Bulldog Carney

As they lay chest to earth in the heavy grass Corporal McBane pivoted his body on elbows close to Sergeant Jerry and whispered: "I'm glad, man, you suggested the flare. In the dark, wi' promiscuous shootin', there might be killin', and I'd no like to pot Bulldog myself', even if he is a whisky runner."

Jerry laughed a soft, throaty chuckle. "You'd have a fine chance, Mac, with that old .44 Enfield pepper-box against Carney with his .45 Colt; he just plays it like a girl fingerin' the keys of a piano; those gray cat-eyes of his can see in the dark."

"Well, wi' the flare on him he'll quit. It's only damn fools that won't wait for a better chance."

"We had him once before," Jerry said reflectively, "and he gave us the slip; just for the joke of it, too, for it was that train hold-up, and it was proved after he had nothing to do with it. But listen to this, Scottie, we both like Bulldog, but if he bucks us, we belong to the Force."

"Aye, I'm aware of it, Sergeant; and Bulldog himself wouldn't thank us to spit on our salt. But what makes you think he'll be with this outfit?"

"Because it's just one of his damned mad capers to run it into Fort Calbert under our noses, and he wouldn't ask anyone to run the risk and not be there."

But McBane had a Scotch reluctance to believe in foolish bravado. "It's no sense, Sergeant," he objected, "and Carney's vera clever."

Suddenly, on top of the cut bank where the trail dipped through the sandy wall, something blurred the blue-black sky; there was a heavy, slipping, sliding noise as if a giant sheet of sand-paper were being shoved along the earth. There was the creaking of wood on wood, the dull thump of an axle in a hub; a softened, just perceptible thud, thud of muffled hoofs.

The shuffling noise that was as if some serpent dragged its length over the deep sands of the cut was opposite the armed men when the voice of Sergeant Platt rang out in a sharp command:

"Halt! hands up – you are covered! If you move we fire!"

At the first word, "Halt!" the bull's-eye threw its arrogant glare of light upon the creeping thing of noise. It painted against the cut-bank the bleary-eyed cayuse, the archaic Red River cart, and the unformidable figure of the Honorable Reginald Fordyce-Anstruther – that was all. That is to say, all but five square tins, atop of which sat the outlaw, Reggie.

It was a goblined, pathetically inadequate figure sitting atop the tins, the lean attenuated arms held high as if in beseechment.

Sergeant Jerry cursed softly; then he laughed; and Corporal McBane exclaimed: "Ma God! it's like catchin' a red herrin'."

But Jerry, careful scout, whispered: "Circle to the rear, Corporal; keep out of the light; it may be a blind."

Soon McBane's voice was heard from the cut-bank: "All clear, Sergeant."

Then Sergeant Jerry, stepping into the open, examined the exhibit. Instead of carrying concealed weapons Reggie had a fair load of concealed spirits; he was fully half-drunk. Questions only brought some nebulous answers about the permit being up in Fort Calbert, and that he was bringing in the goods. Even Jerry's proverbial good nature was sorely taxed.

"I'm gettin' fed up on these damned tricks of Bulldog's," he growled, "for that's what it is."

"I'm not sure," McBane objected; "this ninny may ha' blabbed, and yon breed, hearin' it, saw a chance to make a shillin' or two."

However, Reggie, and his cayuse and the whisky were attached and escorted in to barracks.

Perhaps it was the fortifying courage of the whisky the villain had imbibed that caused him to bear up remarkably well under this misfortune of the very great possibility of losing his not-too-valuable outfit; or he may have known of some fairy who would make good his fine.

In the morning the liquor was very formally taken out to the usual sacrifice place, just at the back of the barracks, and in the presence of the Superintendent and a small guard of constables, poured in a gurgling libation upon the thirsting sand-bank of a little ravine. Then the empty tins were tossed disdainfully into the coulee.

Back in the Fort Major Kane said: "This was all a blind, Sergeant Platt; none of the stuff will come down this way – they'll run it up among the miners and lumberjacks. Take Lemoine the scout, and pick up some of the patrol up about the Pass."

In half an hour Sergeant Jerry rode out from the Fort into the west; and by the middle of the afternoon Corporal McBane reported to the O.C. that the few constables remaining in the Fort were drunk – half were in the guard room.

The Major was horrified. Where had the liquor come from? Corporal McBane didn't know.

