CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIIJOY MAKES A REQUESTAFTERthe mid-day meal, at which Joy Gargrave did not appear, Corporal Bracknell left the house, and strolled down the road until he reached the place where the girl had passed him on the previous night. There he came to a standstill, his brow puckered in thought, then he swung to the right into the same path where he had found Koona Dick lying in the snow. He had gone but a little way however, when a noise behind him caused him to look round. Joy Gargrave was following him. He waited for her, and as she came up to him she said, “Mr. Bracknell, do you mind if I accompany you a little way? I should like to talk to you—if I may.”“It will be a pleasure, Miss Gargrave,” he answered quite sincerely.“Then if you do not mind we will turn aside into the wood. I—I do not care for this path, now, and we might be seen and interrupted by some one, and I have a request to make of you.”“I am entirely at your service, Miss Gargrave.”“Then we will turn—here.”She indicated a place where the wood thinned a little, and turning with her, he fell into step at her side, and waited for her to begin, wondering what she might have to say to him. Half a minute passed in silence, then she began abruptly: “You will haveheard that we are starting for England tomorrow?”“Yes,” he answered. “Mr. Rayner told me. The decision is rather sudden, isn’t it?”She nodded. “The journey is a quite unexpected one, just now. We had thought of waiting until the ice broke up and of canoeing down the river. But a letter has just come from Sir Joseph—Mr. Rayner’s father—stating that my presence is required in England at the earliest possible moment. The letter has been delayed, and Mr. Rayner tells me that it is requisite that we should start at once.”“The business must be very urgent if you have to start on such a long journey at a day’s notice,” commented the corporal.“It is not altogether that,” was the reply, “though Mr. Rayner insists that it is imperative that we shall make an early start. The truth is—” she broke off, and then resumed in a quavering voice: “I am much upset by that mysterious affair of last night, and, Mr. Bracknell, I am afraid—horribly afraid.”“Of what?” he asked, looking into her beautiful face to find it white and tense with emotion.“Of my—my—of Dick Bracknell,” she answered quietly.“But if he is dead, what—”“Do you think he is dead?” she cried sharply. “Tell me, Mr. Bracknell, what do you really think?”“Last night,” he answered slowly, “I had no doubt whatever about it. But today—”“Yes, today?” she prompted anxiously.“I am not quite so sure. His complete disappearanceperplexes me. If he were dead as I thought, then some one has carried his body away; and if he were not dead, then some one must still have helped him, for he was in no condition to help himself.”“That is what you think? Mr. Bracknell, do you know that there was a sledge in the wood to the left of that path?”“I saw the trail,” he answered quietly, “and I saw you following it.”“Whose sled was it?” she asked thoughtfully. “It was none of ours, and it was not yours, and it could not be that of a miner, for any such would have come to the Lodge, as we keep open house for the men on trail.”“I do not know whose it can have been,” answered the corporal thoughtfully. “If we knew that we should have the key to the whole of this mysterious affair, possibly. But whoever it was he was anxious as far as possible to cover his tracks. He did not follow the trail up the river. He crossed to the track on the other side, and then turned off into the wood; he lit a fire there. I found the ashes after I left you this morning. He must have halted there for a little time, for the snow was pretty well trampled, and when he resumed his journey, he marched parallel with the river, and descended to the ice again just south of the bluff. I found his tracks coming down the bank there, and I imagine that from the point he must have followed the trail up-river.”“Whoever could he be?” asked the girl in perplexity.“I do not know. But tomorrow I am going to find out; my dogs will be fresh then, and after the rest I shall be able to travel fast. Of one thing I am convinced: whoever the man was he was not your husband. Dick Bracknell, as I said just now, was in no condition to help himself, certainly not to take the trail.”For a moment Joy Gargrave did not speak, and as he looked at her he wondered what her thoughts were. He was still wondering when she broke the silence.“Mr. Bracknell, I am afraid, terribly afraid. Somehow I feel that your cousin is not dead. I feel that he will come back here, and that is why we are hurrying away tomorrow morning. The letter from Sir Joseph Rayner serves for an excuse. Do you understand?”“I think I do,” answered the corporal sympathetically. “You are afraid that Dick, having found out where you are, will return to worry you?”“You know him, I have told you how I was trapped into marrying him, do you think that he is the man to leave me in peace?”“He is likely to consult only his own interests,” agreed her companion.“But I shall be safe from him in England, if what you tell me is true. He dare not go there openly, and if he were to appear at all, I should be able to protect myself, by invoking the police.”“The police would only be too happy to afford you protection here,” answered the corporal earnestly.The girl looked at him with grateful eyes. “Youmean yourself. Yes! I know, but there is another service that I want from you—”“You have but to name it, Miss Gargrave,” he answered as she hesitated. “So far as duty allows, I am entirely at your service. Tell me what it is that I can do for you.”“You can find out for me whether Dick Bracknell is alive or dead.”The corporal had not anticipated the request, and he was a little startled by it. Instantly his mind reverted to the conversation he had had with Rayner. He recalled the hopes which the latter entertained, and wondered if this white-faced girl at his side was willing to help their realization. As that possibility flashed into his mind, he was conscious of a constriction about his heart. But he gave no sign.“I should be compelled to do that in any case,” he answered quietly. “I cannot relinquish the work on which I started until I know what has become of the man who is known at headquarters as Koona Dick. Some one must know about him—probably the driver of the sled whose trail I followed, and I’ve got to find out. Vague reports are not regarded as satisfactory by the heads of the force.”“You will let me know?” she asked instantly.“I shall be glad to do so,” he answered quietly, and again he was conscious of the tightening about his heart.“You see,” she explained, “my position is so anomalous. All my little world with the exception of my Newnham friend and yourself, my foster-sister,whom I told only last night, thinks of me as a spinster.”“You are sure Mr. Rayner does not know of your marriage?” asked the corporal quickly, as a thought struck him.“I am quite sure,” answered Joy readily, without giving any indication that she found any special significance in the question. “You see the part played by Lady Alcombe was not very credible, and I used my knowledge of it to ensure her silence. I wrote to her and told her that if the wedding was not kept secret, I should proclaim all that had happened to the world. Her vulnerable spot is the position she holds in society, and she knew how that would suffer if it became a matter of common knowledge that for a bribe she had schemed to marry to a scamp an innocent girl left in her charge. She wrote me a short note in reply, in which she said, that she would forget that the marriage had even taken place, and that I need not fear that it would ever become known. That is why I am so sure Mr. Rayner does not know. Lady Alcombe dare not betray me.”Bracknell nodded. “I dare say you are right, but of course you cannot marry again until you are sure of that—”“I do not want to marry again!” interrupted the girl quickly, the blood flaming in her pale face. “Why should you think that I do, Mr. Bracknell?”As the corporal met her blue eyes, clear and unshadowed by guile, his heart grew suddenly light, and on the moment he dismissed from his mind thethought that Joy Gargrave in any way shared Mr. Rayner’s aspirations. He laughed cheerfully as he replied, “I did not say that I thought you wished to marry again, Miss Gargrave. I was merely stating the law on the matter, and there is no personal significance to be attached to such a statement.”Joy Gargrave smiled austerely. “I am not likely ever to marry again,” she said. “Once bitten, twice shy, you know.”The corporal smiled in return, but as he marked her loveliness and remembered the figure at which the Northland had estimated Rolf Gargrave’s wealth, he thought to himself that many a man would endeavour to persuade her to a different mind, but he did not say so.“Miss Gargrave, one never knows what the future holds—but whatever happens you can count me as your friend. I am not proud of my relationship to Dick Bracknell, even though it does make me some sort of a cousin to you. There is nothing that I will not do to serve you, and if anything that I learn will deliver you from your anomalous position, you may rest assured that I will let you know of it at the earliest possible moment.”“Thank you, Mr. Bracknell,” she answered simply. “I shall be very grateful.”They walked on a little way without speaking, then she turned to him suddenly. “You are my cousin, more or less, Mr. Bracknell, but I do not know your christian name.”“It is Roger,” he answered smilingly.“And if at any time I want to communicate with you, where—”“Headquarters at Regina. That will always find me sooner or later, no matter what part of the Territory I may be in.”“I am glad to know that,” she said, “and if at any time you have news for me, any letter sent care of Sir Joseph Rayner will reach me.” She turned in her steps as she spoke. “I think I had better return now. There is much to do at the Lodge, and they will miss me. But I am glad to have met you, and glad to think that I can count you among my friends.”She held out her mittened hand, and as he took it Roger Bracknell felt the blood surge warmly in his face, and in his grey eyes as he looked at her there was a flame that had she observed it would have told her that she had secured more than a friend. But she did not see it, and as she walked away there was a pensive look on the beautiful face.The next day Corporal Bracknell, with his own team ready harnessed, watched Joy Gargrave and her escort take their departure. Four full teams of dogs drew their equipment, and snow having fallen during the night, Joy and her foster-sister wore the great webbed snowshoes of the North. They stood making their good-byes, then the half-breed driver gave the word.“Mooch! Mooch! Linka!”The leading dog gave a yelp, and strained at his collar, and a moment later all the teams were movingsouthward. Joy Gargrave waved her hand as she moved on, and he waved back and stood watching till the cavalcade was out of sight, then turning to his own dogs, he gave the word to move and set his face towards the snowy solitudes of the North.CHAPTER VIIIKOONA DICKAS HE TRAVELLED, Roger Bracknell’s mind was busy with the events of the past two days, and with the information he had gathered. That his cousin Dick should have turned out to be the man whose trail he had followed had occasioned no wonder after the first shock of surprise; but the mystery of the attack upon him, and of his subsequent disappearance, afforded him much food for thought. Some one had determined that Dick Bracknell should die, and some one had shot him. The question was—who was it? He had dismissed from his mind any idea that Joy herself had any complicity in that business, her frankness having quite killed the suspicions he had at first been inclined to entertain.His thoughts swung round to Rayner. Did he know anything of the matter? He could find no satisfactory answer. It was true that immediately after the crime he had seen him entering the Lodge with a rifle, and he had certainly shown a keen interest about the sled which had waited in the wood, but from the first he had casually offered a sufficient explanation, and the instinct which turns every man into an amateur detective on the occasion of a mysterious crime would easily account for the second.Besides—Rayner could have had nothing to dowith the disappearance of Dick Bracknell’s body, for the corporal was quite sure that he had never left the house until he had done so with himself. True, he had betrayed a certain knowledge as to the place where the crime had been committed, but he himself might easily have communicated that knowledge to Rayner, though he could not recollect having done so, whilst on the other hand, the motive for such a serious crime as murder was not immediately apparent. It was true that Rayner designed to marry Joy Gargrave, but that of itself was not a sufficient motive unless he knew of the previous marriage.“But does Rayner know of that marriage?” He uttered the question aloud, and answered it the same way, speech helping him to precipitate his thoughts.“I think not! The girl is so positive ... and Rayner has given no sign. There’s the deuce of a coil to be unwound somehow.”He reached the bluff, turned it, and saw the junction of the tributary Elkhorn with the main river. When he reached it he halted his dogs and made a careful inspection of the trail. The new snow had drifted, but the thick pinewood which grew on the banks of the smaller stream had turned the snow in places, and about two hundred yards up, he came on the half-obliterated traces of sled-runners. He examined them carefully, stood for a minute or two in thought, then nodded his head.“Turned up here out of the main trail, and will probably have made a camp somewhere. Anyway it is worth trying.”He went back for his dogs, and turned up the Elkhorn. The trail at first was not very bad, and he made a good pace; but after the first two miles it worsened, and he struck an abundance of soft snow, presenting an absolutely virgin surface. This made the going very hard, and he marched ahead of his labouring dogs, packing the snow with the great webbed shoes of the North, lifting each foot clear almost perpendicularly, then planting it down to harden the surface for his canine team. Three miles or so he made, in spite of the cold, sweating like a bull, and then he reached a place where the wind had swept the ice like a broom leaving it almost clear of snow.He examined the frozen surface, and after a little search found the marks of sled-runners on the ice. He searched further, but found nothing save these twin scars running parallel to one another. But one sled had passed that way, and he was sure that he was on the right track. A smile of satisfaction came on his lean face, and seating himself, on the sled he swung forward at a rattling pace.The short day was coming to a close when the leading dog yelped suddenly, and with his followers began to manifest signs of canine excitement. Roger Bracknell himself sniffed the keen air. There was a fire somewhere, for the unmistakable odour of burning resinous wood reached his nostrils. He stepped off the sled, and hanging on to the gee-pole tried to check the pace of his team. His efforts however, were in vain. The dogs bent their heads to the ice and threw themselves against the collars, hurrying forward, as they had not hurriedall day. They too smelt the burning pinewood, and to them it signified not merely human habitation, but freedom from the traces, and the frozen salmon which constituted their evening meal.The corporal, finding his endeavours to restrain them vain, prepared for eventualities. Hanging on to the sled with one hand, with the other he unfastened the holster wherein he carried his service pistol. He did not know what to expect. That aromatic odour might come from an Indian tepee, from the hut of some lonely prospecting party, or from the camp of the man he was following; in any case it was as well to be prepared.The leading dog yelped again, and the others responded in joyful chorus. The team swung suddenly towards the left bank, up a slight incline towards a clearing in the wood. Out of the gathering gloom a faint glow appeared, and then the shadowy outline of a hut. The glow was from a frosted parchment window, and the hut was the typical miner’s cabin of the North. Corporal Bracknell smiled and dropped his hand from the pistol-holster, finding the look of the place altogether reassuring. The dogs came to a standstill on the packed snow in front of the cabin, yelping delight, and whip in hand Bracknell waited, listening. If there were dogs at the cabin they might be expected to charge the new-comers, who fastened in the traces would be heavily handicapped. The charge he waited for did not come. There was no challenging answer to the yelping of his own team, and apparently the owner of the cabin was without dogs, or if he owned a team it was absent fromhome. This fact further reassured him and threw him still more off his guard. He stepped forward to the door of the cabin and rapped upon it with the butt-end of his dog-whip.“Come in,” answered a hoarse voice.The corporal felt for the moose-hide thong that worked the wooden catch, opened the door, and stepping inside turned to close it behind him.“That’s right,” said the voice again. “Now put your hands up.”The corporal jumped and his hands moved instinctively towards the holster as he swung round.“Don’t!” snapped the voice. “Put them up, or by—” Bracknell recognized the folly of resistance, and as he raised his hands above his head, his eyes swept the cabin for the speaker. A slush lamp against the wall, and the glow from the roaring Yukon stove gave light to the middle of the cabin, but the corners were in comparative darkness, and it was a second or two before he located the owner of the voice. Then, in a bunk in the corner furthest from the door, he caught sight of a man propped among furs and blankets. On the edge of the bunk rested a hand which held a heavy pistol pointing at himself. The face that he looked into was that which he had last seen in death-like repose in the snow near North Star Lodge—the face of Koona Dick. The eyes of the latter glittered wickedly in the firelight, and whilst the officer waited the voice spoke again, mockingly.“The end of the long trail—hey, bobby?”The corporal did not reply. Apparently hiscousin was alone and comparatively helpless, or he would scarcely have waited his entrance lying in the bunk. His eyes measured the distance between them and he speculated what chance there was of the success of a sudden spring proving successful. But the man on the bunk evidently divined what was passing through his mind, for a second later he broke the silence again.“I wouldn’t try it, officer, not if I were you. I may be a sick man, but I can still shoot.”Roger Bracknell looked at the hand resting on the edge of the bunk. It was perfectly steady. He recognized the hopelessness of any attack proving successful, until the sick man was off his guard, and nodded casually.“I give you best,” he answered, speaking for the first time.The man on the bunk gave a chuckling laugh. “You seem wise,” he replied, “and if you do just what I tell you you’ll prove you are. You’ve got a gun, of course, in that holster of yours? Well, when I give the word, you will unbuckle the belt, and fling it pistol and all under the bunk here. No tricks, mind you. If your hand strays an inch from the buckle, I fire, and I warn you that I am a dead shot.... Now you can get to work.”The corporal dropped his hands to his belt, and as his fingers worked at the stiff buckle, wondered if he might run the risk of trying for his pistol.“Quick! You’re too long!” cried the man in the bunk. Roger Bracknell hesitated for a second.His fingers fumbled at the buckle, then the belt swung loose in his hands.“Throw it!” came the command in a peremptory voice.The corporal threw it along the floor and it slid to the edge of the bunk, then his cousin laughed again.“‘Wisdom is justified of her children.’ If you had a pious upbringing, bobby, you will recognize the Scripture. And now having got rid of your arsenal, you can sit down at the table, and put your hands upon it. That will be easier for you than standing there trying to touch the roof, but I warn you again—no monkey tricks or—”The pistol moved significantly, and the corporal moved towards the rough table, constructed out of a packing case.“Keep your hands up, and shove that stool forward with your feet.”The “stool” referred to was a log of wood, which as the corporal recognized, would prove a very good missile if a man had time to lift and throw it. Evidently his mentor realized that also, and was taking no chances, so, still at the pistol point, Corporal Bracknell pushed the log forward to the table, and then on his captor’s instructions seated himself with his arms resting on the table.“Now,” said the sick man, with a short laugh, “we can talk in peace.”“Talk away,” answered the corporal cheerfully.“I will,” replied the other sharply. “There’s a question that I want to ask you.... Why did you pot me in the wood at North Star Lodge threenights ago? That sort of thing is against the rules of your service, isn’t it?”“It is,” answered the corporal, “and the answer to your other question is that I didn’t pot you.”“You didn’t, hey? Then who the devil did?”“I would give a goodish bit to know,” was the corporal’s reply. “The thing is a mystery to me.”“But it’s no mystery to me,” answered the other, a trifle passionately. “You did it, and it’s no use trying to bluff me. I know you’ve been on my track for weeks, and that you were determined to get me by fair means or foul. If you think that lying is going to help you—”“I am not lying,” interrupted Roger Bracknell. “I give you my word of honour that I am telling you the truth—and I say that not because I am afraid. It is true that I was trailing you, and that I was close at your heels at North Star. But I never shot you, I found you lying in the snow, as I thought, dead, but I’d nothing whatever to do with the shooting.”“The devil!” cried the sick man, and from his tones the corporal knew that he was convinced. “Then who did it?”The corporal saw a chance of further surprising his questioner—and took it.“Well, there was the person whom you went to meet—your wife, you know.”“My wife!” There was amazement in Dick Bracknell’s tones, and for a moment after the exclamation he stared at the officer like the man who could not believe his ears.“Yes, your wife, Joy Gargrave,” answered thecorporal steadily. “You went to meet her in the wood, didn’t you?”Dick Bracknell did not reply. His lips pursed themselves and he began to whistle thoughtfully to himself the while he stared at the man whose question he left unanswered. The corporal smiled a little, and continued—“I should think that you would be the first to admit that Joy Gargrave was not without grievances sufficient to warrant extreme action on her part.”