He took his time about his meal. The moon would be higher later in the night. Plenty of time anyway. No one would start back with him to bring a dog sled load of gasoline to his plane before dawn.
He was just pushing away the warm robe he had drawn over his knees when a curious sound reached his ears, a clank-clank like the moving of gears.
“How strange!” he exclaimed. “Up here close to the Arctic Circle. What a night! Will wonders never cease?”
A low dark bulk came gliding over the ice. The clank-clank grew louder.
“It’s a tractor!” he told himself, only half believing. “But here! Hundreds of miles beyond the end of steel! Who would believe it?” He was forced to believe, for, before he could realize it, the thing was upon him.
Suddenly the clatter and clank ceased. “Hello there!” came in a cheery voice. “What you camping here for? Resolution is just around the corner.
“Oh, it’s you, Curlie Carson?”
The newcomer had dismounted and approached on foot.
“And you, Doctor LeBeau!” came from the boy. “I’m surely glad to see you.
“But that thing—” he pointed at the tractor. “What do you do with that?”
“Many things, my boy. Very useful. Snake out logs. Launch boats. Plenty of work. Just now I am coming from moving an Indian family to their new home seven miles away. Cabin was twelve feet square. Just slid skids under it, hitched on and moved ’em, house, furniture, bag, baggage and babies. Not so bad!” He laughed a merry laugh.
“But answer me. What you doing here?”
“Out of gas.”
“Out of gas!” The doctor whistled. “Thought you were Old Man Preparedness himself.”
“So did I. But when your gas cache has been robbed? What then?”
“Robbed?”
Curlie told him the story of the outlaw plane and the missing gas.
“That’s bad!” exclaimed the doctor. “Have to put a stop to that! Dangerous people who would leave some poor aviator to starve hundred miles from anywhere. Go after him!”
“I will if there’s a chance.”
“But now? Want a tow to town?”
Curlie looked at the tiny tractor, the smallest made, then at his great airplane. He laughed. “Seems a bit odd. Guess you could do it, though.”
“Sure could. Safest way, too. Could give you my gas. Not safe flying at night, though.
“Tell you what!” The doctor’s tone was kindly. “You roll up in your feather robe there in the cabin. I’ll tow you in. You’ll wake up in Resolution. You look like you needed sleep.”
“I’m asleep standing up just now! But you?”
“I’m O.K. We sleep all hours up here. Besides, you fellows have done a lot for us; brought the world to our door, that’s what you’ve done. Just as well do a little something for you.”
So it happened that Curlie arrived at Fort Resolution during the wee small hours of the night. After sleeping straight through until morning, he was as ready as ever for that which a fresh day might bring.
That day passed uneventfully. The dawn of the second day found Curlie once more in the air. He was headed south.
All the glories of the great white wilderness lay beneath him. The glory of the perfect day, sky filled with drifting clouds, air with a tang all its own. But none of these things held the boy’s attention.
His thoughts were divided between his immediate task, the piloting of his plane, and that which lay in the immediate past and the probable future.
At Resolution he had met Speed Samson, his rival. Great had been the other pilot’s astonishment when told of Curlie’s adventure with the “Gray Streak.”
“So it’s true after all!” Speed had exclaimed. “Thereisa plane running wild in this wilderness. The pilot’s living off other men’s food caches, like as not, and using others’ gas.”
“Yes,” Curlie replied. “What are we going to do about it?”
“Wait for orders.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” the boy agreed slowly. By nature he was a person of action. “But suppose we come upon that ‘Gray Streak’ before orders reach us?”
“Pass ’em up. Let ’em go. That’s me. My record, the record of my company, the mail contract’s at stake.
“And,” he added, meaning to be truly generous, “much as I want to win that award for our company, I’d advise you to do the same.”
“It would count in your favor if you drove such a menace from the air or brought them to justice,” Curlie said thoughtfully.
“If! Pretty big IF, boy. And if you fail, you may be in the sticks somewhere with busted landing gear, out of the running. See?” Curlie did see. And for the time being this seemed good counsel. Long and sober thinking had left the matter unsettled in his mind.
