An hour later Philip looked at his watch. It was close to midnight. In
that hour his nerves had been keyed to a tension that was almost at the
breaking point. Not a sound came from off the Barren or from out of the
scrub timber that did not hold a mental and physical shock for him. He
believed that Bram and his pack would come up quietly; that he would
not hear the man's footsteps or the soft pads of his beasts until they
were very near. Twice a great snow owl fluttered over his head. A third
time it pounced down upon a white hare back in the shrub, and for an
instant Philip thought the time had come. The little white foxes,
curious as children, startled him most. Half a dozen times they sent
through him the sharp thrill of anticipation, and twice they made him
climb his tree.
After that hour the reaction came, and with the steadying of his nerves
and the quieter pulse of his blood Philip began to ask himself if he
was going to escape the ordeal which a short time before he had
accepted as a certainty. Was it possible that his shots had frightened
Bram? He could not believe that. Cowardice was the last thing he would
associate with the strange man he had seen in the starlight. Vividly he
saw Bram's face again. And now, after the almost unbearable strain he
had been under, a mysterious SOMETHING that had been in that face
impinged itself upon him above all other things. Wild and savage as the
face had been, he had seen in it the unutterable pathos of a creature
without hope. In that moment, even as caution held him listening for
the approach of danger, he no longer felt the quickening thrill of man
on the hunt for man. He could not have explained the change in
himself--the swift reaction of thought and emotion that filled him with
a mastering sympathy for Bram Johnson.
He waited, and less and less grew his fear of the wolves. Even more
clearly he saw Bram as the time passed; the hunted look in the man's
eyes, even as he hunted--the loneliness of him as he had stood
listening for a sound from the only friends he had--the padded beasts
ahead. In spite of Bram's shrieking cry to his pack, and the
strangeness of the laugh that had floated back out of the white night
after the shots, Philip was convinced that he was not mad. He had heard
of men whom loneliness had killed. He had known one--Pelletier, up at
Point Fullerton, on the Arctic. He could repeat by heart the diary
Pelletier had left scribbled on his cabin door. It was worse than
madness. To Pelletier death had come at last as a friend. And Bram had
been like that--dead to human comradeship for years. And yet--
Under it all, in Philip's mind, ran the thought of the woman's hair. In
Pierre Breault's cabin he had not given voice to the suspicion that had
flashed upon him. He had kept it to himself, and Pierre, afraid to
speak because of the horror of it, had remained as silent as he. The
thought oppressed him now. He knew that human hair retained its life
and its gloss indefinitely, and that Bram might have had the golden
snare for years. It was quite reasonable to suppose that he had
bartered for it with some white man in the years before he had become
an outlaw, and that some curious fancy or superstition had inspired him
in its possession. But Philip had ceased to be influenced by reason
alone. Sharply opposed to reason was that consciousness within him
which told him that the hair had been freshly cut from a woman's head.
He had no argument with which to drive home the logic of this belief
even with himself, and yet he found it impossible not to accept that
belief fully and unequivocally. There was, or HAD been, a woman with
Bram--and as he thought of the length and beauty and rare texture of
the silken strand in his pocket he could not repress a shudder at the
possibilities the situation involved. Bram--and a woman! And a woman
with hair like that!
He left his tree after a time. For another hour he paced slowly back
and forth at the edge of the Barren, his senses still keyed to the
highest point of caution. Then he rebuilt his fire, pausing every few
moments in the operation to listen for a suspicious sound. It was very
cold. He noticed, after a little, that the weird sound of the lights
over the Pole had become only a ghostly whisper. The stars were growing
dimmer, and he watched them as they seemed slowly to recede farther and
farther away from the world of which he was a part. This dying out of
the stars always interested him. It was one of the miracles of the
northern world that lay just under the long Arctic night which, a few
hundred miles beyond the Barren, was now at its meridian. It seemed to
him as though ten thousand invisible hands were sweeping under the
heavens extinguishing the lights first in ones and twos and then in
whole constellations. It preceded by perhaps half an hour the utter and
chaotic blackness that comes before the northern dawn, and it was this
darkness that Philip dreaded as he waited beside his fire.
In the impenetrable gloom of that hour Bram might come. It was possible
that he had been waiting for that darkness. Philip looked at his watch.
