“I don’t know.”
“How’s she come to be traveling with this man anyway?”
“Can’t say.”
“Mighty queer, I’d say.”
“I’d say as much myself. Queer and interesting. I may as well admit that I am as much interested in coming up with the Whisperer as I am in catching this outlaw.”
“Well, we won’t do either if we don’t eat and turn in,” said Joe as he reached for the frying pan.
Joe’s prophecy that they would not at once catch up with the man they sought, proved correct. The first two days they struggled forward through soft snow, over a trackless wilderness. Then they came upon the campsite of the outlaw, his last camping place before he turned back.
To Curlie this was a thrilling moment. It was the first earthly sign he had ever seen of this strange pair, the outlaw and the Whisperer. Heretofore he had followed only the trackless trail of the air. Now he had footprints of a man and of many dogs to go by. The mark of the camp, though three days old, was as fresh as if it had been abandoned but two hours before. There had been no snowfall. There was never a breath of wind in that forest.
“As long as his trail is not joined by any other,” Jennings told the boys, “we can follow it with our eyes shut. We could do that three months from now. There might be four feet of snowfall, but on top of it all there would be the depression made in the first two feet of snow. There is never any wind to move the snow about, so there’s your trail carved in the snow, permanent as marble till the spring thaw comes.”
“But when he comes to the Yukon River trail?” suggested Curlie.