose him. They might meet in a year, or in ten years, or perhaps never again.

As Kit turned the paper over his finger he was stricken by a sudden recollection. He glanced sharply at Miss Durand.

“You say,” he asked, “that you read this note?”

She nodded her auburn head. “_Uhuh!_”

In spite of himself Kit felt an uncomfortable warming of blood under the skin of his face. “I wouldn’t pay any attention--he doesn’t mean anything--” He caught his breath in embarrassment. “He’s a lunatic.”

“He must be a good friend of yours to give you so much good advice,” said Miss Durand.

“He’s an old friend, anyhow,” agreed Kit uneasily. “We’ve known each other for years. Just the same, he’s an idiot.”

“Anything else you want to call him--why, yes,” she returned mildly. “But he’s no idiot. I think it was very smart of him to warn you.”

Kitchener shifted his feet. “I don’t know what he was talking about. Warn me about what?”

“Against anybody named Diane,” said the girl serenely. “Look at Diane d’Angoulême and Diane de Poitiers, just to mention a couple. There were a lot of ’em in history, and they all were sly and tricky and full of the old Nick. It pays to be careful in your dealings with the Dianes.”

“Those two are dead,” remarked Kitchener. “And I don’t need Jerry to tell me what to do about their successors.”

The girl moved to avoid the drifting smoke from the camp fire, and then tilted her head sidewise as she examined him impersonally from under the curve of her hazel eyelashes. “What was the funny look in your eye your friend Jerry noticed?” she asked.

Kitchener stared at her. The audacity of her asking him that! There was an impish suggestion about her mouth and lips that did not quite approach a smile. He found himself feeling bitterly resentful towards Jerry. He might at least have left the nonsense out of his note.

“Does it look funny now?” he asked stiffly.

“Well--no,” she answered judgmatically, and half closed one of her own bright eyes, as though to see him better with the other. “Not noticeably.”

“What Jerry meant,” he remarked, “is that I might fall for you because you’re so pretty. You are, you know.” He was trying to appear as nonchalant about it as the girl herself. “But he also said there were a million of ’em. So what does that amount to?”

“Not a thing,” she said.

“Certainly not. I’ve met a good many of the million myself--Daphnes and Delilahs and Dulcys, and maybe even a Diane or two. Darned pretty, some of ’em--but what of it?”

“We haven’t anything to worry about,” she assured him--“anyhow you haven’t. I can see you’re too well insulated.” She looked at him demurely. “I know now,” she suddenly declared, “why he calls you Cocky-bird. When you push up your left eyebrow, it makes you--you’re just like that.”

He hastily drew his eyebrows straight, and scowled at her.

“I think it’s cute,” she said, and the smile grew definite, and wicked.

He confronted her furiously. “Listen here!” he said: “I suppose you expect to go along with me?”

“I sort of took it for granted.”

“Why don’t you go down to Port-o’-Prayer and get the old Scotch factor to ship you out? It isn’t far from here.”

“Because I don’t want to. I came to find my Uncle Jim, and I’m going to find him. If you won’t take me with you I’ll tag on your trail. Anyhow I will until I freeze to death or die of hunger.” The girl extended her empty hands for his inspection. “I haven’t any outfit or anything.”

“You wouldn’t be able to keep up with me,” he objected.

She tossed back her head and her face looked childishly bewitching under the tousel of ruddy hair. “I’ll keep up,” she promised. “I’ve snowshoed a lot,” she said--“for sport. Saranac and Banff and St. Moritz.”

“How the deuce did you happen to lose your uncle in the first place?” he asked her ungraciously.

“I didn’t exactly lose him,” she replied. “I was visiting friends in Ottawa, when he wrote me that he had decided to spend the winter in this country. I thought it would be nice to be with him, and telegraphed him to wait for me. But he was gone before my message reached him. However, I supposed I might overtake him, so I caught the next to last boat down the Slave River and went ashore at Fort Smith. But for some reason Uncle Jim had changed his mind and struck off from farther down country.”

“Yeah?” said Kitchener. “What does he want up here?”

“He thought he’d spend the winter trapping,” she answered as glibly as though she had learned a formula by heart. “His lungs are not good and the doctor ordered him to spend a few months in the open.”

“Oh, yes,” said Kit expressionlessly. “This is a good place for the lungs.”

“While I was marooned at Fort Smith, wondering what to do next,” the girl went on regretfully, “a couple of Indians told me of a man who had outfitted at Port-o’-Prayer for a trip north. From their description I knew it was Uncle Jim. I thought there was still time to intercept him, and I persuaded these Indians to guide me east from Fort Smith to cross the trails above Port-o’-Prayer. They brought me safely as far as the Dog-Rib country, and then got frightened about something and said they were going back. They were stubborn about it, so I had to let them go, and came on the rest of the way alone.”

