That the films were to prove of inestimable value in the task of hunting out rich mineral-bearing ore, she did not for a moment doubt. Only that evening as he sat poring over the pictures of some rocks laid bare by wind and rain, her father had told her with the greatest enthusiasm that he had on that very day successfully located the spot marked on the pictures and that it gave every promise of being a lead to rich ore-bearing rock.
“Only think!” he had exclaimed. “When I was a young man, when we went over the Yukon Trail, we carried all we would need for two years, on our backs and on sleds. And no dogs, mind you! Not a dog!
“And when we arrived in the North all that vast, uncharted wilderness was before us. We had not a single lead. Little wonder that we returned after two years of terrible privation, empty-handed and heavy-hearted.
“And now look!” He patted the pictures lovingly. “The airplanes give us these. We have only to study them and follow their indications.
“Not alone that, but the airplane carries us a thousand miles far above impassable trails and leaves us with picks, shovels, and food in abundance to work out our own salvation. Is it not all very wonderful?”
Ah, yes, it was wonderful. Yet this conscientious girl, as she sat by the fire thinking things through, was distinctly unhappy.
“If only we had come into possession of the pictures in an honorable manner!” she thought, with a sigh.
“Why don’t I confide in one of father’s partners?” she asked herself. “But which one?”
That indeed was the question. Going at it in blind fashion, as she must, she would with the usual bad luck of such a venture, ask advice of the very one who had stolen the films.
“And he would only lead me away on a false scent,” she told herself. “No, no! I shall say nothing. Watchful waiting, that’s the thing.” With that she sprang to her feet. She felt in need of a touch of the cold night air. Its tingle sent her blood racing. Beneath the stars she could think clearly.
She had ever been a person of action, had this slim, dark-haired girl. In college it had been basketball, tennis and hockey. Here she was limited to following-the dog team and taking long walks by herself. Drawing on her parka and seizing a stout stick, she marched away into the moonlight.
“How still it is!” she said to herself. “And how wonderful! The moon and the stars seem near. God seems near. It is good to be alone with Him.”
So, sometimes communing with herself and sometimes with the stars, she wandered farther than she intended.
She had rounded a clump of spruce trees when suddenly the silence was broken by a terrific snort, and a great dark bulk came charging down upon her from the hill above.
Now her gymnasium training, together with the cool nerve inherited from her father, stood her in good stead. Leaping to a tree, she seized the lowest branch and swung herself up.
Not a second too soon. The irate monster passed directly beneath her.
As he passed, she fancied she smelled fire, shot from his nostrils. “What creature in these wilds could be like that?” she asked herself. “He’s not a bear, nor a moose. He’s too large for any other creature.”
Here, surely, was a conundrum. It was not long in solving. As the creature turned about for one more vain charge she saw him clearly in the moonlight.
“A buffalo!” she exclaimed. “A buffalo in this frozen land! How—how impossible!” That he was indeed a buffalo and a very real one, the beast proceeded to demonstrate by pawing and bellowing beneath her tree.
“He’ll keep me here all night. I’ll freeze!” she thought, half in despair. “This morning it was forty below, and to-night it is just as cold.”
At last, taking a stronger grip on her nerves, she climbed a little higher, selected a stout branch and settled down upon it to think things through.
She was, she knew, more than a mile from camp. No amount of calling would bring aid. In time her father would miss her and there would be a search. But in the North people remain up at all hours. Her friends might not think of retiring for three hours. Her time was her own. They would not think it strange that she was not there.
“In the meantime I shall freeze,” she told herself. In spite of her best efforts at self-control, a touch of the tragic crept into her voice. Already her feet, clad only in wool stockings and moose-hide moccasins, were beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Stop feeling after a while.” She shuddered. “Then they will be frozen.
“Moccasin Telegraph,” she murmured. “If Johnny had told me his secret perhaps I could now flash a message to our camp.”
