Chapter 9 WHO IS THIS WHISPERER

"What does it mean?" puzzled Joe, as Curlie reported the Whisperer's message. "Did he listen in last night when I was calling for help? And was he frightened by that?"

"Might have," said Curlie, "but anyway you couldn't help that. You were in a mess and had to be helped out."

For a moment the two boys were silent. Then Curlie spoke again:

"Might not be that at all. I listened in on a message last night. It was from Munson, the explorer. It was not broken in upon as his others have been. There may have been something in that message which caused the outlaw to turn back."

"Well, anyway," he exclaimed, "whatever the cause is, we'll go out and after them the first thing after dawn. Is everything all right; sled fixed and dogs doctored up?"

"Everything's fine as silk."

"All right then, let's have some chow. After that we'll turn in. Luck doesn't go with any one person forever. Why, even to-morrow we might catch up with our outlaw friend."

"Hardly that," smiled Joe. "We've got forty or fifty miles of unbroken trail to make before we really get on the scent at all. By that time, traveling on a hard-packed trail as he is, he'll have a big lead on us. There are probably forks and crosses in the trail a hundred miles or so farther on, so we've got a real task ahead of us. We'll have to be sly as foxes to catch him now."

"I suppose that's so," Curlie sighed, "but we'll get him, see if we don't."

"Say!" exclaimed Joe suddenly, "who is this whispering friend of yours anyway?"

"Don't know," said Curlie, scratching his head.

"Ever seen her?"

"I don't know."

"How's she come to be traveling with this man anyway?"

"Can't say."

"Mighty queer, I'd say."

"I'd say as much myself. Queer and interesting. I may as well admit that I am as much interested in coming up with the Whisperer as I am in catching this outlaw."

"Well, we won't do either if we don't eat and turn in," said Joe as he reached for the frying pan.

Joe's prophecy that they would not at once catch up with the man they sought, proved correct. The first two days they struggled forward through soft snow, over a trackless wilderness. Then they came upon the campsite of the outlaw, his last camping place before he turned back.

To Curlie this was a thrilling moment. It was the first earthly sign he had ever seen of this strange pair, the outlaw and the Whisperer. Heretofore he had followed only the trackless trail of the air. Now he had footprints of a man and of many dogs to go by. The mark of the camp, though three days old, was as fresh as if it had been abandoned but two hours before. There had been no snowfall. There was never a breath of wind in that forest.

"As long as his trail is not joined by any other," Jennings told the boys, "we can follow it with our eyes shut. We could do that three months from now. There might be four feet of snowfall, but on top of it all there would be the depression made in the first two feet of snow. There is never any wind to move the snow about, so there's your trail carved in the snow, permanent as marble till the spring thaw comes."

"But when he comes to the Yukon River trail?" suggested Curlie.

"Well, that's going to be harder." The miner wrinkled his brow. "But we'll find a way to track him-the way he hitches his dogs, track of his sled. There's always something if you are sharp enough to see it."

Curlie examined the marks of the camp very carefully. It was evident that the man knew as much about making an Arctic camp as did Jennings. The square made by the tent floor showed that he had spread down a canvas floor and the heaps of spruce twigs tossed all about told that he had bedded the place down before he spread out his blankets or sleeping-bags.

"Two teams," was Jennings' comment, "and eight or nine dogs to the team. Fine big fellows too. Shouldn't wonder if they were Siberian wolf hounds."

One thing Curlie made a secret search for: footprints. There were enough of one sort. The broad marks of a man's foot clad in moccasins or Eskimo skin-boots were everywhere present. What he sought was the mark of a smaller foot, a much smaller foot, the foot of the Whisperer. But though he examined every square yard of trampled ground around the camp, and though he ran ahead of the dogs for two miles after resuming the trail, he saw no trace of a woman's footprint.

"Looks like he drove one dog team and led the other," he told himself. "Looks as if-"

For the first time he began to doubt the existence of the Whisperer.

"Can it be," he asked himself, "that the outlaw and the Whisperer are one? Does he change his voice and pretend to give me tips when he is in reality only leading me on?"

In his mind he went back over the times when the Whisperer had broken in on the silence of the night. There had been those two times when he had been listening in at the Secret Tower Room, back there in the city (told about in "Curlie Carson Listens In"). There had been two times when he had caught her whisper out over the sea.

"That time," he told himself, "she told me he had gone north. Why should this man keep me informed of his own doings? He ought to know that I'd report it; that someone would follow him if I didn't.

"No," he told himself, "there must be a real Whisperer. The girl must exist. She's somewhere up there on the trail ahead of us. And yet," he reasoned, "if she is there, where are her tracks?"

Again he began convincing himself that she did not exist, that it was all a hoax invented by the mind of this clever outlaw. The more he thought of it the more sure he became that this was true. The more sure he became of it the more his anger grew.

"To be shamed, to be tricked, deceived, buncoed by the man you are pursuing!" he exploded. "That is adding insult to injury!"

With the plain trail stretching straight out before them, they now traveled far into the night, traveled until dogs and men were ready to drop. Only then did they turn to the right of the trail and set their weary muscles to the task of making camp.