Part 16

The Major was a jaunty, wiry little man; his braided cap, cocked at a defiant angle on his grizzled head, suggested the comb of a Black-Red, a game cock. He had originally been a sergeant in the Imperial forces, and in his speech there was the savor of London fog.

"What's this, my good man?" The words popped from his thin lips as he addressed the agent. "You should have broken the seals on that car: do so now!"

"You'll take the responsibility, then, sir," Craig answered.

"My word! we're always doing that, always--that's what we're here for, to take responsibility; the Force is noted for it."

There was an ominous squint in the little man's eye, which was fastened on Carney rather than the agent, as he said this. Now, led by the Major, a procession headed for the car of interest.

The station agent clipped the seal wire, and as the door was slid open, the sunlight streaming in picked out the goodly forms of several oak barrels.

The Major's lips clipped out a sharp "Ha!" and Sergeant Jerry grinned at Bulldog Carney.

It must be confessed that Bulldog's gray eyes held a trifle of astonishment over this exhibit.

At a command two constables had popped into the car, and the Major, turning to Sergeant Jerry, said, "Back the wagon up, Sergeant, and take this stuff to the fort."

The station master interposed: "I think, Major, that if you're seizing this stuff as liquor you'd better make sure. Them bar'ls looks a bit too greasy and dirty to be whisky bar'ls."

"Just a clever little covering up of the trail by a foxy whisky-runner," the Major said pleasantly, and let his shrewd eyes almost wink at Carney. "But I'll humor you, Mr. Craig. Have one of your section-men bring a sledge and we'll knock in the head of a barrel; it's got to be destroyed; the devilish stuff gives us trouble enough."

One of the yard-men brought a sledge; a barrel was rolled out, stood on end, and the yard-man swung his heavy, long-nosed spike-driving sledge. At the second blow it went through, and a little fountain of syrup fluttered up like a spray of gold in the sunlight.

"Oh, my aunt!" FitzHerbert exclaimed; "you've struck it sweet this time, Major."

A little group of Sarcees who had viewed with apathetic indifference the turmoil of the whites, swarmed forward like so many bees, dipped their dirty fingers in the treacle, and lapped it off with grunts of appreciation. It was Long Dog-leg who grunted: "Heap big chief, Redcoat man! Him damn good; break him more!"

"Dump out another barrel," the nettled Major commanded.

This oaken casket when shattered by the sledge cast oil on the troubled waters--literally, for it contained good healthy kerosene.

The citizens yelped with delight. Dog-leg begged the Major not to waste these things of an Indian's desire, but give them to his tribe.

The station agent, realizing that he had been on the winning horse in his objection, could not resist a little crow. "Well, Major, you've roped something at last. For the next thirty days I can sit up nights answering correspondence. The man that owns this car of groceries will want to know what the hell the company's up to broaching his goods. The Superintendent of the Western Division will want to know why I side-track freight billed through Fort Calbert. You said you'd take responsibility, but you've given me a big lot of work, and I ain't none too well paid as it is. Somebody's doublecrossed you."

"And, by George! I'll keep after that somebody till I get him, if I have to follow him to the North Pole!" Major Kane answered crossly.

Then the constables investigated the car's interior. There were barrels of sugar, biscuit, bundles of brooms, boxes of salt cod, tins of peas, beans--in fact the car's interior was a replica of a well-ordered grocery store rather than the duplicate of a barroom.

The Major was mystified. They certainly had got the car that had been wired on by the Secret Intelligence Department as containing whisky.

He had no word of another car; what could he do? Beyond Fort Calbert were several small places on the line where there were neither police nor men who either feared or were friendly to the law. He turned to the station master, saying:

"Craig, can't you wire ahead and see if you can get that car of whisky cut off? I believe it's on that train."

"How'd I know what car to cut out; besides, I've no jurisdiction outside my own station. As it is, the company'll have a bill of damages to pay, and, of course, somebody on a three-legged stool at head office'll try to cut it out of my pay. You'd better have your men put those packages back in the car, so I can seal it up. I'm going in to wire the Superintendent of the Western Division at Winnipeg to report the whole thing to your Commissioner at Regina."

