The Valley of Silent Men | Page 5

him. Sickness had not
emaciated him. The bronze of his lean, clean-cut face had faded a little,
but the tanning of wind and sun and campfire was still there. His blue
eyes were perhaps dulled somewhat by the nearness of death. One
would not have judged him to be thirty-six, even though over one
temple there was a streak of gray in his blond hair--a heritage from his
mother, who was dead. Looking at him, as his lips quietly and calmly
confessed himself beyond the pale of men's sympathy or forgiveness,
one would have said that his crime was impossible.
Through his window, as he sat bolstered up in his cot, Kent could see
the slow-moving shimmer of the great Athabasca River as it moved on
its way toward the Arctic Ocean. The sun was shining, and he saw the
cool, thick masses of the spruce and cedar forests beyond, the rising
undulations of wilderness ridges and hills, and through that open
window he caught the sweet scents that came with a soft wind from out
of the forests he had loved for so many years.
"They've been my best friends," he had said to Cardigan, "and when
this nice little thing you're promising happens to me, old man, I want to
go with my eyes on them."
So his cot was close to the window.
Nearest to him sat Cardigan. In his face, more than in any of the others,
was disbelief. Kedsty, Inspector of the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, in charge of N Division during an indefinite leave of absence of
the superintendent, was paler even than the girl whose nervous fingers

were swiftly putting upon paper every word that was spoken by those
in the room. O'Connor, staff-sergeant, was like one struck dumb. The
little, smooth-faced Catholic missioner whose presence as a witness
Kent had requested, sat with his thin fingers tightly interlaced, silently
placing this among all the other strange tragedies that the wilderness
had given up to him. They had all been Kent's friends, his intimate
friends, with the exception of the girl, whom Inspector Kedsty had
borrowed for the occasion. With the little missioner he had spent many
an evening, exchanging in mutual confidence the strange and
mysterious happenings of the deep forests, and of the great north
beyond the forests. O'Connor's friendship was a friendship bred of the
brotherhood of the trails. It was Kent and O'Connor who had brought
down the two Eskimo murderers from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and
the adventure had taken them fourteen months. Kent loved O'Connor,
with his red face, his red hair, and his big heart, and to him the most
tragic part of it all was that he was breaking this friendship now.
But it was Inspector Kedsty, commanding N Division, the biggest and
wildest division in all the Northland, that roused in Kent an unusual
emotion, even as he waited for that explosion just over his heart which
the surgeon had told him might occur at any moment. On his death-bed
his mind still worked analytically. And Kedsty, since the moment he
had entered the room, had puzzled Kent. The commander of N Division
was an unusual man. He was sixty, with iron-gray hair, cold, almost
colorless eyes in which one would search long for a gleam of either
mercy or fear, and a nerve that Kent had never seen even slightly
disturbed. It took such a man, an iron man, to run N Division according
to law, for N Division covered an area of six hundred and twenty
thousand square miles of wildest North America, extending more than
two thousand miles north of the 70th parallel of latitude, with its
farthest limit three and one-half degrees within the Arctic Circle. To
police this area meant upholding the law in a country fourteen times the
size of the state of Ohio. And Kedsty was the man who had performed
this duty as only one other man had ever succeeded in doing it.
Yet Kedsty, of the five about Kent, was most disturbed. His face was
ash-gray. A number of times Kent had detected a broken note in his

voice. He had seen his hands grip at the arms of the chair he sat in until
the cords stood out on them as if about to burst. He had never seen
Kedsty sweat until now.
Twice the Inspector had wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. He
was no longer Minisak--"The Rock"--a name given to him by the Crees.
The armor that no shaft had ever penetrated seemed to have dropped
from him. He had ceased to be Kedsty, the most dreaded inquisitor in
the service. He was nervous, and Kent could see that he was fighting to
repossess himself.
"Of course you know what this means to