SNOW-BLIND

CHAPTER I“ARE YOU THERE?”

“This,” said the bland voice on the air, “is Station WBZ, Springfield, Massachusetts, broadcasting greetings from the home folks to the far-advanced outposts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I have a letter for Sergeant Buck Tearl at Port-o’-Prayer in North Saskatchewan. Good evening, Sergeant. Are you there?”

And then the message went into space on the waves of the ether. Like a ripple on a pond, widening to the shores, the voice ranged all directions to reach an audience half a world away. It was heard, no doubt, by many lonesome chaps with ear-phones clamped to their heads: trappers in snow-buried shacks, scattered over a hundred thousand miles of forest and mountain and blizzard-scourged tundra; factors and bush-rovers at the remotest fur-factories; whalers in stout ships, nipped in the polar drift; frost-bitten policemen in barrack and camp, stationed here and there in the great midnight around the curve of the arctic circle, the uttermost videttes of the northern law.

“It is a queer message,” pursued the radio announcer in his pleasantly modulated speech. “Maybe the man for whom it is meant hears me and will understand. Here it is:

“Sergeant Buck Tearl, R.C.M.P., Port-o’-Prayer.” There was a momentary pause and the voice cleared itself of a faint husk—a strangely personal and familiar sound that for a moment seemed to bring the speaker out of distance and invisibility into the very presence of the listener.

The man at the microphone went on with the letter.

“The dead do not always die,” he read. “If you can find Kablunak’s band of A-hi-ag-muit Esquimaux, who winter, they say, on Queen Maud Sea, make them tell you the truth.”

“I don’t know whether I pronounce the Esquimaux names correctly,” ended the announcer, “but anyhow, that’s the letter, and it’s signed—Diane.”

Of course the broadcaster could not know whether Sergeant Tearl had a radio receiver or was tuned-in that night on the wavelength of WBZ. Nor could he have guessed that there was another man named Tearl, who happened to be listening-in at this very moment, and in whose quiet New York apartment that cryptic message arrived like an exploding grenade to rearrange violently the whole of his future life.

Kitchener Tearl found WBZ by accident when in an idle moment he had given the radio dial a careless spin. This much was fate or coincidence, or whatever mischievous force it is that is constantly unsettling people’s nicely settled affairs. But all that happened afterwards followed as naturally and inevitably as blood follows the knife or youth after its own reckless bent or birds take the course of the southerning sun.

The greater part of the broadcasted messages in themselves were not of much interest to an eavesdropper.

“Mother sends love.” “Father’s rheumatism is better.” “Bella wonders if you remember her.” “Did you get the socks we sent last July?” “Baby Nellie, born August second, is waiting for her first glimpse of Uncle Jack.” Small, homely, intimate matters such as these were discussed in the hearing of the rest of the world and flung off into the night to end up under the crackle of the northern lights.

The messages would not have made Kitchener Tearl forget an engagement he had made for that evening; it was the visioning of the men who were receiving them. His imagination soared off to far, strange places which he had never seen, nor ever expected to see, but which were names that had been thrillingly real to him since his earliest days of boyhood.

The whirr of the elevator outside the foyer of his apartment, the rumble of traffic coming up from the pavements of Park Avenue, were lost in the sorcery of his straying thoughts in other, greater sounds: The grumble of ice-floes, the slash of sleet on cabin walls, the rabid cry of the wolf pack, the wind in the pines.

His lean, hard-kept body was sprawled motionless in his chair as he listened and stared into immeasurable distances with one keen eyebrow quizzically upcocked, seeing not the bright window-squares in the apartment building across the way, but big timber and ice barrens and mountains stacked behind mountains and the auroral glimmer on the Arctic sky.

The fascination of the northland for Kitchener Tearl was a part of the tradition of his blood and kind. One of his grandfathers long ago had been a factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he died with his moccasins on in the frozen forests of Keewatin.

William Tearl, Kitchener’s father, had followed the trails that had been broken ahead of him by Factor Jacob Tearl. He was an inspector in the old Royal Northwest Mounted Police.

