Chapter VIII: Part 8

When a halt was called for camping, as the early winter darkness set in, the unbelievable thing happened. Jan, the first dog to be loosed, took one long, ardent sniff at the trail before him and then loped on ahead with never a backward glance for master or team-mates.

"Here, you, Jan! Come in here! Come right in here! D'ye hear me? Jan! Jan! You crazy? Come in here! Come--here!"

Jim Willis flung all his master's authority into the harsh peremptoriness of his last call. And Jan checked in his stride as he heard it. Then the hound shook his shoulders as though a whip-lash had struck them, sniffed hard again at the trail, and went on.

Willis caused his whip to sing, and himself shouted till he was hoarse. Jan, the perfect exemplar of sled-dog discipline, apparently defied him. The big hound was out of sight now.

"Well!" exclaimed Willis as he turned to unharness and feed his other dogs. And again, "Well!" And then, after a pause: "Now I know you're plumb crazy. But all the same--Well, it's got me properly beat. Anyhow, crazy or no, I guess you're meat just the same, an', by the great Geewhillikins! you'll be dead meat, an' digested meat at that, before you're an hour older, my son, if I know anything o' wolves." Later, as he proceeded to thaw out his supper, "Well, I do reckon that's a blame pity," growled Willis to his fire, by way of epitaph. And for Jim Willis that was saying a good deal.

XXXV

THE END OF JAN'S LONE TRAIL

With every stride in his solitary progress along that dark trail Jan's gait and appearance took on more of certitude and of swift concentration upon an increasingly clear and definite objective.

Of the wolves in the neighborhood all save two remained, uneasily ranging the neighborhood of the trail to the rear of Willis's camp. As it seemed to them, Jim Willis's outfit was a sure and safe quarry. It represented meat which must, in due course, become food for them. And so they did not wish to leave it behind them, in a country bare of game.

Two venturesome speculators from the pack had, however, worked round to the front, one on either side of the trail. And these were now loping silent along, each sixty or seventy yards away, watching Jan. Jan was conscious of their presence, as one is conscious of the proximity of mosquitoes. He regarded their presence neither more nor less seriously than this. But he did not forget them. Now and again one or other of them would close in to, perhaps, twenty or thirty paces in a sweeping curve. Then Jan's lip would writhe and rise on the side nearest the encroaching wolf, and a long, bitter snarl of warning would escape him.

"If I hadn't got important business in hand, I'd stop and flay you for your insolence," his snarl said. "I'll do it now, if you're not careful. Sheer off!"

And each time the wolf sheered off, in a sweeping curve, still keeping the lone hound under careful observation.

Wolves are very acute judges; desperate fighters for their lives and when driven by hunger, but at no time really brave. If Jan had fallen by the way, these two would have been into him like knives. While he ran, exhibiting his fine powers, and snarled, showing his fearlessness, no two wolves would tackle him, and even the full pack would likely have trailed him for miles before venturing an attack.

But, however that might be, it is a fact that Jan spared no more than the most occasional odd ends of thought for these two silent, slinking watchers of his trail. His active mind was concentrated upon quite other matters, and was becoming more and more set and concentrated, more absorbingly preoccupied with every minute of his progress.

A bloodhound judge who had watched Jan now would have known that he no longer sniffed the trail, as he ran, for guidance. The trail was too fresh for that. He could have followed it with his nose held high in the air. It was for the sheer joy it brought him that he ran now with low-hanging flews, drinking in the scent he followed. And because of the warmth of the trail, Jan followed it at the gallop, his great frame well extended to every stride.

Of a sudden he checked. It was exactly as though he had run his head into a noose on the end of a snare line made fast to one of the darkling trees which skirted his path on the right-hand side. Here the scent which he followed left the trail almost at right angles, turning into the wood.

A moment more and Jan came into full view of a camp-fire, beside which were a sled, a single dog, and two men. But Jan saw no camp-fire, nor any other thing than the track under his questing nose.

The single dog by the sled leaped to its feet with a growling bark. One of the two men stood up sharply in the firelight, ordering his dog in to heel. His eyes (full of wonder) lighted then on the approaching figure of Jan, head down; and he reached for his rifle where it lay athwart the log on which he had been sitting.

As Jan drew in, the other dog flew at his throat. Without wasting breath upon a snarl, Jan gave the husky his shoulder, with a jar which sent the poor beast sprawling into the red flickering edge of the fire. And in the same moment Jan let out a most singular cry as he reared up on his hind feet, allowing his fore paws, very gently and without pressure, to rest on the man's chest.

