  Eagerly, the policeman and Toma examined the knife that Dick had found, which had, without a doubt, once reposed in Sandy McClaren’s sheath. Yet, after the first flush of excitement had worn off, they all realized that the clue was a very inadequate one. In itself it could not lead to Sandy. Only it served as an added incentive for them to search more diligently for some more definite trace of the lost boy. As they circled slowly, getting farther and farther from camp, the snow continued to present a hard crust which had registered no record of the feet that had passed over it under the impenetrable shroud of the polar darkness. But their patience was rewarded when Toma found a bit of bearskin with the long hair adhering to it. Upon examining the fur closely, they saw that it had been slashed from a larger piece of fur with a knife. “It might have been cut from Sandy’s trousers,” ventured Dick. “That’s possible,” rejoined Corporal McCarthy, “but we just found what seemed to be Sandy’s knife. What did he cut the fur with?” Neither Dick nor Toma could answer that question, and at the time it did not seem important enough to worry about. Close to a hundred feet from where they had spied the first bit of bearskin, they found another fragment of the same kind of fur. It, too, had been obviously cut with a knife. “Now I know Sandy has cut off these bits of fur to mark the way he went,” Dick cried excitedly. “Let’s hurry on and see where the next one is.” After progressing nearly a quarter mile across the crusted snow, they had picked up nearly twenty bits of fur similar to the first one Toma had found, and were certain something more tangible would soon turn up. Then the trail of fur fragments disappeared and was replaced by the imprint of several snowshoes, as they at last reached soft snow. All three bent to examine the tracks. There were three pair of snow-shoe tracks and one pair of small boot tracks. “The boot tracks are Sandy’s, I’m pretty sure,” was Corporal McCarthy’s confident statement. “The snow-shoe tracks must have been made by those who captured him, unless someone picked up his trail after the moon came up.” Hastening onward, they followed an unbroken trail for nearly a half hour, when they again were discouraged upon reaching more crusted snow upon which the trail vanished. But not long were they at loss. Running ahead a short distance, Dick stooped and picked up something which he waved triumphantly to Toma and the Corporal. It was another bit of bearskin. “Sandy’s started marking his trail again!” Dick called. “I’m getting so I’m not so sure just who has been leaving these markers,” Corporal McCarthy said. “That knife we found back there makes me wonder if it’s really Sandy who has dropped those pieces of fur.” “Why, who could it be then?” Dick asked incredulously. “We’ll see, we’ll see,” was the policeman’s enigmatic reply. “But in the meantime you two fellows be ready to obey orders.” Wondering what the Corporal was hinting at, Dick started out to find more of the trail markers. About every fifty or a hundred feet they found them, so that there was no doubt as to the fact that they were going right. Corporal McCarthy cautioned them to keep their eyes open now, for they had reached the end of the level snow and were among some large snowdrifts formed by huge boulders that had lodged the snow. Directly over their heads loomed the long upward slant of the high moraine which had so long served them as a landmark. However, they were in a part of the country unfamiliar to them, and so did not know what to expect. Added to this the moonlight deceived the eyes, and made it difficult for them to tell a boulder from a living body. “Be prepared for an ambush,” the Corporal instructed Dick and Toma. “Mistak hasn’t taken Sandy all this distance for nothing. He knew we would follow.” But minute after minute passed and there was no sign of Mistak or his band, nor of Sandy, with the exception of the clear prints of the snowshoes leading in and out and around the drifts and boulders. Like so many ghosts the three trailers hurried on in the pale moonlight, their snowshoes making scarcely no sound at all in the feathery drifts. Suddenly, there broke upon the icy air a mocking laugh. The three stopped dead in their tracks, mouths agape. “What was that?” whispered Dick. “Him sounded like bad spirit,” Toma’s voice was subdued from sudden fright. Corporal McCarthy said nothing, but his hands tightened on his rifle while he searched every black shadow with probing eyes. Shaken by the eerie sound, they prepared to go on again, when once more the mad laugh pealed out, vindictive, vengeful and subtlely mocking. “It must be a mad man,” quavered Dick. “Nonsense,” grated the policeman. “It’s some of that devilish Mistak’s work. Anyway the sound came from ahead of us. Unlimber your rifles, lads, we’re going to see some action, I think. If I’m lucky enough to get a bead on Mistak, I’ll never get him to Canada