Kitchener was watching the girl sidewise. Her manner was so innocent and confiding that it was hard to disbelieve her. But he was certain that in most of its details the yarn was pure fiction. According to Jerry Tearl--and Jerry usually knew what he was talking about--the uncle’s name was not Jim Durand, but Sim Bent. At the time he was supposed to have written to his niece and started into the woods he was still serving time in the Ottawa prison.

The girl’s excuse for entering the wilderness was unbelievable. A woman so obviously fastidious in tastes and habits certainly would never submit voluntarily to the rigors and hardships of an arctic winter, unless she were actuated by exceptional motives. Kit felt sure that she was acting with Durand, or Bent, in an attempt to sledge a load of stolen gold nuggets out of the forests. Her story of being “lost” was probably only a pretext to bring her into contact with the police of the district, so that she might spy upon their movements and attempt to throw them off her companion’s trail. She was clever enough and daring enough to hoodwink the entire force of the mounted.

Kit turned suddenly to rescue a skillet of beans, which the girl had appropriated from his pack while he slept, and set on the fire to burn.

“Sorry!” she exclaimed. “I just simply forgot ’em.”

As he glanced around at her lovely, contrite face the line of Kitchener’s jaw molded unconsciously into a harder line. The notion had struck him that it would be a good idea to keep her with him. If she were playing a subtle game at his expense, it would be a good job to have her where he could watch her. He felt a strange premonition that through Diane he eventually would be brought to his reckoning with the man who brazenly carried his father’s service revolver.

“You might have known about Indian guides,” he remarked to hide his inward thoughts. “Unless you arrange ahead of time for regular, listed men, you’re out of luck. You pick up these fly-by-nights of the bush and they’re sure to ditch you at the first hard portage.”

“I’d have been all right,” she said, “if my dogs hadn’t chased a rabbit and run away with my sledge and everything I owned. And then your friend Jerry came along with his high-handed performance.”

Her manner changed and she grew wistful and dangerously appealing. “You owe me something if you’re his friend. You’re going to take me with you, aren’t you?”

“I’ll take you,” Kit consented.

They lunched on what Inspector Bill Tearl used to call the “ABC’s” of the wilderness, ashes, beans and coffee. Then, as soon as they had cleaned up and repacked, Kit harnessed-in his dogs, and they started off together upon the northward trail.

It was a gloomy day, with only a few hours of the short daylight left. The snow had stopped falling, but the clouds that they saw through an occasional rift in the spruces were black and low-riding, portentous of trouble.

For a little distance Kitchener followed Jerry’s plainly marked trail. Jerry was wearing a pair of big, broad-toed Chippewyan snowshoes. At one place he had plowed unawares over a sharp root hidden under the snow, and by the subsequent tracks it was seen that the webbing of the right raquette had been torn. The small mishap had not halted him. He had kept onward with enormous energy, and apparently would not bother to make repairs until darkness forced him into camp.

It somehow was comforting to know that Jerry was not many hours ahead and that the future and the past were still tethered together by a visible line of footprints. As long as he clung to the trail Kit was warmed by a feeling that some part of his big brother still lingered companionably with him. But he had reached the time of final parting. After a few hundred yards he resolutely turned leftward, and would not look back at the forking of the trails. He set his eyes on the clean, new snow ahead, which, to his misty vision, was like a freshly turned page that had been assigned to him alone. Jerry had crossed out of his life again, and he was left on his own resources.

Kitchener’s attention was fixed on the snowy aisles of the forest in front of him and the compass that he wore on his wrist like a watch. Jerry had given him the compass with the injunction: “Read it often and believe it absolutely, even though you know it lies.”

Presumably Miss Durand was trudging behind the sledge. Kit did not glance around. He felt a malicious satisfaction in imagining that she was having difficulty in keeping up. Although he was rather sore from yesterday’s travels, he was beginning, nevertheless, to find his snow-legs. He fancied he was setting a stiff pace.

There is nothing so deathly quiet as the deep woods in winter. In the lull between storms the trees stood lifeless as pillars supporting a roof thatched solidly with snow. The chinking was constantly slipping, falling as softly as feathers on heads below. There seemed to be a complete absence of life. Through long stretches of the darker valleys not a tiny, clawed footprint disturbed the white surface of the ground. Even the shy, wild things of the forest shun the places of the deepest gloom.

Early in the afternoon Kit emerged suddenly from thick cover to skirt the edge of a frozen swamp. He lifted his head to look at the open sky and breathed more freely, feeling that a great oppression had been lifted momentarily.

