A. J. Dawson - Jan

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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.

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