We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We're little black sheep who've gone astray,
Baa--aa--aa!
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!
KIPLING
A great peace lay upon the frozen landscape--the deep, wintry peace of
the vast, snow-bound Nor'West. A light breeze murmured over the crisping
snow, and moaned amongst the pines in the timber-lined spurs of the
foothills. High overhead in the sunny, dazzling blue vault of heaven a
huge solitary hawk slowly circled with wide-spread, motionless wings,
uttering intermittently its querulous, eerie whistle.
Awhile the two exhausted men lay gasping for breath--absolutely and
utterly spent. Suddenly Yorke shivered violently and sighed. Redmond
raised himself off the prostrate form of his late opponent and,
staggering over to the pile of their discarded habiliments, slowly and
painfully he donned his fur coat and cap; then, picking up Yorke's, he
stumbled over to the latter. The senior constable was now sitting up,
with arms drooping loosely over his knees. George wrapped the coat
around the bowed shoulders and put on the cap.
"You're cold, old man!" he said simply. "We'd best get our things on
now, and beat it."
Wearily Yorke raised his head, and, at something he beheld in that
disfigured, but unalterably-handsome face, Redmond's heart smote him.
Often in the past he had fondly imagined himself nursing implacable,
absolutely undying hatreds; brooding darkly over injuries received in
fancy or reality, planning dire and utterly ruthless revenge, etc. But,
deep, deep down in his boyish soul he knew it to be only a dismal
failure--that he could not keep it up. His was an impulsive, generous
young heart--equally quick to forgive an injury as to resent one. Now in
his pity and misery he could have cried--to see his erstwhile enemy so
hopelessly broken in body and spirit.
Therefore it did not occur to him that it was sheer sentimental absurdity
on his part now to drop on one knee and put his arms around that
shivering, pride-broken form.
"Yorkey!" he mumbled huskily, "old man! . . . Yor--"
He choked a bit, and was silent.
Waveringly, a skinned-knuckled, but sinewy, shapely hand crept out and
gently ruffled Redmond's curly auburn hair. Vaguely he heard a voice
speaking to him. Could that tired, kind, whimsical voice belong to
Yorke? It said: "Reddy, my old son! . . . we're still in the ring,
anyway. . . . Seems--do what we would or could--we couldn't poke each
other out. . . ."
Came a long silence; then: "If ever a man was sorry for the rotten way
he's acted, it's surely me right now. . . . Got d----d good cause to be
p'raps. . . . I handed it to you about the sponge . . . egad! I
well-nigh came chucking it up myself--later. My colonial oath! but
you're the cleverest, gamest, hardest-hitting young proposition I've ever
ruffled it out with! . . . Where'd you pick it up? Who's handled you?"
George slowly rose to his feet. "Man named Scholes--down East" he
answered. He eyed Yorke's face ruefully and, incidentally felt his own,
"I used to do a bit with the gloves when I was at McGill. Talking about
sponges!--I only wish we had one now to chuck up--in tangible form."
He abstracted the other's handkerchief and, rolling it with his own into
a pad dabbed it in the snow. Yorke winced. "Hold still, old thing!"
said Redmond, "we'll have to clean off a bit ere we hit the giddy trail
again."
For some minutes he gently manipulated the pad. "There! you don't look
too bad now. Have a go at me!"
Figuratively, they licked each other's wounds awhile. Yorke had grown
very silent. Chin in hands and rocking very slightly to and fro, all
huddled up in his fur coat, he gazed unseeingly into the beyond. His
face was clouded with such hopeless, bitter, brooding misery that it
worried Redmond. He guessed it to be something far deeper than the
memory of their recent conflict. He strove to arouse the other.
"Talk about game cocks!" he began lightly. "Ten years ago, say! you must
have been a corker--regular 'Terry McGovern'."
