Part 2

But Cantine had no fear. In the lonely expanse he knew the spot where was life and warm teepees and food. Tutchi was a chief, and he kept his village in a fairly sanitary condition, a condition immeasurably superior to that of the squalid teepees to be found along the Yukon basin. Cantine had been there and he knew, and up the Takhini’s smooth ice he pressed at a furious pace, the beast instinct of him yearning for food and the human side of him yearning for a place where he might without dread of contumely take on again the status of the white.

Jose’s sentiments were in a degree reflected in his companion. She ran at his heels with the swing of the Northwoman trained to the trails, and she seemed to have no difficulty in keeping his pace.

* * * * *

The Klokhok River they sought flowed south along the base of the Miner’s Range into the Takhini. All afternoon they held on for it and at night swung suddenly to the right into its spruce-fringed mouth. Yonder by the fringe of spruce on the low bench-land was the site of Tutchi’s Village, but to Cantine’s astonished eyes there glowed no teepee fires between the black trunks.

“Blazes!” he exclaimed in alarm as he surveyed the bare bench-land. “She’s gone, Blera. And how in tarnation’s that? It wasn’t just a camping-ground. It was a permanent village. But maybe they’ve shifted up-stream or back in the range. Let’s see if there’s a trail.”

With a swift pang of fear and loneliness caused by she knew not what, Blera mechanically followed Cantine as he skimmed up the snow-sheeted ice alongside the Klokhok’s left limit. In that moment of non-discovery of the village the inimical wild crept close to her. She saw it as a concrete force, strong, sure, ruthless as the persecuting Bassett or the avenging hand of Eric Sark.

Her fear grew upon her so that she drew near to Jose in his search, her hand on his elbow, and skimmed with him stride by stride. Her eyes were furtively turned to the dark spruce forests crowding on either side, while the eyes of her companion scrutinized the snowy bank. That was why neither of them marked the scum ice, fragile mask of an unfrozen spring, straight ahead.

They did not mark it, but the moment it rattled and shaled off against the frames of their shoes their trained ears telegraphed the danger. Instinctively both made a violent half-turn in mid-stride, but the movement was not enough to carry them clear. It served only to jerk them against each other, and together they sank to their shoulders through the scum ice.

The Klokhok’s waters were as cold as the vault of death.

For an instant the contact paralyzed the two. Then their arms fell like flails upon the rotten shell about them. For yards they broke their way to shore and pulled themselves like leaden-footed divers up the bank.

A clump of blasted spruce stood on the shore, and, struggling against the clog of their garments which were setting as hard as armor, they madly tore down armfuls of the boughs.

“Jose, the matches!” gasped Blera, dropping on her knees beside the pile. “Give them to me. I’ll light it. You pile on more. Don’t stop piling!”

Jose snatched up the stiff, crackling front of his parka and dabbed his numbing fingers into the pocket of his vest where he kept his matches in a little bottle tightly corked, the best waterproof match-safe the Northman knows.

Even as he jabbed his fingers in he uttered a cry of pain and jerked them out again.

The ends showed all bloody and studded with bits of broken glass.

Tailor swept Cantine’s swarthy face till he looked like a statue in bronze as he stood staring stupidly at his finger-ends and watching the hot blood freeze.

“Jose! Jose!”

Blera’s voice rang thin as a wail in the frosty stillness.

She sprang to Jose, seized on the cloth of his vest and pushed the pocket inside out from the bottom so that the contents fell into the palm of her left gantlet.

Mingled with the broken glass of the bottle was a muddled mass of splintered match-stumps and sodden heads.

“Must have done it in the fall!” quavered Jose, still staring stupidly. “I felt your snow-shoe take me hard in the ribs when we went down.”

But Blera did not heed.

She was kneeling again by the pile of spruce branches, scratching match-head after match-head.

None of them would light despite her frantic and repeated trials. In despair she threw the sodden mass into the unlit pile of twigs and turned again to Cantine.

“Your Colt, Jose!” she appealed, rising stiffly. “Your Colt! You can start it with a shot!”

“My Colt?” Cantine looked bewildered. The frost seemed to be deadening his senses already. “My Colt, Blera? Oh, yes. Bassett took it, ’way back at Happy Camp!”

“Good God!” screamed Blera, remembering.

