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.
A half-breed roared out a profane parody on the Salvation hymn:—
“There are flies on you, and there’re flies on me.
But there ain’t no flies on Je-e-e-sus.”
This crude humor appealed to the men who had issued from the bar; they shouted in delight.
A girl who had started forward with her tambourine to collect stood aghast at the profanity, her blue eyes wide in horror.
The breed broke into a drunken laugh: “That’s damn fine new songs for de Army bums, Miss,” he jeered.
The buckskin cayuse, whose mouse-colored muzzle had been sticking through the door, now pushed to the sidewalk, and his rider, stooping his lithe figure, took the right ear of the breed in lean bony fingers with a grip that suggested he was squeezing a lemon. “You dirty swine!” he snarled; “you’re insulting the two greatest things on earth—God and a woman. Apologize, you hound!”
Probably the breed would have capitulated readily, but his river-mates’ ears were not in a death grip, and they were bellicose with bad liquor. There was an angry yell of defiance; events moved with alacrity. Profanity, the passionate profanity of anger, smote the air; a beer bottle hurtled through the open door, missed its mark,—the man on the buckskin,—but, end on, found a bull’s-eye between the Wolf’s shoulder blades, and that gentleman dove parabolically into the black mud of Jasper Avenue.
A silence smote the Salvation Army band. Like the Arab it folded its instruments and stole away.
A Mounted Policeman, attracted by the clamour, reined his horse to the sidewalk to quiet with a few words of admonition this bar-room row. He slipped from the saddle; but at the second step forward he checked as the thin face of the horseman turned and the steel-gray eyes met his own. “Get down off that cayuse, Bulldog Carney,—I want you!” he commanded in sharp clicking tones.
Happenings followed this. There was the bark of a 6-gun, a flash, the Policeman’s horse jerked his head spasmodically, a little jet of red spurted from his forehead, and he collapsed, his knees burrowing into the black mud and as the buckskin cleared the sidewalk in a leap, the half-breed, two steel-like fingers in his shirt band, was swung behind the rider.
With a spring like a panther the policeman reached his fallen horse, but as he swung his gun from its holster he held it poised silent; to shoot was to kill the breed.
Fifty yards down the street Carney dumped his burden into a deep puddle, and with a ringing cry of defiance sped away. Half-a-dozen guns were out and barking vainly after the escaping man.
Carney cut down the bush-road that wound its sinuous way to the river flat, some two hundred feet below the town level. The ferry, swinging from the steel hawser, that stretched across the river, was snuggling the bank.
“Some luck,” the rider of the buckskin chuckled. To the ferryman he said in a crisp voice: “Cut her out; I’m in a hurry!”
The ferryman grinned. “For one passenger, eh? Might you happen to be the Gov’nor General, by any chanct?”
Carney’s handy gun held its ominous eye on the boatman, and its owner answered, “I happen to be a man in a hell of a hurry. If you want to travel with me get busy.”
The thin lips of the speaker had puckered till they resembled a slit in a dried orange. The small gray eyes were barely discernible between the half-closed lids; there was something devilish compelling in that lean parchment face; it told of demoniac concentration in the brain behind.
The ferryman knew. With a pole he swung the stern of the flat barge down stream, the iron pulleys on the cable whined a screeching protest, the hawsers creaked, the swift current wedged against the tangented side of the ferry, and swiftly Bulldog Carney and his buckskin were shot across the muddy old Saskatchewan.
On the other side he handed the boatman a five-dollar bill, and with a grim smile said: “Take a little stroll with me to the top of the hill; there’s some drunken bums across there whose company I don’t want.”
At the top of the south bank Carney mounted his buckskin and Melted away into the poplar-covered landscape; stepped out of the story for the time being.
Back at the Alberta the general assembly was rearranging itself. The Mounted Policeman, now set afoot by the death of his horse, had hurried down to the barracks to report; possibly to follow up Carney’s trail with a new mount.
