CONNIE PLAYS A HUNCH
Connie Morgan halted his great _malamutes_ in the middle of the
ice-locked Yukon and gazed wistfully toward the familiar outlines of
Dawson. For a year the little sub-arctic city had been home to him.
And as his eyes rested upon the buildings of B Division standing
spick and span and clean in their coats of whitewash and paint, his
lips pressed tight. Behind those walls from which, only a few
minutes before, he had stepped for the last time, were the men who
had been his friends--big men, those--great hearted and clean
minded--the men who kept the Yukon good. He thought of the
grey-haired Superintendent with the twinkling eyes and military
moustache; of big Sergeant Dan McKeever, and Corporal Rickey; and Ick
Far, the silent reader of signs. Then there were the constables:
Beatty, and Dowling, and Shorty Peters--the boy's forehead puckered
in a frown as he thought of Peters.
"I liked Shorty," he muttered. "He would do anything in the world
for a friend. Everybody likes him. The Superintendent said this
morning that all Shorty needs to make a first-class man is a good
stiff jolt that will wake him up."
For three weeks past the men of B Division had mentioned Peters's
name rarely, with grave faces and in the past tense, as men speak of
the dead. "Trouble with Shorty was, he never stopped to think. He
did the first thing that popped into his head. But just the same he
was a fool to desert. His time will be up next month. Wherever he
is I bet he is wishing that he was back this very minute." With a
last look at the town Connie cracked his long whip and started the
dogs northward down the Yukon.
It was a late spring, and as the sled slipped smoothly over the
hard-packed snow the boy thought of that other day just a year ago
when he had slashed the lashings of his pack and shot those same dogs
out over the shore ice to rescue Big Dan McKeever from death on the
floating ice-pan.
One by one, as he mushed steadily northward, the incidents of the
past year crowded through his brain. It had been a great year for
the boy--those twelve months during which he had served side by side
with the men of the Mounted--a year that had rounded out and
crystallized the hand-hammered principles that were his heritage from
Sam Morgan and that his association with Waseche Bill and the rough
men of the gold country had taught him to apply to life in its daily
round.
Connie Morgan was not one whit less a boy than the day he stepped
onto the wharf at Anvik with eight dollars in his pocket and abiding
faith in his ability to find his father somewhere in the great white
land of snow. But he was a boy trained now by experience. A boy
whose nerve and grit and impulsive nature had become subserved to
cool reason, and who had learned to probe deep into the heart in his
judgment of men. Time and again in the big country, where only the
fit survive, he had proven himself fit. Bearded men spoke his name
with respect--as they had spoken the name of Sam Morgan. They called
him a sourdough, and a _tillicum_--and north of sixty, above those
words sounds no higher praise.
"Hello, Const'ble!" a man stepped from the trail and thrust out a
dark hand.
"Hello, Tim!" cried Connie, as he grasped the hand.
"A-ha, Tim Big Martin, she got for say t'ank to l'il p'lice. Som'
day she mebbe-so git chanst to show she no fergit."
Connie grinned: "That's all right, Tim. How's the family?"
The half-breed's homely face stretched into a broad grin: "A-ha,
_bien_! Das fambly she got wan more now--I'm not fergit das night
you breeng de doctaire. Das li'l bab' w'ot com' in de night ob de
beeg snow--she fine boy I'm tell you! We mak' de nam' Spes'
Const'ble Mo'gan Big Martin," he announced proudly. "An' mebbe-so
som' tam's he grow oop an' be _kloshe_ p'lice, too, Ba Gos'!"
"You're all right, Tim," laughed the boy; "when he's old enough to go
to school, let me know. We'll make a policeman out of him, you bet!
With a name like that he'll just naturally have to break into the
Service!" Connie called sharply to his dogs and as they leaped to
their feet the half-breed stepped closer and laid a hand on the boy's
arm!
"Oop on de head Coal Creek, two men, dey hunt de moose for sell."
"Poachers, eh!"
