The next morning the tail of the storm was still sweeping bitterly over
the edge of the Barren, but Philip set out, with Pierre Breault as his
guide, for the place where the half-breed had seen Bram Johnson and his
wolves in camp. Three days had passed since that exciting night, and
when they arrived at the spot where Bram had slept the spruce shelter
was half buried in a windrow of the hard, shot like snow that the
blizzard had rolled in off the open spaces.
From this point Pierre marked off accurately the direction Bram had
taken the morning after the hunt, and Philip drew the point of his
compass to the now invisible trail. Almost instantly he drew his
conclusion.
"Bram is keeping to the scrub timber along the edge of the Barren," he
said to Pierre. "That is where I shall follow. You might add that much
to what I have written to MacVeigh. But about the snare, Pierre
Breault, say not a word. Do you understand? If he is a loup-garou man,
and weaves golden hairs out of the winds--"
"I will say nothing, M'sieu," shuddered Pierre.
They shook hands, and parted in silence. Philip set his face to the
west, and a few moments later, looking back, he could no longer see
Pierre. For an hour after that he was oppressed by the feeling that he
was voluntarily taking a desperate chance. For reasons which he had
arrived at during the night he had left his dogs and sledge with
Pierre, and was traveling light. In his forty-pound pack, fitted snugly
to his shoulders, were a three pound silk service-tent that was
impervious to the fiercest wind, and an equal weight of cooking
utensils. The rest of his burden, outside of his rifle, his Colt's
revolver and his ammunition, was made up of rations, so much of which
was scientifically compressed into dehydrated and powder form that he
carried on his back, in a matter of thirty pounds, food sufficient for
a month if he provided his meat on the trail. The chief article in this
provision was fifteen pounds of flour; four dozen eggs he carried in
one pound of egg powder; twenty-eight pounds of potatoes in four pounds
of the dehydrated article; four pounds of onions in a quarter of a
pound of the concentration, and so on through the list.
He laughed a little grimly as he thought of this concentrated
efficiency in the pack on his shoulders. In a curious sort of way it
reminded him of other days, and he wondered what some of his old-time
friends would say if he could, by some magic endowment, assemble them
here for a feast on the trail. He wondered especially what Mignon
Davenport would say--and do. P-f-f-f! He could see the blue-blooded
horror in her aristocratic face! That wind from over the Barren would
curdle the life in her veins. She would shrivel up and die. He
considered himself a fairly good judge in the matter, for once upon a
time he thought that he was going to marry her. Strange why he should
think of her now, he told himself; but for all that he could not get
rid of her for a time. And thinking of her, his mind traveled back into
the old days, even as he followed over the hidden trail of Bram.
Undoubtedly a great many of his old friends had forgotten him. Five
years was a long time, and friendship in the set to which he belonged
was not famous for its longevity. Nor love, for that matter. Mignon had
convinced him of that. He grimaced, and in the teeth of the wind he
chuckled. Fate was a playful old chap. It was a good joke he had played
on him--first a bit of pneumonia, then a set of bad lungs afflicted
with that "galloping" something-or-other that hollows one's cheeks and
takes the blood out of one's veins. It was then that the horror had
grown larger and larger each day in Mignon's big baby-blue eyes, until
she came out with childish frankness and said that it was terribly
embarrassing to have one's friends know that one was engaged to a
consumptive.
Philip laughed as he thought of that. The laugh came so suddenly and so
explosively that Bram could have heard it a hundred yards away, even
with the wind blowing as it was. A consumptive! Philip doubled up his
arm until the hard muscles in it snapped. He drew in a deep lungful of
air, and forced it out again with a sound like steam escaping from a
valve. The NORTH had done that for him; the north with its wonderful
forests, its vast skies, its rivers, and its lakes, and its deep
snows--the north that makes a man out of the husk of a man if given
half a chance. He loved it. And because he loved it, and the adventure
of it, he had joined the Police two years ago. Some day he would go
back, just for the fun of it; meet his old friends in his old clubs,
and shock baby-eyed Mignon to death with his good health.
