Hawtrey's Deputy

"Shall I open another can?" he asked at length.

"No," said Wyllard. "We owe you thanks enough already. Provisions are evidently plentiful with you."

Overweg nodded. "I have a base camp two or three days' journey back," he said. "It is possible that I shall make a depôt. We brought our stores up from the south with dog sleds before the snow grew soft, but it is necessary for me to push on further. My business, you understand, is the scientific survey; to report upon the natural resources of the country."

He paused, and his manner changed a little when he went on again. "I have," he added, "to this extent taken you into my confidence, and I invite an equal candour. Two things are evident. You have made a long journey, and your French is not that one hears in Paris."

"First of all," said Wyllard, "I must ask again are you a Russian?"

Overweg spread his hands out with a little whimsical gesture. "My name, which I have told you, is not Sclavonic, and it may be admitted that I was born in Bavaria. In the meanwhile, it is true that I have been sent on a mission by the Russian Government."

"I wonder," said Wyllard reflectively, "how far you consider your duty towards your employers goes."

Overweg's eyes twinkled. "It covers all that can be ascertained about the geological structure and the fauna of the country, especially the fauna that produce marketable furs. At present I am not convinced that it goes very much further."

It was clear to Wyllard that he was to a large extent in this man's hands already, since he could not reach the inlet without provisions, and Overweg could, if he thought fit, send back a messenger to the Russian authorities. He was one who could think quickly and make a momentous decision, and he realised that if he could not win the man's sympathy there must be open hostility between them. It seemed possible that he might obviate any necessity for the latter.

"In that case I think I may tell you what has brought me here," he said. "If you have travelled much in Kamchatka you can, perhaps, help me. To begin with, I sailed from Vancouver, in Canada, going on for a year ago."

It took him some time to make his errand clear, and then Overweg looked at him in a rather curious fashion.

"It is," he said, "a tale that in these days one finds some little difficulty in believing. Still, it must be admitted that I am acquainted with one fact which appears to substantiate it."

Then as he saw the blood rise to Wyllard's forehead he broke off with a little soft laugh.

"My friend," he added, "is it permitted to offer you my felicitations? The men who would attempt a thing of this kind are, I think, singularly rare."

"The fact?" said Wyllard, impatiently.

"There is a Kamtchadale in my base camp who told me of a place where a white man was buried some distance to the west of us. He spoke of a second white man, but nobody, I understand, knows what became of him."

Wyllard straightened himself suddenly. "You will send for that Kamtchadale?"

"Assuredly. The tale you have told me has stirred my curiosity. As my path lies west up the river valley, we can, if it pleases you, go on for a while together."

Wyllard, who thanked him, turned to Charly with a faint sigh of relief.

"It seems that we shall not bring those men back, but I think we may find out where they lie," he said. Charly made no comment, for this was the most he had expected, and a few minutes later there was silence in the little tent when the men lay down to sleep among the skins.

They started at sunrise next morning, and followed the river slowly by easy stages until the man sent back to Overweg's base camp overtook them with another Kamtchadale. Then they pushed on still further inland, and it was a week later when one evening their guide led them up to a little pile of stones upon a lonely ridge of rock. There were two letters very rudely cut on one of them, and Wyllard, who stooped down beside it, took off his cap when he rose.

"There's no doubt that Jake Leslie lies here," he said, and looked at Overweg. "Your man is sure it was only one white man who buried him?"

Overweg spoke to the Kamtchadale, who answered him.

"There was only one white man," he said. "It seems he went inland afterwards – at least a year ago."

Then Wyllard turned to Charly, and his face was very grave. "That makes it certain that two of them have died. There was one left, and he may be dead by this time." He spread his hands out with a forceful gesture. "If one only knew!"

Charly made no answer. He was not a man of education or much imagination, but like others of his kind he had alternately borne many privations in the wilderness, logging, prospecting, trail-cutting about the remoter mines, and at sea. As one result of this there crept into his mind some recognition of what the outcast who lay at rest beside their feet had had to face – the infinite toil of the march, the black despair, the blinding snow, and Arctic frost. He met his leader's gaze with a look of comprehending sympathy.

