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The Exeter Times-Advocate, 1932-01-07, Page 7X SE -WWW®®®®- THE EXETER TIMES-ADVQCATE nI T “The Silver Hawk BY WILLIAM BYRON MOWERY SYNOPSIS James Dorn, aerial map maker, as­ signed to a territory in the north­ ern Canadian Rockies lives alone in liis camp on Titan Island. Kansas Eby, his friend for the . past six years was stationed at Eagle east, night were platform train pulled in he seen a girl come out and glance hurriedly ground and then disappear into the darkness, hurriedly hut trace of her, ■ Dorn, about it ; Fere Bergelot, rived* with the The girl, Aurore McNain, asks Dorn to go to a lonely lake in search of her father and she wish­ es to accompany him.. When they arrive at the cabin . there is no sign of habitation. The girl, Aurore McNain, asks Dorn to take her to a lonely lake in search of her father. When they arrive there is no sign of habitation but she tells Dorn she is going to live there alone. Dorn goes to Edmonton f-or supplies for Aurore and is inter­ viewed by a private detective and the police in his room. Nest, two hundred miles Kansas came over one to a dance that the Indians having on the station When the midnight Kansas followed failed to find any He told his friend and the same night a trusty metis ar- ) girl. CHAPTER XIV would be over and he her and start back to He noticed her start, and he knew she realized he wanted to have at least a few minutes’ talk with her before he left. ]She looked away from him and plucked abstractedly at the. wolf-feet of the moss. Dorn caught the- fragrance” of crushed mint where- she lay. Her eyes, he decided, were deep warm brown, with a hint of pansy-purple at the bottom of them and infinite moods slumbering.?in their depths. Study- % ing the delicate profile of her nose ■■fe* and her exquisite lips and that ag­ gressive. small chin, Dorn consider­ ed; ‘‘How little I know about the external things of her life. Just her name and a few fragments of her girlhood. And yet I know her better than any person I ever ■met.” He lit a pipe, meaning it as an hourglass to measure the time he could stay. , When it was finished, this holiday 'would leave Titan Pass. For some time he had been aware of a subtle change in their intimacy. After that incident of the mistletoe Aurore had been shy toward him, and she was a little restrained still. He thought, “She must at least have realized that I’m a man and She’s a desirable girl.” There .was no distrust of him; none of the cold, liard suspicion with which she had gauged him that' first night down in liis tent. On the contrary, he felt that her restraint, witnessed by putting the streamlet and the basin between them now, was for his sake ;—a recognition of the fact, that he was a man and she a desirable girl. Dorn wanted to tell her that he felt he was building up a beautiful , comradeship with her, that it would liave seemed an ugly thing to wreck or even endanger ° that relation on the submerged rocks of sex. But better than telling her would be to live it in all his acts towards her. So he sad notling. It' wag plain to her, studying her knew she ought to about her trouble, shrinking back from it. v 'z him—watching face—that, she tell and now was him yet While his pipe burned out he debated with liimself whether or not to demand that she keep her promise to tell him'. At last he said gently: “I know What you are thinkink about, Aurore. You would rather not tell. I don’t care to lie; of course I’d like to know. But that is wholly up to you. You must have a good reason for keeping it------” “Yes, I do have good reason. And it’s not that you’d stop coming liete and looking after me if you knew. You’d never do that. You’d see this through.” “Then what is your reason?” Aurore answered without looking itp: “I’ll tell you, Jim: I want—•! want to keep°your respect as long as I can/’ “To keep my respect!” He was so Startled by’the bitterness of her low golden voice that for a meaning of her words him. Theft he realized was touching upon one old Bergelot had warned him. about. She was accusing herself of some­ thing which Source, and never/' He looked seconds, and believe that!’ The tears lief eyes; and Boni knew that his moment the was lost to that Auroi'e thing Which was reason, justification, of that “Can at her said sharply, steadily a few T don't sftddeftly sprang into words of faith In her, beating down own assertion, had overwhelm­ ed her, iShe did not answer him, When He realized how desperately she was guarding her secret, self-denying in the face of his desire to know, it was characteristic of Dorn. He arose and knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and gave Aurore his hand to rise, with me to the cove? leave now/’ They walked together great pines to the other island. As Dorn i gauntlets, he said, to her: “I want to say just one thing, Aurore, and then we’ll not recur to tills mattex’ again—-until you want to. What you told me, about losing my re­ spect—I don’t believe that. The mere fact that you had the bravery and the honesty to say it, proves it isn’t true.” But Aurore would not have it s.o. She said bitterly: “I’m sorry you think that, Jim. You—you have an awakening ahead of yon.” And she turned away and left him. CHAPTER XV Henry