Part 13

"As bright as a silver dollar," he commented, relief in his voice; "I'm glad we thought of this." Carney slipped the shells back into the cylinder, and dropped the gun into its holster without comment.

Then the Doctor said: "We can't do anything to-night--we'll only obliterate any tracks and lose good clues. We'll take it up in the morning. You men have got to clear yourselves, so I'd just rest quiet, if I were you. If we go poking about we'll have the whole town about our ears. I'm glad that nobody thought it worth while to investigate if they heard the shot."

"A shot in Bucking Horse doesn't mean much," Carney said, "just a drunken miner, or an Indian playing brave."

It seemed to Carney that Anderson had rather hurried the closing out of the matter, that is, temporarily. It occurred to him that the Scotchman's herring-hued eyes were asking him to acquiesce in what was being done.

Carney lingered when Shipley and Hadley had gone to bed.

The Scotch Doctor had filled a pipe, and Bulldog noticed that as he puffed vigorously at its stem his eyes had wandered several times to the platoon of black bottles ranged with military precision behind the bar.

"I'm tired over this devilish thing," Carney remarked casually, and passing behind the bar he brought out a bottle and two glasses, adding, "Would you mind joining?"

"I'd like it, man. Good whisky is like good law--a wee bit of it is very fine, too much of it is as bad as roguery."

The Doctor quaffed with zest the liquid, wiped his lips with a florid red handkerchief, took a puff at the evil-smelling pipe, and said:

"Court's over! A minute ago I was 'Jeffries, the Hangin' Judge,' and to-morrow, as coroner, I'll be as veecious no doubt; now, _ad interim_ (the Doctor was fond of a legal phrase), I'm going to talk to you, Bulldog, as man to man, because I want your help to pin the right devil. And besides, I have a soft spot in my heart for Jeanette--perhaps it's just her Scotch name, I'm not sayin'. In the first place, Bulldog, has it struck you that you're in fair runnin' to be selected as the man that killed Seth?"

Carney laughed; then he looked quizzically at the speaker; but he could see that the latter was in deadly earnest.

"Mind," the Doctor resumed, "personally I know you didn't do it; that's because I know you devilish well--you're too big for such small-brained acts. But the law is a godless machine; its way is like the way of a brick mason--facts are the bricks that make the structure."

"But the law always searches for the motive, and why should I kill Seth, who was more or less a friend?"

"All the worse. As a matter of fact there are more slayings over strained friendships than over the acquisition of gold. But don't you remember what that foul-mouthed brute, Kootenay Jim, said when Jeanette's brother was near lynched?"

Carney stared; then a little flush crept over his lean tanned face:

"You mean, Doctor, about Jeanette and myself?"

"Aye."

Carney nodded, holding himself silent in suppressed bitterness.

"The same evil mouths will repeat that, Bulldog. And here are the bricks for the law's building. Shipley will swear that he found you bending over the murdered man with a gun in one hand searching his pockets. And I noticed, though I didn't speak of it, there was blood on your hands."

Startled, Carney looked at his fingers; they were blood-stained. Then he drew his gun, saying, "God! and there's blood on this thing, too!"

"There is; I saw it on the butt. And though you broke it here before us to-night to show that it hadn't been discharged, Sergeant Black, while he's thickheaded, will perhaps have wit enough to say that you were off by yourself when you came for me, and could have cleaned house."

"And that swine, Shipley--do you suppose he thought of that, too?"

"I think he did: I did at the time, though I said nothing. You see, Carney, innocent or guilty, he naturally wants to clear himself, and he took a chance. If he's innocent he may really think that you killed Seth, and hoped to find the proof of it in a smudged gun and an empty shell; and if he's guilty, he was directing suspicion towards you, knowing that the clean gun would be nothing in your favor at the examination as you had had the opportunity to put it right. I don't like the incident, nor the man's spirit, but it proves nothing for or against him. I expect he's clever enough to know that the last man seen with a murdered man is, _de facto_, the slayer."