She threw out her arms, weakly trying to fight up circulation, and a second time the ruthless spirit of the wild came very close.

To her terrified eyes it seemed to leap out of the darkness of the spruce, a material presence, and mock her with a shout that reverberated across the fireless land.

It rushed upon her. She could hear the crunch-crunch of its footsteps in the crust. Its grip fell upon her shoulder, and she shrieked insanely.

“Steady, missus, steady!” soothed a mumbling, half-articulate voice.

And not till the spoken words smote on her consciousness could she realize that the material presence was a humble man. Then she gave a little moan of relief and put out a hand for Jose to share in her discovery.

In the arctic gloom they could not see the man’s face at all, but they gathered that he had been disturbed at supper by their cries, for he was capless and coatless. Also he held in his hand a generous slab of pilot-bread, and this it was which, cramming his mouth, rendered his speech so inarticulate. Wildly leading the race, the bread in his left hand and Blera’s frozen gantlet in his right, he hurtled them over the snows between the spruce trees and banged them into his cabin doorway.

At their advent five wolf-dogs leaped up snarling from their rest beside the stove.

“Lie down!” gurgled Cantine’s and Blera’s rescuer.

He kicked the dogs soundly in the ribs till they retreated into the huge empty wood-box that stood behind the stove.

“I don’t like the brutes inside,” he mumbled, still wrestling convulsively to get rid of the gagging pilot-bread, “but it’s a case of have to keep them inside or get them eaten whole. Tutchi’s Village is full of savage semi-wolves, and they run the river in a hunt-pack every night.”

“Tutchi’s Village!” exclaimed Cantine, his teeth clicking incessantly as he whacked the ice from bis garments. “Where’s it moved to? It was hunting sign of it we fell in.”

“Moved five miles up the Klokliok,” spluttered the other, setting the stove-door ajar to obtain a floor-streamer of light in the gloomy cabin. “But you better strip quick. Use that back room there to change. You’ll find a dunnage-bag full of clothes—some of them woman’s things—under the bunk. While you throw them on, I’ll rustle more wood to stoke up the stove. I used all I had in to cook supper. And you can light the candle on the shelf there to see by. I was just getting up to reach for it when I heard your yells!”

Gulping down the last of his pilot-bread, the owner of the cabin was gone while he spoke.

Cantine reached up to the shelf, took off the tallow candle stuck in a wide-necked pickle-bottle, reached a box of matches from the same shelf and lighted the wick.

From force of habit he fingered up a small bunch of matches out of the box and went to shove them into his vest pocket.

“Wait, Jose, wait!” cautioned Blera. “They’ll be as bad as the others if you put them there. Put them in the dry clothes, and after this don’t trust a bottle any more. Get one of those rubber match-safes with the screw top. And now for the dry clothes! I feel as if I can work my arms and legs once more.”

Taking the candle from Jose, she moved across the cabin toward the door of the back room. The yellow light flooding the main room showed it to be built of the customary spruce logs chinked with moss and plastered with mud.

The floor was of rough-hewn slabs. Of slabs, too, but a little better smoothed, was the rude table upon which supper was spread. The table stood under the window which instead of glass for a light boasted a square of golden-brown moose-skin rubbed so smooth as to be almost transparent.

Upon the opposite wall was a bunk also formed of slabs. The Yukon stove stood at the end, and it, with the wood-box behind, completed the furnishings of the cabin.

Out of the empty wood-box the huskies raised their heads and growled so ominously at Blera’s and Jose’s movements that the two ran the last few steps across the floor and shut the door of the back room with a bang.

The back room was but a logged-in annex to the main room and without window or door. A bunk constituted its only furnishing, and it appeared to be used as a store-room, for grub-bags and odds and ends were piled neatly in its corners.

Blera set the candle on a pile of sacks and ferreted out the dunnage-bag from under the bunk. Its lashings were loose, and she tumbled the contents out on the floor where each could pick what was needed.

The rapid run from the river to the cabin and the genial atmosphere of the cabin itself had somewhat warmed their blood as well as partly thawed their mail-like garments. Hastily they ripped off the clammy parkas, mackinaws and woolens and began the process of replacing them with dry ones.

For the most part Blera dressed like Jose in arctic underwear, flannel shirt, German socks and moccasins, but when it came to outer garments she searched in the heart of the disorderly pile on the floor for the woman’s things the owner of the cabin had mentioned.

