Bulldog Carney

"He'll go out over the thieves' highway, down the border trail to Montana or Idaho."

"My guidness! I think you're right. Perhaps before morning somebody may be headin' south with the loot. If it's Shipley – I mean, anybody – he may have a colleague to take the money down over the border."

"Yes, the money; he'll not try to handle it in Canada for fear of being trapped on the numbers."

"So you might not get the murderer after all," Anderson said, meditatively; "just an accomplice who wouldn't squeal."

"No; not with the money alone on him we wouldn't have just what I want, but when we get a man with the marked pack in his pocket that's the murderer. It was devilish fatalism that made him take that pack, like a man will cling to an old pocket-knife; they're the tools of his trade, so to speak. And here in the mountains he could not handily come by another pack, perhaps."

"I comprehend. If the slayer goes down that trail he'll have the marked cards with him still, but if he sends an accomplice the man'll just have the money on him. Very logical, Bulldog."

Twice as they had talked Carney had stepped quickly, silently, to the door at the foot of the stairway and listened; now he came back, and lowering his voice, said: "I get you, Doctor; it's devilish square of you. I'm clear of this thing, I fancy, as you say, in the eye of the law, but for a good woman's sake I've got to get the murderer."

"It would be commendable, Carney, if you can."

"Well, then, give these other men plenty of rope."

"I comprehend," and Dr. Anderson nodded his head.

"I've got a man – 'Oregon' he's known as – down at Big Horn Crossing; he's there for my work; I'm going to pull out to-night and tell 'Oregon' to search every man that rides the border trail going south."

"I don't know whether I can give you the proper authority, Bulldog – I'll look it up with the town clerk."

Carney laughed, a soft, throaty chuckle of honest amusement.

Piqued, the Doctor said irritably, "You're thinking, Bulldog, that the little town clerk and myself are somewhat of a joke as representing authority, eh?"

"No, indeed, Doctor. I was thinking of 'Oregon.' He's got his authority for everything, got it right in his belt; he'll search his man first and explain afterwards; and when he gets the right man he'll bring him in. First, I'm going to make a cast around the police shack with a lantern. Even by its light I may pick up some information. I'll get Jeanette to stake me to a couple of days' grub; I'll take some oats for the buckskin and be back in three days."

"I'll wait here till you have a look," the Doctor declared; "there might be some clue you'd be leaving with me to follow up."

Carney secured a reflector lantern from a back room and, first kneeling down, examined the footsteps that had been left in the soft black earth around the police shack door. He seemed to discover a trial, for he skirted the building, stooping down with the lantern held close to the ground, and once more knelt under a back window. Here there were tracks of a heavy foot; some that indicated that a man had stood for some time there; that sometimes he had been peering in the window, the toe prints almost touching the wall. There were two deeply indented heel marks as if somebody had dropped from the window.

Carney put up his hand and tested the lower half of the sash. He could shove it up quite easily. Next he drew a sheet of paper from his pocket – it was really an old letter – and with his pocket-knife cut it to fit a footprint that was in the earth. Then he returned to the front door, and with his paper gauge tested the different foot imprints, following them a piece as they lead away from the shack. He stood up and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his brows drawn into a heavy frown of reflection, ending by starting off at a fast pace that carried him to the edge of the little town.

In front of a small log shack he stooped and compared the paper in his hand with some footprints. He seemed puzzled, for there were different boot tracks, and the one – the latest, he judged, for they topped the others – was toeing away from the shack.

He straightened up and knocked on the door.

There was no answer. He knocked again loudly; no answer. He shook the door by the iron handle until the latch clattered like a castanet: there was no sound from within. He stepped to a window, tapped on it and called, "Cranford, Cranford!" The gloomed stillness of the shack convinced him that Cranford had gone – perhaps, as he had intimated, to Bald Rock.

He went back and fitted the paper into the topmost tracks, those heading away from the shack. The paper did not seem to fit – not quite; in fact, the other track was closer to the paper gauge.

Back at the hotel he related to Dr. Anderson the result of his trailing.

