"Who says that at Humphrey's?--Pierre, you lie!" was the sharp and
threatening reply. The significance of this last statement had been
often attested on the prairies by the piercing emphasis of a six-
chambered revolver. It was evident that Young Aleck was in earnest.
Pierre's eyes glowed in the shadow, but he idly replied:
"I do not remember quite who said it. Well, 'mon ami,' perhaps I lie;
perhaps. Sometimes we dream things, and these dreams are true. You call
it a lie--'bien!' Sergeant Fones, he dreams perhaps Old Aleck sells
whisky against the law to men you call whisky runners, sometimes to
Indians and half-breeds--halfbreeds like Pretty Pierre. That was a dream
of Sergeant Fones; but you see he believes it true. It is good sport,
eh? Will you not take--what is it?--a silent partner? Yes; a silent
partner, Old Aleck. Pretty Pierre has spare time, a little, to make
money for his friends and for himself, eh?"
When did not Pierre have time to spare? He was a gambler. Unlike the
majority of half-breeds, he had a pronounced French manner, nonchalant
and debonair.
The Indian in him gave him coolness and nerve. His cheeks had a tinge of
delicate red under their whiteness, like those of a woman. That was why
he was called Pretty Pierre. The country had, however, felt a kind of
weird menace in the name. It was used to snakes whose rattle gave notice
of approach or signal of danger. But Pretty Pierre was like the death-
adder, small and beautiful, silent and deadly. At one time he had made
a secret of his trade, or thought he was doing so. In those days he was
often to be seen at David Humphrey's home, and often in talk with Mab
Humphrey; but it was there one night that the man who was ha'sh gave him
his true character, with much candour and no comment.
Afterwards Pierre was not seen at Humphrey's ranch. Men prophesied that
he would have revenge some day on Sergeant Fones; but he did not show
anything on which this opinion could be based. He took no umbrage at
being called Pretty Pierre the gambler. But for all that he was
possessed of a devil.
Young Aleck had inherited some money through his dead mother from his
grandfather, a Hudson's Bay factor. He had been in the East for some
years, and when he came back he brought his "little pile" and an
impressionable heart with him. The former Pretty Pierre and his friends
set about to win; the latter, Mab Humphrey won without the trying. Yet
Mab gave Young Aleck as much as he gave her. More. Because her love
sprang from a simple, earnest, and uncontaminated life. Her purity and
affection were being played against Pierre's designs and Young Aleck's
weakness. With Aleck cards and liquor went together. Pierre seldom
drank.
But what of Sergeant Fones? If the man that knew him best--the
Commandant--had been asked for his history, the reply would have been:
"Five years in the Service, rigid disciplinarian, best non-commissioned
officer on the Patrol of the Cypress Hills." That was all the Commandant
knew.
A soldier-policeman's life on the frontier is rough, solitary, and
severe. Active duty and responsibility are all that make it endurable.
To few is it fascinating. A free and thoughtful nature would, however,
find much in it, in spite of great hardships, to give interest and even
pleasure. The sense of breadth and vastness, and the inspiration of pure
air could be a very gospel of strength, beauty, and courage, to such an
one--for a time. But was Sergeant Fones such an one? The Commandant's
scornful reply to a question of the kind would have been: "He is the best
soldier on the Patrol."
And so with hard gallops here and there after the refugees of crime or
misfortune, or both, who fled before them like deer among the passes of
the hills, and, like deer at bay, often fought like demons to the death;
with border watchings, and protection and care and vigilance of the
Indians; with hurried marches at sunrise, the thermometer at fifty
degrees below zero often in winter, and open camps beneath the stars, and
no camp at all, as often as not, winter and summer; with rough barrack
fun and parade and drill and guard of prisoners; and with chances now and
then to pay homage to a woman's face, the Mounted Force grew full of the
Spirit of the West and became brown, valiant, and hardy, with wind and
weather. Perhaps some of them longed to touch, oftener than they did,
the hands of children, and to consider more the faces of women,--for
hearts are hearts even under a belted coat of red on the Fiftieth
Parallel,--but men of nerve do not blazon their feelings.
No one would have accused Sergeant Fones of having a heart. Men of keen
discernment would have seen in him the little Bismarck of the Mounted
Police. His name carried farther on the Cypress Hills Patrol than any
other; and yet his officers could never say that he exceeded his duty
or enlarged upon the orders he received. He had no sympathy with crime.
