Chapter 16

As Jan drew in, the other dog flew at his throat. Without wasting breath upon a snarl, Jan gave the husky his shoulder, with a jar which sent the poor beast sprawling into the red flickering edge of the fire. And in the same moment Jan let out a most singular cry as he reared up on his hind feet, allowing his fore paws, very gently and without pressure, to rest on the man's chest.

His cry had something of a bark in it, but yet was not a bark. It had a good deal of a kind of crooning whine about it, but yet was not a whine. It was just a cry of almost overpowering joy and gladness; and it was so uncannily different from any dog-talk she had ever heard, that the singed and frightened husky bitch by the fire stood gaping open-mouthed to harken at it.

And the man--long-practised discipline made him lay down his gun, instead of dropping it; and then he voiced an exclamation of astonishment scarcely more articulate than Jan's own cry, and his two arms swung out and around the hound's massive shoulders in a movement that was an embrace.

"Why, Jan--dear old Jan! Jan, come back to me--here! Good old Jan!"

It was with something strangely like a sob that the bearded sergeant, Dick Vaughan, sank down to a sitting position on the log, with Jan's head between his hands.

His beard was evidence of a longish spell on the trail; and the weakness that permitted of his catching his breath in a childlike sob--that was due, perhaps, to solitude and the peculiar strain of his present business on the trail, as well as to the great love he felt for the hound he had thought lost to him for ever.

"How d'ye do, Devil! How d'ye do! We were just hurryin' on for your place. Will ye take a drop o' rye? I'm boss here. That's only my chore-boy you're slobberin' over, Mister Devil. Eh, but it's hunky down to Coney Island, ain't it?"

These remarks came in a jerky sort of torrent from the second man, one of whose peculiarities was that his arms above the elbow were lashed with leather thongs to his body. There were leather hobbles about his ankles, and on the ground near by him lay a pair of unlocked handcuffs, carefully swathed in soft-tanned deerskin.

Sergeant Dick Vaughan's companion may possibly have accentuated the solitude in which he traveled; such a companion could hardly have mitigated it as a source of nervous strain, for he was mad as a March hare. But there was nothing else harelike about him, for he was homicidally mad, and had killed two men and half killed a third before Sergeant Vaughan laid hands upon him. And his was not the only madness the sergeant had had to contend with on this particular trip.

A strong and overtried man's weakness is not a thing that any one cares to enlarge upon, but without offense it may perhaps be stated that tears fell on the iron-gray hair of Jan's muzzle as he stood there with his soft flews pressed hard against Dick Vaughan's thigh. It seemed he wanted to bore right into the person of his sovereign lord; he who had never asked for any man's caress through all the long months of wandering, toil, and hardship that divided him from the Regina barracks. His nose burrowed lovingly under Dick's coat with never a thought of fear or of a trap, although, for many months now, his first instinct had been to keep his head free, vision clear, and feet to the ground, whatever befell.

"My old Jan! My dear old Jan!"

Dick Vaughan paid no sort of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over his shoulder-blades when the man spoke.

Jan did not know much about human ailments, perhaps, but he had seen a husky go mad, and had narrowly escaped being bitten by the beast before Jim Willis had shot it. He did not think it out in any way, but he was intuitively conscious that this man was abnormal, irresponsible, unlike other men. The homicidal devil was the force uppermost in this particular man, and that naturally left no room for emanations of the milk of human kindness and goodness. Jan was instantly aware of the lack. In effect he knew this man was killing-mad.

But remarkable, nay unique, in his experience as the contact was, Jan spared no thought for it. His hackles rose a little and he edged away from the madman, because instinct in him enforced so much. For his mind and his heart they were filled to overflowing; they were afloat on the flood-tide of his consciousness of his sovereign's physical presence, the touch of his body.

The night was far spent when Dick Vaughan proceeded to tether his prisoner as comfortably as might be and to stretch himself in his blankets for sleep. Jan may have slept a little that night, but his eyes were never completely closed for more than a minute at a stretch; and his muzzle, resting on his paws, was never more than three feet from Dick's head. It was to be noted, too, that he chose to lie between Dick and the madman, although the proximity of the latter was more than a little painful to Jan.

