A. J. Dawson - Jan

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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

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