One item that weighed heavily on the safety side was the fact that he carried in his plane that which was to prove of great value to his friend Johnny Thompson and all the world as well—pitchblende.
The venerable giant of a prospector, Sandy MacDonald, with whom Johnny Thompson worked, had prepared his samples sooner than Johnny had thought he might. He had sent those bits of rocks, that gave promise of producing mineral worth a million dollars an ounce, over to Resolution. They were now in the fuselage of Curlie’s plane.
“Guard them well,” had been the prospector’s last word of admonition. “Those samples are pitchblende. From pitchblende comes radium. And radium has been a boon to mankind. Through its mysterious rays of light it has cured thousands of that most dreaded of diseases, cancer. If we can but discover a cheaper supply, we will be benefactors of the whole race. Take them to Edmonton. There’s a laboratory there. If they are not equipped to analyze them, they’ll send them on. In time you’ll bring us the result. And may God speed your flight!”
“May God speed your flight.” Curlie seemed to hear those words now and to feel the gentle touch of a powerful hand on his shoulder.
“This is important,” he told himself. “I must not fail him. The pay is small. The reward may be very great. We—”
His hands gripped the wheel tightly. A great white cloud lay directly before him. Out of that cloud had come a plane. The air was clear, the plane not far distant. His eyes could not deceive him.
“Jerry!” he shouted to the mechanic at his side. (He had taken Jerry on at Resolution.) “Jerry, that’s the ‘Gray Streak’!”
“Absolutely!” Jerry straightened up in his place.
The young pilot’s mind became a battle field of conflicting emotions. Safety, sure reward, the good of his company, his own personal glory seemed to lie upon the side of his nature that whispered: “Keep straight on. Let them go their way.”
“And there is the pitchblende, the radium,” he said aloud.
At the same time he appeared to hear a voice say, “Times come in our lives when the good of scores, hundreds, perhaps thousands we have never seen, may never see, drives from our minds that which seems good for us and those best known to us. When that time comes we must act for the good of all.”
“Who said that?” he asked himself. He could not answer. Somewhere in the past it had been stowed away in the recesses of his mind. Now here it was. It was as if God had spoken.
“Jerry,” he shouted, “we’ve got to go after them! Follow them to the end. Find their hide-out. Bring them to justice!”
“Absolutely!” Jerry turned his face about to display a broad grin. “Absolutely, son!”
Still endeavoring to think through the things which Johnny Thompson had revealed to her, Joyce Mills rode home beneath the great, golden Arctic moon.
More than once she murmured: “One of them is a thief. But how could he be?”
Three weeks spent in the company of very few persons in the lonely land of the North reveals much. In three weeks, under such conditions, he is a sly person indeed who does not reveal his true nature. Joyce had believed that by this time she knew the young men of her camp as well as she did Johnny Thompson, Drew Lane, or any other person with whom she had been closely associated.
“How hard it is to judge people!” She sighed deeply. To discover that we have been deceived in a friend is always a shock.
“I cannot doubt Johnny’s word,” she assured herself. “And yet—”
She could form no real answer to the questions that came unbidden to her mind.
“I will watch,” she told herself, “watch and wait. ‘Be sure your sin will find you out.’ I read that somewhere and I believe it is true. If there is a thief in our camp he will steal again, perhaps many times. In the end, his sin will find him out.”
With these matters settled in her mind, she whistled sharply to her dogs and sent them spinning away with redoubled speed toward the three rude cabins that were a prospector’s camp and her present home.
Arrived there, she unharnessed her dogs and chained them to their places before their kennels; then she went in to prepare supper.
She was not the only cook in this outfit. They all took a hand. Supper fell to her lot. Since the days were still short everyone worked till dark, searching rocky ridges and river banks for elusive signs of wealth and then walking home over long miles after dark.
