Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police Part 10

Later, when it became lighter, they went on hour after hour, through the night. At dawn the trail was still old. There were the same cobwebs of frost, the same signs to show that DeBar and his Mackenzie hound had preceded them a long time before. During the next day and night they spent sixteen hours on their snow-shoes and the lacework of frost in DeBar's trail grew thinner. The next day they traveled fourteen and the next twelve, and there was no lacework of frost at all. There were hot coals under the ashes of DeBar's fires. The crumbs of his bannock were soft. The toes of his Mackenzie hound left warm, sharp imprints. It was then that they came to the frozen water of the Chariot. The Chippewayan turned back to Fond du Lac, and Philip went on alone, the two dogs limping behind him with his outfit.

It was still early in the day when Philip crossed the river into the barrens and with each step now his pulse beat faster. DeBar could not be far ahead of him. He was sure of that. Very soon he must overtake him.

And then--there would be a fight. In the tense minutes that followed, the vision of Isobel's beautiful face grew less and less distinct in his mind. It was filled with something more grim, something that tightened his muscles, kept him ceaselessly alert. He would come on DeBar--and there would be a fight. DeBar would not be taken by surprise.

At noon he halted and built a small fire between two rocks, over which he boiled some tea and warmed his meat. Each day he had built three fires, but at the end of this day, when darkness stopped him again, it occurred to him that since that morning DeBar had built but one. Gray dawn had scarcely broken when he again took up the pursuit. It was bitterly cold, and a biting wind swept down across the barrens from the Arctic icebergs. His pocket thermometer registered sixty degrees below zero when he left it open on the sledge, and six times between dawn and dusk he built himself fires. Again DeBar built but one, and this time he found no bannock crumbs.

For the last twenty miles DeBar had gone straight into the North. He continued straight into the North the next day and several times Philip scrutinized his map, which told him in that direction there lay nothing but peopleless barrens as far as the Great Slave.

There was growing in him now a fear--a fear that DeBar would beat him out in the race. His limbs began to ache with a strange pain and his progress was becoming slower. At intervals he stopped to rest, and after each of these intervals the pain seemed to gnaw deeper at his bones, forcing him to limp, as the dogs were limping behind him. He had felt it once before, beyond Lac Bain, and knew what it meant. His legs were giving out--and DeBar would beat him yet! The thought stirred him on, and before he stopped again he came to the edge of a little lake. DeBar had started to cross the lake, and then, changing his mind, had turned back and skirted the edge of it. Philip followed the outlaw's trail with his eyes and saw that he could strike it again and save distance by crossing the snow-covered ice.

He went on, with dogs and sledge at his heels, unconscious of the warning underfoot that had turned DeBar back. In midlake he turned to urge the dogs into a faster pace, and it was then that he heard under him a hollow, trembling sound, growing in volume even as he hesitated, until it surged in under his feet from every sh.o.r.e, like the rolling thunder of a ten-pin ball. With a loud cry to the dogs he darted forward, but it was too late. Behind him the ice crashed like brittle gla.s.s, and he saw sledge and dogs disappear as if into an abyss. In an instant he had begun a mad race to the sh.o.r.e a hundred feet ahead of him. Ten paces more and he would have reached it, when the toe of his snow-shoe caught in a hummock of snow and ice. For a flash it stopped him, and the moment's pause was fatal. Before he could throw himself forward on his face in a last effort to save himself, the ice gave way and he plunged through. In his extremity he thought of DeBar, of possible help even from the outlaw, and a terrible cry for that help burst from his lips as he felt himself going. The next instant he was sorry that he had shouted. He was to his waist in water, but his feet were on bottom. He saw now what had happened, that the surface of the water was a foot below the sh.e.l.l of ice, which was scarcely more than an inch in thickness. It was not difficult for him to kick off his snow-shoes under the water, and he began breaking his way ash.o.r.e.

Five minutes later he dragged himself out, stiff with the cold, his drenched clothing freezing as it came into contact with the air.

His first thought was of fire, and he ran up the sh.o.r.e, his teeth chattering, and began tearing off handfuls of bark from a birch. Not until he was done and the bark was piled in a heap beside the tree did the full horror of his situation dawn upon him. His emergency pouch was on the sledge, and in that pouch was his waterproof box of matches!

He ran back to the edge of broken ice, unconscious that he was almost sobbing in his despair. There was no sign of the sledge, no sound of the dogs, who might still be struggling in their traces. They were gone--everything--food, fire, life itself. He dug out his flint and steel from the bottom of a stiffening pocket and knelt beside the bark, striking them again and again, yet knowing that his efforts were futile.

He continued to strike until his hands were purple and numb and his freezing clothes almost shackled him to the ground.

"Good G.o.d!" he breathed.

He rose slowly, with a long, shuddering breath and turned his eyes to where the outlaw's trail swung from the lake into the North. Even in that moment, as the blood in his veins seemed congealing with the icy chill of death, the irony of the situation was not lost upon Philip.

"It's the law versus G.o.d, Billy," he chattered, as if DeBar stood before him. "The law wouldn't vindicate itself back there--ten years ago--but I guess it's doing it now."

He dropped into DeBar's trail and began to trot.

"At least it looks as if you're on the side of the Mighty," he continued. "But we'll see--very soon--Billy--"

Ahead of him the trail ran up a ridge, broken and scattered with rocks and stunted scrub, and the sight of it gave him a little hope. Hope died when he reached the top and stared out over a mile of lifeless barren.

"You're my only chance. Billy," he s.h.i.+vered. "Mebby, if you knew what had happened, you'd turn back and give me the loan of a match."

