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