CHAPTER IX

GRANDFATHER’S RED BLANKETS

What change of plan or error of reckoning had brought Jerry into the Vermilion River country, when he should have been miles from here, heading due north, Kit at this moment was unable to imagine. He wasted no time in futile speculation. It sufficed him to know that Hell Bent and his brother were cruising on the river route, almost within rifle shot of one another, while he and Diane Durand were trailing close behind. He did not need the gift of prophecy to realize that events were rapidly shaping themselves towards some sudden crisis.

The girl had come down the river slope to look curiously at the juncture of the trails. For a moment Kitchener lifted his icy eyelashes, trying to discover from her face whether she recognized the pattern of Jerry’s raquettes. She did not enlighten him.

“Funny there’d be somebody else along here on a day like this,” was her only comment.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Kit carelessly. “Maybe some trapper finishing his rounds. You find fur-hunters’ shacks scattered here and there all through the wilderness. Come on. Let’s go.”

They took advantage of the last of twilight and hurried on after the two who had gone before. Kit had no expectancy of closing up the distance to-night, and the best he could hope was that conditions to-morrow might remain favorable for tracking. At this moment, however, the prospects were disquieting. The sleet was changing to snow--stinging, dry flakes that had begun to eddy into drifts along the exposed banks of the river. As he pushed onward he cast many dubious glances towards the northern sky, worried by the auguries that spelled heavy weather and smothered trails.

When darkness finally hid the ground underfoot he had no choice but to go into camp. This night they were lucky enough to find an overhanging bluff by the river which served both as a windbreak and a sheltering roof. By the time the tent was up and supper had been cooked, their fire was almost blotted out by flying clouds of snow. Kit shoved the smoldering fagots closer to the cliffside, and then groped his way along the cracking edges of river ice and dragged in enough down-timber and driftwood to last through the night.

Diane Durand left her tent flap open to catch the rays of heat, and Kit snuggled down by the snoring dogs, where the reflected warmth reached the wall of rock. A dozen times during the night he awakened to replenish the fire and to listen with gloomy forebodings to the wind and the rush of snow down the river levels.

At daybreak he and the girl aroused themselves in a world of swirling whiteness. The moment he had cast off his robes he wallowed through the drifts to the river bank. It was as he had feared. The landscape stretched away into ghostly backgrounds, an unbroken monotony of snow. This was to-day, and all of yesterday’s records were buried under the great downfall of the storm.

Kitchener felt reasonably certain the ex-convict and Jerry both were heading for Great Owl Run. The trails had disappeared, and there was little prospect of picking them up again. But as long as he held the guidance of the river and kept count of the branching streams there was slight danger of his going astray. Diane Durand did not seem to be much alarmed by the burying of yesterday’s tangible paths.

“Uncle Jim’ll be up there somewhere,” she said serenely, “and if we keep on the way we’re going we’ll surely find him.”

“Shouldn’t doubt it,” said Kit.

Through that brief, blustering day they struggled forward in the welter of snow, like specters in a world of death, seeing no living creature, walking in a vast blankness. They crossed the mouths of a third and a fourth creek that ended their ice-choked careers in the Vermilion River. As night closed in at the end of the ghastly daylight they struck the fifth branching stream.

On a high promontory, barely discernible in the hurly-burly of the storm, Kitchener made out a tall, gaunt fir tree that had been stripped of its middle branches and left standing above the river, a beacon for all passers-by. This was a “lobstick” which the Indians had trimmed fantastically to commemorate some noteworthy tribal event. The ancient marker, Jerry had said, would indicate Kit’s turning point. This creek must be Great Owl Run.

Whether Diane Durand knew anything of local geography Kitchener did not know. But she offered no protests when he quitted the river here and turned up the side stream.

In almost any other land Great Owl Run would have been called a river. It was thirty or forty feet wide between its sheer banks, a deep, swift-running stream coming out of the high hills in the northeast. For stretches the course was closed solidly from bank to bank, but along the narrow races the water poured out thunderously from under the ice tunnels, and would not freeze even in below-zero weather.

There was no sign of human footprints along the sheltered shores. If anybody had come this direction during the last twenty-four hours the trail was blotted out under the heavy snowfall. Kit moved furtively and as long as he could see he kept a restless lookout among the gloomy coverts. Bill Tearl and the two outlanders had met with a strange and terrible fate not many miles farther up this stream, and Kit was conscious of a haunting oppression of mind and spirit as he neared the scene of the old tragedy.

Darkness came, and he continued to grope his way up the winding watercourse. The dogs were sagging in the traces, staggering belly-deep in the snow. Behind the sledge Diane Durand stumbled and floundered in the drifts, almost at the end of her endurance. But still Kit would not halt.