In the meantime the buffalo, having ceased roaring and pawing, had settled down to what promised to be a long wait. With head hanging low, he appeared to fall fast asleep.
“Shamming,” she whispered.
But was he? Everyone knows that four-footed creatures often sleep standing up.
Joyce was not a person of great patience. She was all for action.
“I won’t freeze!” she declared stoutly. “I’ll jump down and try to out-dodge him. I’ll take to the trees.”
Having resolved on this, she studied possible landing spots. In the end she chose, one might think, the most perilous of all.
“I’ll climb up a little higher, and then I’ll drop square on his back. He’ll be so startled he’ll run away.”
No sooner resolved than done. From a perch ten feet above, she suddenly descended upon the buffalo’s back.
The result exceeded her expectations. The great beast lurched forward, it seemed, the very second she landed. She was pitched backward and landed full length in the snow.
Her landing place was soft, a bank of snow blown in among the branches of a fallen tree. She was not injured. The breath had been knocked from her; that was all. And this was fortunate. It gave her time to think.
Having thought, she lay quite still. She was, she believed, quite covered with snow. The buffalo, who was snorting and bellowing in an alarming fashion, would find her only by stepping on her.
“The branches will keep him back. I am safe.” She whispered, scarcely daring to breathe.
A moment passed; another and another. Still the snorting and roaring continued.
Then a curious thing happened. A rifle shot rang out in the night. The buffalo went crashing away through the bush. Then followed a silence.
“A rifle,” she whispered to herself. “There is no rifle in our camp.”
She was delivered from one peril, only to be threatened by another. She was far from camp, and there were strangers about.
Five minutes more she lay there. Then, feeling the drowsy sleep of the North coming upon her, she cast aside the snow, to leap to her feet and go speeding away toward the camp.
Ten minutes later she burst into camp, exclaiming:
“A buffalo treed me! I jumped on his back. A stranger shot at him.”
Such a speech called for an explanation. It was given over a hot cup of chocolate.
“Oh, yes, there are buffaloes up here,” Jim drawled in the middle of the talk. “Right smart of ’em. Woods-buffaloes, they are. There’s a preserve down south of here. Feller at Fort Chipewyan told me about ’em. He was what they call a buffalo ranger. They’re protected, these buffaloes. You can’t shoot ’em. Probably this one was a cranky old boy who couldn’t stand his relatives.”
“He couldn’t stand me, either,” Joyce laughed. “Here’s hoping I never see him again.”
Vain hope!
“But the man? The rifle?”
“Probably some Indian,” replied her father. “We’ll look into that in the morning.”
They did not. A short, fierce wind-storm that night blotted out all evidence of the girl’s adventure.
Curlie and Jerry were away with the dawn. As they rose from the glistening white of the landing field to the transparent blue of the sky, Curlie’s heart sang with joy. It was great, this rising aloft to greet the sun. With a safe landing place, the frozen river, ever beneath him, with a dependable mechanic beside him and the long, long lane of air before him, who could ask for more? Once Curlie did wrinkle his brow. He was thinking of the mysterious gray ship he had followed into the storm.
“If that keeps up,” he told himself, “the sky will no more be safe. It will be full of lurking dangers as was the Spanish Main when pirates and buccaneers lurked in every cove.”
With all his thinking he could not solve the mystery of the nameless and numberless plane. Instead, from out the air there leaped a fresh mystery. A simple thing in the beginning it was too—only a bird in flight.
Birds are common enough in the Arctic. Even in mid-winter ravens croak from the tree-tops, pelicans stand upon icy rocks watching for fish and screaming jays cut a path of blue across the wintry sky.
But this bird was neither raven, pelican nor jay. Curlie knew that at a glance. Having long watched the flight of birds, he could distinguish the darting course of one, the soaring flight of another and the steady flap-flap of a third. This bird, he knew at a glance, was a pigeon.
“A pigeon in such a place!” He fairly gasped with astonishment.
Then a thought struck him squarely between the eyes. “It’s a carrier-pigeon! Here may be a clue. I’ll follow him.”