When he spoke of Cranford's absence from the shack, the Doctor involuntarily exclaimed: "My God! that does complicate matters. I was thinking we might get a double hitch on yon Shipley by proving from Cranford he hadn't been near the latter's shack. But now it involves Cranford, if he's gone. He's an unlucky devil, that, and I know, on the quiet, that he's likely to get in trouble over some payments on a mine, – they're threatening a suit for misappropriation of funds or something."

"You see, Doctor," Carney said, "the sooner I block the likely get-away game the better."

"Yes. You pull out as soon as you like. I'll have a search for Cranford, and I'll generally keep things in shape till Sergeant Black comes – likely to-morrow he'll be here. I'll hold an inquest and, of course, the verdict will be 'by someone unknown.' I'll say that you've gone to hurry in Sergeant Black."

When the Doctor had gone Carney went upstairs to where Jeanette was waiting for him in the little front sitting room.

With her there was little beyond just the horror of the terrible ending to it. Her life with Seth Long had been a curious one, curious in its absolute emptiness of everything but just an arrangement. There was no affection, no pretense of it. She was like a niece, or even a daughter, to Seth; their relationship had been practically on that basis. Her father had been a partner of Long in some of his enterprises, enterprises that had never been much of anything beyond final failure. When his partner had died Seth had assumed charge of the girl. It was perhaps the one redeeming feature in Seth's ordinary useless life.

Now Jeanette and Carney hardly touched on the past which they both knew so well, or the future about which, just now, they knew nothing.

Carney explained, as delicately as he could, the situation; the desirability of his clearing his name absolutely, independent of her evidence, by finding the murderer. He really held in his mind a somewhat nebulous theory. He had not confided this fully to Dr. Anderson, nor did he now to Jeanette; just told her that he was going away for two or three days and would be supposed to have gone after the Mounted Policeman.

He told her about the disappearance of the marked pack, and explained how much depended upon the discovery of its present possessor.

Second Part

It was within an hour of daybreak when Carney, astride his buckskin, slipped quietly out of Bucking Horse, and took the trail that skirted the tortuous stream toward the south. He had had no sleep, but that didn't matter; for two or three days and nights at a stretch he could go without sleep when necessary. Perhaps when he spelled for breakfast, as the buckskin fed on the now drying autumn grass, he would snatch a brief half hour of slumber, and again at noon; that would be quite enough.

When the light became strong he examined the trail. There were several tracks, cayuse tracks, the larger footprints of what were called bronchos, the track of pack mules; they were coming and going. But they were cold trails, seemingly not one fresh. Little cobwebs, like gossamer wings, stretched across the sunken bowl-like indentations, and dew sparkled on the silver mesh like jewels in the morning sun.

It was quite ten o'clock when Carney discovered the footprints of a pony that were evidently fresh; here and there the outcupped black earth where the cayuse had cantered glistened fresh in the sunlight.

Carney could not say just where the cayuse had struck the trial he was on. It gave him a depressed feeling. Perhaps the rider carried the loot, and had circled to escape interception. But when Carney came to the cross trail that ran from Fort Steel to Kootenay the cayuse tracks turned to the right toward Kootenay, and he felt a conviction that the rider was not associated with the murder. With that start he would be heading for across the border; he would not make for a Canadian town where he would be in touch with the wires.

Along the border trail there were no fresh tracks.

It was toward evening when Carney passed through the Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge – past the gruesome place where Fourteen-foot Johnson had been killed by Jack the Wolf; past where he himself had been caught in the bear trap.

The buckskin remembered it all; he was in a hurry to get beyond it; he clattered over the narrow, winding, up-and-down footpath with the eager hasty step of a fleeing goat, his head swinging nervously, his big lop ears weaving back and forth in apprehension.

Well beyond the Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge, past the dark maw of the cave in which Jack the Wolf had hidden the stolen gold, Carney went, camping in the valley, that had now broadened out, when its holding walls of mountain sides had blanketed the light so that he travelled along an obliterated trail, obliterated to all but the buckskin's finer sense of perception.

At the first graying of the eastern sky he was up, and after a snatch of breakfast for himself and the buckskin, hurrying south again. No one had passed in the night for Carney had slept on one side of the trail while the horse fed or rested on the other, with a picket line stretched between them: and there were no fresh tracks.