As they advanced the forest grew blacker and denser. The gale still raged overhead, but in the timber-smothered depths of the creek bottoms scarcely a breath of wind reached them. Evergreens do not rustle like deciduous trees, but moan and sigh in living anguish. There are few sounds more dolorous than the wailing of a spruce forest at night.

Kitchener was groping his way through a tangle of snowy underwood, when he was conscious of a shadowy movement at his elbow. Startled, he turned his head to see a slight, wraith-like shape hurrying at his heels. It was Diane Durand. In the darkness he could just see the blur of her lifted face.

“What’s the matter?” he asked as he resumed his weary stride. There was no reason why he might not have spoken in a natural tone, but through the warning of some vague instinct he pitched his voice to a whisper.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I-- How much farther must we go?”

“Not far now,” he said.

He expected her to drop back to her place with the sledge; instead she kept at his side, pressing even closer, as though something had frightened her and she was seeking the reassurance of human fellowship.

It was curious. Until this moment she had never betrayed any symptom of timidity.

“I’ve never seen it so dark anywhere,” she complained. “It isn’t like being out-of-doors, but feeling your way in a strange--” and hesitated for the word--“cavern. Everything is so--shut-in.”

Kitchener had nothing to say. He was forcing his way doggedly through the low, jungle-like thickets, when suddenly, unreasoningly, his breath was quenched in his lungs and his heart stood still.

Something soft and silent and somehow horrible, seemed to move through the air just by his head.

He was not aware of any sound, nor of actual motion. Yet without seeing or hearing he knew that something alive had passed through the darkness and stared at him.

And Diane knew, and the dogs knew. The girl’s hand was clutching the muscles of his forearm, trembling. The dog team scrambled forward to slink at Kitchener’s heels. Like the girl, the beasts also had discovered a sudden need for human companionship.

Kit had pulled up short, listening, his eyes striving vainly to penetrate the stifling gloom.

There was nothing, only the sighing of the spruces and the cracking of frost-brittle branches along the hidden creek. His common sense tried to tell him that he was deluding himself with overwrought imaginings, but his high-keyed instincts knew better.

As he waited, tense and breathless, with the girl clinging to him and the dogs cowering at his feet, it came again. For an instant he fancied, or rather, felt, that a ghostly shape, blacker than the blackness of the night, had soundlessly crossed his line of vision. Similarly, he was conscious of a wavering in the darkness behind him.

Kit felt a cold tingling creep up his backbone to the base of the neck, that queer, atavistic sensation that modern men probably have inherited from furry forebears, who bristled in moments of danger and dread. The girl was standing close, her slim young body as taut as though she had suddenly passed under a mesmeric spell. Without thinking what he did, Kit’s arm slid around her waist, and she did not try to move.

Again he was aware of a shady stirring, as though a grotesque and impalpable substance had stooped his direction and brushed him by. For just that moment the dead air was disturbed and he had the impression that a soft, monstrous form had swept past his face. And all at once the awful silence was disrupted by a harsh, snicking sound--like a pair of steel scissors’ blades that had sharply clashed.

Kit caught his breath, and then his drawn muscles relaxed and he laughed feebly with the letting down of over-strained senses. “Oh, gosh!” he moaned. “What a pair of idiots we are! Scared--”

“Of what?” the girl gasped. “Oh, what?”

“Do you know the name of this place?” Kit’s voice sounded more as though it belonged to him. “Of course! I never thought!”

“This place--?” she echoed.

“Great Owl Run. There must have been a reason for the name.” He released the girl and looked shamefacedly into the darkness. “Owls!”

Something glided past them so close that they felt the fanned wake in the atmosphere.

“It’s an owl pit in here,” explained Kit, who had become his own man again. “There must be dozens of ’em. They’re just swooping to look at us--”

The girl shuddered and threw up one arm to defend her face. “How terrible!” she faltered.

“A puppy or a wolf cub would never get out of here alive,” he told her. “But a man and woman and grown dogs are perfectly safe.”

The girl strained forward as his eyes tried desperately to fathom the obscurity. “I can feel them about us,” she whispered. “They must be enormous.”

“Great Northern Owls!” he said. “I saw one once that had wandered south. He was six feet across the wings. Bloody night pirates! Fiends! This must be a fearful pocket of the woods. Where the owls live nothing else ever lives.” He touched her hand. “Let’s get on.”

Miss Durand was somewhat reassured, but the dogs did not like this place at all. Thenceforward Kit had no worries about the jaded animals keeping up with him. They were nosing his heels at every step.

As he crunched over a carpet of spruce needles, which in places was bare of snow, vague, feathery flutterings wove invisible orbits about his head. Once something croaked above him, and later one of the fearsome nightbirds sent out his hunting call, a voiceless, disembodied sound, like a despairing groan floating out of an insatiable emptiness. He knew it was only an owl, and yet his blood was chilled by the unearthliness of the cry.

