ferryman grinned. “For one passenger, eh? Might you happen to be the Gov’nor General, by any chanct?”
Carney’s handy gun held its ominous eye on the boatman, and its owner answered, “I happen to be a man in a hell of a hurry. If you want to travel with me get busy.”
The thin lips of the speaker had puckered till they resembled a slit in a dried orange. The small gray eyes were barely discernible between the half-closed lids; there was something devilish compelling in that lean parchment face; it told of demoniac concentration in the brain behind.
The ferryman knew. With a pole he swung the stern of the flat barge down stream, the iron pulleys on the cable whined a screeching protest, the hawsers creaked, the swift current wedged against the tangented side of the ferry, and swiftly Bulldog Carney and his buckskin were shot across the muddy old Saskatchewan.
On the other side he handed the boatman a five-dollar bill, and with a grim smile said: “Take a little stroll with me to the top of the hill; there’s some drunken bums across there whose company I don’t want.”
At the top of the south bank Carney mounted his buckskin and Melted away into the poplar-covered landscape; stepped out of the story for the time being.
Back at the Alberta the general assembly was rearranging itself. The Mounted Policeman, now set afoot by the death of his horse, had hurried down to the barracks to report; possibly to follow up Carney’s trail with a new mount.
The half-breed had come back from the puddle a thing of black ooze and profanity.
Jack the Wolf, having dug the mud from his eyes, and ears, and neck band, was in the hotel making terms with Cameron for the summer’s work at Fort Victor.
Billy the Piper was revealing intimate history of Bulldog Carney. From said narrative it appeared that Bulldog was as humorous a bandit as ever slit a throat. Billy had freighted whisky for Carney when that gentleman was king of the booze runners.
“Why didn’t you spill the beans, Billy?” Nagel queried; “there’s a thousand on Carney’s head all the time. We’d’ve tied him horn and hoof and cropped the dough.”
“Dif’rent here,” the Piper growled; “I’ve saw a man flick his gun and pot at Carney when Bulldog told him to throw up his hands, and all that cuss did was laugh and thrown his own gun up coverin’ the other broncho; but it was enough—the other guy’s hands went up too quick. If I’d set the pack on him, havin’ so to speak no just cause, well, Nagel, you’d been lookin’ round for another freighter. He’s the queerest cuss I ever stacked up agen. It kinder seems as if jokes is his religion; an’ when he’s out to play he’s plumb hostile. Don’t monkey none with his game, is my advice to you fellers.”
Nagel stepped to the door, thrust his swarthy face though it, and, seeing that the policeman had gone, came back to the bar and said: “Boys, the drinks is on me cause I see a man, a real man.”
He poured whisky into a glass and waited with it held high till the others had done likewise; then he said in a voice that vibrated with admiration:
“Here’s to Bulldog Carney! Gad, I love a man! When that damn trooper calls him, what does he do? You or me would’ve quit cold or plugged Mister Khaki-jacket—we’d had to. Not so Bulldog. He thinks with his nut, and both hands, and both feet; I don’t need to tell you boys what happened; you see it, and it were done pretty. Here’s to Bulldog Carney!” Nagel held his hand out to the Piper: “Shake, Billy. If you’d give that cuss away I’d’ve kicked you into kingdom come, knowin’ him as I do now.”
* * * *
The population of Fort Victor, drawing the color line, was four people: the Hudson’s Bay Factor, a missionary minister and his wife, and a school teacher, Lucy Black. Half-breeds and Indians came and went, constituting a floating population; Cameron and his men were temporary citizens.
Lucy Black was lathy of construction, several years past her girlhood, and not an animated girl. She was a professional religionist. If there were seeming voids in her life they were filled with this dominating passion of moral reclamation; if she worked without enthusiasm she made up for it in insistent persistence. It was as if a diluted strain of the old Inquisition had percolated down through the blood of centuries and found a subdued existence in this pale-haired, blue-eyed woman.
When Cameron brought Jack the Wolf to Fort Victor it was evident to the little teacher that he was morally an Augean stable: a man who wandered in mental darkness; his soul was dying for want of spiritual nourishment.
On the seventy-mile ride in the Red River buckboard from Edmonton to Fort Victor the morose wolf had punctuated every remark with virile oaths, their original angularity suggesting that his meditative moments were spent in coining appropriate expressions for his perfervid view of life. Twice Cameron’s blood had surged hot as the Wolf, at some trifling perversity of the horses, had struck viciously.
Perhaps it was the very soullessness of the Wolf that roused the religious fanaticism of the little school teacher; or perhaps it was that strange contrariness in nature that causes the widely divergent to lean eachotherward. At any rate a miracle grew in Fort Victor. Jack the Wolf and the little teacher strolled together in the evening as the great sun swept down over the rolling prairie to the west; and sometimes the full-faced moon, topping the poplar bluffs to the east, found Jack slouching at Lucy’s feet while she, sitting on a camp stool, talked Bible to him.
At first Cameron rubbed his eyes as if his Scotch vision had somehow gone agley; but, gradually, whatever incongruity had manifested at first died away.
As a worker Wolf was wonderful; his thirst for toil was like his thirst for moral betterment—insatiable. The missionary in a chat with Cameron explained it very succinctly: “Wolf, like many other Westerners, had never had a chance to know the difference between right and wrong; but the One who missed not the sparrow’s fall had led him to the port of salvation, Fort Victor—Glory to God! The poor fellow’s very wickedness was but the result of neglect. Lucy was the worker in the Lord’s vineyard who had been chosen to lead this man into a better life.
It did seem very simple, very all right. Tough characters were always being saved all over the world—regenerated, metamorphosed, and who was Jack the Wolf that he should be excluded from salvation.
At any rate Cameron’s survey gang, vitalized by the abnormal energy of Wolf, became a high-powered machine.
The half-breeds, when couraged by bad liquor, shed their religion and became barbaric, vulgarly vicious. The missionary had always waited until this condition had passed, then remonstrance and a gift of bacon with, perhaps, a bag of flour, had brought repentance. This method Jack the Wolf declared was all wrong; the breeds were like traindogs, he affirmed, and should be taught respect for God’s agents in a proper muscular manner. So the first time three French half-breeds, enthusiastically drunk, invaded the little log schoolhouse and declared school was out, sending the teacher home with tears of shame in her blue eyes, Jack reestablished the dignity of the church by generously walloping the three backsliders.
It is wonderful how the solitude of waste places will blossom the most ordinary woman into a flower of delight to the masculine eye; and the lean, anaemic, scrawny-haired school teacher had held as admirers all of Cameron’s gang, and one Sergeant Heath of the Mounted Police whom she had known in the Klondike, and who had lately come to Edmonton. With her negative nature she had appreciated them pretty much equally; but when the business of salvaging this prairie derelict came to hand the others were practically ignored.
For two months Fort
