Philip Steel of the Royal Northwest mounted Police, James Oliver Curwood [unputdownable books txt] 📗

he had put out on retiring was burning low. In its dim light stood the doctor, half dressed, in a tense attitude of listening.
"What's the matter?" asked Philip.
The professor started, and turned toward the stove.
"Nervousness, I guess," he said gloomily. "I was afraid I would awaken you. I've been up three times during the last hour--listening for a voice."
"A voice?"
"Yes, back there in the bunk I could have sworn that I heard it calling somewhere out in the night. But when I get up I can't hear it. I've stood at the door until I'm frozen."
"It's the wind," said Philip. "It has troubled me many times out on the snow plains. I've heard it wail like children crying among the dunes, and again like women screaming, and men shouting. You'd better go to bed."
"Listen!" The doctor stiffened, his white face turned to the door.
"Good Heavens, was that the wind?" he asked after a moment.
Philip had rolled from his bunk and was pulling on his clothes.
"Dress and we'll find out," he advised.
Together they went to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. The sky was thick and heavy, with only a white blur where the moon was smothered. Fifty yards away the gray gloom became opaque. Over the thousand miles of drift to the north there came a faint whistling wind, rising at times in fitful sweeps of flinty snow, and at intervals dying away until it became only a lulling sound. In one of these intervals both men held their breath.
From somewhere out of the night, and yet from nowhere that they could point, there came a human voice.
"Pier-r-r-r-e Thoreau--Pier-r-r-r-e Thoreau--Ho, Pierre Thoreau-u-u-u!"
"Off there!" shivered the doctor.
"No--out there!" said Philip.
He raised his own voice in an answering shout, and in response there came again the cry for Pierre Thoreau.
"I'm right!" cried the doctor. "Come!"
He darted away, his greatcoat making a dark blur in the night ahead of Philip, who paused again to shout through the megaphone of his hands. There came no reply. A second and a third time he shouted, and still there was no response.
"Queer," he thought. "What the devil can it mean?"
The doctor had disappeared, and he followed in the direction he had gone. A hundred yards more and he saw the dark blur again, close to the ground. The doctor was bending over a human form stretched out in the snow.
"Just in time," he said to Philip as he came up. Excitement had gone from his voice now. It was cool and professional, and he spoke in a commanding way to his companion. "You're heavier than I, so take him by the shoulders and hold his head well up. I don't believe it's the cold, for his body is warm and comfortable. I feel something wet and thick on his shirt, and it may be blood. So hold his head well up."
Between them they carried him back to the cabin, and with the quick alertness of a man accustomed to every emergency of his profession the doctor stripped off his two coats while Philip looked at the face of the man whom they had placed in his bunk. His own experience had acquainted him with violence and bloodshed, but in spite of that fact he shuddered slightly as he gazed on the unconscious form.
It was that of a young man of splendid physique, with a closely shaven face, short blond hair, and a magnificent pair of shoulders.
Beyond the fact that he knew the face wore no beard he could scarce have told if it were white or black. From chin to hair it was covered with stiffened blood.
The doctor came to his side.
"Looks bad, doesn't he?" he said cheerfully. "Thought it wasn't the cold. Heart beating too fast, pulse too active. Ah--hot water if you please, Philip!"
He loosened the man's coat and shirt, and a few moments later, when Philip brought a towel and a basin of water, he rose from his examination.
"Just in time--as I said before," he exclaimed with satisfaction. "You'd never have heard another 'Pierre Thoreau' out of him, Philip," he went on, speaking the young man's name as it he had been accustomed to doing it for a long time. "Wound on the head--skull sound--loss of blood from over-exertion. We'll have him drinking coffee within an hour if you'll make some."
The doctor rolled up his shirt sleeves and began to wash away the blood.
"A good-looking chap," he said over his shoulder. "Face clean cut, fine mouth, a frontal bone that must have brain behind it, square chin--" He broke off to ask: "What do you suppose happened to him?"
"Haven't got the slightest idea," said Philip, putting the coffee pot on the stove. "A blow, isn't it?"
Philip was turning up the wick of the lamp when a sudden startled cry came from the bedside. Something in it, low and suppressed, made him turn so quickly that by a clumsy twist of his fingers the lamp was extinguished. He lighted it again and faced the doctor. McGill was upon his knees, terribly pale.
"Good Heaven!" he gasped. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing, nothing, Phil--it was he! He let it out of him so unexpectedly that it startled me."
"I thought it was your voice," said Philip.
"No, no, it was his. See, he is returning to consciousness."
The wounded man's eyes opened slowly, and closed again. He heaved a great sigh and stretched out his arms as if about to awaken from a deep slumber. The doctor sprang to his feet.
