Then Sergeant Jerry, stepping into the open, examined the exhibit.
Instead of carrying concealed weapons Reggie had a fair load of
concealed spirits; he was fully half-drunk. Questions only brought some
nebulous answers about the permit being up in Fort Calbert, and that
he was bringing in the goods. Even Jerry's proverbial good nature was
sorely taxed.
"I'm gettin' fed up on these damned tricks of Bulldog's," he growled,
"for that's what it is."
"I'm not sure," McBane objected; "this ninny may ha' blabbed, and yon
breed, hearin' it, saw a chance to make a shillin' or two."
However, Reggie, and his cayuse and the whisky were attached and
escorted in to barracks.
Perhaps it was the fortifying courage of the whisky the villain had
imbibed that caused him to bear up remarkably well under this misfortune
of the very great possibility of losing his not-too-valuable outfit; or
he may have known of some fairy who would make good his fine.
In the morning the liquor was very formally taken out to the usual
sacrifice place, just at the back of the barracks, and in the presence
of the Superintendent and a small guard of constables, poured in a
gurgling libation upon the thirsting sand-bank of a little ravine. Then
the empty tins were tossed disdainfully into the coulee.
Back in the Fort Major Kane said: "This was all a blind, Sergeant Platt;
none of the stuff will come down this way--they'll run it up among the
miners and lumberjacks. Take Lemoine the scout, and pick up some of the
patrol up about the Pass."
In half an hour Sergeant Jerry rode out from the Fort into the west; and
by the middle of the afternoon Corporal McBane reported to the O.C. that
the few constables remaining in the Fort were drunk--half were in the
guard room.
The Major was horrified. Where had the liquor come from? Corporal McBane
didn't know.
In his perplexity the Major, stick in hand, stalked angrily to the scene
of the morning sacrifice. The mound apparently had not been disturbed.
He had a nebulous idea that perhaps the men had chewed up the saturated
earth. He jabbed viciously at the spot with his walking stick as
if spearing the alcoholic demon. At the third thrust his stick went
through, suggesting a hole. With boot and hand the Major sent the sand
flying. A foot down he came upon a gunny sack. Beneath this was a neat
crosshatching of willow wands resting atop an iron grating that was
supported by a tub; a tub boned from the laundry, but the strong odor
that struck the Superintendent's nostrils was not suds--it was whisky.
He yanked the tub out of the cavity and kicked it into the coulee. Then
he stood up and mopped his perspiring forehead, muttering: "The devils!
the cursed stuff! It's that damned outlaw, Bulldog Carney, that's put
them up to this. The liquor that poor waster brought in was just a
blind, the tip from the half-breed was part of his devilish plot. It's a
game to put my men on the blink while he runs that carload."
Rage swirled in the Major's heart as he turned toward the Fort; but
before he had reached the gates his sense--and the little man had
lots of it--laid embargo on his tongue, and he passed silently to his
quarters to sit on the verandah and curse softly to himself.
He was sick of the whole whisky business. He had been in the Mounted
from the very first, fifteen years or so of it now. They had not come
into the Territories to be pitted against the social desires of the
white inhabitants who were in all other things law abiding; but here
this very thing took up more than half their time and energy. And it
was a losing game with the cunning and desires of a hundred men pitted
against every one of his force.
There were rumors that it was soon to be changed--the trade
legitimatized; that is, for Alberta to the Athabasca border. With a
small army of clever whisky traders, no licenses, no supervision against
them, it was a matter of impossibility to keep liquor from the
half-breeds who were a sort of carry-on station to the Indians.
To trail murderers, gunmen, cattle and horse thieves, day after day
across the trackless prairie, or the white sheet-of-snow buried plain,
was an exhilarating game--it was something to stimulate the _espirit de
corps;_ a Mounted Policeman, feeling, when he had landed his man, full
reward for all his hardships and danger; but to poke around like an
ordinary city sleuth and bag some poor devil of a breed with a bottle of
whisky, only to have him up before the magistrate for a small fine was,
to say the least, disquieting; it made his men half ashamed of their
mission.
Of course the present incident was not petty; it was like Bulldog Carney
himself--big; and the Major would have given, right there, a half-year's
pay to have bagged Bulldog, and so, perhaps have broken up the ring.
But determined as the force was, the British law was greater still.
Without absolute, convicting evidence Carney would have been acquitted,
and the Major perhaps censured for making a mistake.
At headquarters was a fixed edict: "Take no position from which you will
have to recede," really, "Don't make mistakes."
As the little man sat thinking over these many things, sore at heart at
the quirky thrust Fate had dealt him, for he loved the Mounted, loved
his duties, loved the very men, until sometimes breaking under the
strain of service in the lonely wastes they cracked and a weak streak
showed--then he was a tiger, a martinet; no sparing: "Out you go, you
hound!" he would snap; "you're a disgrace to the Force, and it's got to
be kept clean."
Then "Dismissed" would be written opposite the man's name in the annual
report that went from the Commissioner at Regina to the "Comptroller at
Ottawa."
Suddenly the chorus of a refrain floated to his ears from the guard
house--it was "The Stirrup Cup."
"God, _England!_" the little man groaned. "That's Cavendish singing," he
muttered.
How long and broad the highway of life; how human, how weakly human
those who travelled it! Cavendish, a younger son of a noble family, a
constable at sixty cents a day! They were all like that--not of noble
family, but adventurers, roamers, men who had broken the shackles of
restraint all over the world. That was largely why they were in the
Mounted; certainly not because of the sixty cents a day. And, so, how,
even in his bitterness of set-awry-authority, could the incident of the
tub be a heinous crime on their part.
