THE BEAT OF A MOUNTED POLICEMAN
Sergeant Mahon was not happy in his new work. After a Police
experience that knew only the ranching district he found the new
conditions, the new crimes and criminals, irritating and a little
bewildering. None of the trailing he loved, of horse and steer; no
ranchers and cowboys and rustling gunmen any longer filled the horizon
of his friendships and duties. He began to fear that a few months of
it would wipe from his mind all he had ever learned. Even his horse
was of little use, for the only path to ride, the three miles to the
trestle, was quite as easy by foot or ballast train.
The limitations of his official horizon were stifling, a mere mile or
two in radius. And within that circle were only a handful he could
call friends, and a camp of bohunks. He hated the shadows of the
forest, where life was scarcer than in the Hills, where even keen wits
were wasted.
Here the guns of his former enemies were supplanted by knives and
knuckle-dusters and clubs; and the men who wielded them were cowardly,
slinking foreigners whose very appearance was repugnant. Sneaky,
underground, despicable crime it was, running the gamut from petty
annoyance to senseless murder. None of the open-handed, bold and
reasoned intelligence of the prairie criminal. It revolted him.
Senseless, insensate, formless, erratic, it only disgusted him with its
sheer and unprofitable lawlessness. On the prairie crime meant double
duty for him--to discover, then to catch the criminal; here there was
no escape--once the criminal was discovered.
This offscouring of Europe was little more individual to him than a
Chinaman; Mahon was doubtful that he could pick out a second time more
than a few of the bohunks. With faces dull and brainless, voices drab
and lifeless, they merged into a mass of slime.
For the first time since he had donned the uniform Mahon began to
question his capacity for it. Knowing the history of the wide effort
demanded of the Mounted Police, he began to wonder if he could throw
himself into it with credit to the Force.
The only attractive feature of his new life was the friendship of the
bluff, cantankerous, but kind-hearted contractor, his sunny daughter,
the manly foreman, and the talkative Murphy. Of Tressa he had so many
glowing things to write in his letters to his wife that Helen
threatened to rush north in self-defence. Thereupon he crammed one
letter from start to finish with Tressa Torrance's praises, and defied
Helen to fulfil her threat.
In the course of his work the solitary part that intrigued him was the
mystery of the Indian. He felt that there was more there than he knew
of; he had more than a suspicion that Torrance was concealing from him
essential facts. But there seemed no call for official action. Thus
far the Indian was friendly; it was his nature to be silent and
mysterious.
Failing use for his horse, Mahon spent much time in the forest. And
after a time, the very shadows, and the secrecy breathed by the trees
seemed to hint at revelations just round the corner. Down in the camp
half a thousand bohunks, with brutal murder in their hearts, would,
under Police eye, climb to their bunks as innocent in appearance as
kittens. There in the woods, freed from observation, the bohunk was
more apt to discard his mask of stupidity. Somewhere there his plans
were laid, orders given and received.
What the Sergeant picked up little by little in the woods, small as it
was and unsatisfying to his youthful impatience, sufficed to sustain
his hopes. The constant meeting after work-hours with slinking bohunks
who always avoided him, convinced him that something within the law was
afoot, and repeated glimpses of distant groups which dribbled away when
he came within sight induced him to alter his methods. More covertly
he hunted, though it tried him sorely, and snatches of conversation
untangled from the froth of their utterances did much to simplify his
task and give more definition to his search.
Somehow his mind never quite freed itself of the haunting memory of his
discoveries that early day down the slope of the river bank. Though
the tracks were dim, he was satisfied that horses had passed that way
at no distant date. Suspicious at first, doubtful as the marks
advanced toward the river (largely on account of certain past memories
roused by peculiarities he seemed to recognise), he had later decided
that what he saw was no figment of an imagination rendered more lively
by the revival of the story of Blue Pete. Certainty was added by the
suspicion that efforts had been made by a master-hand to hide the
tracks.
Where that led he could not even guess, though at that stage his mind
kept reverting to the Indian.
The mysterious arrivals and disappearances of the redskin as Torrance
saw them was interesting enough, but they were as nothing to Mahon
compared with his own failure to meet the Indian face to face. That
was epitomised in the incident of the voice from the darkness over the
trestle the night he rushed to Torrance's assistance. There was little
to connect Torrance's inexplicable Indian friend with the Indian bohunk
who had dived that first day over the cliff to almost certain death,
but Mahon had been living among inferences and deductions and a certain
question was arising in his mind. Still it pointed nowhere.
Constable Williams had told him of isolated bands of Indians who had
visited the camps during the previous summer, and Mahon conceived the
idea that with one of these braves Torrance had had dealings which
placed the redskin under obligation though the contractor himself might
not suspect it. An Indian never forgets; that was the simplest
explanation.
The secrecy of the Indian's movements might be accounted for by a
natural reserve, and specially by a shyness before the uniform. But
where was he hiding? That he was never far away was apparent. Mahon
added to his other duties this new trail.
He realised the difficulty of his task after several distinct twinges
of that strange sense developed in the wary at being under unseen eyes.
It could not be a bohunk, for the workmen were not clever enough to
trail him unseen. Also it was not an inimical inspection. Only the
Indian could trail the trailer with such unerring confidence.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that as time went on the Indian
assumed the proportions of a gripping mystery.
On the track of the new problem, Sergeant Mahon took to roaming the
woods by night. His reward was unexpected and unsought--it had no
connection whatever with the Indian. He discovered that the bohunks
were meeting in their hundreds under cover of the darkness. To satisfy
himself that an outside menace was not added to the perils surrounding
the trestle, Mahon took to inspecting the camp from hiding whenever he
came on one of these gatherings. The fact that they were composed of
the ordinary bohunks of the camp, on some nights almost emptying it,
relieved him.
He was turning his attention more directly to these meetings in the
woods, when something happened to alter his plan.