CHAPTER XXIV

A FACE AT THE WINDOW

The mysterious gray airplane bearing Johnny Thompson and D’Arcy Arden to some unknown destination had not been gone from the abandoned mining camp a half hour when a curious figure appeared upon the scene. His was the height of a boy of ten, the breadth of a giant. His prodigious arms, when hanging straight down, touched the snow. His face was all but hidden by a coarse black beard. A pair of red lips, a huge nose and two bead-like eyes gave character to his face. For all his physical appearance, he might have been a baboon dressed like an Eskimo. He was not. He was a hunchback Indian.

No sooner had he arrived upon the scene than he appeared to understand that something was radically wrong.

And, indeed, evidence was not lacking. In a spot of clean snow, stripped of its load and turned upside down, was Johnny’s sled. Close at hand the snow was trampled as if from a battle. In the trampled spot were footprints of a dog and a man.

The Indian searched the entire locality carefully. The cabin, the sled, the scrub forest, all fell under the scrutiny of his beady eye. He was looking, if truth were known, for a dead dog. He found none.

With a grunt he turned to his own team. A second’s hesitation, and he returned to the abandoned sled. Having righted it, he spied something half buried in the snow.

He picked it up. Instantly his eyes lighted with a strange mixture of joy and astonishment as they gazed upon that object. It was a bow, Johnny’s bow. And that bow had been given to Johnny at a spot hundreds of miles away by a hunchback bowman.

This discovery appeared to alter the Indian’s entire course of action. Beginning again, he went over the ground with painstaking care. He searched the cabin, the forest, the ice covered lake. Finally he followed the course taken by the plane as it glided over the ice before its take-off.

When all this had been done, he lifted his face to the sky as if in prayer; then speaking to his dogs, one of the fastest teams known to this white world, he set them upon a course they were to follow not alone until darkness fell but on and on through the night.

Whatever this person’s purpose might be, he could but have appeared as a heroic figure as, steadily following his untiring team, he traced what to all appearance was a blind trail on through the night.

Scarcely less heroic was a lone gray figure, traveling in the opposite direction. With unerring instinct this gray form followed back over the trail Johnny and his team had traveled. This lone gray figure was only that of a dog; but even a dog, with a purpose, may become a hero.

* * * * * * * *

Once more in Johnny Thompson’s mind, as he felt the strange gray plane whose pilot he had not so much as seen go thundering on, many questions whirled round and round. Why, why was he a captive? Why was D’Arcy Arden here? Who were these great, dark, whiskered men who flew an unmarked plane over these northern wastes?

“One would not think it possible for strangers to live so long and travel so far in such a land without supplies of their own,” he told himself. “Yet in no other land could it be done so easily. In summer it is necessary for dwellers in this land to bring in supplies of gasoline and food for winter’s use. These supplies brought in by steamboat are often left in unguarded spots. Up until now, men in this land have been honest. It is the only way man can survive in such an unfriendly land. But now, if this continues, no man will be safe from cold and hunger.”

Having thought this thing through, he renewed his resolve to do all within his power to bring this unbearable situation to an end.

“But what’s to be done?” He was obliged to smile at himself as he realized how helpless he was. With his ankles tied together he was speeding he knew not where in a plane he had seen only from the outside, and which was piloted by men whose very names were unknown to him.

“I may help yet,” he told himself. “Stranger things have happened.”

As he looked down upon the world that glided beneath him, he saw that the shadow gliding across the blanket of white, their shadow, was far to their right.

“Long shadows,” he shouted to D’Arcy.

The boy heard him above the thunder of motors. “Yes,” he nodded. “Soon be night. And then?” He held his hands before him in a gesture of questioning and uncertainty.

In that gesture one might have read, “Where are we going? Where will we land? Do these people have a base? Will they take us there?”

Would they? Curlie Carson had been forced down by a storm. The pilots of the mystery plane had taken a chance and had flown on and out of the storm. Had Curlie come by mere chance upon their base? Was the powerful man, whose life he had saved, an accomplice of the mystery flyers? Let us see.

At the moment Johnny was watching the distant gliding shadow, Curlie sat before a fire that roared up the mouth of a crudely built chimney while, propped up comfortably in a chair, the injured cabin dweller sat beside him.

“We’ve done what we could for you,” Curlie was saying. “The very best we could, but it’s not enough. We’ll have to take you out to a doctor. Complications may set in. Some of those wounds are deep.”

“I know.” The man spoke with a slightly foreign accent, but his choice of English words was good. “You have been very kind. You saved my life. No doubt of it.

“That bear,” his voice rose, “was a thief. Two thieves they were, she and the cub. In a land like this you have to depend upon fresh meat, caribou, rabbit, ptarmigan, fish.

“The trees are short—you know how they are, ten inches across the bottom of the trunk, but tapering off like a top, not ten feet tall. I hung my meat in trees and my fish on racks. Those bears clawed it down and ate it.

“I set a bear trap. I caught the cub in the trap, you saw. I thought the big one was not about. She was. You know. And she—she nearly got me. If it had not been for you, I—

“Say!” He broke off. “Who sent you here? Why did you come?”

“No one sent us,” Curlie replied quietly. “Yes, perhaps some one did. I believe it was God. He does things that way.”

