CHAPTER VIII

A TRAGEDY OF CONSTRUCTION

Stretched on the dry grass beside the trestle, hanging perilously over the edge of the dizzy drop to the river bottom, Tressa watched the unceasing struggle with the hungry quicksands.

A hive of industry was below her—men and horses, huge tree trunks and masses of rock, network trestle and piled poles. Men swarmed everywhere, appearing from her height mere dots of movement, ridiculously unfit to cope with the force that was making her father so irritable these days.

Two distinct gangs were at work. Over beyond the water the filling in of the trestle was almost complete, the material being hauled by a train working from cuttings to the west. A great hundred-and-fifty foot bank of loose earth had swallowed the "crazy conthraption" to the very edge of the water, sloping steeply upward at its near side from the bridge that spanned the permanent course of the river. Everything hung now waiting only for the choking of the quicksand to commence the filling of the near side.

From bank to bank of the river a heavy boom of logs caught the trees felled in the forest above and floated down for the great maw that had already swallowed so much. These trees, trimmed of all but their larger branches, were being drawn to the shore by the surer footed men and several teams of horses; the river bottom down there was a tangle of trunks ready to feed to the quicksands.

Closer in beneath the bank over which she looked men were piling rocks on the spongy area, as they had been for weeks—as they were a year ago under O'Connor—as they might be forever, unless luck favoured her father.

To the inexperienced eye the scene was ceaseless activity, but Tressa had long since learned the skill with which the bohunk conceals his laziness. A dozen civilised workmen would accomplish as much as three times their number of foreigners. But this was a bohunk's job; civilised workmen treated it as a plague.

The swift figure of Adrian Conrad moved from group to group, leaving a wake of energy. By sheer personality and grit he gained his ends, though railway construction was as foreign to his life's plans, past and future, as suicide.

She smiled as she thought of the reason of his presence, and blew a kiss over the edge to his unsuspecting head. This, the great task of her father's career, would mark the end of Conrad's apprenticeship. These days of a mass attack on the bottomless pit might be the beginning of the end. When the mass of logs and trees and rocks was dumped in, surely she could lay her plans for a new life! Conrad would return to the city, to the partnership he had dropped only temporarily to be near her; and her father would have enough for the rest of his days.

A week or two to test the success of their latest effort, another to build the permanent foundations and strengthen the trestle in its final shape, and then a few weeks at most for the fill-in. Already the wave in the trestle beneath the supply trains was scarcely noticeable. The end was in sight.

Her father she could pick out easily enough—that still, large figure standing by itself, or joined now and then by Adrian. Once it jerked forward, and half a dozen men catapulted themselves at some part of the work that did not please him.

Presently Adrian and two others gathered before the contractor, where they seemed to confer a long time. One, Tressa knew, would be Koppowski; the other must be one of his friends, Werner probably, or Morani, or Heppel. They alone of the five hundred possessed intelligence enough to justify consultation. The rest merely obeyed orders, like the horses, and crammed their stomachs till the dishes were empty. Yes, and made strange music of evenings. She never understood that.

Then Adrian and her father were alone.

The men swarming through the lower lacework of the trestle were keying up with sledge and rope and wrench, adding a pole here and there. These they lifted by means of rope and pulley attached to convenient parts of the existing structure. Her father was pointing upward. A bohunk climbed clumsily to the point indicated and tied a pulley there. Passing a rope through the pulley, he tossed the end down. Several men seized it. To the other end a log was attached.

Down below, Torrance watched the carrying out of his orders with keenest interest. He had been at this for months, and his trained eye could pick out the weak spots with unerring instinct. To his eye he was forced to trust for the support of those twin bands of steel high above his head, since the uncertain and uneven sinking of the trestle, green timber, and ignorant and careless workmen, with the incidence of accident far above the average, made construction at the best patchy and haphazard.

He was surprised and a little chagrinned by the weakness he had discovered; he could not understand how it had escaped him before. The pull, the brace of the trestle poles just there did not seem unsound, yet instinct warned him that something was amiss in the sag of adjacent supports. His orders to Conrad, accordingly, were hurried and abrupt.

