“Great Scott!” gasped Alan. “You mean that Mary Standish—”
“I’m not talking about Mary Standish,” said Stampede. “It’s Nawadlook. If it wasn’t for my whiskers—”
His words were broken by a sudden detonation which came out of the pale gloom ahead of them. It was like the explosion of a cannon a long distance away.
“One of them cussed bums,” he explained. “That’s why they hurried on ahead of us, Alan. She says this Fourth of July celebration is going to mean a lot for Alaska. Wonder what she means?”
“I wonder,” said Alan.
CHAPTER XV
Half an hour more of the tundra and they came to what Alan had named Ghost Kloof, a deep and jagged scar in the face of the earth, running down from the foothills of the mountains. It was a sinister thing, and in the depths lay abysmal darkness as they descended a rocky path worn smooth by reindeer and caribou hoofs. At the bottom, a hundred feet below the twilight of the plains, Alan dropped on his knees beside a little spring that he groped for among the stones, and as he drank he could hear the weird whispering and gurgling of water up and down the kloof, choked and smothered in the moss of the rock walls and eternally dripping from the crevices. Then he saw Stampede’s face in the glow of another match, and the little man’s eyes were staring into the black chasm that reached for miles up into the mountains.
“Alan, you’ve been up this gorge?”
“It’s a favorite runway for the lynx and big brown bears that kill our fawns,” replied Alan. “I hunt alone, Stampede. The place is supposed to be haunted, you know. Ghost Kloof, I call it, and no Eskimo will enter it. The bones of dead men lie up there.”
“Never prospected it?” persisted Stampede.