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Bulldog Carney

by William Alexander Fraser · English · Gutenberg #45926 · 425,683 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Bulldog Carney

Author: William Alexander Fraser


        
Release date: June 10, 2014 [eBook #45926]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45926

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BULLDOG CARNEY ***

BULLDOG CARNEY

By W. A. Fraser

1919

BULLDOG CARNEY




I.--BULLDOG CARNEY

|I've thought it over many ways and I'm going to tell this story as
it happened, for I believe the reader will feel he is getting a true
picture of things as they were but will not be again. A little padding
up of the love interest, a little spilling of blood, would, perhaps,
make it stronger technically, but would it lessen his faith that the
curious thing happened? It's beyond me to know--I write it as it was.

To begin at the beginning, Cameron was peeved. He was rather a diffident
chap, never merging harmoniously into the western atmosphere; what saved
him from rude knocks was the fact that he was lean of speech. He stood
on the board sidewalk in front of the Alberta Hotel and gazed dejectedly
across a trench of black mud that represented the main street. He hated
the sight of squalid, ramshackle Edmonton, but still more did he dislike
the turmoil that was within the hotel.

A lean-faced man, with small piercing gray eyes, had ridden his buckskin
cayuse into the bar and was buying. Nagel's furtrading men, topping
off their spree in town before the long trip to Great Slave Lake, were
enthusiastically, vociferously naming their tipple. A freighter, Billy
the Piper, was playing the "Arkansaw Traveller" on a tin whistle.

When the gray-eyed man on the buckskin pushed his way into the bar, the
whistle had almost clattered to the floor from the piper's hand; then he
gasped, so low that no one heard him, "By cripes! Bulldog Carney!" There
was apprehension trembling in his hushed voice. Well he knew that if he
had clarioned the name something would have happened Billy the Piper.
A quick furtive look darting over the faces of his companions told him
that no one else had recognized the horseman.

Outside, Cameron, irritated by the rasping tin whistle groaned, "My God!
a land of bums!" Three days he had waited to pick up a man to replace
a member of his gang down at Fort Victor who had taken a sudden chill
through intercepting a plug of cold lead.

Diagonally across the lane of ooze two men waded and clambered to the
board sidewalk just beside Cameron to stamp the muck from their boots.
One of the two, Cayuse Gray, spoke:

"This feller'll pull his freight with you, boss, if terms is right; he's
a hell of a worker."

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
halfclosed 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 copped 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 through 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; Cam-aron 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
were 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 buck-board 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 train-dogs, 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 school-mam'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.

"I'll be back, mister," and Heath darted from the shack, swung to his
saddle, and galloped toward the little log school house.

Cameron waited. In half an hour the Sergeant was back, a troubled look
in his face.

"I'll tell you," he said dejectedly, "women are hell; they ought to be
interned when there's business on."

"The little school teacher?"

"The little fool!"

"You trusted her and wrote you were coming, eh?"

"I did."

"Then, my friend, I'm afraid you were the foolish one."

"How was I to know that rustler had been 'making bad medicine'--had put
the evil eye on Lucy? Gad, man, she's plumb locoed; she stuck up for
him; spun me the most glimmering tale--she's got a dime novel skinned
four ways of the pack. According to her the police stood in with Bulldog
Carney on a train holdup, and made this poor innocent lamb the goat.
They persecuted him, and he had to flee. Now he's given his heart to
God, and has gone away to buy a ranch and send for Lucy, where the two
of them are to live happy ever after."

"Ma God!" the Scotchman cried with vehemence.

"That bean-headed affair in calico gave him five hundred she's pinched
up against her chest for years."

Cameron gasped and stared blankly; even his reverent exclamatory standby
seemed inadequate.

"What time yesterday did the Wolf pull out?" the Sergeant asked.

"About three o'clock."

"Afoot?"

"Yes."

"He'll rustle a cayuse the first chance he gets, but if he stays afoot
he'll hit Edmonton to-night, seventy miles."

"To catch the morning train for Calgary," Cameron suggested.

"You don't know the Wolf, Boss; he's got his namesake of the forest
skinned to death when it comes to covering up his trail--no train for
him now that he knows I'm on his track; he'll just touch civilization
for grub till he makes the border for Montana. I've got to get him. If
you'll stake me to a fill-up of bacon and a chew of oats for the horse
I'll eat and pull out."

In an hour Sergeant Heath shook hands with Cameron saying: "If you'll
just not say a word about how that cuss got the message I'll be much
obliged. It would break me if it dribbled to headquarters."

Then he rode down the ribbon of roadway that wound to the river bed,
forded the old Saskatchewan that was at its summer depth, mounted the
south bank and disappeared.

When Jack the Wolf left Fort Victor he headed straight for a little log
shack, across the river, where Descoign, a French half-breed, lived. The
family was away berry picking, and Jack twisted a rope into an Indian
bridle and borrowed a cayuse from the log corral. The cayuse was some
devil, and that evening, thirty miles south, he chewed loose the rope
hobble on his two front feet, and left the Wolf afoot.

Luck set in against Jack just there, for he found no more borrowable
horses till he came to where the trail forked ten miles short of Fort
Saskatchewan. To the right, running southwest, lay the well beaten
trail that passed through Fort Saskatchewan to cross the river and on
to Edmonton. The trail that switched to the left, running southeast, was
the old, now rarely-used one that stretched away hundreds of miles to
Winnipeg.

The Wolf was a veritable Indian in his slow cunning; a gambler where
money was the stake, but where his freedom, perhaps his life, was
involved he could wait, and wait, and play the game more than safe. The
Winnipeg trail would be deserted--Jack knew that; a man could travel it
the round of the clock and meet nobody, most like. Seventy miles beyond
he could leave it, and heading due west, strike the Calgary railroad and
board a train at some small station. No notice would be taken of him,
for trappers, prospectors, men from distant ranches, morose, untalkative
men, were always drifting toward the rails, coming up out of the silent
solitudes of the wastes, unquestioned and unquestioning.

The Wolf knew that he would be followed; he knew that Sergeant Heath
would pull out on his trail and follow relentlessly, seeking the glory
of capturing his man single-handed. That was the _esprit de corps_ of
these riders of the prairies, and Heath was, _par excellence_, large in
conceit.

A sinister sneer lifted the upper lip of the trailing man until his
strong teeth glistened like veritable wolf fangs. He had full confidence
in his ability to outguess Sergeant Heath or any other Mounted
Policeman.

He had stopped at the fork of the trail long enough to light his pipe,
looking down the Fort Saskatchewan-Edmonton road thinking. He knew the
old Winnipeg trail ran approximately ten or twelve miles east of the
railroad south for a hundred miles or more; where it crossed a trail
running into Red Deer, half-way between Edmonton and Calgary, it was
about ten miles east of that town.

He swung his blanket pack to his back and stepped blithely along the
Edmonton chocolate-colored highway muttering: "You red-coated snobs,
you're waiting for Jack. A nice baited trap. And behind, herding me in,
my brave Sergeant. Well, I'm coming."

Where there was a matrix of black mud he took care to leave a footprint;
where there was dust he walked in it, in one or the other of the ever
persisting two furrow-like paths that had been worn through the strong
prairie turf by the hammering hoofs of two horses abreast, and grinding
wheels of wagon and buckboard. For two miles he followed the trail till
he sighted a shack with a man chopping in the front yard. Here the Wolf
went in and begged some matches and a drink of milk; incidentally he
asked how far it was to Edmonton. Then he went back to the trail--still
toward Edmonton. The Wolf had plenty of matches, and he didn't need the
milk, but the man would tell Sergeant Heath when he came along of the
one he had seen heading for Edmonton.

For a quarter of a mile Jack walked on the turf beside the road, twice
putting down a foot in the dust to make a print; then he walked on
the road for a short distance and again took to the turf. He saw a rig
coming from behind, and popped into a cover of poplar bushes until it
had passed. Then he went back to the road and left prints of his feet
in the black soft dust, that would indicate that he had climbed into
a waggon here from behind. This accomplished he turned east across the
prairie, reach-ing the old Winnipeg trail, a mile away; then he turned
south.

At noon he came to a little lake and ate his bacon raw, not risking the
smoke of a fire; then on in that tireless Indian plod--toes in, and head
hung forward, that is so easy on the working joints--hour after
hour; it was not a walk, it was more like the dog-trot of a cayuse, easy
springing short steps, always on the balls of his wide strong feet.

At five he ate again, then on. He travelled till midnight, the shadowy
gloom having blurred his path at ten o'clock. Then he slept in a thick
clump of saskatoon bushes.

At three it was daylight, and screened as he was and thirsting for
his drink of hot tea, he built a small fire and brewed the inspiring
beverage. On forked sticks he broiled some bacon; then on again.

All day he travelled. In the afternoon elation began to creep into his
veins; he was well past Edmonton now. At night he would take the dipper
on his right hand and cut across the prairie straight west; by morning
he would reach steel; the train leaving Edmonton would come along about
ten, and he would be in Calgary that night. Then he could go east,
or west, or south to the Montana border by rail. Heath would go on to
Edmonton; the police would spend two or three days searching all the
shacks and Indian and half-breed camps, and they would watch the daily
outgoing train.

There was one chance that they might wire Calgary to look out for him;
but there was no course open without some risk of capture; he was up
against that possibility. It was a gamble, and he was playing his hand
the best he knew how. Even approaching Calgary he would swing from the
train on some grade, and work his way into town at night to a shack
where Montana Dick lived. Dick would know what was doing.

Toward evening the trail gradually swung to the east skirting muskeg
country. At first the Wolf took little notice of the angle of detour;
he was thankful he followed a trail, for trails never led one into
impassable country; the muskeg would run out and the trail swing west
again. But for two hours he plugged along, quickening his pace, for he
realized now that he was covering miles which had to be made up when he
swung west again.

Perhaps it was the depressing continuance of the desolate muskeg through
which the shadowy figures of startled hares darted that cast the tiring
man into foreboding. Into his furtive mind crept a suspicion that he was
being trailed. So insidiously had this dread birthed that at first it
was simply worry, a feeling as if the tremendous void of the prairie
was closing in on him, that now and then a white boulder ahead was a
crouching wolf. He shivered, shook his wide shoulders and cursed. It was
that he was tiring, perhaps.

Then suddenly the thing took form, mental form--something _was_ on his
trail. This primitive creature was like an Indian--gifted with the sixth
sense that knows when somebody is coming though he may be a day's march
away; the mental wireless that animals possess. He tried to laugh it
off; to dissipate the unrest with blasphemy; but it wouldn't down.

The prairie was like a huge platter, everything stood out against the
luminous evening sky like the sails of a ship at sea. If it were Heath
trailing, and that man saw him, he would never reach the railroad.
His footprints lay along the trail, for it was hard going on the
heavily-grassed turf. To cut across the muskeg that stretched for miles
would trap him. In the morning light the Sergeant would discover that
his tracks had disappeared, and would know just where he had gone.
Being mounted the Sergeant would soon make up for the few hours of
darkness--would reach the railway and wire down the line.

The Wolf plodded on for half a mile, then he left the trail where the
ground was rolling, cut east for five hundred yards, and circled back.
On the top of a cut-bank that was fringed with wolf willow he crouched
to watch. The sun had slipped through purple clouds, and dropping below
them into a sea of greenish-yellow space, had bathed in blood the whole
mass of tesselated vapour; suddenly outlined against this glorious
background a horse and man silhouetted, the stiff erect seat in the
saddle, the docked tail of the horse, square cut at the hocks, told the
watcher that it was a policeman.

When the rider had passed the Wolf trailed him, keeping east of the
road where his visibility was low against the darkening side of the
vast dome. Half a mile beyond where the Wolf had turned, the Sergeant
stopped, dismounted, and, leading the horse, with head low hung searched
the trail for the tracks that had now disappeared. Approaching night,
coming first over the prairie, had blurred it into a gigantic rug of
sombre hue. The trail was like a softened stripe; footprints might be
there, merged into the pattern till they were indiscernible.

A small oval lake showed in the edge of the muskeg beside the trail, its
sides festooned by strong-growing blue-joint, wild oats, wolf willow,
saskatoon bushes, and silver-leafed poplar. Ducks, startled from their
nests, floating nests built of interwoven rush leaves and grass, rose
in circling flights, uttering plaintive rebukes. Three giant sandhill
cranes flopped their sail-like wings, folded their long spindle shanks
straight out behind, and soared away like kites.

Crouched back beside the trail the Wolf watched and waited. He knew what
the Sergeant would do; having lost the trail of his quarry he would
camp there, beside good water, tether his horse to the picket-pin by
the hackamore rope, eat, and sleep till daylight, which would come about
three o'clock; then he would cast about for the Wolf's tracks, gallop
along the southern trail, and when he did not pick them up would surmise
that Jack had cut across the muskeg land; then he would round the
southern end of the swamp and head for the railway.

"I must get him," the Wolf muttered mercilessly; "gentle him if I can,
if not--get him."

He saw the Sergeant unsaddle his horse, picket him, and eat a cold meal;
this rather than beacon his presence by a glimmering fire.

The Wolf, belly to earth, wormed closer, slithering over the gillardias,
crunching their yellow blooms beneath his evil body, his revolver held
between his strong teeth as his grimy paws felt the ground for twigs
that might crack.

If the Sergeant would unbuckle his revolver belt, and perhaps go down to
the water for a drink, or even to the horse that was at the far end of
the picket line, his nose buried deep in the succulent wild-pea vine,
then the Wolf would rush his man, and the Sergeant, disarmed, would
throw up his hands.

The Wolf did not want on his head the death of a Mounted Policeman, for
then the "Redcoats" would trail him to all corners of the earth. All his
life there would be someone on his trail. It was too big a price. Even
if the murder thought had been paramount, in that dim light the first
shot meant not overmuch.

So Jack waited. Once the horse threw up his head, cocked his ears
fretfully, and stood like a bronze statue; then he blew a breath of
discontent through his spread nostrils, and again buried his muzzle in
the pea vine and sweet-grass.

Heath had seen this movement of the horse and ceased cutting at the plug
of tobacco with which he was filling his pipe; he stood up, and searched
with his eyes the mysterious gloomed prairie.

The Wolf, flat to earth, scarce breathed.

The Sergeant snuffed out the match hidden in his cupped hands over the
bowl, put the pipe in his pocket, and, revolver in hand, walked in a
narrow circle; slowly, stealthily, stopping every few feet to listen;
not daring to go too far lest the man he was after might be hidden
somewhere and cut out his horse. He passed within ten feet of where the
Wolf lay, just a gray mound against the gray turf.

The Sergeant went back to his blanket and with his saddle for a pillow
lay down, the tiny glow of his pipe showing the Wolf that he smoked. He
had not removed his pistol belt.

The Wolf lying there commenced to think grimly how easy it would be to
kill the policeman as he slept; to wiggle, snake-like to within a few
feet and then the shot. But killing was a losing game, the blundering
trick of a man who easily lost control; the absolutely last resort when
a man was cornered beyond escape and saw a long term at Stony Mountain
ahead of him, or the gallows. The Wolf would wait till all the advantage
was with him. Besides, the horse was like a watch-dog. The Wolf was down
wind from them now, but if he moved enough to rouse the horse, or the
wind shifted--no, he would wait. In the morning the Sergeant, less wary
in the daylight, might give him his chance.

Fortunately it was late in the summer and that terrible pest, the
mosquito, had run his course.

The Wolf slipped back a few yards deeper into the scrub, and, tired,
slept. He knew that at the first wash of gray in the eastern sky the
ducks would wake him. He slept like an animal, scarce slipping from
consciousness; a stamp of the horse's hoof on the sounding turf bringing
him wide awake. Once a gopher raced across his legs, and he all but
sprang to his feet thinking the Sergeant had grappled with him. Again
a great horned owl at a twist of Jack's head as he dreamed, swooped
silently and struck, thinking it a hare.

Brought out of his sleep by the myriad noises of the waterfowl the
Wolf knew that night was past, and the dice of chance were about to be
thrown. He crept back to where the Sergeant was in full view, the horse,
his sides ballooned by the great feed of sweet-pea vine, lay at rest,
his muzzle on the earth, his drooped ears showing that he slept.

Waked by the harsh cry of a loon that swept by rending the air with his
death-like scream, the Sergeant sat bolt upright and rubbed his eyes
sleepily. He rose, stretched his arms above his head, and stood for a
minute looking off toward the eastern sky that was now taking on a rose
tint. The horse, with a little snort, canted to his feet and sniffed
toward the water; the Sergeant pulled the picket-pin and led him to the
lake for a drink.

Hungrily the Wolf looked at the carbine that lay across the saddle, but
the Sergeant watered his horse without passing behind the bushes. It
was a chance; but still the Wolf waited, thinking, "I want an ace in the
hole when I play this hand."

Sergeant Heath slipped the picket-pin back into the turf, saddled his
horse, and stood mentally debating something. Evidently the something
had to do with Jack's whereabouts, for Heath next climbed a short
distance up a poplar, and with his field glasses scanned the surrounding
prairie. This seemed to satisfy him; he dropped back to earth, gathered
some dry poplar branches and built a little fire; hanging by a forked
stick he drove in the ground his copper tea pail half full of water.

Then the thing the Wolf had half expectantly waited for happened. The
Sergeant took off his revolver belt, his khaki coat, rolled up the
sleeves of his gray flannel shirt, turned down its collar, took a piece
of soap and a towel from the roll of his blanket and went to the water
to wash away the black dust of the prairie trail that was thick and
heavy on his face and in his hair. Eyes and ears full of suds, splashing
and blowing water, the noise of the Wolf's rapid creep to the fire was
unheard.

When the Sergeant, leisurely drying his face on the towel, stood up and
turned about he was looking into the yawning maw of his own heavy police
revolver, and the Wolf was saying: "Come here beside the fire and strip
to the buff--I want them duds. There won't nothin' happen you unless
you get hostile, then you'll get yours too damn quick. Just do as you're
told and don't make no fool play; I'm in a hurry."

Of course the Sergeant, not being an imbecile, obeyed.

"Now get up in that tree and stay there while I dress," the Wolf
ordered. In three minutes he was arrayed in the habiliments of Sergeant
Heath; then he said, "Come down and put on my shirt."

In the pocket of the khaki coat that the Wolf now wore were a pair of
steel handcuffs; he tossed them to the man in the shirt commanding,
"Click these on."

"I say," the Sergeant expostulated, "can't I have the pants and the coat
and your boots?"

The Wolf sneered: "Dif'rent here my bounder; I got to make a get-away.
I'll tell you what I'll do--I'll give you your choice of three ways:
I'll stake you to the clothes, bind and gag you; or I'll rip one of
these .44 plugs through you; or I'll let you run foot loose with a shirt
on your back; I reckon you won't go far on this wire grass in bare
feet."

"I don't walk on my pants."

"That's just what you would do; the pants and coat would cut up into
about four pairs of moccasins; they'd be as good as duffel cloth."

"I'll starve."

"That's your look-out. You'd lie awake nights worrying about where Jack
Wolf would get a dinner--I guess not. I ought to shoot you. The damn
police are nothin' but a lot of dirty dogs anyway. Get busy and cook
grub for two--bacon and tea, while I sit here holdin' this gun on you."

The Sergeant was a grotesque figure cooking with the manacles on his
wrists, and clad only in a shirt.

When they had eaten the Wolf bridled the horse, curled up the picket
line and tied it to the saddle horn, rolled the blanket and with the
carbine strapped it to the saddle, also his own blanket.

"I'm goin' to grubstake you," he said, "leave you rations for three
days; that's more than you'd do for me. I'll turn your horse loose near
steel, I ain't horse stealin', myself--I'm only borrowin'."

When he was ready to mount a thought struck the Wolf. It could hardly
be pity for the forlorn condition of Heath; it must have been cunning--a
play against the off chance of the Sergeant being picked up by somebody
that day. He said:

"You fellers in the force pull a gag that you keep your word, don't
you?"

"We try to."

"I'll give you another chance, then. I don't want to see nobody put in
a hole when there ain't no call for it. If you give me your word, on the
honor of a Mounted Policeman, swear it, that you'll give me four days'
start before you squeal I'll stake you to the clothes and boots; then
you can get out in two days and be none the worse."

