"They went back a mile or two to lay some traps."

"Then," said Wyllard, decisively, "it couldn't have been anything."

Charly did not appear satisfied, and it seemed to Wyllard that Overweg was also listening, but there was deep stillness outside now, and he dismissed the matter from his mind. A few minutes later it, however, seemed to him that a shadowy form appeared out of the gloom among the firs and faded into it again. This struck him as very curious, since if it had been one of the Kamtchadales he would have walked straight into camp, but he said nothing to his companions, and there was silence for a while until Charly rose softly to his feet.

"Get out as quietly as you can," he said, as he slipped by Wyllard, who crept after him to the entrance.

When he reached it his companion's voice rang out with a startling vehemence.

"Stop right now!" he cried, and after a pause, "n.o.body's going to hurt you. Walk right ahead."

Then Wyllard felt his heart beat furiously, for a dusky, half-seen figure materialised out of the gloom, and grew into sharper form as it drew nearer to the sinking fire. The thing was wholly unexpected, almost incredible, but it was clear that the man could understand English, and his face was white. In another moment Wyllard's last doubt vanished, and he sprang forward with a gasp.

"Lewson--Tom Lewson," he said.

Then Charly thrust the man inside the tent, and when somebody lighted a lamp he sat down stupidly and looked at them. His face was gaunt and furrowed, and almost blackened by exposure to the frost, his hair was long, and tattered garments of greasy skins hung about him. There was also something that suggested bewildered incredulity in his eyes.

"It's real?" he said, slowly and haltingly. "You have come at last?"

They a.s.sured him that this was the case, and for a moment or two the man's face worked and he made a hoa.r.s.e sound in his throat.

"Lord," he said, "if I'm dreaming I don't want to wake."

Charly leaned forward and smote him on the shoulder.

"Shall I hit you like I did that afternoon in the Thompson House on the Vancouver water front?" he asked.

Then the certainty of the thing seemed to dawn upon the man, for he quivered, and his eyes half closed. After that he straightened himself with an effort.

"I should have known, and I think I did," he said. "Something seemed to tell me that you would come for us when you could."

Wyllard's face flushed, but he said nothing, and it was Charly who asked the next question.

"The others are dead?"

Lewson made a little expressive gesture. "Hopkins was drowned in a crevice of the ice. I buried Leslie back yonder."

He broke off abruptly, as though speech cost him an effort, and Wyllard turned to Overweg.

"This is the last of the men I was looking for," he said.

Overweg quietly nodded. "Then you have my felicitations--but it might be advisable if you did not tell me too much," he said. "Afterwards I may be questioned by those in authority."

CHAPTER XXIX.

CAST AWAY.

Tom Lewson had been an hour in camp before he commenced the story of his wanderings, and at first he spoke slowly and falteringly, lying propped up on one elbow, with the lamplight on his worn face.

"We broke an oar coming off the beach that night, and it kind of crippled us," he said. "Twice she nearly went back again in the surf, and I don't quite know how we pulled her off. Anyway, one of us was busy heaving out the water that broke into her. It was Jake, I think, and he seemed kind of silly. Once we saw a boat hove up on a sea, but we lost her in the spray, and a long while after we saw the schooner.

Just then a comber that broke on board most hove us over, and when we had dodged the next two there wasn't a sign of her. After that we knew that we were done, and we just tried to keep her head-to and ease her to the seas."

He stopped a moment, and looked round at the others with troubled eyes, as though trying to marshal uncertain memories, for this was a simple sailorman, who contented himself with the baldest narrative. Still, two of those who heard him could fill in the things he had not mentioned--the mad lurching of the half-swamped boat, the tense struggle with the oars each time a big frothing comber forged out of the darkness, and the savage desperation of the drenched and half-frozen men cast away with the roaring surf to lee of them and their enemies watching upon the hammered beach.

"It blew hard that night," he added. "Somehow she lived through it, but there wasn't a sign of the island when morning came. Nothing but the combers and the flying haze. Guess the wind must have shifted a few points and drove us by the end of it. Then we found Jake had his head laid open by a sealing club. The sea was getting longer, and as we were too played out to hold her to it we got her away before it, and somehow she didn't roll over. I think it was next day, though it might have been longer, when we fetched another island. She just washed up on it, and one of the others pulled me out. There wasn't a sign of anybody on the beach, but there were plenty of skinned holluschackie seals on the slope behind it, and that was fortunate for us."