The man nodded and with his lips close to the boy's ear whispered:
"Wan man you know--mebbe-so she gone _kultus_.'
"A man I know gone _kultus_!" exclaimed Connie. "What do you mean?
Who is he?" But the other only shrugged, and shifting his pack,
stepped into the trail and swung off toward Dawson.
"Now what in thunder does that breed mean?" soliloquized the boy as
the dogs strung out onto the trail. "One of those poachers is Brek
Wiley all right, he's an old hand at the game and a mighty slippery
customer--Big Dan McKeever has tried for years to catch him with the
goods. But who is the other one--the man that's gone _kultus_? Tim
didn't mean Brek Wiley--he always was _kultus_. Guess I'll just
swing over onto the head of Coal Creek and see what's doing."
Suddenly the boy stopped dead in his tracks: "Gee Whiz!" he exclaimed
aloud, "I forgot I'm no longer in the Service!" He ran to catch up
with the dogs. 'I could turn the job over to Ewing at Fortymile,' he
muttered as he mushed northward; "but, somehow, I'd kind of like to
handle this one myself. I've just got to know who that other man is.
Maybe--By George! _I'll do it_! I haven't got any authority to, but
_they_ won't know my time's up. And if I can bring 'em in I'll take
a chance on getting the authority afterwards.
"Wouldn't Dan roar if I should bring in Brek Wiley with a good clear
case against him!"
Avoiding Fortymile, Connie swung from the Yukon and headed up a small
tributary that flows in from the north-east. The long winter was
losing its grip on the hill country and the surface of the snow
softened at mid-day. On the first day after leaving the big river
the boy camped and made moccasins for his dogs. With their feet
protected from the flinty surface of the crust that formed as the sun
sank low the big _malamutes_ made good time, and noon of the third
day off the river found him camped on a spruce-capped ridge of the
Ogilvie Range with the deep-gored valleys of the feeders of Coal
Creek spread out before him like giant fingers reaching into the
hills.
"Somewhere in that tangle of ridges and canyons I'm going to find
Brek Wiley and the _kultus_ man," gritted the boy, as he boiled a pot
of tea over a tiny smokeless fire. "I've got to be mighty careful,
too, 'cause they say Brek Wiley can pick up a trail like an Injun."
For three days Connie busied himself snaring rabbits and ptarmigans
to eke out his slender larder and provide food for his dogs, and
always he strained his ears for the sound of a shot that would
disclose the whereabouts of the poachers.
The first day he surprised a moose at close range, and on the third
day a huge bull and two cows crossed the divide a half-mile to the
eastward and descended into the valley of Coal Creek.
"That ought to help 'em out," muttered Connie as he watched the huge
animals disappear in the scrub.
An hour later, sharp and clear, from a point some two or three miles
below where the moose had entered the timber, rang the sound of a
shot swiftly followed by another, and after a short interval of
silence four or five more in rapid succession.
"Three less moose and two less poachers in the Yukon," grinned the
boy, as he slipped into the valley and hurried in the direction of
the shots. On and on he went, following the trail of the three
moose. At the end of an hour he slackened his pace and began to
advance cautiously from boulder to boulder, pausing every few moments
to listen and reconnoitre the foreground. At length the sound of
voices reached his ears, and throwing himself flat upon the crust, he
wriggled forward into the shelter of a huge rock that jutted sharply
from the shoulder of a low ridge.
[Illustration: "In an open space two men were quartering the carcass
of a cow moose."]
In an open space formed by a bend of the creek two men were busily
engaged in quartering the carcass of a cow moose. The bull had
already been quartered and loaded upon a sled, with the huge antlered
head bound securely upon the top of the load. The other cow lay
where she had fallen. The smaller of the two men straightened
himself, glanced cautiously about him, and cleansed his sheath knife
by drawing the flat of it across the sleeve of his coat. "I tell
yeh, Brek Wiley, it's rotten business, an' I wisht I was well out of
it." Something in the man's voice caused Connie to strain forward
for a closer view as Wiley paused in the act of cleaving the backbone
of the moose with an axe.
