Snow-blind

“ARE YOU THERE?”

“This,” said the bland voice on the air, “is Station WBZ, Springfield, Massachusetts, broadcasting greetings from the home folks to the far-advanced outposts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I have a letter for Sergeant Buck Tearl at Port-o’-Prayer in North Saskatchewan. Good evening, Sergeant. Are you there?”

And then the message went into space on the waves of the ether. Like a ripple on a pond, widening to the shores, the voice ranged all directions to reach an audience half a world away. It was heard, no doubt, by many lonesome chaps with ear-phones clamped to their heads: trappers in snow-buried shacks, scattered over a hundred thousand miles of forest and mountain and blizzard-scourged tundra; factors and bush-rovers at the remotest fur-factories; whalers in stout ships, nipped in the polar drift; frost-bitten policemen in barrack and camp, stationed here and there in the great midnight around the curve of the arctic circle, the uttermost videttes of the northern law.

“It is a queer message,” pursued the radio announcer in his pleasantly modulated speech. “Maybe the man for whom it is meant hears me and will understand. Here it is:

“Sergeant Buck Tearl, R.C.M.P., Port-o’-Prayer.” There was a momentary pause and the voice cleared itself of a faint husk--a strangely personal and familiar sound that for a moment seemed to bring the speaker out of distance and invisibility into the very presence of the listener.

The man at the microphone went on with the letter.

“The dead do not always die,” he read. “If you can find Kablunak’s band of A-hi-ag-muit Esquimaux, who winter, they say, on Queen Maud Sea, make them tell you the truth.”

“I don’t know whether I pronounce the Esquimaux names correctly,” ended the announcer, “but anyhow, that’s the letter, and it’s signed--Diane.”

Of course the broadcaster could not know whether Sergeant Tearl had a radio receiver or was tuned-in that night on the wavelength of WBZ. Nor could he have guessed that there was another man named Tearl, who happened to be listening-in at this very moment, and in whose quiet New York apartment that cryptic message arrived like an exploding grenade to rearrange violently the whole of his future life.

Kitchener Tearl found WBZ by accident when in an idle moment he had given the radio dial a careless spin. This much was fate or coincidence, or whatever mischievous force it is that is constantly unsettling people’s nicely settled affairs. But all that happened afterwards followed as naturally and inevitably as blood follows the knife or youth after its own reckless bent or birds take the course of the southerning sun.

The greater part of the broadcasted messages in themselves were not of much interest to an eavesdropper.

“Mother sends love.” “Father’s rheumatism is better.” “Bella wonders if you remember her.” “Did you get the socks we sent last July?” “Baby Nellie, born August second, is waiting for her first glimpse of Uncle Jack.” Small, homely, intimate matters such as these were discussed in the hearing of the rest of the world and flung off into the night to end up under the crackle of the northern lights.

The messages would not have made Kitchener Tearl forget an engagement he had made for that evening; it was the visioning of the men who were receiving them. His imagination soared off to far, strange places which he had never seen, nor ever expected to see, but which were names that had been thrillingly real to him since his earliest days of boyhood.

The whirr of the elevator outside the foyer of his apartment, the rumble of traffic coming up from the pavements of Park Avenue, were lost in the sorcery of his straying thoughts in other, greater sounds: The grumble of ice-floes, the slash of sleet on cabin walls, the rabid cry of the wolf pack, the wind in the pines.

His lean, hard-kept body was sprawled motionless in his chair as he listened and stared into immeasurable distances with one keen eyebrow quizzically upcocked, seeing not the bright window-squares in the apartment building across the way, but big timber and ice barrens and mountains stacked behind mountains and the auroral glimmer on the Arctic sky.

The fascination of the northland for Kitchener Tearl was a part of the tradition of his blood and kind. One of his grandfathers long ago had been a factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he died with his moccasins on in the frozen forests of Keewatin.

William Tearl, Kitchener’s father, had followed the trails that had been broken ahead of him by Factor Jacob Tearl. He was an inspector in the old Royal Northwest Mounted Police.

