“Well, that’s going to be harder.” The miner wrinkled his brow. “But we’ll find a way to track him—the way he hitches his dogs, track of his sled. There’s always something if you are sharp enough to see it.”
Curlie examined the marks of the camp very carefully. It was evident that the man knew as much about making an Arctic camp as did Jennings. The square made by the tent floor showed that he had spread down a canvas floor and the heaps of spruce twigs tossed all about told that he had bedded the place down before he spread out his blankets or sleeping-bags.
“Two teams,” was Jennings’ comment, “and eight or nine dogs to the team. Fine big fellows too. Shouldn’t wonder if they were Siberian wolf hounds.”
One thing Curlie made a secret search for: footprints. There were enough of one sort. The broad marks of a man’s foot clad in moccasins or Eskimo skin-boots were everywhere present. What he sought was the mark of a smaller foot, a much smaller foot, the foot of the Whisperer. But though he examined every square yard of trampled ground around the camp, and though he ran ahead of the dogs for two miles after resuming the trail, he saw no trace of a woman’s footprint.
“Looks like he drove one dog team and led the other,” he told himself. “Looks as if—”
For the first time he began to doubt the existence of the Whisperer.
“Can it be,” he asked himself, “that the outlaw and the Whisperer are one? Does he change his voice and pretend to give me tips when he is in reality only leading me on?”
In his mind he went back over the times when the Whisperer had broken in on the silence of the night. There had been those two times when he had been listening in at the Secret Tower Room, back there in the city (told about in “Curlie Carson Listens In”). There had been two times when he had caught her whisper out over the sea.
“That time,” he told himself, “she told me he had gone north. Why should this man keep me informed of his own doings? He ought to know that I’d report it; that someone would follow him if I didn’t.
“No,” he told himself, “there must be a real Whisperer. The girl must exist. She’s somewhere up there on the trail ahead of us. And yet,” he reasoned, “if she is there, where are her tracks?”