LOST LOOT
In that tremendous moment Kit lost all sense of the cold that chilled
and numbed him to the marrow of his bones. A tingling pulsebeat rang in
his temples and throbbed in his fevered blood. He forgot that dawn was
at hand. He forgot his lurking enemies. He took no account of his
stiffening muscles and chattering teeth. He had found the lost treasure
sledge. It had taken its final plunge over the embankment to be engulfed
for the years in Great Owl Run. This was the place. A brave woman had
died here, and men had fought and killed and vanished. Here the valiant
Bill Tearl had taken leave of the remembering world.
Scarcely realizing what he was doing, Kit ducked under the water and
came up with a bulging, slimy sack in his hand. He deposited his burden
on the shelf, and went under again for another, and for another. There
was no need to look into the swollen bullhide sacks to know what they
contained. No metal excepting raw gold could have the heft of these
bags.
He brought them up, one after another, until warning cramps forced him
out of the water. For a few minutes he ran up and down the bank, beating
himself with his arms, while Oogly trotted behind, slapping him with
stinging and resounding slaps. As soon as his blood felt the resurgence
of life Kit went back into the brook. Five times he climbed in and out
of the water and at his fifth shivering emergence he lugged with him the
last bag of gold.
That appalling job was done. He looked from the heap of sodden bags
towards the sky which, as usual after an overly bright moon, had turned
threateningly black. There was a promise of more snow to-night. If it
snowed hard enough the evidences of this morning’s work would be buried
before to-morrow.
Kit had decided what to do next. He would transport the treasure to
another pool, and he alone would know the secret of the new hiding
place. So to thwart Hell Bent. While Bent was trying to re-locate his
loot, Kit would be given the leisure for his own grim hunting. And if in
the end Bent should kill him, then at least he had struck back at the
killer with a last sardonic jest.
He told Oogly as much as was needed to enlist that amiable savage’s
assistance. A half mile farther upstream they found a spot under a sheer
bank where black ripples ran deep under a sagging ice-bridge. They were
able to carry only two of the plethoric bags apiece. These they lugged
to the marked spot and dumped them overboard.
They made a dozen trips that morning, back and forth, burdened with bags
of gold, which they jettisoned in the swift current of Great Owl Run.
Luck favored them to-day. Their enemies presumably took it for granted
that they were sleeping out the daylight, as usual, in some well-hidden
nook of the Great Owl woods. There were no snipers dogging them this
morning, no curious intruders crossing their trail. And before their
task was finished it had begun to snow.
The dreary downfall began with a misty sleet, which changed presently to
white-drifting flakes. Kit had grown sick of the snow as a man wearies
of an unremitting disease. But now he looked with satisfaction at the
fluff that had begun to fill his tracks. By this time to-morrow nobody
could know that he and Oogly had been tramping up and down the creek
bank.
He watched the dark ring of ripples as the last bag hit the water and
sank out of sight. The Great Owl treasure had found a new resting place,
where it might lie untouched for twelve or fifty or a thousand years.
Who knew?
Although Kit was soaked to the skin under his outer clothing, he felt
overheated after his heavy labor. Unless he dried out immediately he
risked pneumonia or worse. He and his companion were starting back for
the shelter of the Great Owl timber, when Oogly broke away through the
alders. Kitchener followed, to find the Esquimau scowling above a fresh
snowshoe trail that came down almost to the edge of the creek.
The two men peered into the thicket. The tracks were not half an hour
old. Their maker obviously had been standing in concealment, looking
down at the creek. With sinking heart Kit realized that some one had
watched him while he toiled up and down the stream.
There was no sound save the whisper of snow in the frost-hard branches
of the alders and willows. The intruder must have fled at his approach.
He examined the tracks again. They were not the narrow, skiing prints of
the Yellow Knives, nor Hell Bent’s waffle-webs. But he knew whose they
were. A pair of rounded Chippewyan squaw raquettes, too light in build
for a man’s weight. He had seen these same tracks too often to be
mistaken. The trail maker was Diane Durand.
So the morning’s work was wasted: unless he gave the quietus to Diane.
The watchful Oogly may have noticed the sudden dour molding of his face
and jaw, that sinister Tearl look which meant that one of the tribe had
solved a knotty problem to some one’s else disadvantage. He turned
curtly.
“You go to the cabin,” he said, “and stay there to-day with Mayauk. If
the white girl leaves or anybody comes to see her, you come to me at our
camp, right away.”
Oogly’s squinty eyes held the same look that a malamute’s eyes hold for
the man he trusts. Kit took his leave without any misgivings, confident
that the Esquimau would never fail him.
He retraced his steps to the Great Owl woods, chanced a small fire to
dry his underwear, and later turned into his bag and slept the day
through. When he awakened in the early evening he found himself in a
welter of snow-filled darkness.
All of Oogly’s worldly belongings, combined with his own, formed such a
meager kit that he was able to bundle everything into one pack, which he
toted through the woods and across the clearing to the cabin door.