CarteixSnowdon XDorn dropped down upon Titan Pass from the west. It was not wisdom to coxne out of the north and betray the direction of Aurore’s refuge to any suspicious eyes that might be watching for the Silver Hawk, iSkimming low over the Western Titans he banked twice above his island, lit, and taxied in to the mooring between the boulders. Old Luke Illewahwacet was wait­ ing for him at the water’s edge. “How!” Dorn greeted him. “What wawa new? Bad-egg ’breeds keep gone,'huh?” He took out his billfold and paid old Luke for his faithful watching. Fronx the haggard look of the old Indian’s eyes he knew Luke had “slept on foot” those four days and nights. Luke nodded to his • question about the ’breeds. But as he step­ ped into his .birchbark canoe to go home and get some sleep, he jerk­ ed a thumb over his shoulder to­ ward the tent. “Two men . . . they say they good tillicums to yoxi . . . they waiting there.” “Friends of mine?” Dorn asked, suspicious. “Who are they?” “Un’t know,” Luke grunted, shov­ ing off. “One man he look like liiyu chief; big somebody him.” Two men. That was no terrific odds, if they were enemies. Dorn slipped liis automatic from jacket pocket into the pocket of his leather wind-splitter where it would be handy, and started up the path to liis tent. He was in a savage mood. For two hours he had been hearing Aurore’s voice as sue told him. “Then you have an awakenng ahead of you,” and he was in a mood to welcome enemies. Two men came out to meet him. At sight of them Dorn’s eyes hard­ ened and his fingers tightened up­ on the automatic. One of the men was .Scft„Slioe. The other .... Dorn looked at him steadily as the pair confronted him, and he realized that not only had his enem­ ies tracked him down but that here he was face to faco with liis chief foe—the embodiment of the power and the money and the purpose be­ hind this hunt for .Aurore MsNain. One April seventy-odd years ago, fiv-e years,before the American Civil began,’five white men and a Black­ foot meti started up the Fraser River into the Siwash wildnerness then called New Caledonia, on. a triii of tremendous significance in the history of the pacific Coas.t, They were miners, buffalo hunt­ ers, trappers—men typical of that era when bison herds thundered over the Great Plains and the liard- riding Sioux was land. They had spent the lower reaches Fraser, “hawking” sandbars and mud wondered whore came from. They Squawmswaps and nuggets big as liens’ eggs out of the interim'. The ’breed had roused their imagination with the story of a fur-trading trip he liad once made into the Creeks a lake yellow gold, and sluices, the mon had their eyes north-east, day-dreaming Of a rich mother-lode somewhere on iip-river; and when April camo around they set off to penetrate the iviidernoss and that that fabulously rich gold field. Their leader was a masterly Cal- Will you go along I have to under side of piilled on the the his as a terror in the one season along of the miglity flour gold from flats. They had the flour gold had seen the Chilco.oets bring Eraser headwaters; of ruining over golden, beds, Of whose sands were glittering and whose pebbles were pure Working their tomrockers turned J? itornian, a nameless Argonaut who had wandered up-coast keen for new adventure. The second in command was “Hell-Roarin’ ” Car­ ter, a lad of twenty-three, a lusty, laughing giant with the sunset in his hair and fire in his belly and a character as sterling as the gold lie hankered for, Dp past the grinning totem poles of hostile Siwash villages, on north to the great bend of the Fraser, fol­ lowing the river east and south to its headwaters, the two cedar can­ oes pioneered; and they came at last into their El Dorado—the re­ gion later known as Golden Cari­ bou; and along a stream Massacre Creek or Creek they staked claims, the cream o.£ where a man could stir vel with boot-toe and gets with thumb and finger. But on the very day of‘ their dis­ covery the Siwash trapped them in a narrow gorge and rolled a bould­ er slide down upon them; and only the leaders escaped—“Californy” and “Hell-Roarin' ” Carter. Without muskets or food or boat, the two indomitables started back to Fort Vancouver, running a seven- liundred-mile gauntlet of hostile tribes, following the river trails afoot, stealing canoes and shooting down steam at night, till ’ they reached the coast and spread word ■of their stupendous discovery and? led the Caribou Rush back over the trail they had blazed. After partnering together sever­ al years “Californy” and Carter went out to Vancouver, split a poke of three millions, and drifted apart. “Californy” married a Boston girl stranded at a Grey Nuns’ mission •on the Fraser; and took her name— McNain, Their sons built roads and surveyed for railroads in the new-born province; and one of their grandsons, Roger McNain, scientist and engineer was Aurore’s father. “Hell-Roarin’ ” Carter took his pick -of that famous shipload of girls whom the authorities brought over from England. I-Iis eldest son, a shrewd hustler in on the ground floor of a booming -region, multi­ plied his inheritance several times over in lumber, coal mines, and Vic­ toria real estate; but the old sterl- called Millionaire themselves the. cream, • the pea-gra- pick up