“How you coming along with the pelts, Louie?” asked Scharnhorst.
“All right,” growled Louie. “Take me three or four hours more, I guess if — say! I left those two Dutchmen out there. Do you suppose they would beat it?”
“You sap! Get out there! If they’ve ducked for help, we’ve got to scram, too.”
Louie slammed out the door. He returned two minutes later.
“They’ve beat it!”
Scharnhorst cursed roundly. Quade saw Mona Lane flinch. The big man strode across to Becker.
“Where did those men of yours go to?”
“I don’t know,” groaned Becker. “There ain’t no neighbor in ten miles from here, and you can see for yourself that it’s snowing like the devil. Spooner is thirty-one miles from here.”
“Lucky I had the key from the truck ignition,” said Louie. “They couldn’t take the truck. They got the horses, though.”
Scharnhorst pursed his lips thoughtfully. “The way it’s snowing, they’ll be lucky if they can make it to this neighbor in three hours and three hours back here.”
“Not exactly,” said Quade. “This neighbor may have a phone and call Spooner. They have cars and trucks there that can get through here.”
Scharnhorst stared at Becker. “How about it, Dutch? Has this neighbor of yours got a telephone?”
Becker nodded. “Yeah.”
Scharnhorst swore again. “That means if those two lugs get to this neighbor’s, they’ll telephone to Spooner, and they’ll come out here in autos in about an hour — four hours altogether — better make it three in case those bozos push their horses faster than I figure they will. Well, we’ll just have to finish up in three hours.”
His eyes darted around the room. “All right, you fellows! Becker, Quade, and that fat lug beside you! Morgan, you, McGregor and Slade, come on, we got work to do.”
“‘Fat lug’ huh?” Charlie Boston grunted, under his breath. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to him about that.”
“What do you want us to do?” demanded Ben Slade.
“Come on outside and help with the pelts, that’s what. We haven’t got much time. The women’ll stay in here. They ain’t foolish enough to try to get away in this weather.”
“It’s cold outside,” protested Ben Slade, “and I, honest, I wouldn’t be much good out there.”
Scharnhorst looked contemptuously at the little manager. He snorted.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t be much good out there anyway. Stay here with the women.”
“I don’t feel so good either,” said Quade. “And look, I only have this thin overcoat. You wouldn’t make me go out there in the cold, would you?”
“The hell I wouldn’t,” snarled Scharnhorst. “You can work hard and keep warm. C’mon.”
A long, low, snow-covered shed held the fox skins. Quade saw long wires stretched from end to end of the shed on which hung, on wire frames, hundreds upon hundreds of inverted silver fox skins.
“All right, fellows,” said Scharnhorst, hefting his gun, “get busy! Take them skins down from the frames, put them in bundles, and tie them up.”
“There’s another shed,” said Louie. “I better take half of these punks with me. You can stand here at the end and watch these fellows. There’s only one door.”
Quade managed to pair off with Charlie Boston and Karl Becker and follow Louie. That left Scharnhorst with Morgan, McGregor and Hugo.
Outside, Louie herded Quade and the others to a shed about fifty feet away. Inside the shed were row upon row of silver fox pelts.
“Boy! what a lot of fur coats!” exclaimed Charlie Boston. He smacked his gloved hands together, stretched wide his arms, and swooped up an armful of pelts.
“Och!” exclaimed Becker. “Such a business! The skins are still green!” He dropped down upon the pelts and almost reverently began taking out the individual wire frames upon which they were stretched.
Passing Charlie Boston, Quade nudged him. Boston followed him a few feet into the shed. They stood side by side gathering up armfuls of pelts.
“This is it, Charlie,” whispered Quade. “Watch me!”
“Hey, break it up, you two!” called Louie from the door.
Quade moved away with a tremendous armful of pelts. Approaching Becker, kneeling on the floor, he seemed to trip. He cried out and as he plunged forward he heaved the bundle of pelts into Louie’s face. The explosion of Louie’s gun filled the room, but no bullet struck Quade. And then his shoulders hit the gunman’s knees and Louie was falling backwards. Charlie Boston swarmed over Quade, and he heard the solid thump of Boston’s fist landing on Louie. That was all there was to it. Usually, when Boston hit them squarely they did not get up again, not for a while. Quade scooped up Louie’s lantern in his left hand, his gun with his right.
“All right, Ollie. Let’s go!” cried Boston.
Becker was babbling incoherently over his skins. Quade leaped out through the door of the skin-drying shed. At the same instant big Willie Scharnhorst sprang out of the other shed. The big .45 in his hand blasted fire and thunder. The bullet fanned Quade’s cheek. Scharnhorst was no mean shot. Quade fired, more with the intention of scaring Scharnhorst than trying to hit him. Scharnhorst jumped aside, but at that moment a gun somewhere else thundered and hot fire seared Quade’s left shoulder.
“Someone else is shooting at you!” cried Boston.
“I know it,” retorted Quade and made a huge leap around the corner of the shed. He dropped the lantern from his hand. It fell into some loose snow and sunk almost out of sight, but Quade didn’t pause for light. He kept going straight into the darkness. Someone behind him kept shooting and that only made Quade go faster. It was a minute or more before he was really aware that Boston wasn’t behind him. The big fellow couldn’t travel as fast as Quade, but Quade wasn’t worried about him. Boston was quite capable of taking care of himself.
When Quade stopped, there were trees around him. He stepped behind one and looked back in the direction he had come. He saw two or three winking lights moving about and he heard faint talk. But the lights were not approaching him, and he guessed that Scharnhorst realized the futility of trying to capture someone in a snowstorm in an unfamiliar forest.
Scharnhorst would proceed with the work of getting the fox skins together. It was cold out here, and Quade shivered. The prospect of staying out here three or four hours was not a cheerful one.
Furthermore, there were possibilities to this that he did not like. There was Olga Larsen, for example. Scharnhorst was a known kidnapper. Olga Larsen had money, a great deal of it. Furthermore, Scharnhorst was in a precarious situation himself. A truckload of silver fox skins was not easy to conceal even up here in the sparsely settled section of northern Wisconsin. Scharnhorst would have to go one hundred and fifty miles to reach the Canadian border. If he were smart, he would seize Olga Larsen or someone else to use as a hostage until he reached safety.
Quade was quite honest in admitting that he did not care a great deal for Olga Larsen, but on the other hand Scharnhorst might just possibly realize that Quade would be the most formidable pursuer and take along Charlie Boston. For Charlie Boston, Quade would go to very great lengths. He shook his head in the darkness.
“Got to do something before they get away.”
His eyes growing accustomed to the darkness, he made out rectangular spots of blackness to the right. Those, no doubt, were the live fox houses. He moved in the direction and hit meshed wire. He kept his hands on the wire and moved along it. It was a long pen, almost two hundred feet long. When he reached the end of it, he found himself before a long, low shed.