Toward morning, when the fire was practically out, the husky bitch came timidly nosing about Jan's neighborhood, and Jan breathed through his nose at her in quite friendly fashion. But when she happened to place one foot across the direct line in which the hound watched his sovereign's face--then Jan growled, so low and softly as not to waken Dick, and yet with a significance which the husky instantly comprehended and acted on.

"Anywhere else you like, but not between my lord and me, for he is mine, and I am his; not to be divided."

So said Jan's low, throaty growl. And the husky, comprehending, withdrew, and dug herself a place in the snow under Jan's lee, which, as the big hound thought, was well and fittingly done. He gave the bitch an approving glance from the tail of one eye.

The pride of Jan, like his happiness, was just now deep beyond all reach of plummets.

XXXVI

"SO LONG, JAN!"

The way in which Jan brought Jim Willis and Dick Vaughan together that morning was notable and strange.

In finding Dick, Jan had found all he wanted in life. But at the back of his mind was a sort of duty thought which made it clear to him that he must let Willis know about these things, if possible. Willis had undoubted and very strong claims upon the leader of his team, and Jan, at this stage of his North American life and discipline, was not the dog to ignore those claims. He wanted Jim Willis to know. He desired absolution. And, short of letting Dick out of his sight--a step which no threat or inducement would have led him to take--Jan was going to set this matter right.

The outworking of his determination, in the first place, caused a number of delays, and then, when by affectionate play of one kind and another he could no longer keep Dick from the trail, he set to work to try and drag or seduce his lord back over his tracks of the previous day. Now Dick was far too well versed in doggy ways to make the mistake of supposing that Jan was indulging mere wantonness. He knew very well that Jan was not that sort of a dog.

"H'm! And then, again, old chap, as I said last night, you can't have dropped from heaven upon the trail beneath. There must be somebody else where you've come from. I see the collar and trace marks on your old shoulders--bless you! What would Betty say to them, old son? So don't excite yourself. We'll wait a bit and see what happens. I could do with the help of a team, I can tell you, for my own shoulder's bruised to the bone from the trace. You take it from me, Jan, one man and one husky are no sort of a team. No, sir, no sort of a team at all. So sit down, my son, and let me fill a pipe."

Naturally enough, Dick thought he waited as the result of his own reflections, to see what things the trail Jan had traveled by would bring forth. But, all the same, he would not have waited but for Jan's artful insistence on it. Sometimes, but not very often, a dog acquires such guile in the world of civilization. In the wild it comes easily and naturally, even to animals having but a tithe of Jan's exceptional intelligence and wealth of imagination.

Dick Vaughan had not waited long there beside the trail when his ears and Jan's caught the sound of Jim Willis's voice and the singing of his whip. Evidently, in the absence of their leader, Jan's team-mates had not settled down very well to the day's work. In the distance, away back on the trail, could be heard now and again the howl of a wolf.

Jim Willis showed no surprise when, in response to a wave of Dick's hand, he drew up his team alongside a R.N.W.M.P. man and his own missing team-leader. Jim was not much given to showing surprise in the presence of other men. He nodded his comprehension, as Dick told the story of Jan's appearance on the previous evening, and of his disappearance, many months before, from Lambert's Siding in Saskatchewan.

"It's a bit of a miracle that I should find him again--or he find me, rather--away up here, isn't it?" said Dick.

"Ah! Pretty 'cute sort of a dog, Jan," said the laconic Jim.

He was noting--one cannot tell with what queer twinges, with what stirrings of the still deeps of his nature--the fact that, while Jan lolled a friendly tongue at him and waved his stern when Jim spoke, he yet remained, as though tied, with his head at Sergeant Vaughan's knee.

The two men leaned against Jim's sled and exchanged samples of tobacco while Dick briefly told the tale of his travels, with his mad charge, from a lonely silver-mining camp near the Great Slave Lake. It seemed Dick had had some ground for fearing that he had stumbled upon some horrible kind of epidemic of madness in the lone land he had been traversing. At all events, one of the team of seven huskies with which he started had developed raging madness within a day or so of the beginning of his journey, and had had to be shot.

