Bulldog Carney

Carney was so wearied by the sustained struggle that was like a man battling the waves, half the time beneath the waters, that his flagged senses became atrophied, numbed, scarce tabulating anything but the fact that they still held on toward the cave.

Then he heard a bell. Curious that. Was it all a dream – or was this the real thing: that he was in a merry party, a sleighing party – that they were going to a ball in a stone palace? He could hear a sleigh bell.

Then he was nice and warm. He stretched himself lazily. It was a dream – he was waking.

When he opened his eyes he saw a fire, and the flickering firelight played on stone walls. Beside the fire was sitting a man; behind him something stamped on the stone floor.

He turned his head and saw the buckskin asleep on his feet with low-hung head.

"How d'you feel, Stranger?" the man at the fire asked, rising up, and coming to his side.

Carney stared; he was supposed to be back there fighting a blizzard. And now, remembrance, coursing with langourous speed through his mind, he was in the cave where he had held Jack the Wolf a prisoner.

He sat up and pondered this with groggy slowness.

"Some horse, that, Stranger." The man's voice that had sounded thinly sinister had a humanized tone as he said this.

Carney's tongue was dry, puckered from the lowered vitality. He tried to answer, and the man, noting this, said: "Take your time, Mister. You're makin' the grade all right, all right. I knowed you was just asleep. Try this dope."

He poured some hot tea into a tin cup. It toniced the tired Carney; it was like oil on the dry bearings of a delicate machine.

"Some April shower," the man said, piling wood on the fire. "I heerd a horse neigh – it was kind of a squeal, and my bronch havin' drifted out to sea ahead of this damn gale, I thinks he's come back. I heerd his bell, and I makes a fight with ol' white whiskers – 'twan't more'n 'bout ten yards at that – and there's that danged rat of yours, and he won't come in to the warm 'cause you'd got pinned agin a boulder and snow; he seemed to know that if he pulled too hard he'd break your danged neck. Then we got you in – that's all. Some horse!"

This and the warmth and the tonic tea brought Carney up to date. He held out his hand.

But a curious metamorphosis in the man startled Carney. He turned surlily to shake up the fire, throwing over his shoulder: "I ain't done nothin'; you've got to thank that little jack rabbit fer pullin' you through. I went out after my own bronch."

"But ain't I all right, Stranger?" Carney asked gently, for he had met many men in the waste places with just this curious antipathy to an unknown. Oregon was like that. Men living in the wide outside became like outcast buffalo bulls, in their supersensitiveness – every man was an enemy till he proved himself.

The man straightened up, and his eyes that were set too close together each side of the fin-like nose rested on Carney in a squinting look of distrust.

"I ain't never knowed but one man was all right, and the Mounted Police hounded him till he give up."

The cave man turned the stem of the pipe he had been smoking toward the horse. "That buckskin with the mule ears belongs to Bulldog Carney. Are you him, or are you a hawse thief?"

"How do you know the horse?"

"I got reason a-plenty to know him. He cleaned me out in Walla Walla when he beat Clatawa; and I guess you're the racin' shark that cold-decked us boys with this ringer."

Now Bulldog knew why the aversion.

"I'm Carney," he 'admitted; "but it was the gamblers put up the job; I just beat them out."

"Where d'you come from now?" the cave man asked.

"Bailey's Ferry," Carney answered in oblique precaution. He noticed that the other hung with peculiar intensity on his answer.

"How long was you fightin' that blizzard?"

"Since daylight – when I broke camp." Carney looked at his watch; it was three o'clock. "How long have I been here?"

"A couple of hours. Was you runnin' booze or hop, Bulldog?"

Carney started. Perhaps the cave man was conveying a covert threat, an intimation that he might inform on him. "Don't let's talk shop," he answered.

"I ain't got no sore spots on my hide," the other sneered; "I'm an ord'nary damn fool of a gold chaser, and I've been up in the Eagle Hills trailin' a ledge of auriferous quartz that's buck-jumpin' acrost the mountains so damn fast I never got a chanct to rope it. I'd a-stuck her out if the chuck hadn't petered. When I'd just got enough sowbelly to see me to the outside I pulled my freight. That's me, Goldbug Dave."

The other's statement flashed into Carney's mind a sudden disturbing thought —food! He, himself, had about one day's supply – had he it? He turned to his dunnage and saddle that lay where they had been tossed by the cave man when he had stripped them from the horse. His bacon and bannock were gone!

