_A Mystery Story for Boys_
Riddle of the Storm
_By_
ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago
COPYRIGHT 1932
BY
THE REILLY & LEE CO.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Gray Streak 11
II In Swift Pursuit 36
III Trailing the Gray Streak 55
IV Pitchblende 65
V Racing the Storm 77
VI A Shot in the Night 87
VII The Winged Messenger 96
VIII White Foxes 105
IX Eagle Eyes 118
X The Voice of the Wilderness 124
XI The Clue 131
XII The Voice Speaks 137
XIII Curlie Sleeps on the River 144
XIV Drew Lane on the Wing 151
XV Over the Rapids 168
XVI Pawns 184
XVII “Here’s Hoping” 191
XVIII Fluttering from the Clouds 197
XIX A Three Days’ Quest 203
XX The Hunchback Bowman 208
XXI Bowled Over Like a Tenpin 216
XXII Great Good Fortune 229
XXIII Whither Away? 237
XXIV A Face at the Window 245
XXV A Pocketful of Gold 258
XXVI Walls of Light 269
XXVII The Black Cube 281
XXVIII Joy Cometh 296
RIDDLE OF THE STORM
CHAPTER I
THE GRAY STREAK
Curlie Carson’s eyes widened first with surprise, then with downright
terror. His ears were filled with the thunder of a powerful motor. Yes,
he heard that. But what did he see? That was more important. A powerfully
built monoplane with wide-spreading wings was speedily approaching. Even
through the swirl of snow all about him he could see that the plane was
painted a solid gray.
“The ‘Gray Streak’!” he murmured.
Could it be? What tales he had heard of this mysterious plane! During his
three weeks of service on the _Mackenzie River Air Route_ in northern
Canada, extravagant tales had reached his ears. “This gray plane bears no
identification mark, no name, no letters, no numbers. It swoops down upon
some lone cabin, robs the owner of food and blankets, and is away. It is
a phantom ship, a Flying Dutchman of the air. No pilot at the stick!”
What had he not heard?
But now—now it was directly over him. Cold terror gripped his heart. A
part, at least, of the reports was confirmed; the plane carried no
insignia. No name, no letter, no number gave it identification. And these
were required by law.
“The ‘Gray Streak’,” he murmured again.
His fear increased. The plane was flying low along the river. He was
standing close to his own plane, the one entrusted to his care by the
_Midwest Airways_. It was a superb creation, and almost new. Suppose this
stranger, the man of mystery, outlaw perhaps, should drop to the smooth
surface of the river’s ice and compel him to exchange planes!
“Suppose only that he should descend to rob me of my cargo!” His heart
raced. It was a valuable cargo and had come a long way by air.
While these terrifying possibilities were passing through his mind, the
plane moved steadily onward. He was able to study every detail: her
skids, her wings, her cabin, her motor.
The drumming of her motor did not diminish.
“They are passing!” he whispered. “Thank God, they are going on. I—”
His words were checked at sight of some white object that, whirling with
the wind, seemed at first a very large snowflake.
“But no. It—it’s—”
He was about to dive forward in pursuit of it when an inner impulse born
of caution caused him to halt.
Dividing his attention between the vanishing plane and the fluttering
object, he stood for a space of seconds motionless. Then, as the snow-fog
closed in upon the plane, he dashed forward to retrieve a small square of
cloth.
“A handkerchief!” He was frankly disappointed.
“But—a woman’s handkerchief.” His interest quickened. One did not
associate a woman with this mystery plane.
“Perhaps, after all, it’s a boy’s,” he told himself. “But a boy? One—”
His eyes had caught a mark in the corner. There were words written there,
very small words.
Hurrying to his airplane, he climbed into the cabin; then, switching on a
powerful electric torch, he studied the words.
“I am a captive,” he read.
And beneath this was a name: “D’Arcy Arden.”
“D’Arcy,” he murmured. “What a strange name! Would it be a boy or a
girl?”
For a long time he sat staring at that square of white, trying at the
same time to patch together the rumors that had come to him regarding
this mystery ship of the air.
“No use,” he told himself. “Can’t make head nor tail of it.”
The truth was that until that hour no aviator of this northern country
had laid eyes on this gray phantom. They had one and all agreed that it
did not exist, that it was the creation of an over-wrought imagination;
that some mineral-hunting plane on a special mission had passed over here
and there and had created the illusion.
“But now,” he assured himself, “I have seen it. I will vouch for it. And
here,” he held the square of white up to the light, “here is the proof!
“But why is that plane here? Where is it going? Why is that person a
captive? What type of outlaw rides in that cockpit? All that is the
riddle of this storm, a riddle I am bound to aid in solving. But now—”
His ears caught the beat of snow on the cabin window. “Now there is
nothing left but to eat, sleep a bit, and wait out the storm.
“Get a bite to eat,” he told himself. “Something hot. Fellow has to keep
himself fit on a job like this, when you—”
He did not finish. A sudden thought breaking in upon him had startled
him. He had believed himself safe from the peril that had threatened. But
was he? What if the plane turned about and came back?
He opened the cabin door. The throb of a motor smote his ear, and once
more sent tremors of fear coursing up his spine.
Once more consternation seized him. What was to be done? He couldn’t lose
his plane. He must not!
“Only three weeks,” he said aloud, “and then!”
It had been a glorious three weeks. Rising off the field at Edmonton.
Greeting the dawn. Skimming through the clouds. Sailing over a great
white world, ever new. This was his task as a northern pilot.
“So safe, too,” he had said more than once. “The river’s ice, a perfect
landing field, always beneath you.”
No, he could not lose his plane. Reaching up to a niche at the top of the
low cabin, he took down a powerful yew bow and a handful of arrows. The
arrows were of ash, light and strong. They were perfectly feathered.
Their points were of razor-edged steel. “Might help in an emergency,” he
told himself. “And this D’Arcy person might be able to do a little if I
could free him. Even if it were a woman, she might help; you never can
tell.”
The pulsating beat of motors grew louder.
“If I lose my plane it means we lose the mail contract. I won’t!” He set
his lips tight. “I must not!”
Gripping his bow, he stepped out of the cabin.
The next moment his face broadened in a grin.
“Fooled myself!” he exclaimed.
The plane that loomed out from the snow-fog for a space of seconds, only
to lose itself again, was not gray. It was blue, with streaks of white.
It bore on its wings the letters E F—R A C.
“Speed Samson,” he murmured. “He’s going through. He trusts his motors.”
A frown overspread his usually cheerful face. The frown had a meaning. He
admired Speed. Speed was a wonderful pilot with thousands of hours of
flying to his credit. Yet Speed had, only three days before, disappointed
him. Perhaps disappointed is not the word. However that may be, this is
what had happened. Curlie had said,
“You have to learn to trust God in a very real way when you fly in the
North, don’t you?” He had not meant to preach; but Speed had said rather
shortly:
“I trust my motors!”
“He trusts his motors,” the boy repeated. “‘Trust God and keep your
powder dry.’ Some one has said that. Up here you have to trust God and
keep your motors right. But I for one am not going to trust to my motors
alone. God made the iron and steel, the copper and all that goes into my
machine. He made the gas and oil, too. And He made my brain, and I’ll use
it to the best of my ability. This is not safe flying weather. And orders
are, ‘Always play safe.’”
Having thought this through, he returned to his cabin.
“Danger is all over,” he told himself. “But this D’Arcy person? How I’d
like to help! Wonder if I will in the end?"
“Hot chocolate,” he murmured to himself. “A cold chicken sandwich and a
big pot of beans, warmed over the alcohol stove. Boy! A fellow sure does
get an appetite up here!”
An hour later, wrapped in his eight foot square eiderdown robe, he lay on
the floor of the narrow cabin prepared for sleep.
Sleep did not come at once. There were many troubles of the day that must
first be put to rest. He thought of his motor, going over it piece by
piece. In this land of the North much depends upon the pilot’s care of
his motor. Curlie was not neglectful. Even in his hours of repose his
thoughts were upon his task.
That his was a position of grave responsibility he knew right well. Until
his coming into this land he had thought of aviation as a pleasant
luxury, mostly to be indulged in by the rich and the near-rich; a
necessity in war, a luxury in time of peace. But in this far-flung land
of snow the airplane has come to be a thing of great service. Journeys
that required three months of hard mushing after dog teams; of sleeping
in rough, uninhabited cabins at night; of facing cold, hunger and
darkness, are now accomplished with great comfort in three days. In this
land the airplane has made a village a thousand miles from Edmonton one
of that city’s suburbs. Curlie had not been slow to sense all this.
“And there’s gold,” he told himself. “‘Gold hunters of the air.’ That’s
what Johnny Thompson called them. I wonder how it’s done.”
Yes, Curlie had seen Johnny Thompson. You remember Johnny. He had been
Curlie’s pal in more than one strange land and with him had participated
in many a mysterious and thrilling adventure.
He had not come upon Johnny this time by accident. Neither was Curlie’s
presence in northern Canada an accident. He was here because he had a
friend, and that friend was Johnny Thompson.
Curlie, like many another young fellow, had bumped squarely into the
regretted “depression” that, sweeping like a tidal wave over the land,
had left many a man high and dry, with no home and no place to eat.
Having been in the air mail service in America, he was dropped when
demand slackened and fewer men were needed. Men who had more flying hours
to their credit had been retained.
In time of depression one must often rely upon his friends. Little groups
of true friends, drawn closer together by the winds of adversity, stand
back to back, fighting the battle together.
So it happened that Johnny, finding himself in the North and learning of
a temporary vacancy, spoke a good word for his friend Curlie Carson.
“And now,” thought Curlie, “here I am. And here I stay until my last
dollar is spent. A land where airplanes are a real necessity, that’s the
land for me!
“‘Gold hunters of the air,’” he repeated once more. “Wonder how they do
it? Perhaps I’ll learn that business. Sounds thrilling. And gold! Man! It
might make a fellow rich!
“But I wonder—”
He had asked Johnny how it was done, this gold hunting in the air. Johnny
had said,
“How much time you got to spare?”
“Two minutes. Must get back to my motor,” Curlie had replied.
“Not enough by two hours,” had been Johnny’s laughing rejoinder. “Drop in
and stay all night on your next trip and I’ll tell you all about it.
“And by the way!” he had exclaimed. “Be sure not to pass us up on that
next trip. May have something mighty important to send down by you. New
stuff; that is, new to us. Worth about a million dollars an ounce. How
does that strike you between the ears?”
“Million an ounce,” Curlie murmured sleepily. “Million dollars an ounce!
Wonder what that could be?”
* * * * * * * *
Curiously enough, at the very hour in which Curlie had decided to sleep
out a storm, Johnny Thompson, many miles away in a place where the storm
had not yet struck, was telling some one else, an old-time friend of
Curlie’s as well as his, some things about gold hunting in the air. He
was talking in no uncertain terms, and the facts he revealed were as much
a surprise to the listener as they might have been to Curlie.
He had left his camp early that morning, had Johnny. It was well into the
afternoon when, as a sudden smile spread over his close-knit,
winter-hardened face, he sighted the person he had hoped to meet.
A slim girl in her teens, this girl handled her dogs extremely well for a
novice who had been in the North only three short weeks.
“Bravo!” Johnny fairly shouted, as she rushed ahead to seize her leader
and throw him back on his haunches. “She picks things up quickly. Many a
girl would have allowed her team to come straight on to mine. Then our
teams would have mixed, her team against mine, like two football teams on
a gridiron. Best team wins. What a rumpus that would have been! Bad
business. Dogs all crippled up, like as not.”
Swinging his own dogs off the trail, he issued a sharp command which they
instantly obeyed by throwing themselves upon the hard-packed snow in a
position of repose. Dog teams in the North were not new to Johnny, though
this was his first trip into the far northwest of Canada.
The girl, who stood silent and expectant beside her team, was Joyce
Mills. Johnny had learned of her presence in the North quite by accident.
For months he had not heard from her nor from her father, Newton Mills,
the retired city detective. You will remember Joyce and her father well
enough if you have read _The Arrow of Fire_ and _The Gray Shadow_. A
brave, resourceful, independent girl, this Joyce Mills. And her father,
before a nervous breakdown, had been one of the most feared detectives on
the New York force. Now, here they were in the North. Strange, do you
say? In this day nothing is strange. “Foot loose and fancy free,” that’s
the phrase. We go where we will, we Americans.
Joyce had not known Johnny was in the North. And now here they stood face
to face.
“Jo—Johnny Thompson!” she breathed, her eyes widening as he approached.
“Johnny!” she cried aloud. “When did you get here?”
Johnny grinned broadly. “Three weeks ago to-day, same as you.”
“Three—three weeks. And you knew I was here!” Her eyes reproved him.
“Not until yesterday,” he explained. “Of course I knew there was a lady
in your outfit. Yesterday an Indian told me who you were.”
“An Indian. I haven’t talked to one. How did he know my name?”
“He didn’t. He knew you. That was still better. There may be two Joyce
Mills in the world. There is only one you.”
“Knew me!” A puzzled look overspread the girl’s face. “I don’t
understand.”
“You wouldn’t unless you knew Indians. In their own way they are clever
beyond belief; some of them at least. They see everything, can imitate
every action, your smile, your gestures, your walk, everything. They can
describe the fillings in your teeth, the shape of your fingers and every
bit of toggery you wear. This man had not been speaking three minutes
before I knew it must be you.”
“Indians,” she murmured as Johnny came closer to her sled. “Are they as
clever as that?”
“They sure are!”
“But, Johnny!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here? And how does it
happen that we arrived on the same day?”
“I am doing,” said Johnny slowly, “just what your outfit is doing,
searching for mineral, gold, silver, platinum, radium.
“As for that other question—” His words came with great hesitation.
“That—that’s a deep secret. I wonder if you know the answer yourself. No.