Fortunately the course taken by the bird was almost the same as that he must follow to reach his next stopping place, Fort McMurray, the headquarters of steel. At this place he would unload his cargo of furs and mineral samples entrusted to his care, then wire for further orders.
“Who would turn a pigeon loose in this bleak land?” he asked himself. “Only some one in desperate circumstances or a man without a heart.” At once he thought of the mysterious one who piloted the strange gray plane.
“He’s heartless enough,” he assured himself. “Holding some one, a woman or a boy, captive! He’d do anything. There’ll be a message tied to the bird’s foot. I’m sure of that. All I have to do is follow him to his destination. Might bump right into the man’s confederates. Then the mystery would be solved at once.”
But what was the bird’s destination? How was Curlie to know that? “It may be Edmonton; probably is,” he told himself hopelessly. “I can’t follow him there, not just now. Already I am hours behind my schedule. Little more and I’ll be joining the ranks of the unemployed.”
Even as he said this, as if to make an end to this dilemma, the pigeon wavered in his flight, sank earthward, and began to circle.
“Going to alight,” Curlie shouted to Jerry.
“Absolutely.”
“I’m going to land with him. There’s a cabin down there by the river. Seen it many times. Who lives there?”
“Don’t know.”
“May be a partner to that man of the ‘Gray Streak.’”
“Absolutely.”
“We’ll see about it.”
“Absolutely, son. Absolutely.”
Graceful as the bird itself, the plane sank lower and lower, went bump, bump, bump three times, and glided away on an unmarked field of glistening snow.
Ten minutes after this landing they were approaching the cabin. The carrier pigeon was nowhere to be seen.
Had it not been for three dogs skulking at the back of the cabin, and a few fresh moccasin tracks in the snow before the door, the place would have seemed deserted.
“Strange the fellow don’t come out to meet us,” Curlie grumbled, as no one appeared to greet them.
Itwasstrange. In the North the airplane has come to be what coastwise steamers are to fishing villages along a rockbound coast, or the slow-going local passenger train is to mountain towns. It brings the mail, reports news of the outside world, and delivers such necessities as the land itself does not supply. At the first sound of drumming motors the cabin dwellers flock forth to greet their soaring friend.
Not so, here. The place was as still as it might have been had its last occupant passed away.
Curlie knocked loudly on the door. No response. He knocked again, more loudly.
“Asleep or drunk,” he muttered. He gave the door a lusty kick. It flew open. At the same instant a short, scrawny, red-faced man sprang from a bunk in the corner.
“Sorry,” apologized Curlie. “A pigeon soared down here. Seen it?”
“And if I have?” The man’s tone was defiant.
“We want to see it.”
“Your pigeon, I suppose? Flyin’ ’ere in this ’ere blasted frozen wilderness.” The man took a step backward toward the corner. A heavy rifle rested there.
Jerry might be slow at times. Not always.
“As you are!” he commanded. At the same time his hand dropped to his hip.
A queer, cowed look came over the cabin-dweller’s face.
“Oh, all right. ’Ave your own way!” he grumbled. “W’at d’ y’ want?”
“The pigeon.”
The man’s face worked strangely. He was like a man about to go into a convulsion. Reading these signs of distress, Curlie spoke more gently.
“We think he carried a message. We—”
“You think!” the little man broke in. “I know. He does! An’ ’at message you’ll ’ave, an’ welcome! But not ’im!”
“All right. The message,” agreed Curlie.
The little man disappeared into a narrow room at the back, only to reappear with a small billet enclosed in thin oil-cloth.
“There, y’ ’ave it!” He seemed greatly relieved. “There’s the message!”
With trembling fingers, Curlie unrolled the bit of cloth. He spread the message on the table and dropped into a chair before it.
For a long time he sat staring at it; yet it would not have required a mind-reader to tell that he made nothing of it. And indeed, how could he? The message, more than a hundred words long, was so written that not one word made any manner of sense with any other that preceded or followed it.
