“Hurrah! you’re right!” yelled Tom as he too caught sight of two sledges just topping a distant ridge. “Come on!”
Yelling and shouting, the boys raced forward as fast as the newly fallen snow would permit. As they gained the summit of the second hill, they waved their arms wildly. But they were already seen. The dogs wheeled, the sleds swung around, and with the two drivers riding the runners, they came racing towards the boys.
As they came near Tom and Jim looked at each other in surprise. The dogs, they knew, were not the Eskimos’. One team was made up of huge black and white Newfoundlands, the other of shaggy-haired, magnificent, cream-colored huskies. At the boys’ first glance they were sure the men were utter strangers.
“Hello!” cried the foremost man as his sledge, drawn by the Newfoundlands, came to a halt close to the boys. “What you kids doing out here?”
“We got separated from our party and lost,” explained Tom. “Our dogs broke away and cleared out. You’re from the Ruby aren’t you?”
That any other white men should be here had never occurred to the boys, and yet the men did not look like whalemen or sailors. One was clad in a gay Mackinaw, the other in furs; both were large, powerfully built fellows and both had an alert, erect, peculiar bearing that was very different from any whalemen the boys had even seen. The man in the Mackinaw was lean-jawed, with keen gray eyes and wore a close-cropped mustache, while the other was smooth-faced. Although both were as red as Indians from wind and weather and had a week’s stubble of beard upon their faces, they wore an indefinable stamp of authority about them.
The boys remembered that Captain Edwards had said the Ruby was a Nova Scotia ship, and as they had never seen Nova Scotia seamen, they thought the men before them might be the officers of the brigantine.
But at Tom’s words the man with the mustache laughed pleasantly.
“Well, hardly!” he replied. “I’ve been taken for most everything, but never for a sealer before. No, we’re just ordinary Northwest Police. I’m Sergeant Manley and this chap”—jerking his head towards his comrade—“is Private Campbell. We’re from Fort Churchill. Been mushing it for two weeks. Looking for the darkest-dyed rascal that ever disgraced the Dominion. Fellow named Pierre Jacquet—Chippewa half-breed. Wanted for murder and with a thousand dollars reward for him, dead or alive. Haven’t seen anything of him, have you?”
Tom shook his head. “No,” he replied. “But say, Sergeant, we found a dead man back there. He’d been killed by a bear or something. He was awful! His head smashed in and torn to pieces! Gee, it makes me feel sick to think of him.”