Sherlock Holmes of

the Yukon

*

By
‘ *JOSEPH GOLLOMB

*

A True Detective Story in the Wild and Unfamiliar Setting of the Untracked
Northern Wilderness—Written by the Famous Chronicler of “Scotland Yard

ONE CHRISTMAS morning at Minto
on the Yukon River began with mildness
and a thaw, exceptional weather for such
a time and place. At Fussell’s Roadhouse
in Minto three men breakfasted early and
at 9 o’clock set out on foot for Hootchiku,
also on the river, which they should have
reached easily in time to eat their Christ-
mas dinner. They were William Clayton,
a young Seattle merchant who was carry-
ing with him a considerable amount of
money; Linn Relfe, who had been doing
well in Dawson; and Ole Olsen, a line-
man who had to see to it that the tele-
graph wires in the region stayed up. They
left Minto in high spirits and set out on
the river ice along a trail that followed
the right bank of the Yukon.

Four days passed. Nothing was heard
of the three men. Accordingly a detach-
ment of the Mounted Police began a
search. But the heavy snow which had
fallen since Christmas had covered all
tracks. Police and others thoroughly
scoured the country between Minto and
Hootchiku but could find no trace or clue.
One possibility was that the travellers
had fallen through the ice on the river
trail; but the river was solid now. An-
other theory was that not the hazards of
the trail but man was the cause of their
strange disappearance. Const. Pennecuick
was assigned to look into the matter.

Pennecuick was an Englishman as
much at home in the wilderness as any
Indian could be; and how much he sup-
plemented his woodcraft with gifts as a
detective we shall see. He set out from
Fussell’s Roadhouse just as the three
missing men had done, and took the river
bank trail that led to Hootchiku. Only
instead of a traveller’s usual outfit, Pen-

necuick took with him a shovel and a
broom.
Six miles from Fussell’s Roadhouse

the river makes a sharp bend, and to save
distance, travellers reaching that point
sometimes choose to climb the steep bank
there, cut across the jut of land and reach
the river again by a trail, ten miles long
and more or less straight. Half way be-
tween the two ends of the cut-off is a
high hill-top.

Pennecuick closely scrutinized the
snow at every step of the river trail and

SEVENTEENTH EDITION

ial the Master Spies”.

stuck to it instead of taking to the cut-off
at the bend of the river. But minute as
was his study of the snow he saw not the
slightest thing of interest to him until he
came to the tip of the headland equi-
distant between the two ends of the cut-
off.

Snow lay smoothly everywhere over
the bank and to an ordinary observer
there would have been nothing unusual
here to notice. But Pennecuick remarked
ever so shallow a depression in the snow
at this point and ventured a deduction.
It might be that under the fresh snow
that had fallen since Christmas there was
a similar depression. If so, he wanted to
know about it.

With shovel and broom Pennecuick
carefully swept away the top snow until
he came to a harder layer. It will be re-
membered that the snow, partly melted by
the Christmas thaw, froze hard that night,
and Pennecuick found in it what he had
hoped for, signs that some one on Christ-
mas Day had taken to the bank from the
river at that point, or had come down
from the hill to the river. Also, he read
in the uncovered trail more than foot
tracks; it looked to him as if something
heavy had been dragged along it. He fol-
lowed the depression and it led him to the
top of the hill.

Here he looked about. I have said that
the cut-off began at one side of the head-
land and ran in an almost straight line to
the river at the other side. But no foot
trail made by travellers through the wil-
derness is perfectly straight ; here a clump
of growth, there a rock, elsewhere rough
going underfoot makes the track deviate
from the straight line. And on a thickly
wooded stretch such as that cut-off the
deviation would make it unlikely that one
could see along the trail for more than a
comparatively short distance.

Oxsyect oF Cut-orr A Mystery

But Pennecuick was surprised to find
that, narrow as the cut-off was, when he
got to the top of the hill he could see five
miles in each direction down to the river.
In other words, the cut-off had been made
remarkably straight, so much so that Pen-
necuick wondered.

Then he saw that someone had gone to

considerable labour to straighten the trail.
Twenty-three cottonwoods had been
chopped down and there they lay. The
policeman knew of no public-spirited eff-
ort expended to make that cut-off geo-
metrically straight. Such labour would
have been wasted if its purpose were only
to make travel easier across the headland,
for the original footpath was practically
as convenient.

If then those trees were cut down not
to help travellers, what other purpose was
served thereby? Pennecuick concluded
that whoever had put in so much work
om that trail did it because he wanted a
clear view down to the river. And as the
landscape here was in no way striking,
that view must have been desired cer-
tainly not for its aesthetic value but for
some practical end.

Anyone standing on the top of that hill
would see travellers on the river passing
the cut-off without himself being seen by
them. A man so watching could head off
those using the river trail, especially if
he got down by the path Pennecuick’s
broom had discovered. But why should
anyone go to all that trouble unless his
object was to waylay travellers ?

Pennecuick now adopted a double role;
he was both the manhunter and the hypo-
thetical highwayman of his theory. As
a highwayman he imagined himself see-
ing Clayton, Relfe and Olsen pass the
Minto end of the cut-off. He hurried
down to the river by the path he as man-
hunter had uncovered.

In his imagination he waited hidden
until the three men came up, then con-
fronted them. Alone or even with accom-
plices the highwayman would have to act
fast and drastically to make three Yukon
sojourners stop when they did not want
to stop. The chances were that Clayton,
Relfe and Olsen would have to be shot
down as soon as they reached the ambush.

As a highwayman, Pennecuick shot
down his three victims. Whoever pre-
pared the elaborate ambush would have
made a perfect score. Then there would

*By special permission of the
holder, The Press Publishing
(New York World).

copyright
Company

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