Some Stoney Indians, with the Sarcees, watched sadly the return of the broken barrels of desire to the car; not since they had looted the H. B. Coy's store at Fort Platt had there been such a pleasing prospect of something for nothing.

The constables mounted their horses and with the police wagon departed.

Sergeant Jerry Platt, in a little detour passed close to Carney, saying, as he slacked his pace: "Bulldog, you're too damn hot for this country; Montana, I would suggest as a wider field. But we'll get the goods on you yet, old top."

"Then Montana might prove attractive, dear Jerry."

The Major walked away stiffly, pondering over this mixed-up affair. He would wire to one of his outposts up in the hills; but he was handicapped by his now want of data. With whisky as the bone of contention everybody's hand would be against the force--the very train men, if they could get away with it.

Carney had viewed the incident with complacency. If 6100 contained groceries then the other car, for there was one, had got safely through with its holding of liquor. Carney had known before his telegram was sent that Jack Arliss was shipping two cars--one of goods and one of whisky; one consigned to John Ross, and one to Dan Stewart; and John Ross was also of the gang, though ostensibly an industrious storekeeper in the next town to Bald Rock, Dan Stewart's habitat. Of course, neither car would be billed as liquor. How Arliss had double-crossed the police, either by shifting the goods or juggling the shipping bills, did not matter.

Carney's telegram telling Arliss that the police at Fort Calbert were going to seize 6100 made it a sure thing for that gentleman to shoot through the whisky under another number, and a day ahead of the suspected car.

Back at the Fort, Major Kane called in Sergeant Jerry for a consultation. Jerry had been in the force for many years; he had risen from the position of scout and knew every trick and curve of the game; besides, which was almost a greater asset, he was liked of the citizens.

"Bulldog 'illstay right here," he advised; "he's got brains, the cool kind that don't sputter in the pan. It wouldn't do a bit of good to round him up, for we haven't got a thing on him--not a thing. He's so well liked that nobody'll give him away; he plays the game like Robin Hood used to. Dan Stewart 'll handle this stuff; but till you've clapped your hands on somebody with the goods we'll be guessing. A lot of it'll be run into the plains--there isn't a rancher wouldn't buy a barrel of it, and swear he'd never heard of it. Every white man is against this law, sir. They don't think Carney's breakin' the law."

The Major pondered a little, then he said: "Instruct the Sergeant Major to send out a patrol up toward the foothills, with orders to get some of this consignment, and some of the runners at any cost."

So that night a patrol rode into the western gloom.

Next day, as Sergeant Jerry strolled out of the stockade gate, he was accosted by a French halfbreed, who intimated that for a matter of ten dollars, paid in hand, he would tell Jerry where he could nab a big lot of whisky as it was being run the following night.

The informant refused Jerry's invitation to accompany him to the Commanding Officer. To insist would only frighten him, and a frightened breed always lied; so Jerry, taking a gambling chance, passed over the ten, and learned that in the night a whisky caravan would come along the trail that crossed the ford at Whispering Water heading for Fort Calbert itself.

This was quite in keeping with Carney's audacity; and Jerry, still wondering that anybody would give away Bulldog, carried the information to the Major.

"We'll have to act on it," Major Kane declared? "sometimes a breed will sell his own wife for a slab of bacon."

When night had settled down over the prairie Sergeant Jerry Platt, Corporal McBane, and three constables rode quietly through the gates, and, skirting the west wall of the stockade, drifted away to the southwest.

At ten o'clock the police were snugly hidden in the heavy willow bush of a little valley through which rippled Whispering Water; their horses had been taken back on the trail by one constable. A bull's-eye lantern fastened to a stake just topped a rock. In this position, when the slide was pulled, its rays would light up the trail where it dipped from the cut-bank to the stream.

They lay for an hour in the little bluff of willows. A moon that had hung in the western sky wandering lazily toward the distant saw-toothed ridge of the Rockies, had passed behind the gigantic stone wall, and a sombre gloom had obliterated the uneven edge of the cut-bank. In the belly of the valley it was just a well of blackness, cut at times by a penciled line of silver where the waters swirled around a cutting rock. The stillness was oppressive for the air was dead; no winger of the night passed; no animal of the prairie, gopher or coyote, disturbed the solemn hush; nobody spoke; in each one's mind was the unworded thought that they waited for a man that was known to be without fear, a man to whom odds meant little or nothing.