The men in the trestle went about the work in their usual clumsy way, but at last a score of men had hold of the rope and the fresh log rose on its end in slow jerks. Then it was clear of the ground, rolling in a leisurely way against the lower supports of the trestle in response to the uncurling of the rope. Up above, men were holding it away from the trestle; a dozen more waiting to fasten it in place.

It had risen twenty feet when a cry of warning burst from Torrance's lips. He scarcely knew why. His wandering eyes had fancied a sag in the support that held the pulley; his quick ear had caught a new note in the creaking timbers.

From above came the sound of snapping ropes—a chorus of panic-stricken cries—a succession of crashes as the two logs dashed earthward.

The swarthy man half way up, who had been directing the rising log, a task for which he was chosen on account of his great strength and cool judgment, turned a lightning backward somersault without pausing to look where he might land. As he turned over he twisted in the air, caught a support, and swung himself easily to safety. For a moment he contemplated the tragedy below, then like a cat sprang upward through the trestle. The others merely closed their eyes and hung on.

Of the two freed logs the upper bounced from support to support, finally resting in the trestle itself. But the one that had been on its way to remedy the weakness turned slightly sideways and glanced off into the group of frozen bohunks below. The trestle trembled from end to end.

Torrance did not follow the course of the falling logs. All that mattered at such a moment was the fate of his great work. He saw the quiver run through it—felt it in his own body—heard the creaking of ropes and blots, and there flashed through him a horror that he had not provided for a strain like that. When the trestle held its place, a great surge of pride and joy swept over him, but his knees were trembling.

When his eyes returned to earth, the bohunks were in flight, almost to a man, though danger was past. Only Conrad, Koppy, and Lefty Werner were straining at the log that held down their crushed comrades. Torrance sprang forward and bent his great back to the weight. Two fewer bohunks were on construction in Canada.

Some one dropped from the trestle close to Torrance, and a hand thrust itself before the contractor's eyes. In the hand was the end of a rope. Torrance looked from it to the dusky Indian face above it.

"Cut!" jerked the halfbreed. "Thar's more up thar."

Torrance reached out slowly and took the rope, incredulous.

"'Twan't bolted," said the halfbreed. "An' then that."

A wave of crimson deepened the tan on Torrance's face. Whirling on the group beside him, he struck viciously, and Koppy hurtled over the log and lay as still as his dead companions. Instantly Conrad was on the Pole, running his hands swiftly over the unconscious body. With a satisfied smile he drew a knife from a leather sheath fastened inside the trouser-band, and thrust it into his own belt.

"You did well to strike quickly," he muttered to Torrance. "A bullet would be the proper thing, but we've no direct proof; the Police would ask questions. He'll be round in a minute."

Torrance was examining the severed rope.

"Where did you find this, Mavy?"

The halfbreed pointed aloft. "Lower end o' the support the pulley was fastened to. Thar's more."

Torrance was restraining himself for lack of victims on whom to vent his wrath; Werner had retired to a discreet distance. Koppy was sitting weakly on the log, wondering what had happened. The contractor reached out one big hand and jerked him to his feet.

"Now, you—! I'll give you twenty minutes to round up them cusses of yours and get them up in that trestle. The Indian here'll show you what you got to do. And you'll stand right under all the time—and you'll stand there every time we work on the trestle. I'm going to make it worth your skin to stop this thing. And if after to-day I find a rope cut or a bolt missing I'll smash you to pulp. And Big Jim Torrance don't go back on his word. . . . What's more, you and the other dogs won't be paid for the time it takes to fix things up."

He closed his powerful fist on the Pole's shoulder so tightly that the man's face twisted.

"You think you're going to bust this job up, you and your gang. I'm telling you that before you succeed you'll wish you'd stayed in jail in your own country. I don't know what you got against the trestle, but I do know you're a hellish cuss I'm going to break to the halter. If you count to bust things up here, I'll see that the busting falls on your own head. Scat!"