In his perplexity the Major, stick in hand, stalked angrily to the scene of the morning sacrifice. The mound apparently had not been disturbed. He had a nebulous idea that perhaps the men had chewed up the saturated earth. He jabbed viciously at the spot with his walking stick as if spearing the alcoholic demon. At the third thrust his stick went through, suggesting a hole. With boot and hand the Major sent the sand flying. A foot down he came upon a gunny sack. Beneath this was a neat crosshatching of willow wands resting atop an iron grating that was supported by a tub; a tub boned from the laundry, but the strong odor that struck the Superintendent's nostrils was not suds – it was whisky.

He yanked the tub out of the cavity and kicked it into the coulee. Then he stood up and mopped his perspiring forehead, muttering: "The devils! the cursed stuff! It's that damned outlaw, Bulldog Carney, that's put them up to this. The liquor that poor waster brought in was just a blind, the tip from the half-breed was part of his devilish plot. It's a game to put my men on the blink while he runs that carload."

Rage swirled in the Major's heart as he turned toward the Fort; but before he had reached the gates his sense – and the little man had lots of it – laid embargo on his tongue, and he passed silently to his quarters to sit on the verandah and curse softly to himself.

He was sick of the whole whisky business. He had been in the Mounted from the very first, fifteen years or so of it now. They had not come into the Territories to be pitted against the social desires of the white inhabitants who were in all other things law abiding; but here this very thing took up more than half their time and energy. And it was a losing game with the cunning and desires of a hundred men pitted against every one of his force.

There were rumors that it was soon to be changed – the trade legitimatized; that is, for Alberta to the Athabasca border. With a small army of clever whisky traders, no licenses, no supervision against them, it was a matter of impossibility to keep liquor from the half-breeds who were a sort of carry-on station to the Indians.

To trail murderers, gunmen, cattle and horse thieves, day after day across the trackless prairie, or the white sheet-of-snow buried plain, was an exhilarating game – it was something to stimulate the espirit de corps; a Mounted Policeman, feeling, when he had landed his man, full reward for all his hardships and danger; but to poke around like an ordinary city sleuth and bag some poor devil of a breed with a bottle of whisky, only to have him up before the magistrate for a small fine was, to say the least, disquieting; it made his men half ashamed of their mission.

Of course the present incident was not petty; it was like Bulldog Carney himself – big; and the Major would have given, right there, a half-year's pay to have bagged Bulldog, and so, perhaps have broken up the ring.

But determined as the force was, the British law was greater still. Without absolute, convicting evidence Carney would have been acquitted, and the Major perhaps censured for making a mistake.

At headquarters was a fixed edict: "Take no position from which you will have to recede," really, "Don't make mistakes."

As the little man sat thinking over these many things, sore at heart at the quirky thrust Fate had dealt him, for he loved the Mounted, loved his duties, loved the very men, until sometimes breaking under the strain of service in the lonely wastes they cracked and a weak streak showed – then he was a tiger, a martinet; no sparing: "Out you go, you hound!" he would snap; "you're a disgrace to the Force, and it's got to be kept clean."

Then "Dismissed" would be written opposite the man's name in the annual report that went from the Commissioner at Regina to the "Comptroller at Ottawa."

Suddenly the chorus of a refrain floated to his ears from the guard house – it was "The Stirrup Cup."

"God, England!" the little man groaned. "That's Cavendish singing," he muttered.

How long and broad the highway of life; how human, how weakly human those who travelled it! Cavendish, a younger son of a noble family, a constable at sixty cents a day! They were all like that – not of noble family, but adventurers, roamers, men who had broken the shackles of restraint all over the world. That was largely why they were in the Mounted; certainly not because of the sixty cents a day. And, so, how, even in his bitterness of set-awry-authority, could the incident of the tub be a heinous crime on their part.

"By gad!" and the little man popped from his chair and paced the verandah, crying inwardly: "They're my boys; I'd like to forgive them and shoot Carney – damn him! he's at the bottom of it."

The great arrogant sun, supreme in his regal gold, had slipped down behind the jagged mountain peaks as Carney, on his little buckskin, and the blond giant, FritzHerbert, on a bay, swung at a lope out of Fort Calbert for a breather over the prairie.

As they rode, almost silently, they suddenly heard the shuffling "pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat" of a cayuse, and in a little cloud of white dust to the west there grew to their eyes the blurred form of a horseman that seemed to droop almost to the horn of his saddle.

