Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 64: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

62 “By the Doom!” exploded Wayne, rush- ing up with the rest. “It’s Richelieu’s work. The shamming skunk! Too cold for him to go into the forest! Too far to walk, eh? Condemnation, he’s been biding his time, just waiting his chance, Carlisle, and I’ve given it to him.” “But where under the dome of heaven does he hope to hide, Paul?” demanded Andrews breathlessly. Carlisle was reading the signs. He saw where Burning Cloud had been standing upon a drift, the toes of his snow-shoes pointing forestward, no doubt staring at the distant glare of the funeral pyre and listen- ing to the death chant of his people when he was struck down by a blow from behind. His rifle and snow-shoes were gone, and Carlisle, bent double as he scanned the crust, nosed about like a hound to find the tracks of the shoes striking out from the muddle of prints about the gateway. They were the long, slim shoes of the Cree runner. There had been no others like them near Fort Wayne that day, and pres- ently Carlisle discovered where they had struck the softer snows in a scent-breaking, fifteen-foot jump out from the packed area about the entrance. “No weak man’s jump, that!’ he pointed out to the rest. ‘‘And those strides aren’t the strides of a weak man, either!’’ He indicated the marks of Richelieu’s shoes where the Northwester had run upon the tracks he and Joan had made in coming over from Cumberland House. It was plain that Richelieu’s purpose had been to con- fuse trails and throw any tracker off the scent, but Carlisle was never at fault. He skimmed rapidly ahead, Joan glid- ing at his side, Wayne and Andrews keep- ing their distance farther back but equally anxious to see the results of the trailing. The tracks led straight toward the Cree bivouacs, toward the snow-walled quadran- gles glowing pink under the blazing fires within. “He’s hiding in the teepees somewhere, Joan,” breathed Carlisle, “waiting till the woods are clear. You’d better drop back. He’s armed, and he’ll likely shoot on sight.’ Then Carlisle’s shoes struck the snow- banked side of the end quadrangle, sending the flakes hissing into the fire, and instan- taneously the truth struck home to him. There had not been a hunter or asquawin the whole camp to menace or alarm a pillager. Adventure Soaring Eagle’s dogs, the splendid one- hundred-and-fifty-pound Hudson’s Bays, the swiftest dogs in Carlisle’s district, the animals no other post team could pretend to overtake, were gone from their former place by the fire. Soaring Eagle’s up-ended cariole, too, was gone, and yonder was the white furrow of it streaking off in the direction that led up the Saskatchewan. “Escaped!”? breathed Joan. “But be careful, Paul. Maybe-he has spread the plague here as he tried to do once be- fore!”’ “No, thank Heaven, his tracks don’t go any farther than this fire. He hadn’t time to enter the main bivouac, you see, Joan. It took him all his time to get the harness on those five big brutes and get away. He has barely done it, for the cariole furrow hasn’t yet hardened in the frost!” CHAPTER XII THE SORCERY OF SPRING VWs waning they sensed first in the flutter of ptarmigan flocks back from the Takipi Hills, in the drift of the phantom caribou herds down from the Barren Lands, in the lengthening days, the receding horizon which drew away into in- finite remoteness, the rampant winds which snow-smoked that far horizon but died in a strange vacuum over the bosom of Pine Island Lake itself. All about Cumberland House the North- ern world burned incandescent, lurid, shot through and through, earth, air and sky, with weird shafts of color. The snows were billowy seas of coral with the bloody sun- sets lying on them like islands of rubies. The atmosphere was a mystic veil, today a shower of diamond dust, tomorrow a sil- ver vapor, the next day the gossamer cloak of a sleeping glacier chrysoberyl-stained upon a web of hoar frost. And sheer from the dome of heaven to the line of the snows banked the deep purple clouds, like regal hangings in an ancient temple with the mock suns peering through as eyes of the priests of the sacrifice were wont to peer. Yet there came no vernal transition, no slow travail of nature bringing forth new life. Only the purple tapestries and the peering eyes dissolved one day, and in their place floated turquoise skies and cirrous COnnicloookxs (C@