CHAPTER IX

TORRANCE EVOLVES A PLAN

"Were they—real dead, daddy? Couldn't we—can't we do anything?" Horror stared from Tressa's eyes; she was trembling from head to foot. "I thought you or—or Adrian were under it, and I almost fell over. I'd have fainted if I hadn't thought you might need me."

The big man laid his arm across the shaking shoulders and drew her to him.

"I guess it was Adrian before your old dad."

"No—I don't think so." She continued naively: "Adrian's so quick; I don't think he'd be caught like that. It was you I thought of—too."

He smiled a little wistfully. "That's right, little girl, be honest. We all had it—once. When your mother was alive there was no one counted but 'Jim.' God, if I could hear her say it now! . . . 'Jim.'" He lingered over the word, repeating it in reverent whisper. "It was 'Jim' kept me straight them days. . . . Just the little word 'Jim.' I've always thought if I could die with that in my ears, perhaps there might—might open up a bit of a chance for the big rough fellow who hasn't had much chance to get away from things that make men rougher. . . . 'Jim.' Now I'll have to kick out without it."

The girl in his arms was frightened of him when he talked that way; and it was happening more frequently in these days of worry. She had scarcely known her mother, except through the lips of her daddy, but the woman who touched only the fringes of her memory was to her, as to him, a being not quite of this earth.

"'Jim,'" she whispered, scarce knowing she said it.

His arms closed convulsively, and she could feel his beating heart.

"Say it to me—sometimes—won't you, little girl?" he whispered.

But she was suddenly conscious of treading sacred ground.

"I don't think I can, daddy. It's mother's, mother's own. You're my daddy, and there's nothing as good as that to me."

He smiled lovingly down on her, tossing aside his depression.

"And a daddy couldn't have anything better—no, not if he searched this whole wide Canada through from terminal to terminal. I'm just about the luckiest dog this side Heaven.

'Just one girl, There is just one girl; There may be others, I know, But they're not my pearl. Sun or rain, She is just the same; I'll be happy forever with Just one girl.'"

The song was coarse and toneless, but he knew no other way of voicing it, and she noted nothing of its crudeness.

"Daddy, you're a base deceiver."

She was wagging an accusing finger before his eyes, and he blinked in exaggerated concern.

"O' course," he admitted, "I don't say I've had much chance with more than one. This job of mine is death to gallivanting. I wouldn't know how to look at a woman now—not in a way that would mean she was more to me than one of the same sex as the best little girl in the world."

But the silently accusing finger continued to wag.

"Honest, I don't know what you mean."

"What about the cow-girl last year that you bought the horses from?"

He chuckled deep in his throat.

"Shucks! I know a pretty girl when I see one, that's all. I knew how to appreciate that skin of hers, and her riding, and the way she lifted her feet when she walked, and how she wore her clothes—though they weren't much, were they? And I bet they don't half prize her where she comes from. A chap like me who's known the two best women in the world can spot a real pippin any time; and he sort of owes it to the world to pass the message along. Shucks, girl! You didn't think—say, you didn't think I was sidling up to her, or anything like that? All I did was to touch her arm. I wanted to see if they were all alike, like yours. And look what she gave me!"

He made a grimace and drew a finger along a dim line cutting down his cheek.

"She couldn't have been the nice girl I thought," he reflected, "or she wouldn't have got on her high-and-mighty just for a little thing like that."

"Anyway," sighed the girl, snuggling deeper in his arms, "I was real proud of you when she brought that quirt across your face, and your cheek all bleeding, and it looked as if your eye was gone. You just laughed and borrowed my handkerchief."

He laughed again now. "You didn't think I'd slam at her with one of these big fists, did you? I believe I kind of enjoyed wiping away the blood."

"And you paid her every cent without a word."

"O' course! That hadn't anything to do with our little tiff. Didn't I owe the money? I got them horses cheap enough, goodness knows! I'd take a thousand of them any day in the week she trotted 'em along. Easiest way to make a fortune I know."

Tressa eased herself away to look gravely in his face. "Did you ever think those horses might be stolen ones?"