"A tired nichie," FitzHerbert commented; "he smells sow-belly frying in the town – he hasn't eaten for a moon, I should say."

The dust cloud swirled closer, and Carney's gray eyes picked out the familiar form of Lathy George, one of Dan Stewart's men. The rider yanked his cayuse to a stand when they met, almost reeling from the saddle in exhaustion. The cayuse spread his legs, drooped his head, and the flanks of his lean belly pumped as if his lungs were parched.

"Hello, Bulldog!" then the man looked warily at Carney's companion.

FitzHerbert saw the look and knew from the stranger's physical shatterment that some vital errand had spurred him; so he touched a heel to his bay's flank and moved slowly along the trail.

Then the rider of the cayuse in tired, panting gasps gave Carney his message.

"All right, George," Bulldog commented at the finish; "go to the Victoria, feed your horse, have a good supper, get a room and sleep."

"What'll I do, boss, when I wake up – how long'll I sleep?"

"As long as you like – a week if you want."

"What'll I do then – don't you need me?"

"No, play with your toes if you like."

Lathy George pulled his reeling cayuse together, and pushed on. Carney gave a whistle, and FitzHerbert, wheeling his bay, turned. "I've got to go back to town," Carney said.

"I'll go too," the other volunteered; "this devilish boundlessness is like a painted sky above a painted ocean – it gives me the lonely willies."

"There's hell to pay back yonder," Carney said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

"It's always back there, or over yonder – never here when there's any hell to pay," FitzHerbert commented dejectedly; "it's just one long plaintive sabbath."

"I've got to go back to the foothills soon's I've got fixed up," Carney continued.

"Me, too – if there's action there."

"Hardly, my dear boy; it's purely a matter of diplomacy."

"Absolutely, Bulldog; that's why you're going. You're going to kiss somebody on both cheeks, pat him on the back, and say, 'Here's a good cigar for you' – you love it. What's happened?"

"The Stonies are on the war-path."

"Ugly devils – part Sioux. They're hunters – blood letters – first cousins to the Kilkenny cats. In the rebellion, a few years ago, only for the Wood Crees they'd have murdered every white prisoner that came into their hands."

"Yes, they're peppery devils. In the Frog Lake massacre one of them, Itcka, killed a white man or two and was hanged for it."

"What started them now?" FitzHerbert asked. "Whisky."

FitzHerbert stole a glance at Carney's stolid face; then he whistled; Carney's word had been like a gasp of confession, for, undoubtedly, the liquor was from the car.

"How did they make the haul?" he asked.

"The Stonies have just had their Treaty Payment, and there's a new regulation that they may go off the reserve at Morley to make their Fall hunt in the mountains, at this time; they were on their way, under Chief Standing Bear, when they ran into the gent we've just met and his mates in the Vermillion Valley. George was running two loads of whisky up to the lumber camps."

"Great! that combination – lumberjacks, Stonies, and Whisky; it would be as if sheol had opened a chute – there'll be murder."

"I know Standing Bear; he made me a blood brother of his. I did him a bit of a turn. I was coming through the Flathead Valley once, and the old fellow had insulted a grizzly. The grizzly was peeved, for the Stoney had peppered a couple of silly bullets into the brute's shoulder. I happened to get in a lucky shot and stopped the silver-tip when he was about to shampoo old Standing Bear."

"Yes, I heard about that – you and your little buckskin. Say, Bulldog, that little devil must have the pluck of a lion – they say he carried you right up to the grizzly, and you pumped him full of .45's"

"That's just a yarn," Carney asserted; "but, anyway, the Chief and I are good friends. I'm going to pull out and persuade him to go back to the reserve. Jerry Platt has gone down in that direction, and you know what the Sergeant is, Fitz – he'll stack up against that tribe alone; if they're full of fire-water, and have been rowing with the lumberjacks – their squaws will be along, and you know what that means – Jerry stands a mighty good chance of being killed. I feel that it will be sort of my fault."

"It's rotten to go alone, Bulldog. I'll get a dozen of the fellows, and we'll play rugby with those devilish nichies if they don't act like gentlemen."

Carney laughed. "If you'd been at Duck Lake or Cut Knife you'd know all about that. Your bally Remittance Men wouldn't have a chance, Fitz – not a chance. It would be a fight – your hot heads would start it – and after the first shot you wouldn't see anything to shoot at; you'd see the red spit of their rifles, and hear the singing note of their bullets. These Stonies are hunters; they can outwit a big-horn in the mountains; first thing he knows of their approach is when he's bowled over."

