For the Allinson Honor

Andrew had already done so, and it had daunted him. He remembered that they had been since sunrise reaching the top of the first ridge.

"Then what must be done?"

"My advice is to look for the second cache."

They turned back, following the crest until they found an easier but longer way down. Graham glanced at them sharply when they reached the camp, and guessed the truth, though Andrew tried to smile.

"Leave me behind," he urged.

"No," said Andrew firmly; "not while we have strength enough to haul the sled. There's no more to be said on that point. We're going on together to the gap in the long ridge."

"When do you mean to start?"

"Right now!" Carnally broke in. "Get the camp truck rolled up. We'll have mighty keen appetites before we make the cache."

In quarter of an hour they crossed the creek and toiled up a broken slope, and when they gained the top Andrew looked back at the island with a grim smile.

"Yesterday afternoon I came up that river at four miles an hour, looking forward to my supper like an epicure. Now I'm glad to see the last of the place."

"Quit talking!" said Carnally. "We can make a few minutes by a hustle down the pitch ahead."

They went down, stumbling and sliding, while Graham clung tightly to the lurching sled. Time was of vital importance to them now, for its flight could be measured by the exhaustion of their food supply. For the hour or two of daylight that remained Carnally drove his comrade hard, and it was with a strange savage hilarity that they rushed the sled down declivities and dragged it with many a crash and bump through thickets. Their course was roughly south and any deviation was intolerable. Night closed in, but it was far from dark and they held on until Andrew stumbled and fell. The sled struck him before he could get up, but a hard smile was on his lips when he rose shakily and looked about. There was an uncovered rock not far off with a few junipers growing beside it.

"This is far enough, Jake," he said. "You're bad to tire, but I don't suppose you feel equal to hauling another passenger."

They broke camp in the dark the next morning, and the forced marches they made during the next seven days wore the half-starved men terribly. Sometimes they had to contend with fresh snow, in which the sled runners sank; sometimes they plodded doggedly with lowered heads while a raging wind drove the stinging flakes into their pinched faces; and there were days of bitter frost when they could not keep warm. Still, they crept on across the rugged desolation, and one evening reached a belt of timber beneath a low range that stretched across their path. The ridge was broken by a gap a mile or two ahead, and it was there that Andrew had instructed Mappin to make the second cache. A crescent moon rose above the dark tree-tops as they lighted a fire. Andrew glanced at the hillside irresolutely.

"There's food up yonder, if we could get our hands on it, and I would enjoy a good supper, Heaven knows; but I don't feel equal to facing another disappointment," he said. "I'm afraid we'll have to wait until to-morrow."

"That's my feeling," Carnally agreed. "I've gone as far as I'm able, and that grub won't be found easily. You may as well gather some wood and fill the kettle."

When they had eaten the few morsels he allowed them they sat smoking beside the fire. The thin spruce boughs above them were laden with snow which now and then fell upon the brands; a malignant wind swept between the slender trunks and blew the smoke about the men. After a while the casual talk, which had cost them an effort to keep up, died away, and there was a long silence until Carnally spoke.

"I guess we're all thinking about those provisions. We'll look for them at sun-up. What I've been trying to do for several days is to put myself in Mappin's place."

"It must have been difficult," Andrew remarked. "If I thought you could do so, I'd disown you. But go on."

"Well," said Carnally, "we have agreed that he meant to make it hard for us to find the cache; but he'd try to fix things so the packers he sent up with the truck shouldn't guess his object. He wouldn't tell them to pick a place where nobody would think of looking."

"You're assuming that he'd employ honest men," Graham objected. "What's to prevent his hiring three or four toughs and bribing them to say nothing?"

"He's too smart," said Carnally promptly. "He'd know that if we got lost up here the fellows could keep striking him for money and he'd have to pay; while if we got through, there'd be a risk of our finding them and buying them over. Besides, men of the kind he'd want are scarce in the bush. If they're to be found, it's hanging round the saloons in the cities."

"Then we'll assume that the boys were square. That would make it harder for him and easier for us. What follows?"