The story of Inspector Bill Tearl was left a grim, unwritten chapter in the territorial records. Somewhere in the Ottawa files, after his name and service reports, was set down in fading red ink the word—“missing.” One night, more than twelve years ago, Bill Tearl had walked out from a sub-post somewhere in the then-uncharted Vermilion River country, and was never seen nor heard of again.

Tearl’s Yankee-born wife happened to be visiting in New York at the time of the inspector’s disappearance. With her were her three children, Gerald, who was sixteen years old, Kitchener, twelve, and Jane, an elfish, jewel-eyed girl of nine.

An inheritance of money from her own side of the family had enabled Mrs. Tearl to provide for the three fatherless youngsters, to send them one after another to college, and to plan for a life of future comfort. And then, the year Jerry graduated from the university, where he won renown as one of the most ferocious half-backs who ever tore cleat-marks in the Yale bowl, his charming mother was taken ill and suddenly died, and Jerry became the head of the Tearls.

The two grown-up brothers and the growing sister went on living together, a bit quarrelsomely, but with a fierce and undying loyalty. Jerry gave promise of becoming as great a man in the business world as he had been on the college gridirons. But tragedy once more stepped in to decimate the family ranks.

The ex-line-plunger was notoriously quick-tempered. Nobody had ever found out what it was all about, but he got into a fearful argument with a man on a Broadway street corner, and had three-quarters killed that man with his bare hands. A warrant of atrocious assault was issued by the nearest magistrate, but Jerry left town a couple of jumps ahead of the police. Kitchener and Jane never heard another word from him. Like his father before him, he had abruptly quitted his place in the world to be engulfed in the mystery of the passing years.

This had happened a long while ago. Kitchener was now twenty-four, the elder of the remaining Tearls. In all this time he might have lost the image of his prodigious brother in casual forgetfulness. But in his case the hero-worship that had grown in the heart of boyhood still lingered with all the sweetness of the earliest memories. The hearing of the name Tearl choked him with a surging of emotion such as he would have felt if his brother’s sinewy hand had been laid suddenly upon his shoulder.

When Kitchener’s sister came home at one o’clock that morning from some sort of a party she had been attending somewhere or other, she found the floor of the living room carpeted with her father’s old police maps, while her brother crawled over them on his hands and knees, a strange look in his dark, eager eyes.

“What the deuce, Kit?” she demanded from the doorway.

“I think I know where Jerry is,” he said.

Jane dropped the wrap from her fine arms and shoulders and came into the room. “What?” she ejaculated.

Kitchener stood up and showed her the message he had taken down on paper.

“Diane!” read Jane, womanlike, noticing first of all the woman in the case. “Who’s Diane?”

“She sent the message over the radio. I’ve never heard of her before.”

Jane wrinkled her short nose as she perused her brother’s hasty scrawl. “Who’s Buck Tearl?”

“Sounds like Jerry to me,” declared Kitchener.

“Why?” Jane had grown calm and skeptical. “Why would it be Jerry, when it’s Buck?”

“There are not many Tearls in the world,” Kitchener reminded her. “It isn’t like Smith or Einstein or O’Toole or Jones. As far as the nickname goes, a man like Jerry would be apt to pick one up wherever he went. And it just naturally ought to be ‘Buck.’

“Funny I never thought of it before,” he mused. “Knowing Jerry as I did, I can’t understand now why I never guessed it. He went back where he belonged, of course—the north and the Mounties.” Kitchener faced his sister in tense excitement, “It’s Jerry, you can bet on it. He joined up, and naturally by now he’d be a sergeant at least.”

Jane laughed, and then stopped and sighed. “We’re an odd outfit,” she said, “each of us wasting our affections on the one up ahead. Dad thought grandfather was a stupendous man, and Jerry worshiped Dad, and you adore Jerry, and here am I, the last, with nothing to do but to be simply foolish about you.”

He squeezed her graceful shoulders, and then turned away. “Don’t be an ass,” he said.

“Can I help it?” she grinned.

“Listen here!” he said soberly. “Did you get the possible meaning of that message?”

“About so-and-so’s Esquimaux?”

“No,” he returned, “the other part,” and repeated the line: “‘The dead do not always die.’ Does that by any chance make you think of Dad?”