His cry had something of a bark in it, but yet was not a bark. It had a good deal of a kind of crooning whine about it, but yet was not a whine. It was just a cry of almost overpowering joy and gladness; and it was so uncannily different from any dog-talk she had ever heard, that the singed and frightened husky bitch by the fire stood gaping open-mouthed to harken at it.

And the man--long-practised discipline made him lay down his gun, instead of dropping it; and then he voiced an exclamation of astonishment scarcely more articulate than Jan's own cry, and his two arms swung out and around the hound's massive shoulders in a movement that was an embrace.

"Why, Jan--dear old Jan! Jan, come back to me--here! Good old Jan!"

It was with something strangely like a sob that the bearded sergeant, Dick Vaughan, sank down to a sitting position on the log, with Jan's head between his hands.

His beard was evidence of a longish spell on the trail; and the weakness that permitted of his catching his breath in a childlike sob--that was due, perhaps, to solitude and the peculiar strain of his present business on the trail, as well as to the great love he felt for the hound he had thought lost to him for ever.

"How d'ye do, Devil! How d'ye do! We were just hurryin' on for your place. Will ye take a drop o' rye? I'm boss here. That's only my chore-boy you're slobberin' over, Mister Devil. Eh, but it's hunky down to Coney Island, ain't it?"

These remarks came in a jerky sort of torrent from the second man, one of whose peculiarities was that his arms above the elbow were lashed with leather thongs to his body. There were leather hobbles about his ankles, and on the ground near by him lay a pair of unlocked handcuffs, carefully swathed in soft-tanned deerskin.

Sergeant Dick Vaughan's companion may possibly have accentuated the solitude in which he traveled; such a companion could hardly have mitigated it as a source of nervous strain, for he was mad as a March hare. But there was nothing else harelike about him, for he was homicidally mad, and had killed two men and half killed a third before Sergeant Vaughan laid hands upon him. And his was not the only madness the sergeant had had to contend with on this particular trip.

A strong and overtried man's weakness is not a thing that any one cares to enlarge upon, but without offense it may perhaps be stated that tears fell on the iron-gray hair of Jan's muzzle as he stood there with his soft flews pressed hard against Dick Vaughan's thigh. It seemed he wanted to bore right into the person of his sovereign lord; he who had never asked for any man's caress through all the long months of wandering, toil, and hardship that divided him from the Regina barracks. His nose burrowed lovingly under Dick's coat with never a thought of fear or of a trap, although, for many months now, his first instinct had been to keep his head free, vision clear, and feet to the ground, whatever befell.

"My old Jan! My dear old Jan!"

Dick Vaughan paid no sort of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over his shoulder-blades when the man spoke.

Jan did not know much about human ailments, perhaps, but he had seen a husky go mad, and had narrowly escaped being bitten by the beast before Jim Willis had shot it. He did not think it out in any way, but he was intuitively conscious that this man was abnormal, irresponsible, unlike other men. The homicidal devil was the force uppermost in this particular man, and that naturally left no room for emanations of the milk of human kindness and goodness. Jan was instantly aware of the lack. In effect he knew this man was killing-mad.

But remarkable, nay unique, in his experience as the contact was, Jan spared no thought for it. His hackles rose a little and he edged away from the madman, because instinct in him enforced so much. For his mind and his heart they were filled to overflowing; they were afloat on the flood-tide of his consciousness of his sovereign's physical presence, the touch of his body.

The night was far spent when Dick Vaughan proceeded to tether his prisoner as comfortably as might be and to stretch himself in his blankets for sleep. Jan may have slept a little that night, but his eyes were never completely closed for more than a minute at a stretch; and his muzzle, resting on his paws, was never more than three feet from Dick's head. It was to be noted, too, that he chose to lie between Dick and the madman, although the proximity of the latter was more than a little painful to Jan.

Toward morning, when the fire was practically out, the husky bitch came timidly nosing about Jan's neighborhood, and Jan breathed through his nose at her in quite friendly fashion. But when she happened to place one foot across the direct line in which the hound watched his sovereign's face--then Jan growled, so low and softly as not to waken Dick, and yet with a significance which the husky instantly comprehended and acted on.

"Anywhere else you like, but not between my lord and me, for he is mine, and I am his; not to be divided."