I am sure you don’t, nor your father either. You are square shooters, you
are. Your father is the straightest detective that ever guarded the
streets of New York. He wouldn’t be in on a thing like that, not if he
knew it.”
“Johnny!” the girl cried out in alarm. “What are you saying? Are you
telling me that in our camp some one is unfair, dishonest? How could they
be? We are searching for mineral in a wild, open country that belongs to
no one save the Provincial Government. How could we be dishonest?”
“And yet,” Johnny said as he sat down upon the sled, “a very mean trick,
yes, a dishonest, dishonorable one has been played by—. Not by your
father,” he hastened to explain, “but by at least one of the young men
with whom he is associated.
“Sit down and I will tell you.”
The girl sank to a place beside him.
“Listen.” His tone grew impressive. “You have seen those enlarged
photographs?”
“You mean the ones taken from the air, showing the surface of rocks, the
sides of ledges, the ones our men work by? The ones they study and find
signs that save them months of travel?”
“Yes.”
“I have seen them many times.”
“Then you know,” the boy went on, “that they are invaluable as an aid in
the search for mineral, that an expert mineralogist like your father can
sit down before those photographs and can, after studying them carefully,
tell where mineral is likely to be found.
“Of course,” his voice dropped a little, “of course, a skilled observer
may fly over the territory and tell something of the rock formation from
mere eye observations. But photographs are much better.
“Did it ever occur to you,” he demanded suddenly, “to ask yourself the
question: ‘Where did those photographs come from? Who took them?’”
Joyce started. “N—no, it didn’t.”
“I’ll tell you. But first let me assure you that the taking of such
pictures is difficult, tiresome and often dangerous work. It requires a
great deal of time. Those prints are only a hundred or so selected from
more than a thousand. To take those pictures required many days of
soaring in a powerful airplane, close to the surface of the earth. For
such work an airplane is expensive. Those pictures cost a pretty large
sum of money. They were the property of two men, an aged prospector and a
young man. They invested their joint fortunes in the undertaking, hoping
for large returns. They had made one enlargement from each film when all
the films were stolen.”
“Stolen!”
“Stolen.”
“By whom?”
“I leave you to guess.”
The expressions that flitted across the girl’s face, as clouds pass over
a landscape, were strange to see. Despair, distrust, sorrow, hope, then
despair again—all these.
“My father,” she murmured at last, “my poor father.”
“He knows nothing of it. That goes without saying,” Johnny hastened to
assure her.
“But—but it’s not that.” She seemed undecided. There was a strange
hoarseness in her voice as she turned her face to his.
“Johnny, you know my father.”
“Yes,” he replied simply, “I know.”
He spoke the truth, as you will know if you have read that other book,
_The Arrow of Fire_. Johnny did know Newton Mills. He knew that he had
been one of the finest detectives the city of New York had ever known. He
knew, too, that after many years of service he had fallen as a last
sacrifice to the battle against crime. Johnny had done much to reclaim
him.
“You know,” Joyce went on, “that he can never again fill a post on a city
detective force. His nerves are too far gone for that. We are poor. The
depression reached us. We were in despair. Then this opportunity came. He
may never have told you, but he was in the Yukon gold rush. He found no
gold, but instead, a lifetime hobby—the study of minerals. These studies
have fitted him for the work he is now doing. This opening came. He took
it. I came to be with him.”
She said “with him” softly, did this slim, dark-haired girl. She loved
her father.
“And now,” her tone changed, “now it’s all over.” There was no bitterness
in her voice, only weariness, the long, long weariness of one who has
battled long for a great and noble cause, only to feel that defeat lies
directly ahead.
“I can’t see it that way.” Johnny spoke calmly. “The work can go on. If
something really comes of it, your father will receive his full share.”
“But who would want a share of anything obtained by dishonest means?” The
girl’s cheek flushed.
“Well,” Johnny replied quietly, “in the first place, I doubt if all three
of the young men working with your father know of the theft.”
“I am sure they don’t!” the girl exclaimed, ready to weep. “It doesn’t
seem possible that one of them could do such a thing. They seem so
honorable. They have been so very kind to me.”
“And yet, here are the facts staring us in the face,” Johnny continued.
“If you had our set of pictures to compare with those your people are
using, you would find them identical. And they were taken by Scott Ramsey
who is one of the partners in our camp, a real gold hunter of the air.”
“And one of our men is a thief!” the girl spoke slowly. “Who would
believe that?”
“Your task,” Johnny added gently, “is to find the thief. You are the
daughter of a detective. Often you have helped your father in his work.
This should be easy.”
“I will.” The girl stood up. “I will find him. And when I have, what
shall I do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” She stared unbelievingly.
“Exactly that. Can’t you see?” He, too, sprang to his feet. “As long as
we know what they are doing, they are in a way working for us. If they
make a strike, find gold or other rich mineral deposits, we will share
with them.”
“You would take—”
“No. We couldn’t take the claims they file on; at least we would not.
They should have their share. I am sure the men of our camp will deal
fairly, even generously with them.
“But this is the way it works.” He was explaining quietly now. “If they
make a strike, find gold or radium, they will rush outside in an airplane
and bring in friends to file on the land. There will be room for many,
many claims. When they have a broad stretch of ore-bearing territory
staked, they will sell out to some rich company.
“But you see,” he added, “if they make a strike we will know it at once.
Nothing prevents us from moving over and filing on the most promising
spots; in fact, it’s the fair thing to do since they are working with our
pictures.”
“I see.” The girl spoke slowly. A new light of hope shone in her eyes.
“But, Johnny,” she asked suddenly, “how will you know when they make a
strike, if they do? You wouldn’t expect me to—”
“No, we wouldn’t expect you to let us know. But we have a way—the
Moccasin Telegraph.”
“Moccasin Telegraph? What’s that?”
“You will learn much about that before you are here long.” His eyes were
smiling mysteriously.
“And be assured of one thing,” he added. “Whatever comes of it, your
father will have his fair share.”
“Sha—shall I tell him?”
“I think not. His work calls for all his energy. It might disturb him.
This is your case. Work it out. Find the man.”
“I shall find him if—if there is such a one.”
“If? What do you mean? The evidence is conclusive.”
“I find it hard to believe.”
“It is true.” His tone changed. “I must be going. It’s a long way to our
camp.” He put out a hand. She gripped it quite frankly.
“What brought you this far?” she asked.
“Thought I might see you. No ladies in our camp. Only a Chinaman for a
cook. Fellow gets lonesome.”
“Shall you come again?”
“I think not. It’s not safe. Feeling runs high in this land. Our crowds
might mix in the wrong way. That would be bad.”
“Well, so long, then.”
“So long!”
A moment later Johnny and his team vanished behind the cliff, leaving a
very much puzzled girl alone with her thoughts. And they were long, long
thoughts, I assure you.
CHAPTER II
IN SWIFT PURSUIT
When he fell asleep in his airplane, Curlie Carson was many miles from
any human habitation, in the heart of a polar wilderness. In that
wilderness foxes barked and gaunt wolves howled. An Arctic gale sent snow
rattling against his window. And yet he slept like a child in a trundle
bed. A few hours of rest, and then he would, granted the storm had ended,
greet the dawn high in air.
Mid-afternoon next day found him circling above the shore of Great Slave
Lake for a landing.
“Gas cache here,” he told himself. “Just gas up and be away to Fort
Resolution. Far as Speed got, I’m sure, with all his flying in the storm.
My record’s as good as his. Contract’s safe enough yet.”
Ah yes, the contract. How they all worked for that, the mail contract
from Edmonton to the Arctic! A three year contract, it was to be given to
the company that made the best flying record this season. At present
Curlie’s own company, Midwestern Airways, was a few notches ahead. But
one bad break, and the Trans-Canadian, the rival company, would beat
them. Only three weeks remained.
“It’s a race, a race for a grand prize,” he told himself. “And we must
win!”
Up to this moment the boy had a right to be proud of his own record. The
youngest pilot on the route, only a substitute for a disabled pilot of
more mature years, he had exceeded them all in miles flown and service
rendered in this wild northland. For all this, his thoughts at this
moment were humble ones. Full well he knew the treachery of the skies.
His skis bumped. They bumped again three, four times, and his plane went
gliding over the snow. With consummate skill he brought the great bird to
rest exactly opposite three steel drums resting on a high bank at the
lake’s edge.
Many gas caches such as this had been established during the season of
open water when river and lake steamers might operate.
With a rubber hose for siphoning in his hand, the boy climbed the steep
bank. But what was this? In a sheltered spot he came upon a footprint in
the snow. Consternation seized him. Had some one been there before him?
This was his company’s gasoline. None other had a right to it.
“Some trapper passing this way,” he reassured himself.
His hopes were short-lived. One kick at each hollow-sounding drum and he
knew they had been robbed.
Who was the guilty one? Speed? No, Speed was an honorable man! The Gray
Streak, phantom of the air? That was the answer.
“This must be stopped!” he told himself stoutly. “Not enough gas to reach
the next port. And some unfortunate one may be waiting at this moment for
my plane to carry him to the hospital. They can’t realize what it means.”
Down deep in his heart he was convinced that they, the pilots of the Gray
Streak, did know what it meant. They were outlaws, fugitives from
justice, and did not care.
“When they are caught there will be a fight. Well, then, welcome the day!
The airways of the North must be kept open to those who have at heart the
highest good of all.”
Having made this declaration of war, that in time was to lead him over a
vast wilderness into many perils, he slid down the bank to climb into the
cockpit, prepared to make the most of his scant supply of gas.
Three hours later, just as dusk was approaching, he was circling once
more. Less than a gallon of gas remained in his tank. Fort Resolution was
twenty miles away. Night was coming on.
“That means a day lost, a bad record, a black mark, a long loss in the
contest!” he exclaimed almost savagely. “And all because some one cares
nothing for the welfare of others. Truly the running down of such men is
a task worthy of any man’s steel.”
Scarcely had his plane come to rest than fresh perils threatened. There
came a strange sound from the bank of the lake.
“What can it be?” His heart skipped a beat. Instinctively he put out a
hand for a stout yew bow and a quiver of arrows that always hung beside
his cabin door, for like his friend Johnny, Curlie, as you will recall,
was an expert bowman.
In ever increasing volume there came to his ears the sound of cracking
and crashing.
“Sounds like a forest fire,” he told himself. “But there is no fire. Like
a thousand range cattle. But there are no cattle. What can it be?”
Soon enough he was to know. From the brush that grew by the shore bounded
a brown mass with four short legs and a tossing head.
“Buffaloes!” He was amazed. His amazement grew. Three, six, nine, twenty,
fifty, a hundred of these ponderous creatures landed upon the ice, then
came plunging toward him. In a space of seconds, hundreds more joined
them in wild stampede.
“They are mad with fear!” He was all but in a panic himself. “What am I
to do? The plane will be wrecked. It will be laid up for weeks; the
contest lost, everything lost!”
He broke off short. The thread of an old prairie-buffalo story had
entered his mind.
“These are woods-buffaloes,” he told himself. “But buffaloes must be the
same everywhere. I can but try.”
Gripping his bow, he stepped boldly out from his plane and walked like
some young David to meet the onrushing throng. He was a full thirty yards
from his plane, the foremost buffalo scarcely more than that from him,
when with heart pounding painfully against his ribs, but with fingers
that perfectly obeyed his will, he paused to set a steel pointed arrow
against his bowstring. Then he took one long breath before the test which
must mean victory or defeat.
Somewhere in a book of frontier-day tales, he had read an account of the
remarkable manner in which the Red Man, when in danger of being trampled
to death by a thousand stampeding buffaloes, had saved his life. He was
now prepared to put this practice to the test. It seemed a desperate
measure—just how desperate he had not time to judge.
Gripping his bow that was capable of burying an arrow in the heart of any
wild creature, he stood quite still until the foremost buffalo, a
powerful beast with gleaming horns, was within ten paces of him. Then,
quickly bending his bow, he let fly.
No effect. The buffalo came straight on. The thundering herd was behind
him. Already the cloud of snow that rose before them was obscuring his
vision. Still there was time for retreat to the plane. Once in the cabin,
he would be safe from the murderous tramp of their axe-like hoofs. But
the plane! It would be wrecked.
He did not retreat. Standing his ground, with incredible rapidity he
fired a second arrow and a third.
The very breath of the foremost buffalo was upon his cheek when with a
clatter and a thud it fell at his feet.
And now the real test of the Red Man’s ancient plan of action was at
hand. No longer was there opportunity for retreat. The herd was upon him.
Through the cloud of snow he saw it but dimly. The sound of clashing
horns and cracking hoofs was deafening. Casting himself flat in the snow,
directly back of the fallen monarch of the forest, he awaited the
outcome.
Without knowing why, he began to count. Perhaps he was counting his own
wild heartbeats. “One, two, three, four, five.” Would it work? “Six,
seven, eight, nine, ten.” Would he be trampled by those hoofs? “Eleven,
twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” No time to think of that now.
He felt rather than saw, so dense was the cloud of fine snow, that the
herd had divided, that the buffaloes were passing in two columns, one to
the right, the other to the left of their fallen leader. They were
following the manner of their kind as recorded in that story of other
days.
“Thank—thank God!” he breathed.
His plane now was, he hoped, quite safe. It was headed toward the herd.
Divided, they would pass to right and left of it. They would divide for a
fallen comrade. Would they have done the same for an airplane? Who could
tell?
Lying there alone while the onrushing herd whirled by, Curlie realized as
never before what a joyous thing it was just to live, what a priceless
possession the great Father had bestowed upon him when He breathed the
breath of life into his lungs.
The sound of horns and hoofs was fading away. The last member of the herd
had passed, or he thought it had.
Rising stiffly, he put out his hand for his bow. The snow was settling.
At his feet lay a dark mass, the dead buffalo. At his back loomed a gray
bulk, his plane, apparently unharmed.
