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SYNOPSIS.
Philip Cayley, accused of a crime of
which he Is not guilty, resigns from the
army tn disgrace and his affection for
his friend, Lieut, Perry Hunter, turns to
hatred. Cayley seeks solitude, where he
perfects a flying machine. While soaring
over the Arctic regions, he picks up a
ourlously shaped stick he had seen in the
assassin's hand. Mounting again, he dis
covers a yacht anchored In the bay. De
scending near the steamer, he meets a
flrl on an ice floe. He learns that the
girl's name Is Jeanne Fielding and that
the yacht has come north to seek signs
of her father, Captain Fielding, an arctic
•xplorer.
CHAPTER ll.—Continued.
Cayley could not contradict her,
and he saw there was little need of
trying to do so. She had spoken sim
ply, and very gravely, but it was evi
dent the years had not taken the sting
out of her grief.
“He told you where he was?" he
asked.
“Oh, quite exactly,” she told him;
“he gave us latitude and longitude,
and mapped the coast-line. So you
were wrong, you see, in what you said
about cartographers. And he gave us
the route by which with reasonable
fortune, we might find open water.
We had good fortune and we got here
safely, but, of course, we were too
late. The hut on the shore there is
deserted. We have seen no signs of
life at all. The men have gone ashore
to search, and there is to be a gun-fire
if they find anyone alive. But they
have been out all day and there has
been no sound. You will understand,
I think, though, why I did not want to
sleep tonight in my cabin in the
yacht; why the ice and the dome of
stars seemed better.”
“Yes,” he said, “I understand."
Presently, after a moment’s musing,
he added, “What seems strange to me,
Incomprehensible altogether, is, that
men like your father, and so many
others, should risk and lose their lives
trying to reach the pole.”
“You can’t understand that —” she
questioned surprised, “you, a man
with wings-?”
“I suppose it’s because of the
wings," he answered her. “I slept
there once, early this summer —slept,
and rested, and ate a meal.”
“There— ’ she echoed incredulously.
“Where do you mean?”
“At the pole, or within a half degree
of it —I won’t guarantee my instru
ments, nor my hit-and-miss observa
tions any more accurately than that
■—and it seemed a poor place to risk
one’s life trying to reach. Just the
ice-pack—the eternal ice-pack; noth
ing but that." Then his eyes lighted
a little. “But I should like to go there
some time, in the winter —should like
to fly straight ahead, for hours and
hours, through the long dark, until I
could see the North Star squarely
above my head in the zenith, the cen
ter of all the universe. That would
be a sight worth having, I should
think. Some day, perhaps, I shall try
for it. And then one could go straight
on across—a week or ten days would
do it all—from Dawson City, say, to
St. Petersburg.”
“Dawson City to St. Petersburg!”
she repeated; “only a creature of
wings could put those two cities in
the same sentence, even in imagina
tion. And even with you it must be
imaginary. You couldn’t do it, really
—could you?”
“Yes,” he said; “I could do it.”
“You're tireless, then?” she asked.
“You would go on flying, flying, with
out rest, for a week?”
“I don’t fly,” he told her, “or hardly
at all. The birds don’t fly, not these
great sea birds that live on the wing.
They sail; so do I.”
“But, then, don’t you have to go
with the wind?”
“You’ve sailed a boat, haven’t you?”
he asked byway of answer. “You put
up a sail to catch the breeze, and
then you make it force your boat right
up into it; make your boat go against
the wind, by the force of the wind
itself. That was regarded as a mir
acle once when men first did it.”
“Os course,” she admitted, “but you
do that by tacking.”
“That’s the way I do it —by tacking,
and the force of gravity is my heel.”
“How long have you lived like
this?” she asked abruptly.
“Really lived? Only three months
or so. I spent the better part of five
years learning to fly.”
“And you have flown all over the
world?”
“All over this most deserted patch
of it.”
There was another silence. Then
ehe said: “And what a contempt you
must have for us —for us, poor wing
less creatures, who cannot cross a lit
tle fissure in a rock or a bit of open
water without such toilsome labor.
Yes, that must be the feeling—con
tempt; it could hardly be pity.”
