learned from the veterinary surgeon that morning that Sourdough must
always limp a little on his near fore leg, which would be permanently a
little shorter than its fellow, by reason of the slight twist which
surgical care had been unable to prevent. Yet Sergeant Moore, for all
the glow of hatred in his eyes as he watched Dick Vaughan's departure,
nodded his grizzled head with the air of a man quite satisfied.
"So long, Tenderfoot," he growled. "You'll maybe find Sourdough's reach
a longer one than you reckon for, I'm thinking."
It was evident that day, to O'Malley and to all his friends, that Jan
felt the temporary parting with his lord and master a deal more than
Dick had seemed to feel it. And yet Jan could not possibly have known,
any more than Dick knew, as to what the promised forty-eight hours of
separation were to bring forth.
XXV
JAN GOES ON HIS TRAVELS
Jan spent that night beside O'Malley's bunk, in the face of regulations
to the contrary.
In the absence of Paddy from his stall, the good-hearted O'Malley had
not liked to leave Jan to the solitude of his bench. And shortly after
daylight next morning, with a new steel chain, purchased for this
journey, attached to his collar, Jan was put on board the west-bound
train consigned to Lambert's Siding, for wagon carriage, with Dick's
kit, to Buck's Crossing. Jan did not like this business at all. The
chain humiliated him, and the train was an abomination in his eyes. But
at the back of his mind was a dim consciousness that he was going to his
sovereign, and by his sovereign's will, and that was sufficient to
prevent any sort of protest on his part.
Arrived at Lambert's Siding, Jan's chain was fastened to a post by a
humorous person in greasy overalls, who said, as he noted the fine
dignity of Jan's appearance:
"Guess your kerridge will be along shortly, me lord."
The man in the overalls was a new hand transferred from the East, and
but lately settled in Canada, or he might probably have recognized Jan
as "the R.N.W.M.P. bloodhound," of newspaper celebrity.
A few minutes later a man in a fur cap drove up to the siding in a light
buckboard wagon, with a lot of sacking in its tray.
"Has Sergeant Vaughan's dog come from Regina?" asked the new-comer.
"Yep, I guess that's him," said Overalls.
"Well, I'm to pay his freight an' take him, and a wagon will call for
the other truck."
"That so?" rejoined Overalls, with indifference. "Well, I told me lord
his kerridge would be along shortly. Jest give us yer auto here, will
yer? Third line down. Hold on. Ye'd better have a receipt for the money.
Where's that blame pen?"
The first light snow of the season began to flutter down from out a
surprisingly clear sky, as Jan settled down in the buckboard, his chain
passed down through a hole and secured to the step outside, an
arrangement which struck Jan as highly unnecessary, since it kept his
head so low that he could not stand up in the wagon. However, Overalls
and the man in the fur cap (who had signed his name as Tom Smith) seemed
to think it all right, and so friendly Jan, his mind full of thoughts of
Dick Vaughan, accommodated himself docilely to the position, and was
soon quite a number of miles away from Lambert's Siding.
When the Buck's Crossing wagon arrived there an hour or so later, its
driver seemed surprised that there was no dog for him to carry with
Sergeant Vaughan's kit. But he was not a man given to speculation. He
just grunted, expectorated, and said, shortly:
"Well, I guess that's right, then. Muster made some other arrangement;
an' it's just as well, for I'm late an' I've got to have my near front
wheel off an' doctor it a bit, so I won't make the Crossin' till midday
to-morrow, I reckon. I'll be campin' at Lloyd's to-night."
Overalls just nodded as he took the wagoner's signature for Sergeant
Vaughan's kit; and without another thought both men dismissed from their
rather vacant minds (as was perfectly natural, no doubt) all further
thought of a matter which did not concern them, despite its
life-and-death importance to the son of Finn and Desdemona.
After perhaps an hour and a half, the buckboard was pulled up in a
fenced yard beside a small homestead. Here Jan parted with the man in
the fur cap and never set eyes upon him again. His chain was now taken
by a different sort of man; a very lean, spare, hard-bitten little man,
with bright dark eyes and a leather-colored face. He thanked the
fur-capped man for having kindly brought Jan along. Fur-cap deprecated
thanks, but accepted a dollar. And then the leather-faced man led Jan
away. They walked for perhaps a couple of miles, and then they were
joined by another man, who called the first man Jean, so that Jan looked
up quickly, thinking he had been addressed.