The half-breed had come back from the puddle a thing of black ooze and profanity.
Jack the Wolf, having dug the mud from his eyes, and ears, and neck band, was in the hotel making terms with Cameron for the summer’s work at Fort Victor.
Billy the Piper was revealing intimate history of Bulldog Carney. From said narrative it appeared that Bulldog was as humorous a bandit as ever slit a throat. Billy had freighted whisky for Carney when that gentleman was king of the booze runners.
“Why didn’t you spill the beans, Billy?” Nagel queried; “there’s a thousand on Carney’s head all the time. We’d’ve tied him horn and hoof and cropped the dough.”
“Dif’rent here,” the Piper growled; “I’ve saw a man flick his gun and pot at Carney when Bulldog told him to throw up his hands, and all that cuss did was laugh and thrown his own gun up coverin’ the other broncho; but it was enough—the other guy’s hands went up too quick. If I’d set the pack on him, havin’ so to speak no just cause, well, Nagel, you’d been lookin’ round for another freighter. He’s the queerest cuss I ever stacked up agen. It kinder seems as if jokes is his religion; an’ when he’s out to play he’s plumb hostile. Don’t monkey none with his game, is my advice to you fellers.”
Nagel stepped to the door, thrust his swarthy face though it, and, seeing that the policeman had gone, came back to the bar and said: “Boys, the drinks is on me cause I see a man, a real man.”
He poured whisky into a glass and waited with it held high till the others had done likewise; then he said in a voice that vibrated with admiration:
“Here’s to Bulldog Carney! Gad, I love a man! When that damn trooper calls him, what does he do? You or me would’ve quit cold or plugged Mister Khaki-jacket—we’d had to. Not so Bulldog. He thinks with his nut, and both hands, and both feet; I don’t need to tell you boys what happened; you see it, and it were done pretty. Here’s to Bulldog Carney!” Nagel held his hand out to the Piper: “Shake, Billy. If you’d give that cuss away I’d’ve kicked you into kingdom come, knowin’ him as I do now.”
* * * *
The population of Fort Victor, drawing the color line, was four people: the Hudson’s Bay Factor, a missionary minister and his wife, and a school teacher, Lucy Black. Half-breeds and Indians came and went, constituting a floating population; Cameron and his men were temporary citizens.
Lucy Black was lathy of construction, several years past her girlhood, and not an animated girl. She was a professional religionist. If there we
re seeming voids in her life they were filled with this dominating passion of moral reclamation; if she worked without enthusiasm she made up for it in insistent persistence. It was as if a diluted strain of the old Inquisition had percolated down through the blood of centuries and found a subdued existence in this pale-haired, blue-eyed woman.
When Cameron brought Jack the Wolf to Fort Victor it was evident to the little teacher that he was morally an Augean stable: a man who wandered in mental darkness; his soul was dying for want of spiritual nourishment.
On the seventy-mile ride in the Red River buckboard from Edmonton to Fort Victor the morose wolf had punctuated every remark with virile oaths, their original angularity suggesting that his meditative moments were spent in coining appropriate expressions for his perfervid view of life. Twice Cameron’s blood had surged hot as the Wolf, at some trifling perversity of the horses, had struck viciously.
Perhaps it was the very soullessness of the Wolf that roused the religious fanaticism of the little school teacher; or perhaps it was that strange contrariness in nature that causes the widely divergent to lean eachotherward. At any rate a miracle grew in Fort Victor. Jack the Wolf and the little teacher strolled together in the evening as the great sun swept down over the rolling prairie to the west; and sometimes the full-faced moon, topping the poplar bluffs to the east, found Jack slouching at Lucy’s feet while she, sitting on a camp stool, talked Bible to him.
At first Cameron rubbed his eyes as if his Scotch vision had somehow gone agley; but, gradually, whatever incongruity had manifested at first died away.
