CHAPTER VI
An hour later Philip looked at his watch. It was close to midnight. Inthat hour his nerves had been keyed to a tension that was almost at thebreaking point. Not a sound came from off the Barren or from out of thescrub timber that did not hold a mental and physical shock for him. Hebelieved that Bram and his pack would come up quietly; that he wouldnot hear the man's footsteps or the soft pads of his beasts until theywere very near. Twice a great snow owl fluttered over his head. A thirdtime it pounced down upon a white hare back in the shrub, and for aninstant Philip thought the time had come. The little white foxes,curious as children, startled him most. Half a dozen times they sentthrough him the sharp thrill of anticipation, and twice they made himclimb his tree.
After that hour the reaction came, and with the steadying of his nervesand the quieter pulse of his blood Philip began to ask himself if hewas going to escape the ordeal which a short time before he hadaccepted as a certainty. Was it possible that his shots had frightenedBram? He could not believe that. Cowardice was the last thing he wouldassociate with the strange man he had seen in the starlight. Vividly hesaw Bram's face again. And now, after the almost unbearable strain hehad been under, a mysterious SOMETHING that had been in that faceimpinged itself upon him above all other things. Wild and savage as theface had been, he had seen in it the unutterable pathos of a creaturewithout hope. In that moment, even as caution held him listening forthe approach of danger, he no longer felt the quickening thrill of manon the hunt for man. He could not have explained the change inhimself--the swift reaction of thought and emotion that filled him witha mastering sympathy for Bram Johnson.
He waited, and less and less grew his fear of the wolves. Even moreclearly he saw Bram as the time passed; the hunted look in the man'seyes, even as he hunted--the loneliness of him as he had stoodlistening for a sound from the only friends he had--the padded beastsahead. In spite of Bram's shrieking cry to his pack, and thestrangeness of the laugh that had floated back out of the white nightafter the shots, Philip was convinced that he was not mad. He had heardof men whom loneliness had killed. He had known one--Pelletier, up atPoint Fullerton, on the Arctic. He could repeat by heart the diaryPelletier had left scribbled on his cabin door. It was worse thanmadness. To Pelletier death had come at last as a friend. And Bram hadbeen like that--dead to human comradeship for years. And yet--
Under it all, in Philip's mind, ran the thought of the woman's hair. InPierre Breault's cabin he had not given voice to the suspicion that hadflashed upon him. He had kept it to himself, and Pierre, afraid tospeak because of the horror of it, had remained as silent as he. Thethought oppressed him now. He knew that human hair retained its lifeand its gloss indefinitely, and that Bram might have had the goldensnare for years. It was quite reasonable to suppose that he hadbartered for it with some white man in the years before he had becomean outlaw, and that some curious fancy or superstition had inspired himin its possession. But Philip had ceased to be influenced by reasonalone. Sharply opposed to reason was that consciousness within himwhich told him that the hair had been freshly cut from a woman's head.He had no argument with which to drive home the logic of this beliefeven with himself, and yet he found it impossible not to accept thatbelief fully and unequivocally. There was, or HAD been, a woman withBram--and as he thought of the length and beauty and rare texture ofthe silken strand in his pocket he could not repress a shudder at thepossibilities the situation involved. Bram--and a woman! And a womanwith hair like that!
He left his tree after a time. For another hour he paced slowly backand forth at the edge of the Barren, his senses still keyed to thehighest point of caution. Then he rebuilt his fire, pausing every fewmoments in the operation to listen for a suspicious sound. It was verycold. He noticed, after a little, that the weird sound of the lightsover the Pole had become only a ghostly whisper. The stars were growingdimmer, and he watched them as they seemed slowly to recede farther andfarther away from the world of which he was a part. This dying out ofthe stars always interested him. It was one of the miracles of thenorthern world that lay just under the long Arctic night which, a fewhundred miles beyond the Barren, was now at its meridian. It seemed tohim as though ten thousand invisible hands were sweeping under theheavens extinguishing the lights first in ones and twos and then inwhole constellations. It preceded by perhaps half an hour the utter andchaotic blackness that comes before the northern dawn, and it was thisdarkness that Philip dreaded as he waited beside his fire.