His thoughts regarding the buffalo were sober ones. These buffaloes, he
realized, now that there was time to think of it, were not in every sense
of the word wild buffaloes. They ranged a wide preserve. They were
watched over by buffalo rangers. They might not be killed except in a
grave emergency. One who did kill a woods-buffalo was liable to a term in
prison.
“But this,” he assured himself, “was a grave emergency.”
But what was this? Even as he stood there thinking there came the crack
of hoofs once more. A lone buffalo was passing. A youngster, half-grown
and almost spent, he limped painfully after his fast disappearing
companions.
And after him came gray streaks in the failing light. Once more the boy’s
bow sang. A gray form plunged to the snow and went rolling over and over.
A second followed the first. He, too, had felt the sting of the boy’s
arrow. And now they were gone, all gone. The tumult died to a murmur,
then silently ceased to be.
“Wolves,” the boy grumbled, as he touched a gray form at his feet, “the
scourge of the North, killers of all that is good, beautiful and useful
among living things. I did what I could for that poor, limping young
buffalo. Here’s hoping it was enough. If it was, it evens matters up.” He
looked at the fallen buffalo.
“Too bad,” he murmured, “but there was no other way. That plane means
more, a hundred times, to human kind than does a buffalo. It has saved
human lives, by transporting them to hospitals. It will save others and,
please God, I shall have a part.”
Having in this manner adjusted his thoughts and feelings regarding his
immediate surroundings, he considered the future.
Prospects were not bright. “No gas,” he told himself. “It’s a march down
the river in the dark for me.
“Oh, well. Munch a chocolate bar and some crackers. Hate to leave the old
plane. Whew! How good the old feather robe would feel!” He stretched his
weary muscles.
“Wolves down the river at night. But I’d fix ’em!” He patted his bow.
A brief inspection of his plane told him that all was well. “A fortunate
escape. And now, eats.”
He took his time about his meal. The moon would be higher later in the
night. Plenty of time anyway. No one would start back with him to bring a
dog sled load of gasoline to his plane before dawn.
He was just pushing away the warm robe he had drawn over his knees when a
curious sound reached his ears, a clank-clank like the moving of gears.
“How strange!” he exclaimed. “Up here close to the Arctic Circle. What a
night! Will wonders never cease?”
A low dark bulk came gliding over the ice. The clank-clank grew louder.
“It’s a tractor!” he told himself, only half believing. “But here!
Hundreds of miles beyond the end of steel! Who would believe it?” He was
forced to believe, for, before he could realize it, the thing was upon
him.
Suddenly the clatter and clank ceased. “Hello there!” came in a cheery
voice. “What you camping here for? Resolution is just around the corner.
“Oh, it’s you, Curlie Carson?”
The newcomer had dismounted and approached on foot.
“And you, Doctor LeBeau!” came from the boy. “I’m surely glad to see you.
“But that thing—” he pointed at the tractor. “What do you do with that?”
“Many things, my boy. Very useful. Snake out logs. Launch boats. Plenty
of work. Just now I am coming from moving an Indian family to their new
home seven miles away. Cabin was twelve feet square. Just slid skids
under it, hitched on and moved ’em, house, furniture, bag, baggage and
babies. Not so bad!” He laughed a merry laugh.
“But answer me. What you doing here?”
“Out of gas.”
“Out of gas!” The doctor whistled. “Thought you were Old Man Preparedness
himself.”
“So did I. But when your gas cache has been robbed? What then?”
“Robbed?”
Curlie told him the story of the outlaw plane and the missing gas.
“That’s bad!” exclaimed the doctor. “Have to put a stop to that!
Dangerous people who would leave some poor aviator to starve hundred
miles from anywhere. Go after him!”
“I will if there’s a chance.”
“But now? Want a tow to town?”
Curlie looked at the tiny tractor, the smallest made, then at his great
airplane. He laughed. “Seems a bit odd. Guess you could do it, though.”
“Sure could. Safest way, too. Could give you my gas. Not safe flying at
night, though.
“Tell you what!” The doctor’s tone was kindly. “You roll up in your
feather robe there in the cabin. I’ll tow you in. You’ll wake up in
Resolution. You look like you needed sleep.”
“I’m asleep standing up just now! But you?”
“I’m O.K. We sleep all hours up here. Besides, you fellows have done a
lot for us; brought the world to our door, that’s what you’ve done. Just
as well do a little something for you.”
So it happened that Curlie arrived at Fort Resolution during the wee
small hours of the night. After sleeping straight through until morning,
he was as ready as ever for that which a fresh day might bring.
That day passed uneventfully. The dawn of the second day found Curlie
once more in the air. He was headed south.
All the glories of the great white wilderness lay beneath him. The glory
of the perfect day, sky filled with drifting clouds, air with a tang all
its own. But none of these things held the boy’s attention.
His thoughts were divided between his immediate task, the piloting of his
plane, and that which lay in the immediate past and the probable future.
At Resolution he had met Speed Samson, his rival. Great had been the
other pilot’s astonishment when told of Curlie’s adventure with the “Gray
Streak.”
“So it’s true after all!” Speed had exclaimed. “There _is_ a plane
running wild in this wilderness. The pilot’s living off other men’s food
caches, like as not, and using others’ gas.”
“Yes,” Curlie replied. “What are we going to do about it?”
“Wait for orders.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” the boy agreed slowly. By nature he was a person of
action. “But suppose we come upon that ‘Gray Streak’ before orders reach
us?”
“Pass ’em up. Let ’em go. That’s me. My record, the record of my company,
the mail contract’s at stake.
“And,” he added, meaning to be truly generous, “much as I want to win
that award for our company, I’d advise you to do the same.”
“It would count in your favor if you drove such a menace from the air or
brought them to justice,” Curlie said thoughtfully.
“If! Pretty big IF, boy. And if you fail, you may be in the sticks
somewhere with busted landing gear, out of the running. See?” Curlie did
see. And for the time being this seemed good counsel. Long and sober
thinking had left the matter unsettled in his mind.
One item that weighed heavily on the safety side was the fact that he
carried in his plane that which was to prove of great value to his friend
Johnny Thompson and all the world as well—pitchblende.
The venerable giant of a prospector, Sandy MacDonald, with whom Johnny
Thompson worked, had prepared his samples sooner than Johnny had thought
he might. He had sent those bits of rocks, that gave promise of producing
mineral worth a million dollars an ounce, over to Resolution. They were
now in the fuselage of Curlie’s plane.
“Guard them well,” had been the prospector’s last word of admonition.
“Those samples are pitchblende. From pitchblende comes radium. And radium
has been a boon to mankind. Through its mysterious rays of light it has
cured thousands of that most dreaded of diseases, cancer. If we can but
discover a cheaper supply, we will be benefactors of the whole race. Take
them to Edmonton. There’s a laboratory there. If they are not equipped to
analyze them, they’ll send them on. In time you’ll bring us the result.
And may God speed your flight!”
“May God speed your flight.” Curlie seemed to hear those words now and to
feel the gentle touch of a powerful hand on his shoulder.
“This is important,” he told himself. “I must not fail him. The pay is
small. The reward may be very great. We—”
His hands gripped the wheel tightly. A great white cloud lay directly
before him. Out of that cloud had come a plane. The air was clear, the
plane not far distant. His eyes could not deceive him.
“Jerry!” he shouted to the mechanic at his side. (He had taken Jerry on
at Resolution.) “Jerry, that’s the ‘Gray Streak’!”
“Absolutely!” Jerry straightened up in his place.
The young pilot’s mind became a battle field of conflicting emotions.
Safety, sure reward, the good of his company, his own personal glory
seemed to lie upon the side of his nature that whispered: “Keep straight
on. Let them go their way.”
“And there is the pitchblende, the radium,” he said aloud.
At the same time he appeared to hear a voice say, “Times come in our
lives when the good of scores, hundreds, perhaps thousands we have never
seen, may never see, drives from our minds that which seems good for us
and those best known to us. When that time comes we must act for the good
of all.”
“Who said that?” he asked himself. He could not answer. Somewhere in the
past it had been stowed away in the recesses of his mind. Now here it
was. It was as if God had spoken.
“Jerry,” he shouted, “we’ve got to go after them! Follow them to the end.
Find their hide-out. Bring them to justice!”
“Absolutely!” Jerry turned his face about to display a broad grin.
“Absolutely, son!”
CHAPTER III
TRAILING THE GRAY STREAK
Still endeavoring to think through the things which Johnny Thompson had
revealed to her, Joyce Mills rode home beneath the great, golden Arctic
moon.
More than once she murmured: “One of them is a thief. But how could he
be?”
Three weeks spent in the company of very few persons in the lonely land
of the North reveals much. In three weeks, under such conditions, he is a
sly person indeed who does not reveal his true nature. Joyce had believed
that by this time she knew the young men of her camp as well as she did
Johnny Thompson, Drew Lane, or any other person with whom she had been
closely associated.
“How hard it is to judge people!” She sighed deeply. To discover that we
have been deceived in a friend is always a shock.
“I cannot doubt Johnny’s word,” she assured herself. “And yet—”
She could form no real answer to the questions that came unbidden to her
mind.
“I will watch,” she told herself, “watch and wait. ‘Be sure your sin will
find you out.’ I read that somewhere and I believe it is true. If there
is a thief in our camp he will steal again, perhaps many times. In the
end, his sin will find him out.”
With these matters settled in her mind, she whistled sharply to her dogs
and sent them spinning away with redoubled speed toward the three rude
cabins that were a prospector’s camp and her present home.
Arrived there, she unharnessed her dogs and chained them to their places
before their kennels; then she went in to prepare supper.
She was not the only cook in this outfit. They all took a hand. Supper
fell to her lot. Since the days were still short everyone worked till
dark, searching rocky ridges and river banks for elusive signs of wealth
and then walking home over long miles after dark.
She was engaged in the mixing of baking powder biscuits when there came a
sound of sudden commotion outside. Flinging open the door, she all but
ran into Jim Baley, one of the three young prospectors in her outfit, who
was just home from work. Jim, however, was not the cause of the
commotion. The sounds of trouble came from the kennels. Dogs were howling
and snarling. Mingled with this was a sinister snap-snap of jaws.
“Wolves! Timber wolves!” Jim exclaimed, seizing an axe. “Big as men, they
are. Savage brutes. They’ll kill the dogs and eat ’em, like they was
rats.”
He was about to leap away to the battle when the girl held him back.
“Jim, you’ll be killed!”
“I’ll not. Besides, what of it? You can’t let the defenseless be
murdered. In a country like this dogs are your best friends. They’re
chained. Can’t you see?”
Feeling the grip on his arm loosen, he sprang away into the dark.
Standing there erect, motionless, she tried to look away into the
blackness of the night. At the same time a warm feeling crept in about
the portals of her heart as she whispered to herself:
“It can’t be Jim! Oh, no! It can’t be Jim!” She was thinking of the
thief, the one who had stolen those priceless films.
An instant later she, too, seized an axe and raced away to the defense of
her four-footed friends.
* * * * * * * *
The mysterious gray plane which Curlie Carson, with characteristic
promptness of decision, had resolved to follow, sailed straight away into
the east.
Jerry, the one who sat beside him, was, Curlie thought, a strange fellow
in many ways. He was a mechanic, and a good one. Self educated, he
thought all day long of bolts and nuts, pliers, wrenches, spark plugs,
valves and all else that goes to make up an airplane motor. He was,
apparently, quite fond of his youthful pilot. His answer to any suggested
course of action was always the same, “Absolutely.”
“Will he stick in a pinch?” the boy asked himself. “If need be, will he
fight?” He believed so.
It certainly seemed strange to be sailing away into a totally unknown
land, following an airplane that carried a captive, and who could say
what other manner of men?
“Are they kidnappers?” he asked himself, “escaped convicts, foreign
exiles?” To these questions he could form no answer. One thing he did
know; they were robbers. They stole that which in this barren land might
mean life or death to many: gasoline.
A thought struck him. Instinctively he slowed his plane a bit. “What if
they turn on me?”
What, indeed? They were flying over a barren land. The land beneath them
rose in rounded ridges of solid rock. No landing there. Not a chance.
True, here and there he made out an oval of dead white which he knew to
be the frozen surface of the lake.
“Whose plane is the faster?” This he could not know.
“Keep plenty of distance between,” he told himself. “All I can do is
locate their base. After that we can invite the red-coated Mounties to
take a hand. They’ll bring the thing to an end quick enough. They say a
Mountie always gets his man, and I guess it’s true.”
One fact comforted him. He had, but an hour before, taken on a good
supply of gas. Because he was traveling light, he was able to carry it
with ease. “They may be as well supplied as we are,” he told himself.
“But the odds are against them. If I can force them to land, short of
gas, where there is no supply of fuel, they are done. All I have to do is
turn back for aid. We’ll mop ’em up. And the mystery will be solved, and
this wild land will be free of a great menace.”
He had now thought the thing through—at least as far as his limited
knowledge would carry him. The thunder of his motor grew monotonous. His
mind turned to other things.
“Pitchblende. Radium!” he said aloud. “What a thing to dream of!” He was
thinking of the samples entrusted to his care by Sandy MacDonald, of
Johnny’s camp. “They say it gives off heat and light; that if you carry
it in a tube in your pocket it will burn you, but not the pocket. How
odd! One of nature’s unsolved mysteries,” he repeated. “I wonder why men
spend so much time reading of gruesome murder mysteries when nature
offers them a thousand unsolved riddles many times more interesting?”
Once more his attention was claimed by the outlaw plane. It had changed
its course. Heading straight into the wind, it was sailing north.
“Storm ahead,” he told himself. “Sure to lose ’em unless—” There was just
one chance. “Unless they run out of gas before we reach a snow cloud.
“One thing sure,” he told himself, “they’ll not lead me into a storm. Too
dangerous. Safety first, that’s the order. Can’t find a landing in this
desolate white world without the light to guide you.
