Heath slipped the picket-pin back into the turf, saddled his horse, and stood mentally debating something. Evidently the something had to do with Jack’s whereabouts, for Heath next climbed a short distance up a poplar, and with his field glasses scanned the surrounding prairie. This seemed to satisfy him; he dropped back to earth, gathered some dry poplar branches and built a little fire; hanging by a forked stick he drove in the ground his copper tea pail half full of water.
Then the thing the Wolf had half expectantly waited for happened. The Sergeant took off his revolver belt, his khaki coat, rolled up the sleeves of his gray flannel shirt, turned down its collar, took a piece of soap and a towel from the roll of his blanket and went to the water to wash away the black dust of the prairie trail that was thick and heavy on his face and in his hair. Eyes and ears full of suds, splashing and blowing water, the noise of the Wolf’s rapid creep to the fire was unheard.
When the Sergeant, leisurely drying his face on the towel, stood up and turned about he was looking into the yawning maw of his own heavy police revolver, and the Wolf was saying: “Come here beside the fire and strip to the buff—I want them duds. There won’t nothin’ happen you unless you get hostile, then you’ll get yours too damn quick. Just do as you’re told and don’t make no fool play; I’m in a hurry.”
Of course the Sergeant, not being an imbecile, obeyed.
“Now get up in that tree and stay there while I dress,” the Wolf ordered. In three minutes he was arrayed in the habiliments of Sergeant Heath; then he said, “Come down and put on my shirt.”
In the pocket of the khaki coat that the Wolf now wore were a pair of steel handcuffs; he tossed them to the man in the shirt commanding, “Click these on.”
“I say,” the Sergeant expostulated, “can’t I have the pants and the coat and your boots?”
The Wolf sneered: “Dif’rent here my bounder; I got to make a get-away. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll give you your choice of three ways: I’ll stake you to the clothes, bind and gag you; or I’ll rip one of these 44 plugs through you; or I’ll let you run foot loose with a shirt on your back; I reckon you won’t go far on this wire grass in bare feet.”
“I don’t walk on my pants.”
“That’s just what you would do; the pants and coat would cut up into about four pairs of moccasins; they’d be as good as duffel cloth.”
“I’ll starve.”
“That’s your look-out. You’d lie awake nights worrying about where Jack Wolf would get a dinner—I guess not. I ought to shoot you. The damn police are nothin’ but a lot of dirty dogs anyway. Get busy and cook grub for two—bacon and tea while I sit here holdin’ this gun on you.”
The Sergeant was a grotesque figure cooking with the manacles on his wrists, and clad only in a shirt.
When they had eaten the Wolf bridled the horse, curled up the picket line and tied it to the saddle horn, rolled the blanket and with the carbine strapped it to the saddle, also his own blanket.
“I’m goin’ to grubstake you,” he said, “leave you rations for three days; that’s more than you’d do for me. I’ll turn your horse loose near steel, I ain’t horse stealin’, myself—I’m only borrowin’.”
When he was ready to mount a thought struck the Wolf. It could hardly be pity for the forlorn condition of Heath; it must have been cunning—a play against the off chance of the Sergeant being picked up by somebody that day. He said:
“You fellers in the force pull a gag that you keep your word, don’t you?”
“We try to.”
“I’ll give you another chance, then. I don’t want to see nobody put in a hole when there ain’t no call for it. If you give me your word, on the honor of a Mounted Policeman, swear it, that you’ll give me four days’ start before you squeal I’ll stake you to the clothes and boots; then you can get out in two days and be none the worse.”
“I’ll see you in hell first. A Mounted Policeman doesn’t compromise with a horse thief—with a skunk who steals a working girl’s money.”
“You’ll keep palaverin’ till I blow the top of your head off,” the Wolf snarled. “You’ll look sweet trampin’ in to some town in about a week askin’ somebody to file off the handcuffs Jack the Wolf snapped on you, won’t you?”
“I won’t get any place in a week with these handcuffs on,” the Sergeant objected; “even if a pack of coyotes tackled me I couldn’t protect myself.”
The Wolf pondered this. If he could get away without it he didn’t want the death of a man on his hands—there was nothing in it. So he unlocked the handcuffs, dangled them in his fingers debatingly, and then threw them far out into the bushes, saying, with a leer: “I might get stuck up by somebody, and if they clamped these on to me it would make a get-away harder.”
“Give me some matches,” pleaded the Sergeant.
With this request the Wolf complied saying, “I don’t want to do nothin’ mean unless it helps me out of a hole.”
Then Jack swung to the saddle and continued on the trail. For four miles he rode, wondering at the persistence of the muskeg. But now he had a horse and twenty-four hours ahead before train time; he should worry.
Another four miles, and to the south he could see a line of low rolling hills that meant the end of the swamps. Even where he rode the prairie rose and fell, the trail dipping into hollows, on its rise to sweep over higher land. Perhaps some of these ridges ran right through the muskegs; but there was no hurry.
Suddenly as the Wolf breasted an upland he saw a man leisurely cinching a saddle on a buckskin horse.
“Hell!” the Wolf growled as he swung his mount; “that’s the buckskin that I see at the Alberta; that’s Bulldog; I don’t want no mix-up with him.”
He clattered down to the hollow he had left, and raced for the hiding screen of the bushed muskeg. He was almost certain Carney had not seen him, for the other had given no sign; he would wait in the cover until Carney had gone; perhaps he could keep right on across the bad lands, for his horse, as yet, sunk but hoof deep. He drew rein in thick cover and waited.
Suddenly the horse threw up his head, curved his neck backward, cocked his ears and whinnied. The Wolf could hear a splashing, sucking sound of hoofs back on the tell-tale trail he had left.
With a curse he drove his spurs into the horse’s flanks, and the startled animal sprang from the cutting rowels, the ooze throwing up in a shower.
A dozen yards and the horse stumbled, almost coming to his knees; he recovered at the lash of Jack’s quirt, and struggled on; now going half the depth of his cannon bones in the yielding muck, he was floundering like a drunken man; in ten feet his legs went to the knees.
Quirt and spur drove him a few feet; then he lurched heavily, and with a writhing struggle against the sucking sands stood trembling; from his spread mouth came a scream of terror—he knew.
And now the Wolf knew. With terrifying dread he remembered—he had ridden into the “Lakes of the Shifting Sands.” This was the country they were in and he had forgotten. The sweat of fear stood out on
