CHAPTER XIV

A DOUBLE-BARRELLED CASE

Sergeant Russell Seymour of the Royal Canadian again was mounted--actually astride a horse with spur at heel and a fine feel of leather between his knees. The best part of the continent separated him from the Montreal fairyland and the regal beauty in whom his ambition and hope lay centered.

An exigency of the service--the policing of the mushroom gold camp which he was approaching--had been responsible for the sudden shift of action's scene. Not that the hunt for the Armistice embezzler had been forgot or abandoned, but with the idea that a cold trail might warm if left alone for a while, its crossing effected when least expected.

The problem at Gold, British Columbia, was so large a one that the authorities had overlooked no advantage. The fact that Seymour had never seen service in the province presented the attractive possibility of his making a preliminary survey in plain clothes, severely plain, in truth--as plain as stained khaki, scuffed leather and battered felt could materialize.

The fact that the region was that selected by Moira's father for his missionary activities and that she proposed soon to join the parent did not make the summer prospect less attractive for the big policeman. The lovely creature riding beside him, however, was not the Irish girl but another he had overtaken entirely by chance.

"Of course," he was saying to her, "it wouldn't be a worth-while gold rush if there wasn't plenty of crowds and excitement. Do you think I'm in time?"

"Oh, there's still a chance for you to locate a pay claim--if luck's riding with you," she said cheerfully. "Scarcely a day passes without someone reporting a new 'discovery.' But you're just three days too late for our first real excitement. One of the B.C.X. stages was held up and robbed last Monday."

Almost did the sergeant give himself away at this crime report. In more ways than his fair informant could possibly imagine, he felt too late.

At a recent conference in Hazelton, a railroad town on the Grand Trunk Pacific, Assistant Commissioner Baxter, in command of the division in which the new diggings lay, had decided that the sergeant should remain incognito until he had had opportunity to study the field of his new important command. In the role of one of the gold-crazed "rushers" the news of the camp would float unrestrained in his presence. He should be able to get an advance line on those who were prone to lawlessness, as well as identify the element which might be counted on the side of law and order. Moreover, he could form an unbiased opinion as to the prospective permanency of the camp and the number of constables needed to police it satisfactorily.

He had shipped a "war bag" containing his uniforms and personal effects by the stage line of this same British Columbia Express which the girl had just mentioned. The charges were prepaid and the baggage was to be held until called for. Then he had set out on a rangy police horse, Kaw, over the Old Sun Trail, a time-blazed path into the Yukon country, from which a cross-cut had let him into Argonaut Valley.

"Did the robbers get--make their escape?" he asked, remembering in time to cut the professional tone from his question.

"Clean as a whistle. They killed the driver at the reins so there isn't a clew even to what they looked like or how many there were."

"But the passengers?" he ventured to ask.

The girl shrugged shapely shoulders. The face that looked from beneath the shielding brim was framed in ash-blond wavelets. The figure that had looked so boyish from a distance, while he was overtaking her, was now rounded into exquisite feminine lines. Her corduroy riding trousers were frankly worn without hint of a skirt, but her gray flannel shirt was V'd at the neck to show a marble throat such as no boy could have endured. And in the belt that pouched a man-weight automatic was the final touch--a small bouquet of waxen snowflowers.

In answer to his question she told him that there were no passengers in the coach. "It was the inbound baggage wagon they held up, you see--doubtless by mistake."

As he pondered the unusual circumstance of road agents mistaking a baggage wagon for a passenger-carrying coach, they were startled by gun fire. Seymour's expert ears placed it a short distance ahead and to the right of them--a bit nearer town. He recognized the snarl of a rifle and, a moment later, the bark of a pistol. Unquestionably, the reports had come from different weapons.

A half-stifled scream drew his attention to the girl at his side. The effect on her was surprising. She could not have showed greater alarm if one of the bullets had perforated her hat. Every trace of color had fled her cheeks.

"Oh, that it's just some hunter and not----"

If she finished her prayerful expression, Seymour did not hear it, for she had dug heels into her horse and the animal was skimming the trail.

Kaw took after the cayuse full tilt; his rider, the while, listening for other shots, but heard none. Ahead, he saw the girl round a sharp turn into what seemed to be a through road into town. If she was seeking the source of the shots they had heard, he knew she need not go far.

When his black negotiated the turn and the road was spread out before him, he saw that she had arrived. Her horse stood nosing another and she was kneeling in the trail beside an indistinct figure. In a moment he had dismounted and stood beside her.

"Too late," she cried, looking up at him with a terrified expression. "If only I hadn't slowed to chat with you--I feared they would get him and was riding to warn him. I thought there was plenty of time to get to town before he started."

She did not blame him for the delay; seemed only to accuse herself. For the sergeant, there was enough of surprise in the figure of the slain man to occupy his mind and eyes.