So said Jan's low, throaty growl. And the husky, comprehending, withdrew, and dug herself a place in the snow under Jan's lee, which, as the big hound thought, was well and fittingly done. He gave the bitch an approving glance from the tail of one eye.

The pride of Jan, like his happiness, was just now deep beyond all reach of plummets.

XXXVI

"SO LONG, JAN!"

The way in which Jan brought Jim Willis and Dick Vaughan together that morning was notable and strange.

In finding Dick, Jan had found all he wanted in life. But at the back of his mind was a sort of duty thought which made it clear to him that he must let Willis know about these things, if possible. Willis had undoubted and very strong claims upon the leader of his team, and Jan, at this stage of his North American life and discipline, was not the dog to ignore those claims. He wanted Jim Willis to know. He desired absolution. And, short of letting Dick out of his sight--a step which no threat or inducement would have led him to take--Jan was going to set this matter right.

The outworking of his determination, in the first place, caused a number of delays, and then, when by affectionate play of one kind and another he could no longer keep Dick from the trail, he set to work to try and drag or seduce his lord back over his tracks of the previous day. Now Dick was far too well versed in doggy ways to make the mistake of supposing that Jan was indulging mere wantonness. He knew very well that Jan was not that sort of a dog.

"H'm! And then, again, old chap, as I said last night, you can't have dropped from heaven upon the trail beneath. There must be somebody else where you've come from. I see the collar and trace marks on your old shoulders--bless you! What would Betty say to them, old son? So don't excite yourself. We'll wait a bit and see what happens. I could do with the help of a team, I can tell you, for my own shoulder's bruised to the bone from the trace. You take it from me, Jan, one man and one husky are no sort of a team. No, sir, no sort of a team at all. So sit down, my son, and let me fill a pipe."

Naturally enough, Dick thought he waited as the result of his own reflections, to see what things the trail Jan had traveled by would bring forth. But, all the same, he would not have waited but for Jan's artful insistence on it. Sometimes, but not very often, a dog acquires such guile in the world of civilization. In the wild it comes easily and naturally, even to animals having but a tithe of Jan's exceptional intelligence and wealth of imagination.

Dick Vaughan had not waited long there beside the trail when his ears and Jan's caught the sound of Jim Willis's voice and the singing of his whip. Evidently, in the absence of their leader, Jan's team-mates had not settled down very well to the day's work. In the distance, away back on the trail, could be heard now and again the howl of a wolf.

Jim Willis showed no surprise when, in response to a wave of Dick's hand, he drew up his team alongside a R.N.W.M.P. man and his own missing team-leader. Jim was not much given to showing surprise in the presence of other men. He nodded his comprehension, as Dick told the story of Jan's appearance on the previous evening, and of his disappearance, many months before, from Lambert's Siding in Saskatchewan.

"It's a bit of a miracle that I should find him again--or he find me, rather--away up here, isn't it?" said Dick.

"Ah! Pretty 'cute sort of a dog, Jan," said the laconic Jim.

He was noting--one cannot tell with what queer twinges, with what stirrings of the still deeps of his nature--the fact that, while Jan lolled a friendly tongue at him and waved his stern when Jim spoke, he yet remained, as though tied, with his head at Sergeant Vaughan's knee.

The two men leaned against Jim's sled and exchanged samples of tobacco while Dick briefly told the tale of his travels, with his mad charge, from a lonely silver-mining camp near the Great Slave Lake. It seemed Dick had had some ground for fearing that he had stumbled upon some horrible kind of epidemic of madness in the lone land he had been traversing. At all events, one of the team of seven huskies with which he started had developed raging madness within a day or so of the beginning of his journey, and had had to be shot.

"I couldn't find that the brute had bitten any of the others, but next day two of 'em suddenly went clean off, and they certainly did bite another pair before I shot them. Next day I had to kill the other pair, and was expecting every minute to see the bitch, the only one left, break out. However, she seems to have escaped it."

Dick said nothing of the weary subsequent days in which he himself had toiled hour after hour in the traces, ahead of his one dog, with a maniac wrapped in rugs and lashed on the sled-pack. But Jim Willis needed no telling. He saw the trace-marks all across the chest and shoulders of Dick's coat, and he knew without any telling all about the corresponding mark that must be showing on Dick's own skin.

"Well, say," he remarked, admiringly, "but you do seem to 've bin up against it good an' hard."

Very briefly, and as though the matter barely called for mention, Dick explained, in answer to an inquiry, why he had to make a dead burden of the madman.