By what grim efforts and primitive devices their comrade, had clung to life so long as he had done it seemed very probable that they would never know, but they clearly realised that though some might call it an illegal raid, or even piracy, it was a work of mercy this outlaw who had borne so much had undertaken when he was cast away. In the word to swing the boats over and face the roaring surf in the darkness of the night he had heard the clear call of duty, and had fearlessly obeyed. His obedience had cost him much, but as the man who had come so far to search for him looked down upon the little pile of stones that had been raised above his bones in the desolate wilderness, there awoke within him a sure recognition of the fact that this was not the end. That, at least, was unthinkable. His comrade, sloughing off the half-frozen, suffering flesh, had gone on to join the immortals – with his duty done.

It was with a warmth at his heart and a slight haziness in his eyes that Wyllard turned away at length, but when he put on his fur cap again he was more determined than ever to carry out the search. There were many perils and difficulties to be faced, but he felt that he must not flinch.

"One man went inland," he said to Overweg. "I must go that way, too."

The little spectacled scientist looked at him curiously.

"Ah," he said, "the road your comrade travelled is a hard one. You have seen what it leads to."

Then Wyllard did what is in the case of such men as he was a somewhat unusual thing, for he gave another a glimpse of the feelings he generally kept hidden deep in him.

"No," he said, quietly, "the hard road leads further – where we do not know – but one feels that the full knowledge will not bring sorrow when it is some day given to those who have the courage to follow."

Overweg spread his hands out. "It is not the view of the materialists, but it is conceivable that the materialists may be wrong. In this case, however, it is the concrete and practical we have to grapple with, my friend. You say you are going inland to search for that man, and for awhile I go that way, but though I have my base camp there is the question of provisions if you come with me."

They discussed the matter until Wyllard suggested that he could replace any provisions his companion supplied him with from the schooner, to which Overweg agreed, and they afterwards decided to send the Siwash and one of the Kamtchadales on to the inlet with a letter to Dampier. The two started next day when they found a place where the river was with difficulty fordable, and the rest pushed on slowly into a broken and rising country seamed with belts of thin forest here and there. They held westwards for another week, and then one evening made their camp among a few stunted and straggling firs. The temperature had risen in the day-time, but the nights were cold, and when they had eaten their evening meal they were glad of the shelter of the tent. A small fire of resinous branches was sinking into a faintly glowing mass close outside of it.

The flap was, however, drawn back, and Wyllard, who lay facing the opening, could see a triangular patch of dim blue sky with a sharp sickle moon hanging low above a black fir branch. The night was clear and still, but now and then there was a faint elfin sighing among the stunted trees that died away again. He was then, while still determined, moodily discouraged, for they had seen no sign of human life during the journey, and his reason told him that he might search for years before he found the bones of the last survivor of the party. Still, he meant to search while Overweg was willing to supply him with provisions.

By and bye he saw Charly sharply raise his head and gaze towards the opening.

"Did you hear anything outside?" he asked.

"It would be the Kamtchadales," said Wyllard.

"They went back a mile or two to lay some traps."

"Then," said Wyllard, decisively, "it couldn't have been anything."

Charly did not appear satisfied, and it seemed to Wyllard that Overweg was also listening, but there was deep stillness outside now, and he dismissed the matter from his mind. A few minutes later it, however, seemed to him that a shadowy form appeared out of the gloom among the firs and faded into it again. This struck him as very curious, since if it had been one of the Kamtchadales he would have walked straight into camp, but he said nothing to his companions, and there was silence for a while until Charly rose softly to his feet.

"Get out as quietly as you can," he said, as he slipped by Wyllard, who crept after him to the entrance.

When he reached it his companion's voice rang out with a startling vehemence.

"Stop right now!" he cried, and after a pause, "Nobody's going to hurt you. Walk right ahead."

Then Wyllard felt his heart beat furiously, for a dusky, half-seen figure materialised out of the gloom, and grew into sharper form as it drew nearer to the sinking fire. The thing was wholly unexpected, almost incredible, but it was clear that the man could understand English, and his face was white. In another moment Wyllard's last doubt vanished, and he sprang forward with a gasp.