As they lay chest to earth in the heavy grass Corporal McBane pivoted his body on elbows close to Sergeant Jerry and whispered: "I'm glad, man, you suggested the flare. In the dark, wi' promiscuous shootin', there might be killin', and I'd no like to pot Bulldog myself', even if he is a whisky runner."

Jerry laughed a soft, throaty chuckle. "You'd have a fine chance, Mac, with that old .44 Enfield pepper-box against Carney with his .45 Colt; he just plays it like a girl fingerin' the keys of a piano; those gray cat-eyes of his can see in the dark."

"Well, wi' the flare on him he'll quit. It's only damn fools that won't wait for a better chance."

"We had him once before," Jerry said reflectively, "and he gave us the slip; just for the joke of it, too, for it was that train hold-up, and it was proved after he had nothing to do with it. But listen to this, Scottie, we both like Bulldog, but if he bucks us, we belong to the Force."

"Aye, I'm aware of it, Sergeant; and Bulldog himself wouldn't thank us to spit on our salt. But what makes you think he'll be with this outfit?"

"Because it's just one of his damned mad capers to run it into Fort Calbert under our noses, and he wouldn't ask anyone to run the risk and not be there."

But McBane had a Scotch reluctance to believe in foolish bravado. "It's no sense, Sergeant," he objected, "and Carney's vera clever."

Suddenly, on top of the cut bank where the trail dipped through the sandy wall, something blurred the blue-black sky; there was a heavy, slipping, sliding noise as if a giant sheet of sand-paper were being shoved along the earth. There was the creaking of wood on wood, the dull thump of an axle in a hub; a softened, just perceptible thud, thud of muffled hoofs.

The shuffling noise that was as if some serpent dragged its length over the deep sands of the cut was opposite the armed men when the voice of Sergeant Platt rang out in a sharp command:

"Halt! hands up--you are covered! If you move we fire!"

At the first word, "Halt!" the bull's-eye threw its arrogant glare of light upon the creeping thing of noise. It painted against the cut-bank the bleary-eyed cayuse, the archaic Red River cart, and the unformidable figure of the Honorable Reginald Fordyce-Anstruther--that was all. That is to say, all but five square tins, atop of which sat the outlaw, Reggie.

It was a goblined, pathetically inadequate figure sitting atop the tins, the lean attenuated arms held high as if in beseechment.

Sergeant Jerry cursed softly; then he laughed; and Corporal McBane exclaimed: "Ma God! it's like catchin' a red herrin'."

But Jerry, careful scout, whispered: "Circle to the rear, Corporal; keep out of the light; it may be a blind."

Soon McBane's voice was heard from the cut-bank: "All clear, Sergeant."

Then Sergeant Jerry, stepping into the open, examined the exhibit. Instead of carrying concealed weapons Reggie had a fair load of concealed spirits; he was fully half-drunk. Questions only brought some nebulous answers about the permit being up in Fort Calbert, and that he was bringing in the goods. Even Jerry's proverbial good nature was sorely taxed.

"I'm gettin' fed up on these damned tricks of Bulldog's," he growled, "for that's what it is."

"I'm not sure," McBane objected; "this ninny may ha' blabbed, and yon breed, hearin' it, saw a chance to make a shillin' or two."

However, Reggie, and his cayuse and the whisky were attached and escorted in to barracks.

Perhaps it was the fortifying courage of the whisky the villain had imbibed that caused him to bear up remarkably well under this misfortune of the very great possibility of losing his not-too-valuable outfit; or he may have known of some fairy who would make good his fine.

In the morning the liquor was very formally taken out to the usual sacrifice place, just at the back of the barracks, and in the presence of the Superintendent and a small guard of constables, poured in a gurgling libation upon the thirsting sand-bank of a little ravine. Then the empty tins were tossed disdainfully into the coulee.

Back in the Fort Major Kane said: "This was all a blind, Sergeant Platt; none of the stuff will come down this way--they'll run it up among the miners and lumberjacks. Take Lemoine the scout, and pick up some of the patrol up about the Pass."

