The Lady of North Star

“Mr. Bracknell, I am afraid, terribly afraid. Somehow I feel that your cousin is not dead. I feel that he will come back here, and that is why we are hurrying away tomorrow morning. The letter from Sir Joseph Rayner serves for an excuse. Do you understand?”

“I think I do,” answered the corporal sympathetically. “You are afraid that Dick, having found out where you are, will return to worry you?”

“You know him, I have told you how I was trapped into marrying him, do you think that he is the man to leave me in peace?”

“He is likely to consult only his own interests,” agreed her companion.

“But I shall be safe from him in England, if what you tell me is true. He dare not go there openly, and if he were to appear at all, I should be able to protect myself, by invoking the police.”

“The police would only be too happy to afford you protection here,” answered the corporal earnestly.

The girl looked at him with grateful eyes. “You mean yourself. Yes! I know, but there is another service that I want from you – ”

“You have but to name it, Miss Gargrave,” he answered as she hesitated. “So far as duty allows, I am entirely at your service. Tell me what it is that I can do for you.”

“You can find out for me whether Dick Bracknell is alive or dead.”

The corporal had not anticipated the request, and he was a little startled by it. Instantly his mind reverted to the conversation he had had with Rayner. He recalled the hopes which the latter entertained, and wondered if this white-faced girl at his side was willing to help their realization. As that possibility flashed into his mind, he was conscious of a constriction about his heart. But he gave no sign.

“I should be compelled to do that in any case,” he answered quietly. “I cannot relinquish the work on which I started until I know what has become of the man who is known at headquarters as Koona Dick. Some one must know about him – probably the driver of the sled whose trail I followed, and I’ve got to find out. Vague reports are not regarded as satisfactory by the heads of the force.”

“You will let me know?” she asked instantly.

“I shall be glad to do so,” he answered quietly, and again he was conscious of the tightening about his heart.

“You see,” she explained, “my position is so anomalous. All my little world with the exception of my Newnham friend and yourself, my foster-sister, whom I told only last night, thinks of me as a spinster.”

“You are sure Mr. Rayner does not know of your marriage?” asked the corporal quickly, as a thought struck him.

“I am quite sure,” answered Joy readily, without giving any indication that she found any special significance in the question. “You see the part played by Lady Alcombe was not very credible, and I used my knowledge of it to ensure her silence. I wrote to her and told her that if the wedding was not kept secret, I should proclaim all that had happened to the world. Her vulnerable spot is the position she holds in society, and she knew how that would suffer if it became a matter of common knowledge that for a bribe she had schemed to marry to a scamp an innocent girl left in her charge. She wrote me a short note in reply, in which she said, that she would forget that the marriage had even taken place, and that I need not fear that it would ever become known. That is why I am so sure Mr. Rayner does not know. Lady Alcombe dare not betray me.”

Bracknell nodded. “I dare say you are right, but of course you cannot marry again until you are sure of that – ”

“I do not want to marry again!” interrupted the girl quickly, the blood flaming in her pale face. “Why should you think that I do, Mr. Bracknell?”

As the corporal met her blue eyes, clear and unshadowed by guile, his heart grew suddenly light, and on the moment he dismissed from his mind the thought that Joy Gargrave in any way shared Mr. Rayner’s aspirations. He laughed cheerfully as he replied, “I did not say that I thought you wished to marry again, Miss Gargrave. I was merely stating the law on the matter, and there is no personal significance to be attached to such a statement.”

Joy Gargrave smiled austerely. “I am not likely ever to marry again,” she said. “Once bitten, twice shy, you know.”

The corporal smiled in return, but as he marked her loveliness and remembered the figure at which the Northland had estimated Rolf Gargrave’s wealth, he thought to himself that many a man would endeavour to persuade her to a different mind, but he did not say so.

“Miss Gargrave, one never knows what the future holds – but whatever happens you can count me as your friend. I am not proud of my relationship to Dick Bracknell, even though it does make me some sort of a cousin to you. There is nothing that I will not do to serve you, and if anything that I learn will deliver you from your anomalous position, you may rest assured that I will let you know of it at the earliest possible moment.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bracknell,” she answered simply. “I shall be very grateful.”

They walked on a little way without speaking, then she turned to him suddenly. “You are my cousin, more or less, Mr. Bracknell, but I do not know your christian name.”

“It is Roger,” he answered smilingly.

“And if at any time I want to communicate with you, where – ”

“Headquarters at Regina. That will always find me sooner or later, no matter what part of the Territory I may be in.”

“I am glad to know that,” she said, “and if at any time you have news for me, any letter sent care of Sir Joseph Rayner will reach me.” She turned in her steps as she spoke. “I think I had better return now. There is much to do at the Lodge, and they will miss me. But I am glad to have met you, and glad to think that I can count you among my friends.”

She held out her mittened hand, and as he took it Roger Bracknell felt the blood surge warmly in his face, and in his grey eyes as he looked at her there was a flame that had she observed it would have told her that she had secured more than a friend. But she did not see it, and as she walked away there was a pensive look on the beautiful face.

The next day Corporal Bracknell, with his own team ready harnessed, watched Joy Gargrave and her escort take their departure. Four full teams of dogs drew their equipment, and snow having fallen during the night, Joy and her foster-sister wore the great webbed snowshoes of the North. They stood making their good-byes, then the half-breed driver gave the word.

“Mooch! Mooch! Linka!”