As a worker Wolf was wonderful; his thirst for toil was like his thirst for moral betterment—insatiable. The missionary in a chat with Cameron explained it very succinctly: “Wolf, like many other Westerners, had never had a chance to know the difference between right and wrong; but the One who missed not the sparrow’s fall had led him to the port of salvation, Fort Victor—Glory to God! The poor fellow’s very wickedness was but the result of neglect. Lucy was the worker in the Lord’s vineyard who had been chosen to lead this man into a better life.
It did seem very simple, very all right. Tough characters were always being saved all over the world—regenerated, metamorphosed, and who was Jack the Wolf that he should be excluded from salvation.
At any rate Cameron’s survey gang, vitalized by the abnormal energy of Wolf, became a high-powered machine.
The half-breeds, when couraged by bad liquor, shed their religion and became barbaric, vulgarly vicious. The missionary had always waited until this condition had passed, then remonstrance and a gift of bacon with, perhaps, a bag of flour, had brought repentance. This method Jack the Wolf declared was all wrong; the breeds were like traindogs, he affirmed, and should be taught respect for God’s agents in a proper muscular manner. So the first time three French half-breeds, enthusiastically drunk, invaded the little log schoolhouse and declared school was out, sending the teacher home with tears of shame in her blue eyes, Jack reestablished the dignity of the church by generously walloping the three backsliders.
It is wonderful how the solitude of waste places will blossom the most ordinary woman into a flower of delight to the masculine eye; and the lean, anaemic, scrawny-haired school teacher had held as admirers all of Cameron’s gang, and one Sergeant Heath of the Mounted Police whom she had known in the Klondike, and who had lately come to Edmonton. With her negative nature she had appreciated them pretty much equally; but when the business of salvaging this prairie derelict came to hand the others were practically ignored.
For two months Fort Victor was thus; the Wolf always the willing worker and well on the way, seemingly, to redemption.
Cameron’s foreman, Bill Slade, a much-whiskered, wise old man, was the only one of little faith. Once he said to Cameron: “I don’t like it none too much; it takes no end of worry to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; Jack has blossomed too quick; he’s a booze fighter, and that kind always laps up mental stimulants to keep the blue devils away.”
“You’re doing the lad an injustice, I think,” Cameron said. “I was prejudiced myself at first.”
Slade pulled a heavy hand three times down his big beard, spat a shaft of tobacco juice, took his hat off, straightened out a couple of dents in it, and put it back on his head:
“You best stick to that prejudice feeling, Boss—first guesses about a feller most gener’ly pans out pretty fair. And I’d keep an eye kinder skinned if you have any fuss with Jack; I see him look at you once or twice when you corrected his way of doin’ things.”
Cameron laughed.
“’Tain’t no laughin’ matter, Boss. When a feller’s been used to cussin’ like hell he can’t keep healthy bottlin’ it up. And all that dirtiness that’s in the Wolf’ll bust out some day same’s you touched a match to a tin of powder; he’ll throw back.”
“There’s nobody to worry about except the little school teacher,” Cameron said meditatively.
This time it was Slade who chuckled. “The schoolmam’s as safe as houses. She ain’t got a pint of red blood in ’em blue veins of hers, ’tain’t nothin’ but vinegar. Jack’s just tryin’ to sober up on her religion, that’s all; it kind of makes him forget horse stealin’ an’ such while he makes a stake workin’ here.”
Then one morning Jack had passed into perihelion.
Cameron took his double-barreled shot gun, meaning to pick up some prairie chicken while he was out looking over his men’s work. As he passed the shack where his men bunked he noticed the door open. This was careless, for train dogs were always prowling about for just such a chance for loot. He stepped through the door and took a peep into the other room. There sat the Wolf at a pine table playing solitaire.
“What’s the matter?” the Scotchman asked.
“I’ve quit,” the Wolf answered surlily.
“Quit?” Cameron queried. “The gang can’t carry on without a chain man.”