At two o'clock he came to the little log shack just this side of the U. S. border where Oregon kept his solitary ward. Nobody had passed, Oregon advised; and Carney gave the old man his instructions, which were to search any passer, and if he had the fifty-dollar bills or the marked cards, hobble him and bring him back to Bucking Horse.

Over a pan of bacon and a pot of strong tea Oregon reported to his superior all the details of their own endeavor, which, in truth, was opium running. That was his office, to drift across the line casually, back and forth, as a prospector, and keep posted as to customs officers; who they were, where the kind-hearted ones were, and where the fanatical ones were; for once Carney had been ambushed, practically illegally, five miles within Canadian territory, and had had to fight his way out, leaving twenty thousand dollars' worth of opium in the hand of a tyrannical customs department.

At four o'clock Carney sat the buckskin, and reached down to grasp the hand of his lieutenant.

"I'll tell you, Bulldog," the latter said, swinging his eyes down the valley toward the southwest, "there's somethin' brewin' in the way of weather. My hip is pickin' a quarrel with that flat-nosed bit of lead that's been nestin' in a j'int, until I just natural feel as if somebody'd fresh plugged me."

Carney laughed, for the day was glorious. The valley bed through which wandered, now sluggishly, a green-tinged stream, lay like a glorious oriental rug, its colors rich-tinted by the warm flood of golden light that hung in the cedar and pine perfumed air. The lower reaches of the hills on either side were crimson, and gold, and pink, and purple, and emerald green, all softened into a gentle maze-like tapestry where the gaillardias and monkshood and wolf-willow and salmonberry and saskatoon bushes caressed each other in luxurious profusion, their floral bloom preserved in autumn tawny richness by the dry mountain air.

And this splendor of God's artistry, this wondrous great tapestry, was hung against the sombre green wall of a pine and fir forest that zigzagged and stood in blocks all up the mountain side like the design of some giant cubist.

Carney laughed and swung his gloved hand in a semicircle of derision.

"It's purty," Oregon said, "it's purty, but I've seen a purty woman, all smilin' too, break out in a hell of a temper afore you could say 'hands up.' My hip don't never make no mistakes, 'cause it ain't got no fancies. It's a-comin'. You ride like hell, Carney; it's a-comin'. Say, Bulldog, look at that," and Oregon's long, lean, not over-clean finger pointed to the buckskin's head; "he knows as well as I do that the Old Man of the Mountains is cookin' up somethin'. See 'em mule lugs of his – see the white of that eye? And he ain't takin' in no purty scenery, he's lookin' over his shoulder down off there," and Oregon stretched a long arm toward the west, toward the home of the blue-green mountains of ice, the glaciers.

"It's too early for a blizzard," Carney contended. "It might be, if they run on schedule time like the trains, but they don't. I froze to death once in one in September. I come back to life again, 'cause I'd been good always; and perhaps, Bulldog, your record mightn't let you out if you got caught between here and Buckin' Horse in a real he-game of snow hell'ry. The trail runs mostly up narrow valleys that would pile twenty feet deep, and I reckon, though you don't care overmuch yourself what gener'ly happens, you don't want to give the buckskin a raw deal by gettin' him into any fool finish. He knows; he wants to get to a nice little silk-lined sleepin' box afore this snoozer hits the mountains. Good-bye, Bulldog, and ride like hell – the buckskin won't mind; let him run the show – he knows, the clever little cuss."

Carney's slim fingers, though steel, were almost welded together in the heat of the squeeze they got in Oregon's bear-trap of a paw.

The trail here was like a prairie road for the valley was flat, and the buckskin accentuated his apprehensive eagerness by whisking away at a sharp canter. Carney could hear, from over his shoulder, the croaking bellow of Oregon who had noticed this: "He knows, Bulldog. Leave him alone. Let him run things hisself!"

Though Carney had laughed at Oregon's gloomy forecast, he knew the old man was weather-wise, that a lifetime spent in the hills and the wide places of earth had tutored him to the varying moods of the elements; that his super-sense was akin to the subtle understanding of animals. So he rode late into the night, sometimes sleeping in the saddle, as the buckskin, with loose rein, picked his way up hill and down dale and along the brink of gorges with the surefootedness of a big-horn. He camped beneath a giant pine whose fallen cones and needles had spread a luxurious mattress, and whose balsam, all unstoppered, floated in the air, a perfume that was like a balm of life.

