With all his thinking he could not solve the mystery of the nameless and numberless plane. Instead, from out the air there leaped a fresh mystery. A simple thing in the beginning it was too—only a bird in flight.
Birds are common enough in the Arctic. Even in mid-winter ravens croak from the tree-tops, pelicans stand upon icy rocks watching for fish and screaming jays cut a path of blue across the wintry sky.
But this bird was neither raven, pelican nor jay. Curlie knew that at a glance. Having long watched the flight of birds, he could distinguish the darting course of one, the soaring flight of another and the steady flap-flap of a third. This bird, he knew at a glance, was a pigeon.
“A pigeon in such a place!” He fairly gasped with astonishment.
Then a thought struck him squarely between the eyes. “It’s a carrier-pigeon! Here may be a clue. I’ll follow him.”
Fortunately the course taken by the bird was almost the same as that he must follow to reach his next stopping place, Fort McMurray, the headquarters of steel. At this place he would unload his cargo of furs and mineral samples entrusted to his care, then wire for further orders.
“Who would turn a pigeon loose in this bleak land?” he asked himself. “Only some one in desperate circumstances or a man without a heart.” At once he thought of the mysterious one who piloted the strange gray plane.
“He’s heartless enough,” he assured himself. “Holding some one, a woman or a boy, captive! He’d do anything. There’ll be a message tied to the bird’s foot. I’m sure of that. All I have to do is follow him to his destination. Might bump right into the man’s confederates. Then the mystery would be solved at once.”
But what was the bird’s destination? How was Curlie to know that? “It may be Edmonton; probably is,” he told himself hopelessly. “I can’t follow him there, not just now. Already I am hours behind my schedule. Little more and I’ll be joining the ranks of the unemployed.”
Even as he said this, as if to make an end to this dilemma, the pigeon wavered in his flight, sank earthward, and began to circle.