Carnally drank some tea from a blackened can before he answered.

"This matter needs a lot of thinking out, and it looks as if our lives depended on our thinking right. Allinson's instructions to the hog seem to have been pretty clear, and he wouldn't plant the cache too far from the gap. Then he'd have to arrange things so the boys would think they'd dumped the truck in a handy place for a party coming down from the north."

"I believe he has never been up here," Andrew argued. "Are there any good maps? I couldn't get one."

"They're sketchy," Graham said. "My idea is that Mappin would get hold of a prospector who knows the country and have a good talk with him; but he wouldn't send him up with the other men."

"It's probable," agreed Carnally. "Well, in my opinion the provisions are lying south of the pass in one of the gulches leading down from the height of land, but not directly on our line of march. You can come up from Rain Bluff several ways, and the hog would mark a route for the boys which would bring them in, so far as he could figure, a bit outside the shortest track. We've got to find the gulch they'd pitch on. It's our brains against Mappin's."

"Your brains," Andrew corrected him.

Carnally knocked out his pipe.

"I allow I'll want a clear head to-morrow and I'm going to sleep."

He and Andrew left camp in the dark the next morning; but day had broken when they stood in the gap of the neck, looking down on the broken country beneath. For a short distance the descent from the pass was clearly defined, leading down a hollow among the rocks, but after that it opened out on to a scarp of hillside from which a number of ravines branched off and led to the banks of a frozen creek. They seemed to be filled with brush, and the spurs between them were rough. It was a difficult country to traverse, and Andrew realized with concern that the search might last several days.

"Take that right hand gulch," Carnally directed. "Follow it right down to the creek and come back up the next farther on, while I prospect east. If we find nothing in the ravines, we'll try the spurs."

"The obvious place is the gap we're standing in," Andrew pointed out. "How would Mappin get over that without making his packers suspicious?"

"I thought of it," said Carnally. "He'd contend that he was afraid the cache might get snowed up; and it would be a pretty good reason. The drifts pile up deep in a gap like this."

Andrew left him and spent a long while climbing down a rough ravine which led him to the river. It was noon when he came back up another and the exertion had told on him, but they had long ago dispensed with a midday meal and he held on at a dragging pace until a thrill ran through him at the sight of a tall pole among the rocks ahead. He made for it in haste, floundering over the snow-covered stones, and lost it once or twice at a bend in the gully. At last he stopped in the bottom of the hollow, looking up at a steep face of rock. It was ragged and broken, glazed with ice in some places, and he doubted whether he could get up; but a foot or two of the pole rose above the top. Following up the gully, he looked for an easier ascent, but he could not find one. Fearing to lose the pole, he stopped and shouted on the chance that Carnally might be in the neighborhood. Presently a cry answered him, and when Carnally came scrambling down the hollow Andrew took him back and pointed out the pole.

"A dead fir!" cried Carnally. "Looks as if somebody had broken the branches off, and there are no other trees about! The trouble is, we can't get up from here."

"We will have to!" declared Andrew. "If you could give me a lift up over the worst bits, I'd help you when I had found a hold. Anyway, we must try!"

Carnally consented dubiously. The rock was about thirty feet in height and very steep, though there were several crevices and broken edges. Andrew ascended one of the latter, gripping it with hands and knees. Reaching a narrow ledge, he leaned down and gave his hand to Carnally, and when he had helped him up they stopped for a minute or two. They were weak and hungry, and there was an awkward bulge above.

"Steady me up," said Andrew. "If I can find a crack for my hand, I can get up there."

For a few moments he rested his foot on Carnally's back; then he pressed his toes against the stone and his comrade watched him disappear beyond the bulging rock with unpleasant sensations, knowing that he would have to follow. Presently, however, the bottom of Andrew's fur coat fell over the edge and Carnally, seizing it, scrambled up three or four feet, until the projecting stone forced him outward. Losing hold with his feet, he hung by his hands for a moment or two, in a state of horrible fear.

"Throw one arm over the projection!" Andrew shouted.