“God? Yes, perhaps.”

“It looked very much like a wild goose chase,” Curlie went on. “We were following a mysterious gray plane. The plane is absolutely without marks. It flies everywhere on gas that belongs to others. It’s a menace. Ever heard of it?” He looked the man squarely in the eyes. But if this man experienced any emotion he did not betray it.

“Heard a plane once or twice,” he said slowly, “flying high. Thought they were gold seekers, out taking pictures.

“You know what lake this is, of course?”

Curlie shook his head.

“Lake Dubawnt. It’s practically unexplored. Some natives here, Caribou Eskimo. Wild as deer. Seen ’em several times. Never came up to them. Might not be safe. Might send you a shower of arrows.

“It’s a big lake. Half as large as Lake Ontario. No one comes here. It’s a thousand miles from Edmonton. And a thousand miles with dog team or canoe is a long way.”

“But by airplane?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And you live here all the year alone?” Curlie’s tone took on an eager note.

“Alone? Oh, no. Not alone.” The man’s voice trailed off into nothingness. Then, turning his face toward the fire, he sat a long time looking into the flames. He appeared to be reading them. After a time he said,

“God sent them? Well, I shouldn’t wonder. God seems to have a hand in many affairs. I’ll be thinking more of Him after this; natural enough that I should.”

And so the twilight faded into darkness and little white foxes came out to bark on the crest of the hill above the fringe of scrub trees. Far away a white Arctic wolf prowled in search of sleeping ptarmigan.

* * * * * * * *

Just as those evening shadows deepened into darkness the gray plane that carried Johnny Thompson and his new found friend to some unknown destination dropped down from the sky to alight upon the frozen surface of a broad lake. What lake? This Johnny could not tell. No one came forward to inform him. He was not invited to dismount from the plane and relieve his stiffened muscles. Half a loaf of hard bread and a bottle of water were thrust in at the door. Then they were left, he and D’Arcy, to darkness and silence.

By propping himself on an elbow Johnny was able to look through the narrow windows. To the left was a glistening expanse of white. On the right was a narrow fringe of low trees skirting a hill, and at the edge of the trees a cabin. A light shone cheerily from the cabin’s one small window. From time to time this light appeared to flare up. This, Johnny knew, was but the increase of illumination that came to the interior of the cabin when the log fire flamed high.

“Going to be tough, sleeping here with all these dogs,” said D’Arcy.

“Not so bad.” Johnny’s tone was cheerful in spite of his misadventures. “They mind me pretty well. I’ll make them stack up together down by our feet. They’ll keep one another warm.

“The thing that troubles me most,” he went on after a time, “is that this ends my search.”

“Search?”

“For pitchblende. Radio-active rock, you know.” Johnny’s tone was thoughtful. “It’s not so much for myself. I’m young. Lots more chances for me. But Sandy, he’s old. His last great adventure.

“And then, think what it would mean to find pitchblende that would yield a large per cent of radium!

“It’s an awfully long process, this getting radium from pitchblende. You crush the ore fine, then leach it out with acid. Leach it three or four times, and you get a small quantity of uranium. But uranium is not radium. It only contains radium. Another long process, and you get the radium clear. But how much? Much as would rest on the head of a pin, probably.

“In a whole year all the radium workers in the world produced only eight and a half grains, about a fourth of an ounce. Some figures are staggering because of their bigness. Radium figures are shockingly small.

“And yet,” the boy’s tone became deeply serious, “a single half gram of radium, one sixty-fourth of an ounce, has been used to work remarkable cures. Men who seemed doomed to an early and terrible death have been cured and sent back to their happy families, all because of radium.

“And if you want large figures, here they are. One gram of radium is worth about $35,000. One ounce $1,000,000. One pound (if there were such a thing in the world) $16,000,000. And no discount for large orders.”

“I’d like to have a pound in my pocket right now,” D’Arcy chuckled.

“You might regret it.”

“Regret it?”

“If you left it there long enough though you had it securely packed in a tube, it would burn.”

“My pocket.”

“Not your pocket. But it would burn _you_.

“It’s the strangest element this old earth knows.”

Having thus disposed of this interesting subject, the two boys munched their bread, drank their water, put the dogs in their places and, rolling up in Johnny’s feather robe, prepared to make the best of a bad situation by sleeping the night through.

Despite his strange surroundings and the extraordinary position in which he found himself, Johnny slept soundly.

He was awakened, he knew not at what hour, by the low growl of a dog.

“Down Tige!” he commanded in a low voice. “Be still!”

The dog lay down in his place.

“What could have disturbed him?” Johnny asked himself.

The moon at that moment was under a cloud. The interior of the cabin was dark. He caught the sound of light tapping. It came from the window on his right. Strain his eyes as he might, he could see nothing.

Then suddenly the moon, creeping from behind the cloud, flooded all with yellow light.

Involuntarily the boy shrank into the shadows. There was a face at the window. And scarcely could one have imagined an uglier face; a great nose, red lips and beady eyes framed in shaggy hair.

But suddenly the boy leaned eagerly forward. His eyes lighted with a strange fire. Then in a whisper curiously like a cry of triumph, he exclaimed:

“The hunchback bowman!”