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Show I KESMSMECTIOM RIVEK" cwuHan.BMow By William Byron Mowery WNU Service. 1 1 CHAPTER XI Continued 12 Craig sat on the bunk edge, leaning lean-ing over her, one arm under her ihoulder, his other hand smoothing her iilky hair. In quiet tonei he jwas telling her of a huge project which had slowly taken shape j within him since New Year's; and by the feeble light of the candle i Patricia saw his eyes narrow and j bis lean Jaw harden as he sketched his daring ambition. Listening In dreamy comfort, she 'caught the general outlines of the Startling and ambitious project that Craig was sketching. He Intended, he said, to weld those 300 Resurrection Resur-rection men together Into a syndicate, syndi-cate, a rich and powerful company of prospectors. This Vanguard money would hold them till next lummer; and by that time he could raise additional money on a radium deposit which he knew about With that capital he could bring In machinery ma-chinery and start active mining on several of the richest silver lodes. Once he had the power of this Dynamite Bay syndicate behind him, he could then launch his real project, his big program. All along the far-flung Canadian mining frontier fron-tier and all through the vast subarctic sub-arctic territories there were hundreds hun-dreds and thousands of prospectors like Sam, like Bill Fornler hardworking, hard-working, penniless, good - hearted .nen. They were loping the bush, starving, freezing, fighting the wilderness. wil-derness. They did the pioneering, made the mineral discoveries, cleared the way. They had opened up the Flin-Flon, Cobalt and other rich fields. And then had lost them. Poor and helpless men, they had been preyed upon by wildcat promoters pro-moters and unscrupulous companies who bought them out for a song. As Warren was trying to buy out these Dynamite Bay prospectors for a trip to Edmonton and a few miserable mis-erable dollars. "This scheme of mine, partner, or some plan along its general lines," Craig said, "would stop all that injustice. This Dynamite Bay syndicate would be a refuge to all those men. We could advance them capital oa their worth-while claims, and they wouldn't have to take a beggar's dhoice." A chill had crept into the cabin, and the cherry-red glow had faded from the sides of the little sheet-Iron sheet-Iron stove. Whistling through the pines outside, the blizzard was spinning spin-ning the surface snow Into sheets and sending them dancing down the wind like wraiths. Craig stood up, beside the bunk. "I'll stir a bit more fire, sweet." As he turned toward the stove his eyes caught a slight blurry movement move-ment at the small window to the right of the door. Only one pane of the four was of glass; over the others oth-ers Higginson had tacked squares of caribou skin. As Craig glanced at the little glass pane, he saw a human face pressed against it the leathery-dark countenance of a man who was staring into the cabin at Patricia and him. The face was gone in an instant, gone before he could recognize the person; and the pane was empty again. A jolt went through Craig like an electric shock. He did not need to recognize the man. In a flash he knew the Chiwaughimis! They were out there, those six Manito-bans, Manito-bans, in the wind-torn dark. A moment after the face vanished, van-ished, he saw a gleam of rifle steel beyond the glass pane. It was a slow gleam the glint of a rifle being be-ing leveled and aimed at him. His hand shot out and smashed down on the candle, plunging the cabin into darkness. Patricia sat up hastily, on the bunk. "Craig! Why'd you do that?" He stepped across to the door, groped for the wooden bar, found it and slipped it into place so that the Chiwaughimis could not rush him. Something cold was clutching his heart. Lupe had him at last, trapped in a lonely cabin, miles from any human help, one rifle against six. He thought of that hole in the river ice, and shuddered. A quick and effectual way to dispose of an enemy's ene-my's body. "Get Patricia out of this!" that was Craig's one thought now. She must not be exposed to danger or get caught in the life-and-death fight closing in upon him. From the darkness Patricia demanded, de-manded, in startled tones: "Craig, why'd you smash that candle? And why'd you bar that door?" He hurried across to the bunk. It was impossible now to keep her from knowing the truth. "Treeshia, those Chiwaughimis are outside here. They've got us cornered. Rather, they've got me cornered " He broke off