A few moments later the mystery was explained. Pegic, with some others of his tribe, had the day before found a white man with a broken neck at the foot of a precipice.
It had proved to be the “little gray man,” whom they all had seen and of whose flight and theft they knew. Pegic, recalling the story of his friend, Joe Picquet, had searched among the dead man’s effects, which lay scattered about him. Among them were a black fox skin of shimmering beauty, which the Indian gravely handed to the delighted Tom, and many other skins, including those nicked from old Joe.
How the Wolf had met his death was never discovered, nor did his companions ever appear to explain the mystery. One explanation was that he fell from the precipice during a fight, a theory which some marks on his body served to support.
With frontier justice, old Joe Picquet awarded to Pegic for his honesty the skins unclaimed by himself or by the boys. They amounted in value to a considerable sum, and the Indian was delighted with the gifts of his white friends.
The next day they reached the camp of the Yukon Rover, where they found Mr. Dacre, Mr. Chillingworth and Sandy. How much they all had to tell each other and how many hours of the night were consumed in the telling, you may imagine. Tom and Jack did not receive the scolding they had contemplated getting for the loss of the black fox. Their recovery of the skin and the hardships they had undergone on the trail, in the opinion of both their elders, more than counterbalanced any carelessness they might have shown.
The remainder of the winter was spent in trapping with old Joe Picquet, who was retained at a good salary as chief trapper. The old man, too, not long afterward, bought himself a new team of mamelukes, but fine as they are he declares that no sledge animals will ever be seen in the north country to equal his lost team, for which he mourned for many months.
When Jack’s ankle healed, he took as active a part as any in the work and play of the Yukon Rover camp. In due course, spring came over the icy regions North of Fifty-three. The rivers were opened, and one fine day the Yukon Rover slipped her moorings and with a valuable cargo of live foxes—destined to start the first enterprise of its kind in the United States—she dropped down the Porcupine to the Yukon. On the bank a sorrowful figure stood waving goodbye. It was Joe Picquet. Long after a bend of the river shut him out from view, the boys could see him in their mind’s eyes standing there, motionless as a figure of stone, calling:
“Good-bye! Come back some day!”
“I wonder if we ever will?” mused Sandy as they stood on the foredeck beneath the “Totem of the Frozen North.”
“Who can tell?” rejoined Tom. “But whatever happens, we shall never forget our adventures up here.”