“In the end.” Ah, yes! But there were those who shook grave heads at this. Rumors were not lacking that told of the bold, evil doings of the “Gray Streak.” Some of these, to be sure, went unconfirmed. Yet when a starved trapper with a starved dog team came in from the Barrens to tell of a cabin pillaged to the last cupful of flour, the last bacon rind, they said:
“It is time this was stopped!”
But who was to stop it? As for Curlie Carson, his answer was: “Drew Lane.” And yet, in the back of his head was a great desire. He hoped that for the glory of the Company that had trusted him with a powerful and valuable plane in this land of many hazards, he might help to bring the “Gray Streak” to justice.
Even Joyce Mills, busily engaged as she was in the business of bringing her father back to life, and puzzled as she ever was with the problem of the stolen films, found time to listen and thrill at the tale of the arrival of her one-time pal and all-the-time friend, Drew Lane, and to lend an ear to the stories that came floating in from all quarters.
“He’ll get them,” she told her father. “I am sure he will.”
In her more sober moments she puzzled as ever about the stolen films. Matters were coming to a head in their mining camp. Hope ran high.
“But one is a thief,” she whispered more than once. “Jim, Clyde, Lloyd, which could it be? Jim is so religious, so kind and so—so—How could he? Clyde saved my father’s life. How could I doubt him? And Lloyd went all through that terrible war as a boy soldier. He might have gone home from the horror of it all simply by saying the word, yet he never said that word. How can one doubt a man like that?”
So the days passed. Her father’s condition improved. The work at their camp progressed.
From the other camp Johnny Thompson went in search of pitchblende, only to return empty-handed. Nothing daunted, he prepared for a second journey.
In the meantime, with his pilot, Don Burns, one of America’s finest, Drew Lane scoured the country for signs of the “Gray Streak.” Starting at Edmonton, he soared in ever widening circles until his ship of flaming red was known to every Indian child from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and beyond where Great Slave River winds its white wintry way into the lake that bears its name.