In the impenetrable gloom of that hour Bram might come. It was possiblethat he had been waiting for that darkness. Philip looked at his watch.It was four o'clock. Once more he went to his tree, and waited. Inanother quarter of an hour he could not see the tree beside which hestood. And Bram did not come. With the beginning of the gray dawnPhilip rebuilt his fire for the third time and prepared to cook hisbreakfast. He felt the need of coffee--strong coffee--and he boiledhimself a double ration. At seven o'clock he was ready to take up thetrail.
He believed now that some mysterious and potent force had restrainedBram Johnson from taking advantage of the splendid opportunity of thatnight to rid himself of an enemy. As he made his way through the scrubtimber along the edge of the Barren it was with the feeling that he nolonger desired Bram as a prisoner. A thing more interesting than Bramhad entered into the adventure. It was the golden snare. Not with Bramhimself, but only at the end of Bram's trail, would he find what thegolden snare stood for. There he would discover the mystery and thetragedy of it, if it meant anything at all. He appreciated the extremehazard of following Bram to his long hidden retreat. The man he mightoutwit in pursuit and overcome in fair fight, if it came to a fight,but against the pack he was fighting tremendous odds.
What this odds meant had not fully gripped him until he came cautiouslyout of the timber half an hour later and saw what was left of thecaribou the pack had killed. The bull had fallen within fifty yards ofthe edge of the scrub. For a radius of twenty feet about it the snowwas beaten hard by the footprints of beasts, and this arena was stainedred with blood and scattered thickly with bits of flesh, broken bonesand patches of hide. Philip could see where Bram had come in on therun, and where he had kicked off his snowshoes. After that his greatmoccasin tracks mingled with those of the wolves. Bram had evidentlycome in time to save the hind quarters, which had been dragged to aspot well out of the red ring of slaughter. After that the stars musthave looked down upon an amazing scene. The hungry horde had leftscarcely more than the disemboweled offal. Where Bram had dragged hismeat there was a small circle worn by moccasin tracks, and here, too,were small bits of flesh, scattered about--the discarded remnants ofBram's own feast.
The snow told as clearly as a printed page what had happened afterthat. Its story amazed Philip. From somewhere Bram had produced asledge, and on this sledge he had loaded what remained of the cariboumeat. From the marks in the snow Philip saw that it had been of the lowootapanask type, but that it was longer and broader than any sledge hehad ever seen. He did not have to guess at what had happened.Everything was too clear for that. Far back on the Barren Bram hadloosed his pack at sight of the caribou, and the pursuit and kill hadfollowed. After that, when beasts and man had gorged themselves, theyhad returned through the night for the sledge. Bram had made a widedetour so that he would not again pass near the finger of scrub timberthat concealed his enemy, and with a curious quickening of the blood inhis veins Philip observed how closely the pack hung at his heels. Theman was master--absolutely. Later they had returned with the sledge,Bram had loaded his meat, and with his pack had struck out straightnorth over the Barren. Every wolf was in harness, and Bram rode on thesledge.
Philip drew a deep breath. He was learning new things about BramJohnson. First he assured himself that Bram was not afraid, and thathis disappearance could not be called a flight. If fear of capture hadpossessed him he would not have returned for his meat. Suddenly herecalled Pierre Breault's story of how Bram had carried off thehaunches of a bull upon his shoulder
s as easily as a child might havecarried a toy gun, and he wondered why Bram--instead of returning forthe meat this night--had not carried the meat to his sledge. It wouldhave saved time and distance. He was beginning to give Bram credit fora deeply mysterious strategy. There was some definite reason why he hadnot made an attack with his wolves that night. There was a reason forthe wide detour around the point of timber, and there was a still moreinexplicable reason why he had come back with his sledge for the meat,instead of carrying his meat to the sledge. The caribou haunch had notweighed more than sixty or seventy pounds, which was scarcely half aburden for Bram's powerful shoulders.
In the edge of the timber, where he could secure wood for his fire,Philip began to prepare. He cooked food for six days. Three days hewould follow Bram out into that unmapped and treeless space--the GreatBarren. Beyond that it would be impossible to go without dogs orsledge. Three days out, and three days back--and even at that he wouldbe playing a thrilling game with death. In the heart of the Barren amenace greater than Bram and his wolves would be impending. It wasstorm.
