“If he did we’d trap him like a rabbit in a hollow stump!” declared the miner emphatically.
“Well, since we don’t know which way to go and it is getting dark,” suggested Joe, “I move that we make camp right here.”
This suggestion was acted upon and some two hours later Curlie might have been seen nodding over his radiophone boxes. His companions were fast asleep but he had remained up with the receiver clamped over his head in the rather forlorn hope that the outlaw would let slip some fragment of message which might reveal his whereabouts.
“Fact is,” he told himself, “that in spite of all the evidence against it, I still have a sneaking feeling that the Whisperer is a real person, a girl, and that she’s up here somewhere in the white wilderness. I—I sort of hope that sooner or later she’ll whisper some more secrets to me.”
In this hope, for the night at least, he was doomed to disappointment. No whispered secrets came to him from out the air.
A message came, however, a message which set his mind at work. He had fallen quite asleep when he was suddenly wakened by a voice in his ear. He recognized at once the voice of the government official who had dictated that other message regarding the band of smugglers caught operating on Behring Straits.
The message itself to him was unimportant, or at least for the time it seemed so. It gave more definite details of the evidence procured and stated one fact that was most important: The big man, the one higher up, the brains of the smugglers, had not been apprehended. Indeed, it was not even known who he was. It was thought that he might be at this moment in Alaska, but where? This question could not be answered.
The message had proceeded to this point. Curlie had maintained a drowsy interest in it, when he sat up with a sudden start, all awake.
The message had been broken in upon by a powerful sending set which was much nearer to Curlie than was that of the government man.
“Got—gotta get him,” he mumbled as his slim fingers caressed his radio-compass coil.