“You can put that notion out of your noddle, at once,” replied the other harshly. “If you know Joy at all, you know that the idea of shooting me is the very last thing that would enter her head. She’s not that sort.”The corporal remembered Joy’s confession and smiled whimsically at the unconscious irony of her husband’s testimony, then, still trying to move the other to some indiscretion of speech, he answered quietly, “You believe in Joy Gargrave? But have you thought what she must feel like? There are plenty of women who—”“Drop it,” broke in the sick man harshly. “The motion is preposterous. I won’t listen to it; and I warn you, I don’t share Joy’s scruples about shooting.”“Nor about anything else, I imagine?” answered the corporal with a short laugh. “But we can easily settle whether Joy did it or not. Which side did the shot come from?”“Now you’re asking me something,” answered the wounded man. “There were two shots, andthey came from both sides of me. It was a regular ambuscade, and whoever fired meant to get me.”“Where were you hit?” asked the corporal.“Left shoulder! Drilled clean through,” was the reply.“And which way were you facing when the thing happened?” asked the corporal. “Think carefully. It is rather important.”“I was facing up the path, with my back to the main road. I had heard something moving and had turned round, just at the moment.”“That settles it,” answered the corporal emphatically. “It was the shot from the left that did for you, and your wife was on the right.”“But who was on the left? Tell me that if you can, my Solomon.”Corporal Bracknell shook his head. “There you hit one of the mysteries of this business. I don’t know, I wish I did, but as sure as my name is Roger Bracknell—”“As sure as what?” The interruption came like a pistol shot, and the wounded man leaned forward with amazement showing in his face. “What name did you say you called yourself?”“Roger Bracknell!” answered the corporal quietly.“H’m!” responded the other, peering at him thoughtfully, then he said suddenly, “Take off that chapeau of yours!”The corporal removed his fur cap, and sat with it in his hand, whilst the other searched his face with inquisitive eyes. There was a moment’s silence, and then the wounded man spoke again.“It beats the band. You are my cousin Roger right enough, and this is a nice dramatic meeting. Drury Lane isn’t in it with us, though what the blazes you are doing as a ‘Mounter’ beats me. I thought you were at the bar.”“And I didn’t know you were Koona Dick until three nights ago. I had your description given me, and that cut across your cheek bone was particularized. That and the beard you wear are acquisitions since the old days at Harrow Fell, and even when I looked at your face the other night I never associated Koona Dick with Dick Bracknell.”“How did you come to know?” asked the other curiously.“I picked up that note which you sent to your wife asking her to meet you, and naming the place. You had begun to write your surname and then crossed it out. That gave me the first inkling that you and Koona Dick were one and the same, and of course when I talked to Joy Gargrave I knew that what I suspected was the fact.”“And knowing what you now know, you would still arrest me?”As he asked the question, Dick Bracknell leaned forward a little, and the hand that held the pistol hung loosely over the edge of the bunk. The corporal noticed it, and shifted his grip on the heavy fur cap in his hand.“I should be compelled to. Duty is duty—you know.”“But, man, I’m your cousin!” came the protest.“Yes! more’s the pity.”As he replied, the corporal’s arm moved suddenly,and the fur cap was jerked across the room right into the sick man’s face. The corporal himself followed it like lightening, and, as he reached the bunk, gripped his cousin’s pistol-hand. The weapon went off, once, twice, and the bullets plugged the logs of the cabin, whilst Dick Bracknell shouted imprecations. The policeman caught the barrel of the pistol, and turned it away from himself, whilst with the other hand he caught his cousin’s wrist, and dug his thumb into the sinews of it, in order to force him to release his hold. In the midst of the struggle there was a sudden clamour of dogs outside, but neither of the men noticed it. The pistol cracked again, and at that moment the door opened, and an Indian rushed in. Apparently, he took in the situation in a glance. There was a heavy dog-whip in his hand, and in an instant he had swung it, and brought the loaded stock down on the corporal’s head. The latter did not even cry out. He doubled up like a doll out of which the stuffing had been ripped, and lay in a crumpled heap upon the hard mud floor.CHAPTER IXTHE HUSKS OF THE PRODIGALWHENRoger Bracknell came to himself, he had a splitting head, and no exact recollection of recent events. His head ached so much that he felt moved to press his temples with his hands, but found that it was impossible to do so, owing to his arms being bound to his side. On making that discovery, he lay quite still, with his eyes closed, thinking over the situation. Little by little memory came back to him, and he remembered what had befallen, but his remembrance of events ceased with the moment when his cousin’s pistol had cracked for the third time. Had the bullet struck him? He did not know, but at that moment through the drums throbbing in his head, a voice sounded in his ears, a voice that had external reality, and the tones of which he recognized.“Do you think he’s dead, Joe? He lies still enough.”A guttural voice grunted some reply, and there was a sound of movement near him. He opened his eyes, to find himself looking into a dark, frost-scarred face, from which a single eye gleamed malevolently. As that eye encountered his, the dark face was lifted and turned from him, and he caught the reply given over the speaker’s shoulder.“Him eyes open. He alright!”“That’s good hearing. I don’t want him to die on our hands, at least not until I have had a little more conversation with him.”The man Joe gave a careless reply, and moved away. Corporal Bracknell craned his neck a little and looked round.The slush lamp was still burning, but through the parchment window the grey light of the Northland day penetrated, from which fact he deduced that he had lain where he was many hours. In front of the stove, the man of the evil face, whom he had seen on opening his eyes, was busy preparing a meal, and the odour of frying moose-steak and bacon filled the cabin. In the bunk, propped up among the furs, with his left arm in an improvised sling, he descried his cousin, puffing at a pipe, and regarding him with thoughtful gaze. Their eyes met, and Dick Bracknell smiled.“Morning, Cousin Roger. I hope that head of yours is not very bad.”“It is only middling,” answered the corporal truthfully.“Um! I suspected so! Joe there,” he indicated the Indian bending over the stove, “doesn’t know his strength, and he’s a holy terror with a whipstock. You should see him tackle a big wolf dog that’s turned savage. It’s a sight for gods and men!”Roger Bracknell did not reply. He had not been aware of the Indian’s entrance on the previous night, but in a flash he divined what had happened to him, and why his head ached so intolerably. His cousin continued with mocking affability.“He hit you rather hard, I am afraid, but we Bracknells are all a little thick in the skull, and I hope no real harm will follow on Joe’s forceful intervention. In any case you must own that his arrival was a most opportune one.”“I can well believe you found it so,” answered the corporal.“I did, Roger my boy, I did. You surprised me last night. I didn’t think you would have gone for a wounded and disabled man. It was scarcely chivalrous, you know.”“You were armed,” was the reply. “I wasn’t.”Dick Bracknell waved his pipe airily. “We will let it pass. What is done is done, and the past is always to be reckoned as irrevocable, as I know better than most of the parsons. The present and the future are my immediate concern, and the question is what am I to do with you?”“That,” answered the corporal quietly, “is scarcely for me to decide.”“No,” replied his cousin with a little laugh, “but it is a question in which you should be interested.”Roger Bracknell was interested, intensely interested, but he strove his best to appear unconcerned, and after a moment his cousin continued—“Joe there has a very simply solution. He suggests another knock on the head, and sepulchre in the river through an ice-hole. It is a course that would be advantageous to me, since your body would not be found before the ice breaks up in the spring, if then, and in the interval we should have time to clear out of the Territories.”The corporal knew that what he said was true,and shivered a little as he contemplated the suggested way of getting rid of him, but his voice was firm as he asked casually, “Why don’t you accept that solution?”“Why don’t I accept—” began the other, and then broke off, glowering at the man who though in his power was apparently undismayed. Then a sneer came on his face. “Blood is thicker than water,” he remarked. “Though you’re willing to forget that we are cousins, and regardless of family ties are prepared to follow your d—d sense of duty, I can’t forget it; and I’m inclined to spare you, and even to cut those bonds of yours on conditions.”“On conditions! What are they?” asked the corporal.“That you give me your word of honour that you will not attempt to escape or to attack Joe or myself whilst you are with us.”The corporal wondered what was in his cousin’s mind and what was behind the offer, but he was careful not to probe into the matter openly.“You will accept my word of honour?” he asked with a faint touch of surprise in his voice.“Yes,” answered his cousin sneeringly. “You see, I know you of old. The Bracknell strain runs true in you, whilst it has a twist in me. I know you won’t break your parole—if you give it. And of course, you will give it. It’s your word or your life. Ha! Ha! Quite a Dick Turpin touch there, hey?”Roger Bracknell considered the matter swiftly. So far as he could see there was nothing to gain byrejecting the offer, since he was completely in the other’s hands, and though his cousin sneered he was clearly quite in earnest.“I might be disposed to give my word, if—”“Man,” broke in the other savagely, “you had better. There are no ifs and buts about it. Look at Joe there. He doesn’t strike you as one who will be over delicate, does he? If I let him loose you’ll be running down the Elkhorn under the ice inside ten minutes. You’d better agree—and quickly. No!” he lifted his pipe to check the words on the corporal’s lips. “Hear me out. There’s another condition yet, and it is this. As soon as I am able to travel you will accompany me without demur for four days. On the fifth day, I’ll release you and you can do your worst.”The corporal hesitated. There was something here that he did not understand, and again he wondered what lay behind the proposal. His cousin watched him, and as he did not speak, addressed him again.“I may remind you what the situation is. You are in my power. If you can’t give me your word, if I don’t fall in with Joe’s more primitive suggestion, I can keep you tied up here, and I can leave you tied up when we move on; or I can lash you on to a sledge, and, willy nilly, take you along with us. That must be quite plain to you. But I prefer an amicable arrangement.... You will give me your word?”Corporal Bracknell recognized the truth of his cousin’s utterances. There was little choice in the matter, and after a little more reflection he agreed.“Yes, Dick, I give you my word of honour.”“I thought you would!” Dick Bracknell laughed shortly as he spoke, and then turned to his Indian companion. “Just take your knife, Joe, and cut those thongs.”The Indian turned from the stove and growled something in a dialect which the corporal did not understand. He guessed, however, that the Indian was demurring, and with mingled feelings waited to see what would happen. His cousin spoke again, and this time there was a peremptory note in his voice.“Cut those thongs, I tell you; and don’t stand there growling at things you don’t understand.”He added something in his native tongue, and watching the Indian’s scowling face, the corporal saw the frown lift, and a flicker of evil laughter leap into the single eye. A moment later the Indian stepped up to him, and with a hunting knife cut the hide thongs which bound him, and then returned to the stove.The corporal stretched his arms, then his whole body, and after that rose slowly to his feet. His cousin watched him with eyes that smiled inscrutably.“Feels better, hey? You’re a sensible man, Cousin Roger, and now I guess we shall get along famously. A pity, though, that I shan’t be able to sit down to breakfast with you.”“What I can’t understand is how you come to be here at all,” blurted the corporal.“Oh,” laughed the other, “that’s as simple as you please. When I was plugged down by NorthStar, I must have lapsed into unconsciousness—for the first time on any stage. Whilst I was lying there in the snow—”“I examined you,” broke in the corporal. “I thought that you were dead!”“But as you see I wasn’t,” replied the other, “and whilst I was lying there in the snow; Joe, who was waiting with the dogs, having heard the shots came to look for me. He carried me to the sled, took me to the woods on the other side of the river, made a fire, and having doctored me brought me along here. He’s a good sort is Joe, though his looks are against him.”The corporal did not reply. From the trails he had found in the snow, he had already guessed part of the story which he had just heard and was not surprised at it. The wounded man laughed shortly.“Joe is attached to me. I once did him a service, and if I told him to do it he’d run amuck through Regina barracks without demur. He doesn’t love the mounted police, as he owes his lost eye to one of them, so you will see, cousin, that only my family affection saves you.”The Indian turned his scarred face from the stove, and laid the table in primitive fashion. Then having attended to his master, he placed a tin plate with moose meat and beans before the corporal, filled a mug with steaming coffee, and with a grunt invited him to eat. The officer did so readily enough. He had eaten nothing for fourteen hours and was feeling hungry.“Plain fare,” commented his cousin, “but wholesome, and if one brings to it the sauce of hunger, it’s at least as good as anything we had atHarrow Fell.... And that reminds me, cousin. How is the governor?”The corporal remembered the dignified Sir James Bracknell as he had last seen him, and although he had had his own quarrel with him, felt resentment at the tone in which the question was asked.“He was very well when last I saw him,” he answered stiffly.“How long ago is that?”“Two years.”“Um! that’s a goodish time. May I inquire if he knows your whereabouts?”“I think not. I didn’t tell him of my intentions when I came here. We—er—had a difference of opinion.”Dick Bracknell laughed. “I don’t blame you for that. He’s a starchy old buffer is the governor, and a regular perambulating pepper pot.” He was silent for a moment, and then he inquired jerkily, “How—a—did he take—that—a—a—little affair of mine?”“You mean the selling of the plans of the Travis gun?”“There’s no need for you to be brutal!” was the sharp reply. “I’ve paid pretty heavily for that piece of madness. You’ve to remember that I’m the heir of Harrow Fell, and that if I show my nose in England I shall probably get five years at Portland or Dartmoor.”The corporal knew that this was true, and was conscious of a little compunction. Without alluding to it he answered the question. “Sir James took that very badly. It was hushed up, of course,but when you disappeared, and your name was gazetted among the broken, he pressed for an explanation, and got it. As you can guess, proud old man as he is, it wasn’t a nice thing for him to hear.”“No.... Poor old governor!”A strained silence followed, and a full two minutes passed without any one speaking. Then the corporal glanced at his cousin. The latter was sitting in his bunk, staring straight before him, with a troubled look in his eyes. He moved as the corporal looked at him, and as their eyes met, he laughed in a grating way.“The husks are not good eating,” he commented, “and I’ve been feeding on them ever since the day I skipped from Alcombe.”The corporal was still silent, a little amazed at his cousin’s mood, and the other spoke again. “Don’t you go thinking I never regret things, Roger my boy. There never was a prodigal yet who didn’t lie awake o’ nights thinking what a fool he’d been. And for some of us there’s no going back to scoop the ring and the robe and to feast on the fatted veal.... There are times when I think of the Fell, and hear the pheasants clucking in the spinney. And I never sight at a ptarmigan but I think of the grouse driving down the wind on Harrow Moor. Man—it’s Hell, undiluted.”The corporal pushed the tin plate from him. He felt strangely moved. He had thought of his cousin as wholly bad, and now he found good mingled with the evil. He turned round.“Dick, old man,” he said in an unsteady voice, “you might make good yet, if you tried.”His cousin laughed harshly. “Not me, you know better. What were you after me for? Whisky-running? Yes! I thought so. That’s bad enough for a man of—a—my antecedents. But there are worse things credited to Koona Dick, as you’ll learn. I’ve got too far. What is it that fellow Kipling says? ‘Damned from here to Eternity’? That’s me, and I know it.”“You can pull up!” urged the other. “You can make reparation.”“Reparation!” exclaimed the other. “Ah! you are thinking of—Joy—my wife, aren’t you?”“Yes,” answered the corporal simply.Dick Bracknell’s mood changed swiftly. “What’s Joy to you?” he demanded hoarsely. “You know her, you’ve talked with her, consoled her, I don’t doubt. What’s she to you?”As he spoke his tones became violent, and he half threw himself out of the bunk, as if he would attack his cousin. The Indian started to his feet, and his one eye glared at the officer malevolently. The corporal did not move. As his cousin shouted the question the blood flushed his face, and in his heart he knew that he could not answer the question with the directness demanded.“Don’t be a fool, Dick,” he replied quietly. “I never saw Joy Gargrave till four days ago, and if I talk of reparation, well, you’ll own it is due to her.”Dick Bracknell’s jealous passion died down as suddenly as it had flamed. He threw himself back in the bunk and laughed shakily.“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, “but it is one of the things that can’t be done.”“You could let her divorce you!” blurted out the corporal. “It would be the decent thing to do.”“When did I ever do the decent thing,” retorted his cousin sneeringly. “No, Joy’s my wife—and I’ll keep her. It is something to know that there are millions I can dip my hands in some day, and a warm breast I can flee to—”“Not now at any rate,” broke in the corporal sharply, only by an effort restraining himself. “Joy has started for England.”“For England—when?” Dick Bracknell’s face and tones expressed amazement, but his next words were burdened with suspicion. “You’re not lying to me?”“No, it is the truth. Joy started for England yesterday morning. I saw her start.”“And I can’t follow,” commented the prodigal bitterly. “That’s part of the price I pay.”He did not speak again for a long time, and the corporal charged his pipe, lit it, and sat smoking, staring into the stove, and reflecting on the mess his cousin had made of his life.At the end of half an hour the Indian went out, and then Dick Bracknell broke the silence.“I wonder what Joy thinks of me? Did she tell you?”“She knows how she was trapped—you are aware of that, of course? I think she will never forgive you.”“I’m not surprised,” was the reply, “and yet, Roger, I think the world of her. When I marriedher I loved her—and I wasn’t thinking of her money overmuch. It was Lady Alcombe who put that rotten scheme in my head. If I’d only been patient, and run straight, and not been tempted by that agent to sell the secret of the Travis gun—but there’s a whole regiment of ‘if’s’ so what’s the use of gassing? Anyway, Joy’s mine—and no man else can get her while I live.”It was the last word he said upon the subject, and nearly three weeks later, having recovered sufficiently to travel, he journeyed with his cousin and the Indian up the Elkhorn. On the fourth morning of that journey Roger Bracknell woke, to find that preparations were already well advanced for departure. One team was already harnessed with a larger complement of dogs than usual, whilst his own sled, with three dogs standing by, was still unharnessed. His cousin indicated it with a jerk of his head.“We part company today, Roger. I’m sorry to rob your dog team, but Joe insists as he’s afraid you’ll get down to the police-post too soon for us, if we leave you your full team. Besides, we’re tackling a stiff journey and we shall need dogs before we’re through. We’re starting immediately, and you’ll have to breakfast alone, and by the time you’re through with it your parole is off. You understand?”The corporal nodded, and his cousin continued, “With only three dogs you won’t be such a fool as to try and trail us, and we’ve left you enough grub to get you down to North Star comfortably. Your rifle’s there on the top of your sled, and I trust younot to try and use it on us till you’ve eaten your breakfast.... So long, old man.”He turned lightly away, without waiting for his cousin to speak, and the corporal heard him humming an old chanson of the Voyageurs—“Ah, ah, Babette,We go away;But we will comeAgain, Babette—Again back home,On—”The song failed suddenly, and as Joe the Indian cracked his whip to the waiting dogs, Dick Bracknell looked back over his shoulder. His face was white and twisted as if with pain, and there was anguish in his eyes. The corporal took a hasty step towards him, but was waved back, and the team moved forward, the runners singing on the windswept ice. For ten minutes the officer stood watching, until the cavalcade passed out of sight behind a tree-clad island, but Dick Bracknell did not look back once. The corporal turned to the fire with a musing look upon his face, and whilst he prepared breakfast, his mind was with the man travelling up the river. The interrupted chanson haunted him and he found himself searching for the unsung fragment. For a time it eluded him, but presently he found it and hummed to himself—“—On Easter Day—Back home to playOn Easter day,Babette! Babette!”and as he found it he understood to the full the look of pain upon his cousin’s face. Again he looked up the river. Beyond the island a line of black dots appeared, and by them marched two larger dots.“Poor devil!” he murmured as he turned again to the fire.

