“I will,” said his cousin, “sit down!” As the corporal seated himself on a log, Dick Bracknell turned to the Indian. “You can put down that pistol for the present, Joe. There’s a mystery to be cleared up before there’s any shooting to be done. Put it down, I tell you!”
The Indian obeyed reluctantly, but still stood against the door, and Dick Bracknell explained. “Joe there has it saved up against you. He was sure that you had deliberately poisoned the dog food, so that we should get stranded, and you, with a new outfit, would be able to find us at your leisure. I couldn’t believe it of you at first. It was such a low-down game that I’d have sworn that nobody but a Siwash half-breed would have played it. But the logic of facts seemed convincing, and I’d come to believe it.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“That’s easy enough. When I parted from you, I had an idea of working across to the Behring, where I’d have been off the beat of your confounded patrols. We travelled a week and made a good pace, then one night Joe there fed the dogs with the salmon-roe we took off your sled. They were all dead within two hours; and there we were, stranded in the shadow of the Arctic circle and nearly a thousand miles from civilization.” The sick man broke off, shaken by a fit of coughing, and then as the spasm passed and his breath returned, he said meditatively, “If you’d walked into our camp then we’d have fed you with that roe, and watched you twist as those dogs were twisted, for Joe looked at the food and found strychnine, which he’d used when he was trapping for the H. B. C.... Lucky thing for you that you didn’t! Did you say your dogs died of the same thing?”
“Yes,” answered the corporal slowly, “and now I’m wondering who was responsible.”
“Somebody who was getting at you, and not at us,” answered Dick Bracknell quickly, “for he couldn’t have known that we should collar the food. Had you been using the same stuff all along?”
“No.” The word dropped from the corporal reluctantly. “No. I had laid in a new stock at North Star.”
“Then it was there the thing was done,” replied the sick man with conviction. “The question is, who did it? Joy wouldn’t even dream of such a thing!”
“That at any rate is quite certain!” answered the corporal with conviction.
“But somebody did it; somebody who owed you one, and meant to get rid of you. That’s shown by the fact that your dogs did all right on the food at the beginning. That which you used first wasn’t tampered with, or the dogs would have died at the first camp you made. But they didn’t, for you camped with us, and I remember that more than once, whilst we were waiting for my convalescence, you fed your dogs with the roe. That is positive proof that the top portion of the dog-food was all right, it was only lower down that it had been tampered with.”