"I'll see you in hell first. A Mounted Policeman doesn't compromise with
a horse thief--with a skunk who steals a working girl's money."

"You'll keep palaverin' till I blow the top of your head off," the Wolf
snarled. "You'll look sweet trampin' in to some town in about a week
askin' somebody to file off the handcuffs Jack the Wolf snapped on you,
won't you?"

"I won't get any place in a week with these handcuffs on," the Sergeant
objected; "even if a pack of coyotes tackled me I couldn't protect
myself."

The Wolf pondered this. If he could get away without it he didn't want
the death of a man on his hands--there was nothing in it. So he unlocked
the handcuffs, dangled them in his fingers debatingly, and then threw
them far out into the bushes, saying, with a leer; "I might get stuck up
by somebody, and if they clamped these on to me it would make a get-away
harder."

"Give me some matches," pleaded the Sergeant.

With this request the Wolf complied saying, "I don't want to do nothin'
mean unless it helps me out of a hole."

Then Jack swung to the saddle and continued on the trail. For four miles
he rode, wondering at the persistence of the muskeg. But now he had a
horse and twenty-four hours ahead before train time; he should worry.

Another four miles, and to the south he could see a line of low rolling
hills that meant the end of the swamps. Even where he rode the prairie
rose and fell, the trail dipping into hollows, on its rise to sweep over
higher land. Perhaps some of these ridges ran right through the muskegs;
but there was no hurry.

Suddenly as the Wolf breasted an upland he saw a man leisurely cinching
a saddle on a buckskin horse.

"Hell!" the Wolf growled as he swung his mounts, "that's the buckskin
that I see at the Alberta; that's Bulldog; I don't want no mix-up with
him."

He clattered down to the hollow he had left, and raced for the hiding
screen of the bushed muskeg. He was almost certain Carney had not seen
him, for the other had given no sign; he would wait in the cover until
Carney had gone; perhaps he could keep right on across the bad lands,
for his horse, as yet, sunk but hoof deep. He drew rein in thick cover
and waited.

Suddenly the horse threw up his head, curved his neck backward, cocked
his ears and whinnied. The Wolf could hear a splashing, sucking sound of
hoofs back on the tell-tale trail he had left.

With a curse he drove his spurs into the horse's flanks, and the
startled animal sprang from the cutting rowels, the ooze throwing up in
a shower.

A dozen yards and the horse stumbled, almost coming to his knees; he
recovered at the lash of Jack's quirt, and struggled on; now going half
the depth of his cannon bones in the yielding muck, he was floundering
like a drunken man; in ten feet his legs went to the knees.

Quirt and spur drove him a few feet; then he lurched heavily, and with
a writhing struggle against the sucking sands stood trembling; from his
spread mouth came a scream of terror--he knew.

And now the Wolf knew. With terrifying dread he remembered--he had
ridden into the "Lakes of the Shifting Sands." This was the country they
were in and he had forgotten. The sweat of fear stood out on the low
forehead; all the tales that he had heard of men who had disappeared
from off the face of the earth, swallowed up in these quicksands, came
back to him with numbing force. To spring from the horse meant but two
or three wallowing strides and then to be sucked down in the claiming
quicksands.

The horse's belly was against the black muck. The Wolf had drawn his
feet up; he gave a cry for help. A voice answered, and twisting his head
about he saw, twenty yards away, Carney on the buckskin. About the man's
thin lips a smile hovered. He sneered:

"You're up against it, Mister Policeman; what name'll I turn in back at
barracks?"

Jack knew that it was Carney, and that Carney might know Heath by sight,
so he lied:

"I'm Sergeant Phillips; for God's sake help me out."

Bulldog sneered. "Why should I--God doesn't love a sneaking police
hound."

The Wolf pleaded, for his horse was gradually sinking; his struggles now
stilled for the beast knew that he was doomed.

"All right," Carney said suddenly. "One condition--never mind, I'll
save you first--there isn't too much time. Now break your gun, empty
the cartridges out and drop it back into the holster," he commanded.
"Unsling your picket line, fasten it under your armpits, and if I can
get my cow-rope to you tie the two together."

He slipped from the saddle and led the horse as far out as he dared,
seemingly having found firmer ground a little to one side. Then taking
his cow-rope, he worked his way still farther out, placing his feet on
the tufted grass that stuck up in little mounds through the treacherous
ooze. Then calling, "Look out!" he swung the rope. The Wolf caught it
at the first throw and tied his own to it. Carney worked his way back,
looped the rope over the horn, swung to the saddle, and calling, "Flop
over on your belly--look out!" he started his horse, veritably towing
the Wolf to safe ground.

The rope slacked; the Wolf, though half smothered with muck, drew his
revolver and tried to slip two cartridges into the cylinder.

A sharp voice cried, "Stop that, you swine!" and raising his eyes he was
gazing into Carney's gun. "Come up here on the dry ground," the latter
commanded. "Stand there, unbuckle your belt and let it drop. Now take
ten paces straight ahead." Carney salvaged the weapon and belt of
cartridges.

"Build a fire, quick!" he next ordered, leaning casually against his
horse, one hand resting on the butt of his revolver.

He tossed a couple of dry matches to the Wolf when the latter had built
a little mound of dry poplar twigs and birch bark.

When the fire was going Carney said: "Peel your coat and dry it; stand
close to the fire so your pants dry too--I want that suit."

The Wolf was startled. Was retribution so hot on his trail? Was Carney
about to set him afoot just as he had set afoot Sergeant Heath? His two
hundred dollars and Lucy Black's five hundred were in the pocket of
that coat also. As he took it off he turned it upside down, hoping for
a chance to slip the parcel of money to the ground unnoticed of his
captor.

"Throw the jacket here," Carney commanded; "seems to be papers in the
pocket."

When the coat had been tossed to him, Carney sat down on a fallen tree,
took from it two packets--one of papers, and another wrapped in strong
paper. He opened the papers, reading them with one eye while with the
other he watched the man by the fire. Presently he sneered: "Say, you're
some liar--even for a government hound; your name's not Phillips, it's
Heath. You're the waster who fooled the little girl at Golden. You're
the bounder who came down from the Klondike to gather Bulldog Carney in;
you shot off your mouth all along the line that you were going to take
him singlehanded. You bet a man in Edmonton a hundred you'd tie him hoof
and horn. Well, you lose, for I'm going to rope you first, see? Turn you
over to the Government tied up like a bag of spuds; that's just what I'm
going to do, Sergeant Liar. I'm going to break you for the sake of that
little girl at Golden, for she was my friend and I'm Bulldog Carney.
Soon as that suit is dried a bit you'll strip and pass it over; then
you'll get into my togs and I'm going to turn you over to the police as
Bulldog Carney.

"D'you get me, kid?" Carney chuckled. "That'll break you, won't it,
Mister Sergeant Heath? You can't stay in the Force a joke; you'll never
live it down if you live to be a thousand--you've boasted too much."

The Wolf had remained silent--waiting. He had an advantage if his captor
did not know him. Now he was frightened; to be turned in at Edmonton by
Carney was as bad as being taken by Sergeant Heath.

"You can't pull that stuff, Carney," he objected; "the minute I tell
them who I am and who you are they'll grab you too quick. They'll know
me; perhaps some of them'll know you."

A sneering "Ha!" came from between the thin lips of the man on the log.
"Not where we're going they won't, Sergeant. I know a little place over
on the rail"--and he jerked his thumb toward the west--"where there's
two policemen that don't know much of anything; they've never seen
either of us. You ain't been at Edmonton more'n a couple of months since
you came from the Klondike. But they do know that Bulldog Carney is
wanted at Calgary and that there's a thousand dollars to the man that
brings him in."

At this the Wolf pricked his ears; he saw light--a flood of it. If this
thing went through, and he was sent on to Calgary as Bulldog Carney,
he would be turned loose at once as not being the man. The police at
Calgary had cause to know just what Carney looked like for he had been
in their clutches and escaped.

But Jack must bluff--appear to be the angry Sergeant. So he said:
"They'll know me at Calgary, and you'll get hell for this."

Now Carney laughed out joyously. "I don't give a damn if they do. Can't
you get it through your wooden police head that I just want this little
pleasantry driven home so that you're the goat of that nanny band,
the Mounted Police; then you'll send in your papers and go back to the
farm?"

As Carney talked he had opened the paper packet. Now he gave a crisp
"Hello! what have we here?" as a sheaf of bills appeared.

The Wolf had been watching for Carney's eyes to leave him for five
seconds. One hand rested in his trousers pocket. He drew it out and
dropped a knife, treading it into the sand and ashes.

"Seven hundred," Bulldog continued. "Rather a tidy sum for a policeman
to be toting. Is this police money?"

The Wolf hesitated; it was a delicate situation. Jack wanted that money
but a slip might ruin his escape. If Bulldog suspected that Jack was not
a policeman he would jump to the conclusion that he had killed the owner
of the horse and clothes. Also Carney would not believe that a policeman
on duty wandered about with seven hundred in his pocket; if Jack claimed
it all Carney would say he lied and keep it as Government money.

"Five hundred is Government money I was bringin' in from a post, and two
hundred is my own," he answered.

"I'll keep the Government money," Bulldog said crisply; "the Government
robbed me of my ranch--said I had no title. And I'll keep yours, too;
it's coming to you."

"If luck strings with you, Carney, and you get away with this dirty
trick, what you say'll make good--I'll have to quit the Force; an' I
want to get home down east. Give me a chance; let me have my own two
hundred."

"I think you're lying--a man in the Force doesn't get two hundred ahead,
not honest. But I'll toss you whether I give you one hundred or two,"
Carney said, taking a half dollar from his pocket. "Call!" and he spun
it in the air.

"Heads!" the Wolf cried.

The coin fell tails up. "Here's your hundred," and Bulldog passed the
bills to their owner.

"I see here," he continued, "your order to arrest Bulldog Carney. Well,
you've made good, haven't you. And here's another for Jack the Wolf; you
missed him, didn't you? Where's he--what's he done lately? He played me
a dirty trick once; tipped off the police as to where they'd get me. I
never saw him, but if you could stake me to a sight of the Wolf I'd
give you this six hundred. He's the real hound that I've got a low down
grudge against. What's his description--what does he look like?"

"He's a tall slim chap--looks like a breed, 'cause he's got nigger blood
in him," the Wolf lied.

"I'll get him some day," Carney said; "and now them duds are about
cooked--peel!"

The Wolf stripped, gray shirt and all.

"Now step back fifteen paces while I make my toilet," Carney commanded,
toying with his 6-gun in the way of emphasis.

In two minutes he was transformed into Sergeant Heath of the N. W. M.
P., revolver belt and all. He threw his own clothes to the Wolf, and
lighted his pipe.

When Jack had dressed Carney said: "I saved your life, so I don't want
you to make me throw it away again. I don't want a muss when I turn you
over to the police in the morning. There ain't much chance they'd listen
to you if you put up a holler that you were Sergeant Heath--they'd laugh
at you, but if they did make a break at me there's be shooting, and
you'd sure be plumb in line of a careless bullet--see? I'm going to stay
close to you till you're on that train."

Of course this was just what the Wolf wanted; to go down the line as
Bulldog Carney, handcuffed to a policeman, would be like a passport for
Jack the Wolf. Nobody would even speak to him--the policeman would see
to that.

"You're dead set on putting this crazy thing through, are you?" he
asked.

"You bet I am--I'd rather work this racket than go to my own wedding."

"Well, so's you won't think your damn threat to shoot keeps me mum, I'll
just tell you that if you get that far with it I ain't going to give
myself away. You've called the turn, Carney; I'd be a joke even if I
only got as far as the first barracks a prisoner. If I go in as Bulldog
Carney I won't come out as Sergeant Heath--I'll disappear as Mister
Somebody. I'm sick of the Force anyway. They'll never know what happened
Sergeant Heath from me--I couldn't stand the guying. But if I ever
stack up against you, Carney, I'll kill you for it." This last was pure
bluff--for fear Carney's suspicions might be aroused by the other's
ready compliance.

Carney scowled; then he laughed, sneering: "I've heard women talk like
that in the dance halls. You cook some bacon and tea at that fire--then
we'll pull out."

As the Wolf knelt beside the fire to blow the embers into a blaze he
found a chance to slip the knife he had buried into his pocket.

When they had eaten they took the trail, heading south to pass the lower
end of the great muskegs. Carney rode the buckskin, and the Wolf strode
along in front, his mind possessed of elation at the prospect of being
helped out of the country, and depression over the loss of his money.
Curiously the loss of his own one hundred seemed a greater enormity than
that of the school teacher's five hundred. That money had been easily
come by, but he had toiled a month for the hundred. What right had
Carney to steal his labor--to rob a workman. As they plugged along mile
after mile, a fierce determination to get the money back took possession
of Jack.

If he could get it he could get the horse. He would fix Bulldog some way
so that the latter would not stop him. He must have the clothes, too.
The khaki suit obsessed him; it was a red flag to his hot mind.

They spelled and ate in the early evening; and when they started for
another hour's tramp Carney tied his cow-rope tightly about the Wolf's
waist, saying: "If you'd tried to cut out in these gloomy hills I'd
be peeved. Just keep that line taut in front of the buckskin and there
won't be no argument."

In an hour Carney called a halt, saying: "We'll camp by this bit of
water, and hit the trail in the early morning. We ain't more than ten
miles from steel, and we'll make some place before train time." Carney
had both the police picket line and his own. He drove a picket in the
ground, looped the line that was about the Wolf's waist over it, and
said.

"I don't want to be suspicious of a mate jumping me in the dark, so I'll
sleep across this line and you'll keep to the other end of it; if you
so much as wink at it I guess I'll wake. I've got a bad conscience and
sleep light. We'll build a fire and you'll keep to the other side of it
same's we were neighbors in a city and didn't know each other."

Twice, as they ate, Carney caught a sullen, vicious look in Jack's eyes.
It was as clearly a murder look as he had ever seen; and more than
once he had faced eyes that thirsted for his life. He wondered at the
psychology of it; it was not like his idea of Sergeant Heath. From what
he had been told of that policeman he had fancied him a vain, swaggering
chap who had had his ego fattened by the three stripes on his arm. He
determined to take a few extra precautions, for he did not wish to lie
awake.

"We'll turn in," he said when they had eaten; "I'll hobble you, same's a
shy cayuse, for fear you'd walk in your sleep, Sergeant."

He bound the Wolf's ankles, and tied his wrists behind his back,
saying, as he knotted the rope, "What the devil did you do with your
handcuffs--thought you johnnies always had a pair in your pocket?"

"They were in the saddle holster and went down with my horse," the Wolf
lied.

Carney's nerves were of steel, his brain worked with exquisite
precision. When it told him there was nothing to fear, that his
precautions had made all things safe, his mind rested, untortured by
jerky nerves; so in five minutes he slept.

The Wolf mastered his weariness and lay awake, waiting to carry out the
something that had been in his mind. Six hundred dollars was a stake to
play for; also clad once again in the police suit, with the buckskin to
carry him to the railroad, he could get away; money was always a good
thing to bribe his way through. Never once had he put his hand in the
pocket where lay the knife he had secreted at the time he had changed
clothes with Carney, as he trailed hour after hour in front of the
buckskin. He knew that Carney was just the cool-nerved man that would
sleep--not lie awake through fear over nothing.

In the way of test he shuffled his feet and drew from the half-dried
grass a rasping sound. It partly disturbed the sleeper; he changed the
steady rhythm of his breathing; he even drew a heavy-sighing breath;
had he been lying awake watching the Wolf he would have stilled his
breathing to listen.

The Wolf waited until the rhythmic breaths of the sleeper told that he
had lapsed again into the deeper sleep. Slowly, silently the Wolf worked
his hands to the side pocket, drew out the knife and cut the cords that
bound his wrists. It took time, for he worked with caution. Then he
waited. The buckskin, his nose deep in the grass, blew the pollen of the
flowered carpet from his nostrils.

Carney stirred and raised his head. The buckskin blew through his
nostrils again, ending with a luxurious sigh of content; then was
heard the clip-clip of his strong teeth scything the grass. Carney,
recognizing what had waked him, turned over and slept again.

Ten minutes, and the Wolf, drawing up his feet slowly, silently, sawed
through the rope on his ankles. Then with spread fingers he searched the
grass for a stone the size of a goose egg, beside which he had purposely
lain down. When his fingers touched it he unknotted the handkerchief
that had been part of Carney's make-up and which was now about his neck,
and in one corner tied the stone, fastening the other end about his
wrist. Now he had a slung-shot that with one blow would render the other
man helpless.

Then he commenced his crawl.

A pale, watery, three-quarter moon had climbed listlessly up the eastern
sky changing the sombre prairie into a vast spirit land, draping with
ghostly garments bush and shrub.

Purposely Carney had tethered the buckskin down wind from where he and
the Wolf lay. Jack had not read anything out of this action, but Carney
knew the sensitive wariness of his horse,--the scent of the stranger in
his nostrils would keep him restless, and any unusual move on the part
of the prisoner would agitate the buckskin. Also he had only pretended
to drive the picket pin at some distance away; in the dark he had
trailed it back and worked it into the loose soil at his very feet. This
was more a move of habitual care than a belief that the bound man could
work his way, creeping and rolling, to the picket-pin, pull it, and get
away with the horse.

At the Wolfs first move the buckskin threw up his head, and, with ears
cocked forward, studied the shifting blurred shadow. Perhaps it was
the scent of his master's clothes which the Wolf wore that agitated his
mind, that cast him to wondering whether his master was moving about;
or, perhaps as animals instinctively have a nervous dread of a vicious
man he distrusted the stranger; perhaps, in the dim uncertain light, his
prairie dread came back to him and he thought it a wolf that had crept
into camp. He took a step forward; then another, shaking his head
irritably. A vibration trembled along the picket line that now lay
across Carney's foot and he stirred restlessly.

The Wolf flattened himself to earth and snored. Five minutes he waited,
cursing softly the restless horse. Then again he moved, so slowly that
even the watchful animal scarce detected it.

He was debating two plans: a swift rush and a swing of his slung shot,
or the silent approach. The former meant inevitably the death of one or
the other--the crushed skull of Carney, or, if the latter were by
any chance awake, a bullet through the Wolf. He could feel his heart
pounding against the turf as he scraped along, inch by inch. A bare ten
feet, and he could put his hand on the butt of Carney's gun and snatch
it from the holster; if he missed, then the slung shot.

The horse, roused, was growing more restless, more inquisitive.
Sometimes he took an impatient snap at the grass with his teeth; but
only to throw his head up again, take a step forward, shake his head,
and exhale a whistling breath.

Now the Wolf had squirmed his body five feet forward. Another yard
and he could reach the pistol; and there was no sign that Carney had
wakened--just the steady breathing of a sleeping man.

The Wolf lay perfectly still for ten seconds, for the buckskin seemingly
had quieted; he was standing, his head low hung, as if he slept on his
feet.

Carney's face was toward the creeping man and was in shadow. Another
yard, and now slowly the Wolf gathered his legs under him till he rested
like a sprinter ready for a spring; his left hand crept forward toward
the pistol stock that was within reach; the stone-laden handkerchief was
twisted about the two first fingers of his right.

Yes, Carney slept.

As the Wolf's finger tips slid along the pistol butt the wrist was
seized in fingers of steel, he was twisted almost face to earth, and the
butt of Carney's own gun, in the latter's right hand, clipped him over
the eye and he slipped into dreamland. When he came to workmen were
riveting a boiler in the top of his head; somebody with an augur was
boring a hole in his forehead; he had been asleep for ages and had
wakened in a strange land. He sat up groggily and stared vacantly at
a man who sat beside a camp fire smoking a pipe. Over the camp fire a
copper kettle hung and a scent of broiling bacon came to his nostrils.
The man beside the fire took the pipe from his mouth and said: "I hoped
I had cracked your skull, you swine. Where did you pick up that thug
trick of a stone in the handkerchief? As you are troubled with insomnia
we'll hit the trail again."

With the picket line around his waist once more Jack trudged ahead
of the buckskin, in the night gloom the shadowy cavalcade cutting a
strange, weird figure as though a boat were being towed across sleeping
waters.