CHAPTER VIIJOY MAKES A REQUESTAFTERthe mid-day meal, at which Joy Gargrave did not appear, Corporal Bracknell left the house, and strolled down the road until he reached the place where the girl had passed him on the previous night. There he came to a standstill, his brow puckered in thought, then he swung to the right into the same path where he had found Koona Dick lying in the snow. He had gone but a little way however, when a noise behind him caused him to look round. Joy Gargrave was following him. He waited for her, and as she came up to him she said, “Mr. Bracknell, do you mind if I accompany you a little way? I should like to talk to you—if I may.”“It will be a pleasure, Miss Gargrave,” he answered quite sincerely.“Then if you do not mind we will turn aside into the wood. I—I do not care for this path, now, and we might be seen and interrupted by some one, and I have a request to make of you.”“I am entirely at your service, Miss Gargrave.”“Then we will turn—here.”She indicated a place where the wood thinned a little, and turning with her, he fell into step at her side, and waited for her to begin, wondering what she might have to say to him. Half a minute passed in silence, then she began abruptly: “You will haveheard that we are starting for England tomorrow?”“Yes,” he answered. “Mr. Rayner told me. The decision is rather sudden, isn’t it?”She nodded. “The journey is a quite unexpected one, just now. We had thought of waiting until the ice broke up and of canoeing down the river. But a letter has just come from Sir Joseph—Mr. Rayner’s father—stating that my presence is required in England at the earliest possible moment. The letter has been delayed, and Mr. Rayner tells me that it is requisite that we should start at once.”“The business must be very urgent if you have to start on such a long journey at a day’s notice,” commented the corporal.“It is not altogether that,” was the reply, “though Mr. Rayner insists that it is imperative that we shall make an early start. The truth is—” she broke off, and then resumed in a quavering voice: “I am much upset by that mysterious affair of last night, and, Mr. Bracknell, I am afraid—horribly afraid.”“Of what?” he asked, looking into her beautiful face to find it white and tense with emotion.“Of my—my—of Dick Bracknell,” she answered quietly.“But if he is dead, what—”“Do you think he is dead?” she cried sharply. “Tell me, Mr. Bracknell, what do you really think?”“Last night,” he answered slowly, “I had no doubt whatever about it. But today—”“Yes, today?” she prompted anxiously.“I am not quite so sure. His complete disappearanceperplexes me. If he were dead as I thought, then some one has carried his body away; and if he were not dead, then some one must still have helped him, for he was in no condition to help himself.”“That is what you think? Mr. Bracknell, do you know that there was a sledge in the wood to the left of that path?”“I saw the trail,” he answered quietly, “and I saw you following it.”“Whose sled was it?” she asked thoughtfully. “It was none of ours, and it was not yours, and it could not be that of a miner, for any such would have come to the Lodge, as we keep open house for the men on trail.”“I do not know whose it can have been,” answered the corporal thoughtfully. “If we knew that we should have the key to the whole of this mysterious affair, possibly. But whoever it was he was anxious as far as possible to cover his tracks. He did not follow the trail up the river. He crossed to the track on the other side, and then turned off into the wood; he lit a fire there. I found the ashes after I left you this morning. He must have halted there for a little time, for the snow was pretty well trampled, and when he resumed his journey, he marched parallel with the river, and descended to the ice again just south of the bluff. I found his tracks coming down the bank there, and I imagine that from the point he must have followed the trail up-river.”“Whoever could he be?” asked the girl in perplexity.“I do not know. But tomorrow I am going to find out; my dogs will be fresh then, and after the rest I shall be able to travel fast. Of one thing I am convinced: whoever the man was he was not your husband. Dick Bracknell, as I said just now, was in no condition to help himself, certainly not to take the trail.”For a moment Joy Gargrave did not speak, and as he looked at her he wondered what her thoughts were. He was still wondering when she broke the silence.“Mr. Bracknell, I am afraid, terribly afraid. Somehow I feel that your cousin is not dead. I feel that he will come back here, and that is why we are hurrying away tomorrow morning. The letter from Sir Joseph Rayner serves for an excuse. Do you understand?”“I think I do,” answered the corporal sympathetically. “You are afraid that Dick, having found out where you are, will return to worry you?”“You know him, I have told you how I was trapped into marrying him, do you think that he is the man to leave me in peace?”“He is likely to consult only his own interests,” agreed her companion.“But I shall be safe from him in England, if what you tell me is true. He dare not go there openly, and if he were to appear at all, I should be able to protect myself, by invoking the police.”“The police would only be too happy to afford you protection here,” answered the corporal earnestly.The girl looked at him with grateful eyes. “Youmean yourself. Yes! I know, but there is another service that I want from you—”“You have but to name it, Miss Gargrave,” he answered as she hesitated. “So far as duty allows, I am entirely at your service. Tell me what it is that I can do for you.”“You can find out for me whether Dick Bracknell is alive or dead.”The corporal had not anticipated the request, and he was a little startled by it. Instantly his mind reverted to the conversation he had had with Rayner. He recalled the hopes which the latter entertained, and wondered if this white-faced girl at his side was willing to help their realization. As that possibility flashed into his mind, he was conscious of a constriction about his heart. But he gave no sign.“I should be compelled to do that in any case,” he answered quietly. “I cannot relinquish the work on which I started until I know what has become of the man who is known at headquarters as Koona Dick. Some one must know about him—probably the driver of the sled whose trail I followed, and I’ve got to find out. Vague reports are not regarded as satisfactory by the heads of the force.”“You will let me know?” she asked instantly.“I shall be glad to do so,” he answered quietly, and again he was conscious of the tightening about his heart.“You see,” she explained, “my position is so anomalous. All my little world with the exception of my Newnham friend and yourself, my foster-sister,whom I told only last night, thinks of me as a spinster.”“You are sure Mr. Rayner does not know of your marriage?” asked the corporal quickly, as a thought struck him.“I am quite sure,” answered Joy readily, without giving any indication that she found any special significance in the question. “You see the part played by Lady Alcombe was not very credible, and I used my knowledge of it to ensure her silence. I wrote to her and told her that if the wedding was not kept secret, I should proclaim all that had happened to the world. Her vulnerable spot is the position she holds in society, and she knew how that would suffer if it became a matter of common knowledge that for a bribe she had schemed to marry to a scamp an innocent girl left in her charge. She wrote me a short note in reply, in which she said, that she would forget that the marriage had even taken place, and that I need not fear that it would ever become known. That is why I am so sure Mr. Rayner does not know. Lady Alcombe dare not betray me.”Bracknell nodded. “I dare say you are right, but of course you cannot marry again until you are sure of that—”“I do not want to marry again!” interrupted the girl quickly, the blood flaming in her pale face. “Why should you think that I do, Mr. Bracknell?”As the corporal met her blue eyes, clear and unshadowed by guile, his heart grew suddenly light, and on the moment he dismissed from his mind thethought that Joy Gargrave in any way shared Mr. Rayner’s aspirations. He laughed cheerfully as he replied, “I did not say that I thought you wished to marry again, Miss Gargrave. I was merely stating the law on the matter, and there is no personal significance to be attached to such a statement.”Joy Gargrave smiled austerely. “I am not likely ever to marry again,” she said. “Once bitten, twice shy, you know.”The corporal smiled in return, but as he marked her loveliness and remembered the figure at which the Northland had estimated Rolf Gargrave’s wealth, he thought to himself that many a man would endeavour to persuade her to a different mind, but he did not say so.“Miss Gargrave, one never knows what the future holds—but whatever happens you can count me as your friend. I am not proud of my relationship to Dick Bracknell, even though it does make me some sort of a cousin to you. There is nothing that I will not do to serve you, and if anything that I learn will deliver you from your anomalous position, you may rest assured that I will let you know of it at the earliest possible moment.”“Thank you, Mr. Bracknell,” she answered simply. “I shall be very grateful.”They walked on a little way without speaking, then she turned to him suddenly. “You are my cousin, more or less, Mr. Bracknell, but I do not know your christian name.”“It is Roger,” he answered smilingly.“And if at any time I want to communicate with you, where—”“Headquarters at Regina. That will always find me sooner or later, no matter what part of the Territory I may be in.”“I am glad to know that,” she said, “and if at any time you have news for me, any letter sent care of Sir Joseph Rayner will reach me.” She turned in her steps as she spoke. “I think I had better return now. There is much to do at the Lodge, and they will miss me. But I am glad to have met you, and glad to think that I can count you among my friends.”She held out her mittened hand, and as he took it Roger Bracknell felt the blood surge warmly in his face, and in his grey eyes as he looked at her there was a flame that had she observed it would have told her that she had secured more than a friend. But she did not see it, and as she walked away there was a pensive look on the beautiful face.The next day Corporal Bracknell, with his own team ready harnessed, watched Joy Gargrave and her escort take their departure. Four full teams of dogs drew their equipment, and snow having fallen during the night, Joy and her foster-sister wore the great webbed snowshoes of the North. They stood making their good-byes, then the half-breed driver gave the word.“Mooch! Mooch! Linka!”The leading dog gave a yelp, and strained at his collar, and a moment later all the teams were movingsouthward. Joy Gargrave waved her hand as she moved on, and he waved back and stood watching till the cavalcade was out of sight, then turning to his own dogs, he gave the word to move and set his face towards the snowy solitudes of the North.