"Hees name Jan," explained the first man, casually, pointing to Jan's
collar.
"H'm! That so? Better get rid o' that collar, Jean, eh?"
From a bag in the buggy in which they had found the second man,
wire-cutters were produced, and Jan's collar cut in sunder and removed,
after a leather collar had been buckled on in its place and the chain
attached to that. Jan had a vague feeling of uneasiness about this
operation; but only a vague feeling. Like all other animal-folk, he had
long ago arrived at the conclusion that men-folk frequently did quite
unaccountable things; that a dog would have no rest in life if he set
himself to puzzle out a reason for everything he saw the sovereign
people do. Captain Arnutt had locked that collar about his neck, and a
very silly, stiff, and awkward contraption he had thought it. Now
another man, equally without apparent rhyme or reason, took it off and
substituted a leathern collar with a queer, fishy, gamy sort of smell.
Well, it would make little odds to Jan; if only these people would hurry
up about taking him to his own man.
Thinking of that, Jan quite gladly made the best of the very cramped
quarters given him in the buggy, though he grew desperately tired of
those same quarters before night fell and he was transferred to the more
roomy dog-box of a Canadian Northern train. Without doubt the train
would take him direct to Dick. (Until the previous day, his sole
experience of trains in Canada had been closely connected with Dick.) So
confident was Jan of this, that he bent himself quite cheerfully to the
task of tearing and eating the lump of meat given him by Jean before the
train started. Evidently this Jean was a friendly, well-disposed sort of
a person, and in any case any man at all engaged in taking Jan to Dick
Vaughan deserved ready obedience and respect.
In some such way Jan reflected what time the C.N.R. train by which he
traveled rumbled swiftly along its course for Edmonton; and Dick
Vaughan, away back in Buck's Crossing, wondered what might be delaying
the wagoner from Lambert's Siding; the wagoner he was not to see before
the middle of the next day, and then only to learn that the man knew
nothing of Jan's whereabouts.
When Jan left that train in the big crowded depot at Edmonton next day,
winter had descended upon the greater part of North America. The change
was the more marked for Jan by reason that snow had come to Edmonton a
full day earlier than it came to Lambert's Siding. Jan had seen snow
before on the Sussex Downs; but that had been a kind of snow quite
different from this. That snow had been soft and clammy. This was crisp
and dry as salt. Also the air was colder than any air Jan had ever
known, though mild enough for northern winter air, seeing that the
thermometer registered only some five and twenty degrees of frost. And
the sun shone brightly. There was no wind. It was an air rich in
kindling, stimulating properties; an air that made life, movement, and
activity desirable for all, and optimistic determination easy and
natural for most folk.
"By gar!" said Jean to his friend Jake, as together they led Jan from
the train. "You mark me now what I say, thees Jan he's got all them
huskies beat beefore he start. Eh? Hee's great dog, thees Jan."
Jake nodded, and the three of them strode on through the dry powdery
snow. One knew by their walk that these men had covered great distances
on their feet. Their knees swung easily to every stride, with a hint of
the dip that comes from long use of snow-shoes. For a little while Jan
hardly thought of Dick Vaughan, so busy was he in absorbing new
impressions. But when the walk had lasted almost an hour, he began again
to wonder about Dick, and his deep-pouched eyes took on once more the
set look of waiting watchfulness which meant that he was hoping at any
moment to sight his man.
And then they came to a small wooden house with a large barn and a
sod-walled stable beside it. Jan's chain was hitched round a stout
center post in the barn, and there he was left. Later Jean brought him a
tin dish of water and a big lump of dried fish which had had some warm
fat smeared over it, Jean having rightly guessed that it was Jan's first
experience of this form of dog-food. The fat was well enough, and Jan
licked it rather languidly. But the fish did not appeal to him, and so
he left it and went off to sleep, little thinking that he would get no
other kind of food than this for many days to come.
Toward the middle of the next day, Jan, feeling cramped and rather
miserable as the result of his unaccustomed confinement, changed his
mind about that fish and ate it; slowly, and without enjoyment, but yet
with some benefit to himself. Less than an hour later Jean entered to
him, carrying in his hands a contrivance of leather, with long trailing
ends.
For a minute or so Jean stood looking down upon Jan appraisingly. There
was no better judge of a dog--from one standpoint--in that part of
Canada.