Others of the force might wink at it; but his mind appeared to sit
severely upright upon the cold platform of Penalty, in beholding breaches
of the statutes. He would not have rained upon the unjust as the just if
he had had the directing of the heavens. As Private Gellatly put it:
"Sergeant Fones has the fear o' God in his heart, and the law of the land
across his saddle, and the newest breech-loading at that!" He was part
of the great machine of Order, the servant of Justice, the sentinel in
the vestibule of Martial Law. His interpretation of duty worked upward
as downward. Officers and privates were acted on by the force known as
Sergeant Fones. Some people, like Old Brown Windsor, spoke hardly and
openly of this force. There were three people who never did--Pretty
Pierre, Young Aleck, and Mab Humphrey. Pierre hated him; Young Aleck
admired in him a quality lying dormant in himself--decision; Mab Humphrey
spoke unkindly of no one. Besides--but no!
What was Sergeant Fones's country? No one knew. Where had he come from?
No one asked him more than once. He could talk French with Pierre,
--a kind of French that sometimes made the undertone of red in the
Frenchman's cheeks darker. He had been heard to speak German to a German
prisoner, and once, when a gang of Italians were making trouble on a line
of railway under construction, he arrested the leader, and, in a few
swift, sharp words in the language of the rioters, settled the business.
He had no accent that betrayed his nationality.
He had been recommended for a commission. The officer in command had
hinted that the Sergeant might get a Christmas present. The officer had
further said: "And if it was something that both you and the Patrol would
be the better for, you couldn't object, Sergeant." But the Sergeant only
saluted, looking steadily into the eyes of the officer. That was his
reply. Private Gellatly, standing without, heard Sergeant Fones say, as
he passed into the open air, and slowly bared his forehead to the winter
sun:
"Exactly."
And Private Gellatly cried, with revolt in his voice, "Divils me own, the
word that a't to have been full o' joy was like the clip of a rifle-
breech."
Justice in a new country is administered with promptitude and vigour,
or else not administered at all. Where an officer of the Mounted Police-
Soldiery has all the powers of a magistrate, the law's delay and the
insolence of office have little space in which to work. One of the
commonest slips of virtue in the Canadian West was selling whisky
contrary to the law of prohibition which prevailed. Whisky runners were
land smugglers. Old Brown Windsor had, somehow, got the reputation of
being connected with the whisky runners; not a very respectable business,
and thought to be dangerous. Whisky runners were inclined to resent
intrusion on their privacy with a touch of that biting inhospitableness
which a moonlighter of Kentucky uses toward an inquisitive, unsympathetic
marshal. On the Cypress Hills Patrol, however, the erring servants of
Bacchus were having a hard time of it. Vigilance never slept there in
the days of which these lines bear record. Old Brown Windsor had,
in words, freely espoused the cause of the sinful. To the careless
spectator it seemed a charitable siding with the suffering; a proof that
the old man's heart was not so cold as his hands. Sergeant Fones thought
differently, and his mission had just been to warn the store-keeper that
there was menacing evidence gathering against him, and that his
friendship with Golden Feather, the Indian Chief, had better cease at
once. Sergeant Fones had a way of putting things. Old Brown Windsor
endeavoured for a moment to be sarcastic. This was the brief dialogue in
the domain of sarcasm:
"I s'pose you just lit round in a friendly sort of way, hopin' that I'd
kenoodle with you later."
"Exactly."
There was an unpleasant click to the word. The old man's hands got
colder. He had nothing more to say.
Before leaving, the Sergeant said something quietly and quickly to Young
Aleck. Pierre observed, but could not hear. Young Aleck was uneasy;
Pierre was perplexed. The Sergeant turned at the door, and said in
French: "What are your chances for a Merry Christmas at Pardon's Drive,
Pretty Pierre?" Pierre answered nothing. He shrugged his shoulders, and
as the door closed, muttered, "Il est le diable." And he meant it. What
should Sergeant Fones know of that intended meeting at Pardon's Drive on
Christmas Day? And if he knew, what then? It was not against the law to
play euchre. Still it perplexed Pierre. Before the Windsors, father and
son, however, he was, as we have seen, playfully cool.
After quitting Old Brown Windsor's store, Sergeant Fones urged his stout
broncho to a quicker pace than usual. The broncho was, like himself,
wasteful of neither action nor affection. The Sergeant had caught him
wild and independent, had brought him in, broken him, and taught him
obedience. They understood each other; perhaps they loved each other.