He dropped these meditations as he thought of the mysterious man he was
following. During the course of his two years in the Service he had
picked up a great many odds and ends in the history of Bram's life, and
in the lives of the Johnsons who had preceded him. He had never told
any one how deeply interested he was. He had, at times, made efforts to
discuss the quality of Bram's intelligence, but always he had failed to
make others see and understand his point of view. By the Indians and
half-breeds of the country in which he had lived, Bram was regarded as
a monster of the first order possessed of the conjuring powers of the
devil himself. By the police he was earnestly desired as the most
dangerous murderer at large in all the north, and the lucky man who
captured him, dead or alive, was sure of a sergeantcy. Ambition and
hope had run high in many valiant hearts until it was generally
conceded that Bram was dead.
Philip was not thinking of the sergeantcy as he kept steadily along the
edge of the Barren. His service would shortly be up, and he had other
plans for the future. From the moment his fingers had touched the
golden strand of hair he had been filled with a new and curious
emotion. It possessed him even more strongly to-day than it had last
night. He had not given voice to that emotion, or to the thoughts it
had roused, even to Pierre. Perhaps he was ridiculous. But he possessed
imagination, and along with that a great deal of sympathy for
animals--and some human beings. He had, for the time, ceased to be the
cool and calculating man-hunter intent on the possession of another's
life. He knew that his duty was to get Bram and take him back to
headquarters, and he also knew that he would perform his duty when the
opportunity came--unless he had guessed correctly the significance of
the golden snare.
And had he guessed correctly? There was a tremendous doubt in his mind,
and yet he was strangely thrilled. He tried to argue that there were
many ways in which Bram might have secured the golden hairs that had
gone into the making of his snare; and that the snare itself might long
have been carried as a charm against the evils of disease and the devil
by the strange creature whose mind and life were undoubtedly directed
to a large extent by superstition. In that event it was quite logical
that Bram had come into possession of his golden talisman years ago.
In spite of himself, Philip could not believe that this was so. At
noon, when he built a small fire to make tea and warm his bannock, he
took the golden tress from his wallet and examined it even more closely
than last night. It might have come from a woman's head only yesterday,
so bright and shimmery was it in the pale light of the midday sun. He
was amazed at the length and fineness of it, and the splendid texture
of each hair. Possibly there were half a hundred hairs, each of an
equal and unbroken length.
He ate his dinner, and went on. Three days of storm had covered utterly
every trace of the trail made by Bram and his wolves. He was convinced,
however, that Bram would travel in the scrub timber close to the
Barren. He had already made up his mind that this Barren--the Great
Barren of the unmapped north--was the great snow sea in which Bram had
so long found safety from the law. Beaching five hundred miles east and
west, and almost from the Sixtieth degree to the Arctic Ocean, its
un-peopled and treeless wastes formed a tramping ground for him as safe
as the broad Pacific to the pirates of old. He could not repress a
shivering exclamation as his mind dwelt on this world of Bram's. It was
worse than the edge of the Arctic, where one might at least have the
Eskimo for company.
He realized the difficulty of his own quest. His one chance lay in fair
weather, and the discovery of an old trail made by Bram and his pack.
An old trail would lead to fresher ones. Also he was determined to
stick to the edge of the scrub timber, for if the Barren was Bram's
retreat he would sooner or later strike a trail--unless Bram had gone
straight out into the vast white plain shortly after he had made his
camp in the forest near Pierre Breault's cabin. In that event it might
be weeks before Bram would return to the scrub timber again.
That night the last of the blizzard that had raged for days exhausted
itself. For a week clear weather followed. It was intensely cold, but
no snow fell. In that week Philip traveled a hundred and twenty miles
westward.
It was on the eighth night, as he sat near his fire in a thick clump of
dwarf spruce, that the thing happened which Pierre Breault, with a
fatalism born of superstition, knew would come to pass. And it is
curious that on this night, and in the very hour of the strange
happening, Philip had with infinite care and a great deal of trouble
rewoven the fifty hairs back into the form of the golden snare.