alive, mark my word.” Crouching, so as to make use of every bit of shelter, they now moved slowly forward, holding their breaths for a repetition of the cackle of laughter. The very boulders themselves now seemed to be moved in the deceptive moonlight under their imaginative eyes. And again they heard the laugh—ahead of them yet. On and on they crept, a dew of perspiration standing out on their foreheads, and freezing there in tiny drops. But not a sign of any person or thing did they actually see. Only the frequent peals of wild laughter urged them fearfully on, like a will-o’-the-wisp in some frozen swamp. The boulder strewn snow presently gave way to treacherous gashes in the ground made by the erosion of some age-old glacier. Clambering and sliding in and out of these precipitous gullies, they kept on after the elusive laughter. Long since they had given up following the snowshoe tracks. The laughter of a man—even a mad man was much more tangible than footprints. But had it not been for the grim, fearless policeman, Dick and Toma would have turned back. An end to their reckless advance came in a very unexpected manner. Clambering out of a steep gully, they found themselves at the edge of a trackless expanse of soft white snow, apparently as level as a floor and just as solid footing. The laughter had not been repeated for some time before they negotiated the last glacier gash, and they were beginning to wonder if their ghostly guide had deserted them. It was Toma who saw it first—the form of a human being sitting erect against a snow bank across the white level of snow. “Look. Somebody there!” Toma whispered. “It—it must be a dead man,” faltered Dick. “Not on your life,” gritted Corporal McCarthy. “See him move. That fellow’s tied and that fellow is Sandy McClaren!” Dick’s eyes suddenly testified as to the accuracy of the policeman’s statement. “Sandy!” he almost shrieked, starting to run toward him. But the iron hand of Corporal McCarthy dragged him back as if he had been merely a pillowful of feathers. “Look out there!” cried the Corporal. “This is a trap you can bet and we’ll go slow.” Sandy apparently was gagged, for though he had begun to wriggle, he made no sound with his mouth except an almost inaudible gurgle. Corporal McCarthy was pawing in the snow for something. Dick finally saw what he was after—a stone. The policeman finally found one that was quite heavy. He raised this above his head and to Dick and Toma’s amazement, threw it out upon the snow between them and Sandy. The boys expected the stone to bound and roll a little way, but to their horror, as the stone struck it disappeared and, following it, more than twenty square feet of snow caved downward with a rustling hiss and disappeared into a fathomless black void. Dick’s gasp of dismay was followed by a piercing voice from the shadows of the boulders behind them. It was the voice that had done the laughing, but this time it did not laugh but cried out in an expression of rage and disappointment. Corporal McCarthy’s rifle was at his shoulder when the sound reached his ears, but there was nothing to shoot at—only the ghastly moonlight of the polar night, and the inky shadows. The policeman raised his rifle and shook it. “Beat you that time—you half-breed devil!” his big voice pealed out across the desolate wastes. “And I’m praying you’ll come down here and fight it out where I can get a bead on you.” But there was no answer, and a moment later the Corporal turned back to the boys. “Clever trap,” he explained in an undertone. “But I had my suspicions, and as soon as I saw Sandy out there in plain sight, I knew there was a nigger in the fence. That was a snow bridge we came pretty near busting through. Wind built it up across this gorge. Now we’ve got to get at the boy.” Calling across the chasm, they explained to Sandy that they must find some other place to cross over to him. Hurriedly making their way to the left along the treacherous brink, which for many yards was bridged by the frail snow drift, they finally came to a narrow place and one by one leaped over with their snowshoes in their hands. It took them but a few moments to strap on their snowshoes again and run to Sandy. In a trice they had slashed his bonds and yanked the gag from his mouth. With a joy they could not express, Dick and Sandy embraced, whereupon Sandy’s story came tumbling from his lips by fits and starts. Briefly, it was this: About half way to Moonshine Sam’s igloo, following the beaten path, he had heard stealthy footsteps coming toward him. In the gloom he could see nothing, and so he had stopped, waiting for some sign that the person was a friend or an enemy. Then, without warning, a smothering fur robe had been thrown over him and he was lifted up in strong arms and carried away. At a distance from the igloos far enough so that his cries for help would not bring his friends, Sandy’s captors had put him on his feet, and taken off the robe. They then