His heart sank a little as he set out straight north, marking thedirection by the point of his compass. It was a gray and sunless day.Beyond him for a distance the Barren was a white plain, and this plainseemed always to be merging not very far ahead into the purple haze ofthe sky. At the end of an hour he was in the center of a vastamphitheater which was filled with the gloom and the stillness ofdeath. Behind him the thin fringe of the forest had disappeared. Therim of the sky was like a leaden thing, widening only as he advanced.Under that sky, and imprisoned within its circular walls, he knew thatmen had gone mad; he felt already the crushing oppression of anappalling loneliness, and for another hour he fought an almostirresistible desire to turn back. Not a rock or a shrub rose to breakthe monotony, and over his head--so low that at times it seemed asthough he might have flung a stone up to them--dark clouds rolledsullenly from out of the north and east.
Half a dozen times in those first two hours he looked at his compass.Not once in that time did Bram diverge from his steady course into thenorth. In the gray gloom, without a stone or a tree to mark his way,his sense of orientation was directing him as infallibly as thesensitive needle of the instrument which Philip carried.
It was in the third hour, seven or eight miles from the scene ofslaughter, that Philip came upon the first stopping place of thesledge. The wolves had not broken their traveling rank, and for thisreason he guessed that Bram had paused only long enough to put on hissnowshoes. After this Philip could measure quite accurately the speedof the outlaw and his pack. Bram's snow-shoe strides were from twelveto sixteen inches longer than his own, and there was little doubt thatBram was traveling six miles to his four.
It was one o'clock when Philip stopped to eat his dinner. He figuredthat he was fifteen miles from the timber-line. As he ate there pressedupon him more and more persistently the feeling that he had enteredupon an adventure which was leading toward inevitable disaster for him.For the first time the significance of Bram's supply of meat, securedby the outlaw at the last moment before starting out into the Barren,appeared to him with a clearness that filled him with uneasiness. Itmeant that Bram required three or four days' rations for himself andhis pack in crossing this sea of desolation that reached in places tothe Arctic. In that time, if necessity was driving him, he could covera hundred and fifty miles, while Philip could make less than a hundred.
Until three o'clock in the afternoon he followed steadily over Bram'strail. He would have pursued for another hour if a huge and dome-shapedsnowdrift had not risen in his path. In the big drift he decided tomake his house for the night. It was an easy matter--a trick learned ofthe Eskimo. With his belt-ax he broke through the thick crust of thedrift, using care that the "door" he thus opened into it was only largeenough for the entrance of his body. Using a snowshoe as a shovel hethen began digging out the soft interior of the drift, burrowing a twofoot tunnel until he was well back from the door, where he made himselfa chamber large enough for his sleeping-bag. The task employed him lessthan an hour, and when his bed was made, and he stood in front of thedoor to his igloo, his spirits began to return. The assurance that hehad a home at his back in which neither cold nor storm could reach himinspirited him with an optimism which he had not felt at any timeduring the day.
From the timber he had borne a precious bundle of finely splitkindlings of pitch-filled spruce, and with a handful of these he builthimself a tiny fire over which, on a longer stick brought for thepurpose, he suspended his tea pail, packed with snow. The crackling ofthe flames set him whistling. Darkness was falling swiftly about him.By the time his tea was ready and he had warmed his cold bannock andbacon the gloom was like a black curtain that he might have slit with aknife. Not a star was visible in the sky. Twenty feet on either side ofhim he could not see the surface of the snow. Now and then he added abit of his kindling to the dying embers, and in the glow of the laststick he smoked his pipe, and as he smoked he drew from his wallet thegolden snare. Coiled in the hollow of his hand and catching the redlight of the pitch-laden fagot it shone with the rich luster of raremetal. Not until the pitch was burning itself out in a final sputter offlame did Philip replace it in the wallet.
With the going of the fire an utter and chaotic blackness shut him in.Feeling his way he crawled through the door of his tunnel, over theinside of which he had fastened as a flap his silk service tent. Thenhe stretched himself out in his sleeping-bag. It was surprisinglycomfortable. Since he had left Breault's cabin he had not enjoyed sucha bed. And last night he had not slept at all. He fell into deep sleep.The hours and the night passed over him. He did not hear the wailing ofthe wind that came with the dawn. When day followed dawn there wereother sounds which he did not hear. His inner consciousness, theguardian of his sleep, cried for him to arouse himself. It pounded likea little hand in his brain, and at last he began to move restlessly,and twist in his sleeping-bag. His eyes shot open suddenly. The lightof day filled his tunnel. He looked toward the "door" which he hadcovered with his tent.
The tent was gone.
In its place was framed a huge shaggy head, and Philip found himselfstaring straight into the eyes of Bram Johnson.