"As to the matter of the gun," Carney said, "I've an idea Seth was killed with his own gun. He was in a grouchy mood to-night--he always was a damn fool--and he may have pulled his gun, in his usual bluffing way, and the other party twisted it out of his hand and shot him. I only heard one shot." Carney remained silent for a full minute; then he said: "One doesn't care to bring a good woman's name into anything that's evil, but I fancy I'd better tell you: Jeanette was wakened by the shot that wakened me, and we talked in the hall before I went over to the police shack."

"That'll be valuable evidence to establish your alibi, Bulldog--in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of the law."

Then the Doctor puffed moodily at his pipe, and Carney could read the writing on the wall in the irritable little balloons of smoke that went up, the Doctor's unexpressed meaning that gossips would say Jeanette had sworn falsely to clear him. Anderson resumed:

"Hadley was evidently the last man playing cards with Seth, and there was considerable money at stake; that he was still up when the murder was discovered--these things are against him. Supposing he did shoot Seth, he might have come to the hotel and, seeing a light in the' upper hall and hearing Jeanette moving about, might have sat in that dark corner till things had quieted down before going to his room."

"Hadley isn't the kind to commit murder."

"To-night he was another kind of man--he was pretty drunk; and the man that's drunk is like an engine that had lost the governing balls--he has lost control. And the shock of the murder may have sobered him enough to make him a bit cautious."

"But Shipley was out, too," Carney objected. "Aye, he was; and he's got a devilish lame story about going to see Cranford. I don't like his face--' it's avariciously vicious--he's greedy. But the law can't hang a man for having a bad face; it takes little stock in the physiologist's point of view." Carney sat thinking hard. The full significance of the attached possibilities had been put clearly before him by the astute, canny Scotchman, and he realized that it was friendship. He was certain the Doctor suspected Shipley.

"I wanted to get shut of yon two," the Doctor added, presently, "for you're the man that needs to get this cleared up, and you're the man can do it, even as you caught Jack the Wolf. Is there any clue that we can follow up before the trail gets cold?"

"There is, Doctor. There was a pack of marked cards in Seth's pocket, and they're gone."

"The man that has that pack is the murderer," Dr. Anderson declared emphatically.

"He is."

"And the wallet."

"Yes."

Then Carney explained to the Doctor that the marked pack had, evidently belonged to Seth, and told of the change in cards, and the possibility that Shipley had stood in with Seth on the winnings, letting the latter do all the dirty work, perhaps helping Seth's game along by raising the bet when he knew that Seth held the winning cards.

Again the Doctor consulted his old briar pipe; then he said: "Either Shipley or somebody was in collusion with Seth, you think?"

"Yes."

"If we could get that man--?"

"Look here, Doctor," and Carney put his hand on the other's knee, "whoever has got that money will not try to take it out over the railroad, for it was in fifty-dollar bills of the Bank of Toronto."

"I comprehend: the wires, and the police at every important point; a search. Aye, aye! What'll he do, Bulldog?"

"He'll go out over the thieves' highway, down the border trail to Montana or Idaho."

"My guidness! I think you're right. Perhaps before morning somebody may be headin' south with the loot. If it's Shipley--I mean, anybody--he may have a colleague to take the money down over the border."

"Yes, the money; he'll not try to handle it in Canada for fear of being trapped on the numbers."

"So you might not get the murderer after all," Anderson said, meditatively; "just an accomplice who wouldn't squeal."

"No; not with the money alone on him we wouldn't have just what I want, but when we get a man with the marked pack in his pocket that's the murderer. It was devilish fatalism that made him take that pack, like a man will cling to an old pocket-knife; they're the tools of his trade, so to speak. And here in the mountains he could not handily come by another pack, perhaps."

"I comprehend. If the slayer goes down that trail he'll have the marked cards with him still, but if he sends an accomplice the man'll just have the money on him. Very logical, Bulldog."

Twice as they had talked Carney had stepped quickly, silently, to the door at the foot of the stairway and listened; now he came back, and lowering his voice, said: "I get you, Doctor; it's devilish square of you. I'm clear of this thing, I fancy, as you say, in the eye of the law, but for a good woman's sake I've got to get the murderer."