Carnally found a hold; Andrew seized his arm; and after an arduous struggle he stood, gasping, on a snowy knob. The sharp edge of a big slab rose eight or nine feet above him.

"Take a rest," advised Andrew. "If you go slowly, you ought to get up this last bit."

"I'll have to try. It's a sure thing I can't get down. But how d'you come to be so smart at this work?"

"I used to do something like it in Switzerland."

"Well," said Carnally, "you're a curious kind of man: I guess you didn't have to climb. I'd find it a bit too exciting if I wasn't doing it for money."

"We're not climbing for money now," Andrew grimly reminded him. "There's food ahead of us and we must get on!"

They made the ascent, though it tried their nerve severely. When they finally crawled up to the summit Andrew stopped, growing suddenly white in the face.

"Look!" he said hoarsely.

Carnally sat down heavily in the snow.

"A dead tree! Nobody put it there; it grew!"

With an effort he pulled himself together.

"Come! We'll try farther on!"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE EMPTY FLOUR-BAG

When it was getting dark Andrew and Carnally gave up the useless search. A red glow, flickering among the spruce trunks, guided them down the pass, and they saw Graham's figure, black against the firelight, as they approached the camp. He was standing up, looking out for them, but they came on in silence and after a quick glance at their faces he turned away and busied himself getting supper. He knew they had failed and words were superfluous.

They ate the small bannock he took from the frying-pan, and Andrew glanced about the camp when he had lighted his pipe. Graham had been at work while they were away, laying down spruce branches and raising a wall to keep off the wind. It was warm beside the fire, and the place looked comfortable.

"There wouldn't be much to complain of if we had enough to eat," said Andrew. "It's surprising how soon one gets grateful for such a shelter as this, and I believe I've slept as soundly in the snow as I ever did in bed."

"I tried to fix things neatly, though I wouldn't have been sorry if I'd wasted my labor," Graham replied and glanced at Carnally. "It struck me we might be here a day or two."

Carnally's smile was rather grim.

"It's very likely. S'pose I ought to play up to Allinson, but he's put it a notch too high. I've been doing some hard thinking while I was on the hill. We're certainly up against a tough proposition."

"You're still convinced the grub is here?"

"That is a sure thing – all we have to do is to find it; but it's going to be a big job. I expect both of you want me to talk?"

Their willingness to hear his views was obvious.

"The trouble is," he explained, "you can get down from the neck a number of different ways – there are the spurs one could break a trail along and there are the ravines. We may try them all before we strike the right one; but we'll have a better chance if we work up instead of down."

"Why?" Andrew asked.

"Because the packers would start from the low ground, and the benches look different from below."

"Do you think Mappin told them to pick any particular place?"

"I've been figuring on that. He's learned something about the ground, and my idea is that the provisions are dumped in a hollow that looks like a good road up to the gap; that is, as you would see it from the creek. What we don't know is where his boys would strike the ice. It might be anywhere within three or four miles."

Andrew knit his brows.

"It's a puzzling question and we have only a day or two to find the answer. The worst of it is that we're worn out and famishing; I feel that my wits would be quicker if I could come at it fresh from a square meal."

"No, sir! A man's brain is keenest when he's working on short rations."

"I believe that's true," Graham said.

"Our rations," contended Andrew, "couldn't be much shorter; but I couldn't think of anything intelligently as I stumbled along through the snow to-day. And yet – "

He broke off, remembering that once or twice of late he had become capable of a strange clarity of thought, accompanied by an unusual emotional stirring. It had passed, but it had left its mark on him. After all, it was in the stern North that he had first seen things in their true proportions; it was there that the duty he had vaguely realized had grown into definite shape, and Leonard's treachery to Allinson's had been clearly perceived. Moreover, he had somehow gained a new and unexpected sense of power. Then as the fire blazed up he glanced with sudden interest at the faces of his comrades. They were worn and haggard, and Graham's was stamped with lines of pain; but there was something in them he could best describe as fine. Hunger and toil, instead of subduing the men, had given them new strength and an elusive dignity. Andrew remembered having seen that puzzling look in the lean, brown faces of tired and thirsty soldiers as a brigade went by through the rolling dust of the African veldt. It had been flung back, shattered, from a rock fortress, and was pressing on, undaunted, to a fresh attack. Andrew's heart had throbbed faster at the sight, and he now felt something of the same thrill again; but these things were not to be spoken of.