"We must have ice, Phil--finely chopped ice from the creek down there. Will you take the ax and those two pails and bring back both pails full? No hurry, but we'll need it within an hour."
Philip bundled himself in his coat and went out with the ax and pails.
"Ice!" he muttered to himself. "Now what can he want of ice?"
He dug down through three feet of snow and chopped for half an hour. When he returned to the cabin the wounded man was bolstered up in bed, and the doctor was pacing back and forth across the room, evidently worked to a high pitch of excitement.
"Murder--robbery--outrage! Right under our noses, that's what it was!" he cried. "Pierre Thoreau is dead--killed by the scoundrels who left this man for dead beside him! They set upon them late yesterday afternoon as Pierre and his partner were coming home, intending to kill them for their outfit. The murderers, who are a breed and a white trapper, have probably gone to their shack half a dozen miles up the creek. Now, Mr. Philip Steele, here's a little work for you!"
MacGregor himself had never stirred Philip Steele's blood as did the doctor's unexpected wards, but the two men watching him saw nothing unusual in their effect. He set down his ice and coolly took off his coat, then advanced to the side of the wounded man.
"I'm glad you're better," he said, looking down into the other's strong, pale face. "It was a pretty close shave. Guess you were a little out of your head, weren't you?"
For an instant the man's eyes shifted past Philip to where the doctor was standing.
"Yes--I must have been. He says I was calling for Pierre, and Pierre was dead. I left him ten miles back there in the snow." He closed his eyes with a groan of pain and continued, after a moment, "Pierre and I have been trapping foxes. We were coming back with supplies to last us until late spring when--it happened. The white man's name is Dobson, and there's a breed with him. Their shack is six or seven miles up the creek."
Philip saw the doctor examining a revolver which he had taken from the pocket of his big coat. He came over to the bunkside with it in his hand.
"That's enough, Phil," he said softly. "He must not talk any more for an hour or two or we'll have him in a fever. Get on your coat. I'm going with you."
"I'm going alone," said Phil shortly. "You attend to your patient." He drank a cup of coffee, ate a piece of toasted bannock, and with the first gray breaking of dawn started up the creek on a pair of Pierre's old snow-shoes. The doctor followed him to the creek and watched him until he was out of sight.
The wounded man was sitting on the edge of the cot when McGill reentered the cabin.
His exertion had brought a flush of color back into his face, which lighted up with a smile as the other came through the door.
"It was a close shave, thanks to you," he said, repeating Philip's words.
"Just so," replied the doctor. He had placed a brace of short bulldog revolvers on the table and offered one of them now to his companion.
"The shaving isn't over yet, Falkner."
They ate breakfast, each with a gun beside his tin plate. Now and then the doctor interrupted his meal to go to the door and peer over the broadening vista of the barrens. They had nearly finished when he came back from one of these observations, his lips set a little tighter, a barely perceptible tremor in his voice when he spoke.
"They're coming, Falkner!"
They picked up their revolvers and the doctor buttoned his coat tight up about his neck.
For ten minutes they sat silent and listening.
Not until the crunching beat of snow-shoes came to their ears did the doctor move. Thrusting his weapon into his coat pocket, he went to the door. Falkner followed him, and stood well out of sight when he opened it. Two men and a dog team were crossing the opening. McGill's dogs were fastened under a brush lean-to built against the cabin, and as the rival team of huskies began filling the air with their clamor for a fight, the stranger team halted and one of the two men came forward alone. He stopped with some astonishment before the aristocratic-looking little man waiting for him in Pierre's doorway.
"Is Pierre Thoreau at home?" he demanded.
"I'm a stranger here, so I can not say," replied the doctor, inspecting the questioner with marked coolness. "It is possible, however, that he is--for I picked up a man half dead out in the snow last night, and I'm waiting for him to come back to life. A smooth-faced, blond fellow, with a cut on his head. It may be this Pierre Thoreau."
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the man kicked off his snow-shoes and with an, excited wave of his arm to his companion with the dogs, almost ran past the doctor.
"It's him--the man I want to see!" he cried in a low voice. "My name's Dobson, of the--"
What more he had meant to say was never finished. Falkner's powerful arms had gripped his head and throat in a vise-like clutch from which no smother of sound escaped, and three or four minutes later, when the second man came through the door, he found his comrade flat on his back, bound and gagged, and the shining muzzles of two short and murderous-looking revolvers leveled at his breast. He was a swarthy breed, scarcely larger than the doctor himself, and his only remonstrance as his hands were fastened behind his back was a brief outburst of very bad and, very excited French which the professor stopped with a threatening flourish of his gun.
"You'll do," he said, standing off to survey his prisoner. "I believe you're harmless enough to have the use of your legs and mouth." With a comic bow the little doctor added, "M'sieur, I'm going to ask you to drive us back to Fort Smith, and if you so