"Not more'n I could help," he grinned. "It wasn't any of my business; she offered them at a reasonable price—"

"You set the price."

"The buyer always does, my dear—when he can. Ten dollars was only a starter; I'd have given five times as much. They've been the best horses I've had." He stopped with a sudden inspiration. "Say, come to think of it, they're the very ones we've been losing lately. Looks as if some one else is a good judge of horseflesh."

"I hope they don't touch Doll and Prince. Surely nobody would come right up here to our own stable!"

"Not while Big Jim Torrance and booze don't get mixing company too free. You didn't used to think so much of Doll—but that was before she was broke. You're getting your riding legs pretty quick, I say. We'll sell them before we pull out. They're real prairie horses; they wouldn't be happy down East. Just the same," he murmured, after a long pause, "I'd give a week's pay to know who got them horses. Perhaps the camps out west needed brightening up their horse-power, and they've done it at my expense. If we could have got on the trail of the last lot that nearly went over the rapids—but there's nobody can trail in this camp." He smote his knee with a loud smack. "By hickory! Why didn't I think of the Indian before?"

"Peter Maverick?"

"Sure. The only Indian we got. He did me a good turn to-day on that trestle. Never saw an Indian couldn't follow a trail, if there was whisky or a horse at the end of it . . . and I never saw a likelier one than Mavy. Might be worth my while to get in ahead of the Mounted Police. They had to be told, you know."

"Did you tell them how you got the horses, daddy?"

The big man looked grieved. "Do you think your dad has lost all his senses? But this smashing of things was getting too common, and they'd have found out about the horses and wondered why I hadn't called them in. I don't think they'd favour buying strange horses at ten dollars a head and trying to look innocent about it. It isn't any use arguing with them—but you got common sense. You wouldn't suspect your old dad of receiving stolen property—at ten per; but them Mounted Police will ask for a birth certificate for every blessed one. I haven't time to look into the pedigree of every horse I buy. I'm busy. The Police are so unreasonable when it comes to law."

"That's why," he went on, after a thoughtful silence, "I'd like to steer them off the horse question. There's lots else for them to do. . . . Why didn't I think of Mavy before?"

He went to the edge of the bank and whistled. Ten minutes later Conrad was with them.

"Koppy got them repairs done yet?"

"Pretty nearly," replied the foreman.

"When the Indian can get away, send him up . . . or maybe we'd better wait till after hours—if he wouldn't ask overtime."

"You'll never find him after hours; he doesn't sleep in the camp. Wanders off somewhere in the bush. He has about as much use for white trash as you have."

"Send him right away then."



CHAPTER X

MAVY TAKES A RISK

Mavy, known on the camp books as Peter Maverick, received the summons to the boss's shack with his customary silence. For a moment after Conrad delivered the message he hesitated, then, nodding shortly, he swung into the trestle and began to clamber up by way of the hundred and fifty feet of network supports, scorning the path that led up the bank before the foreman's shack. With a puzzled shake of his head Conrad watched the strange figure growing smaller.

"A hundred of him," he muttered, "and they could take the whole bunch of bohunks. If he's a specimen of the wild Indian, Lord only knows what right we had to clean them out of the land. Mr. Torrance would say it was because they never build railways."

To the bohunks, mildly staring after the vanishing halfbreed, his method of reaching the top was merely foolishly exhausting; but several weeks of acquaintance had taught them to accept his silent peculiarities with nothing more than casual wonder, though they disliked him for his unsociability, for the cold contempt that twisted his lips, and for the stifled volcano that smouldered within his squinting eyes. They hated him more than ever now, with a hatred that could be liquidated only in blood. Their own criminal schemes that had taken the lives of two of their companions they did not consider, but the man who had exposed the cause of the deaths, and had made them sweat unrequited hours for exercising the only weapon they knew in their relentless fight against their bosses, must answer to them for his temerity and treason. Hereafter the halfbreed was just prey; sooner or later he would fall before the slumbering fires that knew no law but the knife, no restraint but fear.