"Well," said Carnally, "I might feel content if I thought Mappin was as hungry as we are; but there's not much fear of that. The blasted hog has sense enough to keep out of the bush; going about the country getting his hands on other men's money pays him better. He's no use for eating supper behind a bank of snow; the Place Viger and the Windsor in Montreal are more his style."

This was far from heroic, but Andrew laughed; the minor weaknesses of human nature seldom jarred on him.

"I think," he suggested lightly, "you might, for a change, call him the swine. It's a term we sometimes use and it sounds grosser than the other. The hogs I've seen running in the Ontario bush were thin and not repulsive."

"I'll admit it's foolish; but when I think of that man studying the menu, I get mad! Can't you see him picking out the dollar dishes, on the European plan? Canvasbacks and such, if they're in season."

"They wouldn't give him much canvasback for a dollar," Graham objected.

"That doesn't count. The point is – where does he get the dollar?"

"I'm afraid he has got a few of them out of us," said Andrew. "He has got more out of the Rain Bluff shareholders; though I'm glad to think that supply will be stopped. Anyhow, our first business is to find the cache."

"That's so," assented Carnally, as he threw some branches on the fire. "We'll try again at sun-up. Though it makes you feel easier now and then, talking doesn't do much good."

A few minutes later they were all asleep, and when day broke Andrew and Carnally descended a steep, snow-covered bank below the neck. Their search proved unsuccessful, and they were very silent after they returned to camp in the evening. The next morning Graham gave them a very small bannock for breakfast, and then threw an empty flour-bag into the snow.

"Boys," he said gravely, "you have got to find the cache to-day."

Spurred on by the imminence of starvation, they started off again, beating their way against a driving snowstorm, stumbling often and rising each time with greater difficulty; always, however, keeping eager watch for the pole that should mark the spot of the cache.

After three days of fruitless search, they could not bear to talk when they met in camp in the evening. They knew that starvation was upon them; their last strength was fast running out. They were not the men, however, to give up easily; and once more they set off grimly at sunrise.

It was snowing hard when Andrew, knowing that he could drag himself no farther, crawled into the shelter of a rock on the desolate hillside and sat down shivering. There was an intolerable pain in his left side, he was faint with hunger, and his muscles ached cruelly. His fur coat was ragged, his moccasins were cut by the snow-shoe fastenings and falling to pieces; his face was pinched and hollow. It was some hours since he had seen Carnally. He was physically unable to continue the search, but he shrank from going back to camp, where there was nothing to eat, and facing his famishing comrade. Indeed, as he grew lethargic with cold, it scarcely seemed worth while to make the effort of getting on his feet again. He sat still, listlessly looking down across the white slopes; Carnally would probably pass near the spot, though there was now no expectation of his finding the cache. During the last few days they had sometimes met while they searched and exchanged a brief "Nothing yet," or a dejected shake of the head. It would be the same again, though Andrew felt that his comrade might have succeeded if they could have held out.

He could not see far through the snow, which swept along the hillside before a savage wind. Blurred clumps of spruce marked the edge of the lower ground, but the river was hidden and the straggling junipers on the spurs were formless and indistinct. At last, however, Andrew noticed something moving near the end of a long ridge and, as it must be a man, he concluded it was Carnally returning. Then he imagined that the hazy figure stopped and waved an arm, as if signaling to somebody below; that was curious, for his comrade would be alone.

Andrew decided that he had been mistaken, and bent down to brush the gathering snow from his torn moccasins; but he started when he looked up. There were now two men on the slope below, and while he gazed at them a third emerged from among the rocks.