Diane admitted him without protest when he knocked. “Hello!” said the
girl, and there was nothing in her voice or manner to betray any guilty
consciousness of her morning’s activities.
Kit looked at the ground before tramping into the doorway. The
afternoon’s snowfall had covered the old trails, and there were no
fresher tracks arriving or departing. He shut the door and thumped down
his pack.
“Get ready to pull out,” he commanded. “All of us are traveling to the
police outpost to-night.”
The calm announcement produced a silence, which Diane broke into at last
with a brittle laugh. “Anybody may go who wishes,” she said. “Which
leaves me out, because I don’t wish to.”
Kit did not raise his voice. “We want to start at once. Please hurry.”
He saw the girl’s silhouette grow taut in the reflecting firelight. “Are
you by any chance,” she asked carefully--“in earnest?”
Kit didn’t think it necessary to answer. “Oogly,” he suggested, “will
you call the dogs and hitch ’em in? Everything we’ve got we can carry on
the one sledge.”
“Because if you are,” put in Diane, “you’ll have to get over it. I’m not
going!”
Kitchener faced her unsmiling, maddeningly supercilious. “Mayauk will
help you to pack. If not, I will. Only hurry. And this time we leave off
the ‘please.’”
“Why, you--” She stopped and glared at him. The Diane of the moonlight
was gone. This one was resentful and bitter and untouchable, yet he
never felt an allure more poignant than the beauty of her sultry and
stormy eyes.
He was utterly cold at this moment, because it would have been so easy
to be otherwise. “Oh, very well,” he cut in. “If you force me--I arrest
you.”
“What?” she shrieked.
“If you want the whole formula: I warn you. In the name of the king--”
“What for?” she cried. “By what right?”
“Vagrancy!” he said.
Diane’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. She was so outraged
that for those seconds she was unable to speak or even breathe.
“Why--why--you--what do you mean?” she finally managed to gasp.
“The word has only one meaning. A vagrant is a sort of a hobo without
visible means of support.”
“You’re calling _me_--” It was too humiliating to say. She ripped open
the throat of her shirt with a gesture so violent that one of the
buttons flew across the room. From beneath the open collar she jerked a
string and a chamois bag. The bag was torn wide and she pulled out a
roll of yellow-backed currency so thick that her fist was barely able to
close around it.
“And you say I have no means of support!” she taunted him furiously.
“What’s that?” he asked mildly.
“It’s money! I haven’t counted it: but I guess there’s a couple of
thousand or more!”
“What’s it for?” inquired Kit.
“What’s what for? Money?” Her pretty mouth attempted to sneer. “Why, my
dear sir. Money is to spend. To buy things with.”
“What things?”
“Anything! Anything you want!”
“Where?”
She blinked and looked at him a trifle uncertainly. “At the stores,” she
finally said.
“What stores? I haven’t seen you buying anything. The flour you eat, the
salt, sugar, bacon, beans--I gave you. You’re using my matches and my
shotgun. You don’t even own the blankets you sleep in. Yet you say I
have no right to arrest you for vagrancy. Well, you’re under arrest.”
The girl’s face changed from red to white, and then went red again.
“I’ll pay you for anything of yours I ever had,” she informed him.
“What’s the price?”
“I’m not in business,” he told her. “You’ll find the nearest
store-keeper at Edmonton, or maybe McPherson. When you get down there
you can buy anything you fancy. Here we don’t recognize money, because
there’s nothing for it to buy. That’s why I’m transporting you to
Edmonton. You won’t be a vagrant there.”
“You’re not--” Diane was almost crying with mortification and rage. “I
won’t go!”
“Remember the first morning I met you?” inquired Kit. “You were trussed
up with a pair of handcuffs, riding on a policeman’s sledge. I’ve got
those same handcuffs, and I’ve got a sledge.”
“Oh you--you rotter!” she said with a vitriolic intensity.
“So was the other bird. And you had to travel with him. Ready?”
Diane stood stock-still, her great eyes searching his face with a
helpless, hunted look. Her impassioned resolution seemed to waver. Two
tears trickled from her lashes and glistened on her cheeks. “What can I
do,” she moaned, “when a bully and a brute--so much bigger and
stronger--and I’m just a girl--”
“Certainly you are,” said Kit.
He turned away to spare her his smile. He should have done this before,
he was thinking. She had worried and hampered him more than he would
have admitted. But now he soon would have her off his hands, out of his
sight and, he hoped, out of his mind. She knew where he had sunk the
gold. But that no longer mattered. It would be months before she could
see her uncle again. Long before that time Kit should have settled up
his score with Hell Bent.
With Diane sitting by in sullen hostility, the other three soon gathered
up their belongings and loaded up the dog sledge. They closed the cabin
and started eastward in a swirling storm, Oogly breaking trail, the baby
riding in a nest behind the dogs, Mayauk handling the “gee” pole, and
Kit and Diane trudging speechless in the rear.
Through the long, blustering night they held their steady pace, and
shortly after the crack of dawn they arrived at the police outpost of
_Saut Sauvage_.