"Cold feet, eh," sneered the poacher. "Ye're 'fraid the Mounted'll
grab ye an' take ye in out o' the cold. Well, they won't. I be'n
doin' 'bout as I pleased ever sence I hit this here country, ten year
back. An' I hain't allus pleased to do jest what the law says,
neither. Take the moose business, I be'n sellin' 'mountain beef fur
goin' on three year, an' I hain't be'n nabbed fur it nuther. They's
good money in it--beats gougin' fer gold where they hain't none no
more, an' it beats crankin' win'lasses an' choppin' cord wood fer
wages."
"They ain't got yeh yet--but they will, sure as shootin'--an' me,
too. Yeh don't know 'em like I do. I served with 'em its goin' on
five year an' I ought to be with 'em yet--would of, too, if it hadn't
be'n fer you--" Connie caught a glimpse of the man's face. It was
Shorty Peters!
"There ye go! Still chawin' over that ol' cud!" cried the other--"ef
yer so blame anxious to be in the Mounted why'n't ye go back to 'em
then. Ye don't dast to, that's why! Ye're a deserter, an' they'd
stick ye in the pen 'til yer hair turned white 'cause ye happened to
quit 'em a couple months afore yer time was out. An' now yer blamin'
me 'cause ye hain't back doin' time! I tell ye ye was a deserter
'fore I hooked up with ye! An' 'cause I tol' ye ye was a fool to go
back, yer tryin' to shove it off onto me!"
"I wisht I was back in the service right now. An' if I done what's
right I'd take you in."
The other laughed shortly: "Jest you try it onct an' see how fer ye'd
git! Ye're 'fraid to try it. Ef ye did happen to fetch me in,
what'd happen? I s'pose ye didn't kill none of the meat that's in
the _cache_. An' I s'pose ye hain't helped sell none. Guess I
didn't know what I was doin' when I tuk ye along to dicker with Swede
Johnson down to No Luck, an' Tom Ashley, an' them contractors down on
the river? An' I guess ye didn't help deliver none of it neither!
An', of course, if ye tuk me in, I'd take my medicine an' shet up
about it, wouldn't I? An' I wouldn't put up no holler fer them other
fellers to testify that me an' you was pardners, would I? No, sure
not! I'd jest shet up an' let ye git credit fer fetchin' in Brek
Wiley. I tell ye, Shorty, yer in too deep. Ye'd git it worser'n
what I would, 'cause on top of yer game-law sentence, ye'd git soaked
good an' proper fer desertin'. They's more money in meat than they
is in policin'. Wild game is as much mine an' yourn as it is any one
else's an' they hain't no one got no right to tell us when we kin
kill it or how many we kin kill, nohow. Buck up, now, an' git to
work on that there other cow--an' when the meat business plays out I
got another little scheme up my sleeve."
Shorty set to work upon the carcass of the dead moose. "When the
meat business plays out I'm through," he retorted sharply. "I ain't
no crook an' I'm goin' outside an' live decent. I won't go in on no
other scheme."
Once more Brek Wiley laughed. "Won't ye? We'll see when the time
comes. Guess I'm the boss o' this outfit. Ye'll do as I say. Fat
chanst ye've got o' gittin' outer the Yukon if I slip the word to the
Mounted."
A half-hour later their task was finished, and the two men turned
their attention to the sled. With Wiley in the trace ropes and
Shorty pushing behind, the heavily loaded sled was worked over the
hard crust to a point scarcely a quarter of a mile away where it was
halted before the cleverly concealed door of a dug-out. Connie
managed to follow, keeping well within the shelter of boulders and
scrub timber, and from the vantage point of an old shaft dump watched
the men carry the quarters into the _cache_.
The boy noted that the abandoned cabin of a miner had been patched up
and made habitable, and when the men returned for the remainder of
the moose meat, he made a wide detour which brought him to the creek
far above, from which point, after a hard climb, he regained his camp
on the ridge.