Among the sedges that stood like broken spears in the swamp there were millions of rabbit tracks. Where rabbits make their homes their hunters likewise live. The padded prints of mink and otter and fox were seen on all sides. The muskegs of the wilderness are bloody carnival grounds. But to-day there was a strange brooding quiet everywhere. Not even a jay or a whiskey-jack flew down to mock at the travelers.

Kit traveled on to the northwest and trusted in his compass. And a while before the breathless twilight set in he crossed the base of a long, timbered slope and came out on the banks of a river. At the place where he struck the stream it was sheathed solidly in ice, but farther down he saw ugly rocks and caught the mutter of wild, white water. From Jerry’s description he knew that this must be the Vermilion River.

Miss Durand left her place behind the sledge and came forward among the panting dogs. Her hand was pressed against her ribs, as though to hide her rapid breathing. She grinned cheerfully at her fellow traveler. “You can take it faster if you feel like it,” she remarked.

Kit laughed ironically. This was simply bravado. She probably knew that he couldn’t go much faster, even as he was aware that she never could hold the pace if he did.

Along the curve of the river bank ran a scuffled trail. A sledge and dogs and a solitary man had passed here sometime during the day. Kit called the girl’s attention to the peculiarities of the snowshoe tracks, their waffle-mesh packing, the wide-spread gait, the deep drag of the heels. These same snowshoes had broken the path for him yesterday, and there was no question of their wearer’s identity.

“It’s your uncle,” he said.

She descended the sloping embankment to look with quickened interest.

“How long ago?” she asked.

“Since the snow stopped falling. He can’t be many hours ahead.”

Kitchener hied-on his drooping dogs and the sledge once more got underway. Night was approaching under a lowering sky and the reaches of the river valley and the spreading hills of spruce had begun to fade into a purple-stained haziness. Again Kit moved on in the advance, his eyes strained ahead as he made use of that last half hour of twilight.

He was a hunter pursuing a human quarry. In the dim miles somewhere ahead a tall, furtive figure was moving along with a train of dogs, crowding a little more distance on the end of a hard day’s march. If Jerry had guessed correctly, this man held in his guilty keeping the secret of the old tragedy on Great Owl Run. Presumably he was on his way now to regain the spoils of an earlier crime. The sledge with its fatal lading undoubtedly had been cached near the place where the woman was shot and her brother and Inspector Bill Tearl had vanished--one, perhaps two days farther north.

Kit hoped to be on hand when that rotted sledge was unearthed. He had the trail now, and he would hang on, wherever it led him. By the freshness of the prints he estimated that at this moment his man could not be more than ten miles farther down the river. After this evening he must be wary, neither lagging too far behind, nor closing-in too soon. Above all else the man must not be allowed to suspect that a pursuer was following the river route.

Beyond his anxiety to surprise the ex-convict red-handed in possession of the long-lost sledge, Kit’s plans were still somewhat indefinite. He probably would arrest his man, and, posing as Sergeant Buck Tearl, hand his prisoner over to the police at _Saut Sauvage_. With the new material evidence backing the circumstantial facts that Jerry had gathered, it might be possible to convict the man of an ancient crime. For one thing he would be hard pressed to explain how he happened to be armed with a revolver that at one time had belonged to the missing inspector of police. Even if conviction failed, there still would be a chance of forcing out the truth concerning Bill Tearl’s disappearance and hushing the scandalous rumors that had sullied his memory.

For the immediate future Kitchener held no misgivings. He wore a policeman’s coat and carried a policeman’s gun, and unless somebody discovered that he was an impostor, he held the authority of the law in this gloomy neck of the woods. If his man showed fight the former intercollegiate pistol champion would have no need of begging quarter.

His present doubts concerned only Diane Durand. She perplexed him and worried him more than he admitted even to himself. She was a vivid young woman, fearless and humorous and intensely human, with a queer strain of sweetness underlying the dominant qualities of recklessness and willfulness. He liked her in spite of himself. There was danger of his liking her much too well if he failed to heed his saner judgments.

Luckily, he had been forewarned. She was associated with the scar-faced man, towards whom Kit was beginning to feel a strong personal enmity. In the final reckoning, she too would be his enemy. And a perverse, highly organized woman is so often more bitterly implacable than the ugliest tempered man. He feared her, almost as he feared himself and his own sentimental weakness. For that reason he had set his face and his heart against her. His brother had trusted him, and whatever else he might do on earth, he could not fail Jerry.

He drove his weary dogs down river until darkness finally hid the trail of the sledge that had gone before him. Then he called a halt for the night. The lee side of a great spruce windfall served well enough for a campsite. He unhitched and tossed each of the dogs his evening’s portion of ice-stiff fish. Then he pitched the Burberry tent, which he had inherited as a part of Jerry’s luggage. He built a tiny fire screened behind the river bluff, and, with the girl’s help, he scrambled together a hot supper.