"Eh?" Yorke's far-away eyes stared at him vaguely. "I was in India
then. Army light-weight champion in my day. Slavin wasn't joshing much
at breakfast, by gum! . . . Now we're here! . . . We're a bright pair!"
He made as though to cast snow upon his head, "Ichabod! Ichabod! our
glory has departed!"
He lifted up his tenor voice, chanting the while he rocked--
"_Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!_"
Redmond flinched and raised a weakly protesting hand. "Don't, old man!"
he implored miserably, "don't! what's the--"
"Eh!" queried Yorke brutally--rocking--"does hurt?"
"_If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,
And all we--_"
"No! no! no! Yorkey!" George's voice rose to a cry, "not that! . . .
quit it, old man! . . . that's one of the most terrible things Kipling
ever wrote--terrible because it's so absolutely, utterly hopeless. . . ."
"Well, then!" said Yorke slowly--
"_Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?_"
"It wasn't beer," muttered Redmond absently, "it was whiskey. Slavic and
I drank it." With an effort he strove to arouse himself out of the
despondency that he himself had fallen into.
"Listen! . . . Oh! quit that d----d rocking, Yorkey! . . . Listen now!
we've put up a mighty good scrap against each other--we'll call that a
draw--let's put up another against our--well! we'll call it our rotten
luck . . . D----n it all, old man, we're not 'down an' outs' doing duty
in this outfit--the best military police corps in the world! . . . Let's
both of us quit squalling this eternal 'nobody loves me' stuff! This
isn't any slobbery brotherly love or New Jerusalem business, or anything
like that, either. I'm not a bloomin' missionary!" He qualified that
assertion unnecessarily to prove it. "But let's stick together and back
each other up--just us two and old man Slavin--make it a sort of 'rule of
three.' We can have a deuce of a good time on this detachment
then! . . ."
He spoke hotly, eagerly, with boyish fervour, his soul in his eyes.
Yorke remained silent, with averted eyes. That imploring, wistful,
bruised young countenance was almost more than he could stand. George,
dropping on one knee beside him put a tremulous hand on the senior
constable's shoulder. "What's wrong, Yorkey?" he queried. He shook the
bowed shoulder gently. "What's made you consistently knock every third
buck that's been sent here? 'till they got fed up, and transferred? . . .
They tried to put the wind up me about it at the Post. What's bitin'
you? I don't seem to get your angle at all!"
"Oh, I don't know!" Yorke coughed and spat drearily. "Kind of rum
reason, you'll think. Long story--too long--dates back. Listen then!
Ten years back, in the pride of my giddy youth, I held a Junior Sub's
commission in the ---- Lancers--in India. This is just a synopsis of
my case, mind! . . . Well! the regiment was lying at Rawal Pindi, and--I
guess I kind of ran amuck there--got myself into a rotten
_esclandre_--entirely my own fault I'll admit:
_Man is fire, and Woman is tow,
And the Devil, he comes and begins to blow--_
the same old miserable business the world's fed up with. Since then
seems I've kind of made a mess of things. Burke Slavin's about
right--his estimate of me." He sighed with bitter, gloomy retrospection.
"I've always had a queer, intolerant sort of temperament. If I'd lived
in the days of the Indian Mutiny I guess I'd have been in 'Hodson's
Horse'." (Redmond started, remembering his curious dream.) "He was a
man after my own heart," Yorke continued slowly, "resourceful, slashing
sort of beggar . . . he ruffled it with a high hand. Bold and game as
Sherman, or Paul Jones, but as ruthless as Graham of Claverhouse. He put
the ever-lasting fear into the rebels of Oude--something like Cromwell
did in Ireland. My old Governor served through the Mutiny--he's told me
stories of him. My God!"