abruptly. At the door someone was cautiously trying tu get in. He heard the iron latch go up, heard the squeak of the boards as the person pressed against the door only to find it barred by the heavy beam inside. Patricia heard the noise, too. Craig felt her small hand quivering in his. In a frightened whisper she asked, "What're they trying to do, Craig?" She seemed to understand that some danger threatened, but she did not yet realize that those men out there in'ended to murder him. Craig tnld her the truth, so that she would understand and would get out of the cabin, to safety. "Treeshia, In plain words Lupe Is trying to kill me. He knows I'm your dad's enemy, knows I'm fighting fight-ing the company, but the worst Is that he considers me a personal menace to you. He's broken entirely entire-ly out of Warren's control. Fqr more than a month he's been trying to 'get' me. This Is his first clean chance." Again he was Interrupted, and again it was by a noise at the door. But this time the noise was a tremendous tre-mendous thupp! that jarred the whole cabin and nearly broke the door off Its hinges. Craig whirled to the foot of the bunk and grabbed up his rifle. He had to stop those metis; they were breaking down the door; they had got a log from Higginson's wood pile and were using it as a ram. One more shattering lunge like that first one, and they would be rushing in upon him. He leveled his rifle, aimed breast-high breast-high at the door, and shot three times through the middle boards. From the stormy darkness came the short inarticulate cry of a man hard hit. A silence fell. He heard nothing more of the metis outside. He clipped In three fresh cartridges. car-tridges. "I guess they'll let that door alone," he commented grimly to Patricia. "I hope it was Lupe that I winged; but that'd be too much luck." The silence lengthened three minutes, five, ten. It was an ominous omi-nous quiet. Craig's nerves were jumpy from the sinister quietness. "Patricia, you've got to get out of this placel They're planning something. I don't know what it'll be, but trust Lupe to make a good job of it. You might be killed. I'll palaver Lupe. I'll tell him you're coming out " "I won't go!" Patricia refused point-blank. "The minute I'd go out, they'd start shooting through fc&tS ft "What're They Trying to Do, Craig?" the window and door; they'd riddle this cabin and kill you. As long as I'm here they won't do that." "You've got a ticket to walk out of this, alive and safe, and you're going to take itl" he insisted. "That's that. Get your clothes on, fast. I'll talk to Lupe." He added, to stop her from sobbing so heartbrokenly: "I'll stand a good chance to escape. There's half a box of dynamite under that wall bench. I'll figure out a way to use the stuff. But, Treeshia, hurry! Every minute you waste cuts down my chance." He stepped up near the door. "Lupe!" he called. There was no answer from outside. out-side. He called again, louder; but got no reply. Over at the northwest corner of the cabin he heard a peculiar thudding thud-ding noise. It sounded as though someone had thrown an armful of chunks against the logs. The noise puzzled him, but just then he paid little attention to it Thinking that the Chiwaughimis might not have heard him, he called a third time, from the window flattening himself against the wall so that he could not be shot "Lupe! I'm sending Miss Patricia Patri-cia out. D'you hear? Lupe! Answer me, man!" The answer he got was a stony silence. As he stood there, he caught the smell of wood-smoke in the cabin. Just a first faint whiff. Fresh-burning wood. Birch and dry pine. "Craig" Patricia spoke from the darkness "they're outside the cabin, cab-in, here at this corner. They're throwing something against the logs. I can hear them." Craig hurried over, put his ear to the wall and listened intently. He heard muffled voices outside. Then the unmistakable crackle of fire. Through a chink near the floor the smoke was sifting in so strongly that it stung his eyes. "Where's that smoke coming from?" Patricia whispered. "It's getting stronger. I smelled it a couple of minutes ago." "They're trying to burn us out," Craig had to tell her. "All right we'll go out but the surprise will be on them!" He groped to the wall "bench; lifted three of the dynamite sticks from their sawdust packing; felt on the shelf above for the box of mercury caps and the small reel of No. 3 fuse. The mercury caps were old, corroded; cor-roded; but evidently they were still "live," for Ed Davis had got his hand