"Who--who is he?" he asked after staring a moment.

"He's our new mounted police officer, Sergeant Russell Seymour," she said, her voice hushed. "Don't you know the uniform when you see it?"

Seymour did recognize that particular uniform far better than she possibly could have imagined, but he refrained from admitting it.

Reaching down, the sergeant raised the girl to her feet; but he did not set her right on the mistake in identity. The case looked double-barrelled to him inasmuch as it gave him an inside line on the holdup of the express company's stage and a lead toward at least one element of the heterogeneous camp which was opposed to the coming of the Dominion's law-bringers. He meant to handle both angles with the utmost effect and the fact that they existed must for a time remain his secret.

"Looks like murder," he said, his eyes leaving the stolen uniform and focusing on the wound, the clean hole of a steel bullet in the right temple.

"It is murder--from ambush," the girl declared, her voice sharp with conviction.

But Seymour was not so sure. Without disturbing a convulsive death grip, he examined the revolver held in an outflung hand. It had been discharged once.

"'Twasn't a complete ambush, anyway," he reasoned. "He had some hint of what was coming. Couldn't have drawn his gun after that bullet hit him. The way my ears read the reports, he fired just after the rifle spoke--probably a spasmodic pull on the trigger with no aim or hit. You know, Mounties are not supposed to fire first. The rule has killed a number of them."

"He was so brave--absolutely fearless," she murmured.

Seymour might have gone further in reconstructing the crime, but he checked observation on the subject lest she suspect his training.

"You knew him well, Miss----Miss----" he asked, partially to divert her mind from his professional deductions.

"I'm Ruth Duperow," she told him. "My uncle is a missionary here."

At once he remembered Moira's description of the colorful cousin who was keeping her father company. The contrast in type was remarkable.

"Yes," she went on, "I knew the sergeant quite well and admired--both my uncle and I admired his courage and uprightness."

"You said his name was----"

The girl's frankness did not desert her. "His real name was Russell Seymour but we knew him first as Bart Caswell. You see, he has been here for a month, studying the camp without anyone suspecting that he was not the mining expert he pretended he was. Not until the stage robbery did he disclose who he was and put on his uniform."

Seymour turned to hide a smile; the plan which the girl outlined as Bart Caswell's sounded so exactly like his own. When he turned back to her, his hand was stroking meditatively a clean shaven chin.

"Is there a coroner in Gold?" he asked.

"When a man was killed in a shaft cave-in on Sweet Marie Creek last week, a deputy acted before uncle read the service," was the girl's information, delivered with a frown. The reason for the contraction of brow appeared when she added "That deputy sheriff and coroner is a chump named Sam Hardley, and he didn't like Bart--I mean Mr. Seymour."

The real Seymour made mental note of this fragment without seeming to be impressed or more than casually interested.

"At that, Hardley will have to be notified, I suppose," Miss Duperow went on. "It's the law, isn't it?"

The sergeant nodded. "Something of the sort. But first I'm going to have a little look into the brush to see--what I can see. Mind waiting for a few minutes?"

"Don't risk it," cried the girl, taking a step toward him and laying an impulsive hand upon his sleeve. "Whoever murdered Bart may be lurking in the brush and wouldn't hesitate to take a shot at you. You don't know how desperate the----" She broke off in sudden caution and finished inconsequentially: "One killing is enough for to-day."

"A killing too many," he assured her, but swung into the saddle. "I'll take no unnecessary chances, and I'll not be gone long."

With the girl's disapproving look following him, he rode into the underbrush to the left of the trail. From that direction, he figured, had come the bullet. He had small hope of any encounter. With the cowardly attack neatly turned, he could conceive no reason why the perpetrator should hide around the scene of the crime. There was a chance, however, that he might pick up the trail of departure and learn its trend before the camp's amateur sleuths got busy and blotted out all signs.

On superficial survey, it seemed to the sergeant that the bogus officer had been riding out from town on some mission not entirely unsuspected by those against whom he meant to act. Near the trail forks, someone had lain in wait and killed him.

One shot had sufficed. Caswell's effort to answer undoubtedly had been futile. Then the slayer had slunk away in the brush. It seemed unlikely that he would go into town; entirely reasonable that he would return whence he had come. Seymour imagined that that would be the place for which the pretended Mountie was bound, were that ever determined. That the escape had been through the brush seemed likely, since nobody had passed them on the trail after the shooting.

Twenty yards into the brush, he set Kaw parallel with the trail that followed the River Cheena. The undergrowth was not too thick for riding if one watched for fallen trees and devil-club thickets. The ground, soft from recent spring rains, took tracks like putty. An Indian in moccasins might have passed without leaving a trail, but any booted white must have shed footprints like Crusoe's man Friday.