She was engaged in the mixing of baking powder biscuits when there came a sound of sudden commotion outside. Flinging open the door, she all but ran into Jim Baley, one of the three young prospectors in her outfit, who was just home from work. Jim, however, was not the cause of the commotion. The sounds of trouble came from the kennels. Dogs were howling and snarling. Mingled with this was a sinister snap-snap of jaws.
“Wolves! Timber wolves!” Jim exclaimed, seizing an axe. “Big as men, they are. Savage brutes. They’ll kill the dogs and eat ’em, like they was rats.”
He was about to leap away to the battle when the girl held him back.
“Jim, you’ll be killed!”
“I’ll not. Besides, what of it? You can’t let the defenseless be murdered. In a country like this dogs are your best friends. They’re chained. Can’t you see?”
Feeling the grip on his arm loosen, he sprang away into the dark.
Standing there erect, motionless, she tried to look away into the blackness of the night. At the same time a warm feeling crept in about the portals of her heart as she whispered to herself:
“It can’t be Jim! Oh, no! It can’t be Jim!” She was thinking of the thief, the one who had stolen those priceless films.
An instant later she, too, seized an axe and raced away to the defense of her four-footed friends.
* * * * * * * *
The mysterious gray plane which Curlie Carson, with characteristic promptness of decision, had resolved to follow, sailed straight away into the east.
Jerry, the one who sat beside him, was, Curlie thought, a strange fellow in many ways. He was a mechanic, and a good one. Self educated, he thought all day long of bolts and nuts, pliers, wrenches, spark plugs, valves and all else that goes to make up an airplane motor. He was, apparently, quite fond of his youthful pilot. His answer to any suggested course of action was always the same, “Absolutely.”
“Will he stick in a pinch?” the boy asked himself. “If need be, will he fight?” He believed so.
It certainly seemed strange to be sailing away into a totally unknown land, following an airplane that carried a captive, and who could say what other manner of men?
“Are they kidnappers?” he asked himself, “escaped convicts, foreign exiles?” To these questions he could form no answer. One thing he did know; they were robbers. They stole that which in this barren land might mean life or death to many: gasoline.
A thought struck him. Instinctively he slowed his plane a bit. “What if they turn on me?”
What, indeed? They were flying over a barren land. The land beneath them rose in rounded ridges of solid rock. No landing there. Not a chance. True, here and there he made out an oval of dead white which he knew to be the frozen surface of the lake.
“Whose plane is the faster?” This he could not know.
“Keep plenty of distance between,” he told himself. “All I can do is locate their base. After that we can invite the red-coated Mounties to take a hand. They’ll bring the thing to an end quick enough. They say a Mountie always gets his man, and I guess it’s true.”
One fact comforted him. He had, but an hour before, taken on a good supply of gas. Because he was traveling light, he was able to carry it with ease. “They may be as well supplied as we are,” he told himself. “But the odds are against them. If I can force them to land, short of gas, where there is no supply of fuel, they are done. All I have to do is turn back for aid. We’ll mop ’em up. And the mystery will be solved, and this wild land will be free of a great menace.”
He had now thought the thing through—at least as far as his limited knowledge would carry him. The thunder of his motor grew monotonous. His mind turned to other things.
“Pitchblende. Radium!” he said aloud. “What a thing to dream of!” He was thinking of the samples entrusted to his care by Sandy MacDonald, of Johnny’s camp. “They say it gives off heat and light; that if you carry it in a tube in your pocket it will burn you, but not the pocket. How odd! One of nature’s unsolved mysteries,” he repeated. “I wonder why men spend so much time reading of gruesome murder mysteries when nature offers them a thousand unsolved riddles many times more interesting?”
Once more his attention was claimed by the outlaw plane. It had changed its course. Heading straight into the wind, it was sailing north.
“Storm ahead,” he told himself. “Sure to lose ’em unless—” There was just one chance. “Unless they run out of gas before we reach a snow cloud.
“One thing sure,” he told himself, “they’ll not lead me into a storm. Too dangerous. Safety first, that’s the order. Can’t find a landing in this desolate white world without the light to guide you.