"You struck n.o.body on the island?" enquired Wyllard.

"We didn't," said Lewson simply. "The Russians must have sent a vessel to take off the killers after the last drive of the season a day or two before, for the holluschackie were quite fresh, and perhaps it was blowing hard and the surf getting steep, for they'd left quite a few of their things behind them. Anyway, that was how we figured it. We found the shacks the killers lived in, and we made out that winter in one of them."

It occurred to Wyllard that this was a thing very few men except sealers could have done had they been cast ash.o.r.e without stores or tools to face the awful winter of the north.

"How did you get through?" he asked.

"Well," said Lewson, "we had a rifle, and the ca'tridges weren't spoilt. The killers hadn't taken their cooking outfit, and by and bye we got a walrus in an open lane among the ice. They'd left some gear behind them, but we were most of two days cutting and heaving the beast out with a parbuckle under him. There was no trouble about things keeping in that frost. Besides, we'd the holluschackie blubber to burn, and there was a half-empty bag or two of stores in one of the shacks. No, we hadn't any great trouble in making out."

"You had to stay there until the ice broke up?" said Charly.

"And after. The boat was gone, and we couldn't get away. She broke up in the surf, and we burned what we saved of her. At last a schooner came along, and we hid out across the island until she'd gone away. It was blowing fresh, and hazy, and she just shoved a new gang of killers ash.o.r.e. There was an Okotsk Russian with them, but he made no trouble for us. He was white, anyway, and it kind of seemed to me he didn't like one of the other men who got hurt that night on the beach."

"Then some of them did get badly hurt?" Wyllard broke in.

Lewson laughed, a little, almost silent laugh, which nevertheless sounded strangely grim.

"Well," he said, "from what that Russian told us--and we got to understand each other by and bye--one of the killers had his ribs broke, and it seems that another would go lame for life. Besides, among other things, there was a white man got his face quite smashed.

I saw him after with his nose flattened way out to starboard, and one eye canted. He was a boss of some kind. They called him Smirnoff."

Overweg looked up sharply. "Ah," he said, "Smirnoff. A man with an unsavoury name. I have heard of him."

"Anyway," Lewson went on, "we killed seals all the open season with that Russian, and I've no fault to find with him. In fact, I figure if he could have fixed it he'd have left us on the island that winter, but when a schooner came to take the killers off and collect the skins Smirnoff was on board of her. That"--and an ominous gleam crept into Lewson's eyes--"was the real beginning of the trouble."

"He had us hauled up before him--guess the other man had to tell him who we were--and when I wouldn't answer he slashed me with a sled-dog-whip across the face."

Lewson clenched a lean brown fist. "Yes," he added, hoa.r.s.ely, "I was whipped--but they should have tied my hands first. It was not my fault I didn't have that man's life. It was most a minute before three of them pulled me off him, and he was considerably worse to look at then."

There was silence for a minute or two, and Wyllard, who felt his own face grow a trifle warm, saw the suggestive hardness in Charly's eyes.

Lewson was gazing out into the darkness, but the veins were swollen on his forehead and his whole body had stiffened. Then he spread his hands out.

"We'll let that go. I can't think of it. They put us on board the schooner, and by and bye she ran into a creek on the coast. We were to be sent somewhere to be dealt with, and we knew what that meant, with what they had against us. Well, they went ash.o.r.e to collect some skins from the Kamtchadales, and at night we cut the boat adrift. We got off in the darkness, and if they followed they never trailed us. Guess they figured we couldn't make out through the winter that was coming on."

So far the story had been more or less connected and comprehensible.

It laid no great tax on Wyllard's credulity, and, indeed, all that Lewson described had come about very much as Dampier had once or twice suggested; but it seemed an almost impossible thing that the three men should have survived during the years that followed. Lewson, as it happened, never made that matter very clear. He sat silent for almost a minute before he went on again.

"We hauled the boat out, and hid her among the rocks, and after that we fell in with some Kamtchadales going north," he said. "They took us along, I don't know how far, but they were trapping for furs, and by and bye--I think it was months after--we got away from them. Then we fell in with another crowd, and went on further north with them. They were Koriaks, and we lived with them a long while--a winter and a summer anyway. It was more, perhaps--I can't remember."

He broke off with a vague gesture, and sat looking at the others vacantly with his lean face furrowed.