Torrance looked up at the shadow in the doorway.

"Hey? Where did you come from?"

"Yuh sent fer me, didn't yuh?"

"I thought you were down bossing the Koppy job."

"Sartin. We jest was through when he tol' me."

"But Conrad only got down there; I saw him." Torrance squinted sternly at the halfbreed.

Mavy nodded. "I come by the trestle."

"The h—you did!"

The halfbreed shrugged his shoulders. The contractor examined him with renewed interest.

"How'd you like to be an underforeman?"

Again the wide, sloping shoulders shrugged.

"Say, you don't mean you'd turn down an extra dollar a day?"

"Koppy's underforeman, ain't he?" The halfbreed spat with disgust, and Torrance chuckled sympathetically.

"If I did that every time I felt like it about Koppy, I'd be as dry as a camp-meeting in three days. You're not afraid of him, are you?"

Mavy grinned.

"Because Koppy's going to be some busy for the next few weeks hanging out under that trestle, and we'll need another underforeman perhaps."

The squinting eyes took on a sudden gleam, even a keen anticipation that could not escape the contractor's attention.

"An' wud I be bossin' 'em about, them bohunks? Wud yuh let me do as I liked?"

"Well," smiled Torrance, "not quite what you liked; you'd be under the foreman and me, you know."

The halfbreed sighed. "That's allus the way. Suthin's allus foolin' me. 'Cause ef yuh'd gi' me a free hand thar'd be a dozen er so less bohunks the fus' night fer supper. I jes' natcherl hate hidin' my feelin's." He repeated the sigh more hopelessly. "Yuh'd never git the work did; thar ain't bohunks enough in the world."

Torrance clutched his hand; here in an unexpected quarter was a man to his liking.

"If I could," he whispered, "I'd make you foreman this instant, and round up all the bohunks out of jail. But that ain't what I want you for. Are you a real Indian?"

"Naw," drawled Mavy. "I'm a Chinee, with a bit o' Pole thrown in."

Torrance showed he could appreciate humour like that. "I mean, can you follow a trail?"

The halfbreed's eyes danced. "Take a run in the bush," he said proudly, "an' to-morrow I'll take yuh over it agin t' the foot. Kin I foller a trail! Gor-swizzle! It's wot I done most o' my born days."

The contractor ruminated. Much as he dreaded the interference of the Police in the matter of the stolen horses, he hesitated about entrusting their recovery to this strange Indian; and a tardy thought came to him that the Police might question it. He cast the die in favour of his first plan.

"You know them horses we been losing?"

Mavy kept his eyes fixed on the contractor's face, but he knew the location of door and window with the unerring sense of the trapped wild thing.

"If you can find the thief—or who he is—there's under-foreman's pay for you. A dollar a day more—if money's any use to you. Will you take it on?"

"No."

The reply was prompt and uncompromising. Torrance, flaming as usual before unexpected opposition, was about to fire him on the spot, when the noise of metal against metal drew Tressa to the door.

"It's Constable Williams and a new Policeman—a Sergeant. Father's here, Mr. Williams. He was sending for you. There's been a dreadful accident. A piece of the trestle fell and killed two of the men."

As Tressa stepped back to let the Policeman enter, the halfbreed slid unobtrusively to the other side of the room and stood in the semi-obscurity facing the doorway, his back tight against the wall.

"Yes," stormed Torrance, "and if it had killed a dozen of them it would have served them right. They'd taken out the bolts and cut a rope."

Constable Williams, blinking at the sudden darkness of the sitting room, stepped aside and made way for a straight, bronzed figure wearing the stripes of a Sergeant, who was already acknowledging with a winning smile Tressa's unspoken welcome.

"Torrance, shake hands with Sergeant Mahon. He's been sent up to clear—"

The halfbreed, his squinting eyes staring as at a ghost, seemed to make only a single movement. Then the entire window crashed out, and a pair of heavy boots disappeared over the sill.