JOY MAKES A REQUEST

AFTERthe mid-day meal, at which Joy Gargrave did not appear, Corporal Bracknell left the house, and strolled down the road until he reached the place where the girl had passed him on the previous night. There he came to a standstill, his brow puckered in thought, then he swung to the right into the same path where he had found Koona Dick lying in the snow. He had gone but a little way however, when a noise behind him caused him to look round. Joy Gargrave was following him. He waited for her, and as she came up to him she said, “Mr. Bracknell, do you mind if I accompany you a little way? I should like to talk to you—if I may.”

“It will be a pleasure, Miss Gargrave,” he answered quite sincerely.

“Then if you do not mind we will turn aside into the wood. I—I do not care for this path, now, and we might be seen and interrupted by some one, and I have a request to make of you.”

“I am entirely at your service, Miss Gargrave.”

“Then we will turn—here.”

She indicated a place where the wood thinned a little, and turning with her, he fell into step at her side, and waited for her to begin, wondering what she might have to say to him. Half a minute passed in silence, then she began abruptly: “You will haveheard that we are starting for England tomorrow?”

“Yes,” he answered. “Mr. Rayner told me. The decision is rather sudden, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “The journey is a quite unexpected one, just now. We had thought of waiting until the ice broke up and of canoeing down the river. But a letter has just come from Sir Joseph—Mr. Rayner’s father—stating that my presence is required in England at the earliest possible moment. The letter has been delayed, and Mr. Rayner tells me that it is requisite that we should start at once.”

“The business must be very urgent if you have to start on such a long journey at a day’s notice,” commented the corporal.

“It is not altogether that,” was the reply, “though Mr. Rayner insists that it is imperative that we shall make an early start. The truth is—” she broke off, and then resumed in a quavering voice: “I am much upset by that mysterious affair of last night, and, Mr. Bracknell, I am afraid—horribly afraid.”

“Of what?” he asked, looking into her beautiful face to find it white and tense with emotion.

“Of my—my—of Dick Bracknell,” she answered quietly.

“But if he is dead, what—”

“Do you think he is dead?” she cried sharply. “Tell me, Mr. Bracknell, what do you really think?”

“Last night,” he answered slowly, “I had no doubt whatever about it. But today—”

“Yes, today?” she prompted anxiously.

“I am not quite so sure. His complete disappearanceperplexes me. If he were dead as I thought, then some one has carried his body away; and if he were not dead, then some one must still have helped him, for he was in no condition to help himself.”

“That is what you think? Mr. Bracknell, do you know that there was a sledge in the wood to the left of that path?”

“I saw the trail,” he answered quietly, “and I saw you following it.”

“Whose sled was it?” she asked thoughtfully. “It was none of ours, and it was not yours, and it could not be that of a miner, for any such would have come to the Lodge, as we keep open house for the men on trail.”

“I do not know whose it can have been,” answered the corporal thoughtfully. “If we knew that we should have the key to the whole of this mysterious affair, possibly. But whoever it was he was anxious as far as possible to cover his tracks. He did not follow the trail up the river. He crossed to the track on the other side, and then turned off into the wood; he lit a fire there. I found the ashes after I left you this morning. He must have halted there for a little time, for the snow was pretty well trampled, and when he resumed his journey, he marched parallel with the river, and descended to the ice again just south of the bluff. I found his tracks coming down the bank there, and I imagine that from the point he must have followed the trail up-river.”

“Whoever could he be?” asked the girl in perplexity.

“I do not know. But tomorrow I am going to find out; my dogs will be fresh then, and after the rest I shall be able to travel fast. Of one thing I am convinced: whoever the man was he was not your husband. Dick Bracknell, as I said just now, was in no condition to help himself, certainly not to take the trail.”

For a moment Joy Gargrave did not speak, and as he looked at her he wondered what her thoughts were. He was still wondering when she broke the silence.

“Mr. Bracknell, I am afraid, terribly afraid. Somehow I feel that your cousin is not dead. I feel that he will come back here, and that is why we are hurrying away tomorrow morning. The letter from Sir Joseph Rayner serves for an excuse. Do you understand?”

“I think I do,” answered the corporal sympathetically. “You are afraid that Dick, having found out where you are, will return to worry you?”

“You know him, I have told you how I was trapped into marrying him, do you think that he is the man to leave me in peace?”

“He is likely to consult only his own interests,” agreed her companion.

“But I shall be safe from him in England, if what you tell me is true. He dare not go there openly, and if he were to appear at all, I should be able to protect myself, by invoking the police.”

“The police would only be too happy to afford you protection here,” answered the corporal earnestly.

The girl looked at him with grateful eyes. “Youmean yourself. Yes! I know, but there is another service that I want from you—”

“You have but to name it, Miss Gargrave,” he answered as she hesitated. “So far as duty allows, I am entirely at your service. Tell me what it is that I can do for you.”

“You can find out for me whether Dick Bracknell is alive or dead.”

The corporal had not anticipated the request, and he was a little startled by it. Instantly his mind reverted to the conversation he had had with Rayner. He recalled the hopes which the latter entertained, and wondered if this white-faced girl at his side was willing to help their realization. As that possibility flashed into his mind, he was conscious of a constriction about his heart. But he gave no sign.

“I should be compelled to do that in any case,” he answered quietly. “I cannot relinquish the work on which I started until I know what has become of the man who is known at headquarters as Koona Dick. Some one must know about him—probably the driver of the sled whose trail I followed, and I’ve got to find out. Vague reports are not regarded as satisfactory by the heads of the force.”

“You will let me know?” she asked instantly.

“I shall be glad to do so,” he answered quietly, and again he was conscious of the tightening about his heart.

“You see,” she explained, “my position is so anomalous. All my little world with the exception of my Newnham friend and yourself, my foster-sister,whom I told only last night, thinks of me as a spinster.”

“You are sure Mr. Rayner does not know of your marriage?” asked the corporal quickly, as a thought struck him.

“I am quite sure,” answered Joy readily, without giving any indication that she found any special significance in the question. “You see the part played by Lady Alcombe was not very credible, and I used my knowledge of it to ensure her silence. I wrote to her and told her that if the wedding was not kept secret, I should proclaim all that had happened to the world. Her vulnerable spot is the position she holds in society, and she knew how that would suffer if it became a matter of common knowledge that for a bribe she had schemed to marry to a scamp an innocent girl left in her charge. She wrote me a short note in reply, in which she said, that she would forget that the marriage had even taken place, and that I need not fear that it would ever become known. That is why I am so sure Mr. Rayner does not know. Lady Alcombe dare not betray me.”

Bracknell nodded. “I dare say you are right, but of course you cannot marry again until you are sure of that—”

“I do not want to marry again!” interrupted the girl quickly, the blood flaming in her pale face. “Why should you think that I do, Mr. Bracknell?”

As the corporal met her blue eyes, clear and unshadowed by guile, his heart grew suddenly light, and on the moment he dismissed from his mind thethought that Joy Gargrave in any way shared Mr. Rayner’s aspirations. He laughed cheerfully as he replied, “I did not say that I thought you wished to marry again, Miss Gargrave. I was merely stating the law on the matter, and there is no personal significance to be attached to such a statement.”

Joy Gargrave smiled austerely. “I am not likely ever to marry again,” she said. “Once bitten, twice shy, you know.”

The corporal smiled in return, but as he marked her loveliness and remembered the figure at which the Northland had estimated Rolf Gargrave’s wealth, he thought to himself that many a man would endeavour to persuade her to a different mind, but he did not say so.

“Miss Gargrave, one never knows what the future holds—but whatever happens you can count me as your friend. I am not proud of my relationship to Dick Bracknell, even though it does make me some sort of a cousin to you. There is nothing that I will not do to serve you, and if anything that I learn will deliver you from your anomalous position, you may rest assured that I will let you know of it at the earliest possible moment.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bracknell,” she answered simply. “I shall be very grateful.”

They walked on a little way without speaking, then she turned to him suddenly. “You are my cousin, more or less, Mr. Bracknell, but I do not know your christian name.”

“It is Roger,” he answered smilingly.

“And if at any time I want to communicate with you, where—”

“Headquarters at Regina. That will always find me sooner or later, no matter what part of the Territory I may be in.”

“I am glad to know that,” she said, “and if at any time you have news for me, any letter sent care of Sir Joseph Rayner will reach me.” She turned in her steps as she spoke. “I think I had better return now. There is much to do at the Lodge, and they will miss me. But I am glad to have met you, and glad to think that I can count you among my friends.”

She held out her mittened hand, and as he took it Roger Bracknell felt the blood surge warmly in his face, and in his grey eyes as he looked at her there was a flame that had she observed it would have told her that she had secured more than a friend. But she did not see it, and as she walked away there was a pensive look on the beautiful face.

The next day Corporal Bracknell, with his own team ready harnessed, watched Joy Gargrave and her escort take their departure. Four full teams of dogs drew their equipment, and snow having fallen during the night, Joy and her foster-sister wore the great webbed snowshoes of the North. They stood making their good-byes, then the half-breed driver gave the word.

“Mooch! Mooch! Linka!”

The leading dog gave a yelp, and strained at his collar, and a moment later all the teams were movingsouthward. Joy Gargrave waved her hand as she moved on, and he waved back and stood watching till the cavalcade was out of sight, then turning to his own dogs, he gave the word to move and set his face towards the snowy solitudes of the North.

