her and wrote you were coming, eh?”
“I did.”
“Then, my friend, I’m afraid you were the foolish one.”
“How was I to know that rustler had been ‘making bad medicine’—had put the evil eye on Lucy? Gad, man, she’s plumb locoed; she stuck up for him; spun me the most glimmering tale—she’s got a dime novel skinned four ways of the pack. According to her the police stood in with Bulldog Carney on a train holdup, and made this poor innocent lamb the goat. They persecuted him, and he had to flee. Now he’s given his heart to God, and has gone away to buy a ranch and send for Lucy, where the two of them are to live happy ever after.”
“Ma God!” the Scotchman cried with vehemence.
“That bean-headed affair in calico gave him five hundred she’s pinched up against her chest for years.”
Cameron gasped and stared blankly; even his reverent exclamatory standby seemed inadequate.
“What time yesterday did the Wolf pull out?” the Sergeant asked.
“About three o’clock.”
“Afoot?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll rustle a cayuse the first chance he gets, but if he stays afoot he’ll hit Edmonton to-night, seventy miles.”
“To catch the morning train for Calgary,” Cameron suggested.
“You don’t know the Wolf, Boss; he’s got his namesake of the forest skinned to death when it comes to covering up his trail—no train for him now that he knows I’m on his track; he’ll just touch civilization for grub till he makes the border for Montana. I’ve got to get him. If you’ll stake me to a fill-up of bacon and a chew of oats for the horse I’ll eat and pull out.”
In an hour Sergeant Heath shook hands with Cameron saying: “If you’ll just not say a word about how that cuss got the message I’ll be much obliged. It would break me if it dribbled to headquarters.”
Then he rode down the ribbon of roadway that wound to the river bed, forded the old Saskatchewan that was at its summer depth, mounted the south bank and disappeared.
* * * *
When Jack the Wolf left Fort Victor he headed straight for a little log shack, across the river, where Descoign, a French half-breed, lived. The family was away berry picking, and Jack twisted a rope into an Indian bridle and borrowed a cayuse from the log corral. The cayuse was some devil, and that evening, thirty miles south, he chewed loose the rope hobble on his two front feet, and left the Wolf afoot.
Luck set in against Jack just there, for he found no more borrowable horses till he came to where the trail forked ten miles short of Fort Saskatchewan. To the right, running southwest, lay the well beaten trail that passed through Fort Saskatchewan to cross the river and on to Edmonton. The trail that switched to the left, running southeast, was the old, now rarely-used one that stretched away hundreds of miles to Winnipeg.
The Wolf was a veritable Indian in his slow cunning; a gambler where money was the stake, but where his freedom, perhaps his life, was involved he could wait, and wait, and play the game more than safe. The Winnipeg trail would be deserted—Jack knew that; a man could travel it the round of the clock and meet nobody, most like. Seventy miles beyond he could leave it, and heading due west, strike the Calgary railroad and board a train at some small station. No notice would be taken of him, for trappers, prospectors, men from distant ranches, morose, untalkative men, were always drifting toward the rails, coming up out of the silent solitudes of the wastes, unquestioned and unquestioning.
The Wolf knew that he would be followed; he knew that Sergeant Heath would pull out on his trail and follow relentlessly, seeking the glory of capturing his man single-handed. That was the esprit de corps of these riders of the prairies, and Heath was, par excellence, large in conceit.
A sinister sneer lifted the upper lip of the trailing man until his strong teeth glistened like veritable wolf fangs. He had full confidence in his ability to outguess Sergeant Heath or any other Mounted Policeman.
He had stopped at the fork of the trail long enough to light his pipe, looking down the Fort Saskatchewan-Edmonton road thinking. He knew the old Winnipeg trail ran approximately ten or twelve miles east of the railroad south for a hundred miles or more; where it crossed a trail running into Red Deer, half-way between Edmonton and Calgary, it was about ten miles east of that town.
He swung his blanket pack to his back and stepped blithely along the Edmonton chocolate-colored highway muttering: “You red-coated snobs, you’re waiting for Jack. A nice baited trap. And behind, herding me in, my brave Sergeant. Well, I’m coming.”
Where there was a matrix of black mud he took care to leave a footprint; where there was dust he walked in it, in one or the other of the ever persisting two furrow-like paths that had been worn through the strong prairie turf by the hammering hoofs of two horses abreast, and grinding wheels of wagon and buckboard. For two miles he followed the trail till he sighted a shack with a man chopping in the front yard. Here the Wolf went in and begged some matches and a drink of milk; incidentally he asked how far it was to Edmonton. Then he went back to the trail—still toward Edmonton. The Wolf had plenty of matches, and he didn’t need the milk, but the man would tell Sergeant Heath when he came along of the one he had seen heading for Edmonton.
For a quarter of a mile Jack walked on the turf beside the road, twice putting down a foot in the dust to make a print; then he walked on the road for a short distance and again took to the turf. He saw a rig coming from behind, and popped into a cover of poplar bushes until it had passed. Then he went back to the road and left prints of his feet in the black soft dust, that would indicate that he had climbed into a waggon here from behind. This accomplished he turned east across the prairie, reaching the old Winnipeg trail, a mile away; then he turned south.
At noon he came to a little lake and ate his bacon raw, not risking the smoke of a fire; then on in that tireless Indian plod—toes in, and head hung forward, that is so easy on the working joints—hour after hour; it was not a walk, it was more like the dog-trot of a cayuse, easy springing short steps, always on the balls of his wide strong feet.
At five he ate again, then on. He travelled till midnight, the shadowy gloom having blurred his path at ten o’clock. Then he slept in a thick clump of saskatoon bushes.
At three it was daylight, and screened as he was and thirsting for his drink of hot tea, he built a small fire and brewed the inspiring beverage. On forked sticks he broiled some bacon; then on again.
All day he travelled. In the afternoon elation began to creep into his veins; he was well past Edmonton now. At night he would take the dipper on his right hand and cut across the prairie straight west; by morning he would reach steel; the train leaving Edmonton would come along about ten, and he would be in Calgary that night. Then he could go east, or west, or south to the Montana border by rail. Heath would go on to Edmonton; the police would spend two or three days searching all the shacks and Indian and half-breed camps, and they would watch the daily outgoing train.
There was one chance that they might wire Calgary to look out for him; but there was no course open without some risk of capture; he was up against that possibility. It was a gamble, and he was playing his hand the best he knew how. Even approaching Calgary he would swing from the train on some grade, and work his way into town at night to a shack where Montana Dick lived. Dick would know what was doing.
Toward