“And yet—” His brow wrinkled. “Storms up here sometimes take on a
terrific velocity. What if I run into one that is faster than my plane?
No getting out then.
“Oh, well,” he philosophized, “it’s a chance you take when you agree to
fly in the North, especially if you volunteer to chase an outlaw of the
air.
“Outlaw of the air.” At once his mind was rife with speculation regarding
this mystery ship.
“From time to time,” he told himself, “planes are stolen from their
hangars just as autos are taken from garages. Not very common; but it
happens. Suppose a super-criminal wishes to escape justice by fleeing
from the United States? Suppose he can employ an aviator who is a thief,
or even bribe him to carry him into this land of empty spaces? Who would
know where to look for either the man or the plane?
“On the other hand, Russia is not far away, just across Alaska. Plenty of
gas stations on the Yukon. It’s only a short quarter of an hour in a
plane across Bering Straits. Plenty of reasons why some bold Russian
aviator might be hovering about up here. Might be a voluntary exile.
Might have Russian treasure to sell, jewels, diamonds, rubies and all
that from the old days. Might be preparing to spread propaganda against
the so-called ‘capitalistic nations.’
“But then,” he chuckled to himself, “a person always thinks of the most
improbable solution of a mystery first. Those fellows up ahead may be
just some rich young fellows from Canada or the United States bumming
around up here, having what they’d call ‘one whale of a time’ at the
expense of the rest of us. There are plenty of fellows who’d do just that
if opportunity offered.
“And if that’s the answer,” he set his lips tight, “here’s where I teach
them a lesson. No matter how rich a fellow is, he’s bound to consider the
rights of others; and any fellow who takes gas from another’s cache in a
land like this is not worthy of any consideration.”
He put out a hand. His motor thundered a little louder.
Then a look of consternation overspread his face.
“Jerry!” he shouted. “We’re headed square into a monstrous storm!”
“Absolutely.”
“We’d better turn back.”
“Absolutely.”
“May be too late,” the young aviator told himself. “But one can only do
one’s best.”
Having cut a wide circle, he looked back. The outlaw plane had vanished.
It had flown squarely into a bank of the deepest clouds. They were the
darkest gray Curlie had ever seen. And that bank was an Arctic gale at
its worst.
“May be the end of ’em,” he grumbled. And for the life of him, he could
not help feeling sorry.
“May be the end of us, too.” He took a good grip on himself. “I’ll do my
level best! No one could do more.”
CHAPTER IV
PITCHBLENDE
The fight waged at Joyce Mills’ camp with the gray shadows that were
timber wolves was short and furious. A great gaunt giant of the forest,
large as a man and quick as a tiger, who had been ready the instant
before to engage in an uneven battle with Joyce’s dog leader, Dannie, saw
Jim Baley approaching on the run and turned to leap at him.
Jim was no child. Born and reared in the rough timber-grown hills of
Kentucky, he was as slim and active as a blacksnake. For him an axe was
not alone an axe. It was a weapon.
As the gray beast leaped for his throat, he gripped the axe handle, one
hand at each end, and swung it high. It caught the wolf squarely under
the chin. That same instant Jim’s heavy boot shot forward in a vicious
kick.
With a savage snarl the beast fell groveling in the snow. Before he could
regain his feet he was dealt a blow on the head that left him quite out
of the combat.
Seeing their leader lying motionless before them, the five wolves that
remained turned to go slinking away.
“Cowards! Cowards!” Jim shouted. “A sorry lot, you are! Wouldn’t even
attack a dog unless he’s chained. You—”
He turned to find Joyce at his side. In her hand she still gripped an
axe.
“So you thought you’d take a hand?” he grinned. “Well, ’tain’t necessary.
They’ve left. Right smart glad I am to see your spunk. You’ll need it in
this land.”
Bending down, he scooped a handful of snow to rub it across the back of
his left hand. It came away red.
“You’re hurt!” Joyce’s words came quick.
“Nothing much. Take a heap more’n that to kill a tough timberjack like
me. Scratched me with his claws, the ornery beast!”
“We’d better tend to it anyway.”
“All right.”
“Bounty on him,” Jim added, poking his foot at the dead wolf. “Twenty
dollars or more. Right enough, too. Destroyer he is. Kills everything
from pretty white ptarmigan to the lambs people try to raise further
south.”
Back at the cook-shack Joyce bathed his wounded hand, applied iodine,
then bound it up. And all the time she was thinking to herself, “It can’t
be Jim. True courage and a feeling for others, even dumb animals, does
not go with a dishonest heart.”
But if Jim had not stolen the films that had cost so much and might mean
a fortune to some one, who had? Ah, well, there was time enough to think
of that. Now she must finish preparing supper. The others would be in
very soon.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime there was cause for excitement in Johnny Thompson’s camp.
Scarcely had Johnny arrived when Sandy MacDonald, a bearded giant of a
prospector, came tramping in. Over his back he carried a load that would
have broken the back of a slighter man.
“That,” he declared as he dropped the sack with a heavy sigh, “is more
pitchblende. It looks better than the last.”
“Tell us more about this pitchblende,” Johnny begged.
“Pitchblende,” explained Sandy, as he dropped heavily into a chair, “is
the ore from which we take uranium.
“And from uranium we get radium.”
Radium—Johnny knew in a general way what radium was. He knew little of
its value.
“Radium,” Sandy reminded Johnny with a benevolent smile, “is at present
worth about a million dollars an ounce.”
“How—how do you get it from that stuff?” Johnny pointed at the bag.
“It’s a slow process,” said the aged prospector a trifle wearily. “You
crush the ore fine, then you leach it in acid. After two or three
leachings you get a fair amount of uranium. Then you separate the radium
from other elements. And if you’ve a ton of ore you’ll get, if you’re
lucky, as much radium as you can tuck under your thumb nail.”
“That is,” he went on to explain, “if it’s ore as rich as has been found
thus far. Of course mineralogists are always hoping to find richer
deposits. And when some one does make the discovery, even if it’s on the
North Pole, men will go after it. And the man that finds it will be rich
beyond his wildest dreams; what’s more, he will be classed as one of the
world’s greatest benefactors. What better could he ask?”
“What indeed?” murmured Scott Ramsey, his young partner.
“This stuff,” said Sandy, touching the sack with his moccasined foot,
“must go where the other samples have gone, to Edmonton.”
“Be a week before the next mail plane goes south,” said Johnny.
“That just gives us time for a cup of coffee.” Sandy smiled a broad
smile. “What do you say we have it now?”
They were an interesting group. Sandy, cumbersome, hearty, powerful even
in his old age, ever a prospector, never very prosperous, he had wended
his long way across the world always in a valley of golden dreams. Scott
Ramsey, blonde-haired and still youthful, with an air of business about
him, seemed to say with every move: “This is an adventure, but it must be
more. It must be a financial success.” And so it must. He had led Sandy
to invest his all, a tidy little cabin in Edmonton and a wee bank
account, in this venture.
Johnny Thompson had been included in the party because of his familiarity
with the North. He it was who selected and managed dog teams, built camps
and purchased supplies. Joe Lee, the silent, soft-footed Chinaman, was
the cook. Johnny was all else that goes toward making a prospector’s camp
a place that may be called “Home.”
So, satisfied with their lot, glorying in the abundant health God had
given them, dreaming golden dreams of the morrow, they sat down to their
meal of pilot biscuits, caribou steak, potatoes, pie and coffee with the
feeling that the world was theirs for the asking.
One question troubled Johnny a little: the affair of the afternoon, his
talk with Joyce Mills. Should he tell his companions of it?
After due consideration, he decided to keep silent. “Who knows but we may
have made our great strike?” he reasoned to himself. “Pitchblende,
radium. Who knows? If we win, if they lose, nothing will come of it.”
Then a thought struck him. This was to be a race for treasure. Who would
win that race? Sandy and his group, or the others? Only time would tell.
“We must do our best.” He spoke aloud without really meaning to.
“Yes indeed!” agreed Sandy heartily. “So we must, son. And so we will!”
* * * * * * * *
Strange to say, at this very moment Joyce Mills sat in the small cabin
allotted to her father, dreaming dreams and thinking of the revelation
that had come to her from Johnny’s lips on that very afternoon.
“One of them is a thief,” she repeated to herself. “It does not seem
possible!” And indeed it did not. Never in all her life had she come upon
young men so frank, so kind and so generous, so whole-heartedly serious
about their work, and yet so joyous, as the three who at that moment were
sending out from the other cabin, to the accompaniment of Jim’s banjo,
the hilarious notes of an old backwoods song.
“It can’t be, yet it must be,” she told herself.
Then her brow clouded. If they should find gold; if those others came to
file claims, as they undoubtedly would do, there would be trouble.
“A fight. A terrible fight,” she said aloud.
And yet, how were those others to know when a strike was made? If
necessity required, would she tell them? To this question she could form
no answer.
“Moccasin Telegraph,” she murmured. “Those were the very words Johnny
used. I wonder what he meant?”
Having thought this thing through as far as her mind would carry her, she
allowed mental pictures of her father’s three young partners to drift
before her mind’s eye. Jim, tall and slim, with a Kentucky mountaineer’s
drooping shoulders and drawling voice; Clyde, big and strong, a little
loud, full of fun and ready for the best or the worst of any adventure;
and Lloyd, a Canadian, quiet, soft-spoken, apparently very well educated.
These were the three.
“And one is—
“No, I won’t say it!” she told herself stoutly. “It may not be true. And
if it’s not, I must prove it.”
Having put this subject to rest, she allowed her mind to drift back over
the days that had just passed.
She had come all the way from Edmonton, eight hundred miles, in an
airplane, her first journey through the air. What a thrilling experience
that had been!
As she sat there listening to the roar of the fire, its roar became the
thunder of their motor as they went racing across the landing field at
Edmonton.
The snow had been soft and sticky that day. It clung to the airplane’s
eight-foot skis. Three times they crossed that broad expanse of
whiteness. Then came a redoubled roar from the motor, and some one said:
“Up!”
To her surprise, she found that passing through the air was not different
from skiing across the snow. Seated beside her father, with his three
young partners reposing on a pile of canvas bags before them, she had
watched through the narrow window while the houses grew small and then
began to pass from sight.
They appeared to be moving very slowly, yet reason told her they were
doing better than a hundred miles an hour. The city vanished, and broad
stretches of farm land lay beneath them.
“It’s not exciting at all!” she shouted in her father’s ear. “Just like
riding in a bobsled.”
Yet this was not entirely true. She did experience a thrill as they
passed from the land of broad farms to the world of great silent forests
where a lonely river wound its white and silent way.
“We are pioneers!” she whispered to herself. “Adventurers entering an
unknown land!” And so they were. When at last they landed on the white
surface of Great Slave Lake, they found themselves a full hundred miles
from the nearest settlement. And beyond them, hundreds of miles to the
north, the east, the south, was a great, white, empty wilderness. Here
there was no one.
“What a store of wealth must be hidden yonder!” her father had exclaimed.
“There are lakes no eyes have seen. Magnificent waterfalls tumble over
rocks that may be loaded with silver, copper and platinum. Those waters
may fall on sands of yellow gold. Yet no one has heard the rush of that
water. No eyes have been gladdened by the gleam of the rainbow in its
spray.”
He had been jubilant, happy as a boy. And Joyce had been happy with him.
Yet, even now as she thought of it, her brow wrinkled. All this was very
well. They were comfortably housed and well fed in a land of real
enchantment. Yet all this must have an end. The three young men were
financing it. There was a limit to their resources. Her father, the
expert mineralogist of the group, was to receive his pay from the profits
of the enterprise. When the strike was made they were to share alike, an
even quarter to each man. “But if there is no strike!” She shuddered. “We
must win!” she told herself, rising and walking the floor. “We must!”
Strangely enough, at that moment in his far off camp Johnny Thompson, her
trusted pal of other days, was declaring stoutly:
“We will win!”
Would they? And if not both, which party would win?
CHAPTER V
RACING THE STORM
While Johnny Thompson with his friends in one camp and Joyce Mills with
her companions in another were seated comfortably about their fires
listening to the singing of the wind that foretold an approaching storm,
Curlie Carson, who had at one time played so important a part in their
lives and might, for all they knew, yet play a stellar role in the drama
of the North into which their lives had been cast, was passing through
one of the unique experiences of his not uneventful life.
Having watched the gray outlaw plane lose itself in the solid bank of
clouds that was a storm bearing down upon the land of eternal ice, he
had, as we have seen, chosen the safer part and, turning, had raced away.
He had chosen what appeared to be the safest way. In this he was
influenced by the recollection that he bore in the fusilage of his plane
the samples of pitchblende that might mean a bright future for his old
pal Johnny and his companions. But was the way he had chosen really a
safe one? He was soon enough to know.
Even as he turned, the vast gliding monster that was a storm appeared to
reach out a shrouded arm to grasp him, as if enraged by the sight of a
victim escaping from its grasp.
Snow-fog gathered about him. Particles of sleet rattled like bird-shot
against his fusilage.
Setting his teeth hard, he tilted the plane upward; but all in vain. The
shrouded arm followed.
Abandoning these tactics, he righted his plane to shoot straight away
toward the south. A hundred, a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and
forty miles an hour he sped on. But the storm rode on his tail. It set
his struts singing. It fogged the glass before him. It set up a chill
that no insulation could keep out, no heat from the exhaust dispel.
“I’ll beat it!” he told himself grimly. “I must! It will last for hours.
No one could land safely in such a storm. And one may not stay up
forever.”
Strangely enough, even in such a time of stress his mind went on little
holidays, moments long, to wonder about many things. The “Gray Streak”?
What could have happened to her? Had she gone right on through the storm
and, coming out into the uncertain light of waning day, had she landed
safely on the frozen surface of some lake or had she cracked up? If she
had cracked up, would the wreck be discovered? If it were, what would it
reveal? Once more he thought of master criminals, of Russian exiles and
sporting young highbloods; but he found no answer.