CHAPTER VIIIKOONA DICKAS HE TRAVELLED, Roger Bracknell’s mind was busy with the events of the past two days, and with the information he had gathered. That his cousin Dick should have turned out to be the man whose trail he had followed had occasioned no wonder after the first shock of surprise; but the mystery of the attack upon him, and of his subsequent disappearance, afforded him much food for thought. Some one had determined that Dick Bracknell should die, and some one had shot him. The question was—who was it? He had dismissed from his mind any idea that Joy herself had any complicity in that business, her frankness having quite killed the suspicions he had at first been inclined to entertain.His thoughts swung round to Rayner. Did he know anything of the matter? He could find no satisfactory answer. It was true that immediately after the crime he had seen him entering the Lodge with a rifle, and he had certainly shown a keen interest about the sled which had waited in the wood, but from the first he had casually offered a sufficient explanation, and the instinct which turns every man into an amateur detective on the occasion of a mysterious crime would easily account for the second.Besides—Rayner could have had nothing to dowith the disappearance of Dick Bracknell’s body, for the corporal was quite sure that he had never left the house until he had done so with himself. True, he had betrayed a certain knowledge as to the place where the crime had been committed, but he himself might easily have communicated that knowledge to Rayner, though he could not recollect having done so, whilst on the other hand, the motive for such a serious crime as murder was not immediately apparent. It was true that Rayner designed to marry Joy Gargrave, but that of itself was not a sufficient motive unless he knew of the previous marriage.“But does Rayner know of that marriage?” He uttered the question aloud, and answered it the same way, speech helping him to precipitate his thoughts.“I think not! The girl is so positive ... and Rayner has given no sign. There’s the deuce of a coil to be unwound somehow.”He reached the bluff, turned it, and saw the junction of the tributary Elkhorn with the main river. When he reached it he halted his dogs and made a careful inspection of the trail. The new snow had drifted, but the thick pinewood which grew on the banks of the smaller stream had turned the snow in places, and about two hundred yards up, he came on the half-obliterated traces of sled-runners. He examined them carefully, stood for a minute or two in thought, then nodded his head.“Turned up here out of the main trail, and will probably have made a camp somewhere. Anyway it is worth trying.”He went back for his dogs, and turned up the Elkhorn. The trail at first was not very bad, and he made a good pace; but after the first two miles it worsened, and he struck an abundance of soft snow, presenting an absolutely virgin surface. This made the going very hard, and he marched ahead of his labouring dogs, packing the snow with the great webbed shoes of the North, lifting each foot clear almost perpendicularly, then planting it down to harden the surface for his canine team. Three miles or so he made, in spite of the cold, sweating like a bull, and then he reached a place where the wind had swept the ice like a broom leaving it almost clear of snow.He examined the frozen surface, and after a little search found the marks of sled-runners on the ice. He searched further, but found nothing save these twin scars running parallel to one another. But one sled had passed that way, and he was sure that he was on the right track. A smile of satisfaction came on his lean face, and seating himself, on the sled he swung forward at a rattling pace.The short day was coming to a close when the leading dog yelped suddenly, and with his followers began to manifest signs of canine excitement. Roger Bracknell himself sniffed the keen air. There was a fire somewhere, for the unmistakable odour of burning resinous wood reached his nostrils. He stepped off the sled, and hanging on to the gee-pole tried to check the pace of his team. His efforts however, were in vain. The dogs bent their heads to the ice and threw themselves against the collars, hurrying forward, as they had not hurriedall day. They too smelt the burning pinewood, and to them it signified not merely human habitation, but freedom from the traces, and the frozen salmon which constituted their evening meal.The corporal, finding his endeavours to restrain them vain, prepared for eventualities. Hanging on to the sled with one hand, with the other he unfastened the holster wherein he carried his service pistol. He did not know what to expect. That aromatic odour might come from an Indian tepee, from the hut of some lonely prospecting party, or from the camp of the man he was following; in any case it was as well to be prepared.The leading dog yelped again, and the others responded in joyful chorus. The team swung suddenly towards the left bank, up a slight incline towards a clearing in the wood. Out of the gathering gloom a faint glow appeared, and then the shadowy outline of a hut. The glow was from a frosted parchment window, and the hut was the typical miner’s cabin of the North. Corporal Bracknell smiled and dropped his hand from the pistol-holster, finding the look of the place altogether reassuring. The dogs came to a standstill on the packed snow in front of the cabin, yelping delight, and whip in hand Bracknell waited, listening. If there were dogs at the cabin they might be expected to charge the new-comers, who fastened in the traces would be heavily handicapped. The charge he waited for did not come. There was no challenging answer to the yelping of his own team, and apparently the owner of the cabin was without dogs, or if he owned a team it was absent fromhome. This fact further reassured him and threw him still more off his guard. He stepped forward to the door of the cabin and rapped upon it with the butt-end of his dog-whip.“Come in,” answered a hoarse voice.The corporal felt for the moose-hide thong that worked the wooden catch, opened the door, and stepping inside turned to close it behind him.“That’s right,” said the voice again. “Now put your hands up.”The corporal jumped and his hands moved instinctively towards the holster as he swung round.“Don’t!” snapped the voice. “Put them up, or by—” Bracknell recognized the folly of resistance, and as he raised his hands above his head, his eyes swept the cabin for the speaker. A slush lamp against the wall, and the glow from the roaring Yukon stove gave light to the middle of the cabin, but the corners were in comparative darkness, and it was a second or two before he located the owner of the voice. Then, in a bunk in the corner furthest from the door, he caught sight of a man propped among furs and blankets. On the edge of the bunk rested a hand which held a heavy pistol pointing at himself. The face that he looked into was that which he had last seen in death-like repose in the snow near North Star Lodge—the face of Koona Dick. The eyes of the latter glittered wickedly in the firelight, and whilst the officer waited the voice spoke again, mockingly.“The end of the long trail—hey, bobby?”The corporal did not reply. Apparently hiscousin was alone and comparatively helpless, or he would scarcely have waited his entrance lying in the bunk. His eyes measured the distance between them and he speculated what chance there was of the success of a sudden spring proving successful. But the man on the bunk evidently divined what was passing through his mind, for a second later he broke the silence again.“I wouldn’t try it, officer, not if I were you. I may be a sick man, but I can still shoot.”Roger Bracknell looked at the hand resting on the edge of the bunk. It was perfectly steady. He recognized the hopelessness of any attack proving successful, until the sick man was off his guard, and nodded casually.“I give you best,” he answered, speaking for the first time.The man on the bunk gave a chuckling laugh. “You seem wise,” he replied, “and if you do just what I tell you you’ll prove you are. You’ve got a gun, of course, in that holster of yours? Well, when I give the word, you will unbuckle the belt, and fling it pistol and all under the bunk here. No tricks, mind you. If your hand strays an inch from the buckle, I fire, and I warn you that I am a dead shot.... Now you can get to work.”The corporal dropped his hands to his belt, and as his fingers worked at the stiff buckle, wondered if he might run the risk of trying for his pistol.“Quick! You’re too long!” cried the man in the bunk. Roger Bracknell hesitated for a second.His fingers fumbled at the buckle, then the belt swung loose in his hands.“Throw it!” came the command in a peremptory voice.The corporal threw it along the floor and it slid to the edge of the bunk, then his cousin laughed again.“‘Wisdom is justified of her children.’ If you had a pious upbringing, bobby, you will recognize the Scripture. And now having got rid of your arsenal, you can sit down at the table, and put your hands upon it. That will be easier for you than standing there trying to touch the roof, but I warn you again—no monkey tricks or—”The pistol moved significantly, and the corporal moved towards the rough table, constructed out of a packing case.“Keep your hands up, and shove that stool forward with your feet.”The “stool” referred to was a log of wood, which as the corporal recognized, would prove a very good missile if a man had time to lift and throw it. Evidently his mentor realized that also, and was taking no chances, so, still at the pistol point, Corporal Bracknell pushed the log forward to the table, and then on his captor’s instructions seated himself with his arms resting on the table.“Now,” said the sick man, with a short laugh, “we can talk in peace.”“Talk away,” answered the corporal cheerfully.“I will,” replied the other sharply. “There’s a question that I want to ask you.... Why did you pot me in the wood at North Star Lodge threenights ago? That sort of thing is against the rules of your service, isn’t it?”“It is,” answered the corporal, “and the answer to your other question is that I didn’t pot you.”“You didn’t, hey? Then who the devil did?”“I would give a goodish bit to know,” was the corporal’s reply. “The thing is a mystery to me.”“But it’s no mystery to me,” answered the other, a trifle passionately. “You did it, and it’s no use trying to bluff me. I know you’ve been on my track for weeks, and that you were determined to get me by fair means or foul. If you think that lying is going to help you—”“I am not lying,” interrupted Roger Bracknell. “I give you my word of honour that I am telling you the truth—and I say that not because I am afraid. It is true that I was trailing you, and that I was close at your heels at North Star. But I never shot you, I found you lying in the snow, as I thought, dead, but I’d nothing whatever to do with the shooting.”“The devil!” cried the sick man, and from his tones the corporal knew that he was convinced. “Then who did it?”The corporal saw a chance of further surprising his questioner—and took it.“Well, there was the person whom you went to meet—your wife, you know.”“My wife!” There was amazement in Dick Bracknell’s tones, and for a moment after the exclamation he stared at the officer like the man who could not believe his ears.“Yes, your wife, Joy Gargrave,” answered thecorporal steadily. “You went to meet her in the wood, didn’t you?”Dick Bracknell did not reply. His lips pursed themselves and he began to whistle thoughtfully to himself the while he stared at the man whose question he left unanswered. The corporal smiled a little, and continued—“I should think that you would be the first to admit that Joy Gargrave was not without grievances sufficient to warrant extreme action on her part.”“You can put that notion out of your noddle, at once,” replied the other harshly. “If you know Joy at all, you know that the idea of shooting me is the very last thing that would enter her head. She’s not that sort.”The corporal remembered Joy’s confession and smiled whimsically at the unconscious irony of her husband’s testimony, then, still trying to move the other to some indiscretion of speech, he answered quietly, “You believe in Joy Gargrave? But have you thought what she must feel like? There are plenty of women who—”“Drop it,” broke in the sick man harshly. “The motion is preposterous. I won’t listen to it; and I warn you, I don’t share Joy’s scruples about shooting.”“Nor about anything else, I imagine?” answered the corporal with a short laugh. “But we can easily settle whether Joy did it or not. Which side did the shot come from?”“Now you’re asking me something,” answered the wounded man. “There were two shots, andthey came from both sides of me. It was a regular ambuscade, and whoever fired meant to get me.”“Where were you hit?” asked the corporal.“Left shoulder! Drilled clean through,” was the reply.“And which way were you facing when the thing happened?” asked the corporal. “Think carefully. It is rather important.”“I was facing up the path, with my back to the main road. I had heard something moving and had turned round, just at the moment.”“That settles it,” answered the corporal emphatically. “It was the shot from the left that did for you, and your wife was on the right.”“But who was on the left? Tell me that if you can, my Solomon.”Corporal Bracknell shook his head. “There you hit one of the mysteries of this business. I don’t know, I wish I did, but as sure as my name is Roger Bracknell—”“As sure as what?” The interruption came like a pistol shot, and the wounded man leaned forward with amazement showing in his face. “What name did you say you called yourself?”“Roger Bracknell!” answered the corporal quietly.“H’m!” responded the other, peering at him thoughtfully, then he said suddenly, “Take off that chapeau of yours!”The corporal removed his fur cap, and sat with it in his hand, whilst the other searched his face with inquisitive eyes. There was a moment’s silence, and then the wounded man spoke again.“It beats the band. You are my cousin Roger right enough, and this is a nice dramatic meeting. Drury Lane isn’t in it with us, though what the blazes you are doing as a ‘Mounter’ beats me. I thought you were at the bar.”“And I didn’t know you were Koona Dick until three nights ago. I had your description given me, and that cut across your cheek bone was particularized. That and the beard you wear are acquisitions since the old days at Harrow Fell, and even when I looked at your face the other night I never associated Koona Dick with Dick Bracknell.”“How did you come to know?” asked the other curiously.“I picked up that note which you sent to your wife asking her to meet you, and naming the place. You had begun to write your surname and then crossed it out. That gave me the first inkling that you and Koona Dick were one and the same, and of course when I talked to Joy Gargrave I knew that what I suspected was the fact.”“And knowing what you now know, you would still arrest me?”As he asked the question, Dick Bracknell leaned forward a little, and the hand that held the pistol hung loosely over the edge of the bunk. The corporal noticed it, and shifted his grip on the heavy fur cap in his hand.“I should be compelled to. Duty is duty—you know.”“But, man, I’m your cousin!” came the protest.“Yes! more’s the pity.”As he replied, the corporal’s arm moved suddenly,and the fur cap was jerked across the room right into the sick man’s face. The corporal himself followed it like lightening, and, as he reached the bunk, gripped his cousin’s pistol-hand. The weapon went off, once, twice, and the bullets plugged the logs of the cabin, whilst Dick Bracknell shouted imprecations. The policeman caught the barrel of the pistol, and turned it away from himself, whilst with the other hand he caught his cousin’s wrist, and dug his thumb into the sinews of it, in order to force him to release his hold. In the midst of the struggle there was a sudden clamour of dogs outside, but neither of the men noticed it. The pistol cracked again, and at that moment the door opened, and an Indian rushed in. Apparently, he took in the situation in a glance. There was a heavy dog-whip in his hand, and in an instant he had swung it, and brought the loaded stock down on the corporal’s head. The latter did not even cry out. He doubled up like a doll out of which the stuffing had been ripped, and lay in a crumpled heap upon the hard mud floor.

KOONA DICK

AS HE TRAVELLED, Roger Bracknell’s mind was busy with the events of the past two days, and with the information he had gathered. That his cousin Dick should have turned out to be the man whose trail he had followed had occasioned no wonder after the first shock of surprise; but the mystery of the attack upon him, and of his subsequent disappearance, afforded him much food for thought. Some one had determined that Dick Bracknell should die, and some one had shot him. The question was—who was it? He had dismissed from his mind any idea that Joy herself had any complicity in that business, her frankness having quite killed the suspicions he had at first been inclined to entertain.

His thoughts swung round to Rayner. Did he know anything of the matter? He could find no satisfactory answer. It was true that immediately after the crime he had seen him entering the Lodge with a rifle, and he had certainly shown a keen interest about the sled which had waited in the wood, but from the first he had casually offered a sufficient explanation, and the instinct which turns every man into an amateur detective on the occasion of a mysterious crime would easily account for the second.

Besides—Rayner could have had nothing to dowith the disappearance of Dick Bracknell’s body, for the corporal was quite sure that he had never left the house until he had done so with himself. True, he had betrayed a certain knowledge as to the place where the crime had been committed, but he himself might easily have communicated that knowledge to Rayner, though he could not recollect having done so, whilst on the other hand, the motive for such a serious crime as murder was not immediately apparent. It was true that Rayner designed to marry Joy Gargrave, but that of itself was not a sufficient motive unless he knew of the previous marriage.

“But does Rayner know of that marriage?” He uttered the question aloud, and answered it the same way, speech helping him to precipitate his thoughts.

“I think not! The girl is so positive ... and Rayner has given no sign. There’s the deuce of a coil to be unwound somehow.”