"It would be commendable, Carney, if you can."

"Well, then, give these other men plenty of rope."

"I comprehend," and Dr. Anderson nodded his head.

"I've got a man--'Oregon' he's known as--down at Big Horn Crossing; he's there for my work; I'm going to pull out to-night and tell 'Oregon' to search every man that rides the border trail going south."

"I don't know whether I can give you the proper authority, Bulldog--I'll look it up with the town clerk."

Carney laughed, a soft, throaty chuckle of honest amusement.

Piqued, the Doctor said irritably, "You're thinking, Bulldog, that the little town clerk and myself are somewhat of a joke as representing authority, eh?"

"No, indeed, Doctor. I was thinking of 'Oregon.' He's got his authority for everything, got it right in his belt; he'll search his man first and explain afterwards; and when he gets the right man he'll bring him in. First, I'm going to make a cast around the police shack with a lantern. Even by its light I may pick up some information. I'll get Jeanette to stake me to a couple of days' grub; I'll take some oats for the buckskin and be back in three days."

"I'll wait here till you have a look," the Doctor declared; "there might be some clue you'd be leaving with me to follow up."

Carney secured a reflector lantern from a back room and, first kneeling down, examined the footsteps that had been left in the soft black earth around the police shack door. He seemed to discover a trial, for he skirted the building, stooping down with the lantern held close to the ground, and once more knelt under a back window. Here there were tracks of a heavy foot; some that indicated that a man had stood for some time there; that sometimes he had been peering in the window, the toe prints almost touching the wall. There were two deeply indented heel marks as if somebody had dropped from the window.

Carney put up his hand and tested the lower half of the sash. He could shove it up quite easily. Next he drew a sheet of paper from his pocket--it was really an old letter--and with his pocket-knife cut it to fit a footprint that was in the earth. Then he returned to the front door, and with his paper gauge tested the different foot imprints, following them a piece as they lead away from the shack. He stood up and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his brows drawn into a heavy frown of reflection, ending by starting off at a fast pace that carried him to the edge of the little town.

In front of a small log shack he stooped and compared the paper in his hand with some footprints. He seemed puzzled, for there were different boot tracks, and the one--the latest, he judged, for they topped the others--was toeing away from the shack.

He straightened up and knocked on the door.

There was no answer. He knocked again loudly; no answer. He shook the door by the iron handle until the latch clattered like a castanet: there was no sound from within. He stepped to a window, tapped on it and called, "Cranford, Cranford!" The gloomed stillness of the shack convinced him that Cranford had gone--perhaps, as he had intimated, to Bald Rock.

He went back and fitted the paper into the topmost tracks, those heading away from the shack. The paper did not seem to fit--not quite; in fact, the other track was closer to the paper gauge.

Back at the hotel he related to Dr. Anderson the result of his trailing.

When he spoke of Cranford's absence from the shack, the Doctor involuntarily exclaimed: "My God! that does complicate matters. I was thinking we might get a double hitch on yon Shipley by proving from Cranford he hadn't been near the latter's shack. But now it involves Cranford, if he's gone. He's an unlucky devil, that, and I know, on the quiet, that he's likely to get in trouble over some payments on a mine,--they're threatening a suit for misappropriation of funds or something."

"You see, Doctor," Carney said, "the sooner I block the likely get-away game the better."

"Yes. You pull out as soon as you like. I'll have a search for Cranford, and I'll generally keep things in shape till Sergeant Black comes--likely to-morrow he'll be here. I'll hold an inquest and, of course, the verdict will be 'by someone unknown.' I'll say that you've gone to hurry in Sergeant Black."

When the Doctor had gone Carney went upstairs to where Jeanette was waiting for him in the little front sitting room.

With her there was little beyond just the horror of the terrible ending to it. Her life with Seth Long had been a curious one, curious in its absolute emptiness of everything but just an arrangement. There was no affection, no pretense of it. She was like a niece, or even a daughter, to Seth; their relationship had been practically on that basis. Her father had been a partner of Long in some of his enterprises, enterprises that had never been much of anything beyond final failure. When his partner had died Seth had assumed charge of the girl. It was perhaps the one redeeming feature in Seth's ordinary useless life.