“That,” he said to Jerry, “is worse than a cross-word puzzle.
“The worst of it is,” he added after a moment’s contemplation, “we don’t know who sent it, nor whether we have the least right to interfere with it.
“You see,” he explained, “there are Government posts right up to the shore of the Arctic. The heads of the posts may be trying pigeons as messengers. Then, too, some lone trapper may have carried that bird a thousand miles into the wilderness with the intention of using him in case of distress. This may be a distress message.”
“Written in code?” Jerry lifted his eyebrows.
“Don’t seem probable. But the Government message would be in code.
“I think,” Curlie added after further thought, “that we’ll make a copy of it and send the bird on his way.”
“How do you know you will?” The cabin-dweller was again on his feet. There was a dangerous glint in his eye.
Curlie tried in vain to read the meaning in his expression. Was he, after all, a confederate of those outlaws who had taken to riding the sky in a plane fueled at another’s expense?
“I believe you are in with them!” he exclaimed angrily.
“What d’ y’ mean, in with ’em?” the little man demanded hotly.
“The ‘Gray Streak,’ outlaw of the air.”
Instantly the look on the man’s face changed. “Before Gawd, I know less ’n you about this ’ere ghost of the air!”
“Then,” said Curlie, as his face cleared, “here is the message. It’s up to you. The bird came to your cabin, not to ours.”
He handed over the carefully wrapped billet, arose and led the way out of the cabin. He then climbed into the plane with Jerry following, turned his motor over, set it throbbing, and flew away.
If Jerry marveled at all this, he ventured not one question.
One feature of the North fascinated Joyce Mills more than any other—the dog teams. Her outfit had engaged two of these teams at Fort Resolution. Wonderful dogs they were, too. Long, rangy, muscular fellows, they stood to her waist. And how they could travel!
“All right, boys! Mush!” she would cry. And away they would fly.
On days when one of these teams was not in use, she would go for a long drive into the great unknown. It made little difference what direction she took, for all this world about her was new.
Often, because the dogs traveled best when following a scent, she allowed them to choose their own course. Invariably they took up some trail. At times it was only the tracks of a man on skis or snowshoes, at others it was the mark of some dog sled. Whatever it might be, though the trail was windblown and three days old, they followed it with unerring steps.
On the day when Curlie Carson took up the flight of the pigeon, she started on one of these dog team jaunts. Once more she allowed the team to take its course. This day the leader chose the tracks of a man on snowshoes.
“One of our men,” she told herself. “Be just time to come up with him before sunset. He’ll enjoy a ride home.”
As we have said, Joyce was no weakling. While training her mind, she had developed her body as well. This day she rode only a part of the way.
Trotting after a dog team rouses the drowsy blood and sends it coursing through the veins. It stimulates thoughts. This girl’s thoughts on that day were long, long thoughts. At times she dreamed of gold, placer gold, great moose-hide sacks bulging with nuggets. She knew that Lloyd, the young Canadian of their outfit, had studied the aerial photographs that were taken a hundred miles from the camp, and then had gone into a brown study.
“Looks like quartz, gold, up there,” she had heard him murmur. “Why not placer gold in the streams farther down?” He had disappeared on a strange mission early next morning. When he returned late that evening, if he had anything to report he had made no mention of it. A strange, silent fellow, this Canadian.
“Gold,” she said aloud. “Gold. What will it not buy? Comfort; ease; education; a home. Some even believe it will buy friends. But not true friends, I am sure of that.”
Gold! Would they find it? And if they did, what then? A frown gathered like a storm cloud on her brow. She had thought again of Johnny’s strange revelation. “One of your men is a thief,” she seemed to hear him say.
“I’ll find the thief!” she told herself with renewed determination.
“But if we make a rich strike before I find him?” She shuddered at thought of the terrible possibilities involved.
