Chapter 10 ON THE YUKON

To follow the trail of the outlaw of the air for the first four days was but to trace out his sled-tracks in a wilderness that was trackless save for the footprints of caribou, wolf and bear. But once he had reached the Yukon, all this was changed. There were three trails to choose from. Which had he taken? The one to the left which led up the river, the one to the right, down the river; or the one which led straight before them up one of the branches of the mighty Yukon? The last trail, less traveled than the others, led away toward the Arctic Ocean.

"He may have taken the down-river trail, for that would carry him farther and farther from communication with the outside world," said Jennings, as he searched in vain to distinguish his track from those of scores of other travelers.

"Might have taken the up-river trail," he went on. "He'd be in some danger of getting caught by a message sent on ahead but since the telegraph wires are down the message would have to be sent by radiophone, so he could listen in and take up some branch and over the hills if he needed to."

"You don't think he'd go straight ahead, up the branch?" said Curlie.

"Why should he?" the miner looked at him in surprise. "Up that trail for fifty or a hundred miles you'll find Indian huts and miners' cabins here and there. After that you'll find nothing but a blind trail that grows steeper and steeper. There's no food to be had save wild game and little enough of that. Why should he go up there?"

"Might run up there for a blind and live with an Indian for a time."

"If he did we'd trap him like a rabbit in a hollow stump!" declared the miner emphatically.

"Well, since we don't know which way to go and it is getting dark," suggested Joe, "I move that we make camp right here."

This suggestion was acted upon and some two hours later Curlie might have been seen nodding over his radiophone boxes. His companions were fast asleep but he had remained up with the receiver clamped over his head in the rather forlorn hope that the outlaw would let slip some fragment of message which might reveal his whereabouts.

"Fact is," he told himself, "that in spite of all the evidence against it, I still have a sneaking feeling that the Whisperer is a real person, a girl, and that she's up here somewhere in the white wilderness. I-I sort of hope that sooner or later she'll whisper some more secrets to me."

In this hope, for the night at least, he was doomed to disappointment. No whispered secrets came to him from out the air.

A message came, however, a message which set his mind at work. He had fallen quite asleep when he was suddenly wakened by a voice in his ear. He recognized at once the voice of the government official who had dictated that other message regarding the band of smugglers caught operating on Behring Straits.

The message itself to him was unimportant, or at least for the time it seemed so. It gave more definite details of the evidence procured and stated one fact that was most important: The big man, the one higher up, the brains of the smugglers, had not been apprehended. Indeed, it was not even known who he was. It was thought that he might be at this moment in Alaska, but where? This question could not be answered.

The message had proceeded to this point. Curlie had maintained a drowsy interest in it, when he sat up with a sudden start, all awake.

The message had been broken in upon by a powerful sending set which was much nearer to Curlie than was that of the government man.

"Got-gotta get him," he mumbled as his slim fingers caressed his radio-compass coil.

"There! Got him! That's it!"

He was not a moment too soon, for not only had the message ceased but the interruption as well.

"Huh!" he grunted, scratching his head. "Huh! Up there. Wouldn't have believed it. Why, good gracious, it can't be! Yet I couldn't have missed it. How that man travels! Two hundred miles! And no trail to speak of. Probably none at all."

For a moment he sat in a brown study. Then he suddenly shook his fist toward the north.

"We'll get you now, old boy!" he exclaimed. "We'll get you! You're breaking trail for us. We'll follow that trail if it takes us right out on the ice-floes of the Arctic and we'll get you, just as Jennings says, like a rabbit in a hollow tree. That is," he said more soberly, "if there doesn't come a heavy snow."

The man, so the radio-compass had said, had taken the trail which led straight away toward the Arctic Ocean.

Then for a long time Curlie sat staring at the knob of his tuner. He did not see the knob. He did not see anything. He was concentrating, reasoning, thinking hard, trying to put a lot of facts together and make them fit.

So the master-mind of the smugglers had not been caught. What if the outlaw of the air proved to be that man. Why might he not? That would explain why he was so continually breaking in upon the message regarding it.

"And that," he whispered, leaping to his feet and dashing out of the tent in his excitement, "that would explain why he appears so eager to frustrate all of Munson's plans to keep in touch with the outside world by radiophone. Munson assisted in breaking up the smuggler band. If the outlaw is their leader, there is nothing he would not do to wreak revenge.

"And-and"-he breathed hard because of the thoughts that came trooping into his mind mind-"that might explain the man's change of plans. The very night that Munson sent his message telling of his supply of food on the shore of the ocean this outlaw, who probably listened in, turned about and started straight north, to-to where?"

Dashing back into the tent, he unfolded a map. For a moment with strained attention he studied it.

When he straightened up it was to whisper, "Yes, sir! That's it! Flaxman Island! His present course will bring him straight to Flaxman Island and Munson's food supply."

He sat down again. "Now," he asked himself, "once he arrives there, what will he do? Will he winter there, living upon the explorer's supplies and thus save himself from prison, or will he, out of revenge, destroy the supplies? If he stays and lives on the supplies, what will happen if Munson comes ashore with his band? Huh, some interesting problems there!"

"Interesting and foolish," he told himself as he dropped into another mood. "All imagination, I guess. Suppose there's nothing to it. Probably he's not the king of smugglers at all, but just a plain mischief-maker of the air. When he caught Joe's message to me, that night when we fought the wolves, he knew he was being pursued and turned back. Now he's hiding out till the storm blows over. Possibly knows where there is a native reindeer herder up there at the end of the stream and over the hills!

"Well, old top," he again shook his fist toward the north, "you might just as well come out of your hole. The storm isn't going to blow over. Your little cabin of false dreams is going to be wrecked by it, and that before many days."