He drew his fur coat closer round him. "Well!"--Redmond watched the
sombre profile--"as I was saying . . . I 'muckered'. . . . Since then,
with the years, I guess I've been climbing down the ladder of illusions
till I'm right in the stoke-hole, and Old Nick seems to grin and whisper:
'As you were! my cashiered Sub.--As you were!' every time I chuck a brace
and try to climb up again. How's that for a bit of cheap cynicism?"--the
low, bitter laugh was not good to hear--"Man!"--the brooding eyes
narrowed--"I've sure plumbed the depths--knocking around, with the right
to live. Port Said, Buenos Aires, Shanghai. . . . I've certainly
travelled. Some day I'll throw the book at you. Now--substance and
ambition gone by the board long ago, and mighty little left of principle
I guess--I am--what I am--everything except a prodigal, or a
remittance-man--I never worried them at Home--that way. . . ."
He spoke with a sort of reckless earnestness that moved his hearer more
than that individual cared to show. Redmond felt it was useless to offer
mere conventional sympathy in a case like this. He did the next best
thing possible--he remained silently attentive and let the other run on.
"You take three men now--stationed in the same detachment," resumed Yorke
wearily, "by gum! they're thrown together mighty close when you come to
think of it. It's different to the Post, where there's a crowd. Life's
too short to start in explaining minutely just what that difference is.
Fact remains! . . . to get along and pull together they've got to like
each other--have something in common--give and take. Otherwise the
situation becomes d----d trying, and trouble soon starts in the family."
"By what divine right I should consider myself qualified to--to--Oh! shut
up, you young idiot! . . ." Redmond, forehead pressed into the speaker's
shoulder, giggled hysterically in spite of himself--"Shut up! d'you hear?
or I'll knock your silly block off!"
The two bodies shook, with their convulsive merriment. "You can't do it!
old thing," came George's smothered rejoinder, "and you know darned well
you can't--now! . . . Go on, you bloomin' Hodson!--proceed!"
Yorke gave vent to a good-natured oath. "Hodson? . . . you do me proud,
my buck! . . . Well now!--this 'three men in a boat' business! . . .
I'll admit I 'rocked' it with Crampton. I virtually abolished him
because--oh! I couldn't stick the beggar at all. I simply couldn't make
a pal of him. He was fairly good at police work, but a proper cad, in my
opinion. Always swanking about the palatial residence he'd left behind
in the Old Country. He called it ''is 'ome' at that. Typical specimen
of the middle-class snob. Followed Taylor. Thick-headed, serious-minded
sort of fool. Had great veneration for 'his juty.' No real knowledge of
the Criminal Code, and minus common sense, yet begad! the silly beggar
tried to be more regimental that the blooming Force is itself. I
systematically put the wind up to him 'till he got cold feet and quit."
Redmond recalled the fact that Taylor had been his predecessor.
"Followed!" he echoed mockingly, looking up at his handiwork.
Yorke, with a twisted smile glanced down at the bruised, but debonair
young face. Benevolently he punched its owner in the back.
"Followed . . . a certain young fellow, yclept 'Nemesis'," he said, "I
sized you up for one of these smart Alecks--first crack out of the box,
and egad! I think I'm about right."
Said Redmond, "How about our respected sergeant? we seem to have
forgotten him."
"Slavin?" ejaculated the senior constable; and was silent awhile. There
was no levity in him now. Slowly he resumed, "I guess as much as it's
humanly possible for two men to know each other--down to the bedrock,
it's surely Burke Slavin and I. Should too, the years we've been
together. The good old beggar! . . . We slang each other, and all
that . . . but there's too much between us ever to resent anything for
long."
"I know," said Redmond simply, "he told me himself--last night."
"Eh?" queried Yorke sharply. "My God! . . . Tchkk!" he clucked, and
burying his hands in his face he gave vent to a fretful oath. "My God!"
he repeated miserably, "I'd forgotten--last night! . . . I sure must
have been 'lit' . . . to come that over old Burke. . . ."
"You sure were!" remarked Redmond brutally.
