"Ugh—yes," grunted the Eskimo, seemingly undisturbed.
The young constable was puzzled by the prisoner's demeanor. He stared at the man, whose stolid expression was heightened by thick lips and high cheek-bones. Perhaps the native did not know he was in the hands of the police and on his way to pay for the dreadful crime.
Raising his parkee, La Marr disclosed the scarlet tunic which he wore underneath. It was the color of authority in the far North; no Eskimo who ever had seen it before could doubt it.
There was no gleam of intelligence in the dark eyes that stared from behind narrow, reddened lids. There dawned upon the constable a possibility. The Eskimo was snow blind under the curse of the Northland winter which falls alike to native and outlander, at times. That would explain his back-tracking. Rather than wander in circles over the white blanketed tundra until a miserable death came to his rescue, he was hurrying back, while a glimmer of sight yet remained, to take his chances with the mystery called "Law."
"Not a bad choice," thought La Marr as he stepped out ahead to break the trail that the night's blizzard had covered.
After locking his prisoner in the tiny guard room, a part of the one-story frame structure that sheltered the small detachment, the constable started for the post of the Arctic Trading Company a few hundred yards away. He was young, La Marr, and pleased with himself over his first capture of importance. He anticipated satisfaction in discussing the arrest with Harry Karmack, the only other white man at Armistice now that Oliver O'Malley had passed out.
But he did not get across the yard.
The report of a rifle from down the frozen river, which flowed north, halted him. He saw a dog team limping in over the crust, unmistakably the detachment's own bunch of malamutes. The man at the gee-pole could be none other than Sergeant Seymour, returned at last from the long Arctic patrol.
Here was a vastly more important auditor for his triumph. He sprang forward to offer salute and greetings and to help with the malamutes, for an Eskimo dog team always arrives with a flourish that is exciting and troublesome.
Once the animals were off to their kennels and before Seymour fairly had caught his breath from the last spurt into camp, the young constable was blurting out the details of Oliver O'Malley's untimely end.