At other times he thought of Johnny Thompson and his problems. Johnny had
told him of the stolen films that might mean so much to the mineral
hunting world. What would come of all this? Would the thief be
discovered? Would the swift and sure punishment that belongs to this
northland be meted out to him? Would the rival camps come together at
last? And would there follow a bloody combat? For the sake of Joyce Mills
and her heroic father, he hoped not.
So, with his mind one moment filled with the strain of battle, the next
relieved by restful speculation, he raced the storm.
The brief Arctic day came to its close. He tried to imagine his friends
seated by their fire, but succeeded only in bringing to his own
consciousness a desire for warmth and food.
“Better the storm than that,” he told himself. At once his mind was
filled with grim pictures of the gray specter that now followed him into
the night. It was a monster spider weaving a web as great as the universe
itself and at the same time reaching out one hairy leg to seize him. It
was an octopus in a fathomless sea extending a tentacle to grasp him.
“It will end,” he told himself. “All storms have an ending.”
This, he knew to be a half truth. Arctic gales blow days and nights
through. He could not last. His supply of gas must become exhausted. And
then? Grim rocks of the “Barrens” awaited them.
“Why did we follow them?” he thought.
Then, for the first time in all this storm he thought of Jerry. He turned
to speak to him. To his great surprise he found him fast asleep.
Fear seized him. Jerry might not be sleeping. The cold might have
overcome him. He prodded him vigorously. Jerry opened one eye.
“Jerry!” he shouted. “We’re in one whale of a storm!”
“Absolutely.” Jerry closed the eye and once more lay back in his corner.
“Well,” Curlie thought, “there’s courage for you, and confidence aplenty.
If he believes I can bring him through safely, I can!”
From that time on he felt fresh confidence. How else could he feel about
it when Jerry, a veteran of the flying corps of the North, could sleep
through it all?
“And yet we are in the air. The storm is still with us. I must not grow
over-confident,” he told himself grimly.
One more resolve came to him in this hour of stress. “If that gray
phantom of the air outrides the storm, and if it is my lot to sight her
once more I shall give chase just as I did this day.”
At that he thought of the small square of white cloth with the name
D’Arcy Arden etched in one corner.
“Who can that person be? And why a captive?”
But again the storm claimed his attention. It had now taken the form of a
gray ghost of the night. Slowly, but surely, it was wrapping its mantle
about him.
“Nothing to do but fly into the south,” he told himself as grim
determination took possession of his soul.
This, he found soon enough, was to prove a difficult task. The glass
before him clouded. The gray ghost’s mantle was hiding him from earth and
sky. His going grew heavy. Sleet was piling, fold over fold, upon his
plane.
“It won’t be long now,” he thought to himself with a groan.
Then, with a suddenness that was startling, the gray ghost’s mantle
slipped away, leaving before him a gorgeous moon riding high over an
earth that seemed to sleep.
“Peace!” he said. “This is a place of peace.” Then realizing how strange
that remark would seem to one who heard it, he laughed aloud.
To one who first flies over the Arctic wastes of the far Northwest, the
landscape seems as unmarked as the sweeping blue of a landless sea. No
cities, no villages, no roads, no railways, no farmhouses, not so much as
a cabin is there to guide him in his skyway wanderings. As time passes,
as he flies the same route again and again, that which lies beneath him
becomes familiar. There is the river. Here it forms as an S. There it
winds like a serpent. Here it is thickly bordered by trees, there lined
only by low-growing willows. There are the lakes. Here four of them form
the eyes, nose and mouth of a human face. Here a single large lake with a
broad river entering at a narrow end resembles an elephant with a
prodigiously long trunk. A hundred forms two thousand feet below mark the
lone birdman’s way until at last he knows his route as the plowman knows
his homeward road, the seaman his shore or the Red Man his trail.
It was even so with Curlie. He had not traveled the northern route long,
but certain spots had become well marked by his keen eye.
“Jerry!” he shouted aloud. “Jerry! We have won!”
“Absolutely,” Jerry agreed sleepily.
“Sure we have! Look! We have outridden the storm. And see! There are the
circles of willows that border Lake Athabaska. And away over yonder is a
feeble light. That’s at Fort Chipewyan. Be there in twenty minutes!”
“Absolutely.” Jerry straightened up in his place.
“Pork chops at the Chink’s, Jerry,” the boy went on. “Pork chops with
fried potatoes and coffee and half an apple pie. What say?”
“Absolutely, son. Absolutely.”
“And after that, old sleepy head, you’ll work three hours on the motors.”
“Absolutely, son! Make it four! Can’t be too sure about the blasted
motor. You really can’t.”
As the skis bumped, and then bumped again on the icy surface that was the
landing field at Fort Chipewyan, Curlie’s eyes strayed toward the golden
moon as a voice seemed to whisper: “Somewhere beyond the sky there is a
power that guides and guards our ways.”
All of which has nothing whatever to do with the manner in which he and
Jerry stowed away the Chinaman’s pork chops and fried potatoes while Sam
Kusik, the Russian Jew trader, and Tommy Wooden, the postmaster of this
far-flung outpost, plied them with questions regarding the radium strike
that had been reported, and the gray outlaw plane that had stirred wild
rumors in many quarters.
“We saw the plane.” Curlie laughed at their surprise and awe. “We chased
it into a storm. Did it crack up? Who knows? I doubt it. No such luck. An
honest man meets misfortune many times; a rogue but once, and that when
his time comes. Their time will come. And we’ll do what we can to hasten
it. What say, Jerry?”
“Absolutely.” Jerry gulped down a draught of hot coffee. “Absolutely,
son. Absolutely.”
CHAPTER VI
A SHOT IN THE NIGHT
The storm, which had so successfully defeated Curlie Carson in his effort
to follow the outlaw of the air, was but a narrow finger reaching out
from the vast, wind-blown ice pack that is the Arctic Sea. It did not
extend as far to the west as the spot on Great Slave Lake on which the
cabin occupied by Joyce Mills and her father was located. So it happened
that even while Curlie raced the storm for his very life, Joyce sat
comfortably by the great barrel of a stove that radiated heat aplenty and
dreamed of other days when she, with her friends, Johnny Thompson and
Curlie Carson and the young detective, Drew Lane, were engaged in deeds
of adventure.
“I only wish Drew were here now!” she sighed. “He would help me solve
this mystery of the stolen films.”
That the films were to prove of inestimable value in the task of hunting
out rich mineral-bearing ore, she did not for a moment doubt. Only that
evening as he sat poring over the pictures of some rocks laid bare by
wind and rain, her father had told her with the greatest enthusiasm that
he had on that very day successfully located the spot marked on the
pictures and that it gave every promise of being a lead to rich
ore-bearing rock.
“Only think!” he had exclaimed. “When I was a young man, when we went
over the Yukon Trail, we carried all we would need for two years, on our
backs and on sleds. And no dogs, mind you! Not a dog!
“And when we arrived in the North all that vast, uncharted wilderness was
before us. We had not a single lead. Little wonder that we returned after
two years of terrible privation, empty-handed and heavy-hearted.
“And now look!” He patted the pictures lovingly. “The airplanes give us
these. We have only to study them and follow their indications.
“Not alone that, but the airplane carries us a thousand miles far above
impassable trails and leaves us with picks, shovels, and food in
abundance to work out our own salvation. Is it not all very wonderful?”
Ah, yes, it was wonderful. Yet this conscientious girl, as she sat by the
fire thinking things through, was distinctly unhappy.
“If only we had come into possession of the pictures in an honorable
manner!” she thought, with a sigh.
“Why don’t I confide in one of father’s partners?” she asked herself.
“But which one?”
That indeed was the question. Going at it in blind fashion, as she must,
she would with the usual bad luck of such a venture, ask advice of the
very one who had stolen the films.
“And he would only lead me away on a false scent,” she told herself. “No,
no! I shall say nothing. Watchful waiting, that’s the thing.” With that
she sprang to her feet. She felt in need of a touch of the cold night
air. Its tingle sent her blood racing. Beneath the stars she could think
clearly.
She had ever been a person of action, had this slim, dark-haired girl. In
college it had been basketball, tennis and hockey. Here she was limited
to following-the dog team and taking long walks by herself. Drawing on
her parka and seizing a stout stick, she marched away into the moonlight.
“How still it is!” she said to herself. “And how wonderful! The moon and
the stars seem near. God seems near. It is good to be alone with Him.”
So, sometimes communing with herself and sometimes with the stars, she
wandered farther than she intended.
She had rounded a clump of spruce trees when suddenly the silence was
broken by a terrific snort, and a great dark bulk came charging down upon
her from the hill above.
Now her gymnasium training, together with the cool nerve inherited from
her father, stood her in good stead. Leaping to a tree, she seized the
lowest branch and swung herself up.
Not a second too soon. The irate monster passed directly beneath her.
As he passed, she fancied she smelled fire, shot from his nostrils. “What
creature in these wilds could be like that?” she asked herself. “He’s not
a bear, nor a moose. He’s too large for any other creature.”
Here, surely, was a conundrum. It was not long in solving. As the
creature turned about for one more vain charge she saw him clearly in the
moonlight.
“A buffalo!” she exclaimed. “A buffalo in this frozen land! How—how
impossible!” That he was indeed a buffalo and a very real one, the beast
proceeded to demonstrate by pawing and bellowing beneath her tree.
“He’ll keep me here all night. I’ll freeze!” she thought, half in
despair. “This morning it was forty below, and to-night it is just as
cold.”
At last, taking a stronger grip on her nerves, she climbed a little
higher, selected a stout branch and settled down upon it to think things
through.
She was, she knew, more than a mile from camp. No amount of calling would
bring aid. In time her father would miss her and there would be a search.
But in the North people remain up at all hours. Her friends might not
think of retiring for three hours. Her time was her own. They would not
think it strange that she was not there.
“In the meantime I shall freeze,” she told herself. In spite of her best
efforts at self-control, a touch of the tragic crept into her voice.
Already her feet, clad only in wool stockings and moose-hide moccasins,
were beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Stop feeling after a while.” She shuddered. “Then they will be frozen.
“Moccasin Telegraph,” she murmured. “If Johnny had told me his secret
perhaps I could now flash a message to our camp.”
In the meantime the buffalo, having ceased roaring and pawing, had
settled down to what promised to be a long wait. With head hanging low,
he appeared to fall fast asleep.
“Shamming,” she whispered.
But was he? Everyone knows that four-footed creatures often sleep
standing up.
Joyce was not a person of great patience. She was all for action.
“I won’t freeze!” she declared stoutly. “I’ll jump down and try to
out-dodge him. I’ll take to the trees.”
Having resolved on this, she studied possible landing spots. In the end
she chose, one might think, the most perilous of all.
“I’ll climb up a little higher, and then I’ll drop square on his back.
He’ll be so startled he’ll run away.”
No sooner resolved than done. From a perch ten feet above, she suddenly
descended upon the buffalo’s back.
The result exceeded her expectations. The great beast lurched forward, it
seemed, the very second she landed. She was pitched backward and landed
full length in the snow.
Her landing place was soft, a bank of snow blown in among the branches of
a fallen tree. She was not injured. The breath had been knocked from her;
that was all. And this was fortunate. It gave her time to think.
Having thought, she lay quite still. She was, she believed, quite covered
with snow. The buffalo, who was snorting and bellowing in an alarming
fashion, would find her only by stepping on her.
“The branches will keep him back. I am safe.” She whispered, scarcely
daring to breathe.
A moment passed; another and another. Still the snorting and roaring
continued.
Then a curious thing happened. A rifle shot rang out in the night. The
buffalo went crashing away through the bush. Then followed a silence.
“A rifle,” she whispered to herself. “There is no rifle in our camp.”
She was delivered from one peril, only to be threatened by another. She
was far from camp, and there were strangers about.
Five minutes more she lay there. Then, feeling the drowsy sleep of the
North coming upon her, she cast aside the snow, to leap to her feet and
go speeding away toward the camp.
Ten minutes later she burst into camp, exclaiming:
“A buffalo treed me! I jumped on his back. A stranger shot at him.”
Such a speech called for an explanation. It was given over a hot cup of
chocolate.
“Oh, yes, there are buffaloes up here,” Jim drawled in the middle of the
talk. “Right smart of ’em. Woods-buffaloes, they are. There’s a preserve
down south of here. Feller at Fort Chipewyan told me about ’em. He was
what they call a buffalo ranger. They’re protected, these buffaloes. You
can’t shoot ’em. Probably this one was a cranky old boy who couldn’t
stand his relatives.”
“He couldn’t stand me, either,” Joyce laughed. “Here’s hoping I never see
him again.”
Vain hope!
“But the man? The rifle?”
“Probably some Indian,” replied her father. “We’ll look into that in the
morning.”
They did not. A short, fierce wind-storm that night blotted out all
evidence of the girl’s adventure.
CHAPTER VII
THE WINGED MESSENGER
Curlie and Jerry were away with the dawn. As they rose from the
glistening white of the landing field to the transparent blue of the sky,
Curlie’s heart sang with joy. It was great, this rising aloft to greet
the sun. With a safe landing place, the frozen river, ever beneath him,
with a dependable mechanic beside him and the long, long lane of air
before him, who could ask for more? Once Curlie did wrinkle his brow. He
was thinking of the mysterious gray ship he had followed into the storm.
“If that keeps up,” he told himself, “the sky will no more be safe. It
will be full of lurking dangers as was the Spanish Main when pirates and
buccaneers lurked in every cove.”
With all his thinking he could not solve the mystery of the nameless and
numberless plane. Instead, from out the air there leaped a fresh mystery.
A simple thing in the beginning it was too—only a bird in flight.
Birds are common enough in the Arctic. Even in mid-winter ravens croak
from the tree-tops, pelicans stand upon icy rocks watching for fish and
screaming jays cut a path of blue across the wintry sky.