mangled by one of them. Working swiftly, he pressed the caps solidly into the ends of the three sticks. Then he cut three fuses from the reel one six Inches long, one ten, one eighteen; and affixed af-fixed them to the caps. With the "earthquake sticks" in one hand and his knife in the other, he went to the window, and slashed out one of the squares of caribou skin so that he could throw through the opening. "Treeshia?" "Here," she whispered back. "Take my rifle it's lying on the table and go over beside the door, where I can grab you and we can get gone. We've got to time our get-away to the split-second. If we're too slow we'll be shot down, and if we're too fast we'll be blown to pieces." He knelt on the floor, struck a match, touched it to the six-inch fuse, waited till the tiny spluttering started; then held the match to the ten- and eighteen-inch lengths. When all three fuses were spitting out their little firecracker sparks, he stood up, drew back bis arm The stick with the six-inch fuse went flying through the window, through the opening he had slashed; and hit in a drift twenty feet from the door. The next, flung harder, landed farther down the path. The third, flung as hard as he could throw, went whirring halfway to the river bank. ' He sprang over to the door, lifted the heavy wood bar from its notch, and waited, one hand on Patricia's arm, the other clutching his rifle. He had only a few seconds to wait Came a jarring thunderclap b-o-o-m that stunned and deafened Patricia and him. The whole cabin rocked. The blast smashed out all the panes of the window, and sent the splintered casing flying across the room. It tore the door out of Craig's grasp, wrenched it off its hinges, crashed it against the table. Nearly smothered by the tremendous tremen-dous cloud cf snow and spume kicked up by the explosion, Craig groped through the doorway, clasping clasp-ing Patricia's arm, and stumbled blindly ahead. The spume was so thick that he gasped for breath. Debris was falling all round and upon them lumps of hard snow, pine twigs, tatters of birch paper. In the black welter he banged his head against a sapling, turned aside from it and ran into a rick of wood. Twenty steps ahead of them the second dynamite stick went off. The blast of air and smothering snow knocked them bodily off their feet. It was like getting hit by a flying snowbank. After a bewildered second sec-ond Craig got up, fumbled for his rifle, found it. Patricia managed to get to her knees, but the explosion explo-sion had dazed her and she clutched Craig's arm to keep from falling. Behind them the third dynamite stick exploded, uselessly, for they had no need of its protection. Near the bank of Resurrection, Craig halted, in a clump of squatty balsams. Glancing back, he saw flames leaping up the sides and over the roof of Higginson's cabin. "We'd better wait here a while," he said, "till things quiet down. Those fellows are scouring this whole drogue for us, and we might run into them. We're safe enough now. We'll angle away from Resurrection Res-urrection and make a big swing in to the Bay; and this storm'll blot our tracks shut." While he was whispering courage to Patricia, Craig made out five of the Chiwaughimis, up near Higginson's Higgin-son's fuel pile. By the light of the fiercely burning cabin he saw them, dimly; saw them clustered there in a little knot; saw one of them Lupe, it looked to him kneeling down beside some dark object on the snow. The storm and the whipping whip-ping balsam branches kept him from seeing them clearly or seeing what they were doing. "Craig, please," Patricia begged, "let's go away, let's leave this ghastly place, while they're up yonder." yon-der." "No, wait," Craig said. A suspicion sus-picion had struck him, as he peered uncertainly at that dark prone object; ob-ject; and he felt that he had to know the truth before leaving there. In a few minutes the five Chiwaughimis Chi-waughimis fetched two poles from the wood pile, and made a crude bier of them and a blanket, and lifted the dark object upon it. Then, with slow funereal tread, they came down the path toward the river bank; and Craig knew that their destination was that hole in the river ice the hole through which they had intended to shove him, that night, to oblivion. "C r a i g," Patricia whispered, gasping. "You you killed one of them." "Yes," Craig whispered back, as the little procession neared them. "I think it's young Battu. I must've hit and killed him when they wer trying to break down the door. I'm