She looked startled for an instant, and then closed her firm mouth and shook her head. “No. Why should it? You’d be crazy to get any such ideas. Dad went—mother used to say—écarté—lost, frozen in the drifts, and was never found. Or perhaps he was ambushed by some outlaw he was after. Whatever happened, it was the end.”

“Are you so sure it was the end?”

“As sure as I can ever be in this life.”

“I’m not.” Kitchener gathered up the tattered police maps, refolded them gingerly, and restored them to the keeping of the old mahogany highboy. “You don’t know everything,” he remarked over his shoulder. “For instance, you never heard of the Tearl annuity.”

“The which?” she asked.

“The year Dad was lost,” Kitchener informed her, “an express money order for five thousand dollars was delivered at our address here in town. The envelope that contained it was mailed in San Francisco, postmarked January first. There was no writing—no mark to identify the sender.”

The girl stared with a quick contraction of her jade-tinged eyes. “You mean—?” she began, and then left the rest unasked.

“I don’t know,” answered her brother. “I only know that another five thousand came the next January and the next, and so on, every year, as regularly as the months rolled around. One draft was sent from Portland, another from Sitka, one from St. Johns, Newfoundland, two from Quebec, one from Kamchatka, Siberia.”

“You’ve tried to trace the sender?”

“Mother first, then Jerry. Lately I’ve been trying. No use! If our unknown friend were a skulking criminal he could have taken no greater pains to keep his tracks covered.”

“You think it could have been—” The girl’s speech checked for an instant on a failing breath, and then she ended in a whispered word, “Dad?”

“Who knows? If he were alive and could send money he could have written to us. You were old enough to remember what he was like. It wouldn’t have been like him to duck his family. No matter what had happened to him, he surely would have sent us word. And yet—”

Kitchener took a turn the length of the room, and then came back to stand head-high above his sister. When he was in deadly earnest over something his left eyebrow had an unaccountable habit of cocking itself at the jauntiest angle, as though he had thought up something funny to say. Jerry used to tell him he looked at such moments like a wily, black-headed crow getting ready to guffaw over his sins.

Jane knew that expression of old, and she knew that whatever notion was sticking in his head, all the world could not shake it out. “Hello, Cocky-bird!” she exclaimed. “What’s up now?”

“I’m going to find Jerry,” he said.

No Tearl was ever much astonished by anything another Tearl ever decided to do. She faced him anxiously, but without the least show of surprise. “When?” was all she said.

“As soon as I can pull out.”

“But you’re by no means certain that Sergeant Buck Tearl is Jerry.”

“Yes, I am. And if by any chance he didn’t receive to-night’s message, I want to see that he gets it. And I want to see Jerry.”

“You know what it means, of course. The rail head doesn’t go near Port-o’-Prayer. The rivers will be frozen up there. No canoes. You haven’t been in the forests since you were twelve. You’ll have to walk, my boy!” Her smile did not quite hide the dismay that had suddenly drenched her eyes. “You’ll never make it.”

“That money,” he pursued, without looking at his sister. “We never spent any of it because we didn’t know whether it was ours to spend. Mother put it in the bank. She called it the mystery fund. She deposited five thousand every January—then Jerry—then I. I only learned about it a short while before Jerry left. Didn’t think it was anything to bother you with. But I’m telling you now. There’s sixty thousand dollars all told, plus the interest. I’ll turn the book over to you. Whatever you do about it is your own business.”

“It’s all settled, then? You’re going?”

“I don’t see any way out of it,” said Kitchener.

Jane’s hands reached up to smooth her brother’s raven-black hair. Then she stood a-tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “If you think not,” she said, “there’s no way out of it.”

CHAPTER IIAFTER MANY YEARS

When Kitchener Tearl left New York the city was basking in a spell of sultry, Indian Summer weather that had lingered into late October. As his Pullman traveled up the length of the Hudson Valley he saw robins in the orchards and flocks of belated blackbirds hovering about the meadows and fields. The hills and mountains still loomed green against the line of a soft and sunny sky.

