CHAPTER XXXIII

INTO THE LONE LAND

Into Northern Lights the pursuers drove after a four-day traverse.  Manders, of the Mounted, welcomed them with the best he had.  No news had come to him from the outside for more than two months, and after his visitors were fed and warmed, they lounged in front of a roaring log fire while he flung questions at them of what the world and its neighbor were doing.

Manders was a dark-bearded man, big for the North-West Police.  He had two hobbies.  One was trouble in the Balkans, which he was always prophesying.  The other was a passion for Sophocles, which he read in the original from a pocket edition.  Start him on the chariot race in “Elektra” and he would spout it while he paced the cabin and gestured with flashing eyes.  For he was a Rugby and an Oxford man, though born with the wanderlust in his heart.  Some day he would fall heir to a great estate in England, an old baronetcy which carried with it manors and deer parks and shaven lawns that had taken a hundred years to grow.  Meanwhile he lived on pemmican and sour bannocks.  Sometimes he grumbled, but his grumbling was a fraud.  He was here of choice, because he was a wild ass of the desert and his ears heard only the call of adventure.  Of such was the North-West Mounted.

Presently, when the stream of his curiosity as to the outside began to dry, Beresford put a few questions of his own.  Manders could give him no information.  He was in touch with the trappers for a radius of a hundred miles of which Northern Lights was the center, but no word had come to him of a lone traveler with a dog-train passing north.

“Probably striking west of here,” the big black Englishman suggested.

Beresford’s face twisted to a wry, humorous grimace.  East, west, or north, they would have to find the fellow and bring him back.

The man-hunters spent a day at Northern Lights to rest the dogs and restock their supplies.  They overhauled their dunnage carefully, mended the broken moose-skin harness, and looked after one of the animals that had gone a little lame from a sore pad.  From a French half-breed they bought additional equipment much needed for the trail.  He was a gay, good-looking youth in new fringed leather hunting-shirt, blue Saskatchewan cap trimmed with ribbons, and cross belt of scarlet cloth.  His stock in trade was dog-shoes, made of caribou-skin by his wife, and while in process of tanning soaked in some kind of liquid that would prevent the canines from eating them off their feet.

The temperature was thirty-five below zero when they left the post and there were sun dogs in the sky.  Manders had suggested that they had better wait a day or two, but the man-hunters were anxious to be on the trail.  They had a dangerous, unpleasant job on hand.  Both of them wanted it over with as soon as possible.