“There are not many Tearls in the world,” Kitchener reminded her. “It isn’t like Smith or Einstein or O’Toole or Jones. As far as the nickname goes, a man like Jerry would be apt to pick one up wherever he went. And it just naturally ought to be ‘Buck.’

“Funny I never thought of it before,” he mused. “Knowing Jerry as I did, I can’t understand now why I never guessed it. He went back where he belonged, of course--the north and the Mounties.” Kitchener faced his sister in tense excitement, “It’s Jerry, you can bet on it. He joined up, and naturally by now he’d be a sergeant at least.”

Jane laughed, and then stopped and sighed. “We’re an odd outfit,” she said, “each of us wasting our affections on the one up ahead. Dad thought grandfather was a stupendous man, and Jerry worshiped Dad, and you adore Jerry, and here am I, the last, with nothing to do but to be simply foolish about you.”

He squeezed her graceful shoulders, and then turned away. “Don’t be an ass,” he said.

“Can I help it?” she grinned.

“Listen here!” he said soberly. “Did you get the possible meaning of that message?”

“About so-and-so’s Esquimaux?”

“No,” he returned, “the other part,” and repeated the line: “‘The dead do not always die.’ Does that by any chance make you think of Dad?”

She looked startled for an instant, and then closed her firm mouth and shook her head. “No. Why should it? You’d be crazy to get any such ideas. Dad went--mother used to say--écarté--lost, frozen in the drifts, and was never found. Or perhaps he was ambushed by some outlaw he was after. Whatever happened, it was the end.”

“Are you so sure it was the end?”

“As sure as I can ever be in this life.”

“I’m not.” Kitchener gathered up the tattered police maps, refolded them gingerly, and restored them to the keeping of the old mahogany highboy. “You don’t know everything,” he remarked over his shoulder. “For instance, you never heard of the Tearl annuity.”

“The which?” she asked.

“The year Dad was lost,” Kitchener informed her, “an express money order for five thousand dollars was delivered at our address here in town. The envelope that contained it was mailed in San Francisco, postmarked January first. There was no writing--no mark to identify the sender.”

The girl stared with a quick contraction of her jade-tinged eyes. “You mean--?” she began, and then left the rest unasked.

“I don’t know,” answered her brother. “I only know that another five thousand came the next January and the next, and so on, every year, as regularly as the months rolled around. One draft was sent from Portland, another from Sitka, one from St. Johns, Newfoundland, two from Quebec, one from Kamchatka, Siberia.”

“You’ve tried to trace the sender?”

“Mother first, then Jerry. Lately I’ve been trying. No use! If our unknown friend were a skulking criminal he could have taken no greater pains to keep his tracks covered.”

“You think it could have been--” The girl’s speech checked for an instant on a failing breath, and then she ended in a whispered word, “Dad?”

“Who knows? If he were alive and could send money he could have written to us. You were old enough to remember what he was like. It wouldn’t have been like him to duck his family. No matter what had happened to him, he surely would have sent us word. And yet--”

Kitchener took a turn the length of the room, and then came back to stand head-high above his sister. When he was in deadly earnest over something his left eyebrow had an unaccountable habit of cocking itself at the jauntiest angle, as though he had thought up something funny to say. Jerry used to tell him he looked at such moments like a wily, black-headed crow getting ready to guffaw over his sins.

Jane knew that expression of old, and she knew that whatever notion was sticking in his head, all the world could not shake it out. “Hello, Cocky-bird!” she exclaimed. “What’s up now?”

“I’m going to find Jerry,” he said.

No Tearl was ever much astonished by anything another Tearl ever decided to do. She faced him anxiously, but without the least show of surprise. “When?” was all she said.

“As soon as I can pull out.”

“But you’re by no means certain that Sergeant Buck Tearl is Jerry.”

“Yes, I am. And if by any chance he didn’t receive to-night’s message, I want to see that he gets it. And I want to see Jerry.”

“You know what it means, of course. The rail head doesn’t go near Port-o’-Prayer. The rivers will be frozen up there. No canoes. You haven’t been in the forests since you were twelve. You’ll have to walk, my boy!” Her smile did not quite hide the dismay that had suddenly drenched her eyes. “You’ll never make it.”

“That money,” he pursued, without looking at his sister. “We never spent any of it because we didn’t know whether it was ours to spend. Mother put it in the bank. She called it the mystery fund. She deposited five thousand every January--then Jerry--then I. I only learned about it a short while before Jerry left. Didn’t think it was anything to bother you with. But I’m telling you now. There’s sixty thousand dollars all told, plus the interest. I’ll turn the book over to you. Whatever you do about it is your own business.”

“It’s all settled, then? You’re going?”

“I don’t see any way out of it,” said Kitchener.

Jane’s hands reached up to smooth her brother’s raven-black hair. Then she stood a-tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “If you think not,” she said, “there’s no way out of it.”