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Show o Vanuned Men $1 li Zi By GECRCE MARSH Ca Li U INSTALLMENT NINE THE STORY SO FAR: Bound for the Chibougamau gold country, six men lost their Uvet on the Nottaway river. Red Malone, Garrett Flnlay, brother of one of the ill, ana Blaise, half-breed guide, arrive at Nottaway posing ar surveyors. - "She waa so natural" Finlay groaned, inwardly, "so terrible real! And her story seemed so straight But that was just the bait to catch the mouse! Poor Red and Blaise! What have I done to them?" With a shiver he brushed her from his thoughts. Shame and chagrin vanished. With his .45 covering the direction of the last sound it was another man who lay there, a cold fighting man who waited like a cornered cor-nered wolverine for a movement in the scrub. I Evidently, from the fact that they 1 had not shot him on the beach, their r intention was to take him alive, i Brush snapped behind him. His Ieyes flashed back but saw nothing. They had him surrounded but could not reach him without drawing his fire so were playing safe. For minutes min-utes he lay rigid, listening. Presently his roving eyes caught the green plumes of a young spruce shivering as if touched by wind. But there was no wind. The spruce top moved into the notched rear sight of the .45. Again the spruce quivered and Finlay glimpsed a pair of glittering eyes in a swart face. Like glass splintered by a hammer, the "b-rang!" of the .45 crashed on the silence of the bush. There was no face behind the spruce. "One gone!" Finlay muttered, inching swiftly around to cover his Finlay receives an anonymous letter suggesting that the six men were not drowned as reported. Suspicion prevails that Isadore, rich fur man, has made a gold strike and aims to keep prospectors out of the country at any cost. The three "How you like fly, surveyor?" taunted Tete-Blanche. "Mosquif he start to make hees music, soon, and you swell up like poison dog." There was laughter from the three breeds. Finlay's face, neck and arms were stippled with blood. On his head was a lump left by the clubbed gun. His eyes were almost closed. "You win!" Finlay groaned. "You win, now, but tell Isadore that a police po-lice plane is due here from Ottawa in September. Mounted Police! Ever hear of them? You win, now, but you'll hang before the snow flies! Think that over!" The four breeds exchanged startled star-tled looks. Then Tete-Blanche stood over the man lashed to the spruce. The feral eyes in his grotesque face with its broken nose glittered. Finlay Fin-lay had seen such eyes in a trapped wolf. "T'ree good men you shoot!" he snarled. "Now you pay for dem!" A wave of exultation beat through the man who was about to die. He had made them pay. Death held little terror. He had looked it full In the eyes before. But in the slow hours of unspeakable torture that awaited him he faced an end of which he had never dreamed. An icy sweat burst from his body. But what lay in his heart these men should never see. He squinted through the slits which were now his men start out on the Nottaway, and visit Isadore In his magnificent home where they meet Lise, his pretty stepdaughter. step-daughter. In response to her desperate plea for aid, Finlay meets her secreUy. After she left, gunmen attack him. Under the lash of his remorse Finlay Fin-lay grew numb to the stings that were fast poisoning his blood. Then a sound back in the bush silenced him. Shortly he called: "Come and finish it, you bush rats!" They had returned. If he could only taunt them to cutting it all short with a bullet. "Isadore's handsome, white-haired boy comes back!" he jeered. "And the cross-eyed M'sieu' Batoche who was bitten in the face by a rabbit!" But his answer from the scrub was a mad yelp and the snapping of brush as a dog burst from the bushes, stopped, gazed in doubt at the huddled figure, approached and sniffed at the man who spoke to him, then in a delirium of whines and caresses threw himself on the master mas-ter he loved. "Flame! God bless your old bones! You followed their trail from the shore! Boy, I'm glad to see your whiskered map again!" Frantic with joy the dog nuzzled Garry's tortured face and neck. Hope flowed through Finlay as water wa-ter through a burst dam. With Flame there was a chance. Flame would never leave him. If he could only get the airedale to chew through the thongs that bound his wrists! "Where's Red, Flame? Red and Blaise? They turned you loose to hunt for me but