"By gar!" he muttered between his teeth. "That Sergeant Moore hee's a
queer cuss, sure 'nuff, to give away a dog like thees for nothing; and
then, by gar, to pay me ten dollar for takin' heem."
Then he stooped down and rubbed Jan's ears, with a friendly,
knowledgeable way he had.
"Ah, you, Jan," he said, cheerily. "Here's your harness. Here, good dog,
I show you."
And he proceeded to buckle a set of dog-harness about Jan's massive
chest and shoulders. In doing so he noticed for the first time Dick's
stitches in the hound's dewlap and shoulders.
"By gar!" he said, with a grin. "You bin fightin', Jan, eh? Ah, well,
take care, Jan. We get no nursin' after fightin' here. Bes' leave that
job to the huskies, Jan. Come on--good dog."
A hundred yards away, on the far side of the shack, Jan came upon the
first dog-sled he had ever seen, with a team of seven dogs attached, now
lying resting on the dry snow. They were a mixed team, four of them
unmistakable huskies, one with collie characteristics, one having
Newfoundland blood (through many crosses), and one, the leader, having
the look of something midway between a big powerful Airedale and an old
English sheep-dog, including the bobtail. This leader, Bill, as he was
called, had the air of a master-worker, and was the only member of the
pack (except the wheeler) who did not snarl as Jan was led toward them.
With the dogs was Jake, wearing a deep fur cap that came well down over
the tops of his ears. In one hand Jake held a short-hafted whip with a
rawhide thong, the point of which he could put through a dog's coat from
ten paces distant.
"Take Mixer out an' put heem in behind Bill," said Jean. "We'll try Jan
in front of old Blackfoot."
It was not without thought, and kindly thought, that Jean ordered this
arrangement, for Blackfoot, though old and scarred, a trail-worn
veteran, had not a spark of unkindness in his composition. He was the
dog with Newfoundland blood in him, who, like Bill the leader, and
unlike the rest of the pack, had not snarled at sight of Jan. He even
held out a friendly muzzle in welcome as, rather reluctantly, Jan
allowed himself to be led to his place in front of Blackfoot. The husky
who filled the next forward place wheeled about as far as he could in
the traces and snapped viciously at Jan.
"Ah, Snip!" said Jean, quite pleasantly. But even as he spoke so
pleasantly, the whip he had picked up sang, and its thong, doubled,
landed fair and square in Snip's face, causing that worthy to whirl back
to his place with a yowl of consternation.
Jan was just beginning to think that he had put up with enough of this
sort of thing, and that he would leave these men and their dogs
altogether, when he heard a peremptory order given by Jean and felt
himself jerked forward by means of the harness he wore. In the same
moment Blackfoot's teeth nipped one of his hocks from behind, not
savagely, but yet sharply, and he bounded forward till checked by the
proximity of Snip's stern. He had no wish to touch Snip. But Snip also
was bounding forward it seemed. So Jan thrust out his fore feet and
checked. Instantly two things happened. A whip-lash curled painfully
round his left shoulder, crossing one of his newly healed wounds. And
again came a nip at one of his hocks, a sharper nip this time, and one
that drew two spots of blood.
"Mush, Jan! Mush on there!" said Jean, firmly, but not harshly; and
again the whip curled about Jan's shoulders as, puzzled, humiliated,
hurt, and above all bewildered, he plunged forward again in the traces,
and heard Jean mutter behind him:
"Good dog, thees Jan. By gar! hee's good dog."
And that was how the new life, the working life, began for Jan, the son
of Finn and Desdemona.
XXVI
THE RULE OF TRACE AND THONG
From this point there began for Jan a life so strangely, wildly
different from anything he had ever known or suspected to exist, that
only a dog of exceptionable fiber and stamina--in character as well as
physique--could possibly have survived transition to it from the smooth
routines which Jan had so far known.
To begin with, it was a life in which all days alike were full of toil,
of ordered, unremitting work. And until it began Jan had never done an
hour's work in his life. (In England, outside the sheep-dog fraternity
and a few of the sporting breeds, all dogs spend their lives in
unordered play, uncontrolled loafing, and largely superfluous sleeping.)
The Lady Desdemona, his mother, for example, would certainly not have
lived through a month of Jan's present life; very possibly not a week.