"By gad!" and the little man popped from his chair and paced the
verandah, crying inwardly: "They're my boys; I'd like to forgive them
and shoot Carney--damn him! he's at the bottom of it."
The great arrogant sun, supreme in his regal gold, had slipped down
behind the jagged mountain peaks as Carney, on his little buckskin, and
the blond giant, FritzHerbert, on a bay, swung at a lope out of Fort
Calbert for a breather over the prairie.
As they rode, almost silently, they suddenly heard the shuffling
"pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat" of a cayuse, and in a little cloud of white dust
to the west there grew to their eyes the blurred form of a horseman that
seemed to droop almost to the horn of his saddle.
"A tired nichie," FitzHerbert commented; "he smells sow-belly frying in
the town--he hasn't eaten for a moon, I should say."
The dust cloud swirled closer, and Carney's gray eyes picked out the
familiar form of Lathy George, one of Dan Stewart's men. The rider
yanked his cayuse to a stand when they met, almost reeling from the
saddle in exhaustion. The cayuse spread his legs, drooped his head, and
the flanks of his lean belly pumped as if his lungs were parched.
"Hello, Bulldog!" then the man looked warily at Carney's companion.
FitzHerbert saw the look and knew from the stranger's physical
shatterment that some vital errand had spurred him; so he touched a heel
to his bay's flank and moved slowly along the trail.
Then the rider of the cayuse in tired, panting gasps gave Carney his
message.
"All right, George," Bulldog commented at the finish; "go to the
Victoria, feed your horse, have a good supper, get a room and sleep."
"What'll I do, boss, when I wake up--how long'll I sleep?"
"As long as you like--a week if you want."
"What'll I do then--don't you need me?"
"No, play with your toes if you like."
Lathy George pulled his reeling cayuse together, and pushed on. Carney
gave a whistle, and FitzHerbert, wheeling his bay, turned. "I've got to
go back to town," Carney said.
"I'll go too," the other volunteered; "this devilish boundlessness
is like a painted sky above a painted ocean--it gives me the lonely
willies."
"There's hell to pay back yonder," Carney said, jerking a thumb over his
shoulder.
"It's always back there, or over yonder--never here when there's any
hell to pay," FitzHerbert commented dejectedly; "it's just one long
plaintive sabbath."
"I've got to go back to the foothills soon's I've got fixed up," Carney
continued.
"Me, too--if there's action there."
"Hardly, my dear boy; it's purely a matter of diplomacy."
"Absolutely, Bulldog; that's why you're going. You're going to kiss
somebody on both cheeks, pat him on the back, and say, 'Here's a good
cigar for you'--you love it. What's happened?"
"The Stonies are on the war-path."
"Ugly devils--part Sioux. They're hunters--blood letters--first cousins
to the Kilkenny cats. In the rebellion, a few years ago, only for the
Wood Crees they'd have murdered every white prisoner that came into
their hands."
"Yes, they're peppery devils. In the Frog Lake massacre one of them,
Itcka, killed a white man or two and was hanged for it."
"What started them now?" FitzHerbert asked. "Whisky."
FitzHerbert stole a glance at Carney's stolid face; then he whistled;
Carney's word had been like a gasp of confession, for, undoubtedly, the
liquor was from the car.
"How did they make the haul?" he asked.
"The Stonies have just had their Treaty Payment, and there's a new
regulation that they may go off the reserve at Morley to make their Fall
hunt in the mountains, at this time; they were on their way, under Chief
Standing Bear, when they ran into the gent we've just met and his mates
in the Vermillion Valley. George was running two loads of whisky up to
the lumber camps."
"Great! that combination--lumberjacks, Stonies, and Whisky; it would be
as if sheol had opened a chute--there'll be murder."
"I know Standing Bear; he made me a blood brother of his. I did him a
bit of a turn. I was coming through the Flathead Valley once, and the
old fellow had insulted a grizzly. The grizzly was peeved, for the
Stoney had peppered a couple of silly bullets into the brute's shoulder.
I happened to get in a lucky shot and stopped the silver-tip when he was
about to shampoo old Standing Bear."
"Yes, I heard about that--you and your little buckskin. Say, Bulldog,
that little devil must have the pluck of a lion--they say he carried you
right up to the grizzly, and you pumped him full of .45's"
"That's just a yarn," Carney asserted; "but, anyway, the Chief and I are
good friends. I'm going to pull out and persuade him to go back to the
reserve. Jerry Platt has gone down in that direction, and you know
what the Sergeant is, Fitz--he'll stack up against that tribe alone;
if they're full of fire-water, and have been rowing with the
lumberjacks--their squaws will be along, and you know what that
means--Jerry stands a mighty good chance of being killed. I feel that it
will be sort of my fault."
"It's rotten to go alone, Bulldog. I'll get a dozen of the fellows, and
we'll play rugby with those devilish _nichies_ if they don't act like
gentlemen."
Carney laughed. "If you'd been at Duck Lake or Cut Knife you'd know all
about that. Your bally Remittance Men wouldn't have a chance, Fitz--not
a chance. It would be a fight--your hot heads would start it--and after
the first shot you wouldn't see anything to shoot at; you'd see the red
spit of their rifles, and hear the singing note of their bullets. These
Stonies are hunters; they can outwit a big-horn in the mountains; first
thing he knows of their approach is when he's bowled over."