ON THE YUKON
To follow the trail of the outlaw of the air for the first four days was
but to trace out his sled-tracks in a wilderness that was trackless save
for the footprints of caribou, wolf and bear. But once he had reached the
Yukon, all this was changed. There were three trails to choose from.
Which had he taken? The one to the left which led up the river, the one
to the right, down the river; or the one which led straight before them
up one of the branches of the mighty Yukon? The last trail, less traveled
than the others, led away toward the Arctic Ocean.
“He may have taken the down-river trail, for that would carry him farther
and farther from communication with the outside world,” said Jennings, as
he searched in vain to distinguish his track from those of scores of
other travelers.
“Might have taken the up-river trail,” he went on. “He’d be in some
danger of getting caught by a message sent on ahead but since the
telegraph wires are down the message would have to be sent by radiophone,
so he could listen in and take up some branch and over the hills if he
needed to.”
“You don’t think he’d go straight ahead, up the branch?” said Curlie.
“Why should he?” the miner looked at him in surprise. “Up that trail for
fifty or a hundred miles you’ll find Indian huts and miners’ cabins here
and there. After that you’ll find nothing but a blind trail that grows
steeper and steeper. There’s no food to be had save wild game and little
enough of that. Why should he go up there?”
“Might run up there for a blind and live with an Indian for a time.”
“If he did we’d trap him like a rabbit in a hollow stump!” declared the
miner emphatically.
“Well, since we don’t know which way to go and it is getting dark,”
suggested Joe, “I move that we make camp right here.”
This suggestion was acted upon and some two hours later Curlie might have
been seen nodding over his radiophone boxes. His companions were fast
asleep but he had remained up with the receiver clamped over his head in
the rather forlorn hope that the outlaw would let slip some fragment of
message which might reveal his whereabouts.
“Fact is,” he told himself, “that in spite of all the evidence against
it, I still have a sneaking feeling that the Whisperer is a real person,
a girl, and that she’s up here somewhere in the white wilderness. I—I
sort of hope that sooner or later she’ll whisper some more secrets to
me.”
In this hope, for the night at least, he was doomed to disappointment. No
whispered secrets came to him from out the air.
A message came, however, a message which set his mind at work. He had
fallen quite asleep when he was suddenly wakened by a voice in his ear.
He recognized at once the voice of the government official who had
dictated that other message regarding the band of smugglers caught
operating on Behring Straits.
The message itself to him was unimportant, or at least for the time it
seemed so. It gave more definite details of the evidence procured and
stated one fact that was most important: The big man, the one higher up,
the brains of the smugglers, had not been apprehended. Indeed, it was not
even known who he was. It was thought that he might be at this moment in
Alaska, but where? This question could not be answered.
The message had proceeded to this point. Curlie had maintained a drowsy
interest in it, when he sat up with a sudden start, all awake.
The message had been broken in upon by a powerful sending set which was
much nearer to Curlie than was that of the government man.
“Got—gotta get him,” he mumbled as his slim fingers caressed his
radio-compass coil.
“There! Got him! That’s it!”
He was not a moment too soon, for not only had the message ceased but the
interruption as well.
“Huh!” he grunted, scratching his head. “Huh! Up there. Wouldn’t have
believed it. Why, good gracious, it can’t be! Yet I couldn’t have missed
it. How that man travels! Two hundred miles! And no trail to speak of.
Probably none at all.”
For a moment he sat in a brown study. Then he suddenly shook his fist
toward the north.
“We’ll get you now, old boy!” he exclaimed. “We’ll get you! You’re
breaking trail for us. We’ll follow that trail if it takes us right out
on the ice-floes of the Arctic and we’ll get you, just as Jennings says,
like a rabbit in a hollow tree. That is,” he said more soberly, “if there
doesn’t come a heavy snow.”
The man, so the radio-compass had said, had taken the trail which led
straight away toward the Arctic Ocean.
Then for a long time Curlie sat staring at the knob of his tuner. He did
not see the knob. He did not see anything. He was concentrating,
reasoning, thinking hard, trying to put a lot of facts together and make
them fit.
So the master-mind of the smugglers had not been caught. What if the
outlaw of the air proved to be that man. Why might he not? That would
explain why he was so continually breaking in upon the message regarding
it.
“And that,” he whispered, leaping to his feet and dashing out of the tent
in his excitement, “that would explain why he appears so eager to
frustrate all of Munson’s plans to keep in touch with the outside world
by radiophone. Munson assisted in breaking up the smuggler band. If the
outlaw is their leader, there is nothing he would not do to wreak
revenge.
“And—and”—he breathed hard because of the thoughts that came trooping
into his mind mind—“that might explain the man’s change of plans. The
very night that Munson sent his message telling of his supply of food on
the shore of the ocean this outlaw, who probably listened in, turned
about and started straight north, to—to where?”
Dashing back into the tent, he unfolded a map. For a moment with strained
attention he studied it.
When he straightened up it was to whisper, “Yes, sir! That’s it! Flaxman
Island! His present course will bring him straight to Flaxman Island and
Munson’s food supply.”
He sat down again. “Now,” he asked himself, “once he arrives there, what
will he do? Will he winter there, living upon the explorer’s supplies and
thus save himself from prison, or will he, out of revenge, destroy the
supplies? If he stays and lives on the supplies, what will happen if
Munson comes ashore with his band? Huh, some interesting problems there!”
“Interesting and foolish,” he told himself as he dropped into another
mood. “All imagination, I guess. Suppose there’s nothing to it. Probably
he’s not the king of smugglers at all, but just a plain mischief-maker of
the air. When he caught Joe’s message to me, that night when we fought
the wolves, he knew he was being pursued and turned back. Now he’s hiding
out till the storm blows over. Possibly knows where there is a native
reindeer herder up there at the end of the stream and over the hills!
“Well, old top,” he again shook his fist toward the north, “you might
just as well come out of your hole. The storm isn’t going to blow over.
Your little cabin of false dreams is going to be wrecked by it, and that
before many days.”