He had no idea how far he followed the windings of that ill-omened creek. For hours, it seemed to him, he groped his way among shaggy tree trunks, around rotted windfalls, through tangling, flesh-tearing thickets. And then, without warning, he found nothing in front of his outreaching hand. He stopped and peered blindly, and knew only that the dense forest had abruptly come to an end and that there was open space before him.

Gingerly he moved forward again, and barked his knee on the sharp edge of a stump. There were other snags and stumps sticking up from the ground. He brushed the snow from one of the old stubs, and found the scars of ancient ax-work. Here, apparently, was a man-made clearing.

Diane Durand had pressed up behind him with one unquiet hand touching him as she tried to see past his shoulder. The dogs squatted on their haunches and sat in an uneasy line, their noses and sharp ears cocked to the fore. And then, before anybody could stop him, one of the beasts flung up his head and let forth a long, lugubrious howl.

The sudden eruption of sound in that hushed closure of the wilderness was indecent, uncanny, frightening. Kitchener caught the animal’s throat and choked off the last echoing quaver. “Shut up!” he commanded under his breath.

The girl had ventured a few paces forward, and he straightened and stole up beside her.

“I think there’s something there,” she said close to his ear. “I can just make it out--square and black.”

Kit lifted one eyebrow and stood at straining attention. Gradually a dim, dark outline took shape in the gloom. “It looks like a house,” he mused.

A mutual curiosity drew them on, and after several cautious halts, they arrived before a low-roofed, dismal-looking structure of hewn logs, that stood, apparently, in the middle of an abandoned clearing. There was no sound within, no glimmer of light; the place smelled of emptiness, desolation and decay.

Kit moved under the dank front wall, and waited with his mouth half open and his head alertly tilted. The open doorway yawned at him and the puncheon door hung on one rusted hinge that creaked faintly with the pressure of the wind. At the right and left loomed the dark squares of two broken-shuttered windows. In the faint odor of must that emanated from the interior murk he caught no scent of smoke nor savor of recent cooking. The one-time occupants of the cabin must have been a long while absent.

Kitchener’s sense told him that he might enter the place openly, and that there would be no one to deny him the right. But something more than mere instinct of caution urged him to hesitate. His hand went down to unbutton the flap of his pistol holster, and that simple, unthinking act made him bold. He shouldered aside the swaying door and stepped into the cabin.

Something squeaked and scuttled away overhead, and became silent. The old roof evidently sheltered squirrels, or rats. There was something else. It was a low, measured sound, lifting and falling, like a man breathing in the dark.

The dead air within seemed many degrees colder than the zero weather outside. Kit found himself shivering as he stared into the frigid obscurity, striving with every nerve aquiver to locate the source of that strange, breathy heaving.

Diane Durand had come into the cabin and remained a stilled shadow at his side. The dogs were cowering in their tangled traces at the doorway, snuffing audibly at whatever it was the darkness hid. It might have seemed that they were afraid to stay alone outside, and fearful of coming in.

Kitchener had his flashlight in hand, his thumb irresolute on the button. He drew a quick breath and suddenly pressed the contact. A spot of light danced on the farther wall, and he swung it in a circuit of the room.

His swift reconnoitering disclosed nothing immediately alarming. The brilliant bull’s-eye flicked from wall to wall, illuminating bare, peeled logs, warped and moldy and showing wide cracks at places where the chinking had crumbled. The first hurried survey revealed a clay fireplace choked with stale kitchen litter, a greasy iron pot hanging on a crane, a broken-legged table covered with tattered oilcloth, a slab bench, a trash heap of empty tins and battered cooking utensils, a sheet-iron stove and stove-pipe flaked red with rust, a disused ax driven to the hilt into one of the sill-logs, and a double-decked bunk made of poles and stuffed with withered balsam branches and frowsy-looking bed clothing.

The single, four-square room held no visible habitant, and yet, deliberate and rhythmic as tick-tocks, the breathing sounds continued. Kitchener felt his eyes growing bigger as he switched his light back to the bunk. There was something in the lower section, a shapeless bulge hidden by a red blanket.

For lengthening seconds he watched and listened so particularly to the other breathing that he himself forgot to breathe. At first he thought the blanket had shifted slightly, but as he eyed it closely he changed his mind and decided that nothing had moved. But still the strange, bellows-like pulsations filled and expired, lifted and died again.

Slowly his glance turned upward, and then he shot his light towards the ceiling beams. There was a gaping hole in the roof, where a patch of shakes had rotted through; and one of the rafters had loosened at the eaves. A current of air sucked through the door and drew out through the vent overhead, causing the sagging roof to billow at intervals like a tent-top in a wind. It was the cabin that was breathing.

