_In Which Timothy Light's Team of Ten Potential Outlaws is
Considered, and There is a Significant Description of the Career of
a Blood-Guilty, Ruined Young Dog, Which is in the Way of Making
Desperate Trouble for Somebody_
Of all this Billy Topsail had been an observer. To a good deal of it he
had listened with an awakened astonishment. It did not appear to him
that he would be concerned in what might grow out of the incident. He
did not for a moment imagine, for example, that he would find himself in
a situation wherein his hair would stand on end--that he would stand
stripped naked in the north wind, confronting Death in a most unpleasant
form. Nor was it that Doctor Luke's personality had stirred him to
admiration--though that was true: for Doctor Luke had a hearty, cheery
twinkling way with him, occasionally mixed with a proper austerity, that
would have won any boy's admiration; but what particularly engaged Billy
Topsail was something else--it was Doctor Luke's confident assertion
that he could cure little Teddy Brisk.
Billy Topsail knew something of doctors, to be sure; but he had never
before quite realized their power; and that a man, being only human,
after all, could take a knife in his hand, which was only a man's hand,
after all, and so employ the knife that the painful, hampering leg of
Teddy Brisk, which had placed a dreadful limitation on the little boy,
would be made whole and useful again, caused Billy Topsail a good deal
of deep reflection. If Doctor Luke could do that, why could not Billy
Topsail learn to do it? It seemed to Billy Topsail to be a more
admirable thing to be able to do than to sail a hundred-tonner in a gale
of wind.
"Who _is_ that man?" he asked.
"That's Doctor Luke," said Teddy's mother. "You know that."
"Well, who's Doctor Luke?"
"I don't know. He's jus' Doctor Luke. He've a wee hospital at Our
Harbour. An' he heals folk. You'll find un go anywhere he's asked t' go
if there's a poor soul in need. An' that's all _I_ know about un."
"What does he do it for?"
"I reckon he wants to. An' anyhow, I'm glad he does do it. An' I reckon
you'd be glad, too, if you had a little boy like Teddy."
"I _am_ glad!" said Billy. "I think 'tis the most wonderful thing ever I
heard of. An' I wish----"
And the course of Billy Topsail's life moved inevitably on towards a
nearing fate that he would have shuddered to contemplate had he foreseen
it.
* * * * *
Well, now, there was but one team of dogs in Tight Cove. It was a happy
circumstance. No dogs could have existed as a separate pack in the
neighbourhood of Timothy Light's mob of potential outlaws. It was all
very well for Timothy Light to pleasure his hobby and pride in the
unsavoury collection. Timothy Light had command of his own team. It was
quite another matter for the timid mothers of Tight Cove. Timothy
Light's dogs had a bad name. As neighbours they deserved it, whatever
their quality on the trail--a thieving, snarling crew.
To catch Timothy Light in the act of feeding his team was enough to
establish an antipathy in the beholder--to see the old man beat off the
rush of the pack with a biting walrus whip while he spread the bucket of
frozen fish; to watch him, then, leap away from the ferocious onset; and
to be witness of the ravenous anarchy of the scramble--a free fight,
dwindling, at last, to melancholy yelps and subsiding in the licking of
the small wounds of the encounter. Timothy Light was a fancier of dog
flesh, as a man may be devoted to horse-flesh; and the object of his
selective taste was what he called go-an'-gumption.
"The nearer the wolf," said he, "the better the dog."
It was to accord with this theory--which is a fallacy as a
generalization--that he had evolved the team of ten that he had.
"I'm free t' say," he admitted, "that this here Cracker o' mine is none
too tame. He've the wolf in him--that's so. As a wolf, with the pack in
the timber, he'd be a bad wolf; as a dog in harbour he's a marvellous
wicked rogue. He've a eye as bitter as frost. Did you mark it? He leaves
it fool all over a person in a laughin' sort o' fashion an' never stop
on the spot he really wants t' look at--except jus' once in a while. An'
then it darts t' the throat an' away again; an' Cracker thinks, jus' as
plain as speech:
"'Oh, Lord, wouldn't I like t' fix my teeth in there!'
"Still an' all," the old man concluded, "he yields t' command. A tap on
the snout goes a long way with Cracker. He've a deal o' wolf's
blood--that one has; but he's as big a coward, too, as a wolf, an'
there's no danger in him when he's overmastered. Still an' all"--with a
shrug--"I'd not care t' lose my whip an' stumble an' fall on the trail
in the dusk when he haven't been fed for a while."