It seemed that when first his team had been reduced to one rather undersized dog he did arrange for his charge to walk. And within an hour, having cunningly awaited his opportunity, the demented creature had leaped upon him from behind, exactly as a wolf might, and fastened his teeth in Dick's neck. That, though Dick said little of it, had been the beginning of a strange and terrible struggle, of which the sole observer was a single sled-dog.

To and fro in the trampled snow the men had swayed and fought for fully a quarter of an hour before Dick had finally mastered the madman and bound him hand and foot. He was a big man, of muscular build, and madness had added hugely to his natural capabilities as a fighter. Dick Vaughan's bandaged neck, and his right thumb, bitten through to the bone, would permanently carry the marks of this poor wretch's ferocity in that lonely struggle on the trail.

"Don't seem right, somehow," was Jim Willis's comment. "I guess I'd have had to put a bullet into him."

"Ah no; that wouldn't do at all," said Dick.

He did not attempt to explain just why; and perhaps he hardly could have done so had he tried, for that would have involved some explanation of the pride and the traditions of the force in which he served, and those are things rarely spoken of by those who understand them best and are most influenced by them.

"And where might you be making for now?" asked Jim.

"Well, I'm bound for Edmonton. But since I got down to this one little husky I'd thought of making Fort Vermilion, to see if I could raise a team there."

"Aye. Well, I was bound for steel at Edmonton, too, an' I've bin reckoning on some such a place as Fort Vermilion since I lost my gun," said Jim. "I'm wholly tired o' makin' trail for these gentlemen behind"--the howling of the wolves was still to be heard pretty frequently--"without a shootin'-iron of any kind at all."

"It seems to me we're pretty well met, then," said Dick, with a smile, "for I want what you've got, and you want what I've got."

"Well, I was kind o' figurin' on it that sort of a way myself," admitted Jim. "If it suits you, I guess we can make out to rub along on your Jan an' my dogs right through to Edmonton."

In the end the order of the march was arranged thus: two of Jim Willis's dogs, with Jan to lead them, were harnessed to Dick's sled, with the madman and Dick's rugs for its load. The remainder of Dick's pack was loaded on Jim's sled and drawn by Jim's other three dogs, aided by the sole survivor of Dick's team. And in this order a start was made on the five-hundred-mile run to Edmonton.

From the first Jim showed frankly that there was to be no question as to Jan's ownership. He told how Jock, back there on the edge of the North Pacific, had informed him as to Jan's name and identity from a picture seen in a newspaper. Then Dick broached the question of how much he was to pay for Jan, seeing clearly how just was the other man's claim as lawful owner of the hound. Jim laughed quietly at this.

"Why, no," he said; "I haven't just come to makin' dollars out of other folks' dog-stealin'. No, sir. But it's true enough I have paid, in a way, for Jan; an' I guess there's not another son of a gun in Canada, but his rightful owner, with money enough to buy the dog from me. I'd not've sold him. And I'll not sell him now--because a sun-dried salmon could see he's yours a'ready. But I'll tell you what: I'm short of a gun, an' I've kinder taken a fancy to this one o' yours--I reckon because I'd had such a thirst on me for one before I struck your trail. Jan is yours, anyway, but if you'd like to give me your gun to remember ye by I'll say 'Thank you!'"

"Well, I'm sorry, but I can't make out to give you the gun, anyway," said Dick, "because it isn't mine. It's an R.N.W.M.P. gun. But you wait another day or two, my friend, and when we've got shut of this gentleman in Edmonton"--with a nod in the direction of the madman--"you and I will give an hour or so to finding out the best gun in the city; and when we've found it we'll have your name engraved on it, and underneath, 'From Jan, the R.N.W.M.P. hound, to the man who saved his life.' I know you'll take a keepsake from Jan, boy."

And so it was arranged. Jim would not hear of any selling or buying of the hound; but in Edmonton, where he sold his sled and team, preparatory to taking train for the western seaboard, he accepted, as gift from Jan, the best rifle Dick could find, inscribed as arranged; and, as gift from Dick, a photograph of himself and Jan together.

Their parting was characteristic of life in the North-west. Each man knew that in all human probability he would never again set eyes upon the other. Yet they parted as intimate friends; for their coming together--again most typical of north-western life--had been of the kind which leads swiftly to close friendship--or to antipathy and hostility.

Dick, greatly impressed by the other man's solid worth, urged upon him the claims of the R.N.W.M.P. as offering a career for him.