“And yet—” His brow wrinkled. “Storms up here sometimes take on a terrific velocity. What if I run into one that is faster than my plane? No getting out then.
“Oh, well,” he philosophized, “it’s a chance you take when you agree to fly in the North, especially if you volunteer to chase an outlaw of the air.
“Outlaw of the air.” At once his mind was rife with speculation regarding this mystery ship.
“From time to time,” he told himself, “planes are stolen from their hangars just as autos are taken from garages. Not very common; but it happens. Suppose a super-criminal wishes to escape justice by fleeing from the United States? Suppose he can employ an aviator who is a thief, or even bribe him to carry him into this land of empty spaces? Who would know where to look for either the man or the plane?
“On the other hand, Russia is not far away, just across Alaska. Plenty of gas stations on the Yukon. It’s only a short quarter of an hour in a plane across Bering Straits. Plenty of reasons why some bold Russian aviator might be hovering about up here. Might be a voluntary exile. Might have Russian treasure to sell, jewels, diamonds, rubies and all that from the old days. Might be preparing to spread propaganda against the so-called ‘capitalistic nations.’
“But then,” he chuckled to himself, “a person always thinks of the most improbable solution of a mystery first. Those fellows up ahead may be just some rich young fellows from Canada or the United States bumming around up here, having what they’d call ‘one whale of a time’ at the expense of the rest of us. There are plenty of fellows who’d do just that if opportunity offered.
“And if that’s the answer,” he set his lips tight, “here’s where I teach them a lesson. No matter how rich a fellow is, he’s bound to consider the rights of others; and any fellow who takes gas from another’s cache in a land like this is not worthy of any consideration.”
He put out a hand. His motor thundered a little louder.
Then a look of consternation overspread his face.
“Jerry!” he shouted. “We’re headed square into a monstrous storm!”
“Absolutely.”
“We’d better turn back.”
“Absolutely.”
“May be too late,” the young aviator told himself. “But one can only do one’s best.”
Having cut a wide circle, he looked back. The outlaw plane had vanished. It had flown squarely into a bank of the deepest clouds. They were the darkest gray Curlie had ever seen. And that bank was an Arctic gale at its worst.
“May be the end of ’em,” he grumbled. And for the life of him, he could not help feeling sorry.
“May be the end of us, too.” He took a good grip on himself. “I’ll do my level best! No one could do more.”
The fight waged at Joyce Mills’ camp with the gray shadows that were timber wolves was short and furious. A great gaunt giant of the forest, large as a man and quick as a tiger, who had been ready the instant before to engage in an uneven battle with Joyce’s dog leader, Dannie, saw Jim Baley approaching on the run and turned to leap at him.
Jim was no child. Born and reared in the rough timber-grown hills of Kentucky, he was as slim and active as a blacksnake. For him an axe was not alone an axe. It was a weapon.
As the gray beast leaped for his throat, he gripped the axe handle, one hand at each end, and swung it high. It caught the wolf squarely under the chin. That same instant Jim’s heavy boot shot forward in a vicious kick.
With a savage snarl the beast fell groveling in the snow. Before he could regain his feet he was dealt a blow on the head that left him quite out of the combat.
Seeing their leader lying motionless before them, the five wolves that remained turned to go slinking away.
“Cowards! Cowards!” Jim shouted. “A sorry lot, you are! Wouldn’t even attack a dog unless he’s chained. You—”
He turned to find Joyce at his side. In her hand she still gripped an axe.
“So you thought you’d take a hand?” he grinned. “Well, ’tain’t necessary. They’ve left. Right smart glad I am to see your spunk. You’ll need it in this land.”
Bending down, he scooped a handful of snow to rub it across the back of his left hand. It came away red.
“You’re hurt!” Joyce’s words came quick.
“Nothing much. Take a heap more’n that to kill a tough timberjack like me. Scratched me with his claws, the ornery beast!”
“We’d better tend to it anyway.”
“All right.”