Constables Devon and Cross were at home. The two officers tried
valiantly to hide their astonishment and welcomed their unexpected
visitors with a hospitality that was warmer than the bleak quarters in
which they lived.
Kit explained affairs in a few words. “This is the girl I told you
about. Looking for her uncle and hasn’t found him yet. And this
wilderness is no place for a child.”
He was short and brusque in his speech--a commanding officer telling a
subordinate what to do. “I want you, Constable Cross, to make a patrol
south and take her with you. She says she doesn’t want to go, but that’s
just too bad. Technical charge of vagrancy. You can let the inspector
decide what to do about it.”
Cross looked furtively at the girl, and blushed. His simple face
reflected the pride he felt in being chosen for a responsibility, the
joyous anticipation of a visit to civilization, and also a painful,
gawking shyness at the thought of the company he would have on his way
out.
“It isn’t really right for a young girl to be roamin’ about alone in
this country,” he stammered. “You’ll find it’s better, miss, to be away
from here.”
Diane studied the constable coolly, and then, for just an instant, a
gleam of malicious amusement tinged her eyes. Kit intercepted that
glance, with its sly and tantalizing humor for mischief-making, and
somehow he did not envy the doughty constable his journey out of the
forests.
After their night’s trip the wayfarers were glad to accept the comforts
of the police shack. The rear storeroom, with its cots for guests, was
turned over to Diane and Mayauk. Kit and Oogly stayed awake only long
enough for breakfast. Then they crawled into the constables’ bunks and
throughout the snowy daylight slept the sleep of the righteously weary.
Subdued voices, the scuffle of feet, a poker rattling in the fire-box of
the stove, the faint rasp of snow falling aslant on the log walls and
tar-paper roof, the savor of meat cooking--Kit awakened amid lazy sounds
and pleasant smells. The frosted window square opposite him loomed
opaque against the outer blackness of the night.
Constable Cross was bending over the bake oven on the stove. Devon sat
in low-voiced conversation with a man whom Kit had not seen before, a
broad-backed man with a bullet head, hatrack ears and a round-necked
hair-cut. Diane, Mayauk and Oogly were nowhere visible.
Kit hitched himself into his clothes while lying in the bunk, and then
opened the skin curtains and slid out onto the floor.
In a far corner of the room, beyond the angle of the bunk, he discovered
Diane. The girl was seated on a camp stool, a lock of auburn hair tipped
over one straight eyebrow, her pert nose in the pages of a big book
which she held balanced on one crossed knee. She evidently had spent the
snowy afternoon ransacking the outpost’s supply of literature. Old books
and lop-eared magazines and tattered newspapers littered the table and
the floor about her chair. She appeared as aloof from the rest of the
company as if she had retired to a private apartment with a “no
admittance” sign on the door.
As Kit stretched himself and sauntered across the room the stranger
turned to stare at him. The man’s face, which was close shaven and
unwholesomely pale, had the battered, hard-used appearance of a
third-rate prize-fighter’s mug. His eyes were as protuberant and held
the same metallic coldness as a frog’s eyes.
“Oh, good-evening, sergeant,” said Devon, standing up. “This man came in
on us out of the storm this afternoon. His name is--_um_--”
“Pettijohn,” supplied the stranger. “How-da-do, sergeant.”
“Where’re you from?” inquired Kit without much interest.
“The States.”
“Yeah? You must enjoy chilly weather to be coming up here now.”
“Oh, any time’s good enough for my business,” said the man. “I’m a
missioner. Our people sent me to look after the welfare of the Indians.”
Kit surveyed the stranger ironically. He wondered what sort of welfare
the Yellow Knives might acquire from this ornery-looking plug-ugly. Then
he turned away indifferently. What the intruder did to the Yellow
Knives, or what they did to him, didn’t really seem to matter.
The kettle was humming on the stove, and Kit poured out a basinful of
the first hot water he had reveled in for weeks. He scrubbed his face
and neck and hands, and then paused before a wall mirror with its
chained comb. He was plastering back his wet, sleek-black hair, when he
heard a chair scrape on the floor. Feet stumbled across the room. A
voice cried out:
“I knew it. I knew it!”
The comb dropped to swing on its chain. Kit looked around. He saw Diane
under the lamp. In her hands she clutched an open book--a volume bound
brightly in scarlet and gold. There was not a vestige of color left in
her face. She breathed fitfully and heavily. A ruddy light glinted in
her wide spaced eyes.
Every man in the room gaped at her.
“Look at this!” she said to Constable Devon. “Your police year book. The
_Scarlet and Gold_!”
“Yes,” said Devon, puzzling his eyebrows. “Yes, it is!”
Diane’s laugh was harsh and cramped, utterly different from her real
laughter. “He says he is Sergeant Buck Tearl.” For a moment her glance
fixed Kit rigidly, and then she softly laid the book on the table. She
tapped the open page with her finger, and stepped back.
“Here,” she said, “is a photograph of Sergeant Buck Tearl.”