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:
"It's very good of you fellows--er--Right you are, sir! er--ladies and
gentlemen!--But, really, you know, I can't make a speech. It's no use.
I--er--I'm tremendously obliged to you all. What you say is--er--well,
the fact is I've only done what any other man in the service would have
done. It's splendid to see you all again and--I _have_ brought back the
Mounted Police Dog. Thank you!"
And, according to the shorthand man, that was all. But a generous
sub-editorial fraternity understood the speech differently; and
newspaper readers doubtless came to the conclusion that oratory must now
be added to the other accomplishments of the versatile R.N.W.M.P.
There were no embarrassing calls for speeches at the barracks, but even
there Dick (still closely attended by Jan, upon whom one of the
impressions produced by his return to the complex conditions of
civilization was an anxious fear that his sovereign lord would somehow
be spirited away from him if he ever let Dick out of his sight) was
called upon to face a raking fire of compliments from his commanding
officer, delivered in the presence of a full muster of commissioned and
non-commissioned ranks.
"You have done your duty finely as a sergeant of the Royal North-west
Mounted Police, and, for us who know what it means, I don't know that
the ablest man in the country can hope to earn higher praise than that."
Those were the chief's concluding words, and the full-throated, if
somewhat hoarse, cheer which they elicited from the men assembled behind
Dick and Jan, as well as from the group beside the chief, had the
curious effect of filling Dick's eyes with moisture of a sort that
pricked most painfully, so that as he came to the salute before retiring
he saw the familiar buildings in front of him but dimly, as through a
fog.
XXXVIII
THE FALL OF SOURDOUGH
Just before darkness fell that evening Captain Arnutt called Dick from
his quarters and asked him to go for a stroll. Together, and closely
followed by Jan, they started. Before the barracks gate was reached they
were met by Sergeant Moore, with Sourdough at his heels.
Sourdough had aged a good deal during the past year, but despite the
twist in his near fore leg, which caused him to limp slightly, the old
dog still held his own as despotic ruler of all the dogs in that
locality. But for a good many years he had done no work of any kind,
neither had he had any very serious fighting or come in contact with
northland dogs. His swiftest movements would have seemed clumsy and slow
to the working husky, inured to the comparative wildness of trace life
in the north. But his morose arrogance and ferocity had suffered no
diminution, as was shown by the fact that he flew straight for Jan's
throat directly he set eyes on the big hound.
"Call your dog off, Sergeant, or he'll be killed," shouted Dick.
Sergeant Moore spake no word. In his queer heart intelligence of Dick's
fame rankled bitterly, yet not so bitterly as the fact of Jan's return
to barracks. His obsession made him certain in his own mind that the
redoubtable Sourdough could certainly kill any dog. And so he spake no
word while Sourdough flew at Jan.
And for Jan, as he caught sight in the gloaming of his ancient enemy,
his hackles had risen very stiffly, his pendent lips had twitched
ominously.
Jan was perfectly well aware that the killing of Sourdough or any other
dog he had seen since his return to cities would be a supremely easy
matter for him. Indeed it would be for almost any dog having his
experience of the wild. And having in his simple dog mind no shadow of a
reason for sparing Sourdough, of all creatures that walked, one may take
it that Jan savored with some joyousness the prospect of the killing
which Sourdough's snarling rush presented to him.
He received that rush with a peculiar screwing thrust of his left
shoulder, the commonest trick among fighting-dogs in the northland, but
one for which old Sourdough seemed totally unprepared, since he made no
apparent preparation to withstand it, and as an inevitable consequence
was rolled clean over on his back by the force of his own impetus,
scientifically met.
That, by all the rules in the northland game of which Jan was a
past-master, brought Sourdough within seconds of his end. The throat was
exposed; the deadly underhold, given which no dog breathing could evade
Jan.
And at that moment came Dick's voice in very urgent and meaning
exhortation:
"Back, Jan! Don't kill him. He's too old. Back--here--Jan!"
Jan's jaws had parted for the killing grip. His whole frame was
perfectly poised for the thrust from which no dog placed as Sourdough
was could possibly escape. A swift shudder passed through him as though
his sovereign's words reached him on a cold blast, and, stiff-legged,
wondering, his shoulder hair all erect, and jaws still parted for the
fray, Jan stepped back to Dick's side.