"For you," said Dick, "the work would all be simple as print; plain sailing all the way."

Jim Willis, like most northland men, had a very real respect for the R.N.W.M.P., but he smiled at the idea of joining the force.

"But why?" asked Dick. "It would be such easy work for you."

"Aye, I'll allow the work wouldn't exactly hev me beat," agreed Jim. "But--Oh, well I ain't a Britisher, to begin with, an', what's more to the p'int, a week in barracks 'd choke me."

"But they'd be wise enough to keep you pretty much on the trail; and you're at home there."

"Yes, I guess the trail's about as near home as I'll ever get, mebbe, but I'd have no sorter use for it if I j'ined your bunch."

"How's that?"

"Well, now, I guess that 'd be kinder hard to explain to you, Dick." (In the northland, between men, it is always either Christian names or "Mister.") "You see, we was raised different, you an' me; an' what comes plum nateral to you would set me kickin' like a steer, first thing I'd know. The trail suits me, all right, yes. But I hit it when I want to, an' keep off it when I'm taken that-a-way. I'm only a poor man, but ther' isn't a millionaire in America can buy the right to say 'Come here' or 'Go there' to me, Dick, an', what's more, ther' ain't goin' to be, not while I can sit up an' eat moose. It's mebbe not the best kind of an outfit; an', then again, it's mebbe not jest the worst; but, any ol' way you like, Dick, it's the only kind of an outfit I've got."

Dick nodded sympathetically.

"Why, yes, you can see it stickin' out all over. Look at that little dust-up with the lun_at_ic. Well, now, I should jest 've pumped that gentleman as full o' lead as ever he'd hold. 'You'd bite me,' I'd ha' said. 'Well, Mister Lun_at_ic,' I'd ha' said, 'I count you no more 'n a mad husky; an' when I see a mad husky, I shoot. So you take this,' I'd ha' said, an' plugged him up good an' full. But for you--well, I see how it is. He's a kind of a sacred duty, an' all the like o' that. Yes, I know; only--only I'm not built that kind of a way, ye see."

And Jim was right, and Dick knew he was right. As white and straight and true a man as any in the north, and able to the tips of his fingers and toes, but--but not the "kind of an outfit" for the R.N.W.M.P.

And so they parted, on a hard hand-grip. And to Jan Jim Willis gave a grim, appraising sort of a stare, and (spoken very gruffly) these words:

"Well, so long, Jan! The cards is yours, all right, an' I guess you take the chips!"

He did not touch the big hound as he spoke. But then, despite their long and close association, he never had touched Jan in the way of a caress.

XXXVII

BACK TO REGINA

Long before Sergeant Dick Vaughan--he was always spoken of thus, by both his names--arrived at the R.N.W.M.P. headquarters in Regina news was received there of his strange single-handed journey from the Great Slave Lake, of the mad murderer, the mad dogs, of the sergeant's own toil in the traces, and of his being tracked down by Jan.

The surgeon in Edmonton who attended to Dick's badly wounded and poisoned neck and right thumb happened to be a man with a strong sense of the picturesque and a quite journalistic faculty for visualizing incidents of a romantic or adventurous nature.

An _Edmonton Bulletin_ reporter, in quest of a "story" for his paper, had the good luck to corner the surgeon in his consulting-room. The result took the form of promotion for that reporter, following upon publication in the _Bulletin_ of a many-headed three-column article which was quoted and reproduced all up and down America. Summaries of the "story" were cabled to Europe. Snap-shots of Dick and Jan were obtained by enterprising pressmen in Edmonton, and distributed quite profitably for their owners to the ends of all the earth. Many months afterward extracts and curiously garbled versions of this northland Odyssey cropped up in the news-sheets of Siam, the Philippines, Mauritius, Paraguay, and all manner of odd places.

Their London morning newspaper presented the matter at some length to the Nuthill household and to Dr. Vaughan in Sussex, while Dick and Jim Willis, five or six thousand miles away, were choosing a rifle to have Jan's name inscribed upon it.

As a fact, the subject-matter of the story was sufficiently striking in character, for in a temperature of fifty below zero, with no other help than a little undersized husky bitch can give, it is no small matter for one man to drag a laden sled for twelve days while looking after a maniac who has come very near to killing him.

To this was added the romantic recovery of the famous "R.N.W.M.P. bloodhound," as Jan was called; and that aspect of the business brought special joy to the newspaper writers. To some extent also, no doubt, it colored Dick's addition to R.N.W.M.P. records, and caused that addition to figure more strikingly than it might otherwise have done in the archives of the corps.