Then, shaking herself free from all these brooding thoughts, she shouted: “Ye! Ye! Ye!” to send her dogs spinning away at a reckless speed.
Since the land here was rocky and uneven, this resulted in a spill. Coming to the top of a ridge, the dogs rushed pell mell down the other side and landed all in a heap in a bunch of willows at the bottom.
Joyce was recovering from this spill and her dogs were sitting about her grinning when upon looking up she beheld, not ten paces away, the man she had been following.
She caught her breath in surprise. He was not Jim, nor Clyde, nor Lloyd. Nor was it her father. It was a man she had never seen before.
“Where did you come from?” she wanted to ask, but did not. It gave her a shock to know that she had taken up this man’s trail not half a mile from her cabin and, having followed him for miles, was now alone with him in the great white world.
He was strange, too, and had, she thought, an evil face. “But I must not judge too soon,” she told herself.
The man was short with broad shoulders. He had a dark face that might be French, Indian or half-breed.
“Hello!” he said rather gruffly. “You follow? What want?”
She looked at him, nonplussed. What indeed did she want? Nothing.
She told him so. Plainly he did not believe her.
“My name,” he said stolidly, “Pierre Andres. Trapper, me.” He jingled a bundle of traps hanging from his arm. “You want white fox skin? All right. I geeve heem you.”
“No! No!” she persisted stoutly. “I want nothing. I am looking for some one.”
“Some one look for gold.” He placed a hand above his eyes. “Allee time look. No find. Eh?” He tried to smile, and his face became uglier than before. “Oh, you find. Bye and bye. Not know mine.” He chuckled deep down in his throat.
“See! Look!” he exclaimed suddenly. He made a motion as if to drop on all fours. “Buffalo.” He sent out a curious snort. “You!” He made a face. “’Fraid, you. Up tree. Then, boom! Buffalo gone! Is it not so?
“And now I gotta say good-bye.”
“Good—good-bye.” The words stuck in her throat. Speaking to her dogs, she sent them spinning back over the trail.
Her mind was in a whirl. Who was this man? What had he been doing about their camp? Had he been near when she was treed by the buffalo? Had he fired that shot?
She thought, of his traps. “Hope he hasn’t set any near our cabin.”
Only the night before, while out for a stroll in the moonlight, she had made a delightful discovery. Three beautiful white foxes had their home beneath the cliff back of their cabin. She had surprised them at their play. She did not want one of their skins for a decoration.
But now, while she was wondering whether this man had any connection with Johnny’s half-mythical Moccasin Telegraph, her dogs suddenly took a turn to the right, speeding away on a fresh trail.
Seeing that this trail, cutting her old one at an acute angle, led toward camp and hoping once more that it might lead her to one of her party, she allowed the dogs to pick their own way.
This time she was not disappointed. They had not gone half a mile before she sighted, standing out dark against the sky, a lone figure at the crest of a ridge.
“It’s Lloyd Hill,” she told herself with a thrill of joy. She had recognized him on the instant. His was a military bearing not often found in the North. At this moment he stood rigidly erect, looking away toward the west as a commanding general might while surveying some vast smoking battlefield.
She was obliged to cross a narrow valley to reach him. This gave her time for reflection. Lloyd Hill was not like the other men of her camp. He was more reserved. He was, as her father expressed it, “a good listener.” He talked little. When he did speak his English was perfect. Jim spoke with the mellow drawl of the southern mountains; Clyde with the breezy tongue of the west. Lloyd impressed her as coming from a fine family; yet he never spoke of his family. A silent, rather slender, dark-eyed fellow, he was ever alert, yet never in a hurry.
“Always seems to be all there,” her father had said. “But how tense he is. If you fired off a gun when he wasn’t looking, he’d jump three feet from the ground!” This was more true than he knew, and for good reasons.
With these thoughts passing through her mind and with one half-asked question lurking back of all, “Who stole those films for the pictures we are using?” she crossed the intervening space to climb the ridge.