CHAPTER XIX

A WOMAN'S WAY

They had not been forgotten while they journeyed through the wilds. Frobisher thought of them now and then, and his daughter more often; indeed, her mind dwelt a good deal on Andrew after he left and she found herself looking forward eagerly to his return. She spent some weeks in an American city with her father, but its gaieties had less attraction for her than usual, and she was glad when they went back for a time to the Lake of Shadows. On the day after her arrival she drove across the ice to the Landing and inquired at a store where news circulated whether anything had been heard of the Allinson expedition. The proprietor had nothing to tell her, but while she spoke to him a man crossed the floor, and she saw with annoyance that it was Mappin. She left while he made his purchases, but he joined her when she was putting some parcels into the sleigh, and did not seem daunted by the coldness of her manner.

"I didn't know you were coming back so soon," he greeted her.

"Didn't you?" she asked indifferently. "When my father had finished his business we suddenly made up our minds to leave, without consulting Mrs. Denton. I suppose that explains your ignorance."

"You're smart," he said. "As soon as you're ready to receive people I must make my call."

It was getting dark, but the lights from the store window fell on his face, and Geraldine saw a glitter in his eyes. She thought he meant to defy her.

"You are excused, so far as I am concerned," she replied uncompromisingly.

Mappin stood silent a moment or two, looking at her hard, and she felt half afraid of him.

"You would rather see Allinson! But that's a pleasure you may find deferred. You didn't get much news of him just now!"

"I don't doubt that you heard me ask for it, though there were two teamsters waiting to buy things, who had the good manners to keep away."

"Certainly I heard," he answered coolly; "that's the kind of man I am. I don't let chances pass."

Geraldine knew that he would make unscrupulous use of those he seized, but his candor had its effect on her. He was overbearing, but there was force in the man, and she grew uneasy. Though she shrank from him, she admitted his power; unless she roused herself to fight, he might break her will.

"One could hardly consider it an admirable type," she said, getting into the sleigh. "However, it's too cold to stand talking."

Mappin was obliged to step back when she started the team, and she drove off in some confusion, glad to escape, but feeling that she had run away. It had seemed the safest course, though she did not think she was a coward. Then as the team trotted across the frozen lake she remembered Mappin's curious tone when he had spoken of Andrew Allinson. He had suggested with an unpleasant hint of satisfaction that Andrew's return might be delayed, and she grew troubled as she thought of it. Still, she reasoned, as no news had reached the Landing, Mappin could know nothing about the matter, and the men Andrew had with him were accustomed to the bush. Dismissing the subject, she urged the horses and drew the thick driving-robe close about her. It was very cold and she shivered as she wondered how Andrew and his comrades were faring in the North.

Some days later she met Mrs. Graham at the post-office and inquired about her husband. Geraldine thought she looked anxious.

"He's a little behind time; but soft snow or storms might delay the party."

"Then he mentioned a time when you could expect him?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Graham. "He warned me that he might be a week late; but they thought out the journey very carefully, because it was a question of carrying enough food."

"You mean that helped to fix the time of their return?"

"Of course! They couldn't get food anywhere except at a Hudson Bay factory, and they couldn't take a large quantity. That means they knew within a week or so when they must reach the provision caches that were to be made for them north of the mine."

"I understand," said Geraldine. "They wouldn't delay when they came to the caches, except, perhaps, for a day's rest. I suppose the food was taken up?"

"Oh, yes! I saw the packers leave and come down. They were good bushmen and one of them knew the country. He made the caches at the places decided on."

"Then the expedition should be quite safe," said Geraldine cheerfully; but when she left Mrs. Graham she grew thoughtful.

Andrew was late and Geraldine saw that delay might be dangerous. The men would lose no time in coming south, because, considering the difficulty of transport, the margin of provisions would not be large. Nothing but a serious accident would detain them, which was disconcerting to reflect upon. Then she reasoned that their provisions would be nearly exhausted when they reached the caches, and her mind dwelt on the point, because it was essential that they should obtain fresh supplies. She felt uneasy as she remembered a remark of Mappin's, which she did not think he had made casually. There had been a significant grimness in his manner when he had spoken of Allinson. After all, however, it was possible that there was no ground for anxiety: the prospectors might turn up in the next few days.