Farther north he found notable changes in the climate and the scenery. On the other side of the border the air tingled with a frosty crispness, and the fringes of the forest were blazoned with the colors of the dying season. The people of Ottawa were wearing overcoats and keeping their hands in their pockets. On the way across Ontario the harvested acres reached sere and bleak to the chilly horizon. At Winnipeg the edges of the forked rivers were rimed in the morning with a first film of ice. Traveling from Saskatchewan into Alberta he saw long chains of wild geese, swans, and ducks in clouds, fleeing ahead of winter. Near Edmonton he caught sight of a man walking alongside a pond with a string of muskrat traps slung from his shoulder. The train going north on the branch line ran through snow flurries that increased in frequency and severity all the way to Fort McMurray.

Here he threw away his timetable and opened up his maps. From this point on his life would be regulated, not by the hours of a clock, but by the changing seasons.

He dug out of his baggage a pair of scarlet “four-point” Hudson’s Bay blankets—heirlooms that had been in his family for more than half a century—and he went to bed warmly in the unheated inn and dreamed gratefully of Grandfather Jake Tearl who for twenty years had defied the cold of Keewatin in these same red, imperishable blankets.

The trip down the river afforded him three weeks of complete idleness. The boat ran aground on all the charted shallows, and the crew of Indian stevedores would lighten ship by lightening the cargo: afloat once more, they would re-load and go hopefully northward for a few more miles, until they stuck on another bar. Kitchener had traveled up this same river on this same scraped-bottom steamer with his mother and his brother and his little sister Jane, when they undertook their fateful journey to the city, twelve years ago. He spent the short, gray days on deck, facing sleet and swirling snow, trying to pick out old landmarks as he watched the endless marching of the great spruce forest along the white streaked hills.

They cracked ice the last hundred miles, before they reached the long, black lake that is the geographical key to all the wild watercourses to the north and the west and the east. The captain of the boat hoped to go on down Mackenzie River, but his solitary passenger never learned how far he got. Kitchener had his baggage dumped on the shore near a Chippewyan encampment, and although sheet ice enclosed a part of the lake, he hired two Indians with a canoe, and crossed in a headwind and a heavy sea to his destination at the farthest lonesome harbor. So his sister Jane’s dismal prediction came to nothing. He reached Port-o’-Prayer and had not walked a step of the way.

Kitchener left his belongings on the beach and strolled up the hill towards the group of white-painted buildings that huddled at the edge of the vast forest. There was a sort of inn near the landing, a story and a half log building, with battened doors and windows and an unsmoking chimney. Nobody lived there at this season. Farther on were the company’s store houses and the residency of the store-keeper. The buildings were shuttered and silent, not even a dog was visible in the snowy compound.

In the spring and early summer, when the trappers had come in from the forests, Port-o’-Prayer looked like a populous village. Now the store-keeper was the sole remaining inhabitant. He had sent out his furs long since and had hibernated for the winter.

Kitchener routed the man out of his quarters and found him to be an untalkative, sad-featured Scotsman. He was so lacking in curiosity that he did not even show wonderment at the sight of a tenderfoot who had journeyed into the back-country while winter was beginning to close up all the routes of retreat.

He answered the newcomer’s questions with an air of pained but patient politeness. Yes—a Sergeant Buck Tearl had stopped here at the post. But he went away again, after a couple of days. This was nearly a month ago.

Where had he gone? North somewhere, into the Vermilion River country. There was a police look-out station there at Saut Sauvage, on the ground that vaguely divided the Esquimaux from the forest tribes of the Cree and Yellow Knives. The sergeant was making an Arctic patrol, presumably on the trail of evil-doers.

What was he like, this Sergeant Tearl? He was a big man, who spoke softly, and yet had a hard and dangerous-looking mouth. While he was at Port-o’-Prayer he had kept on his lynxskin capote and the store-keeper had seen only his mouth and nose and his disconcerting eyes.

Even this meager description set Kitchener’s pulses tingling. Having come this far he had no thought except to go on, as far as Saut Sauvage, if need be. This man surely was his brother Jerry.

Had Sergeant Tearl picked up a radio message sent to him on the twenty-fifth of last month? The store-keeper didn’t know. He himself had no interest in hearing things out of the air. The company had given him a receiver last year, but it was too much trouble to buy new batteries for it. If he wanted to hear voices and songs he could go sit in the Chippewyan camp up the river.