had taken his knife away from him and had thrown it away. Sandy had then been compelled to accompany the men on foot. When his eyes had grown accustomed to the dimly starlit night, he had managed to recognize Mistak among the three, and had found out that they were leaving bits of fur behind them to mark their trail. Sandy had not been able to fathom their purpose in leaving such a plain trail, nor had he been fully aware of the nature of the cunning trap laid by Mistak when the outlaw had left him bound and gagged against a snowdrift, after a long roundabout journey among a network of deep gorges. “I didn’t know what it was all about till I saw you three stop out there in front of me, and throw that stone,” Sandy concluded. “I guess I made a pretty good bait for that trap.” “I pretty near went right on after you, too,” shivered Dick, recalling their narrow escape, “but Corporal McCarthy was wise enough to see through it.” “Well, let’s be getting back to camp,” the policeman interrupted them. “We’re a lot farther from home than we ought to be. If a storm catches us before we get in there’s no telling whether we’ll ever get back.” “I’m sure beginning to wish it really was home we were going back to,” groaned Sandy. “In two days I’ve only had one chunk of walrus meat to eat.” “Buck up, Sandy,” Dick replied cheerfully, as they set out on the back trail. “We’ll be back at camp before you know it.” But Dick was wrong. Before they were on the trail an hour, a bank of clouds that had been hovering in the north, spread out fan-like across the stars and presently the moon was blotted out as if some giant hand had taken it from the sky. With not even the stars to light their way, the four travelers stumbled blindly along, until Corporal McCarthy ordered them to halt. “We can’t keep on like this,” said the Corporal grimly. “We’ll get so far off the back trail that we’ll never find our way back. The only thing we can do is build an igloo and wait for the moon to come out again. Let’s hope a storm don’t come up.” After blundering about in the darkness, which was so thick they could cut it with a knife, they finally located a drift which was solid enough and large enough for the cutting of snow blocks for an igloo. It was a poor snow house they erected largely by their sense of touch, but it served the purpose. Hovering inside their makeshift shelter they waited silently for the clouds to disperse, praying for fair weather to continue. Yet the supreme power that governed the capricious whims of the mighty ice cap seemed deaf to their supplications for a half hour after the igloo had been completed the temperature began to fall alarmingly. A wind sprang up out of the northeast, just a whisper at first, like the vast, mournful sigh of a melancholy spirit, then rapidly it grew louder, by gusts and fits, until a thirty mile an hour gale was sweeping the snow wastes with the fury of a stampeded lion. The wind sought out every niche and cranny in the hastily erected igloo, and through the heavy garments of the shivering refugees it cut like so many tiny knives. Futilely, they tried to stop up the holes where the wind seeped in while the gale laughed and howled and whistled, as if in mad glee at the discomfiture it was causing the shivering mortals. In the grip of the terrible cold, the four kept from falling into that dreadful drowsiness which signals death by freezing, by beating themselves and each other with their numbed arms. The fur rims of their parkas became heavy with icicles formed by moisture from their mouth. Their eyelashes froze together from the watering of their eyes. With each breath it seemed red hot irons had been thrust down their throats and liquid fire loosed in their lungs. For extreme cold has much the same sensation of extreme heat. Two hours they fought a losing fight, then the capricious gods of the north changed their minds and the wind began to lay. Almost imperceptibly at first, each gust a little weaker than the last, until finally, they all crept out of the igloo to find a vast silence pervading the ghostly land. Cold and pale, the Arctic moon now lighted their way, for the clouds had been herded southward by the passing polar wind. The temperature had risen a little when all four set out on the return trail, now almost blotted out save where the wind had struck it squarely and had blown the loose snow away around the packed snowshoe tracks. In his weakened condition Sandy had almost succumbed to the cold, and part of the way they had to carry the gritty young Scotchman. Thus they stumbled into the village of igloos hours later, lungs burning from the frost, bodies numb and prickling in a dozen places. No more had they arrived than they found their troubles were not over. Corporal Thalman met them with disturbing news, as soon as they had stumbled into an igloo and lighted an oil heater. Moonshine Sam had escaped during the storm! |
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