The story of Inspector Bill Tearl was left a grim, unwritten chapter in the territorial records. Somewhere in the Ottawa files, after his name and service reports, was set down in fading red ink the word--“missing.” One night, more than twelve years ago, Bill Tearl had walked out from a sub-post somewhere in the then-uncharted Vermilion River country, and was never seen nor heard of again.

Tearl’s Yankee-born wife happened to be visiting in New York at the time of the inspector’s disappearance. With her were her three children, Gerald, who was sixteen years old, Kitchener, twelve, and Jane, an elfish, jewel-eyed girl of nine.

An inheritance of money from her own side of the family had enabled Mrs. Tearl to provide for the three fatherless youngsters, to send them one after another to college, and to plan for a life of future comfort. And then, the year Jerry graduated from the university, where he won renown as one of the most ferocious half-backs who ever tore cleat-marks in the Yale bowl, his charming mother was taken ill and suddenly died, and Jerry became the head of the Tearls.

The two grown-up brothers and the growing sister went on living together, a bit quarrelsomely, but with a fierce and undying loyalty. Jerry gave promise of becoming as great a man in the business world as he had been on the college gridirons. But tragedy once more stepped in to decimate the family ranks.

The ex-line-plunger was notoriously quick-tempered. Nobody had ever found out what it was all about, but he got into a fearful argument with a man on a Broadway street corner, and had three-quarters killed that man with his bare hands. A warrant of atrocious assault was issued by the nearest magistrate, but Jerry left town a couple of jumps ahead of the police. Kitchener and Jane never heard another word from him. Like his father before him, he had abruptly quitted his place in the world to be engulfed in the mystery of the passing years.

This had happened a long while ago. Kitchener was now twenty-four, the elder of the remaining Tearls. In all this time he might have lost the image of his prodigious brother in casual forgetfulness. But in his case the hero-worship that had grown in the heart of boyhood still lingered with all the sweetness of the earliest memories. The hearing of the name Tearl choked him with a surging of emotion such as he would have felt if his brother’s sinewy hand had been laid suddenly upon his shoulder.

When Kitchener’s sister came home at one o’clock that morning from some sort of a party she had been attending somewhere or other, she found the floor of the living room carpeted with her father’s old police maps, while her brother crawled over them on his hands and knees, a strange look in his dark, eager eyes.

“What the deuce, Kit?” she demanded from the doorway.

“I think I know where Jerry is,” he said.

Jane dropped the wrap from her fine arms and shoulders and came into the room. “What?” she ejaculated.

Kitchener stood up and showed her the message he had taken down on paper.

“Diane!” read Jane, womanlike, noticing first of all the woman in the case. “Who’s Diane?”

“She sent the message over the radio. I’ve never heard of her before.”

Jane wrinkled her short nose as she perused her brother’s hasty scrawl. “Who’s Buck Tearl?”

“Sounds like Jerry to me,” declared Kitchener.

“Why?” Jane had grown calm and skeptical. “Why would it be Jerry, when it’s Buck?”

“There are not many Tearls in the world,” Kitchener reminded her. “It isn’t like Smith or Einstein or O’Toole or Jones. As far as the nickname goes, a man like Jerry would be apt to pick one up wherever he went. And it just naturally ought to be ‘Buck.’

“Funny I never thought of it before,” he mused. “Knowing Jerry as I did, I can’t understand now why I never guessed it. He went back where he belonged, of course--the north and the Mounties.” Kitchener faced his sister in tense excitement, “It’s Jerry, you can bet on it. He joined up, and naturally by now he’d be a sergeant at least.”

Jane laughed, and then stopped and sighed. “We’re an odd outfit,” she said, “each of us wasting our affections on the one up ahead. Dad thought grandfather was a stupendous man, and Jerry worshiped Dad, and you adore Jerry, and here am I, the last, with nothing to do but to be simply foolish about you.”

He squeezed her graceful shoulders, and then turned away. “Don’t be an ass,” he said.

“Can I help it?” she grinned.

“Listen here!” he said soberly. “Did you get the possible meaning of that message?”

“About so-and-so’s Esquimaux?”