“Bounty on him,” Jim added, poking his foot at the dead wolf. “Twenty dollars or more. Right enough, too. Destroyer he is. Kills everything from pretty white ptarmigan to the lambs people try to raise further south.”
Back at the cook-shack Joyce bathed his wounded hand, applied iodine, then bound it up. And all the time she was thinking to herself, “It can’t be Jim. True courage and a feeling for others, even dumb animals, does not go with a dishonest heart.”
But if Jim had not stolen the films that had cost so much and might mean a fortune to some one, who had? Ah, well, there was time enough to think of that. Now she must finish preparing supper. The others would be in very soon.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime there was cause for excitement in Johnny Thompson’s camp. Scarcely had Johnny arrived when Sandy MacDonald, a bearded giant of a prospector, came tramping in. Over his back he carried a load that would have broken the back of a slighter man.
“That,” he declared as he dropped the sack with a heavy sigh, “is more pitchblende. It looks better than the last.”
“Tell us more about this pitchblende,” Johnny begged.
“Pitchblende,” explained Sandy, as he dropped heavily into a chair, “is the ore from which we take uranium.
“And from uranium we get radium.”
Radium—Johnny knew in a general way what radium was. He knew little of its value.
“Radium,” Sandy reminded Johnny with a benevolent smile, “is at present worth about a million dollars an ounce.”
“How—how do you get it from that stuff?” Johnny pointed at the bag.
“It’s a slow process,” said the aged prospector a trifle wearily. “You crush the ore fine, then you leach it in acid. After two or three leachings you get a fair amount of uranium. Then you separate the radium from other elements. And if you’ve a ton of ore you’ll get, if you’re lucky, as much radium as you can tuck under your thumb nail.”
“That is,” he went on to explain, “if it’s ore as rich as has been found thus far. Of course mineralogists are always hoping to find richer deposits. And when some one does make the discovery, even if it’s on the North Pole, men will go after it. And the man that finds it will be rich beyond his wildest dreams; what’s more, he will be classed as one of the world’s greatest benefactors. What better could he ask?”
“What indeed?” murmured Scott Ramsey, his young partner.
“This stuff,” said Sandy, touching the sack with his moccasined foot, “must go where the other samples have gone, to Edmonton.”
“Be a week before the next mail plane goes south,” said Johnny.
“That just gives us time for a cup of coffee.” Sandy smiled a broad smile. “What do you say we have it now?”
They were an interesting group. Sandy, cumbersome, hearty, powerful even in his old age, ever a prospector, never very prosperous, he had wended his long way across the world always in a valley of golden dreams. Scott Ramsey, blonde-haired and still youthful, with an air of business about him, seemed to say with every move: “This is an adventure, but it must be more. It must be a financial success.” And so it must. He had led Sandy to invest his all, a tidy little cabin in Edmonton and a wee bank account, in this venture.
Johnny Thompson had been included in the party because of his familiarity with the North. He it was who selected and managed dog teams, built camps and purchased supplies. Joe Lee, the silent, soft-footed Chinaman, was the cook. Johnny was all else that goes toward making a prospector’s camp a place that may be called “Home.”
So, satisfied with their lot, glorying in the abundant health God had given them, dreaming golden dreams of the morrow, they sat down to their meal of pilot biscuits, caribou steak, potatoes, pie and coffee with the feeling that the world was theirs for the asking.
One question troubled Johnny a little: the affair of the afternoon, his talk with Joyce Mills. Should he tell his companions of it?
After due consideration, he decided to keep silent. “Who knows but we may have made our great strike?” he reasoned to himself. “Pitchblende, radium. Who knows? If we win, if they lose, nothing will come of it.”
Then a thought struck him. This was to be a race for treasure. Who would win that race? Sandy and his group, or the others? Only time would tell.
“We must do our best.” He spoke aloud without really meaning to.
“Yes indeed!” agreed Sandy heartily. “So we must, son. And so we will!”
* * * * * * * *
Strange to say, at this very moment Joyce Mills sat in the small cabin allotted to her father, dreaming dreams and thinking of the revelation that had come to her from Johnny’s lips on that very afternoon.