Now Jeanette and Carney hardly touched on the past which they both knew so well, or the future about which, just now, they knew nothing.

Carney explained, as delicately as he could, the situation; the desirability of his clearing his name absolutely, independent of her evidence, by finding the murderer. He really held in his mind a somewhat nebulous theory. He had not confided this fully to Dr. Anderson, nor did he now to Jeanette; just told her that he was going away for two or three days and would be supposed to have gone after the Mounted Policeman.

He told her about the disappearance of the marked pack, and explained how much depended upon the discovery of its present possessor.

Second Part

It was within an hour of daybreak when Carney, astride his buckskin, slipped quietly out of Bucking Horse, and took the trail that skirted the tortuous stream toward the south. He had had no sleep, but that didn't matter; for two or three days and nights at a stretch he could go without sleep when necessary. Perhaps when he spelled for breakfast, as the buckskin fed on the now drying autumn grass, he would snatch a brief half hour of slumber, and again at noon; that would be quite enough.

When the light became strong he examined the trail. There were several tracks, cayuse tracks, the larger footprints of what were called bronchos, the track of pack mules; they were coming and going. But they were cold trails, seemingly not one fresh. Little cobwebs, like gossamer wings, stretched across the sunken bowl-like indentations, and dew sparkled on the silver mesh like jewels in the morning sun.

It was quite ten o'clock when Carney discovered the footprints of a pony that were evidently fresh; here and there the outcupped black earth where the cayuse had cantered glistened fresh in the sunlight.

Carney could not say just where the cayuse had struck the trial he was on. It gave him a depressed feeling. Perhaps the rider carried the loot, and had circled to escape interception. But when Carney came to the cross trail that ran from Fort Steel to Kootenay the cayuse tracks turned to the right toward Kootenay, and he felt a conviction that the rider was not associated with the murder. With that start he would be heading for across the border; he would not make for a Canadian town where he would be in touch with the wires.

Along the border trail there were no fresh tracks.

It was toward evening when Carney passed through the Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge--past the gruesome place where Fourteen-foot Johnson had been killed by Jack the Wolf; past where he himself had been caught in the bear trap.

The buckskin remembered it all; he was in a hurry to get beyond it; he clattered over the narrow, winding, up-and-down footpath with the eager hasty step of a fleeing goat, his head swinging nervously, his big lop ears weaving back and forth in apprehension.

Well beyond the Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge, past the dark maw of the cave in which Jack the Wolf had hidden the stolen gold, Carney went, camping in the valley, that had now broadened out, when its holding walls of mountain sides had blanketed the light so that he travelled along an obliterated trail, obliterated to all but the buckskin's finer sense of perception.

At the first graying of the eastern sky he was up, and after a snatch of breakfast for himself and the buckskin, hurrying south again. No one had passed in the night for Carney had slept on one side of the trail while the horse fed or rested on the other, with a picket line stretched between them: and there were no fresh tracks.

At two o'clock he came to the little log shack just this side of the U. S. border where Oregon kept his solitary ward. Nobody had passed, Oregon advised; and Carney gave the old man his instructions, which were to search any passer, and if he had the fifty-dollar bills or the marked cards, hobble him and bring him back to Bucking Horse.

Over a pan of bacon and a pot of strong tea Oregon reported to his superior all the details of their own endeavor, which, in truth, was opium running. That was his office, to drift across the line casually, back and forth, as a prospector, and keep posted as to customs officers; who they were, where the kind-hearted ones were, and where the fanatical ones were; for once Carney had been ambushed, practically illegally, five miles within Canadian territory, and had had to fight his way out, leaving twenty thousand dollars' worth of opium in the hand of a tyrannical customs department.

At four o'clock Carney sat the buckskin, and reached down to grasp the hand of his lieutenant.

"I'll tell you, Bulldog," the latter said, swinging his eyes down the valley toward the southwest, "there's somethin' brewin' in the way of weather. My hip is pickin' a quarrel with that flat-nosed bit of lead that's been nestin' in a j'int, until I just natural feel as if somebody'd fresh plugged me."