In half an hour Sergeant Jerry rode out from the Fort into the west; and by the middle of the afternoon Corporal McBane reported to the O.C. that the few constables remaining in the Fort were drunk--half were in the guard room.

The Major was horrified. Where had the liquor come from? Corporal McBane didn't know.

In his perplexity the Major, stick in hand, stalked angrily to the scene of the morning sacrifice. The mound apparently had not been disturbed. He had a nebulous idea that perhaps the men had chewed up the saturated earth. He jabbed viciously at the spot with his walking stick as if spearing the alcoholic demon. At the third thrust his stick went through, suggesting a hole. With boot and hand the Major sent the sand flying. A foot down he came upon a gunny sack. Beneath this was a neat crosshatching of willow wands resting atop an iron grating that was supported by a tub; a tub boned from the laundry, but the strong odor that struck the Superintendent's nostrils was not suds--it was whisky.

He yanked the tub out of the cavity and kicked it into the coulee. Then he stood up and mopped his perspiring forehead, muttering: "The devils! the cursed stuff! It's that damned outlaw, Bulldog Carney, that's put them up to this. The liquor that poor waster brought in was just a blind, the tip from the half-breed was part of his devilish plot. It's a game to put my men on the blink while he runs that carload."

Rage swirled in the Major's heart as he turned toward the Fort; but before he had reached the gates his sense--and the little man had lots of it--laid embargo on his tongue, and he passed silently to his quarters to sit on the verandah and curse softly to himself.

He was sick of the whole whisky business. He had been in the Mounted from the very first, fifteen years or so of it now. They had not come into the Territories to be pitted against the social desires of the white inhabitants who were in all other things law abiding; but here this very thing took up more than half their time and energy. And it was a losing game with the cunning and desires of a hundred men pitted against every one of his force.

There were rumors that it was soon to be changed--the trade legitimatized; that is, for Alberta to the Athabasca border. With a small army of clever whisky traders, no licenses, no supervision against them, it was a matter of impossibility to keep liquor from the half-breeds who were a sort of carry-on station to the Indians.

To trail murderers, gunmen, cattle and horse thieves, day after day across the trackless prairie, or the white sheet-of-snow buried plain, was an exhilarating game--it was something to stimulate the _espirit de corps;_ a Mounted Policeman, feeling, when he had landed his man, full reward for all his hardships and danger; but to poke around like an ordinary city sleuth and bag some poor devil of a breed with a bottle of whisky, only to have him up before the magistrate for a small fine was, to say the least, disquieting; it made his men half ashamed of their mission.

Of course the present incident was not petty; it was like Bulldog Carney himself--big; and the Major would have given, right there, a half-year's pay to have bagged Bulldog, and so, perhaps have broken up the ring.

But determined as the force was, the British law was greater still. Without absolute, convicting evidence Carney would have been acquitted, and the Major perhaps censured for making a mistake.

At headquarters was a fixed edict: "Take no position from which you will have to recede," really, "Don't make mistakes."

As the little man sat thinking over these many things, sore at heart at the quirky thrust Fate had dealt him, for he loved the Mounted, loved his duties, loved the very men, until sometimes breaking under the strain of service in the lonely wastes they cracked and a weak streak showed--then he was a tiger, a martinet; no sparing: "Out you go, you hound!" he would snap; "you're a disgrace to the Force, and it's got to be kept clean."

Then "Dismissed" would be written opposite the man's name in the annual report that went from the Commissioner at Regina to the "Comptroller at Ottawa."

Suddenly the chorus of a refrain floated to his ears from the guard house--it was "The Stirrup Cup."

"God, _England!_" the little man groaned. "That's Cavendish singing," he muttered.

How long and broad the highway of life; how human, how weakly human those who travelled it! Cavendish, a younger son of a noble family, a constable at sixty cents a day! They were all like that--not of noble family, but adventurers, roamers, men who had broken the shackles of restraint all over the world. That was largely why they were in the Mounted; certainly not because of the sixty cents a day. And, so, how, even in his bitterness of set-awry-authority, could the incident of the tub be a heinous crime on their part.