“One of them is a thief,” she repeated to herself. “It does not seem possible!” And indeed it did not. Never in all her life had she come upon young men so frank, so kind and so generous, so whole-heartedly serious about their work, and yet so joyous, as the three who at that moment were sending out from the other cabin, to the accompaniment of Jim’s banjo, the hilarious notes of an old backwoods song.
“It can’t be, yet it must be,” she told herself.
Then her brow clouded. If they should find gold; if those others came to file claims, as they undoubtedly would do, there would be trouble.
“A fight. A terrible fight,” she said aloud.
And yet, how were those others to know when a strike was made? If necessity required, would she tell them? To this question she could form no answer.
“Moccasin Telegraph,” she murmured. “Those were the very words Johnny used. I wonder what he meant?”
Having thought this thing through as far as her mind would carry her, she allowed mental pictures of her father’s three young partners to drift before her mind’s eye. Jim, tall and slim, with a Kentucky mountaineer’s drooping shoulders and drawling voice; Clyde, big and strong, a little loud, full of fun and ready for the best or the worst of any adventure; and Lloyd, a Canadian, quiet, soft-spoken, apparently very well educated. These were the three.
“And one is—
“No, I won’t say it!” she told herself stoutly. “It may not be true. And if it’s not, I must prove it.”
Having put this subject to rest, she allowed her mind to drift back over the days that had just passed.
She had come all the way from Edmonton, eight hundred miles, in an airplane, her first journey through the air. What a thrilling experience that had been!
As she sat there listening to the roar of the fire, its roar became the thunder of their motor as they went racing across the landing field at Edmonton.
The snow had been soft and sticky that day. It clung to the airplane’s eight-foot skis. Three times they crossed that broad expanse of whiteness. Then came a redoubled roar from the motor, and some one said:
“Up!”
To her surprise, she found that passing through the air was not different from skiing across the snow. Seated beside her father, with his three young partners reposing on a pile of canvas bags before them, she had watched through the narrow window while the houses grew small and then began to pass from sight.
They appeared to be moving very slowly, yet reason told her they were doing better than a hundred miles an hour. The city vanished, and broad stretches of farm land lay beneath them.
“It’s not exciting at all!” she shouted in her father’s ear. “Just like riding in a bobsled.”
Yet this was not entirely true. She did experience a thrill as they passed from the land of broad farms to the world of great silent forests where a lonely river wound its white and silent way.
“We are pioneers!” she whispered to herself. “Adventurers entering an unknown land!” And so they were. When at last they landed on the white surface of Great Slave Lake, they found themselves a full hundred miles from the nearest settlement. And beyond them, hundreds of miles to the north, the east, the south, was a great, white, empty wilderness. Here there was no one.
“What a store of wealth must be hidden yonder!” her father had exclaimed. “There are lakes no eyes have seen. Magnificent waterfalls tumble over rocks that may be loaded with silver, copper and platinum. Those waters may fall on sands of yellow gold. Yet no one has heard the rush of that water. No eyes have been gladdened by the gleam of the rainbow in its spray.”
He had been jubilant, happy as a boy. And Joyce had been happy with him.
Yet, even now as she thought of it, her brow wrinkled. All this was very well. They were comfortably housed and well fed in a land of real enchantment. Yet all this must have an end. The three young men were financing it. There was a limit to their resources. Her father, the expert mineralogist of the group, was to receive his pay from the profits of the enterprise. When the strike was made they were to share alike, an even quarter to each man. “But if there is no strike!” She shuddered. “We must win!” she told herself, rising and walking the floor. “We must!”
Strangely enough, at that moment in his far off camp Johnny Thompson, her trusted pal of other days, was declaring stoutly:
“We will win!”
Would they? And if not both, which party would win?