But this bird was neither raven, pelican nor jay. Curlie knew that at a
glance. Having long watched the flight of birds, he could distinguish the
darting course of one, the soaring flight of another and the steady
flap-flap of a third. This bird, he knew at a glance, was a pigeon.
“A pigeon in such a place!” He fairly gasped with astonishment.
Then a thought struck him squarely between the eyes. “It’s a
carrier-pigeon! Here may be a clue. I’ll follow him.”
Fortunately the course taken by the bird was almost the same as that he
must follow to reach his next stopping place, Fort McMurray, the
headquarters of steel. At this place he would unload his cargo of furs
and mineral samples entrusted to his care, then wire for further orders.
“Who would turn a pigeon loose in this bleak land?” he asked himself.
“Only some one in desperate circumstances or a man without a heart.” At
once he thought of the mysterious one who piloted the strange gray plane.
“He’s heartless enough,” he assured himself. “Holding some one, a woman
or a boy, captive! He’d do anything. There’ll be a message tied to the
bird’s foot. I’m sure of that. All I have to do is follow him to his
destination. Might bump right into the man’s confederates. Then the
mystery would be solved at once.”
But what was the bird’s destination? How was Curlie to know that? “It may
be Edmonton; probably is,” he told himself hopelessly. “I can’t follow
him there, not just now. Already I am hours behind my schedule. Little
more and I’ll be joining the ranks of the unemployed.”
Even as he said this, as if to make an end to this dilemma, the pigeon
wavered in his flight, sank earthward, and began to circle.
“Going to alight,” Curlie shouted to Jerry.
“Absolutely.”
“I’m going to land with him. There’s a cabin down there by the river.
Seen it many times. Who lives there?”
“Don’t know.”
“May be a partner to that man of the ‘Gray Streak.’”
“Absolutely.”
“We’ll see about it.”
“Absolutely, son. Absolutely.”
Graceful as the bird itself, the plane sank lower and lower, went bump,
bump, bump three times, and glided away on an unmarked field of
glistening snow.
Ten minutes after this landing they were approaching the cabin. The
carrier pigeon was nowhere to be seen.
Had it not been for three dogs skulking at the back of the cabin, and a
few fresh moccasin tracks in the snow before the door, the place would
have seemed deserted.
“Strange the fellow don’t come out to meet us,” Curlie grumbled, as no
one appeared to greet them.
It _was_ strange. In the North the airplane has come to be what coastwise
steamers are to fishing villages along a rockbound coast, or the
slow-going local passenger train is to mountain towns. It brings the
mail, reports news of the outside world, and delivers such necessities as
the land itself does not supply. At the first sound of drumming motors
the cabin dwellers flock forth to greet their soaring friend.
Not so, here. The place was as still as it might have been had its last
occupant passed away.
Curlie knocked loudly on the door. No response. He knocked again, more
loudly.
“Asleep or drunk,” he muttered. He gave the door a lusty kick. It flew
open. At the same instant a short, scrawny, red-faced man sprang from a
bunk in the corner.
“Sorry,” apologized Curlie. “A pigeon soared down here. Seen it?”
“And if I have?” The man’s tone was defiant.
“We want to see it.”
“Your pigeon, I suppose? Flyin’ ’ere in this ’ere blasted frozen
wilderness.” The man took a step backward toward the corner. A heavy
rifle rested there.
Jerry might be slow at times. Not always.
“As you are!” he commanded. At the same time his hand dropped to his hip.
A queer, cowed look came over the cabin-dweller’s face.
“Oh, all right. ’Ave your own way!” he grumbled. “W’at d’ y’ want?”
“The pigeon.”
The man’s face worked strangely. He was like a man about to go into a
convulsion. Reading these signs of distress, Curlie spoke more gently.
“We think he carried a message. We—”
“You think!” the little man broke in. “I know. He does! An’ ’at message
you’ll ’ave, an’ welcome! But not ’im!”
“All right. The message,” agreed Curlie.
The little man disappeared into a narrow room at the back, only to
reappear with a small billet enclosed in thin oil-cloth.
“There, y’ ’ave it!” He seemed greatly relieved. “There’s the message!”
With trembling fingers, Curlie unrolled the bit of cloth. He spread the
message on the table and dropped into a chair before it.
For a long time he sat staring at it; yet it would not have required a
mind-reader to tell that he made nothing of it. And indeed, how could he?
The message, more than a hundred words long, was so written that not one
word made any manner of sense with any other that preceded or followed
it.
“That,” he said to Jerry, “is worse than a cross-word puzzle.
“The worst of it is,” he added after a moment’s contemplation, “we don’t
know who sent it, nor whether we have the least right to interfere with
it.
“You see,” he explained, “there are Government posts right up to the
shore of the Arctic. The heads of the posts may be trying pigeons as
messengers. Then, too, some lone trapper may have carried that bird a
thousand miles into the wilderness with the intention of using him in
case of distress. This may be a distress message.”
“Written in code?” Jerry lifted his eyebrows.
“Don’t seem probable. But the Government message would be in code.
“I think,” Curlie added after further thought, “that we’ll make a copy of
it and send the bird on his way.”
“How do you know you will?” The cabin-dweller was again on his feet.
There was a dangerous glint in his eye.
Curlie tried in vain to read the meaning in his expression. Was he, after
all, a confederate of those outlaws who had taken to riding the sky in a
plane fueled at another’s expense?
“I believe you are in with them!” he exclaimed angrily.
“What d’ y’ mean, in with ’em?” the little man demanded hotly.
“The ‘Gray Streak,’ outlaw of the air.”
Instantly the look on the man’s face changed. “Before Gawd, I know less
’n you about this ’ere ghost of the air!”
“Then,” said Curlie, as his face cleared, “here is the message. It’s up
to you. The bird came to your cabin, not to ours.”
He handed over the carefully wrapped billet, arose and led the way out of
the cabin. He then climbed into the plane with Jerry following, turned
his motor over, set it throbbing, and flew away.
If Jerry marveled at all this, he ventured not one question.
CHAPTER VIII
WHITE FOXES
One feature of the North fascinated Joyce Mills more than any other—the
dog teams. Her outfit had engaged two of these teams at Fort Resolution.
Wonderful dogs they were, too. Long, rangy, muscular fellows, they stood
to her waist. And how they could travel!
“All right, boys! Mush!” she would cry. And away they would fly.
On days when one of these teams was not in use, she would go for a long
drive into the great unknown. It made little difference what direction
she took, for all this world about her was new.
Often, because the dogs traveled best when following a scent, she allowed
them to choose their own course. Invariably they took up some trail. At
times it was only the tracks of a man on skis or snowshoes, at others it
was the mark of some dog sled. Whatever it might be, though the trail was
windblown and three days old, they followed it with unerring steps.
On the day when Curlie Carson took up the flight of the pigeon, she
started on one of these dog team jaunts. Once more she allowed the team
to take its course. This day the leader chose the tracks of a man on
snowshoes.
“One of our men,” she told herself. “Be just time to come up with him
before sunset. He’ll enjoy a ride home.”
As we have said, Joyce was no weakling. While training her mind, she had
developed her body as well. This day she rode only a part of the way.
Trotting after a dog team rouses the drowsy blood and sends it coursing
through the veins. It stimulates thoughts. This girl’s thoughts on that
day were long, long thoughts. At times she dreamed of gold, placer gold,
great moose-hide sacks bulging with nuggets. She knew that Lloyd, the
young Canadian of their outfit, had studied the aerial photographs that
were taken a hundred miles from the camp, and then had gone into a brown
study.
“Looks like quartz, gold, up there,” she had heard him murmur. “Why not
placer gold in the streams farther down?” He had disappeared on a strange
mission early next morning. When he returned late that evening, if he had
anything to report he had made no mention of it. A strange, silent
fellow, this Canadian.
“Gold,” she said aloud. “Gold. What will it not buy? Comfort; ease;
education; a home. Some even believe it will buy friends. But not true
friends, I am sure of that.”
Gold! Would they find it? And if they did, what then? A frown gathered
like a storm cloud on her brow. She had thought again of Johnny’s strange
revelation. “One of your men is a thief,” she seemed to hear him say.
“I’ll find the thief!” she told herself with renewed determination.
“But if we make a rich strike before I find him?” She shuddered at
thought of the terrible possibilities involved.
Then, shaking herself free from all these brooding thoughts, she shouted:
“_Ye! Ye! Ye!_” to send her dogs spinning away at a reckless speed.
Since the land here was rocky and uneven, this resulted in a spill.
Coming to the top of a ridge, the dogs rushed pell mell down the other
side and landed all in a heap in a bunch of willows at the bottom.
Joyce was recovering from this spill and her dogs were sitting about her
grinning when upon looking up she beheld, not ten paces away, the man she
had been following.
She caught her breath in surprise. He was not Jim, nor Clyde, nor Lloyd.
Nor was it her father. It was a man she had never seen before.
“Where did you come from?” she wanted to ask, but did not. It gave her a
shock to know that she had taken up this man’s trail not half a mile from
her cabin and, having followed him for miles, was now alone with him in
the great white world.
He was strange, too, and had, she thought, an evil face. “But I must not
judge too soon,” she told herself.
The man was short with broad shoulders. He had a dark face that might be
French, Indian or half-breed.
“Hello!” he said rather gruffly. “You follow? What want?”
She looked at him, nonplussed. What indeed did she want? Nothing.
She told him so. Plainly he did not believe her.
“My name,” he said stolidly, “Pierre Andres. Trapper, me.” He jingled a
bundle of traps hanging from his arm. “You want white fox skin? All
right. I geeve heem you.”
“No! No!” she persisted stoutly. “I want nothing. I am looking for some
one.”
“Some one look for gold.” He placed a hand above his eyes. “Allee time
look. No find. Eh?” He tried to smile, and his face became uglier than
before. “Oh, you find. Bye and bye. Not know mine.” He chuckled deep down
in his throat.
“See! Look!” he exclaimed suddenly. He made a motion as if to drop on all
fours. “Buffalo.” He sent out a curious snort. “You!” He made a face.
“’Fraid, you. Up tree. Then, boom! Buffalo gone! Is it not so?
“And now I gotta say good-bye.”
“Good—good-bye.” The words stuck in her throat. Speaking to her dogs, she
sent them spinning back over the trail.
Her mind was in a whirl. Who was this man? What had he been doing about
their camp? Had he been near when she was treed by the buffalo? Had he
fired that shot?
She thought, of his traps. “Hope he hasn’t set any near our cabin.”
Only the night before, while out for a stroll in the moonlight, she had
made a delightful discovery. Three beautiful white foxes had their home
beneath the cliff back of their cabin. She had surprised them at their
play. She did not want one of their skins for a decoration.
But now, while she was wondering whether this man had any connection with
Johnny’s half-mythical Moccasin Telegraph, her dogs suddenly took a turn
to the right, speeding away on a fresh trail.
Seeing that this trail, cutting her old one at an acute angle, led toward
camp and hoping once more that it might lead her to one of her party, she
allowed the dogs to pick their own way.
This time she was not disappointed. They had not gone half a mile before
she sighted, standing out dark against the sky, a lone figure at the
crest of a ridge.
“It’s Lloyd Hill,” she told herself with a thrill of joy. She had
recognized him on the instant. His was a military bearing not often found
in the North. At this moment he stood rigidly erect, looking away toward
the west as a commanding general might while surveying some vast smoking
battlefield.
She was obliged to cross a narrow valley to reach him. This gave her time
for reflection. Lloyd Hill was not like the other men of her camp. He was
more reserved. He was, as her father expressed it, “a good listener.” He
talked little. When he did speak his English was perfect. Jim spoke with
the mellow drawl of the southern mountains; Clyde with the breezy tongue
of the west. Lloyd impressed her as coming from a fine family; yet he
never spoke of his family. A silent, rather slender, dark-eyed fellow, he
was ever alert, yet never in a hurry.
“Always seems to be all there,” her father had said. “But how tense he
is. If you fired off a gun when he wasn’t looking, he’d jump three feet
from the ground!” This was more true than he knew, and for good reasons.
With these thoughts passing through her mind and with one half-asked
question lurking back of all, “Who stole those films for the pictures we
are using?” she crossed the intervening space to climb the ridge.
All this time, though she was sure he knew she was coming, he did not so
much as turn his head. Only when she had reached his side did he speak.
With one arm outstretched he said:
“Do you see that?”
“See what?” She turned a puzzled face up to his. “I see the frozen bed of
a stream. There are rapids and a waterfall over there, too swift to
freeze. And I think I see a pelican waiting for a fish.”
“But off to the right?”
“Hills, rocks, snow.”
“Ah, yes. But once that stream flowed there. If you look closely you will
see that the narrow banks of a rapid stream are still suggested there.
Yes, that’s where it ran.”
“What changed its course?”
He shrugged. “Jam of logs and drifting ice in the spring, perhaps.
Anyway, it happened. See this.”
He dropped something in her hand. It was a fine yellow crescent.
“That,” he said with a sudden intake of breath, “is gold. Free gold, they
call it. Found it many miles up from here in the rocks. Gold up there.
But not enough for quartz mining. Too far from everywhere.
“But that,” he pointed again to the ancient bed of the stream, “looks
promising. There are rapids and falls in it, just as there are in this
new channel. And at the foot of the falls there may be golden sands, worn
away from the rocks and carried down there.”
He broke off abruptly. “Jump in! Let’s get back to camp.”
On the return journey she insisted upon his riding part of the way.
Scarcely a word was said during all that long twilight ride. She liked
him all the better for this.
“I wonder if there really could be gold?” she thought to herself. “Much
gold. Anyway, the ground is frozen. How could he prospect there now?”
As if reading her thoughts, he said:
“There’s a steam-thawer over at Fort Resolution. The doctor’s got a
tractor. We could haul it over and thaw that ground out in a hurry.”