He reached the bluff, turned it, and saw the junction of the tributary Elkhorn with the main river. When he reached it he halted his dogs and made a careful inspection of the trail. The new snow had drifted, but the thick pinewood which grew on the banks of the smaller stream had turned the snow in places, and about two hundred yards up, he came on the half-obliterated traces of sled-runners. He examined them carefully, stood for a minute or two in thought, then nodded his head.

“Turned up here out of the main trail, and will probably have made a camp somewhere. Anyway it is worth trying.”

He went back for his dogs, and turned up the Elkhorn. The trail at first was not very bad, and he made a good pace; but after the first two miles it worsened, and he struck an abundance of soft snow, presenting an absolutely virgin surface. This made the going very hard, and he marched ahead of his labouring dogs, packing the snow with the great webbed shoes of the North, lifting each foot clear almost perpendicularly, then planting it down to harden the surface for his canine team. Three miles or so he made, in spite of the cold, sweating like a bull, and then he reached a place where the wind had swept the ice like a broom leaving it almost clear of snow.

He examined the frozen surface, and after a little search found the marks of sled-runners on the ice. He searched further, but found nothing save these twin scars running parallel to one another. But one sled had passed that way, and he was sure that he was on the right track. A smile of satisfaction came on his lean face, and seating himself, on the sled he swung forward at a rattling pace.

The short day was coming to a close when the leading dog yelped suddenly, and with his followers began to manifest signs of canine excitement. Roger Bracknell himself sniffed the keen air. There was a fire somewhere, for the unmistakable odour of burning resinous wood reached his nostrils. He stepped off the sled, and hanging on to the gee-pole tried to check the pace of his team. His efforts however, were in vain. The dogs bent their heads to the ice and threw themselves against the collars, hurrying forward, as they had not hurriedall day. They too smelt the burning pinewood, and to them it signified not merely human habitation, but freedom from the traces, and the frozen salmon which constituted their evening meal.

The corporal, finding his endeavours to restrain them vain, prepared for eventualities. Hanging on to the sled with one hand, with the other he unfastened the holster wherein he carried his service pistol. He did not know what to expect. That aromatic odour might come from an Indian tepee, from the hut of some lonely prospecting party, or from the camp of the man he was following; in any case it was as well to be prepared.

The leading dog yelped again, and the others responded in joyful chorus. The team swung suddenly towards the left bank, up a slight incline towards a clearing in the wood. Out of the gathering gloom a faint glow appeared, and then the shadowy outline of a hut. The glow was from a frosted parchment window, and the hut was the typical miner’s cabin of the North. Corporal Bracknell smiled and dropped his hand from the pistol-holster, finding the look of the place altogether reassuring. The dogs came to a standstill on the packed snow in front of the cabin, yelping delight, and whip in hand Bracknell waited, listening. If there were dogs at the cabin they might be expected to charge the new-comers, who fastened in the traces would be heavily handicapped. The charge he waited for did not come. There was no challenging answer to the yelping of his own team, and apparently the owner of the cabin was without dogs, or if he owned a team it was absent fromhome. This fact further reassured him and threw him still more off his guard. He stepped forward to the door of the cabin and rapped upon it with the butt-end of his dog-whip.

“Come in,” answered a hoarse voice.

The corporal felt for the moose-hide thong that worked the wooden catch, opened the door, and stepping inside turned to close it behind him.

“That’s right,” said the voice again. “Now put your hands up.”

The corporal jumped and his hands moved instinctively towards the holster as he swung round.

“Don’t!” snapped the voice. “Put them up, or by—” Bracknell recognized the folly of resistance, and as he raised his hands above his head, his eyes swept the cabin for the speaker. A slush lamp against the wall, and the glow from the roaring Yukon stove gave light to the middle of the cabin, but the corners were in comparative darkness, and it was a second or two before he located the owner of the voice. Then, in a bunk in the corner furthest from the door, he caught sight of a man propped among furs and blankets. On the edge of the bunk rested a hand which held a heavy pistol pointing at himself. The face that he looked into was that which he had last seen in death-like repose in the snow near North Star Lodge—the face of Koona Dick. The eyes of the latter glittered wickedly in the firelight, and whilst the officer waited the voice spoke again, mockingly.

“The end of the long trail—hey, bobby?”

The corporal did not reply. Apparently hiscousin was alone and comparatively helpless, or he would scarcely have waited his entrance lying in the bunk. His eyes measured the distance between them and he speculated what chance there was of the success of a sudden spring proving successful. But the man on the bunk evidently divined what was passing through his mind, for a second later he broke the silence again.

“I wouldn’t try it, officer, not if I were you. I may be a sick man, but I can still shoot.”

Roger Bracknell looked at the hand resting on the edge of the bunk. It was perfectly steady. He recognized the hopelessness of any attack proving successful, until the sick man was off his guard, and nodded casually.

“I give you best,” he answered, speaking for the first time.

The man on the bunk gave a chuckling laugh. “You seem wise,” he replied, “and if you do just what I tell you you’ll prove you are. You’ve got a gun, of course, in that holster of yours? Well, when I give the word, you will unbuckle the belt, and fling it pistol and all under the bunk here. No tricks, mind you. If your hand strays an inch from the buckle, I fire, and I warn you that I am a dead shot.... Now you can get to work.”

The corporal dropped his hands to his belt, and as his fingers worked at the stiff buckle, wondered if he might run the risk of trying for his pistol.

“Quick! You’re too long!” cried the man in the bunk. Roger Bracknell hesitated for a second.His fingers fumbled at the buckle, then the belt swung loose in his hands.

“Throw it!” came the command in a peremptory voice.

The corporal threw it along the floor and it slid to the edge of the bunk, then his cousin laughed again.

“‘Wisdom is justified of her children.’ If you had a pious upbringing, bobby, you will recognize the Scripture. And now having got rid of your arsenal, you can sit down at the table, and put your hands upon it. That will be easier for you than standing there trying to touch the roof, but I warn you again—no monkey tricks or—”

The pistol moved significantly, and the corporal moved towards the rough table, constructed out of a packing case.

“Keep your hands up, and shove that stool forward with your feet.”

The “stool” referred to was a log of wood, which as the corporal recognized, would prove a very good missile if a man had time to lift and throw it. Evidently his mentor realized that also, and was taking no chances, so, still at the pistol point, Corporal Bracknell pushed the log forward to the table, and then on his captor’s instructions seated himself with his arms resting on the table.

“Now,” said the sick man, with a short laugh, “we can talk in peace.”

“Talk away,” answered the corporal cheerfully.

“I will,” replied the other sharply. “There’s a question that I want to ask you.... Why did you pot me in the wood at North Star Lodge threenights ago? That sort of thing is against the rules of your service, isn’t it?”

“It is,” answered the corporal, “and the answer to your other question is that I didn’t pot you.”

“You didn’t, hey? Then who the devil did?”

“I would give a goodish bit to know,” was the corporal’s reply. “The thing is a mystery to me.”

“But it’s no mystery to me,” answered the other, a trifle passionately. “You did it, and it’s no use trying to bluff me. I know you’ve been on my track for weeks, and that you were determined to get me by fair means or foul. If you think that lying is going to help you—”

“I am not lying,” interrupted Roger Bracknell. “I give you my word of honour that I am telling you the truth—and I say that not because I am afraid. It is true that I was trailing you, and that I was close at your heels at North Star. But I never shot you, I found you lying in the snow, as I thought, dead, but I’d nothing whatever to do with the shooting.”

“The devil!” cried the sick man, and from his tones the corporal knew that he was convinced. “Then who did it?”

The corporal saw a chance of further surprising his questioner—and took it.

“Well, there was the person whom you went to meet—your wife, you know.”

“My wife!” There was amazement in Dick Bracknell’s tones, and for a moment after the exclamation he stared at the officer like the man who could not believe his ears.

“Yes, your wife, Joy Gargrave,” answered thecorporal steadily. “You went to meet her in the wood, didn’t you?”

Dick Bracknell did not reply. His lips pursed themselves and he began to whistle thoughtfully to himself the while he stared at the man whose question he left unanswered. The corporal smiled a little, and continued—

“I should think that you would be the first to admit that Joy Gargrave was not without grievances sufficient to warrant extreme action on her part.”

“You can put that notion out of your noddle, at once,” replied the other harshly. “If you know Joy at all, you know that the idea of shooting me is the very last thing that would enter her head. She’s not that sort.”

The corporal remembered Joy’s confession and smiled whimsically at the unconscious irony of her husband’s testimony, then, still trying to move the other to some indiscretion of speech, he answered quietly, “You believe in Joy Gargrave? But have you thought what she must feel like? There are plenty of women who—”

“Drop it,” broke in the sick man harshly. “The motion is preposterous. I won’t listen to it; and I warn you, I don’t share Joy’s scruples about shooting.”

“Nor about anything else, I imagine?” answered the corporal with a short laugh. “But we can easily settle whether Joy did it or not. Which side did the shot come from?”

“Now you’re asking me something,” answered the wounded man. “There were two shots, andthey came from both sides of me. It was a regular ambuscade, and whoever fired meant to get me.”

“Where were you hit?” asked the corporal.

“Left shoulder! Drilled clean through,” was the reply.

“And which way were you facing when the thing happened?” asked the corporal. “Think carefully. It is rather important.”

“I was facing up the path, with my back to the main road. I had heard something moving and had turned round, just at the moment.”

“That settles it,” answered the corporal emphatically. “It was the shot from the left that did for you, and your wife was on the right.”

“But who was on the left? Tell me that if you can, my Solomon.”

Corporal Bracknell shook his head. “There you hit one of the mysteries of this business. I don’t know, I wish I did, but as sure as my name is Roger Bracknell—”

“As sure as what?” The interruption came like a pistol shot, and the wounded man leaned forward with amazement showing in his face. “What name did you say you called yourself?”

“Roger Bracknell!” answered the corporal quietly.

“H’m!” responded the other, peering at him thoughtfully, then he said suddenly, “Take off that chapeau of yours!”

The corporal removed his fur cap, and sat with it in his hand, whilst the other searched his face with inquisitive eyes. There was a moment’s silence, and then the wounded man spoke again.

“It beats the band. You are my cousin Roger right enough, and this is a nice dramatic meeting. Drury Lane isn’t in it with us, though what the blazes you are doing as a ‘Mounter’ beats me. I thought you were at the bar.”

“And I didn’t know you were Koona Dick until three nights ago. I had your description given me, and that cut across your cheek bone was particularized. That and the beard you wear are acquisitions since the old days at Harrow Fell, and even when I looked at your face the other night I never associated Koona Dick with Dick Bracknell.”

“How did you come to know?” asked the other curiously.

“I picked up that note which you sent to your wife asking her to meet you, and naming the place. You had begun to write your surname and then crossed it out. That gave me the first inkling that you and Koona Dick were one and the same, and of course when I talked to Joy Gargrave I knew that what I suspected was the fact.”

“And knowing what you now know, you would still arrest me?”

As he asked the question, Dick Bracknell leaned forward a little, and the hand that held the pistol hung loosely over the edge of the bunk. The corporal noticed it, and shifted his grip on the heavy fur cap in his hand.

“I should be compelled to. Duty is duty—you know.”

“But, man, I’m your cousin!” came the protest.

“Yes! more’s the pity.”

As he replied, the corporal’s arm moved suddenly,and the fur cap was jerked across the room right into the sick man’s face. The corporal himself followed it like lightening, and, as he reached the bunk, gripped his cousin’s pistol-hand. The weapon went off, once, twice, and the bullets plugged the logs of the cabin, whilst Dick Bracknell shouted imprecations. The policeman caught the barrel of the pistol, and turned it away from himself, whilst with the other hand he caught his cousin’s wrist, and dug his thumb into the sinews of it, in order to force him to release his hold. In the midst of the struggle there was a sudden clamour of dogs outside, but neither of the men noticed it. The pistol cracked again, and at that moment the door opened, and an Indian rushed in. Apparently, he took in the situation in a glance. There was a heavy dog-whip in his hand, and in an instant he had swung it, and brought the loaded stock down on the corporal’s head. The latter did not even cry out. He doubled up like a doll out of which the stuffing had been ripped, and lay in a crumpled heap upon the hard mud floor.

