Murder Point A Tale of Keewatin   By: Coningsby Dawson (1883-1959)

MURDER POINT

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The House of the Weeping Woman Hodder and Stoughton, London

The Worker and Other Poems The Macmillan Co., New York

MURDER POINT

A Tale of Keewatin

by

CONINGSBY WILLIAM DAWSON

[Illustration]

Hodder & Stoughton New York George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1910, by George H. Doran Company

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. John Granger of Murder Point 1 II. The Unbidden Guest 13 III. The Devil in the Klondike 25 IV. Spurling's Tale 42 V. Cities Out of Sight 53 VI. The Pursuer Arrives 74 VII. The Corporal Sets Out 86 VIII. The Last of Strangeways 100 IX. The Break up of the Ice 112 X. A Message from the Dead 120 XI. The Love of Woman 144 XII. He Reviews His Marriage, and is Put to the Test 162 XIII. The Dead Soul Speaks Out 186 XIV. Spurling Makes a Request 210 XV. Manitous and Shades of the Departed 225 XVI. In Hiding on Huskies' Island 240 XVII. The Forbidden River 257 XVIII. The Betrayal 272 XIX. The Hand in the Doorway 283 XX. Spurling Takes Fright 297 XXI. The Murder in the Sky 305 XXII. The Blizzard 318 XXIII. The Last Chance 334

MURDER POINT

CHAPTER I

JOHN GRANGER OF MURDER POINT

John Granger, agent on the Last Chance River in the interests of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, independent traders in the territory of Keewatin, sat alone in his store at Murder Point. He sat upon an upturned box, with an empty pipe between his lips. In the middle of the room stood an iron stove which blazed red hot; through the single window, toward which he faced, the gold sun shone, made doubly resplendent in its shining by the reflected light cast up by the leagues of all surrounding snow and ice.

Speaking to himself, as is the habit of men who have lived many months alone in the aboriginal silence of the North, "Well, and what next?" he asked.

He had been reviewing the uses to which he had put his thirty years of life, and was feeling far from satisfied. That a man of breeding, who had been given the advantages of a classical and university education, and was in addition an English barrister, should at the age of thirty be conducting an independent trader's store in a distant part of northern Canada did not seem right; Granger was conscious of the incongruity. During the past two years and a half he had obstinately refused to examine his career, had fought against introspection, and had striven to forget.

In this he had been wise, for Keewatin is not a good place wherein to remember and to balance the ledger of the soul; it is too remote from human habitation, too near to God its vastness has robbed it of all standards, so that small misdemeanours may seem huge and disastrous as the sin of Cain. Madness lurks in its swampy creeks and wanders along the edges of its woodland seas, so that the border line between natural and supernatural is very faintly marked.