Wheeling, he asked, "Did you see anything of my grub?"

"All that was on your bronch is there, Bulldog. I don't rob no man's cache. And all I got's here," he held up in one hand a slab of bacon, about four pounds in weight, and in the other a drill bag, in its bottom a round bulge of flour the size of a cocoa-nut "That's got to get me to Bailey's Ferry," he added as he dropped them back at the head of his blankets.

A subconscious presentment of trouble caused Carney, through force of habit, to caress the place where his gun should have been – the pigskin pocket was empty.

The other man bared his teeth; it was like the quiver of a wolf's lip. "Your Gatt must've kicked out back there in the snow; I see it was gone."

Bulldog knew this was a lie; he knew the cave man had taken his gun. He ran his eye over his host's physical exhibit – when the time came he would get his gun back or appropriate the one so in evidence in the other's belt. He went back to his dunnage, a thought of the buckskin in his mind; to his joy he found the horse's oats safe in the bag. This fastened the idea he had that the other had stolen his food, for his bacon and bannock had been in the same bag, they could hardly have worked out and the oats remain.

He sat down again, and mentally arranged the situation. He could hear outside the blizzard still raging; he could see in the opening the swirling snow that indeed had gradually raised a barrier, a white gate to their chamber. This kept the intense cold out, a cold that was at least fifty below zero. The snow would lie in the valleys through which the trail wound twenty feet deep in places. They had no snowshoes; he had no food; and Goldbug Dave's store was only sufficient for a week with two men eating it.

He knew that there was something in Dave's mind; either a bargain, or a fight for the food. They might be imprisoned for a month; a chinook wind might come up the next day, or the day following that would melt the snow with its soft warm kiss like rain washes a street.

Carney was not hungry; the strain had left him fagged – he was hungry only for rest; and the buckskin, he knew, felt the same desire.

He lay down, and had slept two hours when he was wakened by the sweet perfume of frying pork.

Casually he noticed that but one slice of bacon lay in the pan. He watched the cook turn it over and over with the point of his hunting knife, cooking it slowly, economically, hoarding every drop of its vital fat. When the bacon was cooked the chef lifted it out on the point of his knife and stirred some flour into the gravy, adding water, preparing that well-known delicacy of the trail known as slumgullion.

Dave withdrew the pan and let it rest on the stone floor just beside the fire; then he looked across af Carney, and, catching the gray of his opened eyes, worded the foreboding thought that had been in Carney's mind before he fell asleep.

"I ain't got no call to give you a show-down on this, Bulldog, but I'm goin' to. When I snaked you in here that didn't cost me nothin'; anyways you was down and out for the count. Now you've come back it ain't up to me to throw my chanct away by de-clarin' you in on this grub; I'd be a damn fool to do it – I'd be just playin' agin myself."

Then he spat in the fire and held the pan over its blaze to warm the slimy mixture.

Carney remained silent, and his host, as if making out a case for himself continued: "We may be bottled up here for a week, or a month. Two men ain't got no chanct on that grub-pile, no chanct."

"Why don't you eat it then?" and Carney sat up. "I could, 'cause it's mine; but I got a proposition to make – you can take it or leave it."

"Spit it out."

"It's just this" – the fox eyes shifted uneasily to the little buckskin, and then back to Carney's face – "I'll share this grub if, when it's gone, you cut in with the bronch."

Carney shivered at this, inwardly; facially he didn't twitch an eye; his features were as immobile as though he had just filled a royal flush. The proposition sounded as cold-blooded as if the other man had asked him to slit the throat of a brother for a cannibalistic orgy.

"It's only ord'nary hawse sense," Dave added when Carney did not speak; "kept in the snow that meat'd last us a month. Feelin's don't count when a man's playin' fer his life, and that's what we're doin'."

"I don't dispute the sense of your proposition, my kind friend," Carney said in a well-mastered voice: "I'm not hungry just now, and I'll think it over. I've got a sneaking regard for the little buckskin, but, of course, if I don't get out he'd starve to death anyway."

"Take your time," and the owner of the pan pulled it between his legs, ate the slice of bacon, and with a tin spoon lapped up the glutinous mess.