“If that’s true,” he rejoined quickly,
“it’s only poetic justice. I’ve only
achieved toward the world the feeling
which the world held for me.”
The words were spoken harshly,
abruptly, as if his memory had just
tasted something intolerably bitter.
The manner of the words, no less
thap the sense of them startled her,
and she checked a movement to turn
and look into his face. Instead, she
tried to recall It as it had looked
when she had first stood confronting
him, before the twilight had faded.
It was a strange face, as she re
membered it, but this, she reflected,
was probably due to the incongruous
effect of his deeply tanned skin with
his very light sun-bleached hair. A
sensitive face, finely chiseled, almost
beautiful —and young, but with an in
explicable stamp of premature age
upon it. It had not struck her at all
as a tragic face. And yet the mean
ing of those last words of his, uttered
as they were, had been tragic enough.
“At least you have a magnificent re
venge,” was all she said. And then
there was another silence. She her
self was trying to think of something
to say, for she realized that his con
fession had been involuntary, and that
the silence must be distressing him.
But it was he himself who broke
the silence with a natural, matter-of
fact question. “You say a searching
party has set out from the yacht?
Have they been long ashore?”
“They set out only a little after sun
rise. We came into the bay with the
last of yesterday’s twilight, and the
sight of those huts, at the edge of the
shore—” her voice faltered a little,
“nearly made us hope that the impos
sible might prove true. We fired our
signal cannon two or three times and
then sent up some rockets, without
getting any answer. It was too late
to go ashore in the dark; so we had
to wait a few hours for another sun
rise. The few of us who were left
on the yacht expected them back to
day before dark fell. But I suppose
there's nothing to worry about in
their not coming. They went equipped
to pass a night ashore, if necessary.
You don't advise me to begin worry
ing about them, do you?”
He did not answer her question. He
was recalling something which his
amazing meeting with the girl out
here on the ice-floe had, for a little
while, put quite out of his mind —the
weird, silent tragedy he had seen en
acted a few hours before upon the
glacier behind the headland. Th*
victim, the man in the leather coat,
must have been one of the party from
the yacht; but It was impossible that
the little ba»d of his murderers could
be. No one freshly landed from the
yacht would have been dressed as
they were, or would have been armed
with darts.
With no better look at them than
had been possible to him as he hung
above their heads, he had been con
vinced that they were white; certain
ly, the leather-ooated man had been
talking to them, freely enough, in
English. And yet, if white, they must
have been refugees—survivors, if not
of Captain Fielding’s ill-fated expedi
tion, then of some other, tragic, unre
ported ship wreck.
But if they were white men —refu-
gees, why had they fled from their
hut at sight of the yacht which came
bringing a rescue? Why had they
driven that one luckless member of
the rescuing party who fell in with
them, into that carefully prepared am
bush, and then murdered him, silent
ly? Even Eskimos would not have
. done a thing like that.
His long silence had alarmed the
girl, and presently, perceiving that
this was so, he drew himself up with
an affected start. “I beg your par
don. I drifted off, thinking of some
thing else. Living in the sky doesn’t
seem conducive to good manners. No,
I don’t believe there is anything to
worry about. Any way, as soon as
light comes back, which won’t be
long now, I can set at rest any faars
you may have. I’ll go and find your
party, and I’ll search the land, too —
for anything else that may be there.
And then I’ll bring you word.”
“You are very good,” she said with
a little hesitation, “but I can't let
you—”
He interrupted her with a laugh.
“It's nothing difficult that I am pro
posing to do for you, you know.”
“That’s true. I had forgotten your
wings. The rocks, the ice, the steep
places, that mean so tragically much
to them, are nothing at all to you. But
what are you doing now? Even you
can’t find them in the dark.”
He had already begun unstrapping
the bundle he had made of his wings,
and seemed to be preparing for Im
mediate flight. That was what caused
her question.
“No,” he said; “I shall wait for sun
rise.”'
“But why not here, on the yacht?
We can give you a comfortable bed
there; better, certainly, than that
sleeping bag of yours.”