A quaint thing about it all was the fact that every one else knew more about it than the two men most concerned, for it happened that neither Dick Vaughan nor Jim Willis had ever cultivated the newspaper habit. Willis was hugely startled and embarrassed, hundreds of miles away in Vancouver, to find himself suddenly famous.

In Edmonton Dick Vaughan presented a very stern front to the snap-shooters because he conceived the idea that he and Jan were being guyed in some way. By the reporters he was presently given up as hopeless, because he simply declined to tell them anything. Their inquiries touched his professional pride as a disciplined man, and they were told that Dick could have nothing whatever to say to them with regard to his official duties. But his innocence made surprisingly little difference in the long run. The surgeon's story was real journalistic treasure-trove, the richest possible kind of mine for ingenious writers to delve in; and after all the most determined reticence in no way affects the working of cameras.

Withal, the welcome prepared for Dick and Jan at Regina station was hardly less than alarming for one of the two men in Canada and the United States who had not read the newspapers.

"You'll excuse my saying so, sir," explained Dick in a flustered aside to Captain Arnutt, "but this is the very devil of a business. I--surely I haven't got to say anything!"

The civilian crowd at the station was good-humoredly shouting for a "speech," cameras were clicking away like pom-poms, and the Regina pressmen were gripping Dick almost savagely by either arm, showing considerable personal bravery thereby, for Jan growled very threateningly as their hands touched the sergeant's tunic, and in common humanity Dick was forced to grab the famous hound by the neck and give him urgent orders to control his wrath.

As Dick subsequently explained to Captain Arnutt, the thing struck him as the more awkward because, having found Jan, he desired now to be allowed to resign from the force, as he wanted to return to England.

"But, hang it, man! you've been gazetted a full sergeant-inspector and--unofficially, of course--I'm told we are only waiting word from Ottawa about offering you commissioned rank."

Dick shrugged his shoulders in comic despair. His speech was finally delivered from the perilous eminence of a booking-clerk's stool, an elevation which Jan so gravely mistrusted that he felt impelled to rise erect on his hind feet, placing both fore paws beside his lord's raised heels, and thereby providing the camera men with the most famous of all the snap-shots yet obtained.

The speech, as literally recorded in shorthand by one of Regina's most promising young pressmen, if not a very finished or distinguished effort, was clearly a hardy and quick-growing production, since it did eventually develop into a long half-column in some newspapers, according to the unimaginative and literal stenographic record aforementioned. It was as follows:

"It's very good of you fellows--er--Right you are, sir! er--ladies and gentlemen!--But, really, you know, I can't make a speech. It's no use. I--er--I'm tremendously obliged to you all. What you say is--er--well, the fact is I've only done what any other man in the service would have done. It's splendid to see you all again and--I _have_ brought back the Mounted Police Dog. Thank you!"

And, according to the shorthand man, that was all. But a generous sub-editorial fraternity understood the speech differently; and newspaper readers doubtless came to the conclusion that oratory must now be added to the other accomplishments of the versatile R.N.W.M.P.

There were no embarrassing calls for speeches at the barracks, but even there Dick (still closely attended by Jan, upon whom one of the impressions produced by his return to the complex conditions of civilization was an anxious fear that his sovereign lord would somehow be spirited away from him if he ever let Dick out of his sight) was called upon to face a raking fire of compliments from his commanding officer, delivered in the presence of a full muster of commissioned and non-commissioned ranks.

"You have done your duty finely as a sergeant of the Royal North-west Mounted Police, and, for us who know what it means, I don't know that the ablest man in the country can hope to earn higher praise than that."

Those were the chief's concluding words, and the full-throated, if somewhat hoarse, cheer which they elicited from the men assembled behind Dick and Jan, as well as from the group beside the chief, had the curious effect of filling Dick's eyes with moisture of a sort that pricked most painfully, so that as he came to the salute before retiring he saw the familiar buildings in front of him but dimly, as through a fog.

XXXVIII

THE FALL OF SOURDOUGH

Just before darkness fell that evening Captain Arnutt called Dick from his quarters and asked him to go for a stroll. Together, and closely followed by Jan, they started. Before the barracks gate was reached they were met by Sergeant Moore, with Sourdough at his heels.