For one brief moment the contractor and his daughter were stupefied. Not so Sergeant Mahon. With the crash he was at the door, tugging at his belt. But Tressa was in the way, and by the time he reached the open only a tiny cloud of dust rising above the edge of the steep drop to the river bottom told the way the halfbreed had gone.

The Sergeant rushed to the bank and looked down the hundred-and-fifty foot wall with a gasp. No need for a revolver there. With a shudder he drew back.

Torrance stormed up beside him, rifle in hand.

"Where is he? Why don't you shoot? Let me—"

The Sergeant, with a deft twist, secured the rifle.

"What's he been doing?"

"Doing?" yelled the contractor. "Didn't you see that whole window—didn't you—"

"We don't shoot men for that."

Tressa came to the rescue:

"He's an Indian, one of the bohunks. I didn't know he'd done anything. We were talking to him when you came. Daddy wanted to make him underforeman, but he refused. And now"—she peered in awe over the edge—"he's killed."

"Guilty conscience, I guess," commented the Sergeant. "Lots of them are taken that way when they see the uniform—though I don't recall quite such a sudden and successful attempt at suicide."

"Suicide!" snorted Torrance, who was lying down where he could see the scene below. "Suicide nothing! That chap's a human cat—or he ain't human at all. He came up by the trestle; this is just another way to get down. Look at that dust! He's not falling, not him! He's just kicking up a dust so we can't see, and all the time he's breaking his up record. He's not dropping fast enough to hurt himself . . . but, by hickory! where he finds toe-holds on that cliff beats me."

They were all craning over. Down below, the bohunks were scattering like frightened sheep, while those further out gaped. The dust-cloud struck the bottom and spread, and out of it emerged a running figure, limping a little but covering the ground with surprising speed. Tag ends of clothing hung to him, and from head to foot he was the colour of earth.

Torrance cheered. "Hurrah! I'm surer than ever I made no mistake offering him the job . . . and I'll pay for the window myself, by hickory!"

Mahon was watching him with a faint smile.

"It's a lively reception to give a stranger. Is there more to the programme?"

"If there is," replied Torrance, "I'm only one of the innocent audience. That guy's beaten the limit three times inside as many hours. He's a continuous performance. He did a few careless flips and tumbles down there to get out of the way of that pole, then he swings up by way of the trestle while you'd say 'Jack Robinson.' He's gone down again," he added, measuring with his eye the dizzy height, "by way of Providence. Wouldn't you say he'd got the wrong job out here, even if he is an Indian?"

"Was it Mavy?" asked Constable Williams.

"We call him Mavy, but he's a blooming sparrow, or a toy balloon."

"An Indian who's been working on construction," Williams explained to his superior, "a strange, silent fellow. Always seemed a bit above the job. Peter Maverick was his name."

Mahon started violently. His heart had made a bound that almost suffocated him. Before his eyes swept a picture of a court of so-called justice, with a big half breed giving evidence for the Police in a rustling case. The Judge, ignorantly persisting in his demand for a name for a child of nature who had all his life been content with "Blue Pete," had swallowed an invention of the moment, though every rancher in the room laughed at the ludicrously unfit term they knew so well. "Peter Maverick," the halfbreed had replied without a smile.

The Sergeant closed his eyes with a weary shake of the head. The picture had faded before another—the halfbreed wounded to death by a bullet he had drawn to his own chest to save the Police friend for whom it was intended.

"Know him?" enquired the Constable curiously.

Mahon passed a hand across his moist brow. "I knew a cowboy once—best friend I ever had—best a man could have. He gave that name once because he had no other to give. . . . He, too, was part Indian. Peter's a common Indian name. . . . He's dead now. He gave his life for me."

"That was Blue Pete, wasn't it?" asked Williams. "We got some of the story up here. He was working with us down there at Medicine Hat, wasn't he?"

The Sergeant moved toward the shack. "That drop makes me dizzy."

Within the shack Tressa laid a sympathetic hand on his.

"You'd better tell us about it, hadn't you? You're thinking a lot."

