Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Rod Crawford, Dave Morgan
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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_The Radio-Phone Boys Stories_
On the
Yukon Trail
_By_
JAMES CRAIG
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago
_Printed in the United States of America_
Copyright, 1922
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
_All Rights Reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Whisper from Afar 9
II On Arctic Feathers 18
III A Clue 27
IV Joe Missing 36
V Dangerous Business 44
VI The Battle Cry 51
VII Revenge for a Lost Comrade 58
VIII A Watch at the Side of the Trail 66
IX Who Is This Whisperer? 73
X On the Yukon 80
XI A Moving Spot on the Horizon 88
XII A Bad Follow Up 95
XIII Saved by a Whisper 103
XIV A Strange Sight 113
XV Curlie Vanishes 120
XVI A Strange Steed 128
XVII A Knotty Problem 138
XVIII A Mysterious Attack 145
XIX Ships That Pass in the Night 154
XX “We Have Met with Disaster” 163
XXI A Tense Situation 170
XXII A Mad Dream 179
XXIII “A Bear! A Bear!” 186
XXIV A Wild Mix-Up 193
XXV The Wild Stampede 199
XXVI The Sparkle of Diamonds 206
XXVII Diamonds and Other Things 214
On the Yukon Trail
CHAPTER I
THE WHISPER FROM AFAR
Curlie Carson sat before an alcohol stove. Above and on all sides of him
were the white walls of a tent. The constant bulging and sagging of these
walls, the creak and snap of ropes, told that outside a gale was blowing.
Beneath Curlie was a roll of deerskin and beneath that was ice; a
glacier, the Valdez Glacier. They were a half day’s journey from the city
of Valdez. Straight up the frowning blue-black wall of ice they had made
their way until darkness had closed in upon them and a steep cliff of ice
had appeared before them.
In a corner of the tent, sprawled upon a deerskin sleeping-bag, lay Joe
Marion, Curlie’s pal in other adventures.
“Lucky we’ve got these sleeping-bags,” Joe drawled. “Even then I don’t
see how a fellow’s going to keep warm, sleeping right out here on the ice
with the wind singing around under the tent.” He shivered as he drew his
mackinaw more closely about him.
Curlie said nothing. If you have read the other book telling of Curlie’s
adventures, “Curlie Carson Listens In,” you scarcely need be told that
Curlie Carson is a boy employed by the United States Bureau of Secret
Service of the Air, a boy who has the most perfect pair of radio ears of
any person known to the service.
In that other adventure which had taken him on a wild chase over the
ocean in a pleasure yacht, he had had many narrow escapes, but this new
bit of service which had been entrusted to him promised to be even more
exciting and hazardous.
He had been sent in search of a man who apparently was bent on destroying
the usefulness of the radiophone in Alaska; his particular desire seeming
to be to imperil the life of Munson, a great Arctic explorer, by
interrupting his radiophone messages. This man was known to be possessed
of abundant resources, to be powerful and dangerous. He had a perfect
knowledge of all matters pertaining to the radiophone and was possessed
of a splendidly equipped sending and receiving set. By moving this set
about from place to place, he had succeeded in eluding every government
operator sent out to silence him. Already he had done incalculable damage
by breaking in upon government messages and upon private ones as well.
Just at this moment, Curlie sat cross-legged upon his sleeping-bag. With
head and shoulders drooping far forward, as if weighed down by the
radiophone receiver which was clamped upon his ears, he appeared half
asleep. Yet every now and again his slim, tapered fingers shot out to
give the coil aerial which hung suspended from the ridge pole of the tent
a slight turn.
“I don’t see how we are going to get the rest of the way over this
glacier!” grumbled Joe. “That wall looks straight up; slick as glass,
too. How y’ ever goin’ to get three sleds and eight hundred pounds of
junk up there? Ought to have taken the lower trail. What if it is three
times as far? Good trail anyway.”
“Leave that to Jennings,” murmured Curlie.
“Oh! Jennings!” exclaimed Joe. “Mebby he doesn’t know so much. He’s been
gone too long already. What’s that package he took with him? Gave us the
slip already, maybe. Might be just a frame-up to keep us from making good
time.”
“Jennings looks all right to me,” persisted Curlie.
He gave the aerial another turn.
“Well, anyway!”—
“Sh”—Curlie held up a warning finger. His nose was wiggling like a
rabbit’s when he eats clover. Joe knew what that meant; Curlie was
getting something from the air.
Curlie started as the first word came to him—a whisper. He had heard that
whisper many times before. For many days it had been silent. Now she was
speaking to him again, that mysterious phantom girl of the air.
As he eagerly pressed the receivers to his ears, he caught, faint as if
coming from afar, yet very distinctly, the whispered words:
“Hello - Curlie - I - wonder - if - you - are - listening - in -
to-night. You - are - on - your - way - north. I - wanted - to - tell -
you - the - man - you - are - after - is - on - the - Yukon - Trail -
coming - south. He - started - yesterday. You - may - meet - him - Curlie
- but - be - careful. It - is - big - Curlie - and - awful - awful -
dangerous.”
Cold beads of perspiration stood out upon the tip of Curlie’s nose as the
whisper ceased.
He had measured the distance. The girl was a thousand miles away to the
north. So that was it? The man he had been sent to track down by means of
the radio-compass was coming south over the trail. They would meet. He
wondered how and where. There were wild, desolate stretches of tundra and
forest on that trail. Inhabited only by Indians and wolves, these offered
fitting background for a tragedy. Whose tragedy would it be?
“We might wait for him,” he mused, “but, no, that wouldn’t do. He might
turn back. Then all that time would be lost. No, we must press on. We
must get off this glacier at once.”
In spite of his optimism, this glacier bothered him. He had taken this
trail at the suggestion of Jennings, a man who had gone over the trail
during the gold rush of ’98 and who had offered to go with them now
without pay. He had, as he expressed it, been called back by the “lure of
the North,” and must answer the call. Curlie had decided to accept his
assistance and advice. Now he wrinkled his brow in thought. Had he made a
mistake in the very beginning?
Just then, as if in answer to his question, Jennings, a short,
broad-shouldered person with keen, deep-set blue eyes and drooping
moustache, parted the tent-flaps and entered.
“What? Not turned in yet?” His eyes showed surprise.
“Had to see that you got back safe,” smiled Curlie. He made a mental note
of the fact that Jennings had not brought back the package he had carried
away. Only a light axe swung at his belt.
“Well, that’s kind and thoughtful,” said Jennings. “But we’d better get
into them sleepin’-bags pronto. Got a good stiff day to-morrow. Make good
progress too or I’m no sourdough-musher.”
Fifteen minutes later, Curlie having buried himself deep in the hairy
depths of his sleeping-bag, had given himself over to a few moments of
thought before the drowsy quiet of the tent lulled him to repose.
The sleeping-bags, in spite of Joe’s forebodings, proved to be all that
one might ask. With nothing but a square of canvas between his
sleeping-bag and the ice, and with the temperature at thirty below, clad
only in his pajamas Curlie felt quite as comfortable as he might have
felt in his own bed back home.
“Wonderful thing, these bags,” he thought dreamily. His thought about the
future, the day just before him, was not quite so reassuring. They had
come to ridges of ice on the surface of the glacier just at nightfall.
There were many of these ridges. Dogs without sleds could climb them, but
up their slopes they could not pull a pound. A man climbed them with
difficulty. His feet slipping at every attempted step, he was constantly
in danger of being dashed to the bottom. How were they to pack eight
hundred pounds of equipment and supplies over these seemingly
unsurmountable barriers?
Yet he dreaded to think of turning back. That meant four days of travel
to reach a point which, straight over the glacier, was but twenty miles
before them.
“Ho, well,” he sighed at last, “let to-morrow take care of itself.
Perhaps Jennings really knows a way. He doesn’t look like a
four-flusher.”
With that his mind turned for a moment to the girl, the Whisperer. Though
he had never seen her, he had come to think of this Whisperer as a real
person. And indeed she must be, for, times without number, in the Secret
Tower Room back there in the city, in the wireless room on the yacht, in
the tent on the trail, her whisper had come to him. Always it told of the
doings of one man, the man he had been sent after. But what sort of
person? He had pictured her to himself as a small, dark, vivacious girl
with snapping black eyes. Yet that was only a piece of fancy. He knew
nothing about her save the fact that she seemed always near the man he
now was seeking. He wondered vaguely now whether he would meet her upon
this trip. He tried to imagine the cabin, the lonely trail or the deep
forest of the north where he might meet her.
“Probably never will,” he told himself at last. “Probably will always be
just a whisper.”
In the midst of his revery he fell asleep.