“I am afraid,” he said, “that what
you call a comfortable bed in a yacht's
cabin would be the surest instrument
that could be found for keeping me
awake all night. No, I shall find a
sheltered hollow up at the top of that
headland yonder, where I shall sleep
deeply enough, you may be sure.”
She watched him, silently, while he
slipped the steel-jointed rods into
place, drew the catgut bow strings
taut, until they sang—until the fabric
of his planes shimmed in the starlight
—quivered, as if they were instinct
with a life of their own.
A senae of the unreality of it all
came welling up strongly within her,
and a touch of an almost forgotten
fear of him.
“Good night,” she said, holding out
her hand —“goodby.”
IIIIIIWIMIM Illi 111 r
I a J' ( -LLjSnlTriM !1 J '
Hi i I '
< pl
w > f fsiMt
> “At Least Y*u Have a Magnificent Revenge.”
“Till morning,” he answered.
A little breeze came blowing across
the ice just then. He dropped her
hand quickly, slipped his arms into
their places in the frame, mounted the
ledge of ice, and then, with a short
run, sprang forward into the breeze.
She saw his planes bend a little,
undulate, rather, with a sort of scull
ing motion, as he flew forward, not
far above the level of her head. He
dipped down again as soon as he had
open water beneath him, and almost
skimmed the surface of it. Then,
gathering speed, he began mounting.
She felt curiously alone now that he
was gone; and a little frightened, like
a child just waking out of a dream.
And she blew a small silver whistle
that hung about her neck, for a signal
to the men on the yacht to send a
boat for her.
Then, while she waited, she dropped
down rather limply on her pile of
bear-skins. Her hand found some
thing hard that had not been there be
fore, and taking it up she found that
it was a curious blunt stick of wood,
rudely whittled, and about ten inches
long. It must have fallen from his
belt while he sat there talking to her.
She wondered what he used it for.
CHAPTER 111.
The Murderers.
Two men clad in bear-skins were
shuffling rapidly along across the
glacier. Dawn was already flooding
the arctic sky with its amazing riot
of color —rose, green-gold, violet, and
the ice beneath their feet was rose
color with misty blue shadows in it.
The foremost of the two wayfarers
was a man of gigantic stature, six
and a halt feet tall and of enormous
girth of chest; yet, somehow, despite
his size and the ungainly clothes he
wore, he contrived to preserve an air
almost of lightness; of lean, compact
U if J S
i™ 1 itoi LA*!
jr
I
Strode On With Unabated Pace, as Though He Had Not Heard.
athleticism, certainly. A stranger,
meeting him anywhere and contem
plating his formidable proportions,
and then looking up past his great,
blunt jaw into his cold, light blue,
choleric eyes, would be likely to shiv
er a little and then get out of his way
as soon as possible.
He was walking steadily, glancing
neither to the right nor the left. Even
over the treacherous, summer-glazed
surface of the glacier, his great stride
carried him along at a pace which his
companion found it difficult to keep up
with. Besides, this companion made
his task the harder by allowing his
eyes to wander from the track they
were following, and casting little fur
tive, anxious glances at the man be
side him. In any other company he
would have been a rather striking fig
ure himself, well above middle height,
powerfully made, and with a face that
had lines of experience and determina
tion engraved In it. But the com
parison dwarfed him.
He seemed to be trying to make up
his mind to speak, and still to find
this a difficult thing to do.
At last, with a deprecatory cough,
he began:
“What I can’t see is, Roscoe, what
you did it for. It was all right to
do it if you were figuring out any gain
from it. We'll all agree to that. Any
thing for our common good, that’s our
motto. But where’s the gain in kill
ing just one poor fellow out of a party
of 30? He seemed a good kind of
chap, too, and friendly spoken. We
didn’t serve you like that, when you
come aboard the Walrus at Cape
Nome.”
“It would have cost you four men
to do it, Planck, and you were short
handed as it was.”
“That wasn’t why we didn't do it.
You was a stranger, and you was in a
bad way. There was a mob of men
that wanted you mighty bad, and we
gave you shelter and carried you off
and made you a regular sharin' mem
ber of the crew. Os course if we’d
had any reason to act contrary, we’d
have done so. And that’s why it
seemed to us —to me, I would say,
that you probably had some reason
In this case, here. And, well —we’d
like to know what it is.”