"I couldn't find that the brute had bitten any of the others, but next day two of 'em suddenly went clean off, and they certainly did bite another pair before I shot them. Next day I had to kill the other pair, and was expecting every minute to see the bitch, the only one left, break out. However, she seems to have escaped it."

Dick said nothing of the weary subsequent days in which he himself had toiled hour after hour in the traces, ahead of his one dog, with a maniac wrapped in rugs and lashed on the sled-pack. But Jim Willis needed no telling. He saw the trace-marks all across the chest and shoulders of Dick's coat, and he knew without any telling all about the corresponding mark that must be showing on Dick's own skin.

"Well, say," he remarked, admiringly, "but you do seem to 've bin up against it good an' hard."

Very briefly, and as though the matter barely called for mention, Dick explained, in answer to an inquiry, why he had to make a dead burden of the madman.

It seemed that when first his team had been reduced to one rather undersized dog he did arrange for his charge to walk. And within an hour, having cunningly awaited his opportunity, the demented creature had leaped upon him from behind, exactly as a wolf might, and fastened his teeth in Dick's neck. That, though Dick said little of it, had been the beginning of a strange and terrible struggle, of which the sole observer was a single sled-dog.

To and fro in the trampled snow the men had swayed and fought for fully a quarter of an hour before Dick had finally mastered the madman and bound him hand and foot. He was a big man, of muscular build, and madness had added hugely to his natural capabilities as a fighter. Dick Vaughan's bandaged neck, and his right thumb, bitten through to the bone, would permanently carry the marks of this poor wretch's ferocity in that lonely struggle on the trail.

"Don't seem right, somehow," was Jim Willis's comment. "I guess I'd have had to put a bullet into him."

"Ah no; that wouldn't do at all," said Dick.

He did not attempt to explain just why; and perhaps he hardly could have done so had he tried, for that would have involved some explanation of the pride and the traditions of the force in which he served, and those are things rarely spoken of by those who understand them best and are most influenced by them.

"And where might you be making for now?" asked Jim.

"Well, I'm bound for Edmonton. But since I got down to this one little husky I'd thought of making Fort Vermilion, to see if I could raise a team there."

"Aye. Well, I was bound for steel at Edmonton, too, an' I've bin reckoning on some such a place as Fort Vermilion since I lost my gun," said Jim. "I'm wholly tired o' makin' trail for these gentlemen behind"--the howling of the wolves was still to be heard pretty frequently--"without a shootin'-iron of any kind at all."

"It seems to me we're pretty well met, then," said Dick, with a smile, "for I want what you've got, and you want what I've got."

"Well, I was kind o' figurin' on it that sort of a way myself," admitted Jim. "If it suits you, I guess we can make out to rub along on your Jan an' my dogs right through to Edmonton."

In the end the order of the march was arranged thus: two of Jim Willis's dogs, with Jan to lead them, were harnessed to Dick's sled, with the madman and Dick's rugs for its load. The remainder of Dick's pack was loaded on Jim's sled and drawn by Jim's other three dogs, aided by the sole survivor of Dick's team. And in this order a start was made on the five-hundred-mile run to Edmonton.

From the first Jim showed frankly that there was to be no question as to Jan's ownership. He told how Jock, back there on the edge of the North Pacific, had informed him as to Jan's name and identity from a picture seen in a newspaper. Then Dick broached the question of how much he was to pay for Jan, seeing clearly how just was the other man's claim as lawful owner of the hound. Jim laughed quietly at this.

"Why, no," he said; "I haven't just come to makin' dollars out of other folks' dog-stealin'. No, sir. But it's true enough I have paid, in a way, for Jan; an' I guess there's not another son of a gun in Canada, but his rightful owner, with money enough to buy the dog from me. I'd not've sold him. And I'll not sell him now--because a sun-dried salmon could see he's yours a'ready. But I'll tell you what: I'm short of a gun, an' I've kinder taken a fancy to this one o' yours--I reckon because I'd had such a thirst on me for one before I struck your trail. Jan is yours, anyway, but if you'd like to give me your gun to remember ye by I'll say 'Thank you!'"

