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"There's no use of feeling your pulse any more, Pelly. The fever's got you. You're sure out of your head." He spoke cheerfully, trying to bring a smile to the other's pale face. Pelliter dropped back with a sigh. "No there isn't any use feeling my pulse," he repeated. "It isn't sickness, Bill not sickness of the ordinary sort. It's in my brain that's where it is.
For he had been a traitor to the Law. He realized that. He could tell the story, with its fictitious ending, before they set out for Churchill, where he would give evidence against Bucky Smith. Meanwhile he would watch Pelliter, and wait for him to reveal whatever he might have hidden from him.
"That was a close one!" He sat down and looked at Blake. He knew that the man was dead. Kazan was sniffing about the sailor's head with stiffened spines. And then a ray of light flashed for an instant through the window. It was the sun the second time that Pelliter had seen it in four months. A cry of joy welled up from his heart. But it was stopped midway.
For a moment Billy waited, his hand on the door, to give the watching Eskimos time to turn their attention toward Pelliter. He could perhaps have counted fifty before he gave Kazan the leash and the six dogs dragged the sledge out into the night.
It shone a dull gold in the gray light that came through the window. He raised his eyes, terrible in their accusation of the man opposite him. "You lie!" he said. "She's not an Eskimo!" Blake had half risen, his great hands clutching the ends of the table, his brutal face thrust forward, his whole body in an attitude that sent Pelliter back out of his reach. He was not an instant too soon.
We might give her up, then fight it out, but that means she'd go back to the Eskimos, 'n' mebbe never be found again. The men and dogs out there are bushed. We are fresh. If we can get away from the cabin we can beat 'em out." "We'll run, then," said Pelliter.
From Pelliter's bunk Little Mystery looked at the strange visitors with eyes which suddenly widened with surprise and joy, and in another moment she had given the strange story that Pelliter or Billy had ever heard her utter. Scarcely had that cry fallen from her lips when one of the Eskimos sprang toward her.
"I believe that woman was Little Mystery's mother," Pelliter went on. "She couldn't bear to leave the little kid when she went with Blake, so she took her along. Some women do that. And after a time she died. Then Blake took up with an Eskimo woman. You know what happened after that. We don't want Little Mystery to know all this when she grows up. It's better not.
"Eskimo squaw," said Blake, producing a black pipe. "The cap'n bought her to keep me company paid four sacks of flour an' a knife to her husband up at Wagner Inlet. Got any tobacco?" Pelliter rose to get the tobacco. He was surprised to find that he was steadier on his feet and that Blake's words were clearing his brain.
Seventeen days after he left Churchill he came to the edge of the big Barren. For two days he swung westward, and early in the forenoon of the third looked out over the gray waste, dotted with moving caribou, over which he and Pelliter had raced ahead of the Eskimos with little Isobel. He went to the cabin first and entered.
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