The Wolf, groggy from the blow that had almost cracked his skull, was
wobbly on his legs--his feet were heavy as though he wore a diver's
leaden boots. As he waded through a patch of wild rose the briars clung
to his legs, and, half dazed he cried out, thinking he struggled in the
shifting sands.

"Shut up!" The words clipped from the thin lips of the rider behind.

They dipped into a hollow and the played-out man went half to his knees
in the morass. A few lurching steps and overstrained nature broke; he
collapsed like a jointed doll--he toppled head first into the mire and
lay there.

The buckskin plunged forward in the treacherous going, and the bag of a
man was skidded to firm ground by the picket line, where he sat wiping
the mud from his face, and looking very all in.

Carney slipped to the ground and stood beside his captive. "You're
soft, my bucko--I knew Sergeant Heath had a yellow streak," he sneered;
"boasters generally have. I guess we'll rest till daylight. I've a way
of hobbling a bad man that'll hold you this time, I fancy."

He drove the picket-pin of the rope that tethered the buckskin, and ten
feet away he drove the other picket pin. He made the Wolf lie on his
side and fastened him by a wrist to each peg so that one arm was behind
and one in front.

Carney chuckled as he surveyed the spread-eagle man: "You'll find some
trouble getting out of that, my bucko; you can't get your hands together
and you can't get your teeth at either rope. Now I _will_ have a sleep."

The Wolf was in a state of half coma; even untethered he probably would
have slept like a log; and Carney was tired; he, too, slumbered, the
soft stealing gray of the early morning not bringing him back out of the
valley of rest till a glint of sunlight throwing over the prairie grass
touched his eyes, and the warmth gradually pushed the lids back.

He rose, built a fire, and finding water made a pot of tea. Then he
saddled the buckskin, and untethered the Wolf, saying: "We'll eat a bite
and pull out."

The rest and sleep had refreshed the Wolf, and he plodded on in front
of the buckskin feeling that though his money was gone his chances of
escape were good.

At eight o'clock the square forms of log shacks leaning groggily against
a sloping hill came into view; it was Hobbema; and, swinging a little to
the left, in an hour they were close to the Post.

Carney knew where the police shack lay, and skirting the town he drew up
in front of a log shack, an iron-barred window at the end proclaiming it
was the Barracks. He slipped from the saddle, dropped the rein over his
horse's head, and said quietly to the Wolf: "Knock on the door, open it,
and step inside," the muzzle of his gun emphasizing the command.

He followed close at the Wolf's heels, standing in the open door as the
latter entered. He had expected to see perhaps one, not more than two
constables, but at a little square table three men in khaki sat eating
breakfast.

"Good morning, gentlemen," Carney said cheerily; "I've brought you a
prisoner, Bulldog Carney."

The one who sat at table with his back to the door turned his head at
this; then he sprang to his feet, peered into the prisoner's face and
laughed.

"Bulldog nothing, Sergeant; you've bagged the Wolf."

The speaker thrust his face almost into the Wolf's. "Where's my
uniform--where's my horse? I've got you now--set me afoot to starve,
would you, you damn thief--you murderer! Where's the five hundred
dollars you stole from the little teacher at Fort Victor?"

He was trembling with passion; words flew from his lips like bullets
from a gatling--it was a torrent.

But fast as the accusation had come, into Carney's quick mind flashed
the truth--the speaker was Sergeant Heath. The game was up. Still it
was amusing. What a devilish droll blunder he had made. His hands crept
quietly to his two guns, the police gun in the belt and his own beneath
the khaki coat.

Also the Wolf knew his game was up. His blood surged hot at the thought
that Carney's meddling had trapped him. He was caught, but the author of
his evil luck should not escape.

"_That's Bulldog Carney!_" he cried fiercely; "don't let him get away."

Startled, the two constables at the table sprang to their feet.

A sharp, crisp voice said: "The first man that reaches for a gun drops."
They were covered by two guns held in the steady hands of the man whose
small gray eyes watched from out narrowed lids.

"I'll make you a present of the Wolf," Carney said quietly; "I thought I
had Sergeant Heath. I could almost forgive this man, if he weren't such
a skunk, for doing the job for me. Now I want you chaps to pass, one by
one, into the pen," and he nodded toward a heavy wooden door that led
from the room they were in to the other room that had been fitted up as
a cell. "I see your carbines and gunbelts on the rack--you really should
have been properly in uniform by this time; I'll dump them out on the
prairie somewhere, and you'll find them in the course of a day or so.
Step in, boys, and you go first, Wolf."

When the four men had passed through the door Carney dropped the heavy
wooden bar into place, turned the key in the padlock, gathered up the
fire arms, mounted the buckskin, and rode into the west.

A week later the little school teacher at Fort Victor received through
the mail a packet that contained five hundred dollars, and this note:--

Dear Miss Black:--

I am sending you the five hundred dollars that you bet on a bad man. No
woman can afford to bet on even a _good_ man. Stick to the kids, for
I've heard they love you. If those Indians hadn't picked up Sergeant
Heath and got him to Hobbema before I got away with your money I
wouldn't have known, and you'd have lost out.

Yours delightedly,

Bulldog Carney.




II.--BULLDOG CARNEY'S ALIBI

|A day's trail north from where Idaho and Montana come together on the
Canadian border, fumed and fretted Bucking Horse River. Its nomenclature
was a little bit of all right, for from the minute it trickled from
a huge blue-green glacier up in the Selkirks till it fell into the
Kootenay, it bucked its way over, under, and around rock-cliffs, and
areas of stolid mountain sides that still held gigantic pine and cedar.

It had ripped from the bowels of a mountain pebbles of gold, and the
town of Bucking Horse was the home of men who had come at the call of
the yellow god.

When Bulldog Carney struck Bucking Horse it was a sick town, decrepid,
suffering from premature old age, for most of the mines had petered out.

One hotel, the Gold Nugget, still clung to its perch on a hillside,
looking like a bird cage hung from a balcony.

Carney had known its proprietor, Seth Long, in the Cour d'Alene: Seth
and Jeanette Holt; in the way of disapproval Seth, for he was a skidder;
Jeanette with a manly regard, for she was as much on the level as a
gyroscope.

Carney was not after gold that is battled from obdurate rocks with
drill and shovel. He was a gallant knight of the road--a free lance of
adventure; considering that a man had better lie in bed and dream
than win money by dreary unexciting toil. His lithe six foot of sinewy
anatomy, the calm, keen, gray eye, the splendid cool insulated nerve
and sweet courage, the curious streaks of chivalry, all these would
have perished tied to routine. Like "Bucking Horse" his name, "Bulldog"
Carney, was an inspiration.

He had ridden his famous buckskin, Pat, up from the Montana border,
mentally surveying his desire, a route for running into the free and
United States opium without the little formality of paying Uncle Sam
the exorbitant and unnatural duty. That was why he first came to Bucking
Horse.

The second day after his arrival Seth Long bought for a few hundred
dollars the Little Widow mine that was almost like a back yard to the
hotel. People laughed, for it was a worked-out proposition; when he put
a gang of men to work, pushing on the long drift, they laughed again.
When Seth threw up his hands declaring that the Little Widow was no
good, those who had laughed told him that they had known it all the
time.

But what they didn't know was that the long drift in the mine now ran on
until it was directly under the Gold Nugget hotel.

It was Carney who had worked that out, and Seth and his hotel were
established as a clearing station for the opium that was shipped in by
train from Vancouver in tins labelled "Peaches," "Salmon," or any old
thing. It was stored in the mine and taken from there by pack-train down
to the border, and switched across at Bailey's Ferry, the U. S. customs
officers at that point being nice lovable chaps; or sometimes it crossed
the Kootenay in a small boat at night.

Bulldog supervised that end of the business, bringing the heavy payments
in gold back to Bucking Horse on a laden mule behind his buckskin; then
the gold was expressed by train to the head office of this delightful
trading company in Vancouver.

This endeavor ran along smoothly, for the whole mining West was one
gigantic union, standing "agin the government"--any old government, U.
S. or Canadian.

Carney's enterprise was practically legitimatized by public opinion;
besides there was the compelling matter of Bulldog's proficiency in
looking after himself. People had grown into the habit of leaving him
alone.

The Mounted Police more or less supervised the region, and sometimes one
of them would be in Bucking Horse for a few days, and sometimes the town
would be its own custodian.

One autumn evening Carney rode up the Bucking Horse valley at his
horse's heels a mule that carried twenty thousand dollars in gold slung
from either side of a pack saddle.

Carney went straight to the little railway station, and expressed the
gold to Vancouver, getting the agent's assurance that it would go out on
the night train which went through at one o'clock. Then he rode back to
the Gold Nugget and put his horse and mule in the stable.

As he pushed open the front door of the hotel he figuratively stepped
into a family row, a row so self-centered that the parties interested
were unaware of his entrance.

A small bar occupied one corner of the dim-lighted room, and behind this
Seth Long leaned back against the bottle rack, with arms folded across
his big chest, puffing at a thick cigar. Facing him, with elbows on the
bar, a man was talking volubly, anger speeding up his vocalization.

Beside the man stood Jeanette Holt, fire flashing from her black eyes,
and her nostrils dilated with passion. She interrupted the voluble one:

"Yes, Seth, I did slap this cheap affair, Jack Wolf, fair across the
ugly mouth, and I'll do it again!"

Seth tongued the cigar to one corner of his ample lips, and drawled:
"That's a woman's privilege, Jack, if a feller's give her just cause for
action You ain't got no kick comin', I reckon, 'cause this little woman
ain't one to fly off the handle for nothin'."

"Nothin', Seth? I guess when I tell you what got her dander up you'll
figger you've got another think comin'. You're like a good many men I
see--you're bein' stung. That smooth proposition, Bulldog Carney, is
stingin' you right here in your own nest."

Biff!

That was the lady's hand, flat open, impinged on the speaker's cheek.

The Wolf sprang back with an oath, put his hand to his cheek, and turned
to Seth with a volley of denunciation starting from his lips. At a look
that swept over the proprietor's face he turned, stared, and stifling an
oath dropped a hand subconsciously to the butt of his gun.

Bulldog Carney had stepped quickly across the room, and was now at his
side, saying:

"So you're here, Jack the Wolf, eh? I thought I had rid civilization of
your ugly presence when I turned you over to the police at Hobbema for
murdering your mate."

"That was a trumped-up charge," the Wolf stammered.

"Ah! I see--acquitted! I can guess it in once. Nobody saw you put that
little round hole in the back of Alberta Bill's head--not even Bill; and
he was dead and couldn't talk."

Carney's gray eyes travelled up and down the Wolf's form in a cold,
searching manner; then he added, with the same aggravating drawl: "You
put your hands up on the bar, same as you were set when I came in, or
something will happen. I've got a proposition."

The Wolf hesitated; but Bulldog's right hand rested carelessly on his
belt. Slowly the Wolf lifted his arm till his fingers touched the wooden
rail, saying, surlily:

"I ain't got no truck with you; I don't want no proposition from a man
that plays into the hands of the damn police."

"You can cut out the rough stuff, Wolf, while there's a lady present."

Carney deliberately turned his shoulder to the scowling man, and said,
"How d'you do, Miss Holt?" touching his hat. Then he added, "Seth,
locate a bottle on the bar and deal glasses all round."

As Long deftly twirled little heavy-bottomed glasses along the plank
as though he were dealing cards, Carney turned, surveyed the room,
and addressing a man who sat in a heavy wooden chair beside a square
box-stove, said: "Join up, stranger--we're going to liquidate."

The man addressed came forward, and lined up the other side of Jack
Wolf.

"Cayuse Braun, Mr. Carney," Seth lisped past his fat cigar as he shoved
a black bottle toward Bulldog.

"The gents first," the latter intimated.

The bottle was slid down to Cayuse, who filled his glass and passed it
back to Wolf. The latter carried it irritably past him without filling
his glass.

"Help yourself, Wolf." It was a command, not an invitation, in Carney's
voice.

"I'm not drinkin'," Jack snarled.

"Yes, you are. I've got a toast that's got to be unanimous."

Seth, with a wink at Wolf, tipped the bottle and half filled the
latter's glass, saying, "Be a sport, Jack."

As he turned to hand the bottle to Carney he arched his eyebrows at
Jeanette, and the girl slipped quietly away.

Bulldog raised his glass of whisky, and said: "Gents, we're going to
drink to the squarest little woman it has ever been my good fortune to
run across. Here's to Miss Jeanette Holt, the truest pal that Seth Long
ever had--_Miss Jeanette_ Cayuse and Seth tossed off their liquor, but
the Wolf did not touch his glass.

"You drink to that toast dam quick, Jack Wolf!" and Carney's voice was
deadly.

The room had grown still. One, two, three, a wooden clock on the shelf
behind the bar ticked off the seconds in the heavy quiet; and in a
far corner the piping of a stray cricket sounded like the drool of a
pfirrari.

There was a click of a latch, a muffled scrape as the outer door pushed
open. This seemed to break the holding spell of fear that was over the
Wolf. "I'll see you in hell, Bulldog Carney, before I drink with you or
a girl that----"

The whisky that was in Carney's glass shot fair into the speaker's
open mouth. As his hand jumped to his gun the wrist was seized with a
loosening twist, and the heel of Bulldog's open right hand caught him
under the chin with a force that fair lifted him from his feet to drop
on the back of his head.

A man wearing a brass-buttoned khaki jacket with blue trousers down
which ran wide yellow stripes, darted from where he had stood at the
door, put his hand on Bulldog's shoulder, and said:

"You're under arrest in the Queen's name, Bulldog Carney!"

Carney reached down and picked up the Wolf's gun that lay where it had
fallen from his twisted hand, and passed it to Seth without comment.
Then he looked the man in the khaki coat up and down and coolly asked.
"Are you anybody in particular, stranger?"

"I'm Sergeant Black of the Mounted Police."

"You amuse me, Sergeant; you're unusual, even for a member of that joke
bank, the Mounted."

"Fine!" the Sergeant sneered, subdued anger in his voice; "I'll
entertain you for several days over in the pen."

"On what grounds?"

"You'll find out."

"Yes, and now, declare yourself!"

"We don't allow, rough house, gun play, and knocking people down, in
Bucking Horse," the Sergeant retorted; "assault means the pen when I'm
here."

"Then take that thing," and Bulldog jerked a thumb toward Jack Wolf, who
stood at a far corner of the bar whispering with Cayuse.

"I'll take you, Bulldog Carney."

"Not if that's all you've got as reason," and Carney, either hand
clasping his slim waist, the palms resting on his hips, eyed the
Sergeant, a faint smile lifting his tawny mustache.

"You're wanted, Bulldog Carney, and you know it. I've been waiting a
chance to rope you; now I've got you, and you're coming along. There's
a thousand on you over in Calgary; and you've been running coke over the
line."

"Oh! that's it, eh? Well, Sergeant, in plain English you're a tenderfoot
to not know that the Alberta thing doesn't hold in British Columbia.
You'll find that out when you wire headquarters for instructions, which
you will, of course. I think it's easier for me, my dear Sergeant, to
let you get this tangle straightened out by going with you than to kick
you into the street; then they would have something on me--something
because I'd mussed up the uniform."

"Carney ain't had no supper, Sergeant," Seth declared; "and I'll go
bail----"

"I'm not takin' bail; and you can send his supper over to the lock-up."

The Sergeant had drawn from his pocket a pair of handcuffs.

Carney grinned.

"Put them back in your pocket, Sergeant," he advised. "I said I'd go
with you; but if you try to clamp those things on, the trouble is all
your own." Black looked into the gray eyes and hesitated; then even
his duty-befogged mind realized that he would take too big a chance
by insisting. He held out his hand toward Carney's gun, and the latter
turned it over to him. Then the two, the Sergeant's hand slipped through
Carney's arm, passed out.

Just around the corner was the police barracks, a square log shack
divided by a partition. One room was used as an office, and contained a
bunk; the other room had been built as a cell, and a heavy wooden door
that carried a bar and strong lock gave entrance. There was one small
window safeguarded by iron bars firmly embedded in the logs. Into this
bull-pen, as it was called, Black ushered Carney by the light of a
candle. There was a wooden bunk in one end, the sole furniture.

"Neat, but not over decorated," Carney commented as he surveyed the
bare interior. "No wonder, with such surroundings, my dear Sergeant, you
fellows are angular."

"I've heard, Bulldog, that you fancied yourself a superior sort."

"Not at all, Sergeant; you have my entire sympathy."

The Sergeant sniffed. "If they give you three years at Stony Mountain
perhaps you'll drop some of that side."

Carney sat down on the side of the bed, took a cigarette case from his
pocket and asked, "Do you allow smoking here? It won't fume up your
curtains, will it?"

"It's against the regulations, but you smoke if you want to."

Carney's supper was brought in and when he had eaten it Sergeant
Black went into the cell, saying: "You're a pretty slippery customer,
Bulldog--I ought to put the bangles on you for the night." Rather
irrelevantly, and with a quizzical smile, Carney asked, "Have you read
'Les Miserables,' Sergeant?"

"I ain't read a paper in a month--I've been too busy."

"It isn't a paper, it's a story."

"I ain't got no time for readin' magazines either."

"This is a story that was written long ago by a Frenchman," Carney
persisted.

"Then I don't want to read it. The trickiest damn bunch that ever come
into these mountains are them Johnnie Crapeaus from Quebec--they're
more damn trouble to the police than so many Injuns." The soft quizzical
voice of Carney interrupted Black gently. "You put me in mind of a
character in that story, Sergeant; he was the best drawn, if I might
discriminate over a great story."

This allusion touched Black's vanity, and drew him to ask, "What did he
do--how am I like him?" He eyed Carney suspiciously.

"The character I liked in 'Les Miserables' was a policeman, like
yourself, and his mind was only capable of containing the one
idea--duty. It was a fetish with him; he was a fanatic."

"You're damn funny, Bulldog, ain't you? What I ought to do is slip the
bangles on you and leave you in the dark."

"If you could. I give you full permission to try, Sergeant; if you can
clamp them on me there won't be any hard feelings, and the first time I
meet you on the trail I won't set you afoot."

Carney had risen to his feet, ostensibly to throw his cigarette through
the bars of the open window.

Black stood glowering at him. He knew Carney's reputation well enough
to know that to try to handcuff him meant a fight--a fight over nothing;
and unless he used a gun he might possibly get the worst of it.

"It would only be spite work," Carney declared presently; "these logs
would hold anybody, and you know it."

In spite of his rough manner the Sergeant rather admired Bulldog's
gentlemanly independence, the quiet way in which he had submitted to
arrest; it would be a feather in his cap that, single-handed, he had
locked the famous Bulldog up. His better sense told him to leave well
enough alone.

"Yes," he said grudgingly, "I guess these walls will hold you. I'll be
sleeping in the other room, a reception committee if you have callers."

"Thanks, Sergeant. I take it all back. Leave me a candle, and give me
something to read."

Black pondered over this; but Carney's allusion to the policeman in "Les
Miserables" had had an effect. He brought from the other room a couple
of magazines and a candle, went out, and locked the door.

Carney pulled off his boots, stretched himself on the bunk and read. He
could hear Sergeant Black fussing at a table in the outer room; then
the Sergeant went out and Carney knew that he had gone to send a wire
to Major Silver for instructions about his captive. After a time he came
back. About ten o'clock Carney heard the policeman's boots drop on the
floor, his bunk creak, and knew that the representative of the law
had retired. A vagrant thought traversed his mind that the
heavy-dispositioned, phlegmatic policeman would be a sound sleeper
once oblivious. However, that didn't matter, there was no necessity for
escape.

Carney himself dozed over a wordy story, only to be suddenly wakened
by a noise at his elbow. Wary, through the vicissitudes of his order of
life he sat up wide awake, ready for action. Then by the light of the
sputtering candle he saw his magazine sprawling on the floor, and knew
he had been wakened by its fall. His bunk had creaked; but listening,
no sound reached his ears from the other room, except certain stertorous
breathings. He had guessed right, Sergeant Black was an honest sleeper,
one of Shakespeare's full-paunched kind.