"Well, I'm sorry, but I can't make out to give you the gun, anyway," said Dick, "because it isn't mine. It's an R.N.W.M.P. gun. But you wait another day or two, my friend, and when we've got shut of this gentleman in Edmonton"--with a nod in the direction of the madman--"you and I will give an hour or so to finding out the best gun in the city; and when we've found it we'll have your name engraved on it, and underneath, 'From Jan, the R.N.W.M.P. hound, to the man who saved his life.' I know you'll take a keepsake from Jan, boy."

And so it was arranged. Jim would not hear of any selling or buying of the hound; but in Edmonton, where he sold his sled and team, preparatory to taking train for the western seaboard, he accepted, as gift from Jan, the best rifle Dick could find, inscribed as arranged; and, as gift from Dick, a photograph of himself and Jan together.

Their parting was characteristic of life in the North-west. Each man knew that in all human probability he would never again set eyes upon the other. Yet they parted as intimate friends; for their coming together--again most typical of north-western life--had been of the kind which leads swiftly to close friendship--or to antipathy and hostility.

Dick, greatly impressed by the other man's solid worth, urged upon him the claims of the R.N.W.M.P. as offering a career for him.

"For you," said Dick, "the work would all be simple as print; plain sailing all the way."

Jim Willis, like most northland men, had a very real respect for the R.N.W.M.P., but he smiled at the idea of joining the force.

"But why?" asked Dick. "It would be such easy work for you."

"Aye, I'll allow the work wouldn't exactly hev me beat," agreed Jim. "But--Oh, well I ain't a Britisher, to begin with, an', what's more to the p'int, a week in barracks 'd choke me."

"But they'd be wise enough to keep you pretty much on the trail; and you're at home there."

"Yes, I guess the trail's about as near home as I'll ever get, mebbe, but I'd have no sorter use for it if I j'ined your bunch."

"How's that?"

"Well, now, I guess that 'd be kinder hard to explain to you, Dick." (In the northland, between men, it is always either Christian names or "Mister.") "You see, we was raised different, you an' me; an' what comes plum nateral to you would set me kickin' like a steer, first thing I'd know. The trail suits me, all right, yes. But I hit it when I want to, an' keep off it when I'm taken that-a-way. I'm only a poor man, but ther' isn't a millionaire in America can buy the right to say 'Come here' or 'Go there' to me, Dick, an', what's more, ther' ain't goin' to be, not while I can sit up an' eat moose. It's mebbe not the best kind of an outfit; an', then again, it's mebbe not jest the worst; but, any ol' way you like, Dick, it's the only kind of an outfit I've got."

Dick nodded sympathetically.

"Why, yes, you can see it stickin' out all over. Look at that little dust-up with the lun_at_ic. Well, now, I should jest 've pumped that gentleman as full o' lead as ever he'd hold. 'You'd bite me,' I'd ha' said. 'Well, Mister Lun_at_ic,' I'd ha' said, 'I count you no more 'n a mad husky; an' when I see a mad husky, I shoot. So you take this,' I'd ha' said, an' plugged him up good an' full. But for you--well, I see how it is. He's a kind of a sacred duty, an' all the like o' that. Yes, I know; only--only I'm not built that kind of a way, ye see."

And Jim was right, and Dick knew he was right. As white and straight and true a man as any in the north, and able to the tips of his fingers and toes, but--but not the "kind of an outfit" for the R.N.W.M.P.

And so they parted, on a hard hand-grip. And to Jan Jim Willis gave a grim, appraising sort of a stare, and (spoken very gruffly) these words:

"Well, so long, Jan! The cards is yours, all right, an' I guess you take the chips!"

He did not touch the big hound as he spoke. But then, despite their long and close association, he never had touched Jan in the way of a caress.

XXXVII

BACK TO REGINA

Long before Sergeant Dick Vaughan--he was always spoken of thus, by both his names--arrived at the R.N.W.M.P. headquarters in Regina news was received there of his strange single-handed journey from the Great Slave Lake, of the mad murderer, the mad dogs, of the sergeant's own toil in the traces, and of his being tracked down by Jan.

