WHO IS THIS WHISPERER?
“What does it mean?” puzzled Joe, as Curlie reported the Whisperer’s
message. “Did he listen in last night when I was calling for help? And
was he frightened by that?”
“Might have,” said Curlie, “but anyway you couldn’t help that. You were
in a mess and had to be helped out.”
For a moment the two boys were silent. Then Curlie spoke again:
“Might not be that at all. I listened in on a message last night. It was
from Munson, the explorer. It was not broken in upon as his others have
been. There may have been something in that message which caused the
outlaw to turn back.”
“Well, anyway,” he exclaimed, “whatever the cause is, we’ll go out and
after them the first thing after dawn. Is everything all right; sled
fixed and dogs doctored up?”
“Everything’s fine as silk.”
“All right then, let’s have some chow. After that we’ll turn in. Luck
doesn’t go with any one person forever. Why, even to-morrow we might
catch up with our outlaw friend.”
“Hardly that,” smiled Joe. “We’ve got forty or fifty miles of unbroken
trail to make before we really get on the scent at all. By that time,
traveling on a hard-packed trail as he is, he’ll have a big lead on us.
There are probably forks and crosses in the trail a hundred miles or so
farther on, so we’ve got a real task ahead of us. We’ll have to be sly as
foxes to catch him now.”
“I suppose that’s so,” Curlie sighed, “but we’ll get him, see if we
don’t.”
“Say!” exclaimed Joe suddenly, “who is this whispering friend of yours
anyway?”
“Don’t know,” said Curlie, scratching his head.
“Ever seen her?”
“I don’t know.”
“How’s she come to be traveling with this man anyway?”
“Can’t say.”
“Mighty queer, I’d say.”
“I’d say as much myself. Queer and interesting. I may as well admit that
I am as much interested in coming up with the Whisperer as I am in
catching this outlaw.”
“Well, we won’t do either if we don’t eat and turn in,” said Joe as he
reached for the frying pan.
Joe’s prophecy that they would not at once catch up with the man they
sought, proved correct. The first two days they struggled forward through
soft snow, over a trackless wilderness. Then they came upon the campsite
of the outlaw, his last camping place before he turned back.
To Curlie this was a thrilling moment. It was the first earthly sign he
had ever seen of this strange pair, the outlaw and the Whisperer.
Heretofore he had followed only the trackless trail of the air. Now he
had footprints of a man and of many dogs to go by. The mark of the camp,
though three days old, was as fresh as if it had been abandoned but two
hours before. There had been no snowfall. There was never a breath of
wind in that forest.
“As long as his trail is not joined by any other,” Jennings told the
boys, “we can follow it with our eyes shut. We could do that three months
from now. There might be four feet of snowfall, but on top of it all
there would be the depression made in the first two feet of snow. There
is never any wind to move the snow about, so there’s your trail carved in
the snow, permanent as marble till the spring thaw comes.”
“But when he comes to the Yukon River trail?” suggested Curlie.
“Well, that’s going to be harder.” The miner wrinkled his brow. “But
we’ll find a way to track him—the way he hitches his dogs, track of his
sled. There’s always something if you are sharp enough to see it.”
Curlie examined the marks of the camp very carefully. It was evident that
the man knew as much about making an Arctic camp as did Jennings. The
square made by the tent floor showed that he had spread down a canvas
floor and the heaps of spruce twigs tossed all about told that he had
bedded the place down before he spread out his blankets or sleeping-bags.
“Two teams,” was Jennings’ comment, “and eight or nine dogs to the team.
Fine big fellows too. Shouldn’t wonder if they were Siberian wolf
hounds.”
One thing Curlie made a secret search for: footprints. There were enough
of one sort. The broad marks of a man’s foot clad in moccasins or Eskimo
skin-boots were everywhere present. What he sought was the mark of a
smaller foot, a much smaller foot, the foot of the Whisperer. But though
he examined every square yard of trampled ground around the camp, and
though he ran ahead of the dogs for two miles after resuming the trail,
he saw no trace of a woman’s footprint.
“Looks like he drove one dog team and led the other,” he told himself.
“Looks as if—”
For the first time he began to doubt the existence of the Whisperer.
“Can it be,” he asked himself, “that the outlaw and the Whisperer are
one? Does he change his voice and pretend to give me tips when he is in
reality only leading me on?”
In his mind he went back over the times when the Whisperer had broken in
on the silence of the night. There had been those two times when he had
been listening in at the Secret Tower Room, back there in the city (told
about in “Curlie Carson Listens In”). There had been two times when he
had caught her whisper out over the sea.
“That time,” he told himself, “she told me he had gone north. Why should
this man keep me informed of his own doings? He ought to know that I’d
report it; that someone would follow him if I didn’t.
“No,” he told himself, “there must be a real Whisperer. The girl must
exist. She’s somewhere up there on the trail ahead of us. And yet,” he
reasoned, “if she is there, where are her tracks?”
Again he began convincing himself that she did not exist, that it was all
a hoax invented by the mind of this clever outlaw. The more he thought of
it the more sure he became that this was true. The more sure he became of
it the more his anger grew.
“To be shamed, to be tricked, deceived, buncoed by the man you are
pursuing!” he exploded. “That is adding insult to injury!”
With the plain trail stretching straight out before them, they now
traveled far into the night, traveled until dogs and men were ready to
drop. Only then did they turn to the right of the trail and set their
weary muscles to the task of making camp.