"But I've captured the murderer!" La Marr exclaimed in triumph. "I've got Avic, the Eskimo, hard and fast in the guard room. Come and see."
With interest the sergeant followed the lead of the one and only man in his command.
The native had been squatted on the floor with his back against the wall near a stove, the sides of which glowed like a red apple. On their entry, he rose muttering in gutturals that meant nothing to the constable. Seymour gave one glance of recognition, then turned.
"You've got a murderer, sure enough, La Marr," he said with that slowness of speech so seldom accelerated as to be an outstanding characteristic. "But his name's not Avic and by no possibility could he have had anything to do with the killing of O'Malley."
"Then who the hell——," the constable began.
"This is Olespe of the Lady Franklin band. For three weeks he's been my prisoner. On the sled out there are the remains of the wife he killed in an attack of seal-fed jealousy."
The chagrin of Constable La Marr was written in gloom across a face so lately aglow.
CHAPTER II
THE ESKIMO WAY
Grim, indeed, had been Sergeant Seymour's sledded return to his detachment. For more than two hundred miles across the frozen tundra he had driven his ghastly load—the murdered woman wrapped in deer skins after the native custom, sewed up in a tarp and lashed to a komatik, the Labrador sled that gives such excellent service on cross-country runs. All this, that the inquest which the Dominion requires, regardless of isolation, might be held in form and the case against the uxoricide assured.