* * * * *
Cracker had come to Tight Cove in a dog trade of questionable propriety.
Cracker had not at once taken to the customs and dogs of Tight Cove; he
had stood off, sullen, alert, still--head low, king-hairs lifted, eyes
flaring. It was an attitude of distrust, dashed with melancholy, rather
than of challenge. Curiosity alone maintained it through the interval
required for decision. Cracker was deliberating.
There was Tight Cove and a condition of servitude to Timothy Light;
there were the free, wild, famishing spaces of the timber beyond.
Cracker must choose between them.
All at once, then, having brooded himself to a conclusion, Cracker
began to wag and laugh in a fashion the most ingratiating to be
imagined: and thereupon he fought himself to an established leadership
of Timothy Light's pack, as though to dispose, without delay, of that
necessary little preliminary to distinction. And subsequently he
accepted the mastery of Timothy Light and fawned his way into security
from the alarmed abuse of the harbour folk; and eventually he settled
himself comfortably into the routine of Tight Cove life.
There were absences. These were invariably foreshadowed, at first, by
yawning and a wretched depth of boredom. Cracker was ashamed of his
intentions. He would even attempt to conceal his increasing distaste for
the commonplaces of an existence in town by a suspiciously subservient
obedience to all the commands of Timothy Light. It was apparent that he
was preparing for an excursion to the timber; and after a day or two of
whimpering restlessness he would vanish.
It was understood, then, that Cracker was off a-visiting of his cronies.
Sometimes these absences would be prolonged. Cracker had been gone a
month--had been caught, once, in a distant glance, with a pack of
timber wolves, from whom he had fled to hiding, like a boy detected in
bad company. Cracker had never failed, however, to return from his
abandoned course, in reasonable season, as lean and ragged as a prodigal
son, and in a chastened mood, to the respectability and plenty of
civilization, even though it implied an acquiescence in the exigency of
hard labour.
Timothy Light excused the dog.
"He've got t' have his run abroad," said he. "I 'low that blood is
thicker than water."
Cracker had a past. Timothy Light knew something of Cracker's past.
What was respectable he had been told, with a good deal of
elaboration--concerning Cracker's feats of endurance on the long
trail, for example, accomplished with broken shoes, or no shoes at
all, and bloody, frosted feet; and relating, with warm, wide-eyed
detail of a persuasively conscientious description, to Cracker's
cheerful resistance of the incredible pangs of hunger on a certain
celebrated occasion.
Moreover, Cracker was a bully of parts. Cracker could bully a
discouraged team into a forlorn endeavour of an amazing degree of power
and courage. "As clever a dog as ever you seed, sir! No
shirkin'--ecod!--with Cracker t' keep watch on the dogs an' snap at the
heels an' haunches o' the loafers." It was all true: Cracker was a
powerful, clever, masterful, enduring beast in or out of harness, and a
merciless driver of the dogs he led and had mastered.
"Give the devil his due!" Timothy Light insisted.
What was disreputable in Cracker's past--in the course of the dog trade
of questionable propriety referred to--Timothy Light had been left to
exercise his wit in finding out for himself. Cracker was from the
north--from Jolly Cove, by the Hen-an'-Chickens. And what Timothy Light
did not know was this: Cracker had there been concerned in an affair so
doubtful, and of a significance so shocking, that, had the news of it
got abroad in Tight Cove, the folk would have taken the customary
precaution as a defensive measure, in behalf of the children on the
roads after dark, and as a public warning to all the dogs of Tight Cove,
of hanging Cracker by the neck until he was dead.
Long John Wall, of Jolly Cove, on the way to the Post at Little Inlet,
by dog team, in January weather, had been caught by the snow between
Grief Head and the Tall Old Man; and Long John Wall had perished on the
ice--they found his komatik and clean bones in the spring of the year;
but when the gale blew out, Long John Wall's dogs had returned to Jolly
Cove in a fawning humour and a suspiciously well-fed condition.
The Jolly Cove youngster, the other party to the dog trade, neglected to
inform Timothy Light--whose eyes had fallen enviously on the smoky,
taut, splendid brute--that this selfsame Cracker which he coveted had
bullied and led Long John Wall's team on that tragic and indubitably
bloody occasion.
His philosophy was ample to his need.
"In a dog trade," thought he with his teeth bare, when the bargain was
struck, "'tis every man for hisself."
And so this blood-guilty, ruined young dog had come unsuspected to Tight
Cove.