"You'll have to keep that old tough in to heel if you mean to save him,
Sergeant," said Captain Arnutt. "You can't expect Jan to lie down to
him. Why don't you keep him in to heel, man?"
The sergeant passed on, saluting, without a word. Doubtless he had
liefer far that Captain Arnutt had hit him in the face. But, when all is
said, no words could hurt this curious monomaniac now, after that which
he had seen with his own eyes and that which he now saw.
Complete enlightenment had come to old Sourdough in one fraction of a
moment. In the moment when he reached earth, on his back, flung there by
his impact with the calculated screwing thrust of Jan's massive
shoulder, Sourdough knew that his day was over. He expected to die then
and there, and was prepared to die. Contact with Jan had told him in a
flash things which could not be written in a page. He tasted in that
moment the cold-drawn, pitiless efficiency of the methods of the
northland wild, and realized that he could no more stand against this
new Jan than a lady's house-bred lap-dog could have stood against
himself. As his feet left the ground his life was ended, as Sourdough
saw it.
And then had come Jan's miraculous, shuddering withdrawal, wholly
inexplicable, chilling to the heart in its uncanny unexpectedness.
Sourdough mechanically regained his footing, and then with low-hung
head, inward-curling tail, and crouching shoulders he slunk away at the
heel of his bitterly disappointed master. The collapse of this old
invincible within a few seconds was a rather horrid sight and a very
strange and startling one.
From that hour Sourdough was never again seen in the precincts of the
R.N.W.M.P. barracks, and, though many people puzzled over the old dog's
disappearance, none ever knew what became of him. The sergeant had been
for some time entitled to retire from the service. That night he
obtained his commanding officer's permission to do so.
XXXIX
HOW JAN CAME HOME
Captain Arnutt proved himself a friend indeed to Dick Vaughan. Once he
had come to understand the position, he fully sympathized with Dick's
wish to leave the service at once and return to England. That sympathy
he proceeded forthwith to translate into action, and within the month
Sergeant-Inspector Dick Vaughan had received his discharge and booked
his passage--with Jan's--for England.
Despite his elation over the prospect before him, Dick found the actual
parting with his comrades in Regina a good deal of a wrench. They were
fond of him, and of Jan, and proud of both. And Dick found when the
packing was over and valedictory remarks begun that these men had
entered pretty deeply into his life and general scheme of things.
They were good fellows all, these hard, spare, long-limbed riders of the
plains, and they and the North-west had made of the Dick who was now
bidding them good-by a man radically different in a hundred ways from
the careless, irresponsible, light-hearted Dick who had come to them a
few years back direct from kindly, indulgent Sussex.
Dick had become a fit and proper part of his western environment and had
"made good" in it, as the saying is. We most of us like doing that which
we do well. Dick's mature and able manhood had come to him in the West.
He would never lose it now, however far eastward he might travel.
But--the West and the good folk tugged pretty hard at his heart-strings,
as from the rear platform of his car on the east-bound train he watched
the waving stiff-brimmed hats of his comrades, and a little later the
last of the roofs of Saskatchewan's capital fading out in the distance.
Hard land as many have found it, hard though it had been in many ways
for Dick, the North-west had forced its bracing, stimulating spirit into
his being and made him the man he was, just so surely as the northland
wilderness had made of Jan the wonderful hound he now was.
And Dick left it all with a swelling heart; not unwillingly, because he
was going to a great promised happiness, but with a swelling heart none
the less, and a kind of mistiness of vision, due in great measure to the
real respect, the sincere gratitude he felt toward the land and life and
people who had helped him to make of himself a very much bigger and
better man than any previous efforts of his had promised to evolve out
of the same material in Sussex, for example.
Winter ruled still in the land, and so the actual seaboard--Halifax--and
not the big St. Lawrence port, was rail-head for Dick and Jan. But for
Jan the enforced confinement of the journey was greatly softened by
regular daily visits from his lord. And in Halifax two and a half days
of almost unbroken companionship awaited them before their steamer left.