Finally she fished them out, a buckskin waist and a mackinaw skirt with a pronounced plaid pattern.

The waist went on like any waist, but at sight of the skirt Blera’s breath whistled in her throat. Her face convulsed in an appalling discovery. She held the plaid mackinaw close to the candle, examining the band and the vent at the back.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Cantine, looking up from his own dressing. “Lousy?”

“Jose, it’s the same! Here’s the band leather sewn on to keep the sheath-knife from wearing it and the hooks and eyes of copper wire on the vent. Jose, it’s my skirt!

And he’s—”

“Sark!” roared Jose.

Terror transformed Cantine’s features. He wildly scanned the walls of the back room for window or door, but, as he remembered now, there was no window or door.

“Blera, we’re trapped!” he faltered with a great revelation. “We’re trapped, and Bassett’s done it. This is the trail his partner was putting relay camps on, the Nordenskold Trail. The road down the Middle Fork runs right here. Why in Hades didn’t we watch where we were going?”

Blera, unanswering, held the mackinaw skirt spread out in her hands. She was trembling from head to foot, and her eyes stared wide under the surge of emotion, jumbled emotion, fear, remorse, anxiety, longing, despair.

“Bassett’s done it!” repeated Jose. “Curse his bloody heart, he knew where his partner was. He knew if he closed the Yukon against us we’d have to travel the Nordenskold. I wish, to blue brimstoned blazes, I’d been quicker with my Colt that night up at—but what in thunder’s the use of raving?” He stopped short in his furious passion. “We got to do something. We got to do it mighty sudden. Blera, what in tarnation can we do without dogs, arms or grub?”

“I don’t know what we can do,” answered Blera, breathing as if she were sobbing, “but we got to get out of here. Put on dry parkas and draw the hoods close and beat it. Maybe we can get out before he comes in. If we don’t, tell him—tell—him we got to keep right on. Tell him your brother’s sick up in the Miner’s Range. Here’s a bullet knocking around in the dunnage-bag. Put it in your mouth, and it’ll help change your voice some. And for God’s sake let’s keep our parka hoods drawn tight.”

* * * * *

Blera dropped the plaid mackinaw skirt and, contorting feverishly, they both donned parkas and pulled open the door.

But as they stepped out into the main room of the cabin the door of it rattled, was kicked back, and both his arms full, Sark staggered in with the wood.

Instantly, as before, the five huskies leaped viciously across the floor at Jose and Blera.

Sark let fall his load, caught up a single billet and belabored the beasts over the heads.

“Down, Skookum! Down, Culuk!” he yelled. “Get to blazes behind the stove!” He overcame their stubborn resistance and hammered them into submission. “Now stay behind it, you savages!”

He turned apologetically to his guests.

“But hold on!” he exclaimed, noting the drawn parka hoods which allowed only their eyes to be seen. “You’re not for hitting the trail again tonight, eh?”

“We got to,” twanged Jose, the bullet in his mouth altering his voice and causing him to enunciate through his nose. “We got to get along on the jump. My brother’s sick up in the Miner’s Range, up on the headwaters of the Klokhok. We. got to keep going tonight, for I sent him word I’d reach him tomorrow.”

“Thunder!” exclaimed Sark. “That’s different. And I’m sorry. But you eat before you travel. You and your missus need solid grub and steaming drink after yon bath. I was just taking the last bite myself. There’s lots of pilot-bread and moose meat and hot coffee on the stove. Dig in!”

Sark waved a hand toward the laden table.

Blera who, although the parka hood concealed every part of her face but her eyes, could not forbear averting her head, turned slightly and took a sidelong glance at Eric Sark. As she viewed the familiar figure so clear in the candlelight, big of limb and of chest, blue-eyed, granite-featured, with the raven-black in his beard and hair, she had an almost unconquerable desire to cry out or to run.

Yet she did neither.

She remained stone-still till her eyes encountered those of Cantine and strayed with them to the food upon the table.

After their days of hunger it was a great temptation, and they fell. Flight delayed, and still trusting to the masks of their parka hoods, they stretched out ravenous hands and munched fiercely upon the bread and meat and gulped the steaming coffee.