Carney watched this performance, smothering the anger and hunger that were now battling in him. It was a one-sided argument; the other man had a gun, and Carney knew that he would use it the minute his store of provisions were gone – perhaps before that. And Carney was determined to make the discussion more equitable. Once he could put a hand on the dictator, the lop-sided argument would true itself up. As to killing the little buckskin that had saved his life – bah! the very idea of it made his fingers twitch for a grasp of the other's windpipe.

For a long time Carney sat moodily turning over in his mind something; and the other man, having lighted his pipe, sat back against the wall of the cave smoking.

At last Carney spoke. "There's a way out of this."

"Yes, if a chinook blows up Kettlebelly Valley – there ain't no other way. The manna days is all gone by."

"There's another way. This is an old worked-out mine we're in, the Lost Ledge Mine."

"She's worked out, right enough. There never was nothin' but a few stringers of gold – they soon petered out."

"When the men who were working this mine pulled out they left a lot of heavy truck behind," Carney continued. "There's a forge, coal, tools, and, what I'm thinking of, half a dozen sets of horse snowshoes back there. I could put a set of those snowshoes on the buckskin and make Bucking Horse in three or four days. He wore them down in the Cour d'Alene."

"If you had the grub," Dave snapped; "where're you goin' to get that?"

"Half of what you've got would keep me up that long on short rations."

"And what about me – where do I come in on givin' you half my grub?"

"The other half would keep you alive till I could bring a rescue party on snowshoes and dog-train." Dave sucked at his pipe, pondering this proposition in silence; then he said, as if having made up his mind to do a generous act: "I'll cut the cards with you – your bronch agin half my chuck. If you win you can try this fool trick, if I win the bronch is mine to do the same thing, or use him to keep us both alive till a chinook blows up."

From an inside pocket of his coat he brought forth a pack of cards, and slid them apart, fan-shaped, on the corner of his blanket.

Carney was almost startled into a betrayal. On the backs of the cards winged seven blue doves. It was the pack that had been stolen from Seth Long's pocket, and the man that sat behind them was the murderer of Seth Long, Carney knew. Yes, it was the same pack; there was the same slight variation of the wings. In a second Carney had mastered himself.

"I guess it's fair," he said hesitatingly; "let me think it over – I'm fond of that little cuss, but I guess a man's life comes first."

He sat looking into the fire thinking, and if Dave had been a mind reader the gun in his belt would have covered Carney for the latter was thinking, "There are three aces in that pack and the fourth is in my pocket."

Then he spoke, shifting closer to the blanket on which the other sat:

"I'll cut!"

"Draw a card, then," Dave commanded, touching the strung-out pack.

Carney could see the acute-angled wings of the middle dove on a card; he turned it up – it was the ace of diamonds.

"Some draw!" Dave declared. Then he deftly flipped over the ace of spades, adding: "Horse and horse, Bulldog; draw agin."

"Shuffle and spread-eagle them again, for luck," Carney suggested.

Dave gathered the cards, gave them a riffle, and swept them along the blanket in a tenuous stream.

Carney edged closer to the ribbon of blue-doved cards; and the owner of them, a sneer on his lips, craned his head and shoulders forward in a gambler's eagerness.

Intensity, too, seemed to claim Bulldog; he rested his elbows on his knees and scanned the cards as if he hesitated over the risk. There, a little to the right, he discovered the third ace, the only one in the pack. If he turned that Dave could not tie him again. He knew that the minute he turned over that card the cave-man would know that he had been double-crossed in his sure thing; his gun would be thrust into Carney's face; perhaps – once a killer always a killer – he would not hesitate but would kill.

So Carney let his right hand hover carelessly a little beyond the ace, while his left crept closer to Dave's right wrist.

"Why don't you draw your card?" Dave snarled. "What're you – "

Carney's right hand flopped over the ace of clubs, and in the same split second his left closed like the jaws of a vise on Dave's wrist.

"Turn over a card with your left hand, quick!" he commanded.

Dave, as if in the act of obeying, reached for his gun with the left hand, but a twist of the imprisoned wrist, almost tearing his arm from the shoulder socket, turned him on his back, and his gun was whisked from its pigskin pocket by Carney.

Then Bulldog released the wrist and commanded: "Draw that card, quick, or I'll plug you; then we'll talk!"

Sullenly the other turned the card: as if in mockery it was a "jack."