To the girl’s great surprise, during the evening he said nothing to his
partners about this recent discovery. “I wonder why?” she said to
herself. “Well, since he does not speak of it, neither shall I.”
“Punch Dickinson will be dropping down here with the plane to-morrow
morning,” Clyde Hawke said. “I asked him to come when I saw him last.”
“That’s right!” Lloyd Hill leaped from his chair. “Just in time. I’ll
ride over with him.” All eyes were turned on him for an explanation.
“Found some encouraging dirt back in the hills,” he said simply. “Need a
thawer. One there. I’ll bring it over.”
If they expected more details they did not get them.
“Since you’re going,” Newton Mills said after a moment, as he dragged a
bag from a corner, “you might take this along and see what you can do
about getting it down to Edmonton for an analysis.”
“What is it?” Jim asked.
“Pitchblende.”
“Pitchblende, radio-active rock. Last price quoted on radium was a
million dollars an ounce,” Jim drawled. “Be great if we’d discover a
pound or two laying around loose up here somewhere!”
“Wouldn’t it!” laughed Clyde.
Though she understood little of this talk and was unable to tell what was
said in jest and what in earnest, Joyce was thrilled by this new
discovery.
“It will go to Edmonton,” she told herself. “Be some time before we can
get the report, know the truth. In the meantime we may dream, and half
the joy of life comes from dreaming.”
Before retiring she slipped on her faun-skin parka and stole out into the
crisp air of night. She climbed the ridge that lay between their camp and
the rocky cliff. Then she turned to look back.
She caught her breath. How wonderful it was! The moon, a ball of pale
gold, hung high overhead. The whole empty white world, clean as fresh
laundered linen, lay before her.
But she had not come for this. Creeping farther up the ridge where some
scrub spruce trees grew, she moved stealthily forward into the shadows,
at last parting the branches noiselessly and looking into the space
beyond.
“Ah, yes,” she breathed, “there they are.”
Three white foxes, two old ones and one half-grown cub, were sporting in
the moonlight. How beautiful they were! And how they did romp! “No
kittens could be half as cute,” she told herself.
Now they formed a circle and chased one another’s tails round and round.
Now they piled into a heap and rolled about like balls of snow. And now,
sitting in a row like choir boys, they sang their night song.
“_Yap—yap—yap!_”
In the midst of this Joyce thought of the stranger she had followed that
day, and shuddered, she hardly knew why.
All this was forgotten as, half an hour later, she crept beneath her
downy feather robe and fell asleep, dreaming dreams in which gold and
radium were sadly mixed with Indians and traps, white foxes, wild
buffaloes and moonlit night.
CHAPTER IX
EAGLE EYES
There are some who believe that, should one be so fortunate as to reach
Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, he would be at an outpost of civilization.
Nothing could be more false. Edmonton is not an outpost. It is a city.
There are those again who believe that all cities are alike. They, too,
are mistaken. The city of Edmonton is not like any other city in the
world.
No one knew this better than Curlie Carson. He was not a stranger to
other cities. Chicago, New York City he knew. Belize, in British
Honduras, had seen him on her streets. Paris he loved for her beauty. Yet
none of these thrilled him more than did Edmonton. On his days off,
between flights, nothing suited him quite so well as sitting in the
narrow lobby of his own hotel, the old Prince George, listening to the
scraps of conversation that drifted unbidden to his ears. For, while not
an outpost, Edmonton is the gateway to a thousand outposts. All the vast
Northwest lies beyond it.
And down from this Northwest, even in these conventional days when all
men appear to think alike, talk alike, and dress alike, men still drift
into Edmonton who are unique. They dress in strange ways and speak of
affairs that are far from the minds of the commonplace men of the street.
They drift into Edmonton, and then an invisible bond draws them one and
all to the Prince George. There in the lobby they sit and talk of timber
drives along some unknown river, of mineral in the Rockies, of musk ox,
of reindeer on the tundra, of fish in Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes,
of fur from the far flung barrens, of petroleum and of tar-sands, of gold
outcroppings, and a hundred other curious industries and discoveries.
“The thrill one gets from it!” Curlie said to Jerry that evening, after
they had followed the carrier pigeon to the lone cabin and had left it
there, to continue their flight to McMurray and then to Edmonton. “The
thrill comes from knowing that every man of them is sure that he is going
to make his fortune at once, or at least after the break-up in the
spring.”
“That,” said Jerry, “is the pioneer spirit. It is not dead. It still
lives here.”
“Yes!” exclaimed Curlie. “And I am glad it does! How wonderful it is to
live in a land where men still dream!”
“Ah, yes.” Jerry settled back and closed his eyes as if he, too, would
dream.
Curlie was in no mood for dreaming. The incident of the carrier pigeon
was too fresh in his mind for that.
Drawing a slip of paper from his pocket, he began studying it. “I’d give
a pretty penny to be able to read it,” he grumbled to himself after a
time. He was looking at his copy of the code message he had taken from
the carrier pigeon. So absorbed did he become that he did not notice that
a tall, dark-haired man moved across the room to take a chair directly
behind him. The man had small, piercing eyes. He wore no beard, yet the
very blueness of his chin suggested that he might recently have had a
beard. His eyes, as they fell upon the paper in Curlie’s hand, became
strangely fixed.
Curlie did not read the message. Indeed, as we have said, since no two
words of it made sense as they stood, how could he? It was one of those
messages that impart information only after they are rearranged. It is
possible that every fifth word, plucked from the rest and set in order,
would make a sentence. Then again, it might be every third or every sixth
word. Or perhaps the first and fourth, then the fifth and eighth words
might be combined with the ninth and twelfth, and so on. The thing had so
many possibilities that Curlie gave it up very soon and, folding the
paper, put it back into his pocket.
Perhaps this was just as well, for the man of the eagle eye, if one were
to judge by the tense look on his face, even from his point of
disadvantage was making progress at deciphering the message.
“Curlie,” said Jerry starting up from his reverie, “why did you allow
that little fellow back in the cabin to keep the carrier pigeon?”
“I—I don’t know.” Curlie seemed confused.
“What? You do a thing and don’t know the reason?”
“Sometimes I do.” Curlie spoke slowly. “There are times when I seem to be
guided by instinct, or shall we say led by a spirit that is not myself,
that is higher and wiser than I. At least,” he half apologized, “I like
to think of it that way. Probably it’s all wrong.
“But I say, Jerry!” He sat up quickly. The eagle-eyed one started
suddenly, then rising, glided silently away. “I say, Jerry old boy, that
chap in the cabin was a world war veteran. A real one from Canada, or
perhaps Ireland. He’s one of those scrawny little fellows so small and so
quick that a shell couldn’t get them, nor a bullet either. Served through
it all, then came back here to live on the birds and fish he can get with
a light rifle and a gill-net. You can’t be rough with a chap like that,
you really can’t.”
“No,” murmured Jerry. “Not even if he committed murder. But, Curlie, do
you think he’s in with the crowd that’s flying wild up here and burning
up our gas?”
“That,” said Curlie, “remains to be found out.”
“But, Jerry!” He leaned far forward. “There’s something about that little
trapper and the carrier pigeon that we don’t know. I’m going to keep an
eye on that little fellow and his cabin. There’s something worth knowing
there. And in the end I’ll know it.”
CHAPTER X
THE VOICE OF THE WILDERNESS
Strange to say, at about the time Curlie and Jerry spoke of the pigeon
that seemed so out of place in this frozen land, others in the cabin on
the shore of far-off Great Slave Lake were speaking of this same bird.
This did not come to pass, however, until a certain mysterious
individual, seated beside the fire in Johnny Thompson’s cabin, had
maintained complete silence for the space of two full hours. This person,
who had the straight black hair of an Indian and the sharp, hawk-like
features of a certain type of white man, was known far and wide as “The
Voice of the Wilderness,” or more briefly as “The Voice.” The Voice spoke
only when the Spirit moved him. And woe be to that one who attempted to
break in upon his periods of silence.
Johnny knew him. Sandy MacDonald knew him. They knew his ways; knew, too,
that at times he was able to render valuable service to those who
respected his silence.
When, therefore, as the twilight faded, he appeared at their door, they
greeted him with a hearty “B’Jo” (a corruption of the French _bon jour_),
made a place for him by the fire, poured him a cup of black coffee, and
left him to his silence.
That did not mean, however, that the others might not speak. On this
night it was Sandy MacDonald who talked. And when Sandy elected to speak
something was said, for Sandy was wise in many lores and was no mean
philosopher besides.
Appearing to sense the fact that The Voice there in the corner would
maintain a long silence, he drew on his fur parka and invited Johnny to
join him in a stroll in the moonlight along the shore before the cabin.
As they walked along the snow-whitened shores at a spot where, other than
themselves, no one lived, he said as a look of contentment overspread his
face:
“Johnny, for me this is the place of peace.”
“This place?” Johnny looked at him in surprise.
“Yes. I have been here before. Must have been ten years back. I was
prospecting then with a pack on my back. No, I didn’t build the cabin.
Some other dreamer had been here before me.
“It was late winter when I arrived. I lingered through spring and summer.
Why? I couldn’t tell you that. Perhaps I was getting acquainted with
nature and with God.
“You know, Johnny,” his voice was low and mellow, “for each of us there
is a place of peace. Once there was a man who was asked to define peace.
He led the one who asked to a waterfall. There in bubbling, tumbling
confusion a tumultuous cataract made its way to the rocks below.
“‘Peace!’ his friend cried. ‘Do you call this peace?’
“‘No,’ replied the philosopher, ‘Not this. But look! Above the falls,
poised over that rushing confusion, swaying there on a slender branch, is
a tiny bird. And if you will watch closely, though because of the
thundering waters you cannot hear him, you will see that he is singing
his little song to the tune of the rushing water. He has found peace.’
“And so it was for him,” the aged prospector added, after looking away at
the stars. “There are men like that, thousands of them. Go into some
great steel mill where is constant din and confusion. Look far up to a
narrow cage. A man stands manipulating levers. Climb up there and ask
him: ‘Where is your place of peace?’
“If he knows the answer it will be: ‘Here.’
“You’ll find the same thing in a great city, Johnny. Go into some
department store where the rush is greatest; in the wheat pit where men
are shouting loudest; it’s all the same. You’ll find men there who’ll
say: ‘This is the place of peace.’
“But for me—” His tone dropped once more. “As for me, this is the place
of peace. Do you know that at the back of the cabin only a few low trees
grow?”
Johnny nodded.
“It’s no clearing. No axe has been put to any tree. When God and the
birds planted these low forests they left this place for me.
“Spring and summer,” he mused, “they are marvelous here. The wild ducks
come to lay their eggs and rear their young. There’s an egg or two extra
for me. There are ptarmigan in the low hills and fish aplenty. A light
rifle and a gill-net, that’s all you need for living well.
“At night you hear the bull moose calling to his mate. One stormy day you
see the caribou passing by your cabin, a line many miles long, straking
away toward the north.
“When the notion seizes you, you drop into your canoe and paddle away.
You enter a broad bay and you say to yourself, ‘There must be a
prosperous village deep in the heart of this bay. There the saw mills are
humming and the merchants are measuring out goods over the counter. There
I will find a bed and a meal such as only good Molly McGregor can
provide.’
“But you are deceiving yourself. There is no village, no saw mill, no
store, no bed save that of spruce boughs, and no meal save that which
nature will provide.
“In all this broad bay there is no village, nor even an inhabited cabin.
This is God’s country and His alone.
“His and mine!” he added reverently. “That is why I love it. That is why,
for me, it is the place of peace.
“And, Johnny,” he went on after a time, “sometimes I’d leave the lake and
go wandering away into the heart of the forest, following a trail not
made by man but by wild creatures of the North; moose, caribou, deer and
bear had been there. And then I, smaller than them all, walked there
unafraid. It made me feel strong, Johnny; made me think I was truly a
child of the Great Father.
“The path was soft under my feet, all padded with moss, Johnny. The air
was cool and damp. And such a stillness as there was, until some little
bird began his faint, melodious song.
“And then a noisy old raven who was raising his black brood in a tree
near-by would spy me. And, ah! how he would tear the air into shreds with
his senseless warning!
“I’d hide myself away and squawk like a young raven who’d been captured.
Then I’d throw myself on my back and look up as the angry black-coated
one would come over shouting at me. I’d shout back and laugh, laugh at
him and at the sun and everything that is good and clean and new. I’d
imagine I was a boy again, Johnny, just a boy. Yes, Johnny, this is the
place of peace, the place I can call home.
“But come!” He shook himself as if to bring himself back to the present.
“Come, let us go inside. The silence may be broken. The Voice may speak.
It will pay well to listen. Indeed it will.” And once again he told the
truth.
CHAPTER XI
THE CLUE
The room Curlie Carson occupied while he stayed at the Prince George at
Edmonton was on the second floor. It was reached by a very narrow
elevator. There were probably stairways leading up. Curlie had never
taken the trouble to look into that.
On this particular night, after he had tried in vain to study out the
mysterious message, he retired early. He fell asleep the moment his head
struck his pillow.
Since it was one of those silent nights of intense cold, he left his
window open only a crack.
Late in the night he awoke with a feeling that a sudden draft of air had
blown across his face.
“Wind’s coming up.” He shuddered with cold as he crept from his bed with
the intention of shutting the window. Still not fully awake, he found
himself bewildered by the facts that presented themselves to his mind.
The wind had not risen. There was no draft. Yet the room was icy cold.
“As if the window had been wide open,” he thought.
Throwing up the shade, he looked out. At the back of the hotel was a
narrow court and an alley. Down that alley a man was walking. He was tall
and seemed rather gaunt.
“Probably some watchman been in for coffee,” he told himself.
Just then the man turned his head. He looked back and up. Then it seemed
to the boy that he resisted with difficulty an impulse to bolt down the
alley.