EVIL SPIRITS

"How are you going to do it then, mister man? Go in and get shot up just because you feel that it's your fault?"

"No, I'm going to try and make good. If I can hook up with Jerry Platt we'll put before them the strongest kind of an argument, the only kind they'll listen to. They'll obey the Police generally, because they know the 'Redcoat' is an agent of the Queen, the White Mother who feeds them; but, being drunk, the young bucks will be hostile – some of them will feel like pulling the White Mother's nose. But Standing Bear has got sense and he promised me when we were made blood brothers that his whole tribe was pledged to me. I'm going down to collect – do you see, Fitz?"

They were riding in to town now, and FitzHerbert made another plea: "Let me go with you, Bulldog. I'm petrified with fanning the air with my eyes, and nothing doing. I sit here in this damned village watching the west wind blow the boulders up the street, and the east wind blow them back again, till they're worn to the size of golf balls. I'm atrophied; my insides are like an enamelled pot from the damned alkaline dust."

"Sorry, my dear boy, but I know what would happen if you went with me. While I'd be holding a pow-wow with Standing Bear one of those boozed Stonies would spit in your eye, and you'd knock him down; then hell would break loose."

"You're generally right, Bulldog, mister some man; none of us have got the cool courage you've got. I guess it's rather moral cowardice. I've seen you stand more abuse than a mule-skinner gives his mule and not lose caste over it." He held out his big hand, saying: "Good luck, old boy! I rather fancy Standing Bear will be back on his reserve or this will be good-bye."

It was dark when Carney rode out of Fort Calbert heading for the heavy gloomed line of the Vermillions. The little buckskin pricked his ears, threw up his head with a playful clamp at the bit, and broke into a long graceful lope; beneath them the chocolate trail swam by like shadow chasing shadow over a mirror. A red-faced moon that had come peeping over Fort Calbert, followed the rider, traversing the blue upturned prairie above, as if it, too, hurried to rebuke with its silent serenity the turbulent ones in the foothills. It cast a mystic, sleepy haze over the plain that lay in restful lethargy, bathed in an atmosphere so peaceful that Carney's mission seemed but the promptings of a phantasmagoria. There was a pungent, acrid taint of burning grass in the sleepy air, and off to the south glinted against the horizon the peeping red eyes of a prairie fire. They were like the rimmed lights of a shore-held city.

The way was always uphill, the low unperceived grade of the prairie uplifting so gradually to the foothills, and the buckskin, as if his instinct told him that their way was long, broke his lope into the easy suffling pace of a cayuse.

Carney, roused from the reverie into which the somnolence of the gentle night had cast him, patted the slim neck approvingly. Then his mind slipped back into a fairy boat that ferried it across leagues of ocean to the land of green hills and oak-hidden castles.

Something of the squalid endeavor ahead bred in his mind a distaste for his life of adventure. Was it good enough? Danger, the pitting of his wits against other wits, carried a savor of excitement that was better than remembering. The foolish past could only be kept in oblivion by action, by strain, by danger, by adventure, by winning out against odds; but the thing ahead – drunken, brawling lumberjacks, and Indians thrust back into primitive savagery because of him, put in his soul a taste of the ashes of regret.

Even the test he was going to put himself to was not enough to deaden this suddenly awakened remorse. To the blond giant he had minimized the danger, the prospect of conflict, but he knew that he was playing a game with Fate that the roll of the dice would decide. He was going to pit himself against the young bucks of the Stonies. They were an offshoot of the Sioux; in their veins ran fighting blood, the blood of killers; and inflamed by liquor the blood would be the blood of ghazis. It would all depend upon Standing Bear, for Carney could not quit, could not weaken; he must turn them back from the valley of the Vermillion, or remain there with his face upturned to the sky, and his soul seeking the Ferryman at the crossing of the Styx.

He had ridden three hours, scarce conscious of anything but the mental traverse, when the palpitating beat of hoofs pounding the drum-like turf fell upon his ears. From far down the trail to the west came a sound that was like the drum of a mating pheasant's wings.

The trail he rode dipped into a little hollow. Here he slipped from the saddle, led the buckskin to one side, and dropped the bridle rein over his head. Then he took a newspaper from his pocket, canopied it into a little gray mound on the trail, and, drawing his gun, stepped five paces to one side and waited. All this precaution was that he might hold converse with the galloping horseman without the startling semblance of a hold-up; sometimes the too abrupt command to halt meant a pistol shot.