where " A distant shot stopped him. He listened while the dog s soothing tongue licked the blood on his face and head. "That's Red, signalling, or else there's a fight on." Like a madman Finlay battled with his thongs. They gave slightly and the blood began to ease into his numb hands. Then the long hours that Sergeant Finlay had spent on the education of an airedale puppy began be-gan to bear fruit. Fearing that, some day, he might be stolen and tied up, Finlay had taught the dog to chew through any rope, leather leash or raw-hide that held him prisoner. pris-oner. After much coaxing Garry managed man-aged to focus the dog's attention on his bound wrists. Shortly Flame was licking the thongs as well as Finlay's hands. "Eat it up! It's good good chow for dogs! Chew it! It tastes good. Flame!" the man endlessly coaxed while his dog licked the thongs and the swollen forearms. Then Flame hooked a long fang under a loop and tugged at it. "That's the dog! Eat it up. Flame!" urged the man battling desperately against time). Gradually the airedale seemed to comprehend. It was a game they were playing and he liked the taste of the fresh hide. At last the dog lay down behind the bound man and with his great grinders jammed against Finlay's wrists began to chew at the knots. "That's the dog! Chew it up!" Spurred by his master's approval and relishing the taste of the hide as he would a bone the airedale chewed through two key knots. A last heave and Finlay's numbed hands were free. In his joy, he shook like grass in the wind. Again life beckoned as a camp-fire to a man lost at night in the bush. He laughed, now, at the black cloud of his tormentors which once meant a slow death. He laughed at Tete-Blanche, at Isadore. He'd come back from the grave. "We've licked 'em. Flame!" he panted. "Bless your old hide, you've done it, boy!" Hugging the dog's wriggling body, Finlay crushed his face against the scarred skull. "I love every hair of your old carcass," he crooned. "I'll have my feet clear in a minute but you'll have to lead me to the shore. I'm stone blind." When his numbed legs could carry him. Flame led him by a thong over the back track to the shore. Headlong Head-long into the cool water plunged man rear. He was just in time. From behind the boll of a Jack-pine, eyes roved the undergrowth seeking his position. posi-tion. Finlay lined his sights. Then the full face and a shoulder edged Into view. "Flambeau!" Again the forest rocked with the thunder of the .45. There was a scream followed by a stillness so intense in-tense it hurt the ear-drums. Then the liquid notes of a chickadee broke the spell. "Two gone!" But the jaws of the trap were closing on the hunted man. His firing fir-ing nad marked his position. He must move. Quick! Flat on his chest he hunched to the sanctuary of another an-other spruce. From three sides came the snapping snap-ping of twigs as the hunters closed in on the hidden quarry. The eyes of the trapped man blazed with the fighting flame of a beast at bay. His nerves were ice as he knelt, watching in three directions for the rush that was coming. Suddenly there were yells and a thrashing in the brush. But the concealed con-cealed man would not be stampeded into showing himself. Then a ring of men simultaneously rushed a few yards, to fade, flattened to the earth. But one never moved again. A slug from the .45 had drilled his forehead. "Three gone!" "They're close in, now!" muttered Finlay. "The next one will reach me!" Then five men flung themselves at him. He found the white head of Tete-Blanche and the .45 flamed. Again it roared. They reached him and he fired point-blank into a grimacing grim-acing face. The face burst into a bloody mask. With his heavy gun he bludgeoned a black head that dove at him. Free, he stumbled back and swung at another. As he did there was a blinding flash of light in his eyes. He sagged to his knees, then to the earth. CHAPTER X At intervals, in Finlay's brain flickered a dim consciousness of his surroundings. Through blurred thoughts filtered the sound of voices, only to die away. For, time and again, the dull pounding in his head drove him back into the abyss. But gradually he groped his way through the mental twilight and was aware of his splitting head and of an indefinable in-definable torture. Sharp pains sliced through his upper arms and legs. He tried to move but his hands and feet were numb. Something held him like a vise. With difficulty Finlay peered through the