Almost across the trail Carney slept lest the bearer of the loot might slip by in the night.

He had lain down with one gray blanket over him; he had gone to sleep with a delicious sense of warmth and cosiness; he woke shivering. His eyes opened to a gray light, a faint gray, the steeliness that filtered down into the gloomed valley from a paling sky. A day was being born; the night was dying.

An appalling hush was in the air; the valley was as devoid of sound as though the very trees had died in the night; as if the air itself had been sucked out from between the hills, leaving a void.

The buckskin was up and picking at the tender shoots of a young birch. It had been a half-whinnying snort from the horse that had wakened Carney, for now he repeated it, and threw his head up, the lop ears cocked as though he listened for some break in the horrible stillness, watched for something that was creeping stealthily over the mountains from the west.

Carney wet the palm of his hand and held it up. It chilled as though it had been dipped in evaporating spirits. Looking at the buckskin Oregon's croak came back:

"He knows: ride like hell, Bulldog!"

Carney rose, and poured a little feed of oats from his bag on a corner of his blanket for the horse. He built a fire and brewed in a copper pot his tea. Once the shaft of smoke that spiraled lazily upward flickered and swished flat like a streaming whisp of hair; and above, high up in the giant pine harp, a minor string wailed a thin tremulous note. The gray of the morning that had been growing bright now gloomed again as though night had fled backwards before the thing that was in the mountains to the west.

The buckskin shivered; the hairs of his coat stood on end like fur in a bitter cold day; he snapped at the oats as though he bit at the neck of a stallion; he crushed them in his strong jaws as though he were famished, or ate to save them from a thief.

In five minutes the strings of the giant harp above Carney's head were playing a dirge; the smoke of his fire swirled, and the blaze darted here and there angrily, like the tongue of a serpent. From far across the valley, from somewhere in the rocky caverns of the mighty hills, came the heavy moans of genii. It was hardly a noise, it was a great oppression, a manifestation of turmoil, of the turmoil of God's majesty, His creation in travail.

Carney quaffed the scalding tea, and raced with the buckskin in the eating of his food. He became a living thermometer; his chilling blood told him that the temperature was going down, down, down. The day before he had ridden with his coat hung to the horn of his saddle; now a vagrant thought flashed to his buffalo coat in his room at the Gold Nugget.

He saddled the buckskin, and the horse, at the pinch of the cinch, turned from his oats that were only half eaten, and held up his head for the bit.

Carney strapped his dunnage to the back of the saddle, mounted, and the buckskin, with a snort of relief, took the trail with eager steps. It wound down to the valley here toward the west, and little needles stabbed at the rider's eyes and cheeks as though the air were filled with indiscernible diamond dust. It stung; it burned his nostrils; it seemed to penetrate the horse's lungs, for he gave a snorting cough.

And now the full orchestra of the hills was filling the valleys and the canyons with an overture, as if perched on the snowed slope of Squaw Mountain was the hydraulicon of Vitruvius, a torrent raging its many throats into unearthly dirge.

Carney's brain vibrated with this presage of the something that had thrilled his horse. In his ears the wailing, sighing, reverberating music seemed to carry as refrain the words of Oregon: "Ride like hell, Carney! Ride like hell!"

And, as if the command were within the buckskin's knowing, he raced where the path was good; and where it was bad he scrambled over the stones and shelving rocks and projecting roots with catlike haste.

In Carney's mind was the cave, the worked-out mine tunnel that drove into the mountain side; the cave that Jack the Wolf had homed in when he murdered the men on the trail; it was two hours beyond. If he could make that he and the buckskin would be safe, for the horse could enter it too.

In the thought of saving his life the buckskin occupied a dual place; that's what Oregon had said; he had no right to jeopardize the gallant little steed that had saved him more than once with fleet heel and stout heart.

He patted the eager straining neck in front of him, and, though he spoke aloud, his voice was little more in that valley of echo and reverberation than a whisper: "Good Patsy boy, we'll make it. Don't fret yourself tired, old sport; we'll make it – the cave."

