|I've thought it over many ways and I'm going to tell this story as
it happened, for I believe the reader will feel he is getting a true
picture of things as they were but will not be again. A little padding
up of the love interest, a little spilling of blood, would, perhaps,
make it stronger technically, but would it lessen his faith that the
curious thing happened? It's beyond me to know--I write it as it was.
To begin at the beginning, Cameron was peeved. He was rather a diffident
chap, never merging harmoniously into the western atmosphere; what saved
him from rude knocks was the fact that he was lean of speech. He stood
on the board sidewalk in front of the Alberta Hotel and gazed dejectedly
across a trench of black mud that represented the main street. He hated
the sight of squalid, ramshackle Edmonton, but still more did he dislike
the turmoil that was within the hotel.
A lean-faced man, with small piercing gray eyes, had ridden his buckskin
cayuse into the bar and was buying. Nagel's furtrading men, topping
off their spree in town before the long trip to Great Slave Lake, were
enthusiastically, vociferously naming their tipple. A freighter, Billy
the Piper, was playing the "Arkansaw Traveller" on a tin whistle.
When the gray-eyed man on the buckskin pushed his way into the bar, the
whistle had almost clattered to the floor from the piper's hand; then he
gasped, so low that no one heard him, "By cripes! Bulldog Carney!" There
was apprehension trembling in his hushed voice. Well he knew that if he
had clarioned the name something would have happened Billy the Piper.
A quick furtive look darting over the faces of his companions told him
that no one else had recognized the horseman.
Outside, Cameron, irritated by the rasping tin whistle groaned, "My God!
a land of bums!" Three days he had waited to pick up a man to replace
a member of his gang down at Fort Victor who had taken a sudden chill
through intercepting a plug of cold lead.
Diagonally across the lane of ooze two men waded and clambered to the
board sidewalk just beside Cameron to stamp the muck from their boots.
One of the two, Cayuse Gray, spoke:
"This feller'll pull his freight with you, boss, if terms is right; he's
a hell of a worker."
Half turning, Cameron's Scotch eyes took keen cognizance of the
"feller": a shudder twitched his shoulders. He had never seen a more
wolfish face set atop a man's neck. It was a sinister face; not the
thin, vulpine sneak visage of a thief, but lowering; black sullen eyes
peered boldly up from under shaggy brows that almost met a mop of black
hair, the forehead was so low. It was a hungry face, as if its owner
had a standing account against the world. But Cameron wanted a strong
worker, and his business instinct found strength and endurance in that
heavy-shouldered frame, and strong, wide-set legs.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Jack Wolf," the man answered.
The questioner shivered; it was as if the speaker had named the thought
that was in his mind.
Cayuse Gray tongued a chew of tobacco into his cheek, spat, and added,
"Jack the Wolf is what he gets most oftenest."
"From damn broncho-headed fools," Wolf retorted angrily.
At that instant a strangling Salvation Army band tramped around the
corner into Jasper Avenue, and, forming a circle, cut loose with brass
and tambourine. As the wail from the instruments went up the men in the
bar, led by Billy the Piper, swarmed out.