Sourdough had aged a good deal during the past year, but despite the twist in his near fore leg, which caused him to limp slightly, the old dog still held his own as despotic ruler of all the dogs in that locality. But for a good many years he had done no work of any kind, neither had he had any very serious fighting or come in contact with northland dogs. His swiftest movements would have seemed clumsy and slow to the working husky, inured to the comparative wildness of trace life in the north. But his morose arrogance and ferocity had suffered no diminution, as was shown by the fact that he flew straight for Jan's throat directly he set eyes on the big hound.

"Call your dog off, Sergeant, or he'll be killed," shouted Dick.

Sergeant Moore spake no word. In his queer heart intelligence of Dick's fame rankled bitterly, yet not so bitterly as the fact of Jan's return to barracks. His obsession made him certain in his own mind that the redoubtable Sourdough could certainly kill any dog. And so he spake no word while Sourdough flew at Jan.

And for Jan, as he caught sight in the gloaming of his ancient enemy, his hackles had risen very stiffly, his pendent lips had twitched ominously.

Jan was perfectly well aware that the killing of Sourdough or any other dog he had seen since his return to cities would be a supremely easy matter for him. Indeed it would be for almost any dog having his experience of the wild. And having in his simple dog mind no shadow of a reason for sparing Sourdough, of all creatures that walked, one may take it that Jan savored with some joyousness the prospect of the killing which Sourdough's snarling rush presented to him.

He received that rush with a peculiar screwing thrust of his left shoulder, the commonest trick among fighting-dogs in the northland, but one for which old Sourdough seemed totally unprepared, since he made no apparent preparation to withstand it, and as an inevitable consequence was rolled clean over on his back by the force of his own impetus, scientifically met.

That, by all the rules in the northland game of which Jan was a past-master, brought Sourdough within seconds of his end. The throat was exposed; the deadly underhold, given which no dog breathing could evade Jan.

And at that moment came Dick's voice in very urgent and meaning exhortation:

"Back, Jan! Don't kill him. He's too old. Back--here--Jan!"

Jan's jaws had parted for the killing grip. His whole frame was perfectly poised for the thrust from which no dog placed as Sourdough was could possibly escape. A swift shudder passed through him as though his sovereign's words reached him on a cold blast, and, stiff-legged, wondering, his shoulder hair all erect, and jaws still parted for the fray, Jan stepped back to Dick's side.

"You'll have to keep that old tough in to heel if you mean to save him, Sergeant," said Captain Arnutt. "You can't expect Jan to lie down to him. Why don't you keep him in to heel, man?"

The sergeant passed on, saluting, without a word. Doubtless he had liefer far that Captain Arnutt had hit him in the face. But, when all is said, no words could hurt this curious monomaniac now, after that which he had seen with his own eyes and that which he now saw.

Complete enlightenment had come to old Sourdough in one fraction of a moment. In the moment when he reached earth, on his back, flung there by his impact with the calculated screwing thrust of Jan's massive shoulder, Sourdough knew that his day was over. He expected to die then and there, and was prepared to die. Contact with Jan had told him in a flash things which could not be written in a page. He tasted in that moment the cold-drawn, pitiless efficiency of the methods of the northland wild, and realized that he could no more stand against this new Jan than a lady's house-bred lap-dog could have stood against himself. As his feet left the ground his life was ended, as Sourdough saw it.

And then had come Jan's miraculous, shuddering withdrawal, wholly inexplicable, chilling to the heart in its uncanny unexpectedness. Sourdough mechanically regained his footing, and then with low-hung head, inward-curling tail, and crouching shoulders he slunk away at the heel of his bitterly disappointed master. The collapse of this old invincible within a few seconds was a rather horrid sight and a very strange and startling one.

From that hour Sourdough was never again seen in the precincts of the R.N.W.M.P. barracks, and, though many people puzzled over the old dog's disappearance, none ever knew what became of him. The sergeant had been for some time entitled to retire from the service. That night he obtained his commanding officer's permission to do so.

XXXIX

HOW JAN CAME HOME

Captain Arnutt proved himself a friend indeed to Dick Vaughan. Once he had come to understand the position, he fully sympathized with Dick's wish to leave the service at once and return to England. That sympathy he proceeded forthwith to translate into action, and within the month Sergeant-Inspector Dick Vaughan had received his discharge and booked his passage--with Jan's--for England.

Despite his elation over the prospect before him, Dick found the actual parting with his comrades in Regina a good deal of a wrench. They were fond of him, and of Jan, and proud of both. And Dick found when the packing was over and valedictory remarks begun that these men had entered pretty deeply into his life and general scheme of things.