He tried to laugh at his own little joke, but it was a ghastly attempt and his purpling lips closed tightly as he stumbled down the ridge. As his legs grew weaker and his blood more sluggish, his mind seemed to work faster, and the mult.i.tude of thoughts that surged through his brain made him oblivious of the first gnawing of a strange dull pain. He was freezing. He knew that without feeling pain. He had before him, not hours, but minutes of life, and he knew that, too. His arms might have been cut off at the shoulders for all feeling that was left in them; he noticed, as he stumbled along in a half run, that he could not bend his fingers. At every step his legs grew heavier and his feet were now leaden weights. Yet he was surprised to find that the first horror of his situation had left him. It did not seem that death was only a few hundred yards away, and he found himself thinking of MacGregor, of home, and then only of Isobel. He wondered, after that, if some one of the other four had played the game, and lost, in this same way, and he wondered, too, if his bones would never be found, as theirs had never been.

He stopped again on a snow ridge. He had come a quarter of a mile, though it seemed that he had traveled ten times that distance.

"Sixty degrees below zero--and it's the vindication of the law!"

His voice scarcely broke between his purple lips now, and the bitter sweep of wind swayed him as he stood.

Chapter XI. The Law Versus The Man

Suddenly a great thrill shot through Philip, and for an instant he stood rigid. What was that he saw out in the gray gloom of Arctic desolation, creeping up, up, up, almost black at its beginning, and dying away like a ghostly winding-sheet? A gurgling cry rose in his throat, and he went on, panting now like a broken-winded beast in his excitement. It grew near, blacker, warmer. He fancied that he could feel its heat, which was the new fire of life blazing within him.

He went down between two great drifts into a pit which seemed bottomless. He crawled to the top of the second, using his pulseless hands like sticks in the snow, and at the top something rose from the other side of the drift to meet him.

It was a face, a fierce, bearded face, the gaunt starvation in it hidden by his own blindness. It seemed like the face of an ogre, terrible, threatening, and he knew that it was the face of William DeBar, the seventh brother.

He launched himself forward, and the other launched himself forward, and they met in a struggle which was pathetic in its weakness, and rolled together to the bottom of the drift. Yet the struggle was no less terrible because of that weakness. It was a struggle between two lingering sparks of human life and when these two sparks had flickered and blazed and died down, the two men lay gasping, an arm's reach from each other.

Philip's eyes went to the fire. It was a small fire, burning more brightly as he looked, and he longed to throw himself upon it so that the flames might eat into his flesh. He had mumbled something about police, arrest and murder during the struggle, but DeBar spoke for the first time now.

"You're cold," he said.

"I'm freezing to death," said Philip.

"And I'm--starving."

DeBar rose to his feet. Philip drew himself together, as if expecting an attack, but in place of it DeBar held out a warmly mittened hand.

"You've got to get those clothes off--quick--or you'll die," he said.

"Here!"

Mechanically Philip reached up his hand, and DeBar took him to his sledge behind the fire and wrapped about him a thick blanket. Then he drew out a sheath knife and ripped the frozen legs of his trousers up and the sleeves of his coat down, cut the string of his shoe-packs and slit his heavy German socks, and after that he rubbed his feet and legs and arms until Philip began to feel a sting like the p.r.i.c.kly bite of nettles.

"Ten minutes more and you'd been gone," said DeBar.

He wrapped a second blanket around Philip, and dragged the sledge on which he was lying still nearer to the fire. Then he threw on a fresh armful of dry sticks and from a pocket of his coat drew forth something small and red and frozen, which was the carca.s.s of a bird about the size of a robin. DeBar held it up between his forefinger and thumb, and looking at Philip, the flash of a smile pa.s.sed for an instant over his grizzled face.

"Dinner," he said, and Philip could not fail to catch the low chuckling note of humor in his voice. "It's a Whisky Jack, man, an' he's the first and last living thing I've seen in the way of fowl between here and Fond du Lac. He weighs four ounces if he weighs an ounce, and we'll feast on him shortly. I haven't had a full mouth of grub since day before yesterday morning, but you're welcome to a half of him, if you're hungry enough."

"Where'd your chuck go?" asked Philip.

He was conscious of a new warmth and comfort in his veins, but it was not this that sent a heat into his face at the outlaw's offer. DeBar had saved his life, and now, when DeBar might have killed him, he was offering him food. The man was spitting the bird on the sharpened end of a stick, and when he had done this he pointed to the big Mackenzie hound, tied to the broken stub of a dead sapling.

"I brought enough bannock to carry me to Chippewayan, but he got into it the first night, and what he left was crumbs. You lost yours in the lake, eh?"

"Dogs and everything," said Philip. "Even matches."

"Those ice-traps are bad," said DeBar companionably, slowly turning the bird. "You always want to test the lakes in this country. Most of 'em come from bog springs, and after they freeze, the water drops. Guess you'd had me pretty soon if it hadn't been for the lake, wouldn't you?"

He grinned, and to his own astonishment Philip grinned.

"I was tight after you, Bill."

"Ho! ho! ho!" laughed the outlaw. "That sounds good! I've gone by another name, of course, and that's the first time I've heard my own since--"

He stopped suddenly, and the laugh left his voice and face.

"It sounds--homelike," he added more gently. "What's yours, pardner?"

"Steele--Philip Steele, of the R.N.W.M.P.," said Philip.

"Used to know a Steele once," went on DeBar. "That was back--where it happened. He was one of my friends."

For a moment he turned his eyes on Philip. They were deep gray eyes, set well apart in a face that among a hundred others Philip would have picked out for its frankness and courage. He knew that the man before him was not much more than his own age, yet he appeared ten years older.