The horse seemed to swing his head reassuringly as though he, too, had in his heart the undying courage that nothing daunted.

Now the invisible cutting dust that had scorched Carney's face had taken visible form; it was like fierce-driven flour. Across the valley the towering hills were blurred shapes. Carney's eyelashes were frozen ridges above his eyes; his breath floated away in little clouds of ice; the buckskin coat of the horse had turned to gray.

Sometimes at the turn of a cliff was a false lull as if the storm had been stayed; and then in twenty yards the doors of the frozen north swung again and icy fingers of death gripped man and beast.

And all the time the white prisms were growing larger; closer objects were being blotted out; the prison walls of ice were coming closer; it was more difficult to breathe; his life blood was growing sluggish; a chill was suggesting indifference – why fight?

The horse's feet were muffled by the ghastly white rug, the blizzard was spreading over the earth that the day before had been a cloth of gold; it was like a winding sheet.

Carney could feel the brave little beast falter and lurch as the merciless snow clutched at his legs where it had swirled into billows.

To the man direction was lost – it was like being above the clouds; but the buckskin held on his way straight and true; fighting, fighting, making the glorious fight that is without fear. To stop, to falter, meant death; the buckskin knew it; but he was tiring.

Carney unslung his picket line, put the loop around his chest below his arms, fastened it to the saddle horn, leaving a play of eight feet, and slipping to the ground, clutched the horse's tail, and patted him on the rump. The buckskin knew; he had checked for five seconds; now he went on again, the weight off his back being a relief.

The change was good. Carney had felt the chill of death creeping over him in the saddle; the deadly chill, the palpitating of the chest that preluded a false warmth that meant the end, the sleep of death. Now the exertion wined his blood; it brought the battling back.

Time, too, like direction, was a haze in the man's mind. Two hours away the cave had been, and surely they had struggled on hour after hour. It scarce mattered; to draw forth his watch and look was a waste of energy, the vital energy that weighed against his death; an ounce of it wasted was folly; just on through the enveloping curtain of that white wall.

Carney had meant to remount the horse when he was warmer, when he himself was tiring; but it would be murder, murder of the little hero that had fought his battles ever since they had been together. The buckskin's flanks were pumping spasmodically, like the sides of a bellows; his withers drooped; his head was low hung; he looked lean and small – scarce mightier than a jack rabbit, knee deep in the shifting sea of snow.

But the cave must be near. Carney found himself repeating these words: "The cave is near, the cave is near, Patsy; on, boy – the cave is near." His mind dwelt on the wood that he had left in the cave when he took Jack the Wolf to Bucking Horse; of how cosy it would be with a bright fire going, and the baffled blizzard howling without. Yes, he would make it. Was his life, so full of the wild adventures that he had always won out on, to be blotted by just a snowstorm, just cold?

He took a lofty stand against this. He was possessed of a feeling that it was a combat between the crude elements and his vital force of mental stamina. If he kept up his courage he would win out, as he always had. It was just Excelsior and Success, just —

There was a swirl of oblivion; he had flown through space and collided with another world; there had been some sort of a gross shock; he was alone, floating through space, and passing through snowladen clouds. There was a restful exhilaration, such as he had felt once when passing under an anesthetic – Nirvana.

Then the cold snout of some abnormal creature in these regions of the beyond pressed against his face. Gradually, as though waking from a dream – it was the muzzle of the buckskin nosing him back to consciousness. He struggled painfully to his feet. How heavy his legs were; at the bottom of them were leaden-soled diver's boots. His brain, not more than half clearing at that, he realized that he and the buckskin had slid from a treacherous shelf of rock, and fallen a dozen feet; the snow, unwittingly kind, catching them in a lap of feathery softness. But for the gallant horse he would have lain there, never to rise again of his own volition.

They scrambled back to the trail, he and the little horse, and they were going forward. Oregon's command was working out – "Let the buckskin have his own way."

If they had been out on the prairie undoubtedly they would have gone around in a circle – in fact, Carney once had done so – and the cold would have been more intense, the sweep of the wind more life-sapping; but here in the valleys in places the snow piled deeper; it was like surf rolling up in billows; it took the life force out of man and horse.