OVER THE RAPIDS
On the day following her experience with Jim and the foxes, Joyce Mills
once more took to the trail with her dog team. And a dangerous trail it
proved to be.
She wanted time to think. And what better opportunity could be afforded?
Well tucked in, half buried in caribou robes, with the wind at her back
and her toboggan sled gliding over the snow, and with Dannie, the leader,
choosing his own course, her mind had little to do but wander at will.
Her thoughts were for the moment on that strange brownish-black rock her
father called pitchblende. He had found samples and had sent them south
on the airplane.
“Will they contain radium?” she asked herself. “Much radium?”
Her father had told her a little about the wonders of radium. “A grain,”
he had said, “one thirty-second part of an ounce, is worth more than
thirty thousand dollars. In a year all the operators in the world
produced less than nine grams. Yet a single half gram owned by a great
hospital has sent many a poor soul, stricken with the deadly cancer
disease, back to his loved ones in perfect health. The healing qualities
of radium is one of God’s great gifts to man. Think what it would mean to
find a fresh and richer supply of this life-restoring mineral?”
She had thought, and had thrilled to the very core of her being.
So she dreamed on and on and, like many another, all unaware of impending
danger, enjoyed the drowsy comfort of the passing hour.
Suddenly she was shocked from her dreaming, for her dog team, breaking
away from a leisurely trot, sprang away across the snow like a pack of
hounds in full cry.
Her first thought was, “They are after a snowshoe rabbit. But Dannie! I
hoped he was better trained than that.”
So he was. Next instant she knew the cause of this terrific speed and her
cheek blanched. The outlaw buffalo, the very one who had before brought
her into great peril, was upon their trail. With a mad bellow, with white
frost pouring from his nostrils like smoke, he charged straight on.
They were on the lake’s ice. No trees to climb here. Speed was their only
chance. How fast was a buffalo? Could he outrun a dog team? She was to
know.
The team’s speed for the moment saved her. As the buffalo charged down a
treeless slope, he fell behind them. One instant more, and he was on
their trail.
“What if the sled tips and I am thrown out?” she asked herself with a
shudder.
But the thought of what might happen was crowded out by that which was
happening. The buffalo was gaining. There could be no question about it.
“He has shortened the distance between us by ten yards,” she told
herself.
She caught the gleam of his terrifying horns, heard his deep, guttural
bellow; then, dragging her eyes away, she shouted bravely:
“Now! Dannie! Now! _Ye! Ye! Ye!_ Now, Grover! Now, Ginger! _Now! Now!
Now! Ye! Ye! Ye!_”
The splendid creatures responded to her call that was half plea, half
command, by a fresh burst of speed. But was it enough? She dared not look
back. They sped on across the white waste.
Moments passed, agonizing moments they were. Urging her dogs to their
utmost, she still refrained from looking behind. If she looked her heart
might fail her.
“The way out!” she repeated to herself over and over. “What can be the
way out?”
What indeed? She might, if there was time, call upon her dogs to pause in
their mad rush. They might face about and trust their fates to a battle.
That these fine fellows would fight she did not question.
“But what chance?” Her voice was choked with a dry sob. “Hindered by the
harness, they could never win.”
Dark to the left on the horizon a clump of tamarack showed.
“Too late! We’ll never make it. We—”
Then suddenly, as upon that other occasion, a curious thing happened; a
rifle cracked.
This time the result was different. It was as if an avenging God had
said: “It is enough.” The girl heard a dull thud and, looking fearfully
about, saw the outlaw buffalo lying upon the snow. A bullet had brought
his mad career to an end.
Instinctively the dogs slowed down. The girl’s eyes searched the low
hills for her benefactor. He was nowhere to be seen.
A moment passed into eternity; another and yet another. In all that great
white world not a living creature moved.
Seized by a strange new fear, she spoke to her dogs and once more they
sped away. Ten minutes later they were back on the trail they had
followed in the beginning. And this, she discovered by a study of
snowshoe prints, was the trail of her father and his companion.
Once more she settled back in peace. But not for long. This was to be a
day of days in her life.
* * * * * * * *
Drew Lane followed hot on the trail of his message. Curlie Carson was
warming up his plane for one more journey in the land of great white
silence when a small, fast monoplane circled above the field for a
landing.
This little ship of the air caught Curlie’s eye at once. And why not? It
was painted a vivid red.
