Ike was sampling his soup, so failed to notice her agitation. Taking a deep draught from the tin can, he then wiped his lips on his jacket sleeve, and proceeded to answer her questions.
“Oh, he died real game. I always said he was a lad of parts, only the trouble was he’d got such a lot of misdirected energy that it was bound to get him into trouble sooner or later. He’d got two pals, one was his father, the veriest old hypocrite that ever drew breath, and the other was a chap they called Doss Umpey, a pretty good match for Brunsen senior by all accounts. A long time ago, when I was a young man, they two and an Irishman named Logan were up to no end of law-breaking, smuggling across the border, setting up coaches, and all that sort of thing; then Logan got pinched, and the other two turned virtuous, or pretended to.”
Nell nodded. So much of Doss Umpey’s past she already knew from Mrs. Nichols, but she was wondering what fresh revelations were to be made by Ike, or what he would say if she were to tell him that she had lived so long at the Lone House with the old man, believing him to be really her grandfather, and not merely the stepfather of her mother.
Ike had paused for another draught of soup; when it was swallowed he went on with his story.
“It seems that when we lifted Master Dick out of that Chinaman’s coffin, where you’d chained him up so secure, and he had paid back that little lump of dollars out of which he had cheated us, he and the two old chaps tracked off to Nelson, and worked there for awhile, with the eyes of the police on them all the time. Then suddenly they disappeared, and when next they were heard of, it was at Skeena, and they were giving it out that they had struck it rich on the shores of the Babine Lake, an uncertain number of miles from Skeena, and in a district pretty thickly sprinkled with Tacla Indians.”
“But Skeena is very cold, isn’t it?” asked Nell, thinking how Doss Umpey used to grumble about the cold during the long winters on Blue Bird Ridge.
“Rayther nippy, but it doesn’t count for much if you’ve wintered at Klondike, as I have,” replied Ike, taking another pull at the soup, which nearly emptied the can.
Nell shivered. She had the feeling of wanting to pull the information out of him, but Ike was not the sort of man to be hurried over any story he had to tell, so she was forced to wait patiently, and let him go his own way.
“There was a man stopping at Carter’s—he was working at Cate’s shipyard just then, but he had been in Skeena a month before, and had left the day after the thing happened,” went on Ike.
“What happened?” asked Nell, with a little stamp of her foot, for his slowness of narration thoroughly exasperated her.