CHAPTER IXTHE HUSKS OF THE PRODIGALWHENRoger Bracknell came to himself, he had a splitting head, and no exact recollection of recent events. His head ached so much that he felt moved to press his temples with his hands, but found that it was impossible to do so, owing to his arms being bound to his side. On making that discovery, he lay quite still, with his eyes closed, thinking over the situation. Little by little memory came back to him, and he remembered what had befallen, but his remembrance of events ceased with the moment when his cousin’s pistol had cracked for the third time. Had the bullet struck him? He did not know, but at that moment through the drums throbbing in his head, a voice sounded in his ears, a voice that had external reality, and the tones of which he recognized.“Do you think he’s dead, Joe? He lies still enough.”A guttural voice grunted some reply, and there was a sound of movement near him. He opened his eyes, to find himself looking into a dark, frost-scarred face, from which a single eye gleamed malevolently. As that eye encountered his, the dark face was lifted and turned from him, and he caught the reply given over the speaker’s shoulder.“Him eyes open. He alright!”“That’s good hearing. I don’t want him to die on our hands, at least not until I have had a little more conversation with him.”The man Joe gave a careless reply, and moved away. Corporal Bracknell craned his neck a little and looked round.The slush lamp was still burning, but through the parchment window the grey light of the Northland day penetrated, from which fact he deduced that he had lain where he was many hours. In front of the stove, the man of the evil face, whom he had seen on opening his eyes, was busy preparing a meal, and the odour of frying moose-steak and bacon filled the cabin. In the bunk, propped up among the furs, with his left arm in an improvised sling, he descried his cousin, puffing at a pipe, and regarding him with thoughtful gaze. Their eyes met, and Dick Bracknell smiled.“Morning, Cousin Roger. I hope that head of yours is not very bad.”“It is only middling,” answered the corporal truthfully.“Um! I suspected so! Joe there,” he indicated the Indian bending over the stove, “doesn’t know his strength, and he’s a holy terror with a whipstock. You should see him tackle a big wolf dog that’s turned savage. It’s a sight for gods and men!”Roger Bracknell did not reply. He had not been aware of the Indian’s entrance on the previous night, but in a flash he divined what had happened to him, and why his head ached so intolerably. His cousin continued with mocking affability.“He hit you rather hard, I am afraid, but we Bracknells are all a little thick in the skull, and I hope no real harm will follow on Joe’s forceful intervention. In any case you must own that his arrival was a most opportune one.”“I can well believe you found it so,” answered the corporal.“I did, Roger my boy, I did. You surprised me last night. I didn’t think you would have gone for a wounded and disabled man. It was scarcely chivalrous, you know.”“You were armed,” was the reply. “I wasn’t.”Dick Bracknell waved his pipe airily. “We will let it pass. What is done is done, and the past is always to be reckoned as irrevocable, as I know better than most of the parsons. The present and the future are my immediate concern, and the question is what am I to do with you?”“That,” answered the corporal quietly, “is scarcely for me to decide.”“No,” replied his cousin with a little laugh, “but it is a question in which you should be interested.”Roger Bracknell was interested, intensely interested, but he strove his best to appear unconcerned, and after a moment his cousin continued—“Joe there has a very simply solution. He suggests another knock on the head, and sepulchre in the river through an ice-hole. It is a course that would be advantageous to me, since your body would not be found before the ice breaks up in the spring, if then, and in the interval we should have time to clear out of the Territories.”The corporal knew that what he said was true,and shivered a little as he contemplated the suggested way of getting rid of him, but his voice was firm as he asked casually, “Why don’t you accept that solution?”“Why don’t I accept—” began the other, and then broke off, glowering at the man who though in his power was apparently undismayed. Then a sneer came on his face. “Blood is thicker than water,” he remarked. “Though you’re willing to forget that we are cousins, and regardless of family ties are prepared to follow your d—d sense of duty, I can’t forget it; and I’m inclined to spare you, and even to cut those bonds of yours on conditions.”“On conditions! What are they?” asked the corporal.“That you give me your word of honour that you will not attempt to escape or to attack Joe or myself whilst you are with us.”The corporal wondered what was in his cousin’s mind and what was behind the offer, but he was careful not to probe into the matter openly.“You will accept my word of honour?” he asked with a faint touch of surprise in his voice.“Yes,” answered his cousin sneeringly. “You see, I know you of old. The Bracknell strain runs true in you, whilst it has a twist in me. I know you won’t break your parole—if you give it. And of course, you will give it. It’s your word or your life. Ha! Ha! Quite a Dick Turpin touch there, hey?”Roger Bracknell considered the matter swiftly. So far as he could see there was nothing to gain byrejecting the offer, since he was completely in the other’s hands, and though his cousin sneered he was clearly quite in earnest.“I might be disposed to give my word, if—”“Man,” broke in the other savagely, “you had better. There are no ifs and buts about it. Look at Joe there. He doesn’t strike you as one who will be over delicate, does he? If I let him loose you’ll be running down the Elkhorn under the ice inside ten minutes. You’d better agree—and quickly. No!” he lifted his pipe to check the words on the corporal’s lips. “Hear me out. There’s another condition yet, and it is this. As soon as I am able to travel you will accompany me without demur for four days. On the fifth day, I’ll release you and you can do your worst.”The corporal hesitated. There was something here that he did not understand, and again he wondered what lay behind the proposal. His cousin watched him, and as he did not speak, addressed him again.“I may remind you what the situation is. You are in my power. If you can’t give me your word, if I don’t fall in with Joe’s more primitive suggestion, I can keep you tied up here, and I can leave you tied up when we move on; or I can lash you on to a sledge, and, willy nilly, take you along with us. That must be quite plain to you. But I prefer an amicable arrangement.... You will give me your word?”Corporal Bracknell recognized the truth of his cousin’s utterances. There was little choice in the matter, and after a little more reflection he agreed.“Yes, Dick, I give you my word of honour.”“I thought you would!” Dick Bracknell laughed shortly as he spoke, and then turned to his Indian companion. “Just take your knife, Joe, and cut those thongs.”The Indian turned from the stove and growled something in a dialect which the corporal did not understand. He guessed, however, that the Indian was demurring, and with mingled feelings waited to see what would happen. His cousin spoke again, and this time there was a peremptory note in his voice.“Cut those thongs, I tell you; and don’t stand there growling at things you don’t understand.”He added something in his native tongue, and watching the Indian’s scowling face, the corporal saw the frown lift, and a flicker of evil laughter leap into the single eye. A moment later the Indian stepped up to him, and with a hunting knife cut the hide thongs which bound him, and then returned to the stove.The corporal stretched his arms, then his whole body, and after that rose slowly to his feet. His cousin watched him with eyes that smiled inscrutably.“Feels better, hey? You’re a sensible man, Cousin Roger, and now I guess we shall get along famously. A pity, though, that I shan’t be able to sit down to breakfast with you.”“What I can’t understand is how you come to be here at all,” blurted the corporal.“Oh,” laughed the other, “that’s as simple as you please. When I was plugged down by NorthStar, I must have lapsed into unconsciousness—for the first time on any stage. Whilst I was lying there in the snow—”“I examined you,” broke in the corporal. “I thought that you were dead!”“But as you see I wasn’t,” replied the other, “and whilst I was lying there in the snow; Joe, who was waiting with the dogs, having heard the shots came to look for me. He carried me to the sled, took me to the woods on the other side of the river, made a fire, and having doctored me brought me along here. He’s a good sort is Joe, though his looks are against him.”The corporal did not reply. From the trails he had found in the snow, he had already guessed part of the story which he had just heard and was not surprised at it. The wounded man laughed shortly.“Joe is attached to me. I once did him a service, and if I told him to do it he’d run amuck through Regina barracks without demur. He doesn’t love the mounted police, as he owes his lost eye to one of them, so you will see, cousin, that only my family affection saves you.”The Indian turned his scarred face from the stove, and laid the table in primitive fashion. Then having attended to his master, he placed a tin plate with moose meat and beans before the corporal, filled a mug with steaming coffee, and with a grunt invited him to eat. The officer did so readily enough. He had eaten nothing for fourteen hours and was feeling hungry.“Plain fare,” commented his cousin, “but wholesome, and if one brings to it the sauce of hunger, it’s at least as good as anything we had atHarrow Fell.... And that reminds me, cousin. How is the governor?”The corporal remembered the dignified Sir James Bracknell as he had last seen him, and although he had had his own quarrel with him, felt resentment at the tone in which the question was asked.“He was very well when last I saw him,” he answered stiffly.“How long ago is that?”“Two years.”“Um! that’s a goodish time. May I inquire if he knows your whereabouts?”“I think not. I didn’t tell him of my intentions when I came here. We—er—had a difference of opinion.”Dick Bracknell laughed. “I don’t blame you for that. He’s a starchy old buffer is the governor, and a regular perambulating pepper pot.” He was silent for a moment, and then he inquired jerkily, “How—a—did he take—that—a—a—little affair of mine?”“You mean the selling of the plans of the Travis gun?”“There’s no need for you to be brutal!” was the sharp reply. “I’ve paid pretty heavily for that piece of madness. You’ve to remember that I’m the heir of Harrow Fell, and that if I show my nose in England I shall probably get five years at Portland or Dartmoor.”The corporal knew that this was true, and was conscious of a little compunction. Without alluding to it he answered the question. “Sir James took that very badly. It was hushed up, of course,but when you disappeared, and your name was gazetted among the broken, he pressed for an explanation, and got it. As you can guess, proud old man as he is, it wasn’t a nice thing for him to hear.”“No.... Poor old governor!”A strained silence followed, and a full two minutes passed without any one speaking. Then the corporal glanced at his cousin. The latter was sitting in his bunk, staring straight before him, with a troubled look in his eyes. He moved as the corporal looked at him, and as their eyes met, he laughed in a grating way.“The husks are not good eating,” he commented, “and I’ve been feeding on them ever since the day I skipped from Alcombe.”The corporal was still silent, a little amazed at his cousin’s mood, and the other spoke again. “Don’t you go thinking I never regret things, Roger my boy. There never was a prodigal yet who didn’t lie awake o’ nights thinking what a fool he’d been. And for some of us there’s no going back to scoop the ring and the robe and to feast on the fatted veal.... There are times when I think of the Fell, and hear the pheasants clucking in the spinney. And I never sight at a ptarmigan but I think of the grouse driving down the wind on Harrow Moor. Man—it’s Hell, undiluted.”The corporal pushed the tin plate from him. He felt strangely moved. He had thought of his cousin as wholly bad, and now he found good mingled with the evil. He turned round.“Dick, old man,” he said in an unsteady voice, “you might make good yet, if you tried.”His cousin laughed harshly. “Not me, you know better. What were you after me for? Whisky-running? Yes! I thought so. That’s bad enough for a man of—a—my antecedents. But there are worse things credited to Koona Dick, as you’ll learn. I’ve got too far. What is it that fellow Kipling says? ‘Damned from here to Eternity’? That’s me, and I know it.”“You can pull up!” urged the other. “You can make reparation.”“Reparation!” exclaimed the other. “Ah! you are thinking of—Joy—my wife, aren’t you?”“Yes,” answered the corporal simply.Dick Bracknell’s mood changed swiftly. “What’s Joy to you?” he demanded hoarsely. “You know her, you’ve talked with her, consoled her, I don’t doubt. What’s she to you?”As he spoke his tones became violent, and he half threw himself out of the bunk, as if he would attack his cousin. The Indian started to his feet, and his one eye glared at the officer malevolently. The corporal did not move. As his cousin shouted the question the blood flushed his face, and in his heart he knew that he could not answer the question with the directness demanded.“Don’t be a fool, Dick,” he replied quietly. “I never saw Joy Gargrave till four days ago, and if I talk of reparation, well, you’ll own it is due to her.”Dick Bracknell’s jealous passion died down as suddenly as it had flamed. He threw himself back in the bunk and laughed shakily.“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, “but it is one of the things that can’t be done.”“You could let her divorce you!” blurted out the corporal. “It would be the decent thing to do.”“When did I ever do the decent thing,” retorted his cousin sneeringly. “No, Joy’s my wife—and I’ll keep her. It is something to know that there are millions I can dip my hands in some day, and a warm breast I can flee to—”“Not now at any rate,” broke in the corporal sharply, only by an effort restraining himself. “Joy has started for England.”“For England—when?” Dick Bracknell’s face and tones expressed amazement, but his next words were burdened with suspicion. “You’re not lying to me?”“No, it is the truth. Joy started for England yesterday morning. I saw her start.”“And I can’t follow,” commented the prodigal bitterly. “That’s part of the price I pay.”He did not speak again for a long time, and the corporal charged his pipe, lit it, and sat smoking, staring into the stove, and reflecting on the mess his cousin had made of his life.At the end of half an hour the Indian went out, and then Dick Bracknell broke the silence.“I wonder what Joy thinks of me? Did she tell you?”“She knows how she was trapped—you are aware of that, of course? I think she will never forgive you.”“I’m not surprised,” was the reply, “and yet, Roger, I think the world of her. When I marriedher I loved her—and I wasn’t thinking of her money overmuch. It was Lady Alcombe who put that rotten scheme in my head. If I’d only been patient, and run straight, and not been tempted by that agent to sell the secret of the Travis gun—but there’s a whole regiment of ‘if’s’ so what’s the use of gassing? Anyway, Joy’s mine—and no man else can get her while I live.”It was the last word he said upon the subject, and nearly three weeks later, having recovered sufficiently to travel, he journeyed with his cousin and the Indian up the Elkhorn. On the fourth morning of that journey Roger Bracknell woke, to find that preparations were already well advanced for departure. One team was already harnessed with a larger complement of dogs than usual, whilst his own sled, with three dogs standing by, was still unharnessed. His cousin indicated it with a jerk of his head.“We part company today, Roger. I’m sorry to rob your dog team, but Joe insists as he’s afraid you’ll get down to the police-post too soon for us, if we leave you your full team. Besides, we’re tackling a stiff journey and we shall need dogs before we’re through. We’re starting immediately, and you’ll have to breakfast alone, and by the time you’re through with it your parole is off. You understand?”The corporal nodded, and his cousin continued, “With only three dogs you won’t be such a fool as to try and trail us, and we’ve left you enough grub to get you down to North Star comfortably. Your rifle’s there on the top of your sled, and I trust younot to try and use it on us till you’ve eaten your breakfast.... So long, old man.”He turned lightly away, without waiting for his cousin to speak, and the corporal heard him humming an old chanson of the Voyageurs—“Ah, ah, Babette,We go away;But we will comeAgain, Babette—Again back home,On—”The song failed suddenly, and as Joe the Indian cracked his whip to the waiting dogs, Dick Bracknell looked back over his shoulder. His face was white and twisted as if with pain, and there was anguish in his eyes. The corporal took a hasty step towards him, but was waved back, and the team moved forward, the runners singing on the windswept ice. For ten minutes the officer stood watching, until the cavalcade passed out of sight behind a tree-clad island, but Dick Bracknell did not look back once. The corporal turned to the fire with a musing look upon his face, and whilst he prepared breakfast, his mind was with the man travelling up the river. The interrupted chanson haunted him and he found himself searching for the unsung fragment. For a time it eluded him, but presently he found it and hummed to himself—“—On Easter Day—Back home to playOn Easter day,Babette! Babette!”and as he found it he understood to the full the look of pain upon his cousin’s face. Again he looked up the river. Beyond the island a line of black dots appeared, and by them marched two larger dots.“Poor devil!” he murmured as he turned again to the fire.

THE HUSKS OF THE PRODIGAL

WHENRoger Bracknell came to himself, he had a splitting head, and no exact recollection of recent events. His head ached so much that he felt moved to press his temples with his hands, but found that it was impossible to do so, owing to his arms being bound to his side. On making that discovery, he lay quite still, with his eyes closed, thinking over the situation. Little by little memory came back to him, and he remembered what had befallen, but his remembrance of events ceased with the moment when his cousin’s pistol had cracked for the third time. Had the bullet struck him? He did not know, but at that moment through the drums throbbing in his head, a voice sounded in his ears, a voice that had external reality, and the tones of which he recognized.

“Do you think he’s dead, Joe? He lies still enough.”

A guttural voice grunted some reply, and there was a sound of movement near him. He opened his eyes, to find himself looking into a dark, frost-scarred face, from which a single eye gleamed malevolently. As that eye encountered his, the dark face was lifted and turned from him, and he caught the reply given over the speaker’s shoulder.

“Him eyes open. He alright!”

“That’s good hearing. I don’t want him to die on our hands, at least not until I have had a little more conversation with him.”

The man Joe gave a careless reply, and moved away. Corporal Bracknell craned his neck a little and looked round.

