THE TROOPER’S STORY.
“However, I put the best face I could on the matter and even tried to
talk cheerfully to Nevins. But he would have none of my conversation
and zig-zagged along on his snow shoes with his queer, swinging gait in
the same silent way. It began to grow dusk, and I saw that we should
never make the lake that night. I halted Nevins and told him so.
“He gave an odd kind of laugh.
“‘Not make it? Man alive. I’m going to make it’ he grated out in an
odd, rasping sort of a voice.
“‘Don’t talk like a fool,’ said I. ‘Come, here’s a place under this
ledge that’ll make a good camp, and bright and early we’ll hit the
trail again.’
“He whipped round on me with blazing eyes. If ever a demon shone out
of a man’s optics it blazed out of his.
“‘I’m going on, I tell you,’ he snarled, ‘and what’s more, you’re going
with me.’
“I’ve been in some pretty tight places, but take my word for it, right
then I began to think that I hadn’t begun to know what a tight corner
was. I could see by the way that poor crazy Nevins gripped his rifle
that he meant to have company on his night ‘mush,’ even if he had to
shoot him to get it. I felt as if somebody had dropped a chunk of ice
down my back.
“‘All right, Nevins,’ I said, ‘I’ll go along. Don’t get excited.’
“‘I’m not excited,’ he said. And then he added, ‘It’s only that they’ll
get us if we don’t keep on going.’
“‘Who’s them?’ I inquired.
“‘Those things that have been following us,’ he whispered.
“Then he came quite close to me and caught my arm.
“‘They live back there up in the snow, and they’re trying to get me and
take me back with them, but they won’t.’ He broke into a wild laugh
that made my scalp tighten till I could almost feel my hat lift on my
hair.
“‘Don’t talk nonsense, Nevins,’ I snapped. ‘We’re far ahead of them.
They’ll never catch us now.’
“He looked sharply at me.
“‘You’re more of a fool than I thought you,’ he said contemptuously.
‘They’ve been following us all day. They’re close behind us now!’
“I confess that his manner was such that I jumped nervously and looked
behind me as he spoke. Of course there was nothing there but the trail,
and I told him so, but a contemptuous laugh was all that I got.
“Well, in the course of my career as a trooper I’ve handled some
pretty bad characters and been into some tight places and faced some
situations where things looked mighty bad, but I never felt such
a feeling of real scare as I had at that moment. Having made this
outburst, Nevins started off again. After a while, when it began to
get dark, I determined to make a last try to check his crazy plan. I
stopped dead.
“‘Here’s where I stop, Nevins,’ I said. ‘I’m dead beat.’
“He faced round like a wild man, and before I could lift a hand he had
his rifle raised, and with the yell of a maniac he fired blindly in my
direction. I felt the bullet fan my ear.
“‘What on earth are you trying to do, Nevins?’ I asked in as firm a
voice as I could assume, but I’m afraid it was as wobbly as a dish of
jelly. ‘Are you crazy?’
“‘Crazy!’ he echoed with a wild laugh. ‘It’s you that are crazy. Come
on, follow me. I’ll save you from those creatures that are after us.’
“There was nothing to do but to obey. Up I got and started on again
after Nevins, who went staggering along, edging from side to side of
the trail like a dizzy man. I found myself wondering how it was all
going to end. I’m pretty tough and hard to tire, but I felt almost all
in, and Nevins, not nearly so strong as I was, must have been going
solely on the unnatural strength lent him by his insanity.
“By and by it got dark, but Nevins kept on. He kept shouting back
at me, and I’d answer him from time to time. I couldn’t let him go
on alone, although I was almost dead. After a while his shouts grew
less frequent and finally they died out altogether. I guessed what
had probably happened. I thought that by and by if I kept on I would
stumble over his body lying in the snow.
“For a long time I walked slowly, every minute expecting to come upon
him, but he was nowhere on the trail. I don’t like to recall that night
nor the next day when I went on staggering down the trail till I began
to get crazy, too, and hear odd things and voices.
“If it hadn’t been that a party from the station out hunting found me I
don’t like to think of what might have happened. I soon came round and
told all I could about Nevins. A search party started out at once, but
returned the next day empty-handed. They had found and then lost tracks
of many snow shoes in the woods near the trail. We always suspected
that Nevins had wandered off the trail when I missed him, been found
dead by Blood Indians, robbed and buried in a drift.... And that, boys,
is one incident in the life of a trooper of the Mounted.”
“It’s a ghastly story,” shuddered Ralph, while the others looked grave
and sober.
“Chum around with a bunch of troopers some time and you’ll hear
stranger yarns than that,” said Trooper Carthew. “And,” he added
thoughtfully, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, “the worst of it is,
they are all true. There’s no need to do any fancy color work on ’em.”
Not long after, the trooper rose with the remark that he must “mush
along.” The party intended moving on, too, so they rode with him till
their trails parted. The last they saw of Trooper Carthew was his broad
back as his horse surmounted a brow of the trail and disappeared. He
turned in his saddle and waved, and then was gone.
It was a new experience to the boys and it was long before they forgot
his story, but such men are met with frequently in the wild places.
Real heroes, worthy of world recognition, die fighting a good fight,
without hope of reward or praise beyond that bestowed by their mates.