They kept awake only long enough to eat. Then with a faint, tired “good night” the girl crept into the tent.

“’Night,” said Kit curtly. He rolled up by the fire in the spare fur robes and was asleep before the dogs had finished burying themselves in the snow bank beside him.

At the hour exclusive to milkmen and the rounders of night clubs in milder lands farther south, Kit aroused himself in the frigid darkness. A stiff breeze had sprung up in the north and sleet was rattling among the gaunt branches of the willows and alders that hedged the riverside. There was something in the wild sound of the wind and the feel of the raw, tingling air that filled him with unpleasant foreboding. A native could have told him that one of the dreaded northeast storms was gathering forces to sweep down from the polar regions. It was nearly the end of the year, three days before Christmas.

He raked up the dying embers of the fire, fed on new fuel, and started breakfast. Then he shook the tent flap and awakened Miss Durand.

The girl pushed a reluctant head out into the cold, glanced heavy-eyed about her, and yawned impolitely in Kitchener’s face. “What time is it?” she demanded.

“It’s an unearthly hour,” he said.

“I haven’t had half enough sleep,” she protested.

“Neither have I,” he returned unfeelingly. “Get up. I’m pulling out of here in twenty minutes and taking the tent with me.”

They were both too drowsy and too cross even to pretend to be good-humored, and they ate breakfast without talk, and then struck camp and reloaded the sledge like a pair of automatons. While the girl was pulling on her green parka and mittens, Kit served the dogs their fishy portion and hustled them into the traces. The man and woman then slipped into their snowshoes, fumbled at the lashings with numbed fingers, and started the day’s march as the sullen dawn was beginning to break.

They traveled as they did yesterday, Kitchener acting as pioneer, and the girl tramping behind at the “gee” pole of the sledge. The new light revealed the partly obliterated trail of the man who had proceeded them down the river.

Kit followed with his head bowed to the cutting sleet, pushing on remorselessly, and not always remembering the slender, frost-whitened figure that trudged at his heels. Some time in the morning he came to a sheltered place where the remnants of a campfire had been snowed under, not many hours earlier. The ex-convict had spent the night here, and had gone on again, probably at daybreak.

From this point the trail was fresher and, for the present, very easily distinguished. The man was staying with the river. He had crossed the ice of a tributary creek and still continued down the course of the main stream. This creek was the first of the branches that Jerry had mentioned. The fifth would be Great Owl Run.

Kit did not wish to overtake his man until after he had turned into the Great Owl country. Late in the morning he discovered that the tracks of snowshoes and sledge runners had a cleaner demarcation at the edges, and he realized that he was closing up the gap too quickly. Thereafter he moved more leisurely and kept a sharper look-out ahead.

He and the girl halted at noon for lunch, and later they again stopped for a few minutes to give the dogs a breathing spell. The afternoon was beginning to fade when they reached the second of the creeks that flowed from the east into the Vermilion River.

The small stream entered the larger waterway between sloping, timbered banks. Kit descended through the willows at the head of his dogs, started across the thick ice, and then stopped as short as though an alarming voice had challenged him. In the snow along the north margin of the creek he saw a new trail--dog tracks, the twin grooves of a heavy-laden sledge, and a pair of big raquettes crushing through the snow.

Kitchener brought his team to a standstill and curtly signaled Miss Durand to halt. He strode forward to investigate, and then stood in wondering silence.

The newcomer evidently was a heavily built and energetic man. His snowshoes were of the two-bar type, remarkably broad at the toes, but in spite of their sustaining spread they sank deeply under his hard-cruising weight. The webbing of the right shoe had been torn, and afterwards roughly repaired. The imprints were too familiar to leave any possibility of doubt. Kit yesterday had examined a line of tracks that were identical with these, and he knew that he could not be mistaken. The new arrival was Jerry Tearl.

Kit beckoned on his companion and crossed the brook to regain the embankment of the main stream. The broad-toed prints ranged down to the river’s edge, and there turned northward to meet and run parallel with the trail that Kit had been following all that day. Jerry and the ex-convict were traveling the same direction, and by the recent appearance of the two trails they could not be many minutes apart.

It was incredible that the pair had actually encountered one another and were cruising in each other’s company. One must be following the other, with not more than a couple of miles separating them. Kit anxiously inspected first one snowshoe depression and then another, trying to decide which held the deepest film of sleet. To his untrained eyes there was no appreciable difference in the trails. One man probably was a little ahead of the other, but which was the pursuer and which the pursued, Kit was unable to determine.