While Johnny Thompson with his friends in one camp and Joyce Mills with her companions in another were seated comfortably about their fires listening to the singing of the wind that foretold an approaching storm, Curlie Carson, who had at one time played so important a part in their lives and might, for all they knew, yet play a stellar role in the drama of the North into which their lives had been cast, was passing through one of the unique experiences of his not uneventful life.
Having watched the gray outlaw plane lose itself in the solid bank of clouds that was a storm bearing down upon the land of eternal ice, he had, as we have seen, chosen the safer part and, turning, had raced away.
He had chosen what appeared to be the safest way. In this he was influenced by the recollection that he bore in the fusilage of his plane the samples of pitchblende that might mean a bright future for his old pal Johnny and his companions. But was the way he had chosen really a safe one? He was soon enough to know.
Even as he turned, the vast gliding monster that was a storm appeared to reach out a shrouded arm to grasp him, as if enraged by the sight of a victim escaping from its grasp.
Snow-fog gathered about him. Particles of sleet rattled like bird-shot against his fusilage.
Setting his teeth hard, he tilted the plane upward; but all in vain. The shrouded arm followed.
Abandoning these tactics, he righted his plane to shoot straight away toward the south. A hundred, a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and forty miles an hour he sped on. But the storm rode on his tail. It set his struts singing. It fogged the glass before him. It set up a chill that no insulation could keep out, no heat from the exhaust dispel.
“I’ll beat it!” he told himself grimly. “I must! It will last for hours. No one could land safely in such a storm. And one may not stay up forever.”
Strangely enough, even in such a time of stress his mind went on little holidays, moments long, to wonder about many things. The “Gray Streak”? What could have happened to her? Had she gone right on through the storm and, coming out into the uncertain light of waning day, had she landed safely on the frozen surface of some lake or had she cracked up? If she had cracked up, would the wreck be discovered? If it were, what would it reveal? Once more he thought of master criminals, of Russian exiles and sporting young highbloods; but he found no answer.
At other times he thought of Johnny Thompson and his problems. Johnny had told him of the stolen films that might mean so much to the mineral hunting world. What would come of all this? Would the thief be discovered? Would the swift and sure punishment that belongs to this northland be meted out to him? Would the rival camps come together at last? And would there follow a bloody combat? For the sake of Joyce Mills and her heroic father, he hoped not.
So, with his mind one moment filled with the strain of battle, the next relieved by restful speculation, he raced the storm.
The brief Arctic day came to its close. He tried to imagine his friends seated by their fire, but succeeded only in bringing to his own consciousness a desire for warmth and food.
“Better the storm than that,” he told himself. At once his mind was filled with grim pictures of the gray specter that now followed him into the night. It was a monster spider weaving a web as great as the universe itself and at the same time reaching out one hairy leg to seize him. It was an octopus in a fathomless sea extending a tentacle to grasp him.
“It will end,” he told himself. “All storms have an ending.”
This, he knew to be a half truth. Arctic gales blow days and nights through. He could not last. His supply of gas must become exhausted. And then? Grim rocks of the “Barrens” awaited them.
“Why did we follow them?” he thought.
Then, for the first time in all this storm he thought of Jerry. He turned to speak to him. To his great surprise he found him fast asleep.
Fear seized him. Jerry might not be sleeping. The cold might have overcome him. He prodded him vigorously. Jerry opened one eye.
“Jerry!” he shouted. “We’re in one whale of a storm!”
“Absolutely.” Jerry closed the eye and once more lay back in his corner.
“Well,” Curlie thought, “there’s courage for you, and confidence aplenty. If he believes I can bring him through safely, I can!”
From that time on he felt fresh confidence. How else could he feel about it when Jerry, a veteran of the flying corps of the North, could sleep through it all?
“And yet we are in the air. The storm is still with us. I must not grow over-confident,” he told himself grimly.
One more resolve came to him in this hour of stress. “If that gray phantom of the air outrides the storm, and if it is my lot to sight her once more I shall give chase just as I did this day.”
At that he thought of the small square of white cloth with the name D’Arcy Arden etched in one corner.
“Who can that person be? And why a captive?”