All this time, though she was sure he knew she was coming, he did not so much as turn his head. Only when she had reached his side did he speak. With one arm outstretched he said:
“Do you see that?”
“See what?” She turned a puzzled face up to his. “I see the frozen bed of a stream. There are rapids and a waterfall over there, too swift to freeze. And I think I see a pelican waiting for a fish.”
“But off to the right?”
“Hills, rocks, snow.”
“Ah, yes. But once that stream flowed there. If you look closely you will see that the narrow banks of a rapid stream are still suggested there. Yes, that’s where it ran.”
“What changed its course?”
He shrugged. “Jam of logs and drifting ice in the spring, perhaps. Anyway, it happened. See this.”
He dropped something in her hand. It was a fine yellow crescent.
“That,” he said with a sudden intake of breath, “is gold. Free gold, they call it. Found it many miles up from here in the rocks. Gold up there. But not enough for quartz mining. Too far from everywhere.
“But that,” he pointed again to the ancient bed of the stream, “looks promising. There are rapids and falls in it, just as there are in this new channel. And at the foot of the falls there may be golden sands, worn away from the rocks and carried down there.”
He broke off abruptly. “Jump in! Let’s get back to camp.”
On the return journey she insisted upon his riding part of the way. Scarcely a word was said during all that long twilight ride. She liked him all the better for this.
“I wonder if there really could be gold?” she thought to herself. “Much gold. Anyway, the ground is frozen. How could he prospect there now?”
As if reading her thoughts, he said:
“There’s a steam-thawer over at Fort Resolution. The doctor’s got a tractor. We could haul it over and thaw that ground out in a hurry.”
To the girl’s great surprise, during the evening he said nothing to his partners about this recent discovery. “I wonder why?” she said to herself. “Well, since he does not speak of it, neither shall I.”
“Punch Dickinson will be dropping down here with the plane to-morrow morning,” Clyde Hawke said. “I asked him to come when I saw him last.”
“That’s right!” Lloyd Hill leaped from his chair. “Just in time. I’ll ride over with him.” All eyes were turned on him for an explanation.
“Found some encouraging dirt back in the hills,” he said simply. “Need a thawer. One there. I’ll bring it over.”
If they expected more details they did not get them.
“Since you’re going,” Newton Mills said after a moment, as he dragged a bag from a corner, “you might take this along and see what you can do about getting it down to Edmonton for an analysis.”
“What is it?” Jim asked.
“Pitchblende.”
“Pitchblende, radio-active rock. Last price quoted on radium was a million dollars an ounce,” Jim drawled. “Be great if we’d discover a pound or two laying around loose up here somewhere!”
“Wouldn’t it!” laughed Clyde.
Though she understood little of this talk and was unable to tell what was said in jest and what in earnest, Joyce was thrilled by this new discovery.
“It will go to Edmonton,” she told herself. “Be some time before we can get the report, know the truth. In the meantime we may dream, and half the joy of life comes from dreaming.”
Before retiring she slipped on her faun-skin parka and stole out into the crisp air of night. She climbed the ridge that lay between their camp and the rocky cliff. Then she turned to look back.
She caught her breath. How wonderful it was! The moon, a ball of pale gold, hung high overhead. The whole empty white world, clean as fresh laundered linen, lay before her.
But she had not come for this. Creeping farther up the ridge where some scrub spruce trees grew, she moved stealthily forward into the shadows, at last parting the branches noiselessly and looking into the space beyond.
“Ah, yes,” she breathed, “there they are.”
Three white foxes, two old ones and one half-grown cub, were sporting in the moonlight. How beautiful they were! And how they did romp! “No kittens could be half as cute,” she told herself.
Now they formed a circle and chased one another’s tails round and round. Now they piled into a heap and rolled about like balls of snow. And now, sitting in a row like choir boys, they sang their night song.
“Yap—yap—yap!”
In the midst of this Joyce thought of the stranger she had followed that day, and shuddered, she hardly knew why.