"By gad!" and the little man popped from his chair and paced the verandah, crying inwardly: "They're my boys; I'd like to forgive them and shoot Carney--damn him! he's at the bottom of it."

The great arrogant sun, supreme in his regal gold, had slipped down behind the jagged mountain peaks as Carney, on his little buckskin, and the blond giant, FritzHerbert, on a bay, swung at a lope out of Fort Calbert for a breather over the prairie.

As they rode, almost silently, they suddenly heard the shuffling "pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat" of a cayuse, and in a little cloud of white dust to the west there grew to their eyes the blurred form of a horseman that seemed to droop almost to the horn of his saddle.

"A tired nichie," FitzHerbert commented; "he smells sow-belly frying in the town--he hasn't eaten for a moon, I should say."

The dust cloud swirled closer, and Carney's gray eyes picked out the familiar form of Lathy George, one of Dan Stewart's men. The rider yanked his cayuse to a stand when they met, almost reeling from the saddle in exhaustion. The cayuse spread his legs, drooped his head, and the flanks of his lean belly pumped as if his lungs were parched.

"Hello, Bulldog!" then the man looked warily at Carney's companion.

FitzHerbert saw the look and knew from the stranger's physical shatterment that some vital errand had spurred him; so he touched a heel to his bay's flank and moved slowly along the trail.

Then the rider of the cayuse in tired, panting gasps gave Carney his message.

"All right, George," Bulldog commented at the finish; "go to the Victoria, feed your horse, have a good supper, get a room and sleep."

"What'll I do, boss, when I wake up--how long'll I sleep?"

"As long as you like--a week if you want."

"What'll I do then--don't you need me?"

"No, play with your toes if you like."

Lathy George pulled his reeling cayuse together, and pushed on. Carney gave a whistle, and FitzHerbert, wheeling his bay, turned. "I've got to go back to town," Carney said.

"I'll go too," the other volunteered; "this devilish boundlessness is like a painted sky above a painted ocean--it gives me the lonely willies."

"There's hell to pay back yonder," Carney said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

"It's always back there, or over yonder--never here when there's any hell to pay," FitzHerbert commented dejectedly; "it's just one long plaintive sabbath."

"I've got to go back to the foothills soon's I've got fixed up," Carney continued.

"Me, too--if there's action there."

"Hardly, my dear boy; it's purely a matter of diplomacy."

"Absolutely, Bulldog; that's why you're going. You're going to kiss somebody on both cheeks, pat him on the back, and say, 'Here's a good cigar for you'--you love it. What's happened?"

"The Stonies are on the war-path."

"Ugly devils--part Sioux. They're hunters--blood letters--first cousins to the Kilkenny cats. In the rebellion, a few years ago, only for the Wood Crees they'd have murdered every white prisoner that came into their hands."

"Yes, they're peppery devils. In the Frog Lake massacre one of them, Itcka, killed a white man or two and was hanged for it."

"What started them now?" FitzHerbert asked. "Whisky."

FitzHerbert stole a glance at Carney's stolid face; then he whistled; Carney's word had been like a gasp of confession, for, undoubtedly, the liquor was from the car.

"How did they make the haul?" he asked.

"The Stonies have just had their Treaty Payment, and there's a new regulation that they may go off the reserve at Morley to make their Fall hunt in the mountains, at this time; they were on their way, under Chief Standing Bear, when they ran into the gent we've just met and his mates in the Vermillion Valley. George was running two loads of whisky up to the lumber camps."

"Great! that combination--lumberjacks, Stonies, and Whisky; it would be as if sheol had opened a chute--there'll be murder."

"I know Standing Bear; he made me a blood brother of his. I did him a bit of a turn. I was coming through the Flathead Valley once, and the old fellow had insulted a grizzly. The grizzly was peeved, for the Stoney had peppered a couple of silly bullets into the brute's shoulder. I happened to get in a lucky shot and stopped the silver-tip when he was about to shampoo old Standing Bear."

"Yes, I heard about that--you and your little buckskin. Say, Bulldog, that little devil must have the pluck of a lion--they say he carried you right up to the grizzly, and you pumped him full of .45's"