"Lewson – Tom Lewson," he said.

Then Charly thrust the man inside the tent, and when somebody lighted a lamp he sat down stupidly and looked at them. His face was gaunt and furrowed, and almost blackened by exposure to the frost, his hair was long, and tattered garments of greasy skins hung about him. There was also something that suggested bewildered incredulity in his eyes.

"It's real?" he said, slowly and haltingly. "You have come at last?"

They assured him that this was the case, and for a moment or two the man's face worked and he made a hoarse sound in his throat.

"Lord," he said, "if I'm dreaming I don't want to wake."

Charly leaned forward and smote him on the shoulder.

"Shall I hit you like I did that afternoon in the Thompson House on the Vancouver water front?" he asked.

Then the certainty of the thing seemed to dawn upon the man, for he quivered, and his eyes half closed. After that he straightened himself with an effort.

"I should have known, and I think I did," he said. "Something seemed to tell me that you would come for us when you could."

Wyllard's face flushed, but he said nothing, and it was Charly who asked the next question.

"The others are dead?"

Lewson made a little expressive gesture. "Hopkins was drowned in a crevice of the ice. I buried Leslie back yonder."

He broke off abruptly, as though speech cost him an effort, and Wyllard turned to Overweg.

"This is the last of the men I was looking for," he said.

Overweg quietly nodded. "Then you have my felicitations – but it might be advisable if you did not tell me too much," he said. "Afterwards I may be questioned by those in authority."

CHAPTER XXIX.

CAST AWAY

Tom Lewson had been an hour in camp before he commenced the story of his wanderings, and at first he spoke slowly and falteringly, lying propped up on one elbow, with the lamplight on his worn face.

"We broke an oar coming off the beach that night, and it kind of crippled us," he said. "Twice she nearly went back again in the surf, and I don't quite know how we pulled her off. Anyway, one of us was busy heaving out the water that broke into her. It was Jake, I think, and he seemed kind of silly. Once we saw a boat hove up on a sea, but we lost her in the spray, and a long while after we saw the schooner. Just then a comber that broke on board most hove us over, and when we had dodged the next two there wasn't a sign of her. After that we knew that we were done, and we just tried to keep her head-to and ease her to the seas."

He stopped a moment, and looked round at the others with troubled eyes, as though trying to marshal uncertain memories, for this was a simple sailorman, who contented himself with the baldest narrative. Still, two of those who heard him could fill in the things he had not mentioned – the mad lurching of the half-swamped boat, the tense struggle with the oars each time a big frothing comber forged out of the darkness, and the savage desperation of the drenched and half-frozen men cast away with the roaring surf to lee of them and their enemies watching upon the hammered beach.

"It blew hard that night," he added. "Somehow she lived through it, but there wasn't a sign of the island when morning came. Nothing but the combers and the flying haze. Guess the wind must have shifted a few points and drove us by the end of it. Then we found Jake had his head laid open by a sealing club. The sea was getting longer, and as we were too played out to hold her to it we got her away before it, and somehow she didn't roll over. I think it was next day, though it might have been longer, when we fetched another island. She just washed up on it, and one of the others pulled me out. There wasn't a sign of anybody on the beach, but there were plenty of skinned holluschackie seals on the slope behind it, and that was fortunate for us."

"You struck nobody on the island?" enquired Wyllard.

"We didn't," said Lewson simply. "The Russians must have sent a vessel to take off the killers after the last drive of the season a day or two before, for the holluschackie were quite fresh, and perhaps it was blowing hard and the surf getting steep, for they'd left quite a few of their things behind them. Anyway, that was how we figured it. We found the shacks the killers lived in, and we made out that winter in one of them."

It occurred to Wyllard that this was a thing very few men except sealers could have done had they been cast ashore without stores or tools to face the awful winter of the north.

"How did you get through?" he asked.

