His fingers moved rapidly from instrument to pencil and paper, then back to instrument again. There was a look of tense excitement on his face, such a look as comes upon the hunter as he sights a moose not a hundred yards away. Curlie was a born hunter, a hunter of the air. He had got scent of a prey, a dangerous prey, and was at this moment hunting him down.
“There,” he breathed as the bedlam ceased, and he drew the receiver from his head. “I know where you are, at least. You’re moving. I wonder if we’ll meet and when. I know what I’m going to say to you when we meet. Wonder if you know what you’re going to say to me!”
Having packed his instruments away, he stretched himself out before the fire to think. Events were moving on apace. It looked as if his journey would be shorter than he had at first believed it would be. You never could tell, though. He thought for the hundredth time of the Whisperer; wondered who she really was and why her whisper had been missing to-night.
At last, reaching over to Joe, he shook him into wakefulness and told him to turn in. Having undressed, he slipped on a suit of pajamas, crept into his sleeping-bag and was soon fast asleep.
CHAPTER IV
JOE MISSING
Curlie Carson was worried. As he sat on his rolled-up sleeping-bag in the tent which had been set with the usual care for a night’s comfort, his fingers drummed incessantly on the box which held his three-stage amplifier, while he muttered ever now and again:
“Wish he’d come. I don’t like the looks of it. What’s keeping him? That’s what I’d like to know.”
Joe was three hours overdue. After many days of travel they had made their way far into the interior of Alaska, well away toward the Yukon. Day by day they had broken trail for their dogs and day by day moved forward. At first the trail had been hard-packed from many dog teams passing from village to village. But as they pushed farther and farther into the wilderness these villages had vanished. Towns that were towns only in name greeted them now as they advanced. An Indian’s hovel here, the shack of a long-bearded patriarch of a miner there, that was all.
Snow had fallen in abundance. They were obliged to break every foot of trail before their dog teams.
Food was scarce. The question of feeding their dogs had become a problem. Then, only this very afternoon an Indian had told of a cache of caribou meat some ten miles away in the forest. If they would wait for him to bring it, they would have fine fresh meat in abundance.