Carney blew out the candle; and now, perversely, his mind refused
to cuddle down and rest, but took up the matter of Jack the Wolf's
presence. He hated to know that such an evil beast was even indirectly
associated with Seth, who was easily led. His concern was not over Seth
so much as over Jeanette.

He lay wide awake in the dark for an hour; then a faint noise came from
the barred window; it was a measured, methodical click-click-click of a
pebble tapping on iron.

With the stealthiness of a cat he left the bunk, so gently that no
tell-tale sound rose from its boards, and softly stepping to the window
thrust the fingers of one hand between the bars.

A soft warm hand grasped his, and he felt the smooth sides of a folded
paper. As he gave the hand a reassuring pressure, his knuckles were
tapped gently by something hard. He transferred the paper to his other
hand, and reaching out again, something was thrust into it, that when he
lifted it within he found was a strong screw-driver.

He crept back to his bunk, slipped the screwdriver between the blankets,
and standing by the door listened for ten seconds; then a faint gurgling
breath told him that Black slept.

Making a hiding canopy of his blanket, he lighted his candle, unfolded
the paper, and read:

"Two planks, north end, fastened with screws. Below is tunnel that leads
to the mine. Will meet you there. Come soon. Important."

There was no name signed, but Carney knew it was Jeanette's writing.

He blew out the candle and stepping softly to the other end of the pen
knelt down, and with his fingertips searched the ends of the two planks
nearest the log wall. At first he was baffled, his fingers finding the
flat heads of ordinary nails; but presently he discovered that these
heads were dummies, half an inch long. Suddenly a board rapped in the
other room. He had just time to slip back to his bunk when a key clinked
in the lock, and a light glinted through a chink as the door opened.

As if suddenly startled from sleep, Carney called out: "Who's that--what
do you want?"

The Sergeant peered in and answered, "Nothing! thought I heard you
moving about. Are you all right, Carney?"

He swept the pen with his candle, noted Carney's boots on the floor,
and, satisfied, closed the door and went back to his bunk.

This interruption rather pleased Carney; he felt that it was a somnolent
sense of duty, responsibility, that had wakened Black. Now that he had
investigated and found everything all right he would probably sleep
soundly for hours.

Carney waited ten minutes. The Sergeant's bunk had given a note of
complaint as its occupant turned over; now it was still. Taking his
boots in his hand he crept back to the end of the pen and rapidly,
noiselessly, withdrew the screw-nails from both ends of two planks. Then
he crept back to the door and listened; the other room was silent save
for the same little sleep breathings he had heard before.

With the screw-driver he lifted the planks, slipped through the opening,
all in the dark, and drew the planks back into place over his head. He
had to crouch in the little tunnel.

Pulling on his boots, on hands and knees he crawled through the small
tunnel for fifty yards. Then he came to stope timbers stood on end,
and turning these to one side found himself in what he knew must be a
cross-cut from the main drift that ran between the mine opening and the
hotel.

As he stood up in this he heard a faint whistle, and whispered,
"Jeanette."

The girl came forward in the dark, her hand touching his arm.

"I'm so glad," she whispered. "We'd better stand here in the dark, for I
have something serious to tell you."

Then in a low tone the girl said:

"The Wolf and Cayuse Braun are going to hold up the train to-night, just
at the end of the trestle, and rob the express car."

"Is Seth in it?"

"Yes, he's standing in, but he isn't going to help on the job. The Wolf
is going to board the train at the station, and enter the express car
when the train is creeping over the trestle. He's got a bar and rope for
fastening the door of the car behind the express car. When the engine
reaches the other side Cayuse will jump it, hold up the engineer, and
make him stop the train long enough to throw the gold off while the
other cars are still on the trestle; then the Wolf will jump off, and
Cayuse will force the engineer to carry the train on, and he will drop
off on the up-grade, half a mile beyond."

"Old stuff, but rather effective," Carney commented; "they'll get away
with it, I believe."

"I listened to them planning the whole thing out," Jeanette confessed,
"and they didn't know I could hear them."

"What about this little tunnel under the jail--that's a new one on me?"

"Seth had it dug, pretending he was looking for gold; but the men
who dug it didn't know that it led under the jail, and he finished it
himself, fixed the planks, and all. You see when the police go away they
leave the keys with Seth in case any sudden trouble comes up. Nobody
knows about it but Seth."

There was a tang of regret in Carney's voice as he said:

"Seth is playing it pretty low down, Jeanette; he's practically stealing
from his pals. I put twenty thousand in gold in to-night to go by
that train, coke money; he knows it, and that's what these thieves are
after."

"Surely Seth wouldn't do that, Bulldog--steal from his partners!"

"Well, not quite, Jeanette. He figures that the express company is
responsible, will have to make good, and that my people will get their
money back; but all the same, it's kind of like that--it's rotten!"

"What am I to do, Bulldog? I can't peach, can I--not on Seth--not while
I'm living with him? And he's been kind of good to me, too. He ain't
--well, once I thought he was all right, but since I knew you it's
been different. I've stuck to him--you know, Bulldog, how straight I've
been--but a thief!"

"No, you can't give Seth away, Jeanette," Carney broke in, for the
girl's voice carried a tremble.

"I think they had planned, that you being here in Bucking Horse, the
police would kind of throw the blame of this thing on you. Then your
being arrested upset that. What am I to do, Bulldog? Will you speak to
Seth and stop it?"

"No. He'd know you had told me, and your life with him would be just
hell. Besides, girl, I'm in jail."

"But you're free now--you'll go away."

"Let me think a minute, Jeanette."

As he stood pondering, there was the glint of a light, a faint rose
flicker on the wall and flooring of the cross-cut they stood in, and
they saw, passing along the main drift, Seth, the Wolf, and Cayuse
Braun.

The girl clutched Carney's arm and whispered, "There they go. Seth is
going out with them, but he'll come back and stay in the hotel while
they pull the job off."

The passing of the three men seemed to have galvanized Carney into
action, fructified in his mind some plan, for he said:

"You come back to the hotel, Jeanette, and say nothing--I will see what
I can do."

"And Seth--you won't----"

"Plug him for his treachery? No, because of you he's quite safe. Don't
bother your pretty little head about it."

The girl's hand that had rested all this time on Carney's arm was
trembling. Suddenly she said, brokenly, hesitatingly, just as a
school-girl might have blundered over wording the grand passion:
"Bulldog, do you know how much I like you? Have you ever thought of it
at all, wondered?"

"Yes, many times, girl; how could I help it? You come pretty near to
being the finest girl I ever knew."

"But we've never talked about it, have we, Bulldog?"

"No; why should we? Different men have different ideas about those
things. Seth can't see that because that gold was ours in the gang, he
shouldn't steal it; that's one kind of man. I'm different."

"You mean that I'm like the gold?"

"Yes, I guess that's what I mean. You see, well--you know what I mean,
Jeanette."

"But you like me?"

"So much that I want to keep you good enough to like."

"Would it be playing the game crooked, Bulldog, if you--if I kissed
you?".

"Not wrong for you to do it, Jeanette, because you don't know how to
do what I call wrong, but I'm afraid I couldn't square it with myself.
Don't get this wrong, girl, it sounds a little too holy, put just that
way. I've kissed many a fellow's girl, but I don't want to kiss you,
being Seth's girl, and that isn't because of Seth, either. Can you
untangle that--get what I mean?"

"I get it, Bulldog. You are some man, some man!"

There was a catch in the girl's voice; she took her hand from Carney's
arm and drew the back of it irritably across her eyes; then she said in
a steadier voice: "Good night, man--I'm going back." Together they felt
their way along the cross-cut, and when they came to the main drift,
Carney said: "I'm going out through the hotel, Jeanette, if there's
nobody about; I want to get my horse from the stable. When we come to
the cellar you go ahead and clear the way for me."

The passage from the drift through the cellar led up into a little
store-room at the back of the hotel; and through this Carney passed out
to the stable where he saddled his bucksin, transferring to his belt a
gun that was in a pocket of the saddle. Then he fastened to the horn
the two bags that had been on the pack mule. Leading the buckskin out
he avoided the street, cut down the hillside, and skirted the turbulent
Bucking Horse.

A half moon hung high in a deep-blue sky that in both sides was bitten
by the jagged rock teeth of the Rockies. The long curving wooden
trestle looked like the skeleton of some gigantic serpent in the faint
moonlight, its head resting on the left bank of the Bucking Horse, half
a mile from where the few lights of the mining town glimmered, and its
tail coming back to the same side of the stream after traversing two
short kinks. It looked so inadequate, so frail in the night light to
carry the huge Mogul engine with its trailing cars. No wonder the train
went over it at a snail's pace, just the pace to invite a highwayman's
attention.

And with the engine stopped with a pistol at the engineer's head what
chance that anyone would drop from the train to the trestle to hurry to
his assistance.

Carney admitted to himself that the hold-up was fairly well planned,
and no doubt would go through unless---- At this juncture of thought Carney
chuckled. The little unforeseen something that was always popping into
the plans of crooks might eventuate. When he came to thick scrub growth
Carney dismounted, and led the buckskin whispering, "Steady, Pat--easy,
my boy!"

The bucksin knew that he must make no noisy slip--that there was no
hurry. He and Carney had chummed together for three years, the man
talking to him as though he had a knowledge of what his master said, and
he, understanding much of the import if not the uttered signs.

Sometimes going down a declivity the horse's soft muzzle was over
Carney's shoulder, the flexible upper lip snuggling his neck or cheek;
and sometimes as they went up again Carney's arm was over the buckskin's
withers and they walked like two men arm in arm.

They went through the scrubby bush in the noiseless way of wary deer; no
telltale stone was thrust loose to go tinkling down the hillside; they
trod on no dried brush to break with snapping noise.

Presently Carney dropped the rein from over the horse's head to the
ground, took his lariat from the saddle-horn, hung the two pack-bags
over his shoulder, and whispering, "Wait here, Patsy boy," slipped
through the brush and wormed his way cautiously to a huge boulder a
hundred feet from the trestle. There he sat down, his back against the
rock, and his eye on the blobs of yellow light that was Bucking Horse
town. Presently from beyond the rock carried to his listening ears the
clink of an iron-shod hoof against a stone, and he heard a suppressed,
"Damn!"

"Coming, I guess," he muttered to himself.

The heavy booming whistle of the giant Mogul up on the Divide came
hoarsely down the Bucking Horse Pass, and then a great blaring
yellow-red eye gleamed on the mountain side as if some Cyclops forced
his angry way down into the valley. A bell clanged irritably as the
Mogul rocked in its swift glide down the curved grade; there was the
screeching grind of airbrakes gripping at iron wheels; a mighty sigh as
the compressed air seethed from opened valves at their release when the
train stood at rest beside the little log station of Bucking Horse.

He could see, like the green eye of some serpent, the conductor's
lantern gyrate across the platform; even the subdued muffled noise of
packages thrust into the express car carried to the listener's ear. Then
the little green eye blinked a command to start, the bell clanged, the
Mogul coughed as it strained to its task, the drivers gripped at
steel rails and slipped, the Mogul's heart beating a tattoo of gasping
breaths; then came the grinding rasp of wheel flange against steel
as the heavy train careened on the curve, and now the timbers of the
trestle were whining a protest like the twang of loose strings on a
harp.

Carney turned on his hands and knees and, creeping around to the far
side of the rock, saw dimly in the faint moonlight the figure of a man
huddled in a little rounded heap twenty feet from the rails. In his hand
the barrel of a gun glinted once as the moon touched it.

Slowly, like some ponderous animal, the Mogul crept over the trestle! it
was like a huge centipede slipping along the dead limb of a tree.

When the engine reached the solid bank the crouched figure sprang to the
steps of the cab and was lost to view. A sharp word of command carried
to Carney's ear; he heard the clanging clamp of the air brakes; the
stertorous breath of the Mogul ceased; the train stood still, all behind
the express car still on the trestle.

Then a square of yellow light shone where the car door had slid open,
and within stood a masked man, a gun in either hand; in one corner, with
hands above his head, and face to the wall, stood a second man, while a
third was taking from an iron safe little canvas bags and dropping them
through the open door.

Carney held three loops of the lariat in his right hand, and the balance
in his left; now he slipped from the rock, darted to the side of the car
and waited.

He heard a man say, "That's all!" Then a voice that he knew as Jack the
Wolf's commanded, "Face to the wall! I've got your guns, and if you move
I'll plug you!"

The Wolf appeared at the open door, where he fired one shot as a signal
to Cayuse; there was the hiss and clang of releasing brakes and gasps
from the starting engine. At that instant the lariat zipped from a
graceful sweep of Carney's hand to float like a ring of smoke over the
head of Jack the Wolf, and he was jerked to earth. Half stunned by the
fall he was pinned there as though a grizzly had fallen upon him.

The attack was so sudden, so unexpected, that he was tied and helpless
with hardly any semblance of a fight, where he lay watching the tail
end of the train slipping off into the gloomed pass, and the man who had
bound him as he nimbly gathered up the bags of loot.

Carney was in a hurry; he wanted to get away before the return Cayuse.
Of course if Cayuse came back too soon so much the worse for Cayuse, but
shooting a man was something to be avoided.

He was hampered a little due either to the Wolf's rapacity, or the
express messenger's eagerness to obey, for in addition to the twenty
thousand dollars there were four other plump bags of gold. But
Carney, having secured the lot, hurried to his horse, dropped the pack
bags astride the saddle, mounted, and made his way to the Little Widow
mine. He had small fear that the two men would think of looking in that
direction for the man who had robbed them; even if they did he had a
good start for it would take time to untie the Wolf and get their one
horse. Also he had the Wolf's guns.

He rode into the mine, dismounted, took the loot to a cross-cut that
ran off the long drift and dropped it into a sump hole that was full of
water, sliding in on top rock debris. Then he unsaddled the buckskin,
tied him, and hurried along the drift and crawled his way through the
small tunnel back to jail. There he threw himself on the bunk, and,
chuckling, fell into a virtuous sleep.

He was wakened at daybreak by Sergeant Black who said cheerfully,
"You're in luck, Bulldog."

"Honored, I should say, if you allude to our association."

The Sergeant groped silently through this, then, evidently missing the
sarcasm, added, "The midnight was held up last night at the trestle, and
if you'd been outside I guess you'd been pipped as the angel."

"Thanks for your foresight, friend--that is, if you knew it was coming
off. Tell me how your friend worked it."

Sergeant Black told what Carney already knew so well, and when he had
finished the latter said: "Even if I hadn't this good alibi nobody would
say I had anything to do with it, for I distrust man so thoroughly that
I never have a companion in any little joke I put over."

"I couldn't do anything in the dark," the Sergeant resumed, in an
apologetic way, "so I'm going out to trail the robbers now."

He looked at Carney shiftingly, scratched an ear with a forefinger, and
then said: "The express company has wired a reward of a thousand dollars
for the robbers, and another thousand for the recovery of the money."

"Go to it, Sergeant," Carney laughed; "get that capital, then go east to
Lake Erie and start a bean farm."

Black grinned tolerantly. "If you'll join up, Bulldog, we could run them
two down."

"No, thanks; I like it here."

"I'm going to turn you out, Bulldog--set you free."

"And I'm going to insist on a hearing. I'll take those stripes off your
arm for playing the fool." The Sergeant drew from his pocket a telegram
and passed it to Carney. It was from Major Silver at Golden, and ran:

"Get Carney to help locate robbers. He knows the game. Express company
offers two thousand."

"Where's the other telegram?" Carney asked, a twinkle in his eye.

"What other one?"

"The one in answer to yours asking for instructions over my arrest."

The Sergeant looked at Carney out of confused, astonished eyes; then he
admitted: "The Major advises we can't hold you in B. C. on the Alberta
case. But what about joining in the hunt? You've worked with the police
before."

"Twice; because a woman was getting the worst of it in each case. But
I'm no sleuth for the official robber--he's fair game."

"You won't take the trail with me then, Carney?"

"No, I won't; not to run down the hold-up men--that's your job. But you
can tell your penny-in-the-slot company, that piking corporation that
offers thousand dollars for the recovery of twenty or thirty thousand,
that when they're ready to pay five thousand dollars' reward for the
gold I'll see if I can lead them to it. Now, my dear Sergeant, if
you'll oblige me with my gun I'd like to saunter over to the hotel for
breakfast."

"I'll go with you," Sergeant Black said, "I haven't had mine yet."

Jeanette was in the front room of the hotel as the two men entered.
Her face went white when she saw Carney seemingly in the custody of the
policeman. He stopped to speak to her, and Black, going through to the
dining room saw the Wolf and Cayuse Braun at a table. He had these two
under suspicion, for the Wolf had a record with the police.

He closed the door and, standing in front of it, said: "I'm going to
arrest you two men for the train robbery last night. When you finish
your breakfast I want you to come quietly over to the lock-up till this
thing is investigated."

The Wolf laughed derisively. "What're you doin' here, Sergeant--why
ain't you out on the trail chasin' Bulldog Carney?"

The Sergeant stared. "Bulldog Carney?" he queried; "what's he got to do
with it?"

"Everything. It's a God's certainty that he pulled this hold-up off when
he escaped last night."

The Sergeant gasped. What was the Wolf talking about. He turned, opened
the door and called, "Carney, come here and listen to Jack Wolf tell how
you robbed the train!"

At this the Wolf bent across the table and whispered hoarsely, "Christ!
Bulldog has snitched--he's give us away! I thought he'd clear out when
he got the gold. And he knowed me last night when we clinched. And his
horse was gone from the stable this morning!"

As the two men sprang to their feet, the Sergeant whirled at the rasp of
their chairs on the floor, and reached for his gun. But Cayuse's gun was
out, there was a roaring bark in the walled room, a tongue of fire, a
puff of smoke, and the Sergeant dropped.

As he fell, from just behind him Carney's gun sent a leaden pellet that
drilled a little round hole fair in the center of Cayuse's forehead, and
he collapsed, a red jet of blood spurting over the floor.

In the turmoil the Wolf slipped through a door that was close to where
he sat, sped along the hall into the storeroom, and down to the mine
chamber.

With a look at Cayuse that told he was dead, Carney dropped his pistol
back into the holster, and telling Seth, who had rushed in, to hurry for
a doctor, took the Sergeant in his arms like a baby child carried him
upstairs to a bed, Jeanette showing the way.

As they waited for the doctor Carney said: "He's shot through the
shoulder; he'll be all right."

"What's going to happen over this, Bulldog?" Jeanette asked.

"Cayuse Braun has passed to the Happy Hunting Ground--he can't talk;
Seth, of course, won't; and the Wolf will never stop running till he
hits the border. I had a dream last night, Jeanette, that somebody gave
me five thousand dollars easy money. If it comes true, my dear girl,
I'm going to put it in your name so Seth can't throw you down hard if he
ever takes a notion to."

Carney's dream came true at the full of the moon.




III.--OWNERS UP

|Clatawa had put racing in Walla Walla in cold storage.

You can't have any kind of sport with one individual, horse or man, and
Clatawa had beaten everything so decisively that the gamblers sat down
with blank faces and asked, "What's the use?"

Horse racing had been a civic institution, a daily round of joyous
thrills--a commendable medium for the circulation of gold. The Nez
Perces Indians, who owned that garden of Eden, the Palouse country, and
were rich, would troop into Walla Walla long rolls of twenty-dollar gold
pieces plugged into a snake-like skin till the thing resembled a black
sausage, and bet the coins as though they were nickels.

It was a lovely town, with its straggling clap-boarded buildings, its U.
S. Cavalry post, its wide-open dance halls and gambling palaces; it was
a live town was Walla Walla, squatting there in the center of a great
luxuriant plain twenty miles or more from the Columbia and Snake Rivers.

Snaky Dick had roped a big bay with black points that was lord of a
harem of wild mares; he had speed and stamina, and also brains; so they
named him "Clatawa," that is, "The-one-who-goes-quick." When Clatawa
found that men were not terrible creatures he chummed in, and enjoyed
the gambling, and the racing, and the high living like any other
creature of brains.

He was about three-quarter warm blood. How the mixture nobody knew. Some
half-bred mare, carrying a foal, had, perhaps, escaped from one of the
great breeding ranches, such as the "Scissors Brand Ranch" where the
sires were thoroughbred, and dropped her baby in the herd. And the
colt, not being raced to death as a two-year-old, had grown into a big,
upstanding bay, with perfect unblemished bone, lungs like a blacksmith's
bellows and sinews that played through unruptured sheaths. His courage,
too, had not been broken by the whip and spur of pin-head jocks. There
was just one rift in the lute, that dilution of cold blood. He wasn't a
thoroughbred, and until his measure was taken, until some other equine
looked him in the eye as they fought it out stride for stride, no man
could just say what the cold blood would do; it was so apt to quit.

At first Walla Walla rejoiced when Snaky Dick commenced to make the Nez
Perces horses look like pack mules; but now had come the time when there
was no one to fight the "champ," and the game was on the hog, as Iron
Jaw Blake declared.

Then Iron Jaw and Snaggle Tooth Boone, and

Death-on-the-trail Carson formed themselves into a committee of three to
ameliorate the monotony.

They were a picturesque trio. Carson was a sombre individual,
architecturally resembling a leafless gaunt-limbed pine, for he lacked
but a scant half inch of being seven feet of bone and whip-cord.

Years before he had gone out over the trail that wound among sage bush
and pink-flowered ball cactus up into the Bitter Root Mountains with
"Irish" Fagan. Months after he came back alone; more sombre, more gaunt,
more sparing of speech, and had offered casually the statement that
"Fagan met death on the trail." This laconic epitome of a gigantic
event had crystallized into a moniker for Carson, and he became solely
"Death-on-the-trail."

Snaggle Tooth Boone had a wolf-like fang on the very doorstep of his
upper jaw, so it required no powerful inventive faculty to rechristen
him with aptitude.

Blake was not only iron-jawed physically, but all his dealings were of
the bullheaded order; finesse was as foreign to Iron Jaw as caviare to a
Siwash.

So this triumvirate of decorative citizens, with Iron Jaw as penman,
wrote to Reilly at Portland, Oregon, to send in a horse good enough
to beat Clatawa, and a jock to ride him. Iron Jaw's directions were
specific, lengthy; going into detail. He knew that a thoroughbred,
even a selling plater, would be good enough to take the measure of any
cross-bred horse, no matter how good the latter apparently was, running
in scrub races. He also knew the value of weight as a handicap, and the
Walla Walla races were all matches, catch-weights up. So he wrote to
Reilly to send him a tall, slim rider who could pad up with clothes and
look the part of an able-bodied cow puncher.

It was a pleasing line of endeavor to Reilly--he just loved that sort
of thing; trimming "come-ons" was right in his mitt. He fulfilled the
commission to perfection, sending up, by the flat river steamer, the
_Maid of Palouse,_ what appeared to be an ordinary black ranch cow-pony
in charge of "Texas Sam," a cow puncher. From Lewiston, the head of
navigation, Texas Sam rode his horse behind the old Concord coach over
the twenty-five miles of trail to Walla Walla.

The endeavor had gone through with swift smoothness. Nobody but Iron
Jaw, Death-on-the-trail, and Snaggle Tooth knew of the possibilities
that lurked in the long chapp-legged Texas Jim and the thin rakish black
horse that he called Horned Toad.

As one spreads bait as a decoy, Sam was given money to flash, and
instructed in the art of fool talk.

Iron Jaw was banker in this game; while Snaggle Tooth ran the wheel and
faro lay-out in the Del Monte saloon. So, when Texas dribbled a thousand
dollars across the table, "bucking the tiger," it was show money; a
thousand that Iron Jaw had passed him earlier in the evening, and which
Snaggle Tooth would pass back to its owner in the morning.

There was no hurry to spring the trap. Texas

Sam allowed that he himself was an uncurried wild horse from the great
desert; that he was all wool and a yard wide; that he could lick his
fighting weight in wild cats; and bet on anything he fancied till the
cows came home with their tails between their legs. And all the time he
drank: he would drink with anybody, and anybody might drink with him.
This was no piking game, for the three students of get-it-in-big-wads
had declared for a coup that would cause Walla Walla to stand up on its
hind legs and howl.

Of course Snaky Dick and his clique cast covetous eyes on the bank roll
that Texas showed an inkling of when he flashed his gold. That Texas had
a horse was the key to the whole situation: a horse that he was
never tired of describing as the king-pin cow-pony from Kalamazoo to
Kamschatka; a spring-heeled antelope that could run rings around any
cayuse that had ever looked through a halter.

But Snaky Dick went slow. Some night when Texas was full of hop he'd
rush him for a match. Indeed the Clatawa crowd had the money ready
to plunk down when the psychological pitch of Sam's Dutch courage had
arrived.

It was all going swimmingly, both ends of Walla Walla being played
against the middle, so to speak, when the "unknown quantity" drifted
into the game.

A tall, lithe man, with small placid gray eyes set in a tanned face,
rode up out of the sage brush astride a buckskin horse on his way to
Walla Walla. He looked like a casual cow-puncher riding into town
with the laudable purpose of tying the faro outfit hoof and horn, and,
incidentally, showing what could be done to a bar when a man was in
earnest and had the mazuma.

As the buckskin leisurely loped down the trail-road that ran from the
cavalry barracks to the heart of Walla Walla, his rider became aware of
turmoil in the suburbs. In front of a neat little cottage, the windows
of which held flowers partly shrouded by lace curtains, a lathy
individual, standing beside a rakish black horse, was orating with
Bacchanalian vehemence. Gathered from his blasphemous narrative he knew
chronologically the past history of a small pretty woman with peroxided
hair, who stood in the open door. He must have enlarged on the
sophistication of her past life, for the little lady, with a crisp oath,
called the declaimer a liar and a seven-times misplaced offspring.

The rider of the buckskin checked his horse, threw his right leg loosely
over the saddle, and restfully contemplated the exciting film.

The irate and also inebriated man knew that he had drawn on his
imagination, but to be told in plain words that he was a liar peeved
him. With an ugly oath he swung his quirt and sprang forward, as if he
would bring its lash down on the décolletéd shoulders of the woman.

At that instant something that looked like a boy shot through the door
as though thrust from a catapult, and landed, head on, in the bread
basket of the cantankerous one, carrying him off his feet.

The man on the buckskin chuckled, and slipped to the ground.

But the boy had shot his bolt, so to speak; the big man he had tumbled
so neatly, soon turned him, and, rising, was about to drive a boot into
the little fellow's rib. I say about to, for just then certain fingers
of steel twined themselves in his red neckerchief, he was yanked volte
face, and a fist drove into his midriff.

Of course his animosity switched to the newcomer; but as he essayed a
grapple the driving fist caught him quite neatly on the northeast corner
of his jaw. He sat down, the goggle stare in his eyes suggesting that he
contemplated a trip to dreamland.

The little woman now darted forward, crying in a voice whose
gladsomeness swam in tears: "Bulldog Carney! You always man--you beaut!"
She would have twined her arms about Bulldog, but the placid gray eyes,
so full of quiet aloofness, checked her.

But the man's voice was soft and gentle as he said: "The same Bulldog,
Molly, girl. Glad I happened along."

He turned to the quarrelsome one who had staggered to his feet: "You
ride away before I get cross; you smell like the corpse of a dead
booze-fighter!"

The man addressed looked into the gray eyes switched on his own for
inspection; then he turned, mounted the black, and throwing over his
shoulder, "I'll get you for this, Mister Butter-in!" rode away.

The other party to the rough-and-tumble, winded, had erected his five
feet of length, and with a palm pressed against his chest was emiting
between wheezy coughs picturesque words of ecomium upon Bulldog, not
without derogatory reflections upon the man who had ridden away.

In the midst of this vocal cocktail he broke off suddenly to exclaim in
astonishment:

"Holy Gawd!"

Then he scuttled past Carney, slipped a finger through the ring of the
buckskin's snaffle and peered into the horse's face as if he had found a
long-lost friend.

Perhaps the buckskin remembered him too, for he pressed a velvet,
mouse-colored muzzle against the lad's cheek and whispered something.

The little man ran a hand up and down the horse's canon-bones with the
inquisitiveness of a blind man reading raised print.

Then he turned to Carney who had been chatting with Molly--in full
dignity of Walla Walla nomenclature Molly B'Damn--and asked: "Where the
hell d'you get Waster?"

A faint smile twitched the owner's tawny mustache, chased away by a
little cloud of anger, for in that land of many horse stealings to ask
a man how he had come by his horse savoured of discourtesy. But it was
only a little wizen-faced, flat-chested friend of Molly B'Damn's; so
Carney smiled again, and answered by asking:

"Gentle-voiced kidaloona, explain what you mean by the Waster. That chum
of mine's name is Pat--Patsy boy, often enough."

"Pat nothin'! nor Percy, nor Willie; he's just plain old Waster that I
won the Ranch Stakes on in Butte, four years ago."

"Guess again, kid," Carney suggested.

"Holy Mike! Say, boss, if you could think like you can punch you'd be
all right. That's Waster. Listen, Mister Cowboy, while I tell you 'bout
his friends and relatives. He's by Gambler's Money out of Scotch Lassie,
whose breedin' runs back to Prince Charlie: Gambler's Money was by
Counterfeit, he by Spendthrift, and Spendthrift's sire was imported
Australian, whose grandsire was the English horse, Melbourne. D'you get
that, sage-brush rider?"

"I hear sounds. Tinkle again, little man."

Molly laughed, her white teeth and honest blue eyes discounting the
chemically yellow hair until the face looked good.

The little man stretched out an arm, at the end of it a thin finger
levelled at the buckskin's head: "Have you _ever_ took notice of them
lop ears?"

"Once--which was continuous."

"And you thought there was a jackass strain in him, eh?"

"Pat looked good to me all the time, ears and all."

"Well, them sloppy listeners are a throw-back to Melbourne, he was like
that. I've read he was a mean-lookin' cuss, with weak knees; but he
was all horse: and ain't Waster got bad knees? And don't he get
that buckskin from Spendthrift who was a chestnut, same's his dad,
Australian?" This seemed a direct query for he broke off to cough.

"Go on, lad----"

"Excuse me, sorry"--Molly was speaking--"this is Billy MacKay. My old
school chum, Bessie, his sister, wished him on me a month ago to see
what God's country could do for that busted chest."

The little man was impatient over the switch to himself--the horse was
the thing.

"If it wasn't for them dicky forelegs--Gawd! what a horse Waster'd been.
And if his owner, Leatherhead Mike Doyle, had kept the weight offen
him he'd've stood up anyway, for he was the truest thing. Say,
Bulldog,--don't mind me, I like that name, it talks good,--Waster didn't
need no blinkers he didn't need no spurs; he didn't need no whip--I'd
as lief hit a child with the bud as hit him. He'd just break his hear
tryin'. Waster was Leather-head's meal ticket, dicky knees and all, till
he threw a splint. It was the weight that broke him down; a hundred and
thirty-six pounds the handicapper give him in the Gold Range Stakes at
a mile and a quarter; at that he was leadin' into the stretch and
finished, fightin', on three legs. He was beat, of course; and
Leatherhead was broke, and I never see Waster again. A trombone player
in a beer garden would have known the little cuss with them hot-jointed
knees couldn't pack weight, and would 've scratched him."

Carney put a hand caressingly on Jockey Mackay's shoulder, saying: "You
stand pat with me, kid--your heart is about human, I guess. What was
that hostile person's game?"

Molly explained with a certain amount of asperity:

"He comes here to-day, Bulldog--Well, you know----"

Carney nodded placidly.

"He'd seen me down in the Del Monte joint, and thought--well, he was
filled up on Chinese rum. He wasn't none too much like a man in anything
he said or done, but I was standin' for him so long as he don't get
plumb Injun."

"Injun? Cripes! An Injun's a drugstore gent compared to that stiff,
Slimy Red," Billy objected.

"Yes, that's what started it, Bulldog,--Billy knew him."

"Knew him--huh! Slimy Red was the crookedest rider that ever throwed
a leg over a horse. He used to give his own father the wrong steer and
laugh when the old man's money was burnt up on a horse that finished in
the ruck."

"He comes in here palmin' off the moniker of Texas Sam, a big ranch
guy that sees blood on the moon when he's out for a time," Molly helped
with.

"I didn't know him at first," the little man admitted, "his face bein'
a garden of black alfalfa, till I sees that the crop is red for half
an inch above the surface where it had pushed through the dye. Then he
says, 'I'll bet my left eye agin' your big toe,' and I'm on, for that's
a great sayin' with Slimy Red Smith--he was Slimy Red hisself. And
politely, not givin' the game away, but callin' him 'Texas,' I suggests
that me and Molly is goin' to sing hymns for a bit, and that he'd best
push on."

"Soon's Billy warbles, 'Good-bye, stranger,'" Molly laughed, "this Texas
person goes up in the air. Well, you see the finish, Bulldog."

The little man had wrestled a coughing spell into subjection and
with apparent inconsistency asked, "Did you ever hear of it rainin'
bullfrogs, Mr. Carney?"

Carney nodded, a suspicion flashing upon him that the weak chest was
twin brother to a weak brain in Billy the Jock.

"Well, it's been rainin' discard race-horses about Walla Walla."

"Much of a storm?"

"They're comin' kind of thick. There's yours, Waster, and Slimy Red has
got Ding Dong; he's out of Weddin' Bells by Tambourine."

"Are you in a hurry, Bulldog?" Molly asked, fancying that Carney's
well-known courtesy was perhaps the father of his apparent interest.

"I was, Molly, till I saw you," he answered graciously, a gentle smile
lighting up his stern features.

"Oh, you gentleman knight of the road--always the silver-tongued
Bulldog. There's a bottle inside with a gold necktie on it, waitin' for
a real man to pull the cork. Come on, kid Billy."

The boy looked at Carney, and the latter said;

"It's been a full moon since I pattered with anybody about anything but
fat pork and sundown. We'll accept the little lady's invitation."

"I can give Waster four quarts of oats, Mr. Carney; I've been ridin' in
the way of a cure."

Carney laughed. "You're a sure little bit of all right, kid; the horse
first when it comes to grub--that's me; but I'll feed Pat when he's
bedded for the night."

Inside the cottage Molly and Bulldog jaunted back over the life trail
upon which they had met at different times and in divers places.

But Jockey Mackay had been thrown back into his life's environment at
sight of Waster. He was as full of racing as the wine bottle was full of
bubbles; like the wine he effervesced.

"You been here in Walla Walla before?" he asked Carney, breaking in on
the memory of a funny something that had happened when Molly and Bulldog
were both in Denver.

"Some time since," Carney replied.

"D'you know about Clatawa?"

"Is it a mine or a cocktail, Billy?"

"Clatawa's a horse."

"I might have known," Carney murmured resignedly.

Then the little man narrated of Clatawa, and the fatuous belief Walla
Walla held that a horse with cold blood in his veins could gallop fast
enough to keep himself warm. He waxed indignant over this, declaring
that boneheads that held such crazy ideas ought to be bled white, that
is in a monetary way.

Carney, being a Chevalier d'industrie, had a keen nose for oblique
enterprises, but up to the present he had enjoyed the little man's
chatter simply because he loved horses himself; but at this, the Clatawa
disease, He pricked his ears.

"What is your unsavory acquaintance, Slimy Red, doing here with Ding
Dong?" he asked.

A cunning smile twisted the lad's bluish lips as he lighted a cigarette.

"Slimy Red is padded," he vouchsafed after a puff at the cigarette.

"Padded!" Molly exclaimed, her blue eyes rounding.

"Sure thing. That herrin' gut can ride at a hundred and twenty pounds.
He's a steeplechase jock, gener'ly, though he's good on the flat, too.
He's got a couple of sweaters on under that corduroy jacket to make him
look big."

Carney laughed. "That explains something. When I pushed my fist against
his stomach I thought it had gone clean through--it sank to the wrist;
it was just as though I had punched a bag of feathers."

"But the upper cut was all right, Mr. Carney; it was a lallapaloosa."

"Why all the clothes?" Molly asked.

"I've been dopin' it out," the boy answered. "It's all match races here,
catch weights; there ain't one of them could ride a flat car without
givin' it the slows, but they know what weight is in a race; they
know you can pile enough on to bring a cart horse and a winner of the
Brooklyn Handicap together."

"I see," Carney said contemplatively; "Slimy Red, if he makes a match,
figures to get a big pull in the weights."

"Sure thing, Mike; Walla Walla will bet the family plate on Clatawa;
they'll go down hook, line, and sinker, and then some. They'll fall for
the clothes and think Slimy weighs a hundred and seventy. D'you get it?"

"Fancy I do," Carney chuckled. "The avaricious Mister Red is probably
here on a missionary venture; he aims to separate these godless ones
from the root of evil through having a trained thoroughbred, and an
ample pull in the weight."

"Now you're talkin'," Jockey Mackay declared. Then he relapsed into
a meditative silence, sipping his wine as he correlated several
possibilities suggested by the rainfall of racing horses in Walla Walla.

Carney and Molly drifted into desultory talk again.

After a time Billy spoke.

"It ain't on the cards that a lot of money is comin' to Slimy Red--he
don't deserve it; he ought to be trimmed hisself."

"He sure ought," Molly corroborated.

"Hell!" the little man exclaimed; "nobody could never trim Red, 'cause
he never had nothin'. I got it! Somebody in Walla Walla is the angel;
and Red'll get a rakeoff. He don't own Ding Dong; he couldn't own a lead
pad; booze gets his."

"Billy," Molly's face went serious; "I can guess it in once--Iron
Jaw! Oh, gee! I've been blind. Iron Jaw, and Snaggle Tooth, and
Death-on-the-trail ain't men to cotton to a coot like Slimy Red; they're
gamblers, and don't stand for anything that ain't a man, only just while
they take his roll. They've been nursin' this four-flusher. It's been,
'Hello, Texas!' and 'Have a drink, Texas.' I've got it."

"Fancy you have, Molly," Bulldog submitted. "Gawd! that's the
combination," Billy declared. "I was right."

"And Iron Jaw has got a down on Snaky Dick that owns Clatawa over some
bad splits in bets," Molly added.

"The old game," Carney laughed. "When thieves fall out honest men win a
bet. It would appear from the evidence that Iron Jaw Blake--I know his
method of old--has sent out and got some one to ship in a horse and
rider to trim Clatawa, and turn an honest penny."

"You're gettin' warm, Bulldog, as we used to say in that child's game,"
Molly declared. "I know the pippin; one Reilly, at Portland. I heard
Iron Jaw and this Texas talkin' about him."

Carney turned toward the little man. "What are we going to do about it,
Billy--do we draw cards?"

Billy sprang from his chair, and paced the floor excitedly. "Holy Mike!
there never was such a chance. Waster can trim Ding Dong to a certainty
at a mile and a quarter. See, Bulldog, that's his distance; he's a
stayer from Stayville; but he can't pack weight--don't forget that. If
you rode him--let's see----"

The little man stood back and eyed critically the tall package of bone
and muscle, that while it suggested no surplus flesh, would weigh well.

"You're a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and you ride in one of 'em
rockin' chairs that'll tip the beam at forty pounds. What chance? Slimy
'll have a five-pound saddle; he could weigh in, saddle and all, a
hundred and twenty-five. You'd be takin' on a handicap of ninety pounds.
What chance?"

"I might get an Indian boy," Carney suggested. "You might get a doll or
a pet monkey," Billy sneered. "What chance?"

"And they all work for Iron Jaw," Molly advised; "they'd blow; he'd
bribe them to pull the horse."

"What chance?" Billy repeated with the mournful persistency of a parrot.
"Guess I'll go out and tell Waster to forget he's a gentleman and go on
pluggin' among the sage brush as a cow-pony." Carney rose when Billy had
gone, saying, "Fancy I'll drift on to the rest joint, Molly. I rather
want to hold converse with a certain man while the seeing's good, if
he's about."

"Good-bye, Bulldog," Molly answered, and her blue eyes followed the
figure that slipped so gracefully through the door, their depths
holding a look that was beautiful in its honest admiration. "God!" she
whispered; "why do women like him--gee!" Billy was tickling a lop ear on
the buckskin. "Mr. Carney," he said in a low voice, one eye on the cabin
door, "you heard what Molly said about Bessie wishin' me on her, didn't
you?"

"Uh-huh!"

"Let me give you the straight info. Molly sent the money to Bessie
to bring me here; we was both broke. Then I found out Bessie had been
gettin' it for a year from her, 'cause I was sick and couldn't ride. I
hadn't saved none, thinkin' I'd got Rockefeller skinned to death as a
money-getter. It was the wastin' to make weight that got me. I don't
have to sweat off flesh now," he added pathetically; "I'm a hundred and
two."

"That's Molly Bur-dan" (her right name) "all over--I know her. But don't
worry kid. I haven't got anybody to look after, and having money and no
use for it makes me lonesome. You give me Bessie's address, and don't
tout off Molly that you're doing it."

"I can get the money myself, Mr. Carney--you just listen now. I didn't
spring it inside 'cause Molly'd get hot under the collar; she'd say
that if I rode in a race I'd bust a lung. Gee! ridin' to me is just like
goin' by-bye in a hammock; it'd do me good."

Carney put a hand gently on the boy's shoulder, saying: "The size of the
package doesn't mean much when it comes to being a man, does it, kid?
Spring it; get it off your chest."

Billy made a horseshoe in the sand with the toe of his boot
meditatively; then said:

"Slimy Red, of course, will be lookin' for a match for Ding Dong. Most
of the races here is sprints, the old Texas game of half-a-mile, and
weight don't cut much ice that distance. He'll make it for a mile, or
a mile-and-a-quarter, 'cause Ding Dong could stay that distance pretty
well himself. If you was to match Waster against the black, and let me
ride him, I'd bring home the bacon. He's a fourteen pound better horse
than Ding Dong ever was; a handicapper would separate them that much on
their form. Gee! I forgot somethin'," and Billy, a shame-faced look in
his eyes, gazed helplessly at Bulldog.

"What was it dropped out of your think-pan, kid?"

"The roll. I've been makin' a noise like a man with a bank behind him. A
match ain't like where a feller can go into the bettin' ring if he knows
a couple of hundred-to-one chances and parley a shoe-string into a block
of city houses; a match is even money, just about. And to win a big
stake you've got to have the long green."

"How much, Billy?"

"Well, the Iron Jaw bunch, bein' whisky men and gamblers, naturally
would stand to lose twenty thousand, at least."

"I could manage it in a couple of days, Billy, by keeping the wires
hot."

"Before I forget it, Mr. Carney, if you do buck this crowd make it catch
weights. Slimy Red don't own a hair in Ding Dong's tail, of course, but
he'll have a bill of sale right enough showin' he's the owner, and as he
can ride light they'll word it, 'owners up'."

Carney was thinking fast, and a glint of light shot athwart his placid
gray eyes.

"Happy thought, Kid; we'll string with them on that; we'll make it
owners up."

"I said catch weights," Billy snapped irritably. Carney answered with
only a quizzical smile, and the boy, turning, walked around the horse
eyeing him from every angle. He lifted first one foot and then the
others, examining them critically, pressing a thumb into the frogs.
He pinched with thumb and forefinger the tendons of both forelegs; he
squeezed the horse's windpipe till the latter coughed; then he said:

"Please, Mr. Carney, mount and give him half a furlong at top speed,
finishin' up here. Make him break as quick as you can till I see if he's
got the slows."

As obedient as a servant Bulldog swung to the saddle, centered the
buckskin down the road, wheeled, brought the horse to a standstill, and
then, with a shake of the rein and a cry of encouragement, came tearing
back, the pound of the horse's hoofs on the turf palpitating the air
like the roll of a kettle-drum.

"Great!" the boy commented when Carney, having gently eased the horse
down, returned. "He's the same old Waster; he flattens out in that
stride of his till he looks like a pony. His flanks ain't pumpin' none.
He'll do; he's had lots of work--he's in better condition than Ding
Dong, 'cause Slimy Red's been puttin' in most of his trainin' time at
the bar. I got a three-pound saddle in my trunk that I won the 'Kenner
Stakes' at Saratoga on. Slimy Red will be givin' me about ten pounds if
you make the match catch weights; it'll be a cinch--like gettin' money
from home. But don't tell Molly."

"We'll split fifty-fifty," Carney said.

"Nothin' doin', Mister Mug; you cop the coin for yourself--how much are
you goin' to bet?"

"Five or ten thousand."

"Well, you give me ten per cent of the five thousand--five hundred
bucks, if we win. That'll square Molly's bill for bringin' me up here."

"Come inside, kid," Carney said; "I want to write out something."

Inside Carney said, "Molly, I'm going to give Pat to Billy for a riding
horse----"

"What?"

But Billy's gasp of astonishment was choked by a frowning wink of one of
Bulldog's gray eyes.

"Pat's getting a little old for the hard knocks I have to give a horse,"
Carney resumed; "that's partly what I came to Walla Walla for, to get a
young horse. Let me have a sheet of paper and a pen; it doesn't do for a
man to own a horse in this country without handy evidence as how he came
by him; and though this is a gift I'm going to make it out in the form
of a bill of sale."

Carney drew up a simple bill of sale, stating, that for one dollar,
paid in hand, he transferred his buckskin horse "Pat" to William Mackay.
Molly signed it as witness.

"I'll have to keep Pat for a day or two till I get a new pony." Bulldog
declared; "also rather think I'll leave this bill of sale with a friend
in town for safe keeping, Billy might lose it," and a wink closed one of
the gray eyes that were turned on the boy's face.

As Carney sat the buckskin outside, he whispered, "Do you get it,
Billy--owners up?"

"Gee! I get you."

The little man had been mystified.

"Don't be in a hurry over the race," he advised; "make it for one week
away. That'll give me a chance to give Waster a few lessons in breakin'
to bring him back to the old days. I'll put a heavy blanket about his
neck for a gallop or two and sweat some of the fat off his pipes. I can
get a set of racin' plates made for him, too, for a pound off his feet
is four pounds off his back. We'll give him all the fine touches, Mr.
Carney, and Waster 'll do his part."

The little man watched the buckskin lope down toward Walla Walla, then
he turned in to the cottage where he was greeted by Molly.

"Ain't Bulldog some man, Billy?"

"Will you tell me something, Molly?" the boy asked hesitatingly.

"Shoot," she commanded.

"Is he--was he--the man--Bessie told me something?"

"There ain't no woman on God's footstool, Billy, can say Bulldog Carney
was the man that fell down. That's why we all like him. There ain't a
woman on the Gold Coast that ever lamped Bulldog that wouldn't stake
him if she had to put her sparklers in hock. And there ain't a man
that knows him that'll try to put one over--'tain't healthy. He's got a
temper as sweet as a bull pup's, but he's lightnin' when he starts.
He don't cotton to no girl, 'cause he was once engaged to one of the
sweetest you ever see, Billy."

"Did she die, Molly?"

"The other man did! And nothin' was done to Bulldog 'cause it was comin'
to the hound."

Carney rode on till he came to the Mountain House. Here he was at home
for the proprietor was an old Gold Range friend.

First he saw that the buckskin had a worthy supper, then he ate his own.

When it had grown dark and the gleaming lights of the Del Monte Saloon
were throwing their radiancy out into the street, he put the bridle
on his buckskin and rode to the house of "Teddy the Leaper," who was
Sheriff of Shoshone County.

The sheriff welcomed Carney with a differential friendship that showed
they stood well together as man to man; for though Bulldog's reputation
varied in different places, and with different people, it stood
strongest with those who had known him longest, and who, like most men
of the West, were apt to judge men from their own experience.

Teddy the Leaper admired Bulldog Carney the man; he would have staked
his life on anything Carney told him. Officially, as sheriff, the County
of Shoshone was his bailiwick, and the County of Shoshone held nothing
on its records against Carney. "Always a gentleman," was Teddy's summing
up of Bulldog Carney.

Carney drew an envelope from his pocket, saying: "Will you take care of
this for me, Sheriff? Inside is a bill of sale of my horse."

"What, Bulldog--the buckskin?" Teddy's eyes searched the speaker's face;
it was unbelievable. A light dawned upon the sheriff; Bulldog had put
many a practical joke over--he was kidding. Teddy laughed.

"Bulldog," he said, "I've heard that you was English, a son of one of
them bloated lords, but faith it's Irish you are. You've as much humor
as you've nerve--you're Irish."

"There's also a note in that envelope"--Carney ignored the chaff--"that
directs you to pay over to a little lad that's up against it out at
Molly's place, any money that might happen to be in your hands if I
suddenly--well, if I didn't need it--see?"

"I'll do that, Bulldog."

"Think you'll be at the Del Monte to-night, Sheriff?" Carney asked
casually.

Teddy's Irish eyes flashed a quizzical look on the speaker; then
he answered diplomatically: "There ain't no call why I got to be
there--lest I'm sent for, and I ain't as spry gettin' around as I was
when I made that record of forty-six feet for the hop-step-and-jump. If
you've got anything to settle, go ahead."

Carney rippled one of his low musical laughs: "I'd like to line you up
at the bar, Sheriff, for a thimbleful of poison."

Teddy's eyes again sought the speaker's mental pockets, but the placid
face showed no warrant for expected trouble. The Sheriff coughed, then
ventured:

"If you're goin' to stack up agin odds, Bulldog, I'll dress for the
occasion; I don't gener'ly go 'round hostile draped."

Again Carney laughed. "You might bring a roomy pocket, Sheriff; it might
so turn out that I'd like you to hold a few eagle birds till such times
as they're right and proper the property of another man or myself. Does
that put any kink in your code?"

"Not when I act for you, Bulldog; 'cause it'll be on the level: I'll be
there."

Next Carney rode to the Del Monte; and hitching the buckskin to a post,
he adjusted his belt till the butt of his gun lay true to the drop of
his hand.

As he entered the saloon slowly, his gray eyes flashed over the bar and
a group of men on the right of the gaming tables, for there was one man
perhaps in Walla Walla he wanted to see before the other saw him. It
wasn't Slimy Red--it was a tougher man.

Iron Jaw was leaning against the bar talking to Death-on-the-trail, and
behind the bar Snaggle Tooth Boone stood listening to the conversation.

As Carney entered a quick look of apprehension showed for an instant
in Iron Jaw's heavy-browned eyes; then a smile of greeting curled his
coarse lips. He held out a hand, saying: "Glad to see you, Old Timer.
You seem conditioned. Know Carson?"

"Yes."

Carney shook hands with the two men, and reached across to clasp Boone's
paw, adding: "We'll sample the goods, Snaggle Tooth."

Boone winced at the appellation, for Carney did not smile; there was
even the suspicion of a sneer on the lean face.

"How is Walla Walla?" Carney queried, as the four glasses were held
toward each other in salute. "Racing relieved by a little gun argument
once in a while, I suppose. Chief Joseph threatening to let his Nez
Perces loose on you?"

"Racin' is on the hog," Iron Jaw growled. "There's a bum over yonder
pikin' agin the Wheel that's been stung by the racin' bug, but when he
calls for a show-down some of 'em will trim him. Hear that?"

Iron Jaw held up a thumb, and they could hear a thin strident voice
babbling:

"Walla Walla's a nursery for tin horn sports. There ain't a man here got
anythin' but a goose liver pumpin' his system, and a length of rubber
hose up his back holdin' his ribs."

Somebody objected; and the voice, that Carney recognized as Texas Sam's
snarled:

"Five birds of liberty! You call that bettin'--a hundred iron men?"

"Want to see him?" Iron Jaw queried. "I can't place him. Texas Sam he
comes here as; seems to be well fixed; but he's a booze fighter. I guess
that's what gives him dreams."

Quiescently Bulldog followed the lead of Iron Jaw and Death-on-the-trail
across the room where, with his back to the door, at a roulette table
sat Texas Sam. He was winning; three stacks of chips rose to a toppling
height at his right hand.

Carney noticed from the color that they were five dollar chips. Knowing
from Molly that Texas was a stool pigeon he understood the philosophy
of the high-priced counters. It was easier to keep tally on what he
drew and what he turned back in after the game, for the losings and the
winnings were all a bluff, and the money furnished him for the show had
to be accounted for Iron Jaw trusted no man. "The game's like roundin'
up a bunch of cows heavy in calf," Texas was saying as they approached;
"it's too damn slow. I want action."

He placed five chips on the thirteen as the croupier spun the wheel,
bleating:

"Hoodoo thirteen's my lucky number. I was whelped on Friday the
thirteenth, at thirteen o'clock--as you old leatherheads make it, one
A.M." The little ivory ball skipped and hopped as it slid down from the
smooth plane of the wheel to the number chambers. It almost settled into
one, and then, as if agitated by some unseen devil of perversity, rolled
over the thin wall and lay, like a bird's egg, in a black nest that was
number "13."

"By a nose!" Texas exulted. "Do I win, Judge?" The croupier's face was
as expressionless as the silver veil of Mahmoud as he built into pillars
over eight hundred dollars in chips, and shoved them across the board to
Texas.

The noisy one swept them to the side of the table, and called for a
drink.

It was a curiously diversified interest that centered on this play
of the uncouth Texas. Iron Jaw and Death-on-the-trail viewed it with
apathetic interest, much as a trainer might watch a pupil punching the
bag--it didn't mean anything.

Carney, too, knowing its farcical value, looked on, waiting for his
opportunity.

Snaky Dick sat across the table from Texas, dribbling a few fifty-cent
chips here and there amongst the numbers, also waiting. To him the play
was real; he had seen it in reality a thousand times--a man loaded with
bad liquor and in possession of money running the gamut. Behind Snaky
Dick sat others of the Clatawa clique waiting for his lead. Their money
was ready to cinch the match as soon as made.

Iron Jaw watched Snaky Dick furtively; the time seemed ripening. They
had arranged, through some little vagaries of the wheel, vagaries that
could be brought out by the assistance of the croupier, that apparently
Texas should make a killing.

Now the croupier called out: "Make your bets, gentlemen." He gave the
wheel a send-off with finger and thumb, his droning voice singing
the cadence of: "Hurry up, gentlemen! Make your bets while the
merry-go-round plays on."

"For a repeat," Texas shrilled, dropping the chips one after another on
to the thirteen square until they stood like a candle. Impatiently the
croupier checked him:

"Mind the limit, Mister."

"When I play the sky's my limit," Texas answered.

"Not here," the croupier admonished, sweeping three-quarters of the
ivory discs from thirteen.

The little ball of peripatetic fate that had held on its erratic way
during this, now settled down into a compartment painted green.

"Double zero!" the croupier remarked, and swept the table bare.

Texas cursed. "There ain't no double zero in racin'; there ain't no
green-eyed horse runnin' for the the track--everybody's got a chance.
Here! I'm goin' to cash in."

He shoved the ivory chips irritably across the table, and the croupier,
stacking them in his board, said: "A thousand and fifty."

As methodically as he had built up the chips, from a drawer he erected
little golden plinths of twenty-dollar pieces, and with both hands
pushed them toward the winner. .

Texas put the palm of his hand on the shiny mound, saying:

"I'm goin' to orate; I'm gettin' plumb hide-bound 'cause of this long
sleep in Walla Walla. To-morrow I'm pullin' my freight down the trail to
the outside where men is. But these yeller-throated singin' birds says
I got a cow-hocked whang-doodle on four hoofs named Horned Toad that
can outrun anything that eats with molars in Walla Walla, from a
grasshopper's jump to four miles. Now I've said it, ladies--who's next?"

A quiet voice at his elbow answered almost plaintively: "If you will
take your paw off those yellow boys I'll bury them twice."

At the sound of that drawling voice Texas sprang to his feet, whirled,
and seeing Carney, struck at him viciously. Carney simply bent his lithe
body, and the next instant Iron Jaw had Texas by the throat, shaking him
like a rat.

"You damn locoed fool!" he swore; "what d'you mean?--what d'you mean?"
each query being emphasized by a vigorous shake.

"He simply means," explained Carney, "that he's a cheap bluffer--a wind
gambler. When he's called he quits. That's just what I thought."

"Give him a chance, Blake," Death-on-the-trail interposed; "let go!"

Iron Jaw pressed Texas back into his chair, saying:

"You've got too much booze. If you want to bet on your horse sit there
and cut out this Injun stuff." Snaky Dick had jumped to his feet,
startled by the fact that Carney was about to break in on his preserve.
Now he said: "If Texas is pinin' for a race Clatawa is waitin'--so is
his backin'."

Carney turned his gray eyes on the speaker: "There's a rule in this
country, Snaky, that when two men have got a discussion on, others keep
out. I've undertaken to call this jack rabbit's bluff, and he makes
good, or takes his noisy organ away to play it outside of Walla Walla."

Texas Sam had received a thumb in the rib from Iron Jaw that meant, "Go
ahead," so he said, surlily: "There's my money on the table. Anybody can
come in--the game's wide open."

"That being so," Carney drawled, "there's a little buckskin horse tied
to the post outside, that's carried me for three years around this land
of delight, and he looks good to me."

He unslung from his waist a leather roll, and dropped its snake-like
body across the Texas coin, saying:

"There's two thousand in twenties, and if this cheap-singing person sees
the raise, it goes for a race at a mile-and-a-quarter between the little
buckskin outside and this cow-hocked mule he sings about."

"I want to see this damn buckskin," Texas objected.

"You don't need to worry," Iron Jaw commented; "the horse is pretty nigh
as well known as Bulldog."

But Texas, having been born in a very nest of iniquity, having been
stable boy, tout, half-mile-track ringer, and runner for a wire-tapping
bunch, was naturally suspicious.

"I don't match against an unknown," he objected; "let me lamp this
Flyin' Dutchman of the Plains; it may be Salvator for all I know."

"Let him get out the door," Carney sneered; "it will be good-bye--we'll
never see him again."

"And if we don't," Snaky Dick interposed, "I'll cover your money,
Carney."

Bulldog swung the gray eyes, and levelled them at the red-and-yellow
streaked beads that did seeing duty in Snaky's face:

"You ever hear about the gent who was kicked out of Paradise and told to
go scoot along on his belly for butting in?" Then he followed the little
crowd at Texas Sam's heels.

In the yellow glare of the Del Monte lights the buckskin looked very
little like a race horse. He stood about fifteen and a quarter hands,
looking not much more than a pony, as, half asleep, he had relaxed his
body; the lop ears hanging almost at right angles to his lean bony head
suggested humor more than speed. He stood "over" on his front legs, a
habit contracted when he favoured the weak knees. As he was a gelding
his neck was thin, so far removed from a crest that it was almost
ewe-like; his tremendous width of rump caused the hip bones to project,
suggesting an archaic design of equine structure. The direct lamplight
threw cavernous shadows all over his lean form.

Texas Sam shot one rapid look of appraisement over the sleepy little
horse; then he laughed.

"Pinch me, Iron Jaw!" he cried; "am I ridin' on the tail board of an
overland bus seein' things in the desert, and hearin' wings?"

He pointed a forefinger at the buckskin. "Is that the lopin' jack-rabbit
that runs for your money?" he queried of Carney.

"That horse's name is Pat," Bulldog answered quietly, "and we've been
pals so long that when any yapping coyote snaps at him I most naturally
kick the brute out of the way. But that's the horse, Buckskin Pat,
that my money says can outrun, for a mile-and-a-quarter, the horse you
describe as a cow-hocked cow-pony, the same being, I take it, the horse
you scooted away on when I palmed you on the mouth this morning."

Texas Sam was naturally of a vicious temper, and this allusion caused
him to flare up again, as Carney meant it to. But Iron Jaw whirled him
around, saying:

"Cut out the man end of it--let's get down to cases. We ain't had a live
'hoss race for so long that I most forget what it looks like. If you two
mean business come inside and put up your bets, gentlemen."

Iron Jaw abrogated to himself the duty of Master of Ceremonies. First
he set his croupier to work counting the gold of Texas Sam and Bulldog
Carney. There were an even hundred twenty-dollar gold pieces in the belt
Carney had thrown on the table.

"You're shy on the raise," Iron Jaw remarked, winking at Texas.

"I'll see his raise," the latter growled. "You've got more'n that of
mine in your safe, Iron Jaw, so stack 'em up for me till they're level.
I might as well win somethin' worth while--there won't be no fun in the
race. That jack--that buckskin,"--he checked himself--"won't make me go
fast enough to know I'm in the saddle."

"You let me in that and I'll furnish the speed," Snaky Dick could not
resist the temptation to clutch at the money he saw slipping away from
him. "Make it a three-cornered sweep, Mr. Carney," he pleaded; "I'll
ante."

"It would be some race," Iron Jaw encouraged; "some race, boys. I've
seen the little buckskin amble. I don't know nothin' about this Texas
person's caravan, but Clatawa, for a sauce bottle that holds both warm
and cold blood, ain't so slow--he ain't so slow, gents."

The idea caught on; everybody in the saloon rose to the occasion. Yells
of, "Make it a sweep! Let Clatawa in! Wake up old Walla Walla with
something worth while!" came from many throats.

Bulldog seemed to debate the matter, a smile twitching his drab
mustache.

"I've said it," Texas cried; "she's wide open. Anybody that's got a pet
eagle he thinks can fly faster'n my cow-pony can run, can enter him.
There ain't no one barred, and the limit's up where the pines point to."

Snaky Dick had edged around the table till he stood close beside
Bulldog, where he whispered: "Let me in, Carney; I've been layin' for
this flannel-mouth. I don't want to see him get away with Walla Walla
money. You save your stake with me, if I'm in."

Carney pushed the little wizzen-face speaker away, saying:

"Any kind of a talking bird can swing in on a winning if he's got a
copper-riveted, cinch bet. But sport, as I understand it, gentlemen,
consists in providing excitement, taking on long chances."

"That's Bulldog talkin'," somebody interrupted; and they all cheered.

"That being acknowledged," Carney resumed, "I feel like stealing candy
from a blind kid when I crowd in on this Texas person. A yellow man
wouldn't know how to own a real horse; that money on the table is, so
to speak, mine now; but as Snaky Dick is panting to make it a real race,
purely out of a kindly feeling for Walla Walla sports, I'm going to let
him draw cards. Clatawa is welcome."

"The drinks is on the house when I hear a wolf howl like that!" Snaggle
Tooth yelled. "Crowd up, gentlemen--the drinks is on the house! Old
Walla Walla is goin' to sit up and take notice; Bulldog is some live
wire."

Chairs were thrust back; men crowded the bar; liquors were tossed off.
Sheriff Teddy the Leaper, who had come in, felt his arm touched by
Carney, and inclining his head to a gentle pull at his coat-sleeve, he
heard the latter whisper, "Stake holder for my sake." That was all.

Then the crowd swarmed back to the table where the croupier had remained
beside the mound of gold.

"You give Jim, there, a receipt for a thousand, and he'll pass it out,"
Iron Jaw told Texas.

Jim the croupier took from the safe behind him rolls of twenty-dollar
gold pieces and stood them up in Texas's pile. He removed a few coins,
saying, "The pot is right, gentlemen; two thousand apiece."

"Hold on," Snaky Dick cried; "it ain't called yet--I draw cards."

"Not till you see the bet and the raise," Carney objected. "Nobody
whispers his way into this game; it's for blood."

"Give me a cheque book, Snaggle Tooth," Snaky pleaded.

"Flimsies don't go," Carney objected.

"Nothin' but the coin weighs in agin me," Texas agreed; "put up the
dough-boys or keep out."

Snaky was in despair. Here was just the softest spot in all the world,
and without the cash he couldn't get in.

"Will you cash my cheque?" he asked Iron Jaw.

"If Baker'll O.K. it I figger you must have the stuff in his bank--it'll
be good enough for me," Iron Jaw replied.

There was a little parley between Snaky Dick, his associates, and Baker,
who was a private banker. The cheque was made out, endorsed, and cashed
from the gambling funds, Iron Jaw being a partner of Snaggle Tooth's in
this commercial enterprise.

When the pot was complete, six thousand on the table, Texas said:

"We've got to have a stakeholder; put the money in Blake's hands--does
that go?"

Snaky Dick coughed, and hesitated. He had no suspicion that Iron Jaw had
any interest with Texas Sam, but knowing the man as he did, he felt sure
that before the race was run Iron Jaw and Snaggle Tooth would be in the
game up to the eyes.

The drawling voice of Carney broke the little hush that followed this
request.

"You're from the outside, Texas; you know all about your own horse,
and that lets you out. The selecting of a stakeholder, and such, most
properly belongs to Walla Walla, that is to say, such of us interested
as more or less live here. The Sheriff of Shoshone, who is present, if
he'll oblige, is the man that holds my money, and yours, too, unless you
want to crawfish. Does that suit you, Snaky?"

"It does," the latter answered cheerfully, for, fully believing that
Clatawa was going to show a clean pair of heels to the other horses, he
wanted the money where he could get it without gun-play.

"That's settled, then," Carney said blithely, ignoring Texas completely.
He turned to Teddy the Leaper: "Will you oblige, Sheriff?"

The Sheriff was agreeable, saying that as soon as they had completed
details they would take the money over to Baker's bank and lock it up
in the safe, Baker promising to take charge of it, even if it were at
night.

"Just repeat the conditions of the match," the Sheriff said, and he drew
from his pocket a note book and pencil.

Carney seized the opportunity to say:

"A three-cornered race between the buckskin gelding Pat, the black
gelding Horned Toad, and the bay horse Clatawa at one mile and a
quarter. The stake, two thousand dollars a corner; winner take all. To
be run one week from to-day."

"Is that right, gentlemen?" the Sheriff asked; "all agreed?"

"Owners up--this is a gentleman's race," Texas snapped.

"Satisfactory?" the Sheriff asked, his eyes on Carney.

The latter nodded; and Iron Jaw winked at Snaggle Tooth.

Snaky Dick could scarce credit his ears; surely the gods were looking
with favor upon his fortunes; the other riders would be giving him many
pounds in this self-accepted handicap.

At Sheriff Teddy's suggestion the gold was carried over to Baker's bank,
a stone building almost opposite the Del Monte; the bag containing it
was sealed and placed in a big safe, Baker giving the Sheriff a receipt
for six thousand dollars.

Then they went back to the Del Monte for target practise at the bottle,
each man implicated buying ammunition.

At this time Carney had taken the buckskin to his stable, going back to
the saloon.

Snaggle Tooth made a short patriotic speech, the burden of which was
that the saloon was full of men of eager habit who had not had a chance
to sit into the game, and to ameliorate the condition of these mournful
mavericks he would sell pools on the race, for the mere honorarium of
five per cent.

Fever was in the men's blood; if he had suggested twenty per cent it
would have gone.

Snaggle Tooth took up his position behind a faro table and called out:

"The pool is open, with Clatawa, Horned Toad, and Pat in the box. What
am I bid for first choice?"

"Twenty dollars," a voice cried.

"Thirty," another said.

"Forty."

"Fifty."

A dry rasp that suggested an alkaline throat squeaked: "A hundred. Is
this a horse race, or are we dribblin' into the plate at the synagogue?"

"Sold!" Snaggle Tooth yapped, knowing well that excitement begat quick
action. "Which cayuse do you favor, plunger?"

"The range horse, Clatawa."

The croupier at Snaggle Tooth's elbow took the bidder's live
twenty-dollar gold pieces and passed him a slip with Clatawa's name on
it.

"A hundred dollars in the box and second choice for sale," Snaggle Tooth
drawled, his prominent fang gleaming in the lamp light as he mouthed the
words.

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty was bid like the quick popping of a
machine gun; at seventy-five the bids hung fire, and the auctioneer,
thumping the table with his bony fist, snapped, "Sold! Name your jack
rabbit."

"Horned Toad!" came from the bidder of the seventy-five.

"A hundred and seventy-five in the box," Snaggle Tooth droned, "and the
buckskin for sale. What about it, you pikers--what about it?"

There seemed to be nothing about it, unless silence was something. The
hush seemed to dampen the gambling spirit.

"What!" yelped Snaggle Tooth; "two thousand golden bucks staked on the
horse now, and no tinhorn with sand enough in his gizzard to open his
trap. This is a race, not a funeral--who's dead? Bulldog, you laid even
money; here's a hundred and seventy-five goin' a-beggin'. Ain't you got
a chance?"

"Ten dollars!" Carney bid as if driven into it.

"Ten dollars, ten dollars bid for the buckskin; a hundred and
seventy-five in the box, and ten dollars bid for the buckskin. Sold!"

The first pool was followed by others, one after another: the roulette
table, the keno game, and faro were in the discard--their tables were
deserted.

It soon became evident that Clatawa was a hot favorite; the public's
money was all for the Walla Walla champion.

Noting this, the Horned Toad trio hung back, bidding less. Clatawa
was selling for a hundred, Horned Toad about fifty, and the buckskin
sometimes knocked down at ten to Carney, or sometimes bid up to twenty
by someone tempted by the odds.

At last Carney slipped quietly away, having bought at least twenty
pools that stood him between three and four thousand to a matter of two
hundred.

In the morning he rode the buckskin out to Molly's cottage and turned
him over to Billy.

The boy's voice trembled with delight when he was told of what had taken
place.

"Gee! now I will get well," he said; "I'll beat the bug out now--I'll
have heart. You see, Mr. Carney, I got set down in California a year
ago. It wasn't my fault; I was ridin' for Timberleg Harley, and he give
the horse a bucket of water before the race; he didn't want to win--was
lettin' the horse run for Sweeney, layin' for a big price later on.
He had an interest in a book, and they took liberties with the horse's
odds--he was favorite. He didn't dare tell me anything about it, the
hound. When I found the horse couldn't raise a gallop, hangin' in my
hands like a sea lion, I didn't ride him out, thinkin' he'd broke down.
They had me up in the Judges' Stand, and sent for the books. It looked
bad. Timberleg got off by swearin' I'd pulled the horse to let the other
one win; swore that I stood in with the book that overlaid him. I was
give the gate, and it just broke my heart. I was weak from wastin'
anyway. And you can't beat the bug out if your heart's soft; the bug'll
win--it's a hundred-to-one on him. First thing I'm goin' to give Waster
a ball to clean him out, give him a bran mash, too. He must be like a
currycomb inside, grass and hay and everything here is full of this damn
cactus. A week ain't much to ready up a horse for a race, but he ain't
got no fat to work off, and he knows the game. In a week he'll be as
spry as a kitten. I'll just play with him. I'll bunk with him, too. If
Slimy Red got wise to anything he'd slip him a twig of locoe, or put a
sponge up his nose. Do you know what that thief did once, Mr. Carney? He
was a moonlighter; he sneaked the favorite for a race that was to be
run next day out of his stall at night and galloped him four miles with
about a hundred and sixty in the saddle. That settled the favorite; he
run his race same's if he was pullin' a hearse.

"That's a good idea, Billy. There's half-a-dozen Slimy Reds in Walla
Walla: it's a good idea, only I'll do the sleeping with the buckskin.
I'd be lonesome away from him."

The boy objected, but Carney was firm.

Billy was not only a good rider, but he was a man of much brains. There
was little of the art of training that he did not know, for his father
had been a trainer before him--he had been brought up in a stable.

Fortunately the buckskin's working life had left little to be desired in
the way of conditioning; it was just that the sinews and muscles might
have become case-hardened, more the muscles of endurance than activity.

But then the race was over a distance, a mile-and-a-quarter, where the
endurance of the thoroughbred would tell over Clatawa. Indeed, full of
the contempt which a racing man has for a cold-blooded horse, Billy did
not consider Clatawa in the race at all.

"That part of it is just found money," he assured Carney. "Clatawa will
go off with a burst of speed like those Texas half-milers, and he'll
commence to die at the mile; he hasn't a chance."

As to Ding Dong it was simply a question of whether the black had
improved and Waster gone back enough, through being thrown out of
training, to bring the two together. Anywhere near alike in condition
Waster was a fourteen-pound better horse than Ding Dong. It might be
that now, his legs sounder than they had ever been when he was racing,
Waster might run the best mile-and-a-quarter of his life.

Of course this might not be possible in a three-quarter sprint, for, at
that terrific rate of going, running it from end to end at top speed,
a certain nervous or muscular system would be called upon that had
practically become atrophied through the more leisure ways of the trail
work.

The little man pondered over these many things just as a man of commerce
might mentally canvas great markets, conveying his point of view to
Carney generally. He would map out the race as they sat together in the
evening.

"Of course Snaky Dick will shoot out from the crack of the pistol, and
try to open up a gap that'll break our hearts. He won't dare to
pull Clatawa in behind; a cold-blooded horse's got the heart of a
chicken--he'd quit. Slimy'll carry Ding Dong along at a rate he knows
will leave him enough for a strong run home; but he'll think that he's
only got Clatawa to beat and he'll pull out of his pace--he'll keep
within strikin' distance of Clatawa. I'll let them go on. I know 'bout
how fast Waster can run that mile-and-a-quarter from end to end. Don't
you worry if you see me ten lengths out of it at the mile. Waster won
all his races comin' through his horses from behind--'cause he's game.
When Caltawa cracks, and I'm not up, Slimy'll stop ridin' he'll let
his horse down thinkin' he's won. You'll see, Mr. Carney. If a
quarter-of-a-mile from the finish post I'm within three lengths of Ding
Dong and not drivin' him you can take all the money in sight. I'll tell
you somethin' else, Mr. Carney; if I'm up with Ding Dong, and Slimy Red
thinks I've got him, he'll try a foul."

"Glad you mentioned it, little man," Carney remarked drily.

The buckskin was given a long steady gallop the day after he had
received the ball of physic; then for three days he was given short
sprinting runs and a little practise at breaking from the gun. Two days
before the race he was given a mile and a quarter at a little under
full speed; rated as though he were in a race, the last half a topping
gallop. He showed little distress, and cleaned up his oats an hour later
after he had been cooled out. Billy was in an ecstasy of happy content.

Nobody who was a judge of a horse's pace had seen Waster gallop his
trial over the full course, for the boy had arranged it cleverly.
Texas Sam and Snaky Dick both worked their horses in the morning, and
sometimes gave them a slow gallop in the evening. Billy knew that at the
first peep of day some of the Clatawa people would be on the track,
so he waited that morning until everybody had gone home to breakfast,
thinking all the gallops were over; then he slipped on to the course and
covered the mile-and-a-quarter without being seen.

The course was a straightaway, one hundred feet wide, lying outside of
the town on the open plain, and running parallel to the one long street.
The finish post was opposite the heart of the town.

The week was one long betting carnival; one heard nothing but betting
jargon. It was horse morning, noon, and night.

Carney had acquired another riding horse, and the Horned Toad cabal
laughed cynically at his seriousness. Iron Jaw could not understand it,
for Bulldog had a reputation for cleverness; but here he was acting like
a tenderfoot. Once or twice a suspicion flashed across his mind that
perhaps Bulldog had discovered something, and meant to call them after
they had won the race. But there was Clatawa; there was nothing to cover
up in his case, and surely Carney didn't think he could beat the bay
with his buckskin. Besides they weren't racing under Jockey Club rules.
They hadn't guaranteed anything; Carney had matched his horse against
the black, and there he was; names didn't count--the horse was the
thing.

Molly had heard about the match and had grown suspicious over Billy's
active participation, fearing it might bring on a hemorrhage if he rode
a punishing race. When she taxed Billy with this he pleaded so hard for
a chance to help out, assuring Molly that Waster would run his own race,
and would need little help from him, that she yielded. When she talked
to Bulldog about it he told her he was going to give the whole stake to
Billy, the four thousand, if he won it.

And then came the day of the great match. From the time the first golden
shafts of sunlight had streamed over the Bitter Root Mountains, picking
out the forms of Walla Walla's structures, that looked so like a mighty
pack of wolves sleeping in the plain, till well on into the afternoon,
the border town had been in a ferment. What mattered whether there
was gold in the Coeur d'Alene or not; whether the Nez Perces were good
Presbyterians under the leadership, physically, of Chief Joseph, and
spiritually, Missionary Mackay, was of no moment. A man lay cold in
death, a plug of lead somewhere in his chest, the result of a gambling
row, but the morrow would be soon enough to investigate; to-day was
_the_ day--the day of the race; minor business was suspended.

It made men thirsty this hot, parching anticipation; women had a desire
for finery. Doors stood open, for the dwellers could not sit, but
prowled in and out, watching the slow, loitering clock hands for four
o'clock.

One phrase was on everybody's lips: "I'll take that bet."

Numerically the followers of Clatawa were in the majority; but there was
a weight of metal behind Horned Toad that steadied the market; it came
from a mysterious source. Texas Sam had been played for a blatant
fool; nobody had seen Horned Toad show a performance that would warrant
backing.

The little buckskin was looked upon as a sacrifice to his owner's
well-known determination, his wild gambling spirit, that once roused,
could not be bluffed. They pitied Carney because they liked him; but
what was the use of stringing with a man who held the weakest hand?
And yet when somebody, growing rash, offered ten to one against the
buckskin, a man, quite as calm and serene as Bulldog Carney himself,
looking like a placer miner who worked a rocker on some bend of the
Columbia, would say, diffidently, "I'll take that bet." And he would
make good--one yellow eagle or fifty. It was almost ominous, the quiet
seriousness of this man who said his name was Oregon, just Oregon.

"Talk of gamblers," Iron Jaw said with a spluttering laugh, and he
pointed to the street where little knots of people stood, close packed
against some two, who, money in hand, were backing their faith. Then the
fatty laugh chilled into a coldblooded sneer:

"Snaggle Tooth, we'll learn these tin-horns somethin'; tomorrow your
safe won't be big enough to hold it. But, say, don't let that Texas
brayin' ass have no more booze."

"If you ask me, Blake, I think he's yeller. He's plumb babyfied now
because of Carney--sober he'd quit."

"Carney won't turn a hair when we win."

"Course he won't. But you can't get that into Texas's noodle with a
funnel--he's hoodooed; wants me to plant a couple of gun men at the
finish for fear Bulldog'll grab him."

"Look here, Snaggle, that coyote--hell! I know the breed of them
outlaws, they'd rather win a race crooked than by their horse gallopin'
in front--he just can't trust himself; he's afraid he'll foul the others
when the chance flashes on him. You just tell him that we can't stand
to kiss twenty thousand good-bye because of any Injun trick; the Sheriff
wouldn't stand for it for a minute; he'd turn the money over to the
horse that he thought ought to get it, quick as a wolf'd grab a calf by
the throat."

That was the atmosphere on that sweet-breathed August day in the archaic
town of Walla Walla.

It was a perfectly conceived race; three men in it and each one
confident that he held a royal flush; each one certain that, bar crooked
work, he could win.

The sporting Commandant of the U. S. Cavalry troop had been appointed
judge of the finish at the Sheriff's suggestion; and another officer was
to fire the starting gun.

It was a springy turf course; just the going to suit Waster, whose legs
had been dicky. On a hard course, built up of clay and sand, guiltless
of turf, the fierce hammering of the hoofs might even yet heat up his
joints, though they looked sound; his clutching hoofs might cup out
unrooted earth and bow a tendon.

An hour before race time people had flocked out to the goal where would
be settled the ownership of thousands of dollars by the gallant steed
that first caught the judge's eye as he flashed past the post. Even
Lieutenant Governor Moore was there; that magnificent Nez Perces, Chief
Joseph, sat his half-blooded horse a six-foot-three bronze Apollo, every
inch a king in his beaded buckskins and his eagle feathers. The picture
was Homeric, grand; and behind the canvas was the subtle duplicity of
gold worshipers.

At half-past three a hush fell over the chattering, betting,
vociferating throng, as the judge, a tall soldierly figure of a man,
called:

"Bring out the horses for this race: it is time to go to the post!"

Clatawa was the first to push from behind the throng to the course
where the judge stood. He was a beautiful, high-spirited bay with black
points, and a broad line of white, starting from a star in his forehead,
ran down his somewhat Roman nose. Two men led him, one on either side,
and a blanket covered his form.

Then Horned Toad was led forward by a stable man; beneath a loose
blanket showed the outlines of a small saddle. The horse walked with
the unconcerned step of one accustomed to crowds, and noise, and blare.
Beside him strode Texas Sam, a long coat draping his form.

Behind Horned Toad came the buckskin, at his heels Bulldog Carney, and
beside Carney a figure that might have been an eager boy out for the
holiday. The buckskin walked with the same indifference Horned Toad had
shown.

As he was brought to a stand he lifted his long lean neck, threw up the
flopped ears, spread his nostrils, and with big bright eyes gazed far
down the track, so like a huge ribbon laid out on the plain, as if
wondering where was the circular course he loved so well. He knew it
was a race--that he was going to battle with those of his own kind. The
tight cinching of the little saddle on his back, the bandages on his
shins, the sponging out of his mouth, the little sprinting gallops he
had had--all these touches had brought back to his memory the game his
rich warm, thoroughbred blood loved. His very tail was arched with the
thrill of it.

"Mount your horses; it is time to go to the post!" Judge Cummings
called, watch in hand.

The blanket was swept from Clatawa's back, showing nothing but a wide,
padded surcingle, with a little pocket either side for his rider's feet.
And Snaky Dick, dropping his coat, stood almost as scantily attired; a
pair of buckskin trunks being the only garment that marked his brown,
monkeylike form.

Horned Toad carried a racing saddle, and from a shaffle bit the reins
ran through the steel rings of a martingale.

At this Carney smiled, and more than one in the crowd wondered at this
get-up for a supposed cow-pony.

Then when Texas threw his long coat to a stable man, and stood up a
slim lath of a man, clad in light racing boots, thin white tight-fitting
racing breeches and a loose silk jacket, people stared again. It was as
if, by necromancy, he'd suddenly wasted from off his bones forty pounds
of flesh.

But there was still further magic waiting the curious throng, for now
the buckskin, stripped of his blanket, showed atop his well-ribbed back
a tiny matter of pigskin that looked like a huge postage stamp. And the
little figure of a man, one foot in Carney's hand, was lifted lightly to
the saddle, where he sat in attire the duplicate of Texas Sam's.

With a bellow of rage Iron Jaw pushed forward, crying:

"Hold, there! What th' hell are you doin' on that horse, you damn runt?
Get down!"

He reached a huge paw to the rider's thigh, as though he would yank him
out of the saddle.

His fingers had scarce touched the boy's leg when his hands were thrown
up in the air, and he reeled back from a scimitar-like cut on his
wind-pipe from the flat open hand of Carney, and choking, sputtering an
oath of raging astonishment, he found himself looking into the bore of a
gun, and heard a voice that almost hissed in its constrained passion:

"You coarse butcher! You touch that boy and you'll wake up in hell. Now
stand back and make to Judge Cummings any complaint you have."

Snaggle Tooth and Death-on-the-trail had pushed to Iron Jaw's side,
their hands on their guns, and Carney, full of a passion rare with him,
turned on them:

"Draw, if you want that, or lift your hands, damn quick!"

Surlily they dropped their half-drawn guns back into their pig-skin
pockets. And Oregon, who had thrust forward, drew close to the two and
said something in a low voice that brought a bitter look of hatred into
the face of Snaggle Tooth.

But Oregon looked him in the eye and said audibly: "That's the last call
to chuck--don't forget."

Iron Jaw was now appealing to the judge:

"This match was for owners up."

He beckoned forward the stakeholder:

"Ain't that so, Sheriff--owners up?"

"That was the agreement," Teddy sustained. "Wasn't that the bargain,
Carney?" Iron Jaw asked, turning on Bulldog.

"It was."

"Then what th' hell 're you doin' afoot--and that monkey up?" And Iron
Jaw jerked a thumb viciously over his shoulder at the little man on
Waster.

Carney's head lifted, and the bony contour of his lower jaw thrust out
like the ram of a destroyer: "Mr. Blake," he said quietly, "don't use
any foul words when you speak to me--we're not good enough pals for
that; if you do I'll ram those crooked teeth of yours down your throat.
Secondly, that's the owner of the buckskin sitting on his back. But the
owner of Horned Toad is sitting in a chair down in Portland, a man named
Reilly, and that thing on Ding Dong's back is Slimy Red, a man who has
been warned off every track in the West. He doesn't own a hair in the
horse's tail."

Iron Jaw's face paled with a sudden compelling thought that Carney,
knowing all this, and still betting his money, held cards to beat him.

The judge now asked: "Do you object to the rider of Horned Toad, Mr.
Carney?"

"No, sir--let him ride. I'm not trying to win their money on a
technicality, but on a horse."

"Well, the agreement was owners up, you admit?"

"I do," Carney answered.

"Did this boy on the buckskin's back own him when the match was made?"

"He did."

"Is there any proof of the transaction, the sale?" Major Cummings asked.

"Let me have that envelope I asked you to keep," Carney said, addressing
the sheriff.

When Teddy drew from a pocket the sealed envelope, Carney tore it open,
and passed to the judge the bill of sale to MacKay of the buckskin. Its
date showed that it had been executed the day the match was made, and
Teddy, when questioned, said he had received it on that date, and before
the match was made.

"It was a plant," Iron Jaw objected; "that proves it. Why did he put it
in the sheriff's hands--why didn't the boy keep it--it was his?"

"Because I had a hunch I was going up against a bunch of crooks," Carney
answered suavely; "crooks who played win, tie, or wrangle, and knew they
would claim the date was forged when they were beat at their own game.
And there was another reason."

Carney drew a second paper from the envelope, and passed it to the
Judge. It was a brief note stating that if anything happened Carney his
money, if the buckskin won, was to be turned over to the owner, Billy
MacKay.

When the judge lifted his eyes Carney said, with an apologetic little
smile: "You see, the boy's got the bug, and he's up against it. Molly
Burdan is keeping both him and his sister, and she can't afford it."

Major Cummings coughed; and there was a little husky rasp in his voice
as he said, quietly:

"The objection to the rider of the buckskin horse is disallowed. This
paper proves he is the legitimate owner and entitled to ride. Go down to
the post."

A yell of delight went up from many throats. The men of Walla Walla,
and the riders of the plains who had trooped in, were sports; they
grasped the idea that the gambling clique had been caught at their own
game; that the intrepid Bulldog had put one over on them. Besides,
now they could see that the race was for blood. The heavy betting had
started more than one whisper that perhaps it was a bluff; some of the
Clatawa people believing in the invincibility of their horse, had hinted
that perhaps there was a job on for the two other horses to foul Clatawa
and one of them go on and win; though few would admit that Carney would
be party to cold-decking the public.

But accident had thrown the cards all on the table; it was to be a race
to the finish, and the stakes represented real money.

Before they could start quite openly Carney stepped close to the rider
of Horned Toad, and said, in even tones:

"Slimy Red, if you pull any dirty work I'll be here at the finish
waiting for you. If you can win, win; but ride straight, or you'll never
ride again."

"I'll be hangin' round the finish post, too," Oregon muttered
abstractedly, but both Iron Jaw and Snaggle Tooth could hear him.

The three horses passed down the course, Clatawa sidling like a boat
in a choppy sea, champing at his bit irritably, flecks of white froth
snapping from his lips, and his tail twitching and swishing, indicating
his excitable temperament; Horned Toad and Waster walked with that
springy lift to the pasterns that indicated the perfection of breeding.
Indians and cowboys raced up and down the plain, either side of the
course, on their ponies, bandying words in a very ecstasy of delight.
Old Walla Walla had come into its own; the greatest sport on earth was
on in all its glory.

After a time the three horses were seen to turn far down the course;
they criss-crossed, and wove in and out a few times as they were
being placed by the starter. The excitable Clatawa was giving trouble;
sometimes he reared straight up; then, with a few bucking jumps, fought
for his head. But the sinewy Snaky Dick was always his master.

Atop the little buckskin the boy was scarce discernible at that
distance, as he sat low crouched over his horse's wither. Almost like an
equine statue stood Waster, so still, so sleepy-like, that those who had
taken long odds about him felt a depression.

Horned Toad was scarcely still for an instant; his wary rider, Texas,
was keeping him on his toes--not letting him chill out; but, like the
buckskin's jockey, his eye was always on the man with the gun. They were
old hands at the game, both of them; they paid little attention to the
antics of Clatawa--the starter was the whole works.

Clatawa had broken away to be pulled up in thirty yards. Now, as he came
back, his wily rider wheeled him suddenly short of the starting line,
and the thing that he had cunningly planned came off. The starter,
finger on trigger, was mentally pulled out of himself by this; his
finger gripped spasmodically; those at the finish post saw a puff of
smoke, and a white-nosed horse, well out in front, off to a flying
start.

The backers of Clatawa yelled in delight.

"Good old Snaky Dick!" some one cried.

"Clatawa beat the gun!" another roared.

"They'll never catch him!--never catch him! He'll win off by himself!"
was droned.

Behind, seemingly together, half the width of the track separating them,
galloped the black and the buckskin. It looked as if Waster raced alone,
as if he had lost his rider, so low along his wither and neck lay the
boy, his weight eased high from the short stirrups. A hand on either
side of the lean neck, he seemed a part of his mount. He was saying,
"Ste-a-dy boy! stead-d-dy boy! stead-d-dy boy!" a soft, low monotonous
sing-song through his clinched teeth, his crouch discounting the
handicap of a strong wind that was blowing down the track.

He could feel the piece of smooth-moving machinery under him flatten out
in a long rhythmic stride, and his heart sang, for he knew it was the
old Waster he had ridden to victory more than once; that same powerful
stride that ate up the course with little friction. He was rating his
horse. "Clatawa will come back," he kept thinking: "Clatawa will come
back!"

He himself, who had ridden hundreds of races, and working gallops and
trials beyond count, knew that the chestnut was rating along of his own
knowledge at a pace that would cover the mile-and-a-quar-ter in under
2.12. Methodically he was running his race. Clatawa was sprinting; he
had cut out at a gait that would carry him a mile, if he could keep it
up, close to 1.40. Too fast, for the track was slow, being turf.

He watched Homed Toad; that was what he had to beat, he knew.

Texas had reasoned somewhat along the same lines; but his brain was more
flighty. As Clatawa opened a gap of a dozen lengths, running like a wild
horse, Texas grew anxious; he shook up his mount and increased his pace.

The buckskin reached into his bridle at this, as though he coaxed for
a little more speed, but the boy called, "Steady, lad, steady!" and let
Horned Toad creep away a length, two lengths; and always in front the
white-faced horse, Clatawa, was galloping on and on with a high
deer-like lope that was impressive.

At the finish post people were acclaiming the name of Clatawa. They
could see the little buckskin trailing fifteen lengths behind, and
Horned Toad was between the two.

Carney watched the race stoically. It was being run just as Billy had
forecasted; there was nothing in this to shake his faith.

Somebody cried out: "Buckskin's out of it! I'll lay a thousand to a
hundred against him."

"I'll take it," Carney declared.

"I'll lay the same," Snaggle Tooth yelled.

"You're on," came from Carney.

And even as they bet the buckskin had lost a length.

Half-a-mile had been covered by the horses; three-quarters; and now it
seemed to the watchers that the black was creeping up on Clatawa, the
latter's rider, who had been almost invisible, riding Indian fashion
lying along the back of his horse, was now in view; his shoulders were
up. Surely a quirt had switched the air once.

Yes, the Toad was creeping up--his rider was making his run; they could
see Texas's arms sway as he shook up his mount.

Why was the boy on the little buckskin riding like one asleep? Had he
lost his whip--had he given up all idea of winning?

They were at the mile: but a short quarter away.

A moan went up from many throats, mixed with hoarse curses, for Clatawa
was plainly in trouble; he was floundering; the monkey man on his back
was playing the quirt against his ribs, the gyrations checking the horse
instead of helping him.

And the Toad, galloping true and straight, was but a length behind.

Watching this battle, almost in hushed silence, gasping in the smothered
tenseness, the throng went mentally blind to the little buckskin. Now
somebody cried:

"God! look at the other one comin'! Look at him--lo-ook at him, men!"

His voice ran up the scale to a shrill scream. Other eyes lengthened
their vision, and their owners gasped.

Clatawa seemed to be running backwards, so fast the little buckskin raced
by him as he dropped out of it, beaten.

And Horned Toad was but three lengths in front now. Three lengths?
It was two--it was one. Now the buckskin's nose rose and fell on the
black's quarters; now the mouse-coloured muzzle was at his girth; now
their heads rose and fell together, as, stride for stride, they battled
for the lead: Texas driving his mount with whip and spur, cutting the
flanks of his horse with cruel blows in a frantic endeavor to lift him
home a winner.

How still the boy sat Waster; how well he must know that he had the race
won to nurse him like a babe. No swaying of the body to throw him out
of stride; no flash of the whip to startle him--to break his heart; the
brave little horse was doing it all himself. And the boy, creature of
brains, was wise enough to sit still.

They could hear the pound of hoofs on the turf like the beat of twin
drums; they could see the eager strife in the faces of the two brave,
stout-hearted thoroughbreds: and then the buckskin's head nodding
in front; his lean neck was clear of the black and he was galloping
straight as an arrow.

"The Toad is beat!" went up from a dozen throats. "The buckskin
wins--the buckskin wins!" became a clamor.

Pandemonium broke loose. It was stilled by a demoniac cry, a curse,
from some strong-voiced man. The black had swerved full in on to the
buckskin; they saw Texas clutch at the rider. Curses; cries of "Foul!"
rose; it was an angry roar like caged animals at war.

Carney, watching, found his fingers rubbing the butt of his gun. The
buckskin had been thrown out of his stride in the collision: he stumbled;
his head shot down--almost to his knees he went: then he was galloping
again, the two horses locked together.

Fifty feet away from the finish post they were locked: twenty feet.

The cries of the throng were hushed; they scarce breathed.

Locked together they passed the post, the buckskin's neck in front.
Their speed had been checked; in a dozen yards they were stopped,
and the boy pitched headlong from the buckskin's back, one foot still
tangled in the martingale of Horned Toad.

Men closed in frantically. A man--it was Oregon--twisted Carney's gun
skyward crying: "Leave that coyote to the boys."

He was right. In vain Iron Jaw and Death-on-the-trail sought to
battle back the tense-faced men who reached for Texas. Iron Jaw and
Death-on-the-trail were swallowed up in a seething mass of clamoring
devils. Gun play was out of the question: humans were like herrings
packed in a barrel.

Major Cummings, cool and quick-witted, had called shrilly "Troopers!"
and a little cordon of men in cavalry uniform had Texas in the centre of
a guarding circle.

Carney, on his knees beside the boy, was guarding the lad from the mad,
trampling, fighting men; striking with the butt of his pistol. And then
a woman's shrill voice rose clear above the tumult, crying:

"Back, you cowards--you brutes: the boy is dying: give him room--give
him air!"

Her bleached hair was down her back; her silk finery was torn like a
battered flag; for she had fought her way through the crowd to the boy's
side.

"Don't lift him--he's got a hemorrhage!" she shrilled, as Carney put
his arms beneath the little lad. "Drive the men back--give him air!" she
commanded; and turned Billy flat on his back, tearing from her shoulders
a rich scarf to place beneath his head. The lad's lips, coated with red
froth, twitched in a weak smile; he reached out a thin hand, and Molly,
sitting at his head, drew it into her lap.

"Just lie still, Billy. You'll be all right, boy; just lie still; don't
speak," she admonished.

She could hear the lad's throat click, click, click at each breath, the
ominous tick tick, of "the bug's" work; and at each half-stifled cough
the red-tinged yeasty sputum bubbled up from the life well.

The fighting clamor was dying down; shamefaced men were widening the
circle about the lad and Molly.

The judge's voice was heard saying:

"The buckskin won the race, gentlemen." And he added, strong
condemnation in his voice: "If Horned Toad had been first I would have
disqualified him: it was a deliberate foul."

The cavalry men had got Texas away, mounted, and rushed him out to the
barracks for protection.

"Get a stretcher, someone, please," Molly asked of the crowd. "Billy
will be all right, but we must keep him flat on his back.

"You'll be all right, Billy," she added, bending her head till her lips
touched the boy's forehead, and her mass of peroxided hair hid the hot
tears that fell from the blue eyes that many thought only capable of
cupidity and guile.




IV.--THE GOLD WOLF

|All day long Bulldog Carney had found, where the trail was soft, the
odd imprint of that goblined inturned hoof. All day in the saddle,
riding a trail that winds in and out among rocks, and trees, and cliffs
monotonously similar, the hush of the everlasting hills holding in
subjection man's soul, the towering giants of embattled rocks thrusting
up towards God's dome pigmying to nothingness that rat, a man, produces
a comatose condition of mind; man becomes a child, incapable of little
beyond the recognition of trivial things; the erratic swoop of a bird,
the sudden roar of a cataract, the dirge-like sigh of wind through the
harp of a giant pine.

And so, curiously, Bulldog's fancy had toyed aimlessly with the history
of the cayuse that owned that inturned left forefoot. Always where the
hoof's imprint lay was the flat track of a miner's boot, the hob nails
denting the black earth with stolid persistency. But the owner of the
miner's boot seemed of little moment; it was the abnormal hoof that, by
a strange perversity, haunted Carney.

The man was probably a placer miner coming down out of the Eagle Hills,
leading a pack pony that carried his duffel and, perhaps, a small
fortune in gold. Of course, like Carney, he was heading for steel, for
the town of Bucking Horse.

Toward evening, as Carney rode down a winding trail that led to the
ford of Singing Water, rounding an abrupt turn the mouth of a huge cave
yawned in the side of a cliff away to his left. Something of life had
melted into its dark shadow that had the semblance of a man; or it might
have been a bear or a wolf. Lower down in the valley that was called the
Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge, his buckskin shied, and with a snort
of fear left the trail and elliptically came back to it twenty yards
beyond.

In the centre of the ellipse, on the trail, stood a gaunt form, a huge
dog-wolf. He was a sinister figure, his snarling lips curled back from
strong yellow fangs, his wide powerful head low hung, and the black
bristles on his back erect in challenge.

The whole thing was weird, uncanny; a single wolf to stand his ground in
daylight was unusual.

Instinctively Bulldog reined in the buckskin, and half turning in the
saddle, with something of a shudder, searched the ground at the wolf's
feet dreading to find something. But there was nothing.

The dog-wolf, with a snarling twist of his head, sprang into the bushes
just as Carney dropped a hand to his gun; his quick eye had seen the
movement.

Carney had meant to camp just beyond the ford of Singing Water, but the
usually placid buckskin was fretful, nervous.

A haunting something was in the air; Carney, himself, felt it. The
sudden apparition of the wolf could not account for this mental unrest,
either in man or beast, for they were both inured to the trail, and a
wolf meant little beyond a skulking beast that a pistol shot would drive
away.

High above the rider towered Old Squaw Mountain. It was like a battered
feudal castle, on its upper reaches turret and tower and bastion
catching vagrant shafts of gold and green, as, beyond, in the far
west, a flaming sun slid down behind the Selkirks. Where he rode in the
twisted valley a chill had struck the air, suggesting vaults, dungeons;
the giant ferns hung heavy like the plumes of knights drooping with
the death dew. A reaching stretch of salmon bushes studded with myriad
berries that gleamed like topaz jewels hedged on both sides the purling,
frothing stream that still held the green tint of its glacier birth.

Many times in his opium running Carney had swung along this wild trail
almost unconscious of the way, his mind travelling far afield; now
back to the old days of club life; to the years of army routine; to the
bright and happy scenes where rich-gowned women and cultured men laughed
and bantered with him. At times it was the newer rough life of the West;
the ever-present warfare of man against man; the yesterday where he had
won, or the to-morrow where he might cast a losing hazard--where the
dice might turn groggily from a six-spotted side to a deuce, and the
thrower take a fall.

But to-night, as he rode, something of depression, of a narrow
environment, of an evil one, was astride the withers of his horse; the
mountains seemed to close in and oppress him. The buckskin, too, swung
his heavy lop ears irritably back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes
one ear was pricked forward as though its owner searched the beyond,
the now glooming valley that, at a little distance, was but a blur,
the other ear held backward as though it would drink in the sounds of
pursuit.

Pursuit! that was the very thing; instinctively the rider turned in his
saddle, one hand on the horn, and held his piercing gray eyes on the
back trail

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