As the pound of the hoofs neared, the rhythmic cadence separated into staccato beats of, "pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat," and Carney muttered: "Rather like a drunken nichie; he's riding hell-bent-for-leather."

Now the racing horseman was close; now he loomed against the sky as he topped the farther bank. Half-way down the dipping trail the cayuse saw the paper mound, and with his prairie bred instinct took it for a crouching wolf. With a squealing snort he swerved, propped, and his rider, in search of equilibrium, shot over his head. As he staggered to his feet a strong hand was on his arm, and a disagreeable cold circle of steel was touching his cheek.

"By gar!" the frightened traveller cried aghast, "don't s'oot me."

Carney laughed, and lowering his gun, said: "Certainly not, boy – just a precaution, that's all. Where are you going?"

"I'm goin' to de Fort, me," the French halfbreed replied. "De Stoney nichies an' de lumberjacks is raise hell; by gar! dere's fine row; dey s'oot de Sergeant, Jerry Platt."

"Where?"

"Jus' by Yellowstone Creek, De Stonies pitch dere tepees dere."

"Where's the Sergeant?"

"I don't know me. He get de bullet in de shoulder, but he swear by le bon Dieu dat he'll get hes man, an' mak' de Injun go back to hees reserve. He's hell of brave mans, dat Jerry."

"All right, boy," Carney said; "you ride on to the Fort and tell the Superintendent that Bulldog Carney – "

"Sacre! Bulldog Carney?" The poor breed gasped the words much as if the Devil had clapped him on a shoulder.

"Yes; tell him that Bulldog Carney has gone to help Jerry Platt put the fear of God into those drunken bums. Now pull out."

The breed, who had clung to the bridle rein, mounted his cayuse, crying, as he clattered away: "May de Holy Mudder give you de help, Bulldog, dat's me, Ba'tiste, wish dat."

Then Carney swung to the back of the little buckskin, and pushed on to the help of jerry Platt.

Dozing in the saddle he rode while the gallant horse ate up mile after mile in that steady, shuffling trot he had learned from his cold-blooded brothers of the plains. The grade was now steeper; they were approaching the foothills that rose at first in undulating mounds like a heavy ground swell; then the ridges commenced to take shape against the sky line, looking like the escarpments of a fort.

The trail Carney followed wound, as he knew, into the Vermillion Valley, at the upper end of which, near the gap, the Indians were encamped on Yellowstone Creek.

The Indians' clock, the long-handled dipper, had swung around the North Star off to Carney's right, and he had tabulated the hours by its sweep. It was near morning he knew, for the handle was climbing up in the east.

Then, faintly at first, there carried to his ears the droning "tump-tump, tump-tump, tump-tump, tump-tump!" of a tom-tom, punctuated at intervals by a shrill, high-pitched sing-song of "Hi-yi, hi-yi, hi-yi, hi-yi!"

Carney pulled his buckskin to a halt, his trained ear interpreted the well-known time that was beaten from the tom-tom – it was the gambling note. That was the Indians all over; when drunk to squat on the ground in a circle, a blanket between them to hide the guessing bean, and one of their number beating an exciting tattoo from a skin-covered hoop, ceasing his flagellation at times to tighten the sagging skin by the heat of a fire.

Carney slipped from the buckskin's back, stripped the saddle off, picketed the horse, and stretched himself on the turf, muttering, as he drifted into quick slumber: "The cold gray light of morning is the birth time of the yellow streak – I'll tackle them then."

The sun was flicking the upper benches of the Vermillion Range when Carney opened his eyes. He sat up and watched the golden light leap down the mountain side from crag to crag as the fount of all this liquid gold climbed majestically the eastern sky. As he stood up the buckskin canted to his feet. Bulldog laid his cheek against the soft mouse-colored nose, and said: "Patsy, old boy, it's business first this morning – we'll eat afterwards; though you've had a fair snack of this jolly buffalo grass, I see from your tummy."

The tom-tom was still troubling the morning air, and the crackle of two or three gunshots came down the valley.

As Carney saddled the buckskin he tried to formulate a plan. There was nothing to plan about; he had no clue to where he might find Platt – that part of it was all chance. Failing to locate the Sergeant he must go on and play his hand alone against the Stonies.