They were good fellows all, these hard, spare, long-limbed riders of the plains, and they and the North-west had made of the Dick who was now bidding them good-by a man radically different in a hundred ways from the careless, irresponsible, light-hearted Dick who had come to them a few years back direct from kindly, indulgent Sussex.

Dick had become a fit and proper part of his western environment and had "made good" in it, as the saying is. We most of us like doing that which we do well. Dick's mature and able manhood had come to him in the West. He would never lose it now, however far eastward he might travel. But--the West and the good folk tugged pretty hard at his heart-strings, as from the rear platform of his car on the east-bound train he watched the waving stiff-brimmed hats of his comrades, and a little later the last of the roofs of Saskatchewan's capital fading out in the distance.

Hard land as many have found it, hard though it had been in many ways for Dick, the North-west had forced its bracing, stimulating spirit into his being and made him the man he was, just so surely as the northland wilderness had made of Jan the wonderful hound he now was.

And Dick left it all with a swelling heart; not unwillingly, because he was going to a great promised happiness, but with a swelling heart none the less, and a kind of mistiness of vision, due in great measure to the real respect, the sincere gratitude he felt toward the land and life and people who had helped him to make of himself a very much bigger and better man than any previous efforts of his had promised to evolve out of the same material in Sussex, for example.

Winter ruled still in the land, and so the actual seaboard--Halifax--and not the big St. Lawrence port, was rail-head for Dick and Jan. But for Jan the enforced confinement of the journey was greatly softened by regular daily visits from his lord. And in Halifax two and a half days of almost unbroken companionship awaited them before their steamer left.

This homeward journey was a totally different matter for Jan from the outward trip. It was true he gave no thought to England as yet. But he perfectly understood the general idea of travel. He knew that he and his lord were on a journey together, that certain temporary separations were an unavoidable feature of this sort of traveling, and that, the journey done, the two of them would come together again. The sum of Jan's knowledge, his reasoning powers, and his faculties of observation and deduction were a hundredfold greater now than at the time of his departure from England.

Jan loathed the close confinement of his life at sea, but he did not rebel against it, neither was he cast down by it. He knew that it was to be no more than a brief interlude, and he understood quite well that though, unfortunately, men-folk had so arranged things that he must be kept out of sight of his sovereign, save during those daily intervals of delight in which Dick visited him in his house beside the butcher's shop, yet his lord was in the same vessel with him, at no great distance from him, and bound with him for the one destination. He knew that he and Dick were traversing the one trail.

And sure enough the morning came at length, after all their shared divagations since the night of meeting beside the Peace River trail, when Jan stood beside his lord again, under the open sky and on the steamer's boat-deck, watching the rapidly nearing shores of England.

Many pictures were passing through Jan's mind, some inspired by memory of the tense, strenuous life he had left behind him in the northland, but a larger number having for background and subjects scenes that he remembered in his old life in Sussex-by-the-Sea.

The steamer was in yellow tidal waters now, with land close in all about her. As Jan reached the open deck he had drawn in first one and then another and another long, tremulous, deep breaths which, passing through the infinitely delicate test-tubes of his wonderful nostrils, recorded in his brain impressions more vivid and accurate than any that vision could supply to him.

In this air, incalculably more soft and humid than any he had breathed for many a long day, were subtly distinctive qualities that were quite easily recognized by Jan. Well he knew now the meaning of this voyaging. Well he knew that this was England. It was this knowledge made him lift his muzzle and touch Dick's left hand with his tongue. The other hand held binoculars through which Dick was gazing fixedly at the line of wharfs they were approaching.

"Well, old chap," said he, in answer to the meaning touch. "You know all about it, eh? I believe you do; begad, I quite believe you do. Well, see if you can understand this: On the wharf there, where we shall be in a few minutes, there's old Finn, your sire, waiting, and the Pater and the Master, and--and there's Betty, Jan, boy, there's sweet Betty standing there, and she's waiting for you and me. She's waiting there for us, Jan, boy, and we're never going away from her again, old chap--never, as long as ever we live."

And if Jan did not understand it all just then he did very soon afterward, when he felt Betty Murdoch's arms about his neck, and lordly gray old Finn was sniffing and nuzzling friendly-wise about his flanks.

Jan fully understood then that after all his far wanderings he had at the last of it come home.

THE END