It was four o'clock. Once more he went to his tree, and waited. In
another quarter of an hour he could not see the tree beside which he
stood. And Bram did not come. With the beginning of the gray dawn
Philip rebuilt his fire for the third time and prepared to cook his
breakfast. He felt the need of coffee--strong coffee--and he boiled
himself a double ration. At seven o'clock he was ready to take up the
trail.
He believed now that some mysterious and potent force had restrained
Bram Johnson from taking advantage of the splendid opportunity of that
night to rid himself of an enemy. As he made his way through the scrub
timber along the edge of the Barren it was with the feeling that he no
longer desired Bram as a prisoner. A thing more interesting than Bram
had entered into the adventure. It was the golden snare. Not with Bram
himself, but only at the end of Bram's trail, would he find what the
golden snare stood for. There he would discover the mystery and the
tragedy of it, if it meant anything at all. He appreciated the extreme
hazard of following Bram to his long hidden retreat. The man he might
outwit in pursuit and overcome in fair fight, if it came to a fight,
but against the pack he was fighting tremendous odds.
What this odds meant had not fully gripped him until he came cautiously
out of the timber half an hour later and saw what was left of the
caribou the pack had killed. The bull had fallen within fifty yards of
the edge of the scrub. For a radius of twenty feet about it the snow
was beaten hard by the footprints of beasts, and this arena was stained
red with blood and scattered thickly with bits of flesh, broken bones
and patches of hide. Philip could see where Bram had come in on the
run, and where he had kicked off his snowshoes. After that his great
moccasin tracks mingled with those of the wolves. Bram had evidently
come in time to save the hind quarters, which had been dragged to a
spot well out of the red ring of slaughter. After that the stars must
have looked down upon an amazing scene. The hungry horde had left
scarcely more than the disemboweled offal. Where Bram had dragged his
meat there was a small circle worn by moccasin tracks, and here, too,
were small bits of flesh, scattered about--the discarded remnants of
Bram's own feast.
The snow told as clearly as a printed page what had happened after
that. Its story amazed Philip. From somewhere Bram had produced a
sledge, and on this sledge he had loaded what remained of the caribou
meat. From the marks in the snow Philip saw that it had been of the low
ootapanask type, but that it was longer and broader than any sledge he
had ever seen. He did not have to guess at what had happened.
Everything was too clear for that. Far back on the Barren Bram had
loosed his pack at sight of the caribou, and the pursuit and kill had
followed. After that, when beasts and man had gorged themselves, they
had returned through the night for the sledge. Bram had made a wide
detour so that he would not again pass near the finger of scrub timber
that concealed his enemy, and with a curious quickening of the blood in
his veins Philip observed how closely the pack hung at his heels. The
man was master--absolutely. Later they had returned with the sledge,
Bram had loaded his meat, and with his pack had struck out straight
north over the Barren. Every wolf was in harness, and Bram rode on the
sledge.
Philip drew a deep breath. He was learning new things about Bram
Johnson. First he assured himself that Bram was not afraid, and that
his disappearance could not be called a flight. If fear of capture had
possessed him he would not have returned for his meat. Suddenly he
recalled Pierre Breault's story of how Bram had carried off the
haunches of a bull upon his shoulders as easily as a child might have
carried a toy gun, and he wondered why Bram--instead of returning for
the meat this night--had not carried the meat to his sledge. It would
have saved time and distance. He was beginning to give Bram credit for
a deeply mysterious strategy. There was some definite reason why he had
not made an attack with his wolves that night. There was a reason for
the wide detour around the point of timber, and there was a still more
inexplicable reason why he had come back with his sledge for the meat,
instead of carrying his meat to the sledge. The caribou haunch had not
weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds, which was scarcely half a
burden for Bram's powerful shoulders.
In the edge of the timber, where he could secure wood for his fire,
Philip began to prepare. He cooked food for six days. Three days he
would follow Bram out into that unmapped and treeless space--the Great
Barren. Beyond that it would be impossible to go without dogs or
sledge. Three days out, and three days back--and even at that he would
be playing a thrilling game with death. In the heart of the Barren a
menace greater than Bram and his wolves would be impending. It was
storm.
His heart sank a little as he set out straight north, marking the
direction by the point of his compass. It was a gray and sunless day.
Beyond him for a distance the Barren was a white plain, and this plain
seemed always to be merging not very far ahead into the purple haze of
the sky. At the end of an hour he was in the center of a vast
amphitheater which was filled with the gloom and the stillness of
death. Behind him the thin fringe of the forest had disappeared. The
rim of the sky was like a leaden thing, widening only as he advanced.
