“But why——”
“It’s as plain as a barn-door. You were meant to get well away on the trail, and one night you would unknowingly feed the dogs with poisoned roe. They would die, and unless you had wonderful luck you would die too, long before you got back to civilization. That is the amiable plan that somebody thought out for you; and as things turned out he nearly bagged me and Joe instead of you.”
“But he almost got me too,” said the corporal thoughtfully, and gave his cousin a brief account of his adventures.
“You were lucky,” commented the sick man. “A broken leg can be spliced, but who is going to splice a set of frozen lungs?” His face grew suddenly convulsed with passion, and he broke into terrible oaths. “If I had the murderer here—but who was he anyway?”
“There is only one man of whom I can think, and before I tell you his name there are two questions I should like to ask.”
“Fire them off!”
“The first is this, do you know anything of Rolf Gargrave’s death?”
“I know that the bottom dropped out of the trail and that he was drowned—nothing more. What’s that got to do with it anyway?”
The corporal looked at his cousin. The haggard face was clear of guilt, and in that moment he knew that his earliest suspicions when Chief Louis had told him the story of Rolf Gargrave’s death had been utterly wrong. Whatever crimes Dick Bracknell had to his account this was not one of them.
“I’ll explain why I asked you in a moment,” he answered. “There is the second question—yet; and it is this, did you ever inform any one of your marriage with Joy?”