Jose removed the bullet from his mouth while he ate, but both he and Blera were careful to sit backing the tallow-candle which Sark placed upon its shelf again, so that their faces were cast in gloom.

Sark, to maintain the part of host, picked up the remainder of the slab of pilot-bread he had carried when he rescued them and poured himself another cup of coffee.

“What might your name be, stranger?” he asked.

Blera started, the piece of moose-shoulder she was munching slipping to the floor.

“Karle Lott!” coughed Jose through the drink he snatched.

“Mine’s Eric Sark.”

Dreading another personal question, Blera bent low by the table-edge to pick up the meat.

But Skookum, the most cunning as well as the most evil of the wolf-dogs, had seen it fall and stolen from behind the stove. He leaped as Blera reached for it and, losing it by the fraction of a second, slashed with his chisel-sharp fangs at her face.

The fangs fell short of the flesh, but met in the parka hood and tore it from her head.

Unmasked, the woman sprang away from the brute with a violent scream.

“Blera!” Sark’s vicious voice thundered in the cabin.

Swift as his wolf-dog he sprang up.

For a moment he stared at her as across a gulf, his blue eyes blazing. Then the lightning-fire of his glance struck her companion.

“You can drop your hood, too, Cantine!”

With the ultimatum Sark’s lingers slid back and seized the rifle lying in his bunk on the wall, for he looked to see a weapon flash in Cantine’s hand and guessed that one of them had traveled his last trail.

But Blera was upon him on the instant, pressing down the gun.

“You can’t harm us, Eric! You can’t harm us!” she declared hysterically. “You can’t touch us here, people you’ve broken bread with under your own roof. You know that’s the Northland law!”

Again Sark stared at her as across a gulf and dropped the rifle on the bunk.

“You’re right,” he admitted slowly, nodding his head as if she had expounded some all-powerful decree. “Though laws aren’t worth a Siwash curse to you two, they are to me. You’re safe—for the night. Because now I savvy that ‘brother in the Miner’s Range’ was only lyin’ bluff.”

“But look here, Sark,” whined Jose, “we—”

“Stop right up! I’d sure palaver with a murdering Sundowner. I’d sure palaver with a cannibal Hoonah. But I won’t palaver with you. I’m telling you you’re safe under this roof. Out from under it you take your chance. I’ll give you an hour’s clear start in the morning, and then, by thunder, look out for me! Now jump into that back room quick, the both of you. Jump in, I say, for fear I forget I’ve broken bread under my own roof with you!”

The intensity of Sark’s passion heaved and tore at his mighty chest and vibrated in his smashing voice.

They did not want him to forget. They had the temporary saving grace of the night hours. Much might perhaps be accomplished in those hours, and with that idea in their degenerate minds Cantine and the woman slunk into the logged-in annex and shut the door.

As if he were already slamming lead into Cantine’s body, Sark slammed stick after stick into the stove.

Then, although it was still early in the evening, he blew out the candle and threw himself upon his bunk, lying on hip and elbow, resting his head on his hand and staring like a graven image at the flame-dance on the darkened walls of the cabin.

Blera, peering through a chink in the back-room door, watched him thus hour by hour. It was a strange and weary vigil, but on after midnight his head slipped down from his hand.

“Jose,” she breathed, “he’s asleep. Now’s our chance. But we have to have the rifle to make our get-away good. Then you can stand him off. I’ll take the gun. I’m lighter than you, and the slab floor’s awful creaky.”

Cautiously she slipped out of the back room and as cautiously, inch by inch, edged across the main room toward Sark’s bunk.

Her figure as she crept was now lost in shadow, now etched out faintly by the leaping flamelight. She moved apparently without stepping, with the peculiar gliding grace that is the inheritance of North-born people.

The irregularities of the slab floor seemed to lose stability, to become fluid and flow under her feet like waves in a rapid. Not once did her moccasincd toes strike knot or scam. Not once did the limber slabs shriek as they bowed and sprung. Not once did the sleeping huskies stir from their dreams by the stove. She reached the bunk, and her mobile fingers closed on the weapon.

Sark faced outward as he slept.

The rifle lay on the blankets between his back and the wall, free of his touch except where his shoe-packed foot curled over the heel of the stock.

Blera had the rifle by the barrel, and slowly, with a motion so gentle as to be scarcely perceptible, she began to twist loose the butt.