The slush lamp was still burning, but through the parchment window the grey light of the Northland day penetrated, from which fact he deduced that he had lain where he was many hours. In front of the stove, the man of the evil face, whom he had seen on opening his eyes, was busy preparing a meal, and the odour of frying moose-steak and bacon filled the cabin. In the bunk, propped up among the furs, with his left arm in an improvised sling, he descried his cousin, puffing at a pipe, and regarding him with thoughtful gaze. Their eyes met, and Dick Bracknell smiled.

“Morning, Cousin Roger. I hope that head of yours is not very bad.”

“It is only middling,” answered the corporal truthfully.

“Um! I suspected so! Joe there,” he indicated the Indian bending over the stove, “doesn’t know his strength, and he’s a holy terror with a whipstock. You should see him tackle a big wolf dog that’s turned savage. It’s a sight for gods and men!”

Roger Bracknell did not reply. He had not been aware of the Indian’s entrance on the previous night, but in a flash he divined what had happened to him, and why his head ached so intolerably. His cousin continued with mocking affability.

“He hit you rather hard, I am afraid, but we Bracknells are all a little thick in the skull, and I hope no real harm will follow on Joe’s forceful intervention. In any case you must own that his arrival was a most opportune one.”

“I can well believe you found it so,” answered the corporal.

“I did, Roger my boy, I did. You surprised me last night. I didn’t think you would have gone for a wounded and disabled man. It was scarcely chivalrous, you know.”

“You were armed,” was the reply. “I wasn’t.”

Dick Bracknell waved his pipe airily. “We will let it pass. What is done is done, and the past is always to be reckoned as irrevocable, as I know better than most of the parsons. The present and the future are my immediate concern, and the question is what am I to do with you?”

“That,” answered the corporal quietly, “is scarcely for me to decide.”

“No,” replied his cousin with a little laugh, “but it is a question in which you should be interested.”

Roger Bracknell was interested, intensely interested, but he strove his best to appear unconcerned, and after a moment his cousin continued—

“Joe there has a very simply solution. He suggests another knock on the head, and sepulchre in the river through an ice-hole. It is a course that would be advantageous to me, since your body would not be found before the ice breaks up in the spring, if then, and in the interval we should have time to clear out of the Territories.”

The corporal knew that what he said was true,and shivered a little as he contemplated the suggested way of getting rid of him, but his voice was firm as he asked casually, “Why don’t you accept that solution?”

“Why don’t I accept—” began the other, and then broke off, glowering at the man who though in his power was apparently undismayed. Then a sneer came on his face. “Blood is thicker than water,” he remarked. “Though you’re willing to forget that we are cousins, and regardless of family ties are prepared to follow your d—d sense of duty, I can’t forget it; and I’m inclined to spare you, and even to cut those bonds of yours on conditions.”

“On conditions! What are they?” asked the corporal.

“That you give me your word of honour that you will not attempt to escape or to attack Joe or myself whilst you are with us.”

The corporal wondered what was in his cousin’s mind and what was behind the offer, but he was careful not to probe into the matter openly.

“You will accept my word of honour?” he asked with a faint touch of surprise in his voice.

“Yes,” answered his cousin sneeringly. “You see, I know you of old. The Bracknell strain runs true in you, whilst it has a twist in me. I know you won’t break your parole—if you give it. And of course, you will give it. It’s your word or your life. Ha! Ha! Quite a Dick Turpin touch there, hey?”

Roger Bracknell considered the matter swiftly. So far as he could see there was nothing to gain byrejecting the offer, since he was completely in the other’s hands, and though his cousin sneered he was clearly quite in earnest.

“I might be disposed to give my word, if—”

“Man,” broke in the other savagely, “you had better. There are no ifs and buts about it. Look at Joe there. He doesn’t strike you as one who will be over delicate, does he? If I let him loose you’ll be running down the Elkhorn under the ice inside ten minutes. You’d better agree—and quickly. No!” he lifted his pipe to check the words on the corporal’s lips. “Hear me out. There’s another condition yet, and it is this. As soon as I am able to travel you will accompany me without demur for four days. On the fifth day, I’ll release you and you can do your worst.”

The corporal hesitated. There was something here that he did not understand, and again he wondered what lay behind the proposal. His cousin watched him, and as he did not speak, addressed him again.

“I may remind you what the situation is. You are in my power. If you can’t give me your word, if I don’t fall in with Joe’s more primitive suggestion, I can keep you tied up here, and I can leave you tied up when we move on; or I can lash you on to a sledge, and, willy nilly, take you along with us. That must be quite plain to you. But I prefer an amicable arrangement.... You will give me your word?”

Corporal Bracknell recognized the truth of his cousin’s utterances. There was little choice in the matter, and after a little more reflection he agreed.

“Yes, Dick, I give you my word of honour.”

“I thought you would!” Dick Bracknell laughed shortly as he spoke, and then turned to his Indian companion. “Just take your knife, Joe, and cut those thongs.”

The Indian turned from the stove and growled something in a dialect which the corporal did not understand. He guessed, however, that the Indian was demurring, and with mingled feelings waited to see what would happen. His cousin spoke again, and this time there was a peremptory note in his voice.

“Cut those thongs, I tell you; and don’t stand there growling at things you don’t understand.”

He added something in his native tongue, and watching the Indian’s scowling face, the corporal saw the frown lift, and a flicker of evil laughter leap into the single eye. A moment later the Indian stepped up to him, and with a hunting knife cut the hide thongs which bound him, and then returned to the stove.

The corporal stretched his arms, then his whole body, and after that rose slowly to his feet. His cousin watched him with eyes that smiled inscrutably.

“Feels better, hey? You’re a sensible man, Cousin Roger, and now I guess we shall get along famously. A pity, though, that I shan’t be able to sit down to breakfast with you.”

“What I can’t understand is how you come to be here at all,” blurted the corporal.

“Oh,” laughed the other, “that’s as simple as you please. When I was plugged down by NorthStar, I must have lapsed into unconsciousness—for the first time on any stage. Whilst I was lying there in the snow—”

“I examined you,” broke in the corporal. “I thought that you were dead!”

“But as you see I wasn’t,” replied the other, “and whilst I was lying there in the snow; Joe, who was waiting with the dogs, having heard the shots came to look for me. He carried me to the sled, took me to the woods on the other side of the river, made a fire, and having doctored me brought me along here. He’s a good sort is Joe, though his looks are against him.”

The corporal did not reply. From the trails he had found in the snow, he had already guessed part of the story which he had just heard and was not surprised at it. The wounded man laughed shortly.

“Joe is attached to me. I once did him a service, and if I told him to do it he’d run amuck through Regina barracks without demur. He doesn’t love the mounted police, as he owes his lost eye to one of them, so you will see, cousin, that only my family affection saves you.”

The Indian turned his scarred face from the stove, and laid the table in primitive fashion. Then having attended to his master, he placed a tin plate with moose meat and beans before the corporal, filled a mug with steaming coffee, and with a grunt invited him to eat. The officer did so readily enough. He had eaten nothing for fourteen hours and was feeling hungry.

“Plain fare,” commented his cousin, “but wholesome, and if one brings to it the sauce of hunger, it’s at least as good as anything we had atHarrow Fell.... And that reminds me, cousin. How is the governor?”

The corporal remembered the dignified Sir James Bracknell as he had last seen him, and although he had had his own quarrel with him, felt resentment at the tone in which the question was asked.

“He was very well when last I saw him,” he answered stiffly.

“How long ago is that?”

“Two years.”

“Um! that’s a goodish time. May I inquire if he knows your whereabouts?”

“I think not. I didn’t tell him of my intentions when I came here. We—er—had a difference of opinion.”

Dick Bracknell laughed. “I don’t blame you for that. He’s a starchy old buffer is the governor, and a regular perambulating pepper pot.” He was silent for a moment, and then he inquired jerkily, “How—a—did he take—that—a—a—little affair of mine?”

“You mean the selling of the plans of the Travis gun?”

“There’s no need for you to be brutal!” was the sharp reply. “I’ve paid pretty heavily for that piece of madness. You’ve to remember that I’m the heir of Harrow Fell, and that if I show my nose in England I shall probably get five years at Portland or Dartmoor.”

The corporal knew that this was true, and was conscious of a little compunction. Without alluding to it he answered the question. “Sir James took that very badly. It was hushed up, of course,but when you disappeared, and your name was gazetted among the broken, he pressed for an explanation, and got it. As you can guess, proud old man as he is, it wasn’t a nice thing for him to hear.”

“No.... Poor old governor!”

A strained silence followed, and a full two minutes passed without any one speaking. Then the corporal glanced at his cousin. The latter was sitting in his bunk, staring straight before him, with a troubled look in his eyes. He moved as the corporal looked at him, and as their eyes met, he laughed in a grating way.

“The husks are not good eating,” he commented, “and I’ve been feeding on them ever since the day I skipped from Alcombe.”

The corporal was still silent, a little amazed at his cousin’s mood, and the other spoke again. “Don’t you go thinking I never regret things, Roger my boy. There never was a prodigal yet who didn’t lie awake o’ nights thinking what a fool he’d been. And for some of us there’s no going back to scoop the ring and the robe and to feast on the fatted veal.... There are times when I think of the Fell, and hear the pheasants clucking in the spinney. And I never sight at a ptarmigan but I think of the grouse driving down the wind on Harrow Moor. Man—it’s Hell, undiluted.”

The corporal pushed the tin plate from him. He felt strangely moved. He had thought of his cousin as wholly bad, and now he found good mingled with the evil. He turned round.

“Dick, old man,” he said in an unsteady voice, “you might make good yet, if you tried.”

His cousin laughed harshly. “Not me, you know better. What were you after me for? Whisky-running? Yes! I thought so. That’s bad enough for a man of—a—my antecedents. But there are worse things credited to Koona Dick, as you’ll learn. I’ve got too far. What is it that fellow Kipling says? ‘Damned from here to Eternity’? That’s me, and I know it.”

“You can pull up!” urged the other. “You can make reparation.”

“Reparation!” exclaimed the other. “Ah! you are thinking of—Joy—my wife, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” answered the corporal simply.

Dick Bracknell’s mood changed swiftly. “What’s Joy to you?” he demanded hoarsely. “You know her, you’ve talked with her, consoled her, I don’t doubt. What’s she to you?”

As he spoke his tones became violent, and he half threw himself out of the bunk, as if he would attack his cousin. The Indian started to his feet, and his one eye glared at the officer malevolently. The corporal did not move. As his cousin shouted the question the blood flushed his face, and in his heart he knew that he could not answer the question with the directness demanded.

“Don’t be a fool, Dick,” he replied quietly. “I never saw Joy Gargrave till four days ago, and if I talk of reparation, well, you’ll own it is due to her.”

Dick Bracknell’s jealous passion died down as suddenly as it had flamed. He threw himself back in the bunk and laughed shakily.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, “but it is one of the things that can’t be done.”

“You could let her divorce you!” blurted out the corporal. “It would be the decent thing to do.”

“When did I ever do the decent thing,” retorted his cousin sneeringly. “No, Joy’s my wife—and I’ll keep her. It is something to know that there are millions I can dip my hands in some day, and a warm breast I can flee to—”

“Not now at any rate,” broke in the corporal sharply, only by an effort restraining himself. “Joy has started for England.”

“For England—when?” Dick Bracknell’s face and tones expressed amazement, but his next words were burdened with suspicion. “You’re not lying to me?”

“No, it is the truth. Joy started for England yesterday morning. I saw her start.”

“And I can’t follow,” commented the prodigal bitterly. “That’s part of the price I pay.”

He did not speak again for a long time, and the corporal charged his pipe, lit it, and sat smoking, staring into the stove, and reflecting on the mess his cousin had made of his life.

At the end of half an hour the Indian went out, and then Dick Bracknell broke the silence.

“I wonder what Joy thinks of me? Did she tell you?”

“She knows how she was trapped—you are aware of that, of course? I think she will never forgive you.”

“I’m not surprised,” was the reply, “and yet, Roger, I think the world of her. When I marriedher I loved her—and I wasn’t thinking of her money overmuch. It was Lady Alcombe who put that rotten scheme in my head. If I’d only been patient, and run straight, and not been tempted by that agent to sell the secret of the Travis gun—but there’s a whole regiment of ‘if’s’ so what’s the use of gassing? Anyway, Joy’s mine—and no man else can get her while I live.”

It was the last word he said upon the subject, and nearly three weeks later, having recovered sufficiently to travel, he journeyed with his cousin and the Indian up the Elkhorn. On the fourth morning of that journey Roger Bracknell woke, to find that preparations were already well advanced for departure. One team was already harnessed with a larger complement of dogs than usual, whilst his own sled, with three dogs standing by, was still unharnessed. His cousin indicated it with a jerk of his head.

“We part company today, Roger. I’m sorry to rob your dog team, but Joe insists as he’s afraid you’ll get down to the police-post too soon for us, if we leave you your full team. Besides, we’re tackling a stiff journey and we shall need dogs before we’re through. We’re starting immediately, and you’ll have to breakfast alone, and by the time you’re through with it your parole is off. You understand?”

The corporal nodded, and his cousin continued, “With only three dogs you won’t be such a fool as to try and trail us, and we’ve left you enough grub to get you down to North Star comfortably. Your rifle’s there on the top of your sled, and I trust younot to try and use it on us till you’ve eaten your breakfast.... So long, old man.”

He turned lightly away, without waiting for his cousin to speak, and the corporal heard him humming an old chanson of the Voyageurs—

“Ah, ah, Babette,We go away;But we will comeAgain, Babette—Again back home,On—”

The song failed suddenly, and as Joe the Indian cracked his whip to the waiting dogs, Dick Bracknell looked back over his shoulder. His face was white and twisted as if with pain, and there was anguish in his eyes. The corporal took a hasty step towards him, but was waved back, and the team moved forward, the runners singing on the windswept ice. For ten minutes the officer stood watching, until the cavalcade passed out of sight behind a tree-clad island, but Dick Bracknell did not look back once. The corporal turned to the fire with a musing look upon his face, and whilst he prepared breakfast, his mind was with the man travelling up the river. The interrupted chanson haunted him and he found himself searching for the unsung fragment. For a time it eluded him, but presently he found it and hummed to himself—

“—On Easter Day—Back home to playOn Easter day,Babette! Babette!”

and as he found it he understood to the full the look of pain upon his cousin’s face. Again he looked up the river. Beyond the island a line of black dots appeared, and by them marched two larger dots.

“Poor devil!” he murmured as he turned again to the fire.

Back to IndexNext