Of course, he meant to carry on until he had the man who would have kidnapped Moira O'Malley, except for the enactments of the snows. But why go back to Moira? This cousin was of a different type. Beautiful, to be sure, but not his sort of beauty—not the sort that thrilled and held him. He stopped ruminating with a jerk. Almost had he forgot——
Most puzzling of all was that "Bart said you were coming." Who did she think he was, anyway? That she had made a faulty surmise of some sort was evidenced by the fact that she still held the crook at his assumed sergeancy value.
As for the rest of the message, nothing would please him better than to accept the strangely sent invitation to call. It would mean getting in touch with Moira quicker than he could hope to do if he continued his incognito role in the camp.
Seymour turned his attention for some time, then, to an intensive study of the blue print map of the district which he had purchased at the surveyor's office on riding into Gold that morning. His hope was to find a way toward the creeks after nightfall without asking questions.
His morning course to the point where he had overtaken the boyish-looking rider was easily traced, and thence into town. Working back, he found the trail over which Ruth Duperow had come and followed that to the mouth of Glacier Creek. Evidently the girl, for some reason, had taken a roundabout course that morning, for he found that a more direct trail to town followed the Cheena. His acquaintance with the Indian tongue was sufficient to spare him the map-maker's mistake of adding the word river to a name that really included it in the "na" suffix.
From such detail as was drawn into the map, he judged that Glacier was not much of a creek. It appeared to start in a nest of glaciers and to flow through a cañon as from the neck of a bottle. Between the Cheena and the cañon was drawn a square with a legend, "Indian Mission." That no mining claims were marked off on this creek, although those surrounding it were well staked, seemed remarkable; but the stranger did not try to guess the answer.
For no other reason than that the name had lodged in his mind, Seymour sought out Hoodoo Creek on the map and found the claim accredited to Cato—Thirteen Above. If the long-armed ox-man cited it in advancing his hopes with the widow, Seymour hoped that the number would exert its supposedly baleful influence.
From the blue-print, he turned to writing a report to his chief in Vancouver to whom word of the murder of his "Staff-Sergeant Russell Seymour" had undoubtedly been sent without delay. He took a grim sort of enjoyment in an opening after Mark Twain:
"I have the honor to state my safe arrival in Gold, B.C. Any reports of my violent death that may reach you are slightly exaggerated."
In the terse English that has made mounted police reports models of modesty, he told how he had "run into" two murder mysteries in addition to the embezzlement case which had brought him from the Far North. One of these, with its accompanying stage robbery, he believed he had solved except for stray angles that did not affect the capital crime. He was at work on the second murder case, with fair progress.