“I don’t care a damn. It don’t make no dif’rence to me. I’m sick of that tough bunch—swearin’ and cussin’, and tellin’ smutty stories all day; a man can’t keep decent in that outfit.”
“Ma God!” Startled by this, Cameron harked back to his most expressive Scotch.
“You needn’t swear ’bout it, Boss; you yourself ain’t never give me no square deal; you’ve treated me like a breed.”
This palpable lie fired Cameron’s Scotch blood; also the malignant look that Slade had seen was now in the wolfish eyes. It was a murder look, enhanced by the hypocritical attitude Jack had taken.
“You’re a scoundrel!” Cameron blurted; “I wouldn’t keep you on the work. The sooner Fort Victor is shut of you the better for all hands, especially the women folks. You’re a scoundrel.”
Jack sprang to his feet; his hand went back to a hip pocket; but his blazing wolfish eyes were looking into the muzzle of the double-barrel gun that Cameron had swung straight from his hip, both fingers on the triggers.
“Put your hands flat on the table, you blackguard,” Cameron commanded. “If I weren’t a married man I’d blow the top of your head off; you’re no good on earth; you’d be better dead, but my wife would worry because I did the deed.”
The Wolf’s empty hand had come forward and was placed, palm downward, on the table.
“Now, you hound, you’re just a bluffer. I’ll show you what I think of you. I’m going to turn my back, walk out, and send a breed up to Fort Saskatchewan for a policeman to gather you in.”
Cameron dropped the muzzle of his gun, turned on his heel and started out.
“Come back and settle with me,” the Wolf demanded.
“I’ll settle with you in jail, you blackguard!” Cameron threw over his shoulder, stalking on.
Plodding along, not without nervous twitchings of apprehension, the Scotchman heard behind him the voice of the Wolf saying. “Don’t do that, Mr. Cameron; I flew off the handle and so did you, but I didn’t mean nothin’.”
Cameron, ignoring the Wolf’s plea,
went along to his shack and wrote a note, the ugly visage of the Wolf hovering at the open door. He was humbled, beaten. Gun-play in Montana, where the Wolf had left a bad record, was one thing, but with a cordon of Mounted Police between him and the border it was a different matter; also he was wanted for a more serious crime than a threat to shoot, and once in the toils this might crop up. So he pleaded. But Cameron was obdurate; the Wolf had no right to stick up his work and quit at a moment’s notice.
Then Jack had an inspiration. He brought Lucy Black. Like woman of all time her faith having been given she stood pat, a flush rouging her bleached cheeks as, earnest in her mission, she pleaded for the “wayward boy,” as she euphemistically designated this coyote. Cameron was to let him go to lead the better life; thrown into the pen of the police barracks, among bad characters, he would become contaminated. The police had always persecuted her Jack.
Cameron mentally exclaimed again, “Ma God!” as he saw tears in the neutral blue-tinted eyes. Indeed it was time that the Wolf sought a new runway. He had a curious Scotch reverence for women, and was almost reconciled to the loss of a man over the breaking up of this situation.
Jack was paid the wages due; but at his request for a horse to take him back to Edmonton the Scotchman laughed. “I’m not making presents of horses to-day,” he said; “and I’ll take good care that nobody else here is shy a horse when you go, Jack. You’ll take the hoof express it’s good enough for you.”
So the Wolf tramped out of Fort Victor with a pack slung over his shoulder; and the next day Sergeant Heath swung into town looking very debonaire in his khaki, sitting atop the bright blood-bay police horse.
He hunted up Cameron, saying: “You’ve a man here that I want—Jack Wolf. They’ve found his prospecting partner dead up on the Smoky River, with a bullet hole in the back of his head. We want Jack at Edmonton to explain.”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone! When?”
“Yesterday.”
The Sergeant stared helplessly at the Scotchman.
A light dawned upon Cameron. “Did you, by any chance, send word that you were coming?” he asked.
The Second Western Megapack Page 14
