“There! Got him! That’s it!”
He was not a moment too soon, for not only had the message ceased but the interruption as well.
“Huh!” he grunted, scratching his head. “Huh! Up there. Wouldn’t have believed it. Why, good gracious, it can’t be! Yet I couldn’t have missed it. How that man travels! Two hundred miles! And no trail to speak of. Probably none at all.”
For a moment he sat in a brown study. Then he suddenly shook his fist toward the north.
“We’ll get you now, old boy!” he exclaimed. “We’ll get you! You’re breaking trail for us. We’ll follow that trail if it takes us right out on the ice-floes of the Arctic and we’ll get you, just as Jennings says, like a rabbit in a hollow tree. That is,” he said more soberly, “if there doesn’t come a heavy snow.”
The man, so the radio-compass had said, had taken the trail which led straight away toward the Arctic Ocean.
Then for a long time Curlie sat staring at the knob of his tuner. He did not see the knob. He did not see anything. He was concentrating, reasoning, thinking hard, trying to put a lot of facts together and make them fit.
So the master-mind of the smugglers had not been caught. What if the outlaw of the air proved to be that man. Why might he not? That would explain why he was so continually breaking in upon the message regarding it.
“And that,” he whispered, leaping to his feet and dashing out of the tent in his excitement, “that would explain why he appears so eager to frustrate all of Munson’s plans to keep in touch with the outside world by radiophone. Munson assisted in breaking up the smuggler band. If the outlaw is their leader, there is nothing he would not do to wreak revenge.
“And—and”—he breathed hard because of the thoughts that came trooping into his mind mind—“that might explain the man’s change of plans. The very night that Munson sent his message telling of his supply of food on the shore of the ocean this outlaw, who probably listened in, turned about and started straight north, to—to where?”