"Well," said Lewson, "we had a rifle, and the ca'tridges weren't spoilt. The killers hadn't taken their cooking outfit, and by and bye we got a walrus in an open lane among the ice. They'd left some gear behind them, but we were most of two days cutting and heaving the beast out with a parbuckle under him. There was no trouble about things keeping in that frost. Besides, we'd the holluschackie blubber to burn, and there was a half-empty bag or two of stores in one of the shacks. No, we hadn't any great trouble in making out."

"You had to stay there until the ice broke up?" said Charly.

"And after. The boat was gone, and we couldn't get away. She broke up in the surf, and we burned what we saved of her. At last a schooner came along, and we hid out across the island until she'd gone away. It was blowing fresh, and hazy, and she just shoved a new gang of killers ashore. There was an Okotsk Russian with them, but he made no trouble for us. He was white, anyway, and it kind of seemed to me he didn't like one of the other men who got hurt that night on the beach."

"Then some of them did get badly hurt?" Wyllard broke in.

Lewson laughed, a little, almost silent laugh, which nevertheless sounded strangely grim.

"Well," he said, "from what that Russian told us – and we got to understand each other by and bye – one of the killers had his ribs broke, and it seems that another would go lame for life. Besides, among other things, there was a white man got his face quite smashed. I saw him after with his nose flattened way out to starboard, and one eye canted. He was a boss of some kind. They called him Smirnoff."

Overweg looked up sharply. "Ah," he said, "Smirnoff. A man with an unsavoury name. I have heard of him."

"Anyway," Lewson went on, "we killed seals all the open season with that Russian, and I've no fault to find with him. In fact, I figure if he could have fixed it he'd have left us on the island that winter, but when a schooner came to take the killers off and collect the skins Smirnoff was on board of her. That" – and an ominous gleam crept into Lewson's eyes – "was the real beginning of the trouble."

"He had us hauled up before him – guess the other man had to tell him who we were – and when I wouldn't answer he slashed me with a sled-dog-whip across the face."

Lewson clenched a lean brown fist. "Yes," he added, hoarsely, "I was whipped – but they should have tied my hands first. It was not my fault I didn't have that man's life. It was most a minute before three of them pulled me off him, and he was considerably worse to look at then."

There was silence for a minute or two, and Wyllard, who felt his own face grow a trifle warm, saw the suggestive hardness in Charly's eyes. Lewson was gazing out into the darkness, but the veins were swollen on his forehead and his whole body had stiffened. Then he spread his hands out.

"We'll let that go. I can't think of it. They put us on board the schooner, and by and bye she ran into a creek on the coast. We were to be sent somewhere to be dealt with, and we knew what that meant, with what they had against us. Well, they went ashore to collect some skins from the Kamtchadales, and at night we cut the boat adrift. We got off in the darkness, and if they followed they never trailed us. Guess they figured we couldn't make out through the winter that was coming on."

So far the story had been more or less connected and comprehensible. It laid no great tax on Wyllard's credulity, and, indeed, all that Lewson described had come about very much as Dampier had once or twice suggested; but it seemed an almost impossible thing that the three men should have survived during the years that followed. Lewson, as it happened, never made that matter very clear. He sat silent for almost a minute before he went on again.

"We hauled the boat out, and hid her among the rocks, and after that we fell in with some Kamtchadales going north," he said. "They took us along, I don't know how far, but they were trapping for furs, and by and bye – I think it was months after – we got away from them. Then we fell in with another crowd, and went on further north with them. They were Koriaks, and we lived with them a long while – a winter and a summer anyway. It was more, perhaps – I can't remember."

He broke off with a vague gesture, and sat looking at the others vacantly with his lean face furrowed.

"We must have been with them two years – but I don't quite know. It was all the same up yonder – ever so far to the north."

It seemed to Wyllard that he had seldom heard anything more expressive in its way than this sailorman's brief and fragmentary description of his life in the wilderness. He had heard from steam whaler skippers a little about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation frozen hard in summer a few inches below the surface, on which nothing beyond the mosses ever grew. It was easy to understand the brain-crushing sameness and monotony of an existence chequered only by times of dire scarcity on those lonely shores.