"Keats' 'St. Agnes' Eve'! . . . Oh, Lord!" . . . He drew in his breath
with a sibilant hiss, "There seems something--something devilish about--"
"I know! I know!" breathed Yorke tensely, "what . . . you mean." His
haggard eyes implored Redmond's. "No! no! never again . . . I swear
it. . . ."
There came a long, painful silence. "See here; look!" began Yorke
suddenly. He stopped and surveyed George, a trifle anxiously.
"Mind! . . . I'm not trying to justify myself but--get me right about
this now. Don't you ever start in making a mistake about Slavin--blarney
and all. No, Sir! I tell you when old Burke runs _amôk_ in those
tantrums he's a holy fright. He'd kill a man. Might as well run up
against a gorilla."
A vision of the huge, sinister, crouching figure seemed to rise up in
Redmond's mind--the great, clutching, _simian_ hands.
"In India," continued Yorke, "we'd say he'd got a touch of the 'Dulalli
Tap.' The man doesn't know his own strength. I was taking an awful
chance--getting his goat like that last night. It's a wonder he didn't
kill me. He's man-handled me pretty badly at times. Oh, well! I guess
it's been coming to me all right. Neither of us has ever dreamt of going
squalling to the Orderly-room over our . . . differences. I don't think
Burke's ever taken the trouble to 'peg' a man in his life. Not his way.
'I must take shteps!' says he, and 'I will take shteps!' and when he
starts in softly rubbing those awful great grub-hooks he calls
hands--together! . . . well! you want to look out."
Lighting a cigarette he resumed reminiscently: "They were a tough crowd
to handle up in the Yukon. The devil himself 'd have been scared to butt
in to that 'Soapy Smith' gang; but, by gum! they were afraid of Slavin.
He doesn't drink much now, but he did then--mighty few that didn't--up
there--and I tell you, even our own fellows got a bit leery of him when
he used to start in 'trailing his coat.' They were glad when he 'came
outside.' That's one of the reasons why he's shoved out on a prairie
detachment. He wouldn't do at all for the Post. He never reports in
there more than he has to--dead scared of the old man, who's about the
only soul he is afraid of on earth. The O.C.'s awful sarcastic with him
at times, and that gets Burke's goat properly. He sure does hate getting
a choke-off from the old man."
He grinned guiltily. "That's why he prefers to wash the family linen
strictly at home--what little there is. But, sarcasm and all, the O.C.
gives him credit for being onto his job--and it's coming to him, too.
He's quick acting and he's got the Criminal Code well-nigh by heart.
Regular blood-hound when he starts in working up a case."
He yawned, and rising stiffly to his feet stretched his cramped limbs.
"We-ll! Reddy, my giddy young hopeful!--Now we've fallen on each other's
ruddy necks and kissed and wept and had a heart-to-heart talk we'll--"
"Aw, quit making game, Yorkey! Is it a go? You know what I said?"
Strangely compelling, Yorke found that bruised, eager, wistful young
face, with its earnest, honest eyes. "All right!" he agreed, with
languid bonhomie. "You've certainly earned the office of Dictator, and,
as I remarked--we really have quite a lot in common. Mind, though, you
don't repent of your bargain. One thing!" the curved, defiant nostrils
dilated faintly, "Seems the world always has use for us runagates in one
capacity. It's just the likes of us that compose the rank and file of
most of the Empire's military police forces. Who makes the best M.P.
man, executing duty, say, in a critical life-and-death hazard? The
cautious, upright, model young man, with a tender regard for a whole skin
and a Glorious Future? Or the poor devil who's lost all, and doesn't
care a d----n? We tackle the world's dangerous, dirty criminal work
and--swank and all--Society don't want to forget it."
He pointed to their horses who were playfully rearing and biting at each
other in equine sport. "Look at old Parson and Fox tryin' to warm
themselves? Bloomin' fine example we've set 'em. Well! _allons_! _mon
camarade_, let's up and beat it."