Under that sky, and imprisoned within its circular walls, he knew that
men had gone mad; he felt already the crushing oppression of an
appalling loneliness, and for another hour he fought an almost
irresistible desire to turn back. Not a rock or a shrub rose to break
the monotony, and over his head--so low that at times it seemed as
though he might have flung a stone up to them--dark clouds rolled
sullenly from out of the north and east.
Half a dozen times in those first two hours he looked at his compass.
Not once in that time did Bram diverge from his steady course into the
north. In the gray gloom, without a stone or a tree to mark his way,
his sense of orientation was directing him as infallibly as the
sensitive needle of the instrument which Philip carried.
It was in the third hour, seven or eight miles from the scene of
slaughter, that Philip came upon the first stopping place of the
sledge. The wolves had not broken their traveling rank, and for this
reason he guessed that Bram had paused only long enough to put on his
snowshoes. After this Philip could measure quite accurately the speed
of the outlaw and his pack. Bram's snow-shoe strides were from twelve
to sixteen inches longer than his own, and there was little doubt that
Bram was traveling six miles to his four.
It was one o'clock when Philip stopped to eat his dinner. He figured
that he was fifteen miles from the timber-line. As he ate there pressed
upon him more and more persistently the feeling that he had entered
upon an adventure which was leading toward inevitable disaster for him.
For the first time the significance of Bram's supply of meat, secured
by the outlaw at the last moment before starting out into the Barren,
appeared to him with a clearness that filled him with uneasiness. It
meant that Bram required three or four days' rations for himself and
his pack in crossing this sea of desolation that reached in places to
the Arctic. In that time, if necessity was driving him, he could cover
a hundred and fifty miles, while Philip could make less than a hundred.
Until three o'clock in the afternoon he followed steadily over Bram's
trail. He would have pursued for another hour if a huge and dome-shaped
snowdrift had not risen in his path. In the big drift he decided to
make his house for the night. It was an easy matter--a trick learned of
the Eskimo. With his belt-ax he broke through the thick crust of the
drift, using care that the "door" he thus opened into it was only large
enough for the entrance of his body. Using a snowshoe as a shovel he
then began digging out the soft interior of the drift, burrowing a two
foot tunnel until he was well back from the door, where he made himself
a chamber large enough for his sleeping-bag. The task employed him less
than an hour, and when his bed was made, and he stood in front of the
door to his igloo, his spirits began to return. The assurance that he
had a home at his back in which neither cold nor storm could reach him
inspirited him with an optimism which he had not felt at any time
during the day.
From the timber he had borne a precious bundle of finely split
kindlings of pitch-filled spruce, and with a handful of these he built
himself a tiny fire over which, on a longer stick brought for the
purpose, he suspended his tea pail, packed with snow. The crackling of
the flames set him whistling. Darkness was falling swiftly about him.
By the time his tea was ready and he had warmed his cold bannock and
bacon the gloom was like a black curtain that he might have slit with a
knife. Not a star was visible in the sky. Twenty feet on either side of
him he could not see the surface of the snow. Now and then he added a
bit of his kindling to the dying embers, and in the glow of the last
stick he smoked his pipe, and as he smoked he drew from his wallet the
golden snare. Coiled in the hollow of his hand and catching the red
light of the pitch-laden fagot it shone with the rich luster of rare
metal. Not until the pitch was burning itself out in a final sputter of
flame did Philip replace it in the wallet.
With the going of the fire an utter and chaotic blackness shut him in.
Feeling his way he crawled through the door of his tunnel, over the
inside of which he had fastened as a flap his silk service tent. Then
he stretched himself out in his sleeping-bag. It was surprisingly
comfortable. Since he had left Breault's cabin he had not enjoyed such
a bed. And last night he had not slept at all. He fell into deep sleep.
The hours and the night passed over him. He did not hear the wailing of
the wind that came with the dawn. When day followed dawn there were
other sounds which he did not hear. His inner consciousness, the
guardian of his sleep, cried for him to arouse himself. It pounded like
a little hand in his brain, and at last he began to move restlessly,
and twist in his sleeping-bag. His eyes shot open suddenly. The light
of day filled his tunnel. He looked toward the "door" which he had
covered with his tent.
The tent was gone.
In its place was framed a huge shaggy head, and Philip found himself
staring straight into the eyes of Bram Johnson.