"How did you live?" he asked.

"There were the birds in summer, and fish in the rivers. In winter we killed things in the lanes in the ice, though there were weeks when we lay about the blubber lamp in the pits. They made pits and put a roof on them. I don't know why we stayed there, but Jake had always a notion that we might get across to Alaska – somehow. We were way out on the ice one day when Jim fell into a crevice, and we couldn't get him out."

He broke off, and sat still awhile as one dreaming. "I can't put things together, but at last we came south, Jake and I, and struck the Kamtchadales again. We could talk to them, and one of them told us about a schooner lying in an inlet by a settlement. The Russians had brought her there from the islands, and she must have been a sealer. Jake figured it was just possible we might run away with her and push across for the Aleutians or Alaska."

Charly looked up suddenly. "She – was – a sealer – Hayson's Seminole. I was in Victoria when we heard that the Russians had seized her."

Wyllard turned to Overweg, who nodded when he asked a question in French.

"Yes," he said, "I believe the vessel lies in the inlet still. They have used her now and then. It is understood that they were warranted in seizing her, but I think there was some diplomatic pressure brought to bear on them, for they sent her crew home."

Then Lewson went on again. "Food was scarce that season, and we got most nothing in the traps," he said. "Besides, there were Russians out prospecting, and that headed us off. We figured that some of the Kamtchadales who traded skins to the settlements would put them on our trail. When we went to look for the boat she'd gone, but we hadn't much notion of getting off in her, though another time – I don't remember when – we gave two Kamtchadales messages we'd cut on slips of wood. Sometimes the schooners stood in along the coast."

Wyllard nodded. "Dunton of the Cypress got your message," he said. "He was in difficulties then, but he afterwards sent it me."

"Well," said Lewson, "there isn't much more to it. We hung about the beach awhile, and then went north before the winter. Jake played out on the trail. By and bye he had to let up, and in a day or two I buried him."

He spread his hands out, and his voice grew hoarse. "After that it didn't seem to matter what became of me, but I kept the trail somehow, and found I couldn't stay up yonder. That's why I started south with some of them before the summer came. Now I'm here – talking English – talking with white men – but it doesn't seem the same as it should have been – without the others."

He broke off, and said no more that night, but Wyllard translated part of his story for the benefit of Overweg. The latter made a little expressive gesture.

"The thing, it seems incredible," he commented. "This man, who has so little to tell, knows things which would make a trained explorer famous."

"It generally happens that way," said Wyllard with a dry smile. "The men who know can't tell."

Overweg made a sign of assent, and then changed the subject.

"What will you do now?"

"Start for the inlet where we expect to find the schooner at sunrise. I want to say" – and Wyllard hesitated – "that you have laid an obligation on me which I can never repay; but I can, at least, replace the provisions you have supplied me with."

"That goes for nothing," said the other with a smile. "I have, however, drawn upon my base camp rather heavily, and should be glad of any stores from the schooner that you could let me have. The difficulty is that I do not wish to go too far towards the beach."

They arranged a rendezvous a day or two's march from the inlet, and in another half-hour all of them were fast asleep.

When the first of the daylight came Wyllard set off with his two companions, and since it was evident that Dampier must have now lain in the inlet awaiting them a considerable time, they marched fast for several days. Then to their consternation they came upon the Siwash lying beside a river badly lame. It appeared that in climbing a slippery ridge of rock the knee he had injured had given way, and he had fallen some distance heavily, after which the Kamtchadale finding him helpless had disappeared with most of the provisions. None of the party ever learned what had become of him, but they realised in the meanwhile that the situation was now a rather serious one. Charly, who looked at Wyllard when he had heard the Indian's story, explained it concisely.

"I'm worrying about the boat we left on the edge of the ice," he said. "I've had a notion all along it was going to make trouble. Dampier would see the wreckage when he ran in, and I guess it would only mean one thing to him. He'd make quite certain he was right when he didn't find us at the inlet." He paused and pointed towards the distant sea. "You have got to push right on with Lewson as fast as you can while I try to bring the Siwash along."