Finn would have endured it much longer, because of his experiences in
Australia, his knowledge of the wild kindred and their ways. But even
Finn, despite his huge strength and exceptional knowledge, would not
have come through this ordeal so well as Jan did, unless it had come to
him as early in life as it came to Jan. And even then his survival would
have been doubtful. The difference between the climates of Australia and
the North-west Territory is hardly greater than the difference in stress
and hardness between Finn's life in the Tinnaburra ranges, as leader of
a dingo pack, and Jan's life in North-west Canada as learner in a
sled-team.
The physical strength of Finn the wolfhound, in whose veins ran the
unmixed blood of many generations of wolfhound champions, might have
been equal to the strain of Jan's new life. But his pride, his
courtliness, his fine gentlemanliness, would likely have been the death
of him in such a case. He would have died nobly, be sure of that. But it
is likely he would have died. Now in the case of Jan, while he had
inherited much of his sire's fine courtesy, much of his dam's noble
dignity, yet these things were not so vitally of the essence of him as
they were of his parents. They were a part of his character, and they
had formed his manners. But they were not Jan.
The essential Jan was an immensely powerful hound of mixed blood reared
carefully, trained intelligently and well, and endowed from birth with a
tremendously keen appetite for life--a keener appetite for life than
falls to the lot of any champion-bred wolfhound or bloodhound. Jan was a
gentleman rather than a fine gentleman; before either he was a hound, a
dog; and before all else he was a master and lover of his life. And
since, by the arrangements of Sergeant Moore, "Tom Smith," Jean, and
Jake, he had to take his place between Snip and Blackfoot in a
sled-team, it was well, exceedingly well, for Jan that these things were
thus and not otherwise.
Jan's supper on the evening of his first day in the traces was a meal he
never forgot. The slab of dried fish Jean tossed to him was half as big
again as the pieces given to the other dogs. For Jean--a just and not
unkindly man in all such matters--well recognized that Jan was very much
bigger and heavier than the average husky. (Jan was three and a half
inches higher at the shoulder, and forty to fifty pounds heavier and
more massive than any of his team-mates.) His previous night's supper
Jan had eaten that morning. Still, the afternoon's work, in some thirty
or forty degrees of frost, had put an edge on his appetite, and he
tackled the fish--which two days before he would have scorned--with
avidity.
He had swallowed one mouthful and was about to tear off another, when
Snip intervened with a terrifying snarl between Jan and his food. Jan,
who was learning fast, turned also with a snarling growl to ward off
Snip's fangs. And in that moment--it was no more than a moment--Bill,
the leader, stole and swallowed the whole remainder of Jan's supper.
Jean was watching this, and did not try to prevent it. But leaving Jan
to settle with Snip, he descended upon Bill with his whip,
double-thonged, and administered as sound a trouncing to that hardy
warrior as any member of the team had ever received. That ended, Jean
swung on his heel and gave Snip the butt of the whip-handle across the
top of his nose, and this so shrewdly that Snip's muzzle ached for
twenty-four hours, reminding him, every minute of the time, that he must
not harry Jan--while his master was in sight.
It would have been easy for Jean to have spared another ration of fish
for Jan, since in a few more days they would reach a Hudson Bay post at
which fresh supplies were to be taken in. But Jean was too wise for
this. He preferred that Jan should go hungry because he wanted Jan to
learn quickly. Jan educated meant dollars to Jean, and a good many of
them. Jan uneducated, or learning but slowly, would, as Jean well knew,
very soon mean Jan dead--a mere section of dog-food worth no dollars at
all. So Jean laughed at the big hound.
"You see, Jan," he said. "You watch um, Jan, an' learn queek--eh? Yes, I
think you learn queek."
Thus in that little matter of the daily meal, if Jan had gone on making
the mistake he made on his first night in the wilderness, not all Jean's
authority could have saved him. The rest of the team, by hook or crook,
would have kept him food-less and killed him outright long before the
slower process of starvation could have released him. But, his first
lesson sufficed for Jan. When his next supper came he had done a day and
a half's work; he had lived and exerted himself more in that day and a
half than during any average month of his previous life. As a
consequence, when Bill and Snip looked round for Jan's supper, after
bolting their own, they saw a great hound with stiff legs and erect
hackles, alert in every hair of his body--but no supper. The supper,
very slightly masticated and swallowed with furious haste, was already
beginning its task of helping to stiffen Jan's fibers and give
fierceness to the lift of his upper lip.