"You lose," Carney declared. "Now sit back there against the wall."

Cursing Bulldog for a cold-deck sharp, the other sullenly obeyed.

Then Carney turned up the end of Dave's blanket and found, as he knew he should, Hadley's plethoric wallet, and his own six-gun. This proceeding had hushed the other man's profane denunciation; his eyes held a foreboding look.

Carney stepped back to the fire, saying:

"You're Tacoma Jack – you're the man that staked Seth Long to this marked pack." He drew from his pocket the ace of hearts and held it up to Tacoma's astonished view. "Here's the missing ace."

He put it back in his pocket and resumed: "That was to rob Hadley, when you found he was leaving the money in Seth's strong box while he went with you up into the hills to look at a mine that didn't exist. If he had taken the money with him he would have been killed instead of Seth. When the game was over that night, Seth signaled you with a lamp in the window, and when you went in to settle with him the sight of the money was too much, and you plugged him."

"It's a damn lie! I was up in the mountains and don't know nothin' about it."

"You were standing at that back window of the police shack when Seth and Hadley were playing alone, and when you shot Seth you were smooth enough not to open the front door for fear some one might be coming and see you, but jumped from the back window."

Carney took from his pocket the paper templet he had made of the tracks in the mud.

"I see from the soles of your gum-shoe packs that this gets you." He held it up.

"It's all a damned pack of lies, Bulldog; you've been chewin' your own hop. Who's goin' to swaller that guff?"

Carney had expected this. He knew Tacoma was of the determined one-idea type; lacking absolute eye-witness evidence he would deny complicity even with a rope around his neck. He realized that with the valley lying twenty feet deep in snow he couldn't take Tacoma to Bucking Horse; in fact with him that was not the real desired point. If Carney had been a Mounted Policeman the honor of the force would have demanded that he give up his life trying to land his prisoner; but he was a private individual, trying to keep clean the name of a woman he had a high regard for – Jeanette Holt. He wanted a written confession from this man. Bringing in the stolen money and the cards wouldn't be enough; it might be said that he, himself, had taken these two things and returned them.

Even the punishment of Tacoma didn't interest him vitally. Two thieves had combined to rob a stranger, and over a division of the spoil one had been killed – it was not, vitally, Carney's funeral.

Now to gain the confession he stretched a point, saying:

"They believe Seth Long. He says you shot him." Startled out of his cunning, Tacoma blundered: "That's a damn lie – Seth's as dead's a herrin'!"

"How do you know, Tacoma?" and Carney smiled.

The other, stunned by his foolish break, spluttered sullenly, "You said so yourself."

"Seth's dead now, Tacoma, but you were in too much of a hurry to make your get-away. Dr. Anderson and I found him alive, and he said that you, Tacoma Jack, shot him. That's why I pulled out on this trail."

The two men sat in silence for a little. Tacoma knew that Carney was driving at something; he knew that Carney could not take him to Bucking Horse with the trail as it was; the buckskin would have all he could do to carry one man, and without huge moose-hunting snowshoes no man could make half a mile of that trail.

Carney broke the silence: "You made a one-sided proposition, Tacoma, when you had the drop on me; now I'm going to deal. I'd take you in if I didn't value the little buckskin more than your carcass; I don't give a damn whether you're hanged or die here. I'm going to cut from that slab of bacon six slices. That'll keep you alive for six days with a little flour I'll leave you. I can make Bucking Horse in three days at most with snowshoes on the buckskin; then I'll come back for you with a dogtrain and a couple of men on snowshoes. You've got a gambling chance; it's like filling a bob-tailed flush – but I'm going to let you draw. If the chinook comes up the valley kissing this snow before I get back you'll get away; I'd give even a wolf a fighting chance. But I've got to clear a good woman's name; get that, Tacoma!" and Carney tapped the cards with a forefinger in emphasis. "You've got to sign a confession here in my noteboook that you killed Seth Long."

"I'll see you in hell first! It's a damn trap – I didn't kill him!" %

"As you like. Then you lose your bet on the chinook right now; for I take the money, your gun, your boots, and all the grub."

As Carney with slow deliberation stated the terms Tacoma's heart sank lower and lower as each article of life saving was specified.