cracks between his putTed eyelids. He was on the lip of a bog. lnshed to a trimmed spruce sapling. For a time he stared stu- pidly at the four men with rifles watching him. Then, into his dazed brain shot the memory of the fight on the shore. So they had clubbed him from behind? It seemed long ago very long ago. They had him lashed hand and foot with rawhide thongs, the victim vic-tim of clouds of black flies that hovered around him like smoke. What would they do? Shoot him or leave him to be stung to death by the flics and mosquitoes? Men had died tlint way in swamps. He heard again the crash of his .45, and his tortured lips twisted in a smile. It had been a fight while it lasted. He'd got three - perhaps four. They'd remember that! But the man he wanted, whom he'd promised Bob he'd got, stood there with a leer on his hideous face under its thatch of yellowish-white hnir. He'd missed Teto-B'.anche. Beside him wore Batoche Ba-toche and two others, one a bow-leg,;ea bow-leg,;ea dwarf with the darting eyes of a mink Tetn. What would they do? eyes at the venomous face of Tete-Blanche Tete-Blanche and said: "I wanted you, handsome, for myself! my-self! Now the rope'll get you. It's too bad to soil an honest rope!" Tete-Blanche thrust his leering face close to Finlay's. The pupils of his eyes dilated like those of a snake. "You get de kiss from fly and mosquif, now, not de woman!" he jeered. "Bonsoir, M'sieu' Feen-lee!" Feen-lee!" He made a mocking bow. "We see you in de mornin'! You swell j up good by den! Look like beeg fat ; man! Bo'-jo', M'sieu' Feenlee! I wish you sleep good!" The breed waved his hand across Finlay's face. On the little finger was a ring of hammered gold. "Bob's ring!" A storm of hate beat through the man trussed to the tree. He strained desperately against the thongs that held him but Tete-Blanche had done his work well. As they left, Batoche struck Finlay Fin-lay in the mouth. "Dat ees for Joe Flambeau!" Blood burst from Finlay's split lips as he flung back: "Sorry I missed you, you yellow dog!" Garry Finlay was alone with the horror of the coming night. He gazed through his fast closing eyes at the rose afterglow above him. "Last sunset! Last twilight, Garry!" he muttered. He filled his lungs with the spruce-sweet air and looked long at the black silhouettes of tree tops etched on the horizon. "Slow death from poisoning and shock! Slow death!" He was young and life was good. But it was over, now! He peered hungrily at the fading flush in the sky. "Last evening. Garry!" He thought of the loyal Red and Blaise anxiously hunting the shore; of his family and of the grave on the Waswanipi. "Two of us, now. Bob!" he groaned. "He's got your ring! I saw it! Two instead of one. Bob, and I promised to get Tete-Blanche for you! " Again and again he wrenched at the thongs on his wrists until his lacerated skin rind the throb of his head stopped him "Sergeant Garrett Gar-rett Finlay, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, lost on duty! Lost neglecting his duly! I begged for the detail and 1 got it And this is what I've done it walked into a tr: p with my , cs Tpen! Fwgoi duty and a cu;ii' tti.-rd for a lying client of a girl ! it ii . B:a ;e! " he pleaded. "For.w r,.v for what ''ve done to you! " and dog, maddened by the lancelike lance-like thrusts which had stippled their bodies with wells. "Oh, this is good, Flame!" Laving Lav-ing his burning arms and face, Finlay Fin-lay wallowed with grunts of relief in the comforting water. "I'm puffed up like a poisoned pig, Flamey, old socks! But we've whip-sawed this Tete-Blanche, you and I. We'll meet again some day and when we do ! there'll be lead in the air." He laughed bitterly. A distant shot cut him short. ! "Hear that? Must be Red and Blaise hunting for us! Answer 'em, Flame! I've lost my gun. It's Red! Tell i 'em we're here!" j The airedale's brittle bark floated j through the murk settling on the j lake. Then Red hailed. Finlay answered and shortly the Peterboro slid up to . the man lying in the shallow water ! of the shore. j "What's happened to you, Garry?' cried the alarmed Red, leaping from the canoe and bending over the man soaking in the water. "What are you lying there for. Garry? You hurl?" "Hello. Red! You there, Blaise? I I'm all r:ghl, but I've been eaten alive by bugs. I'r blmd as a dead i?h and I've eM a I j n : p on my head like an euLj. I hate to leave this ; w a ; e r even to shake h a r, d s wi th i ycu." (to nr. rtw rtMED |