Carney laughed, for the day was glorious. The valley bed through which wandered, now sluggishly, a green-tinged stream, lay like a glorious oriental rug, its colors rich-tinted by the warm flood of golden light that hung in the cedar and pine perfumed air. The lower reaches of the hills on either side were crimson, and gold, and pink, and purple, and emerald green, all softened into a gentle maze-like tapestry where the gaillardias and monkshood and wolf-willow and salmonberry and saskatoon bushes caressed each other in luxurious profusion, their floral bloom preserved in autumn tawny richness by the dry mountain air.

And this splendor of God's artistry, this wondrous great tapestry, was hung against the sombre green wall of a pine and fir forest that zigzagged and stood in blocks all up the mountain side like the design of some giant cubist.

Carney laughed and swung his gloved hand in a semicircle of derision.

"It's purty," Oregon said, "it's purty, but I've seen a purty woman, all smilin' too, break out in a hell of a temper afore you could say 'hands up.' My hip don't never make no mistakes, 'cause it ain't got no fancies. It's a-comin'. You ride like hell, Carney; it's a-comin'. Say, Bulldog, look at that," and Oregon's long, lean, not over-clean finger pointed to the buckskin's head; "he knows as well as I do that the Old Man of the Mountains is cookin' up somethin'. See 'em mule lugs of his--see the white of that eye? And he ain't takin' in no purty scenery, he's lookin' over his shoulder down off there," and Oregon stretched a long arm toward the west, toward the home of the blue-green mountains of ice, the glaciers.

"It's too early for a blizzard," Carney contended. "It might be, if they run on schedule time like the trains, but they don't. I froze to death once in one in September. I come back to life again, 'cause I'd been good always; and perhaps, Bulldog, your record mightn't let you out if you got caught between here and Buckin' Horse in a real he-game of snow hell'ry. The trail runs mostly up narrow valleys that would pile twenty feet deep, and I reckon, though you don't care overmuch yourself what gener'ly happens, you don't want to give the buckskin a raw deal by gettin' him into any fool finish. He knows; he wants to get to a nice little silk-lined sleepin' box afore this snoozer hits the mountains. Good-bye, Bulldog, and ride like hell--the buckskin won't mind; let him run the show--he knows, the clever little cuss."

Carney's slim fingers, though steel, were almost welded together in the heat of the squeeze they got in Oregon's bear-trap of a paw.

The trail here was like a prairie road for the valley was flat, and the buckskin accentuated his apprehensive eagerness by whisking away at a sharp canter. Carney could hear, from over his shoulder, the croaking bellow of Oregon who had noticed this: "He knows, Bulldog. Leave him alone. Let him run things hisself!"

Though Carney had laughed at Oregon's gloomy forecast, he knew the old man was weather-wise, that a lifetime spent in the hills and the wide places of earth had tutored him to the varying moods of the elements; that his super-sense was akin to the subtle understanding of animals. So he rode late into the night, sometimes sleeping in the saddle, as the buckskin, with loose rein, picked his way up hill and down dale and along the brink of gorges with the surefootedness of a big-horn. He camped beneath a giant pine whose fallen cones and needles had spread a luxurious mattress, and whose balsam, all unstoppered, floated in the air, a perfume that was like a balm of life.

Almost across the trail Carney slept lest the bearer of the loot might slip by in the night.

He had lain down with one gray blanket over him; he had gone to sleep with a delicious sense of warmth and cosiness; he woke shivering. His eyes opened to a gray light, a faint gray, the steeliness that filtered down into the gloomed valley from a paling sky. A day was being born; the night was dying.

An appalling hush was in the air; the valley was as devoid of sound as though the very trees had died in the night; as if the air itself had been sucked out from between the hills, leaving a void.

The buckskin was up and picking at the tender shoots of a young birch. It had been a half-whinnying snort from the horse that had wakened Carney, for now he repeated it, and threw his head up, the lop ears cocked as though he listened for some break in the horrible stillness, watched for something that was creeping stealthily over the mountains from the west.