“In the name of all that’s good!” he cried, when he saw Drew Lane spring
with his pilot from the cockpit. “You don’t expect to do detective work
up here in that fire wagon, do you?”
Drew laughed as he gripped Curlie’s hand. “What does color matter? It’s
speed that counts. She’s the fastest thing in the air. Let me get sight
of those robbers in that lumbering old mail truck and you’ll see
something pretty. The Red Knight of Germany won’t be in it with me.
“But tell me.” He sobered. “You’ve seen this gray outlaw of the air. Do
you think it could be the plane that was stolen in Chicago?”
“Y—e—s,” Curlie said slowly. “It could be. Same type of plane and all
that. But—”
“But what?”
“Nothing. At least not a thing that’s tangible. Just a fancy, I suppose.
I found a mitten in my room. It was made from the pelt of a Siberian
wolf-hound.”
“For John’s sake!” Drew Lane stared. “What’s that to do with an outlaw
plane?”
Curlie told him of the carrier pigeon, of the copied message, and of the
theft in the night.
“That,” agreed Drew when he had ended, “may have a bearing. At least
we’ll not forget it. But, as for me, I stick to the theory that this
outlaw is driving the stolen mail plane. There were valuable papers on
board, being transferred from one city to another. Owners have offered a
large reward. And say!” he exclaimed, “why couldn’t those fellows be
trying to collect the reward through carrier pigeons?”
“Wrong end to,” Curlie objected. “If they were doing that the pigeons
would be sent in a crate to the persons paying the reward. Then the plan
would be to have them released with the reward in thousand dollar bills
attached to them.”
“That’s right. Well, we’ll see.”
Drew then changed the subject. “You’re off for the North?”
“In an hour.”
“I’ll trail you.”
“How far?”
“Until I get a hunch to sail away on my own.”
“Which won’t be long,” Curlie grinned, and then led him away for a cup of
coffee.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime, strange and terrible things were happening to Joyce and
her friends. With her team she had left the lake and had traveled two
miles into the low hills when, on rounding the point of a ridge, she
sighted her father.
Quite close at hand, he was bending over a rocky ledge that hung above a
rushing cataract. “A dangerous position,” she told herself. “One step
and—”
To her great consternation, at that instant she saw him throw up a
hand—then plunge downward.
There is a section to the north and east of Great Slave Lake where the
surface of the land is one heap of gigantic rocks. The land falls off to
the west so rapidly that the streams are little more than cascades
playing continually over giant stairways. It was into one of these
unnatural streams that her father had fallen.
Even as Joyce stood looking, too terrified to move, Clyde Hawke, a
powerful swimmer, plunged in after her father. So swift was the water,
however, that he was three yards behind in the mad race for life.
Never very strong, Newton Mills, now prematurely old, offered little
resistance to the wild torrent that appeared determined to carry him to
destruction. One fortunate instance, for the moment, saved him. An
overhanging snag caught at his stout jacket. It held for a space of
seconds. Before the stout canvas gave way, he had secured a tight grip on
the snag. Ten seconds more, and the brave young westerner, swimming with
one hand, had gripped the older man by the arm and was struggling to
bring him ashore.
The battle seemed all but won when, without warning, the snag gave way to
cast them once more upon the mercy of the torrent.
To Joyce, who had made her way to the brink of the stream and stood ready
to lend a hand, all seemed lost.
The last vestige of hope left her when, with a cry of horror, she saw
them, tight in one another’s grip, disappear beneath the ice of the pool
that lay beyond the rapids.
“They’re gone! Gone!” she sobbed.
But what was this? Beyond the narrow stretch of ice was a second chain of
rapids less precipitous than the first. Poised on a rock at the very
center of the rapids, she had seen a lone pelican waiting for fish. Now,
as if disturbed, he rose and went flapping away.
“Can it be—”
Plunging headlong over rocks and treacherous ice, she made her way to
this second space of open water. She was just in time to lean far over
and grip Clyde by the collar of his coat. Then, securing a hold upon a
stout willow bush, she clung with the grip of death. Not one life, but
two, depended upon her strength and endurance. Clyde Hawke still retained
his grip upon her father. Together they had passed beneath the ice and
had come out on the other side.
Ten minutes of heart-breaking battle with the elements, and they had won.
Or had they? True, her father lay upon the snow beside the exhausted
youth who had risked his life to save him; but he neither moved nor
spoke. Was he dead? She could not be sure.
