To his great relief, he found that the bullet had gone entirely through, leaving a clean bore through the muscles, with no need for probing. The girl's coma, so like death as to deceive the excited factor, evidently had been from shock. Applying a first-aid dressing, he bundled the injured shoulder against the cold.
Koplock, with fingers none too gentle, looked after Seymour's own injury and bandaged it with material from the police emergency kit. Then they gathered brush from the thicket and built a rousing fire before the tent.
That they would make no attempt to move that day was Seymour's first decision. The girl, he felt, needed rest after the shock of her wounding more than immediate attention from one with more surgical experience than he possessed. Whether to take her back to Armistice or across country to Wolf Lake required more consideration. The fact that there was a missionary surgeon at the lake who had more skill than Luke Morrow finally decided him. Moreover, by going to the trading post, he would be much nearer the frozen highway of the Mackenzie over which his pursuit of Karmack must continue.
In the afternoon, as they lounged in the tent with the genial warmth of the brush fire playing upon them, Seymour broached one of the mysteries of the eventful winter.
"Mind telling me, Moira, what brought you on this wild, unseasonable dash into the North?" he asked her.
"It was fear, Sergeant Scarlet--fear for my brother."
He was surprised. "You mean that you had a premonition that something was going to happen to him?"
"Not that exactly," the girl amplified her first response. "There was a motion picture I chanced to see in Ottawa. It was a dreadful thing called 'The Perils of the North' or something like that. The young man in the picture, away from all of his own kind--well, you know what might happen. He became a--a squaw man. I got to thinking of Oliver. He had dashed off while I was on a visit in Montreal and hadn't even said good-bye. There was nothing really to keep me in the cities and I decided my place was with him. That was why I came and not in time----" she broke off with a sob.
Sergeant Seymour assured her that her apprehensions of her brother becoming a squaw-man were absolutely unfounded. A cleaner specimen of young Canadian, he declared, had never fared to the Arctic foreshore. But he did not tell her, then, the real reason behind Oliver O'Malley's ill-starred venture.