The surgeon in Edmonton who attended to Dick's badly wounded and poisoned neck and right thumb happened to be a man with a strong sense of the picturesque and a quite journalistic faculty for visualizing incidents of a romantic or adventurous nature.

An _Edmonton Bulletin_ reporter, in quest of a "story" for his paper, had the good luck to corner the surgeon in his consulting-room. The result took the form of promotion for that reporter, following upon publication in the _Bulletin_ of a many-headed three-column article which was quoted and reproduced all up and down America. Summaries of the "story" were cabled to Europe. Snap-shots of Dick and Jan were obtained by enterprising pressmen in Edmonton, and distributed quite profitably for their owners to the ends of all the earth. Many months afterward extracts and curiously garbled versions of this northland Odyssey cropped up in the news-sheets of Siam, the Philippines, Mauritius, Paraguay, and all manner of odd places.

Their London morning newspaper presented the matter at some length to the Nuthill household and to Dr. Vaughan in Sussex, while Dick and Jim Willis, five or six thousand miles away, were choosing a rifle to have Jan's name inscribed upon it.

As a fact, the subject-matter of the story was sufficiently striking in character, for in a temperature of fifty below zero, with no other help than a little undersized husky bitch can give, it is no small matter for one man to drag a laden sled for twelve days while looking after a maniac who has come very near to killing him.

To this was added the romantic recovery of the famous "R.N.W.M.P. bloodhound," as Jan was called; and that aspect of the business brought special joy to the newspaper writers. To some extent also, no doubt, it colored Dick's addition to R.N.W.M.P. records, and caused that addition to figure more strikingly than it might otherwise have done in the archives of the corps.

A quaint thing about it all was the fact that every one else knew more about it than the two men most concerned, for it happened that neither Dick Vaughan nor Jim Willis had ever cultivated the newspaper habit. Willis was hugely startled and embarrassed, hundreds of miles away in Vancouver, to find himself suddenly famous.

In Edmonton Dick Vaughan presented a very stern front to the snap-shooters because he conceived the idea that he and Jan were being guyed in some way. By the reporters he was presently given up as hopeless, because he simply declined to tell them anything. Their inquiries touched his professional pride as a disciplined man, and they were told that Dick could have nothing whatever to say to them with regard to his official duties. But his innocence made surprisingly little difference in the long run. The surgeon's story was real journalistic treasure-trove, the richest possible kind of mine for ingenious writers to delve in; and after all the most determined reticence in no way affects the working of cameras.

Withal, the welcome prepared for Dick and Jan at Regina station was hardly less than alarming for one of the two men in Canada and the United States who had not read the newspapers.

"You'll excuse my saying so, sir," explained Dick in a flustered aside to Captain Arnutt, "but this is the very devil of a business. I--surely I haven't got to say anything!"

The civilian crowd at the station was good-humoredly shouting for a "speech," cameras were clicking away like pom-poms, and the Regina pressmen were gripping Dick almost savagely by either arm, showing considerable personal bravery thereby, for Jan growled very threateningly as their hands touched the sergeant's tunic, and in common humanity Dick was forced to grab the famous hound by the neck and give him urgent orders to control his wrath.

As Dick subsequently explained to Captain Arnutt, the thing struck him as the more awkward because, having found Jan, he desired now to be allowed to resign from the force, as he wanted to return to England.

"But, hang it, man! you've been gazetted a full sergeant-inspector and--unofficially, of course--I'm told we are only waiting word from Ottawa about offering you commissioned rank."

Dick shrugged his shoulders in comic despair. His speech was finally delivered from the perilous eminence of a booking-clerk's stool, an elevation which Jan so gravely mistrusted that he felt impelled to rise erect on his hind feet, placing both fore paws beside his lord's raised heels, and thereby providing the camera men with the most famous of all the snap-shots yet obtained.

The speech, as literally recorded in shorthand by one of Regina's most promising young pressmen, if not a very finished or distinguished effort, was clearly a hardy and quick-growing production, since it did eventually develop into a long half-column in some newspapers, according to the unimaginative and literal stenographic record aforementioned. It was as follows: