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 half-closed lids; there was something devilish compelling in that lean parchment face; it told of demoniac concentration in the brain behind.
The ferryman knew. With a pole he swung the stern of the flat barge down stream, the iron pulleys on the cable whined a screeching protest, the hawsers creaked, the swift current wedged against the tangented side of the ferry, and swiftly Bulldog Carney and his buckskin were shot across the muddy old Saskatchewan.
On the other side he handed the boatman a five-dollar bill, and with a grim smile said: “Take a little stroll with me to the top of the hill; there’s some drunken bums across there whose company I don’t want.”
At the top of the south bank Carney mounted his buckskin and Melted away into the poplar-covered landscape; stepped out of the story for the time being.
Back at the Alberta the general assembly was rearranging itself. The Mounted Policeman, now set afoot by the death of his horse, had hurried down to the barracks to report; possibly to follow up Carney’s trail with a new mount.
The half-breed had come back from the puddle a thing of black ooze and profanity.
Jack the Wolf, having dug the mud from his eyes, and ears, and neck band, was in the hotel making terms with Cameron for the summer’s work at Fort Victor.
Billy the Piper was revealing intimate history of Bulldog Carney. From said narrative it appeared that Bulldog was as humorous a bandit as ever slit a throat. Billy had freighted whisky for Carney when that gentleman was king of the booze runners.
“Why didn’t you spill the beans, Billy?” Nagel queried; “there’s a thousand on Carney’s head all the time. We’d’ve tied him horn and hoof and cropped the dough.”
“Dif’rent here,” the Piper growled; “I’ve saw a man flick his gun and pot at Carney when Bulldog told him to throw up his hands, and all that cuss did was laugh and thrown his own gun up coverin’ the other broncho; but it was enough—the other guy’s hands went up too quick. If I’d set the pack on him, havin’ so to speak no just cause, well, Nagel, you’d been lookin’ round for another freighter. He’s the queerest cuss I ever stacked up agen. It kinder seems as if jokes is his religion; an’ when he’s out to play he’s plumb hostile. Don’t monkey none with his game, is my advice to you fellers.”
Nagel stepped to the door, thrust his swarthy face though it, and, seeing that the policeman had gone, came back to the bar and said: “Boys, the drinks is on me cause I see a man, a real man.”
He poured whisky into a glass and waited with it held high till the others had done likewise; then he said in a voice that vibrated with admiration:
“Here’s to Bulldog Carney! Gad, I love a man! When that damn trooper calls him, what does he do? You or me would’ve quit cold or plugged Mister Khaki-jacket—we’d had to. Not so Bulldog. He thinks with his nut, and both hands, and both feet; I don’t need to tell you boys what happened; you see it, and it were done pretty. Here’s to Bulldog Carney!” Nagel held his hand out to the Piper: “Shake, Billy. If you’d give that cuss away I’d’ve kicked you into kingdom come, knowin’ him as I do now.”
* * * *
The population of Fort Victor, drawing the color line, was four