But again the storm claimed his attention. It had now taken the form of a gray ghost of the night. Slowly, but surely, it was wrapping its mantle about him.
“Nothing to do but fly into the south,” he told himself as grim determination took possession of his soul.
This, he found soon enough, was to prove a difficult task. The glass before him clouded. The gray ghost’s mantle was hiding him from earth and sky. His going grew heavy. Sleet was piling, fold over fold, upon his plane.
“It won’t be long now,” he thought to himself with a groan.
Then, with a suddenness that was startling, the gray ghost’s mantle slipped away, leaving before him a gorgeous moon riding high over an earth that seemed to sleep.
“Peace!” he said. “This is a place of peace.” Then realizing how strange that remark would seem to one who heard it, he laughed aloud.
To one who first flies over the Arctic wastes of the far Northwest, the landscape seems as unmarked as the sweeping blue of a landless sea. No cities, no villages, no roads, no railways, no farmhouses, not so much as a cabin is there to guide him in his skyway wanderings. As time passes, as he flies the same route again and again, that which lies beneath him becomes familiar. There is the river. Here it forms as an S. There it winds like a serpent. Here it is thickly bordered by trees, there lined only by low-growing willows. There are the lakes. Here four of them form the eyes, nose and mouth of a human face. Here a single large lake with a broad river entering at a narrow end resembles an elephant with a prodigiously long trunk. A hundred forms two thousand feet below mark the lone birdman’s way until at last he knows his route as the plowman knows his homeward road, the seaman his shore or the Red Man his trail.
It was even so with Curlie. He had not traveled the northern route long, but certain spots had become well marked by his keen eye.
“Jerry!” he shouted aloud. “Jerry! We have won!”
“Absolutely,” Jerry agreed sleepily.
“Sure we have! Look! We have outridden the storm. And see! There are the circles of willows that border Lake Athabaska. And away over yonder is a feeble light. That’s at Fort Chipewyan. Be there in twenty minutes!”
“Absolutely.” Jerry straightened up in his place.
“Pork chops at the Chink’s, Jerry,” the boy went on. “Pork chops with fried potatoes and coffee and half an apple pie. What say?”
“Absolutely, son. Absolutely.”
“And after that, old sleepy head, you’ll work three hours on the motors.”
“Absolutely, son! Make it four! Can’t be too sure about the blasted motor. You really can’t.”
As the skis bumped, and then bumped again on the icy surface that was the landing field at Fort Chipewyan, Curlie’s eyes strayed toward the golden moon as a voice seemed to whisper: “Somewhere beyond the sky there is a power that guides and guards our ways.”
All of which has nothing whatever to do with the manner in which he and Jerry stowed away the Chinaman’s pork chops and fried potatoes while Sam Kusik, the Russian Jew trader, and Tommy Wooden, the postmaster of this far-flung outpost, plied them with questions regarding the radium strike that had been reported, and the gray outlaw plane that had stirred wild rumors in many quarters.
“We saw the plane.” Curlie laughed at their surprise and awe. “We chased it into a storm. Did it crack up? Who knows? I doubt it. No such luck. An honest man meets misfortune many times; a rogue but once, and that when his time comes. Their time will come. And we’ll do what we can to hasten it. What say, Jerry?”
“Absolutely.” Jerry gulped down a draught of hot coffee. “Absolutely, son. Absolutely.”
The storm, which had so successfully defeated Curlie Carson in his effort to follow the outlaw of the air, was but a narrow finger reaching out from the vast, wind-blown ice pack that is the Arctic Sea. It did not extend as far to the west as the spot on Great Slave Lake on which the cabin occupied by Joyce Mills and her father was located. So it happened that even while Curlie raced the storm for his very life, Joyce sat comfortably by the great barrel of a stove that radiated heat aplenty and dreamed of other days when she, with her friends, Johnny Thompson and Curlie Carson and the young detective, Drew Lane, were engaged in deeds of adventure.
“I only wish Drew were here now!” she sighed. “He would help me solve this mystery of the stolen films.”