Time restored strength to the plucky Clyde Hawke. Then together they
carried Newton Mills to a sheltered crevice among the rocks. After
gathering dry twigs and branches, they built a roaring fire.
“It’s the only thing that will save him,” Clyde explained. “Home is too
far away.”
Joyce removed her warm fur parka. Then she walked a short distance up the
hill. When she returned Clyde had stripped off her father’s clothing and,
after chafing his limbs, had dressed him in her parka. As she came up her
father’s eyes opened and he murmured hoarsely: “That was close, awful
close!” Then his eyelids fell.
With the hatchet from his belt Clyde cut off spruce branches and built
them a shelter. Sheltered by the three walls of boughs and warmed by the
fire, they soon were as comfortable as they might have been in the cabin.
When her splendid mind had regained its full powers, Joyce sprang up and
cried:
“The dog team!”
She had left the dogs, she hardly knew where. And the toboggan sled was
lined with caribou-skin robes.
“I will go for them.” She stood up. “As soon as you are dry enough to be
safe, we can take him home in the sled.”
“When you’re back I’ll be O.K.,” Clyde said simply.
A hurried search showed her the dogs curled up in a low run where the
sled had tangled in the willows. “Good old pups!” she murmured, as she
gulped down a sob.
Two hours after dark they arrived at camp from an expedition that had
threatened to be the most disastrous in the entire history of the
enterprise. Newton Mills was still unconscious. Would he recover? Who
could say?
By great good fortune they found Punch Dickinson there with his plane. He
had arrived late and was prepared to stay all night. Although night
flying is, as a rule, off the program of Arctic flyers, he agreed in this
extremity to go to Resolution for the doctor.
A little more than two hours later, there came the thunder of the motor
and Punch was back with medical aid.
“It’s the shock and exposure,” was the doctor’s verdict. “With care he
should pull through.”
“He’ll get the care right enough,” said Jim Baley. “He ain’t one of them
sorry old men. He’s a king. That’s what he is. We’ll stick with him if we
don’t never find narry a bit of radium nor gold.”
“Come to think of it,” Punch Dickinson started up from his place by the
fire, “I’ve a message for you. Report on your pitchblende I guess.”
He drew two envelopes from his pocket.
“Curious thing happened.” He seemed ill at ease. “You know two bags of
samples went down; both of them pitchblende? Well, some way the tags were
torn off and there’s no way of telling which sample belongs to which
outfit. I—I’m sorry it came out that way. But up here I guess you’re all
friends in the same game. Luck for one is luck for all.”
“Luck for one, luck for all?” Joyce wondered as her mind went over the
words.
“What’s to be done?”
Clyde, the westerner, scratched his head. “Guess we get first look,”
smiled Lloyd Hill, putting out a hand for the envelopes.
“Seems that it might be a case of sending down more samples,” he murmured
as he tore open the first envelope.
“I’m sorry some one blundered,” Punch apologized. “I know how hard it is
to get samples. I—”
“Just a minute.” Lloyd Hill held up a hand. “Looks as if it hasn’t made
any difference. The reports are almost identical; same amount of copper,
same nickel, same cobalt and—”
“Radium! Radium!”
Instantly the word was on every tongue. “Just a trace,” said Lloyd
reluctantly. “Not enough to make the slightest difference. In other
words, we lose, all of us; the other fellows, too.”
“Oh!” The cry that escaped the girl’s lips was a cry of pain. Her father
had hoped much from his radium rock. She had hoped, too. She had dreamed.
Johnny Thompson had dreamed. They were all friends together. And all had
lost.
“And now this!” she whispered as she turned to hide a tear that would not
stay. “Now father is desperately ill. If he recovers I must tell him
this. And we hoped so much!” Truly this was her darkest hour.
The air of the cabin suddenly seemed oppressive. Throwing on a coat, she
wandered out into the night. As she stood there bathing her hot temples
in the cool night air, a figure moved silently toward her.
“You find gold? Mebby yes? Mebby no?”
It was the Indian, he of the traps. He had found his broken trap, she
felt sure of that. As she looked he seemed to leer at her in a mocking
manner. Then he passed on into the night.
The look on that man’s face disturbed her. Many things troubled her. She
was tired, needed rest.
“I must sleep,” she told herself.
The doctor was to remain, at least for the night. Her father was in good
hands. Creeping away to her small room, she disrobed in the dark and was
soon fast asleep.