nug- $’• [ > Ing character was lacking. His father's name was too pieWan for him so he added his mother's name to make it Carter-Snowdon; and marrying late in lite, he selected one of his sons after the fashton of primogeniture to inherit the entire family fortune and keep those ram­ ified monopolies intact, This Henry CarternSnowden,; grandson of TIell-BiOar' ” Carter, ■was the man whom Jim Dorn con­ fronted outside his tent at Titan Pass, Carter-Snowden was now in the prime of his early forties, tall and splendidly built, though a trifle ponderous—- a man of exceptional powers, physical and mental, Quiet­ ly dressed in gray tweeds, he gave little sign of his vast wealth. In his younger manhood he had been splashy with money and inclined to speak broadly of mistresses; but now he had outgrown the ostenta­ tion and had learned that in a prov­ ince where the sturdy British ele­ ment was strong and the moral code was circle high, this talk of “affairs' frowned upon by his social and by the pubic at large, He was the Jast of the old Roarin’' brothers, er, and gone to return, and fall were showing their fine worth at Cambrai and along, the Somme, and • British Columbia regiments were being used as spearheads of those fierce thrusts, that Carter-Snowden achieved two long-standing ambi­ tions—the merger of a huge sweep of coal and iron mines, and the es­ tablishment of a steamer line which carried the products of his vast tim­ ber limits to China, Japan and Australia. Since then, with his schemes for exploitation of natural resources rolling on of their own momentum he had been reaching out into other fields for power and dominance. Be­ fore Canadian Parliament passed its act prohibiting Canadians from assuming British titles of nobility he had tried to buy knighthood; he had offered a staggering have those three letters in his name, but he had ly refused. He had break into Canadian had been crushingly one thing that he wanted as grew older was public esteem; when he discovered that he could not buy it with money or show of philanthropy in his province, he set about to achieve it by other means. Vaguely Dorn remembered seen a newspaper picture of this man con­ fronting him, but he could not re­ call where, or in what connection. 'Hell- three' Carter stock, His one older and two young- all of them childless, had Prance early in T5 not to It was during the summer of ’KJ when the Canadians been tried politics defeated. sum to front of pointed- ouce to In his cool estimate of his enemy there was something of admiration. This big stranger was at least a hu­ man being susceptible to emotion; not a cold-blooded alley-wolf like Soft-Shoe, The latter stood a respectful pace to one side of his chief. His jaw was bandaged where (Dorn's knuckles had laid it open. ‘You’re Dorh the cartographer," the big stranger stated, is Carter-Snowdon.1 out his hand, and friendly enough. The name was ah place him memories, had worked in a Carter-iSnowdon shingle factory and had bummed many a ride on “C-S” narrow-gauge railways. Here was the man whom hundreds of straw bosses walked in fear and trembling, of, Dorn thought: “He’s the H- C-S that Aurore sent her message to. It’s his power and his money that’s behind this hunt for her.” Carter-Snowdon 'went on; “You escaped rather cleverly from Edmon­ ton. But my man here remember­ ed seeing a news picture of you. Some ‘airplane rescue down in the Lillooets, I believe, through back and identified Dorn knew tile morning a “My name He reached- his clasp was Dorn needed to It woke a score of In his wander days he He searched files in the library you by that means.” it. was a reference to when Kansas had crashed on a mesa and he had made a pack-shute jump and pull­ ed Kansas from the wreckage be­ fore the gas tank exploded. A news plane had oome out from Vic­ toria and taken pictures of that wreck, and the papers had played up the story. “I presume you know why I came to see you, Dorn.” Though there was a noticeable condescension in Carter-Snowdon’s tones, he tspoke quietly, decently. He seemed to want a peaceful set­ tlement. brought or tried muzzle thought a moment before he replied. He wanted to answer decency with At any rate he had not along a squad of policemen to force negotiations at the of an automatic. Dorn THURSDAY, JANUARY 7<i, decency. All th© king's proverbial 'hww <and men could net swerve him from a sense of fair play. He thought; “Maybe I can ©erne to an understanding with -Carter- Snowdon. Maybe I can smooth out Aurore’s troubles for her/' He answered: “You want to 'know where Miss McNain is« (She came to. me for help, I have reasons to believe she did nothing illegal. If you can prove to me you’ve .got a. right to know where she is, I’m ready to talk to you,*' I-Iis words caught Carter-Snowdon by surprise; he whirled on Soft- Shoe, “I thought you told m| this feb low knew all about her—v—” “I didn't pry into her trouble, Dorn interrupted, nettled 'by fellow/’ Since she’s a girl the benefit of the doubt, giving you also a chance your side of it/' “You’re giving me a Carter-Snowdon was half-amused at the words—at the equality implied- by them. Then he sobered. “She’s, my ward. lOur families were con­ nected some years back. 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