"And now if Orcutt should show up within the next day
or two, Downey will know just where to follow, and even with a two
days' start, I doubt if I could keep ahead of him. They say he's a
devil on the trail. But I'll fool him. I'll leave the canoe at the
end of the lake, and instead of striking on down the river I'll hit out
overland. Once I get to the railway, they can all go to hell!"
The mistake Wentworth made on the trail when he first came into the
North was not so much the insisting upon bringing in his trunk, nor his
refusal to carry a pack; it was in striking Alex Thumb with the
dog-whip when he refused to pull the outfit in the face of a blizzard.
Thumb's reputation as a "bad Injun" was well founded. The son of a
hot-tempered French trader and a Cree mother, his early life had been a
succession of merciless beatings. At the age of fourteen he killed his
father with a blow from an ice chisel, and thereafter served ten years
of an indeterminate sentence, during the course of which the unmerciful
beatings were administered for each infraction of reformatory rules,
until in his heart was born a sullen hatred of all white men and an
abysmal hatred of the lash. When Wentworth struck, his doom was
sealed, but as Murchison said, Alex Thumb was canny. He had no mind to
serve another term in prison.
All through the spring and summer he trailed the engineer, waiting with
the patience that is the heritage of the wilderness dweller for the
time and the place to strike and avoid suspicion.
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