She had nearly succeeded when she saw the twitching of muscles round Sark’s closed eyes.

Swiftly she released the weapon and with a lithe swing of her body stretched herself along the outer edge of the bunk. Her arms were about Sark’s neck, and her voice was whispering in his ear when he half awoke.

“Eric,” she whispered hurriedly, hysterically, “I’ve come back—stolen out of there while he slept. We got to go away—together. He was never—”

But Sark awakened fully.

“You cursed vampire!” he gritted. “Get off. Get away from me. I don’t want the touch of your hands. Aren’t you seeing you’re poison and pollution to me?”

He half arose on one knee, roughly thrusting her from the bunk, and even as he repulsed her, the touch of her arms brought the thrill of another day, a day when his hours had been full of dream and desire, of marvel and of miracle, when Blera had been a splendor and a vision to him and lain in honor by his side.

For a reeling moment he saw not this woman who was poison and pollution to him. His eyes were fixed, seer-like, upon the panels of those vanished days, upon the words and smiles and deeds and delights of another woman tapestried in golden story upon the snow-white curtain of the North, days before he had come into the companionship of Tom Bassett and discovered the love that passeth the love of woman.

And that short moment of Sark’s unwariness was his undoing and Blera’s opportunity. Right before his unseeing eyes her swift hands grasped the rifle, and like another Delilah, turned Philistine against her Samson, she crashed the butt across his temple.

Sark’s face turned blank. He quivered a little, poised on one knee, and collapsed in the bunk.

“Jose, quick!”

But she did not need to cry. Cantine had seen from the chink in the back-room door and run as she struck.

“Blera, you didn’t—”

“No, no! Only stunned! And he’s stirring already. Be sharp! Get the dog-harness. Down, you brutes!”

The awakened dogs had sprung up snarling, but Blera had a formidable weapon in the rifle, and she bludgeoned them on the heads with the butt. Jose, too, sprang for the long-lashed dog-whip, coiled on pegs on the wall, and flayed them into subjection. “Now the harness, quick, Jose!”

* * * * *

Still using the butt of his whip to keep the victory already gained, Cantine threw the harness on the ugly beasts and haled them out into the piercing cold. Blera tossed down the sled up-ended by the door. Rapidly they traced in the huskies, whining resentfully at being lashed and dragged from the warmth of the cabin out into a temperature of fifty-five below, and cast themselves on the sled.

“Mush!” roared Cantine, bringing down the whip.

Under the dreaded lash the shivering team dashed down the bank and headed up the ice of the Klokhok. The steel-shod sled-runners shrieked a shrill tune. The ice boomed to their flying passage.

High in the heavens overhead flashed the brilliant stars and the mid-Winter aurora. There was in the hearts of Blera and Jose no remorse, no regret, not even pity. There was only devilish recklessness and the sheer exultation of escape. Continually they urged on the dogs to greater speed, lashing them till Skookum the leader flung up his nose as he galloped and howled a protest.

And challenging Skookum’s howl, from around the abrupt bend they were taking at express-train speed broke the tumultuous cry of many wolf-dogs on the arctic night.

As if suddenly revealed by a lightning flash Jose and Blera glimpsed them right ahead, the murderous hunt-pack from Tutchi’s Village sweeping the river-ice one hundred strong with one lone cross-fox straining from their jaws. An instant they glimpsed them, then in the belly of the bend, fox, team, sled and hunt-pack collided in a heap.

Cantine had loosened his grip on the sled to grasp the rifle in defense, and the smashing impact catapulted him clear into the heart of the horde.

One moment Blera watched him sink in a sea of bristling fur and slavering fangs before she beheld the same sea surging upon her, the sea which was the concrete force of the inimical wild, strong, sure, more ruthless even than the persecuting Bassett or the avenging hand of Eric Sark.

* * * * *

Two weeks later, Tom Bassett, returning from Dawson City up the Nordenskold River and swinging through the night down the Klokhok River to his partner’s cabin on the Nordenskold Trail, drove over a rattling heap of debris at the first bend above the Klokhok’s mouth. Curiously he swerved his sled back to investigate, and one brief look before he whipped on showed the remnants of a broken sled mingled with gnawed husky and human bones glistening white under a rising moon.