All this was forgotten as, half an hour later, she crept beneath her downy feather robe and fell asleep, dreaming dreams in which gold and radium were sadly mixed with Indians and traps, white foxes, wild buffaloes and moonlit night.
There are some who believe that, should one be so fortunate as to reach Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, he would be at an outpost of civilization. Nothing could be more false. Edmonton is not an outpost. It is a city.
There are those again who believe that all cities are alike. They, too, are mistaken. The city of Edmonton is not like any other city in the world.
No one knew this better than Curlie Carson. He was not a stranger to other cities. Chicago, New York City he knew. Belize, in British Honduras, had seen him on her streets. Paris he loved for her beauty. Yet none of these thrilled him more than did Edmonton. On his days off, between flights, nothing suited him quite so well as sitting in the narrow lobby of his own hotel, the old Prince George, listening to the scraps of conversation that drifted unbidden to his ears. For, while not an outpost, Edmonton is the gateway to a thousand outposts. All the vast Northwest lies beyond it.
And down from this Northwest, even in these conventional days when all men appear to think alike, talk alike, and dress alike, men still drift into Edmonton who are unique. They dress in strange ways and speak of affairs that are far from the minds of the commonplace men of the street.
They drift into Edmonton, and then an invisible bond draws them one and all to the Prince George. There in the lobby they sit and talk of timber drives along some unknown river, of mineral in the Rockies, of musk ox, of reindeer on the tundra, of fish in Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes, of fur from the far flung barrens, of petroleum and of tar-sands, of gold outcroppings, and a hundred other curious industries and discoveries.
“The thrill one gets from it!” Curlie said to Jerry that evening, after they had followed the carrier pigeon to the lone cabin and had left it there, to continue their flight to McMurray and then to Edmonton. “The thrill comes from knowing that every man of them is sure that he is going to make his fortune at once, or at least after the break-up in the spring.”
“That,” said Jerry, “is the pioneer spirit. It is not dead. It still lives here.”
“Yes!” exclaimed Curlie. “And I am glad it does! How wonderful it is to live in a land where men still dream!”
“Ah, yes.” Jerry settled back and closed his eyes as if he, too, would dream.
Curlie was in no mood for dreaming. The incident of the carrier pigeon was too fresh in his mind for that.
Drawing a slip of paper from his pocket, he began studying it. “I’d give a pretty penny to be able to read it,” he grumbled to himself after a time. He was looking at his copy of the code message he had taken from the carrier pigeon. So absorbed did he become that he did not notice that a tall, dark-haired man moved across the room to take a chair directly behind him. The man had small, piercing eyes. He wore no beard, yet the very blueness of his chin suggested that he might recently have had a beard. His eyes, as they fell upon the paper in Curlie’s hand, became strangely fixed.
Curlie did not read the message. Indeed, as we have said, since no two words of it made sense as they stood, how could he? It was one of those messages that impart information only after they are rearranged. It is possible that every fifth word, plucked from the rest and set in order, would make a sentence. Then again, it might be every third or every sixth word. Or perhaps the first and fourth, then the fifth and eighth words might be combined with the ninth and twelfth, and so on. The thing had so many possibilities that Curlie gave it up very soon and, folding the paper, put it back into his pocket.
Perhaps this was just as well, for the man of the eagle eye, if one were to judge by the tense look on his face, even from his point of disadvantage was making progress at deciphering the message.
“Curlie,” said Jerry starting up from his reverie, “why did you allow that little fellow back in the cabin to keep the carrier pigeon?”
“I—I don’t know.” Curlie seemed confused.
“What? You do a thing and don’t know the reason?”
“Sometimes I do.” Curlie spoke slowly. “There are times when I seem to be guided by instinct, or shall we say led by a spirit that is not myself, that is higher and wiser than I. At least,” he half apologized, “I like to think of it that way. Probably it’s all wrong.