“Been into something,” Curlie decided. “None of my business, though.”
Having drawn the shade once more, he turned about and would have been
under the covers in another ten seconds had not his bare foot come into
contact with something soft and furry.
A surprised downward glance revealed a large mitten lying close to the
window.
“That,” he whispered excitedly, “is not my mitten. No one’s been here but
Jerry. It’s not his either. How—”
He broke off. Fully awake now, he was beginning to put facts together. He
had awakened with a sense of cold. The room was frigid; yet the window
was open only a crack. No gale was blowing. And now here was a mitten
belonging to no one he knew. And it lay by the window.
“Some one has been in this room,” he told himself. “He lost his mitten.
I’ve been robbed!” A thrill shot up his spine. “But in Edmonton of all
places! The police are speedy and successful in their work. If I’ve been
robbed I’ll—”
Once more he broke off. He had not been robbed; at least his most
valuable possessions, his purse and his watch, had not been taken.
“The mystery deepens.” He searched his mind for some motive and found it
at once.
“The paper, the copy of that message taken from the pigeon!” he exclaimed
breathlessly.
He thrust nervous fingers into his inner coat pocket.
“Right at last. It _is_ gone!
“And now,” he thought, sitting down upon his bed, “what’s next?
“I might call the office and tell them what has happened. They would call
the police. There would be an investigation. The police would ask
questions. I had been robbed? What of? A paper? What paper? A message?
What message? How did you come by it? How indeed? And how much right had
I to copy a message taken from a carrier pigeon?”
To this last question he could form no adequate answer.
At once his mind was in a whirl. He was from the United States. Having
read all his life of the efficiency of the Mounted Police (and to a boy
all Canadian officers are “Mounties”), he held those officers in great
awe.
“I’ll not notify the office.” He crept back into bed. “I’ll handle this
affair myself.”
Holding the mitten up before him, he examined it closely. It was a large
mitten made of long-haired fur. The fur was on the outside. It was gray.
First impressions made him believe it was wolf’s fur. A more careful
examination caused him to doubt it. “Some foreign fur, perhaps,” he
concluded.
“This mitten,” he told himself, “is a clue. Find the other mitten in some
one’s pocket. That’s the man.
“This mitten,” he began enlarging on the idea, “this mitten is from
Siberia. The man is a Russian. For some reason, not known to us, he and
his friends of the flying ‘Gray Streak’ have entered this land by
crossing Bering Straits and Alaska. They have treasure. They are
negotiating some secret treaty. They—there’s no knowing their mission.
But this is the man to find.
“All of which,” he told himself soberly a moment later, “is probably
entirely wrong. But who flies the ‘Gray Streak’? Who sent that message?
Who stole my copy? These are questions I mean to answer if I can.”
At that he fell asleep.
Next morning, somewhat to his surprise, he found the gray mitten still
lying by his bed. And the mysterious message was still missing.
CHAPTER XII
THE VOICE SPEAKS
The tiny clock that ticked away cheerfully in the corner of the cabin
indicated that a full hour had gone by, and Johnny and Sandy sat by the
fire awaiting the moving of the spirit that was to restore animation to
the motionless figure lumped over in the chair.
To Johnny, who was accustomed to action and plenty of it, this seemed a
strange procedure. A bit spooky it was, too. Night lay silent over all.
Only the dull glow of a half-dead fire lighted the room. From time to
time a log, burned to glowing charcoal, would break and fall. For a
moment after, strangely grotesque shadows would dance upon the wall. Then
they, too, would lapse into inactivity.
At last the figure in the corner stirred. A bony hand outstretched seemed
to beckon. Sandy knew the meaning of this. All the time the great coffee
pot had stood just close enough to the fire to simmer low. Now he poured
a steaming cup and passed it to the outstretched hand.
“See!” came in a hollow, cracked voice after the cup had been drained.
“See many strange things, me.”
“Ah!” Johnny thought to himself, not daring to stir, “The oracle speaks.”
“See Devil Bird,” the Voice went on. “See two Devil Birds.”
“He means airplanes,” Johnny told himself. “Devil Birds belong to Indian
legends. Airplanes are like them.”
“One Devil Bird,” the Voice droned on, “gray like clouds on a day of slow
rain. No marks. No, none. No white man’s writing.”
“The gray outlaw,” Johnny breathed.
Sandy placed a hand on his arm for silence.
“Other Devil Bird plenty marks,” the Voice went on. “This one follow gray
like a cloud Devil Bird. Go fast. Both, very, very fast. One go. One
follow.”
“That will be Curlie chasing the ‘Gray Streak.’” Johnny’s lips barely
moved. “How does it end?”
“See storm,” the Voice continued. “Gray storm. Plenty wind. Plenty cold.
Plenty snow. Gray Devil Bird not stop. Lost in cloud. Other Devil Bird
turn back. Run. Run very fast. Storm follow very fast.”
Johnny sat forward, scarcely daring to breathe.
“One hour, two hour, three, four, big race, cloud chase Devil Bird. Devil
Bird fly fast.
“Bye-um-bye,” the Voice lost his animation, “bye-um-bye all right. Fort
Chipewyan. All right.”
“Curlie is safe. But what about the ‘Gray Streak’?” Johnny was about to
ask the question aloud when the pressure of Sandy’s arm stopped him.
For some time after that the Voice was silent. Sandy cast some bits of
dry sprucewood on the fire. It flared up and for a time the place was as
bright as day. When it had died down the Voice spoke again.
“See girl, white man’s girl. White man, too, much white hair. See three
white man, not too old.”
“That,” thought Johnny, “will be the party who are trying to beat us in
the discovery of minerals by using the films stolen from Sandy and his
partner.” He frowned. It hurt him to feel that his one-time pals, Joyce
Mills and her father, now belonged to a rival camp. That this was due to
no fault of theirs he realized clearly.
As he closed his eyes now he seemed to see the girl, Joyce Mills, as he
had seen her on that day when, after their final battle with a great
city’s crime, she had asked:
“When do we go back?”
They had stood then on a rickety little dock before a deserted cabin on
the shore of Lake Huron.
How well he recalled his own answer: “We don’t go back. We go on into the
silent North, perhaps. It may be that we shall find a land where men are
just and merciful and kind.”
“I said that,” he told himself. As he looked back upon it now, that
remark seemed near to prophecy, for were they not now in the far North?
“There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we may,”
he thought to himself.
Ah, yes, they were in the North. Yet, how different it all was from what
he had dreamed! He had dreamed of working by her father’s side, of
sharing with him and with the girl who held a central place in both their
hearts the joys and the privations of a strange new land.
“And now this!” he thought grimly.
But the Voice spoke once more. “See girl. See dog team. See much danger.”
Once more Johnny leaned forward.
“See—see—” The Voice grew faint. “See dim. See not at all.”
Johnny started to his feet. Sandy pulled him back. Once more the fire
flared up, then again died away.
“See bird.” The Voice rose high. “Strange bird. Not Devil Bird. Bird, how
you say? Like raven. So big. No croaks. No black. Gray like clouds when
sun not yet up. Fly, fly fast, that bird. Fly far. Not sing, that bird.
White man keep in box. White man let him out, say: ‘Fly away! Fly
straight!’ Fly far, that one.”
“Must be a carrier pigeon,” Johnny thought to himself. “But who would
have a pigeon in such a land?”
Two minutes of silence. Sandy cast more tinder on the fire. The light
flared up. Johnny started and stared. The figure was no longer in the
corner. He fully expected the Voice to drone on. It did not. The Voice
had slipped silently from the room, into the night.
A few moments later, as Johnny stood looking away at the glimmering field
of white that was the frozen lake, he murmured two words:
“Moccasin Telegraph.” Then he turned back into the house.
And that is how it came about that Johnny and Sandy sat for an hour
before their fire telling one another all they knew about carrier pigeons
and speculating on their possible use in this frozen land.
“I read,” said Johnny, “an article in some paper telling of the manner in
which blackmailers used carrier pigeons. They sent a pigeon with a demand
for money to some wealthy man. The money was to be attached to the bird’s
leg and the bird was to be freed. Detectives in airplanes tried following
the pigeons.”
“Think they could?” asked Sandy.
“Who knows?” For a time after that they were silent. At last Sandy yawned
as he rumbled, “Time for three winks.”
Johnny did not get his three winks until he had put many thoughts of
airplanes, carrier pigeons, gold, radium and old-time friends to rest.
But at last sleep came, and before he knew it there was a new day.
CHAPTER XII
CURLIE SLEEPS ON THE RIVER
Time passed, as time has a way of doing. There was much to be
accomplished and Curlie Carson’s slim shoulders bore their full share of
the burden.
Always in the back of his mind as he labored one thought remained to urge
him on. He was working not for himself alone but for the glory of his
company. The men who toiled with him and those in the office in far away
Winnipeg were, he knew right well, worthy of his most loyal endeavors.
“Loyalty. That’s the great word,” John Mansfield, the President of the
Company, had said to him. “Loyalty to a proper cause or a deserving group
of human beings; that is the greatest driving power this old world will
ever know.”
Curlie believed he spoke the truth. He rejoiced in the knowledge that,
come what might, his loyalty and his most earnest endeavor would never be
overlooked, discounted or disregarded.
So Curlie worked untiringly as millions have done before and other
millions will do in the years that are to come.
All one’s life may not be spent in the unravelling of mysteries and
hunting adventure. This Curlie knew full well. His work? Was there
adventure in that? Very little. Piloting a six-passenger airplane over
the Mackenzie River route is about as exciting as driving a bus in New
York. Curlie carried a load of freight, beef, eggs, coffee, calico and a
score of other items from Fort McMurray to Fort Chipewyan. He answered an
emergency call from Resolution. A Catholic Sister was rushed to the
hospital at Edmonton.
At Edmonton he took on two cases of eggs, a case of oranges, a package of
phonograph records, one missionary and two “Udson’s Bay’s Men” (as the
native Canadians call them), and sailed away straight for the shore of
the Arctic Ocean. He was there on the second day and, after a night’s
sleep, was ready for the return journey.
It was during this return journey that one or two questions that had been
puzzling him were, in a way, answered.
At Fort Chipewyan he lay over for a few hours to await the passing of a
snowstorm. He did not tarry long enough. The storm was traveling south.
It was making but fifty miles an hour. He was doing better than a
hundred. He had not been in the air an hour when he realized that he
could not reach McMurray without running into that storm.
“That means I can’t see to land,” he grumbled to himself. Jerry was not
with him. “Have to sleep on the river.”
Sleeping on the river is not as bad as it sounds. Here and there along
the river, trappers’ cabins are to be found. The inhabitants of these
cabins are for the most part known to the pilots. And any weary bird-man
is sure of a hearty welcome there. The coffee pot is ever on the fire and
a pan of beans rich in bacon fat ready for warming. There is an extra
bunk in the corner to which the stranger is welcome. But, for the most
part, the pilot prefers rolling up in his eight-foot-square eiderdown
robe and sleeping on the floor of his cabin. This is what is known as
“sleeping on the river.”
It may appear strange that out of the three possible cabins on this
section of the river Curlie chose to come to earth before the one
occupied by the rough and ready little world war hermit who had in so
strange a manner defied him when a pigeon had been tracked to his window.
“Oh, it’s you, me lad!” the scrawny little man exclaimed, as Curlie
climbed from the cockpit. “Sure it’s sorry vittals I be ’avin’, but such
as they be, y’ are welcome.”
“Ptarmigan!” exclaimed Curlie. “Nothing better than that!” A brace of
these birds hung by the cabin door.
“And can y’ eat ’em?”
“Sure. Why not? They’re fine.”
“Every man to ’is taste. Sure I’ve fed ’em to me dorgs until they’ve
grown feathers, they ’ave. But it’s the birds ye shall ’ave, roasted with
bacon fat fer seasonin’.”
Curlie could not complain of his birds, nor of the coffee he drank.
“That,” he said, “is the best coffee I’ve had for a month!”
“An’ I wouldn’t doubt it!” exclaimed the little man. “Learned ’ow t’ brew
it from a bloomin’ Australian bushman in th’ bloody war; right in th’
trenches.
“Ye see,” he went on, warmed by his own beverage and cheered by kind
words, “I were in th’ signal service. Bein’ small, I was set to carin’
fer pigeons an’ sendin’ ’em away with messages a-hangin’ from their laigs
or their necks.
“And y’ know, son, ’avin’ ’em always with ye like yer bloomin’ dorgs,
makes ’em seem like yer bloomin’ pals. D’ ye understand that?”
“Yes,” Curlie replied, “I understand.”
“An’ ye know, son, if it weren’t fer ’avin’ one of them pigeons under me
arm in a cage made of wood, I’d not be trappin’ foxes now.”
“No?” Curlie sat up. “Tell me about it.”
He did tell Curlie. And for Curlie that story held a special interest. It
was no great story as stories go; just the account of one little underfed
Irish boy soldier lost in a forest in No Man’s Land, with a leg half torn
away by a shell, and a plain, drab carrier pigeon kept safe by the boy’s
shielding body. The boy scribbled a note to his pals in camp, then
released the pigeon that he might bear the message home.
“They found ’im safe,” he ended quite undramatically. “They found th’
message an’ after that th’ ’eathen enemy’s guns was silenced, an’ then
they found me, too.
“’T’ain’t much of a story, son. But ye’ll not be thinkin’ me soft when I
tell ye as ’ow them carryin’ pigeons seems like the truest friends I ever
had.”
“No,” said Curlie huskily, “I surely will not.”
Before Curlie left the cabin next morning he heard a sound that bore a
suspicious resemblance to the coo-coos he was accustomed to hear on his
uncle’s farm when the pigeons were waking to greet the sunshine.
“I believe this little chap kept that bird for a pal,” he told himself.
“And he might have done worse than that—a whole lot worse, yes, a whole
lot worse.”