Rut the man he had addressed as
"Roscoe” strode on with unabated
pace, as if he had not heard. For any
attention he paid to his questioner he
might have been alone in that ex
panse of ice and sky.
Planck accepted the silent rebuff as
if It had been only what he had ex
pected, but he sighed regretfully. He
had once known, and it was only four
years ago, that same swaggering trick
of contemptuous authority himself.
He had been master, the most tyran
nical sort of master, some say, to be
found anywhere in the world; the
captain of an American whaler. And
this very man, at whose heels he was
scrambling along over the ice, had
be*n one of his crew; had never ap
proached the quarter-deck where he
reigned supreme, without an apolo
getic hand at his forelock, and had
always passed to the leeward side of
him up on the deck.
But the Walrus had been destined
never to see port again. She lingered
too long on the whaling grounds to
get back through Behring strait that
fall; and failed in the attempt to
make McKenzie bay, where other
whalers in similar plight put in for the
winter. Instead of this friendly har
bor, she was caught in the pack and
carried, relentlessly, north and west
ward. The milling pressure of great
masses of ice crushed in her stout
hull, so that the open water they had
been hoping for, became, at once,
their deadliest peril. The moment the
ice broke away, she would go to the
bottom like a plummet.
But still the slow, irresistible drift
of the ice-pack carried them north and
west Into a latitude and longitude
which, so far as they knew, no human
travelers had ever crossed before.
And then in the depth of the arctic
night, bereft of hope, and half mutin
ous, they found a land that never had
been charted, and, most marvelous of
all, a human welcome. For here on
the shore were Captain Fielding and
the two other survivors of his ill
fated expedition.
The fate of the explorer’s ship had
been, it seemed, precisely that of the
Walrus. She had been caught in the
pack, crushed in it and carried against
this coast. Before the coming of
spring, and with it the breaking of
the ice, Fielding and his men had been
able to carry their stores ashore, and
of these, the greater part still re
mained.
Os the Walrus people, in all, there
were 11, and these, with the three
original castaways, settled down to
the prospect of an indefinite number
of years upon that nameless coast.
“We can live like Christians," Cap
tain Fielding had said, "and we can
always hope."
His superior knowledge of arctic
conditions made him, rather than Cap
tain Planck, naturally commander of
the little company. He established
the regimen of their life, doled out
the store from day to day, and, as
best he could, through that long win
ter night, provided entertainment for
the forlorn little group. He told them
of his explorations on the coast, of the
lay of the land, of what they might
hope to see when the sun should
come back to them, marking the be
ginning of another long arctic day.
Among other things, quite casually
he told them of a ledge in the hills,
across the glacier, which contained,
he believed, the most extraordinary
deposit of gold in the world. So in
credibly rich was it, that the rock
itself had almost been replaced by
solid metal. The Alaska gold, he said,
was only the sweepings, in his opin
ion, of this immense sto,re.
At the sound of the word “gold," the
eyes of the man named Roscoe had
brightened for the first time since
they had taken him, shivering from
his long immersion in the cold water,
aboard the Walrus. He drew into the
circle that sat about the reading lamp,
and began asking questions. Gold was
something he knew about. He had
mined it in Australia, in California,
and in the Klondike. He questioned
Captain Fielding about the exact
whereabouts of the ledge, about the
sort of ore it occurred in, and about
the best means of cutting it out.
To some extent his own excitement
infected the others. Even Captain
Planck, whose only well-understood
form of wealth was whale blubber, be
gan to take an interest in Roscoe’s
questions and In the explorer’s an
swers to them.
It was a strange and rather pathetic
sort of excitement. Captain Fielding
thought. To them, in their practical
ly hopeless plight, gold was about the
least useful thing they could find; not
hard enough to tip lances or arrows
with, too heavy and too easily melted
for domestic purposes. However, it
gave them something to think about,
and he, without a suspicion of the
sinister direction in which these .
thoughts might turn, went on and told ‘
them all he knew.