“But I say, Jerry!” He sat up quickly. The eagle-eyed one started suddenly, then rising, glided silently away. “I say, Jerry old boy, that chap in the cabin was a world war veteran. A real one from Canada, or perhaps Ireland. He’s one of those scrawny little fellows so small and so quick that a shell couldn’t get them, nor a bullet either. Served through it all, then came back here to live on the birds and fish he can get with a light rifle and a gill-net. You can’t be rough with a chap like that, you really can’t.”
“No,” murmured Jerry. “Not even if he committed murder. But, Curlie, do you think he’s in with the crowd that’s flying wild up here and burning up our gas?”
“That,” said Curlie, “remains to be found out.”
“But, Jerry!” He leaned far forward. “There’s something about that little trapper and the carrier pigeon that we don’t know. I’m going to keep an eye on that little fellow and his cabin. There’s something worth knowing there. And in the end I’ll know it.”
Strange to say, at about the time Curlie and Jerry spoke of the pigeon that seemed so out of place in this frozen land, others in the cabin on the shore of far-off Great Slave Lake were speaking of this same bird. This did not come to pass, however, until a certain mysterious individual, seated beside the fire in Johnny Thompson’s cabin, had maintained complete silence for the space of two full hours. This person, who had the straight black hair of an Indian and the sharp, hawk-like features of a certain type of white man, was known far and wide as “The Voice of the Wilderness,” or more briefly as “The Voice.” The Voice spoke only when the Spirit moved him. And woe be to that one who attempted to break in upon his periods of silence.
Johnny knew him. Sandy MacDonald knew him. They knew his ways; knew, too, that at times he was able to render valuable service to those who respected his silence.
When, therefore, as the twilight faded, he appeared at their door, they greeted him with a hearty “B’Jo” (a corruption of the Frenchbon jour), made a place for him by the fire, poured him a cup of black coffee, and left him to his silence.
That did not mean, however, that the others might not speak. On this night it was Sandy MacDonald who talked. And when Sandy elected to speak something was said, for Sandy was wise in many lores and was no mean philosopher besides.
Appearing to sense the fact that The Voice there in the corner would maintain a long silence, he drew on his fur parka and invited Johnny to join him in a stroll in the moonlight along the shore before the cabin. As they walked along the snow-whitened shores at a spot where, other than themselves, no one lived, he said as a look of contentment overspread his face:
“Johnny, for me this is the place of peace.”
“This place?” Johnny looked at him in surprise.
“Yes. I have been here before. Must have been ten years back. I was prospecting then with a pack on my back. No, I didn’t build the cabin. Some other dreamer had been here before me.
“It was late winter when I arrived. I lingered through spring and summer. Why? I couldn’t tell you that. Perhaps I was getting acquainted with nature and with God.
“You know, Johnny,” his voice was low and mellow, “for each of us there is a place of peace. Once there was a man who was asked to define peace. He led the one who asked to a waterfall. There in bubbling, tumbling confusion a tumultuous cataract made its way to the rocks below.
“‘Peace!’ his friend cried. ‘Do you call this peace?’
“‘No,’ replied the philosopher, ‘Not this. But look! Above the falls, poised over that rushing confusion, swaying there on a slender branch, is a tiny bird. And if you will watch closely, though because of the thundering waters you cannot hear him, you will see that he is singing his little song to the tune of the rushing water. He has found peace.’
“And so it was for him,” the aged prospector added, after looking away at the stars. “There are men like that, thousands of them. Go into some great steel mill where is constant din and confusion. Look far up to a narrow cage. A man stands manipulating levers. Climb up there and ask him: ‘Where is your place of peace?’
“If he knows the answer it will be: ‘Here.’
“You’ll find the same thing in a great city, Johnny. Go into some department store where the rush is greatest; in the wheat pit where men are shouting loudest; it’s all the same. You’ll find men there who’ll say: ‘This is the place of peace.’
“But for me—” His tone dropped once more. “As for me, this is the place of peace. Do you know that at the back of the cabin only a few low trees grow?”