"Take your choice, quick!" Carney resumed; "a grub stake for you, and you bet on the chinook if you sign the confession; if you refuse I make a cleanup. You starve to death here, or die on the trail, even if the chinook comes in two or three days." There was an ominous silence. Carney broke it, saying, a sharp determination in his voice: "Decide quick, for I'm going to hobble you."

Tacoma knew Bulldog's reputation; he knew he was up against it. If Carney took the food – and he would – he had no chance. The alternative was his only hope.

"I'll sign – I got to!" he said, surily; "you write and I'll tell just how it happened."

"You write it yourself – I won't take a chance on you: you'd swear I forged your signature, but a man can't forge a whole letter."

He tossed his notebook and pencil over to the other.

When Tacoma tossed it back with a snarling oath, Carney, keeping one eye on the other man, read it. It was a statement that Seth Long and Tacoma Jack had quarreled over the money; that Seth, being half drunk, had pulled his gun; that Tacoma had seized Seth's hand across the table, and in the struggle Seth had been shot with his own gun.

Carney closed the notebook and put it in his pocket, saying: "This may be true, Tacoma, or it may not. Personally I've got what I want. If you're laughing down in your chest that you've put one over on Bulldog Carney, forget it. To keep you from making any fool play that might make me plug you I'm going to hobble you. When I pull out in the morning I'll turn you loose."

Carney was an artist at twisting a rope security about a man, and Tacoma, placed in the helpless condition of a swathed babe, Carney proceeded to cook himself a nice little dinner off the latter's bacon. Then he rubbed down the buckskin, melted some snow for a drink for the horse, gave him a feed of oats, and stretched himself on the opposite side of the fire from Tacoma, saying: "You're on your good behavior, for the minute you start anything you lose your bet on the chinook."

In the morning when Carney opened his eyes daylight was streaming in through the cave mouth. He blinked wonderingly; the snow wall that had all but closed the entrance had sagged down like a weary man that had huddled to sleep; and the air that swept in through the opening was soft and balmy, like the gentle breeze of a May day.

Carney rose and pushed his way through the little mound of wet, soggy snow and gazed down the valley. The giant pines that had drooped beneath the weight of their white mantles were now dropping to earth huge masses of snow; the sky above was blue and suffused with gold from a climbing sun. Rocks on the hillside thrust through the white sheet black, wet, gnarled faces, and in the bottom of the valley the stream was gorged with snow-water.

A hundred yards down the trail, where a huge snow bank leaned against a cliff, the head and neck of a horse stood stiff and rigid out of the white mass. About the neck was a leather strap from which hung a cow-bell. It was Tacoma's cayuse frozen stiff, and the bell was the bell that Carney had heard as he was slipping off into dreamland behind the little buckskin.

Carney turned back to where the other man lay, his furtive eyes peeping out from above his blanket – they were like rat eyes.

"You win your bet, Tacoma," Carney said; "the chinook is here."

Tacoma had known; he had smelt it; but he had lain there, fear in his heart that now, when it was possible, Bulldog would take him in to Bucking Horse.

"The bargain stands, don't it, Bulldog?" he asked: "I win on the chinook, don't I?"

"You do, Tacoma. Bulldog Carney's stock in trade is that he keeps his word."

"Yes, I've heard you was some man, Bulldog. If I'd knew you'd pulled into Buckin' Horse that day, and was in the game I guess I'd a-played my hand dif'rent – p'raps it's kind of lucky for you I didn't know all that when I drug you in out of the blizzard."

Carney waited a day for the snow to melt before the hot chinook. It was just before he left that Tacoma asked, like a boy begging for a bite from an apple: "Will you give me back them cards, Bulldog – I'd be kind of lost without them when I'm alone if I didn't have 'em to riffle."

"If I gave you the cards, Tacoma, you'd never make the border; Oregon is waiting down at Bighorn to rope a man with a pack of cards in his pocket that's got seven blue doves on the back; and I'm not going to cold-deck you. After you pass Oregon you take your own chances of them getting you."

VI. – EVIL SPIRITS

The Rockies, their towering white domes like sheets of ivory inlaid with blue and green, the glacier gems, looked down upon the Vermillion Range, and the Vermillion looked down upon the sienna prairie in which was Fort Calbert, as Marathon might have looked down upon the sea.

In Fort Calbert the Victoria Hotel, monument to the prodigality of Remittance Men, held its gray stone body in aloofment from the surrounding boxlike structures of the town.