sorry. Young Battu came the nearest near-est of that pack to being human. I hate to think that he got killed in a fight that was all Lupe's doing." "Warren'll tag a murder charge onto you, now " "No! Don't worry about that Warren knows his law too well to try that The Chiwaughimis would have to explain what they were doing do-ing here at Higginson's place and why they burned this cabin; and they'd have a hard time concocting any story that wouldn't boomerang on them. Lupe will report officially, official-ly, that Battu got drowned or accidentally acci-dentally killed. They don't dare say anything else." The procession filed past them, five shadowy and silent figures, carrying car-rying the bier; and at the head of them went Lupe, holding a candle-lantern. candle-lantern. CHAPTER XII The Den was all in an uproar that Saturday evening, with eighty-odd prospectors staging a riotous celebration cele-bration over the Kessler hill discovery. dis-covery. The news about the gold lode had leaked out that afternoon and created cre-ated a furore; and at the supper hour, when Craig officially announced an-nounced that the claims were safely recorded at the Land Office, a first-class first-class pandemonium had broken loose. Whenever anybody came in at the entrance-way, the men would peer through the smoke haze to see whether the newcomer was Phil Kessler. Kessler was not there, and had not been there since mid-afternoon. mid-afternoon. They were waiting for him to show up, waiting like eighty cats at a mouse hole. He, the lucky one among them, was slated to get a prodigious reception when he did come. In their exuberant high spirits they Intended to ride him on a thin rail, toss him in a blanket, put him through the ice test and the blind man's hanging and then make him the guest of honor at the midnight meal which Patricia had planned. In the doorway of her office Patricia Pa-tricia stood watching the scene with Craig. Though this was the victory vic-tory for which she had fought and sacrificed since the poppies were blooming last fall, she felt anything any-thing but happy herself Six hours ago a mail plane had arrived from Resolution, bringing the injunction; and before the legal day was over Corporal Northup would have to serve the writ on Craig and her. She tried to believe that this gold lode would eventuaDy deliver them from the bondage of that injunction; injunc-tion; but the months ahead, until that time should come, stretched bleak and empty and unbearable. And she had written, just that day, to her mother p.nd Frances, trying to explain all that had happened to her on this fateful Arctic trip, and telling them that she was not to come home again or be one with them again. Across the big room Corporal Dennis Northup appeared at the entrance-way, looked around at the jubilant ju-bilant men, finally saw her and Craig, and started over toward them. "Steady, Treeshia," Craig comforted. com-forted. "Take this like a good little lit-tle soldier. Like you've taken all these other hard knocks. This is Warren's inning, but some day we'll have ours." "Hello," Northup greeted them, shamefaced and apologetic. "Come in, Dennis," Craig said evenly. Northup took a document from his pocket. "It's a pretty raw deal you two are getting. I hate like poison to serve this and enforce it, but my personal likes and dislikes don't matter." He unfolded the paper, glanced at Patricia and Craig; then began reading hurriedly: TO Craig Tarlton and to Patricia May Wellington and to your attorneys, solicitors, so-licitors, agents and servants, and each and every one of you. Greeting: Whereas, It hath been represented . . . on the part of Rosalie L. Tarlton, complainant com-plainant . . . that said complainant is the lawful wedded wife of said Craig Tarlton The office door drifted open and the jubilant noise came pouring into the tiny room. Craig rose and closed the door. . . and he did willfully and deliberately deliber-ately and without cause desert and abandon said complainant, his wife . . . and has refused to live with her or provide for her or receive her into his dwelling . . . and is not providing said complainant with moneys or goods or means of sustenance Patricia thought of the million and a half dollars which Craig had given Rosalie and which Rosalie had squandered in Europe. She glanced up at him, thinking to see him indignant; in-dignant; but he was listening calmly to the writ, unmoved by its skillfully skill-fully dressed-up lies and its glaring perversion of the human truth. (TO BE CONTINUED) |