Soon, the officer picked up horse tracks so fresh as to be still sucking moisture from the muskeg. These angled toward the trail over which he had followed Miss Duperow. He traced them back to a clump of poplars. There he found evidence that a horse had been tied, evidently having been ridden from the main trail.

Footprints coming and going testified to a round trip in that direction. He examined these with care. In measuring these with a lead pencil, for lack of a tape, he noted the impress of a peculiar plate on the side of the right sole. Either the wearer was slightly lame or possessed a gait that made it advisable to reinforce the outer edge of his boot.

The foot trail ended in a patch of salmonberry bushes, already in thick leaf and furnishing an ideal curtain. Groping about where the earth was beaten down, he soon discovered a copper cartridge case. His eyes sized this as having been thrown from a 30-30 Winchester, the same sort as that his saddle carried, one likely to be common in that region. Undoubtedly the dented case had held the steel nosed bullet that had ended the career of the crook who had dared impersonate a Mountie.

When Seymour stood erect, he saw he was head and shoulders above the bramble screen, in plain view and easy range of the tragedy scene. Doubtless in the very spot which he occupied, the murderer had stood erect to fling a taunt or shout a false warning at the approaching horseman; then he had shot before the other could act.

The circumstances of the crime reproduced to his own satisfaction, Seymour squandered a moment in studying his partner of the trail, his scrutiny unsuspected by the fair object thereof.

Ruth Duperow stood uncovered, her hat hanging from the horn of her saddle. The sun played upon the unmeshed waves of her silver-gold hair, bringing out unnumbered glints. She was taller than he had thought, almost as tall as her cousin, Moira. Her face was buried in hands that rested on the saddle seat, her poise slumped and heavy with grief.

"Poor youngling," mused the sergeant in deep sympathy. "She's taking it hard. These gentlemen crooks sure raise Ned with the ladies. Knowing that her uncle was a missionary, this Bart would not be at loss what trumps to lead. Reckon his blossoming out in my scarlet just topped the bill. Must have cut quite a figure in life, this Bart Caswell--or whatever his real name was. Handsome dog, too. No resemblance to me." He turned away with the hope that someone else would have the job of telling her the murdered man himself was a criminal.

Regaining his horse, Seymour mounted, minded to follow the hoof-print trail for a way. This was child's play; Kaw attended to it, leaving the sergeant free to peer ahead. Meantime, his mind was busy revolving the surprising facts with which chance had equipped him.

He saw no need for mental doubt over the stage robbery. The uniform in which Bart was clad unquestionably was the dressier of the two he had enclosed in the bag and shipped to Gold. The "E" Division had a new tailor, a mistake had been made in stitching on the insignia and trace of the change remained on the sleeve. Even had there been other members of the Force in the district, he would have sworn to that uniform. He had not a doubt that the handsome deceiver of Cousin Ruth either had held up the stage single handed or had participated in the crime.

He could not agree with Ruth Duperow that the road agent, or agents, had mistaken the express vehicle for one of the passenger coaches in use on this difficult line. That did not stand the test of reason, any more than did a supposition that the robbery had been for the sake of obtaining the uniform of a mounted police officer. No one possibly could have known that such a rig was in transit. At best, the authority which any spurious wearer might command, must be of brief duration for the owner could be counted on to follow his clothes. The risk was not worth the fleeting advantage.

The sergeant did not have to argue himself into a conviction that he must seek elsewhere for the purpose of the holdup. Some other shipment--just what, he meant to find out--that was coveted and worth taking chances to secure must have been expected. He believed that, in examining his loot, the robber-murderer had come upon the uniform and had decided to use it in some other bold stroke without the law.

The sergeant could not withhold admiration for the daring which the man who called himself Caswell had shown in his last hours of life. To put on the trusted and feared uniform, to declare himself the representative of Dominion authority and to undertake the solution of his own crime was a coup as clever and novel as it was impudent. Had the culprit stopped there, he might have made a clean get-away with whatever else of loot the stage carried. Seymour concluded that the prize which had made him resort to murder must be of great value. He did not overlook the possibility that Bart might have been slain by a pal dissatisfied with the division of the spoils. But, in view of hints dropped by Ruth, he was inclined to believe that this morning's slaying had no connection with the B.C.X. crime. The girl, after all, was his best source of information.

Just as he was about to turn back and question her further, the horse tracks he was following broke from the bush into the switchback trail and were lost. At once he swung Kaw around for the return canter. Shortly he overtook his own pack cayuse faithfully plodding in pursuit, and took the animal under halter, that it might not become confused at the crossroads.

At the turn, he saw that a group of men had gathered about the lifeless figure of Bart. A freight wagon drawn by three yoke of oxen had been stopped near by and reins dropped on four or five saddle horses. But he looked in vain for his companion of chance. Ruth Duperow and her mount were gone.