The leading dog gave a yelp, and strained at his collar, and a moment later all the teams were moving southward. Joy Gargrave waved her hand as she moved on, and he waved back and stood watching till the cavalcade was out of sight, then turning to his own dogs, he gave the word to move and set his face towards the snowy solitudes of the North.

CHAPTER VIII

KOONA DICK

AS HE TRAVELLED, Roger Bracknell’s mind was busy with the events of the past two days, and with the information he had gathered. That his cousin Dick should have turned out to be the man whose trail he had followed had occasioned no wonder after the first shock of surprise; but the mystery of the attack upon him, and of his subsequent disappearance, afforded him much food for thought. Some one had determined that Dick Bracknell should die, and some one had shot him. The question was – who was it? He had dismissed from his mind any idea that Joy herself had any complicity in that business, her frankness having quite killed the suspicions he had at first been inclined to entertain.

His thoughts swung round to Rayner. Did he know anything of the matter? He could find no satisfactory answer. It was true that immediately after the crime he had seen him entering the Lodge with a rifle, and he had certainly shown a keen interest about the sled which had waited in the wood, but from the first he had casually offered a sufficient explanation, and the instinct which turns every man into an amateur detective on the occasion of a mysterious crime would easily account for the second.

Besides – Rayner could have had nothing to do with the disappearance of Dick Bracknell’s body, for the corporal was quite sure that he had never left the house until he had done so with himself. True, he had betrayed a certain knowledge as to the place where the crime had been committed, but he himself might easily have communicated that knowledge to Rayner, though he could not recollect having done so, whilst on the other hand, the motive for such a serious crime as murder was not immediately apparent. It was true that Rayner designed to marry Joy Gargrave, but that of itself was not a sufficient motive unless he knew of the previous marriage.

“But does Rayner know of that marriage?” He uttered the question aloud, and answered it the same way, speech helping him to precipitate his thoughts.

“I think not! The girl is so positive … and Rayner has given no sign. There’s the deuce of a coil to be unwound somehow.”

He reached the bluff, turned it, and saw the junction of the tributary Elkhorn with the main river. When he reached it he halted his dogs and made a careful inspection of the trail. The new snow had drifted, but the thick pinewood which grew on the banks of the smaller stream had turned the snow in places, and about two hundred yards up, he came on the half-obliterated traces of sled-runners. He examined them carefully, stood for a minute or two in thought, then nodded his head.

“Turned up here out of the main trail, and will probably have made a camp somewhere. Anyway it is worth trying.”

He went back for his dogs, and turned up the Elkhorn. The trail at first was not very bad, and he made a good pace; but after the first two miles it worsened, and he struck an abundance of soft snow, presenting an absolutely virgin surface. This made the going very hard, and he marched ahead of his labouring dogs, packing the snow with the great webbed shoes of the North, lifting each foot clear almost perpendicularly, then planting it down to harden the surface for his canine team. Three miles or so he made, in spite of the cold, sweating like a bull, and then he reached a place where the wind had swept the ice like a broom leaving it almost clear of snow.

He examined the frozen surface, and after a little search found the marks of sled-runners on the ice. He searched further, but found nothing save these twin scars running parallel to one another. But one sled had passed that way, and he was sure that he was on the right track. A smile of satisfaction came on his lean face, and seating himself, on the sled he swung forward at a rattling pace.

The short day was coming to a close when the leading dog yelped suddenly, and with his followers began to manifest signs of canine excitement. Roger Bracknell himself sniffed the keen air. There was a fire somewhere, for the unmistakable odour of burning resinous wood reached his nostrils. He stepped off the sled, and hanging on to the gee-pole tried to check the pace of his team. His efforts however, were in vain. The dogs bent their heads to the ice and threw themselves against the collars, hurrying forward, as they had not hurried all day. They too smelt the burning pinewood, and to them it signified not merely human habitation, but freedom from the traces, and the frozen salmon which constituted their evening meal.

The corporal, finding his endeavours to restrain them vain, prepared for eventualities. Hanging on to the sled with one hand, with the other he unfastened the holster wherein he carried his service pistol. He did not know what to expect. That aromatic odour might come from an Indian tepee, from the hut of some lonely prospecting party, or from the camp of the man he was following; in any case it was as well to be prepared.

The leading dog yelped again, and the others responded in joyful chorus. The team swung suddenly towards the left bank, up a slight incline towards a clearing in the wood. Out of the gathering gloom a faint glow appeared, and then the shadowy outline of a hut. The glow was from a frosted parchment window, and the hut was the typical miner’s cabin of the North. Corporal Bracknell smiled and dropped his hand from the pistol-holster, finding the look of the place altogether reassuring. The dogs came to a standstill on the packed snow in front of the cabin, yelping delight, and whip in hand Bracknell waited, listening. If there were dogs at the cabin they might be expected to charge the new-comers, who fastened in the traces would be heavily handicapped. The charge he waited for did not come. There was no challenging answer to the yelping of his own team, and apparently the owner of the cabin was without dogs, or if he owned a team it was absent from home. This fact further reassured him and threw him still more off his guard. He stepped forward to the door of the cabin and rapped upon it with the butt-end of his dog-whip.

“Come in,” answered a hoarse voice.

The corporal felt for the moose-hide thong that worked the wooden catch, opened the door, and stepping inside turned to close it behind him.

“That’s right,” said the voice again. “Now put your hands up.”

The corporal jumped and his hands moved instinctively towards the holster as he swung round.