But that was far from being the end of the lesson. In point of size, and
in other ways, Jan was exceptional. He needed more than the other dogs;
and because he needed more, and had the sort of personality which makes
for survival, he got more. Jean gave him more than was given to the
others. But that was not enough. Jan was so hungry, what with his
strivings in the traces and the novelty for him of this life of tense
unceasing effort and alertness, that his appetite was as a thorn in his
belly and as a spur to his ingenuity and enterprise.
It is the law of the sled-dog that you shall not steal your trace-mates'
grub. Jan broke this law wherever he saw the glint of a chance to do so;
that is, wherever he could manage it by force of fang and shoulder, or
by cunning--beyond the range of the whip. He did more. He stole his
master's food; not every day, of course, but just as often as extreme
cunning and tireless watchfulness enabled him to manage it. He was
caught once, and only once, and beaten off with a gee-pole and a club;
pretty sorely beaten, too. But--
"Don' mark heem, Jake! Don' touch hees head."
Jean might be ever so angry, but he never lost his temper. He might
punish ever so sorely, but he never lost sight of his main objective and
could not be induced to knock dollars off his own property. Incidentally
he knew precisely what his aching hunger meant to Jan, and why the big
dog stole. But that knowledge did not weigh one atom with Jean in
apportioning Jan's food, or his punishment for stealing; both being
meted out, not with any view to Jan's comfort, but solely with the aim
of protecting the food-supply and keeping up Jan's value in dollars. For
Jean, before and above all else, was able; a finished product of the
quite pitiless wilderness in which he made out, not only to survive
where many went under, but in surviving to prosper.
XXVII
MUTINY IN THE TEAM
Jean made sure he would sell Jan at Fort Frontenac. And that he did not
was due to accidental causes over which he had no control.
Jean asked three hundred dollars. The would-be buyer--a man pretty
nearly as able as Jean himself in northland craft--had only two hundred
in cash; but possessed, besides, an invincible objection to owing or
borrowing. (Resembling Jean in his knowledge of the wild, he was
curiously different in most other ways, having a good deal of sentiment
and a keen, almost conventional sense of honor.)
"He's worth three hundred, all right," said the man--who hailed from New
England--when he had seen Jan at work.
"You bet," said Jean, laconically.
"But I just haven't got the money, or he'd be my dog."
Jean grinned. "Ah, well, eet's money talks," said he. And on that they
parted; for this last talk between them came when Jean's team was
pulling out for the north-west, after a profitable little rest-time in
which Jean had exchanged a little rubbish for a lot of good food and a
quite considerable wad of dollars.
But Jean did, on occasion, make mistakes; not vital mistakes, but slips
that might injure his pocket. He made one when he put Jan in the lead,
and named Bill wheeler, in place of Blackfoot. Jean wanted to make a
completely educated dog of Jan as soon as might be. But he did not want
to lose Bill--a very useful dog--nor yet to injure Blackfoot's health
and efficiency. Bill, as leader reduced to wheeling, made Blackfoot's
life a hell upon earth for the kindly wise old dog with Newfoundland
blood in him; and that, of course, was not good for Blackfoot.
But this was not the worst of it. As recognized leader of the team, Bill
could endure Jan's officious zeal, and even make shift to suffer the big
hound's real supremacy, while by craft he could avoid a conflagration.
So far, then, Bill had remained a force making for discipline and the
working efficiency of the team. As wheeler, he became at one stride a
crafty and embittered mutineer, aiming primarily at Jan's discomfiture,
and generally at the disruption of the team as a compact entity. When
not occupied in working off his vindictive spleen upon poor Blackfoot,
whose hind quarters he gashed at every opportunity, Bill concentrated
all his notable energies upon stirring up disorder, indiscipline,
confusion, and strife among his mates.
Jean flogged Bill pretty severely; and in the interval he said:
"Tha's all right, Bill. Jan 'll lick all thees outer you, bimeby."
And that was where Jean's mistake lay. Jan could safely be trusted to
lick pretty well anything into, or out of, the rest of the team; but
there was that in Bill, the ex-leader, which no power on earth would
lick out of him. He knew it; and Jan knew it. And that was where, in
this one matter, they both saw a little farther than the astute Jean.
The thing of it was that what they saw did not trouble either of them.
They were content to bide the issue. But had he known of it, Jean would
not have been at all content with anything of the sort. Far from it.