"Mush!" he yelled savagely, and the whiplash hissed its message to the leaders.... They were off at full speed.
"Too late!" Jack groaned, as the dogs bounded forward. "Oh, damn him! I hope he hangs for it—the dirty murderer!"
It was, indeed, too late. When they were come up the lesser valley, through which the creek ran, to a point near where the body of Sam Ward was lying, Jack halted the dogs, and went forward alone. He would not yield to Nell's pleadings that she be allowed to accompany him. He was not minded that she should thus look on the assassin's victim.
Jack returned very soon.
"Dead as a door-nail!" he said shortly. His face was a little pale under the bronze of open-air living. "A knife-blade in his chest—handle broken off. We've seen the chap. It was Sam Ward. Had a secret mine, they said."
Jack chose a camp-site close at hand, to which he removed the body of the murdered man, so that it would be protected from any prowling wolf. He brought down to his camp the dead man's pack, and he covered the still and rigid shape decently with one of the blankets that had been Sam Ward's. He made no attempt to trace the assassin. To have done so would have been useless in itself, and would have been to risk the like death. Nor did he make even a cursory search for the secret mine. He had no wish for personal profit out of this grewsome event. On the contrary, he was willing to delay his operations in the mountains, in order that he might deliver the corpse to the authorities, and make known to them the facts in the case.
"We'll put him on the sled in the morning," he said to Nell, who was very quiet, and who turned her eyes from time to time fearfully toward a place just on the edge of the firelight, where flickering shadows danced grotesquely over a deeper shadow—a shadow huge and misshapen and menacing.
"We'll take him up to Kalmak. It's a little place on the way to Malamute. But they have a sheriff, and that's what we need."
And neither he nor his wife, who looked from time to time affrightedly toward the shadows, had any hint as to the irony that the Fates had put into the husband's concluding words.