When, after a period of tantalizing
twilight, the sun again came fairly
over the horizon, they besought their
commander, with a savage sort of
eagerness from which he might have
augured ill, that he take them at
once to the ledge. They had caught
sight of it from a distance, even as
Cayley had done, hung in the air
above the valley, and had run reck
lessly on ahead of their leader. When
he came up to them, he found them
dangerously excited, the man Rosco*
fairly dazed and drunken with it.
Finally Fielding had left them to
their own devices, and came away
with his two companions. And until
the light of that short day had begun
to fail, they—the Walrus people-—
stayed, gloating over this strangely
useless treasure.
For three days after that the man
Roscoe never spoke a word. On the
fourth day, when the little party as
sembled for their mid-day meal, the 11
men of the Walrus were the only
ones to answer the summons. Cap
tain Fielding and his two companions
had disappeared.
Captain Planck could not recall that
meal now without shuddering, for
there at the foot of the table, oppo
site to him, had sat the man Roscoe,
with murder written plain in every
line of his face. He had looked a
beast, rather than a man, that day.
The sated blood lust in his eyes made
them positively terrifying, so that the
others shrank away from him. He
had seemed not to notice it, at least
not to take offense at it. He was in
hilarious spirits for the first time
since they had known him; seemed
really to try to be a good companion.
Captain Planck abdicated his lead
ership that day. He was perfectly
conscious of the fact. He had known
that to retain the leadership he must
take that murderer out and execute
him. He knew that if he did not do
this, the murderer, not he, would here
after command the party, and that
unless he himself yielded the prompt
est obedience of any, he would follow
the luckless trio whom they were
never to see again.
From that day to this there had
been no more murders. Roscoe had
ruled them with a decision and a
truculence which put anything like
insubordination out of the question.
He had been obeyed better than Cai*
tain Planck ever had been. He had
worked them fiercely all those four
years, cutting, everlastingly, at that
wonderful, exhautless golden ledge,
beating the friable ore out of it with
heavy mauls, then, laboriously, con
veying the great rude slabs of pure
metal on rough sledges over the per
petual ice of the glacier to a cave
near the shore, where they had de
posited it. There were literally tons
of it hidden there when the smoke
from the yacht’s funnel was first seen
on the horizon.
The moment the news of the ap
proaching steamer was reported to
Roscoe, he had entered upon what
seemed to his followers a thoroughly
Irrational and inexplicable line of ac
tion. He had ordered them, first, to
remove all signs of recent habitation
from the hut to the cave where their
gold was concealed; then, to cover the
cave mouth with a heap of boulders,
to secure it against discovery.
Long before the strongest glass on
the ship could have made out their
moving figures, he took the whole
party back to the hills in hiding. He
had kept them from answering the
hails and the gun-fire from the yacht
by the sheer weight of his authority,
without vouchsafing a word of expla
nation.
The next day they had seen the
searching party come ashore, and with
their knowledge of the lay' of the
land found it perfectly easy to evade
observation, though nothing but the
strong habit of obedience kept them
from courting it.
Then, along in the afternoon, had
happened what seemed to them the
strangest thing of all. They had seen
a solitary straggler from the search
ing party coming along across the
ice. He could not see them. It would
have been perfectly easy to evade
him, but Roscoe now ordered them
to go down to him and tell him who
they were, and to offer to escort him
along the trail down the glacier. And
at a certain point they were to lag
behind and let him go on alone. That
was all any of them knew of their
leader’s plans, till they saw the flying
dart and the smudge of crimson on
the snow. <
Now, at last, came Planck to th*
leader, asking the reason why. But
his mission, as it appeared, had not
prospered.
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
Progressive Farming.
"Well, yes,” confessed Honest
Farmer Hornbeak, the while a grim
grin wrinkled hUs weather-beaten
complexion. “It’s e good ’eal &
trouble, but the satisfaction I feel am
ply repays me for the extry work. Y*
see, by degrees I’m sharpenin’ up th*
top of every stump on the place, and
in the course o’ time I hope to have
matters so arranged that the hired
man will find it fully as comfortable
to stand up Curin’ the day as to set
down.”—Puck.
