Dashing back into the tent, he unfolded a map. For a moment with strained attention he studied it.
When he straightened up it was to whisper, “Yes, sir! That’s it! Flaxman Island! His present course will bring him straight to Flaxman Island and Munson’s food supply.”
He sat down again. “Now,” he asked himself, “once he arrives there, what will he do? Will he winter there, living upon the explorer’s supplies and thus save himself from prison, or will he, out of revenge, destroy the supplies? If he stays and lives on the supplies, what will happen if Munson comes ashore with his band? Huh, some interesting problems there!”
“Interesting and foolish,” he told himself as he dropped into another mood. “All imagination, I guess. Suppose there’s nothing to it. Probably he’s not the king of smugglers at all, but just a plain mischief-maker of the air. When he caught Joe’s message to me, that night when we fought the wolves, he knew he was being pursued and turned back. Now he’s hiding out till the storm blows over. Possibly knows where there is a native reindeer herder up there at the end of the stream and over the hills!
“Well, old top,” he again shook his fist toward the north, “you might just as well come out of your hole. The storm isn’t going to blow over. Your little cabin of false dreams is going to be wrecked by it, and that before many days.”
CHAPTER XI
A MOVING SPOT ON THE HORIZON
But the outlaw’s teams of powerful dogs had endurance to exceed anything ever before witnessed by those who followed on their trail. Even Jennings was astonished by the manner in which they ate up the miles.
“Those dogs are devils!” he exclaimed after ten days of trailing them. “Devils is what they are and the prince of devils is their driver.”
Straight north the trail ran. There could be no mistaking it. In the soft snow of the forest, as Jennings had said, it might have been followed after three months had elapsed just as surely as on the day after it was made.
Up frozen streams, over ridges when streams were too rapid to freeze even in midwinter, down narrow Indian trails when snow-laden branches constantly showered the traveler with snow, the trail led. On and on and on. Always, as nearly as possible, due north.