But about that even Private Gellatly had views in common with the general
sentiment as to the character of Sergeant Fones. The private remarked
once on this point "Sarpints alive! the heels of the one and the law of
the other is the love of them. They'll weather together like the Divil
and Death."
The Sergeant was brooding; that was not like him. He was hesitating;
that was less like him. He turned his broncho round as if to cross the
Big Divide and to go back to Windsor's store; but he changed his mind
again, and rode on toward David Humphrey's ranch. He sat as if he had
been born in the saddle. His was a face for the artist, strong and
clear, and having a dominant expression of force. The eyes were deepset
and watchful. A kind of disdain might be traced in the curve of the
short upper lip, to which the moustache was clipped close--a good fit,
like his coat. The disdain was more marked this morning.
The first part of his ride had been seen by Young Aleck, the second part
by Mab Humphrey. Her first thought on seeing him was one of apprehension
for Young Aleck and those of Young Aleck's name. She knew that people
spoke of her lover as a ne'er-do-weel; and that they associated his name
freely with that of Pretty Pierre and his gang. She had a dread of
Pierre, and, only the night before, she had determined to make one last
great effort to save Aleck, and if he would not be saved--strange that,
thinking it all over again, as she watched the figure on horseback coming
nearer, her mind should swerve to what she had heard of Sergeant Fones's
expected promotion. Then she fell to wondering if anyone had ever given
him a real Christmas present; if he had any friends at all; if life meant
anything more to him than carrying the law of the land across his saddle.
Again he suddenly came to her in a new thought, free from apprehension,
and as the champion of her cause to defeat the half-breed and his gang,
and save Aleck from present danger or future perils.
She was such a woman as prairies nurture; in spirit broad and thoughtful
and full of energy; not so deep as the mountain woman, not so
imaginative, but with more persistency, more daring. Youth to her was a
warmth, a glory. She hated excess and lawlessness, but she could
understand it. She felt sometimes as if she must go far away into the
unpeopled spaces, and shriek out her soul to the stars from the fulness
of too much life. She supposed men had feelings of that kind too, but
that they fell to playing cards and drinking instead of crying to the
stars. Still, she preferred her way.
Once, Sergeant Fones, on leaving the house, said grimly after his
fashion: "Not Mab but Ariadne--excuse a soldier's bluntness.....
Good-bye!" and with a brusque salute he had ridden away. What he meant
she did not know and could not ask. The thought instantly came to her
mind: Not Sergeant Fones; but who? She wondered if Ariadne was born on
the prairie. What knew she of the girl who helped Theseus, her lover, to
slay the Minotaur? What guessed she of the Slopes of Naxos? How old was
Ariadne? Twenty? For that was Mab's age. Was Ariadne beautiful? She
ran her fingers loosely through her short brown hair, waving softly
about her Greek-shaped head, and reasoned that Ariadne must have been
presentable, or Sergeant Fones would not have made the comparison.
She hoped Ariadne could ride well, for she could.
But how white the world looked this morning, and how proud and brilliant
the sky! Nothing in the plane of vision but waves of snow stretching to
the Cypress Hills; far to the left a solitary house, with its tin roof
flashing back the sun, and to the right the Big Divide. It was an old-
fashioned winter, not one in which bare ground and sharp winds make life
outdoors inhospitable. Snow is hospitable-clean, impacted snow; restful
and silent. But there was one spot in the area of white, on which Mab's
eyes were fixed now, with something different in them from what had been
there. Again it was a memory with which Sergeant Fones was associated.
One day in the summer just past she had watched him and his company put
away to rest under the cool sod, where many another lay in silent
company, a prairie wanderer, some outcast from a better life gone by.
Afterwards, in her home, she saw the Sergeant stand at the window,
looking out towards the spot where the waves in the sea of grass were
more regular and greener than elsewhere, and were surmounted by a high
cross. She said to him--for she of all was never shy of his stern ways:
"Why is the grass always greenest there, Sergeant Fones?"
He knew what she meant, and slowly said: "It is the Barracks of the
Free."
She had no views of life save those of duty and work and natural joy and
loving a ne'er-do-weel, and she said: "I do not understand that."
And the Sergeant replied: "'Free among the Dead like unto them that are
wounded and lie in the grave, who are out of remembrance.'"