Kitchener should have been relieved when he traced the source of disturbing sound. But he wasn’t. There was something wrong about this place. He felt it. He knew it. He felt it in the air, in the chilling darkness, in his blood and nerves and in the marrow of his bones. The light flickered back to the bunk. He looked, took a couple of steps forward, and looked harder.

The red blanket was an old Hudson’s Bay Company four pointer. He saw the marking stripes at the corner that hung off the edge of the bunk, and also he saw a charred spot in the fabric, down near the border. A spark had hopped out of the camp fire his first night in the woods and scorched that hole in the wool. It was Grandfather Tearl’s old red blanket. There was no mistaking it. He had given it to Jerry when they traded clothes and equipment, two days ago. Jerry was here, or had been here.

With misgivings that he could never have explained, Kit moved to the bunk and pulled at the edge of the blanket. He tugged tentatively, and then jerked it to the floor. In the middle of the bunk was a crumpled garment--a gray stag shirt--and nothing else.

Kitchener stood like a torpid man, staring senselessly at his own bare hand. His fingers were wet and sticky. He turned the light towards himself and felt weak and sick. The blanket had left a gory smear across his palm.

As though he had suddenly aroused himself from a stupor he snatched up the shirt from the mattress of browse. He looked at the label under the neck band. It was the shirt he himself had purchased not long ago at a New York store of outfitters. His brother had it when they last saw each other.

In an access of horror Kit spread wide the garment and brought his lamp to bear. And then his eyes shut as though with an anguish that was almost too great to bear. In the center of the back, where the cloth would stretch over the wearer’s shoulder blades, he found a small, round hole, soggy to the touch and stained an ugly crimson.

“Jerry!” The name stuck in his throat, choking him.

He whirled with his light to see Diane Durand standing behind him, her lips apart, her eyes wildly gleaming as she stared at the bunk. “What is it?” she gasped.

Kit said nothing. His spot-light was a will-o’-the-wisp, darting about the room. A bare floor of hard-packed earth; bare, log walls; naked timber-rafters supporting the roof: there was no hiding-place here. He heard nothing except the thumping of his heart, the sighing of the old cabin, the horrible sniffing of the dogs in the doorway.

The snow had swirled down through the hole in the roof, whitening the floor in the middle of the room. In the snow Kit discovered the pattern of a man’s boot-sole fouled with red. The light blazed a path through the darkness as he moved forward, crouching almost to his knees. There were other bloodspots on the floor, a spattering trail leading to the broken window at the far end of the cabin.

On the floor beneath the casement there was an ugly, dark pool and the windowsill was similarly bedabbled. He stood up, looked into the outer darkness. Shrinking from contact with the red-stained sill, he thrust his head out of doors and turned his lamp downward. His breath stopped short as he peered after the piercing light beam.

The cabin, he discovered, had been erected on the brink of Great Owl Run. The embankment descended in a sheer drop, straight down to the stream, twenty or thirty feet below. In the flash of his lamp he caught the gleam of black, open water racing under a yawning ice-tunnel a little farther downstream.

He turned away, his eyes in a stinging mist, conjuring the image of his lusty brother: the dauntless Jerry who had started with such supreme self-confidence on his journey to Queen Maud Sea.

Kit needed to search no farther. He knew what had happened. Jerry must have been in the lead, traveling down the Vermilion River and up the course of Great Owl Run with Hell Bent only a mile or so, a couple of hours, behind. Jerry could have had no warning that he was being followed. Tired out after bucking the blizzard all day he had crept into the bunk with his clothes on, rolled up in Grandfather Tearl’s blankets, and slept.

It did not take a morbid imagination to visualize the rest. The second man arrived stealthily under the cover of the storm. He would have paused outside for a moment to remove his waffle-meshed snowshoes. Then he tiptoed into the gloomy cabin, pausing to listen and searched out the location of the bunk.

Probably the rats squeaked and scuttled away in the rafters. Silence after that, save for the sighing of the cabin and the breathing of the sleeping man. A furtive approach; a shot fired at close range. Utter quiet then. Only the wind drawing softly through the cabin roof.

The valiant, resourceful Jerry had been caught asleep with his boots on.

Kit could visualize only too vividly the subsequent horrors: the stripping off of blanket and shirt, the search of pockets; a limp shape toppled off the bunk, dragged across the snowy floor, boosted to the window sill and dumped overside. A plummet-like drop, a cold splash in the darkness below.

Kitchener’s gun was in his hand, but he was not thinking of himself or of lurking dangers. He was staring in direful fascination at the black window opening, hearing only the swirl and gurgle of Great Owl Run, the downpouring waters that ran under ice to empty their flotsam at last into the frozen wastes of Queen Maud Sea.