He smiled sadly into her tender eyes. "There's not much to tell," he began, "at least, not in quantity. Blue Pete was the whitest man that ever lived, the whitest of any colour. Yet he died a rustler—giving his life gladly for one who had done nothing more for him than call him friend. He was no rustler at heart. For years he had stolen horses and cattle in the Badlands of Montana, because, as he said, every one rustled there, more or less; he was brought up to it. Perhaps he did a bit more than the others, but that was because he knew more tricks. I came on him just north of the border. He'd come across before the rifles of two cowboys who hated him so badly they'd quite forgotten that he could have picked them off with ease any time he wished. Though he was the best shot in the Badlands, he never used his rifle till he had to; and for days he'd been running before them."

He looked about the room, feeling the silence. To him it was as a tribute to his dead friend.

"I took him in to the Inspector. He became a detective for us. You see, the rustlers were getting a bit the better of us because they knew the Cypress Hills and we never had force enough to take time to study them. Blue Pete didn't need to. He could pick up a trail anywhere and follow it like a blood-hound. . . . I learned a little from him; that's why I'm up here. With his assistance we ran down some of the rustlers. It was he proved to us that our own ranchers were among the rustlers—proved it to his own destruction. It was at the trial of one of them that he received the blow that sent him wild again. For a week he'd been on the trail of that fellow, a man we'd long suspected, half rancher, half hotel-keeper, and his nerves were a bit raw from lack of sleep and being forced into the open. You see, it meant giving up all the cow-punching he loved, for no rancher would employ him then."

A flash of anger lit the Sergeant's face.

"The Judge questioned his evidence—doubted it—even censured the Police for using such an acknowledged rustler. . . . Pete left the courtroom straight for the old game . . . and I, his old friend—I was put on his track. It was my duty. In the meantime some of his old companions from the Badlands crossed the border. I don't know whether Blue Pete joined up with them or not. If he did there are so many things can't be explained. We caught a few of them—including a white girl who—who also had gone wild. She was—a friend of mine, too, once. When we caught her brothers, who owned one of the best ranches in the district, the 3-bar-Y, and they—killed themselves, she just broke away. She and Blue Pete worked together. I think they loved each other. It was a crazy venture of hers that put her in our hands. She got six months. . . .

"It was spring when she came out, early spring this year. A gang of Badland rustlers got into the Hills. We surrounded them, and I went in with one companion on a trail of blood from a lucky shot we'd got at them when they tried to break through for the border. The wounded man ambushed me . . . but Blue Pete—he'd been creeping along beside me all the time—took the bullet instead of me. He managed to tell me the rustlers' rendezvous, and then something struck me on the head and I dropped. My companion came to my assistance then. I guess I was half-crazy from the blow, and from the awful wound I'd seen in Pete's chest, because when we closed in on the rendezvous that night I took fool chances. I jumped in alone. Dutch Henry had my life in his hands when Blue Pete fired from the shadows. . . . Somehow he'd dragged himself there to be on hand. He saved my life again. . . . He died for it."

Constable Williams cleared his throat. Torrance was silent. Tressa leaned forward and touched Mahon's sleeve.

"You didn't bury him in a cemetery? He'd hate it."

"We never found his body. Mira Stanton, the girl I told you of, buried him where we never could find. She wrote us . . . and she hated us. There's a rough stone to his memory down there on the edge of the Cypress Hills. It reminds the few of us who see it of my friend, simple, plain, rugged, lasting. There's no name on it, just 'Greater Love.'"

"You didn't find him? What was he like?" Tressa's face was flushed.

"A big, slouching sort of figure, but with a world of muscle you'd never suspect. The face of an Indian, but lighter; it's bluish tint gave him his name. A smile that made you forget anything but that he was your friend; a square jaw, squinting eyes—"

"Was his face very thin, almost haggard, with hollows under the eyes, and one shoulder lower than the other?"

Mahon smiled at her excitement. "No, his face lurked a little heavily, waiting only for that wonderful smile, but it wasn't haggard. And his shoulders were twin towers of strength."

"Oh," she sighed, "then it isn't him."

"I can assure you, Miss Torrance, that there's not a grain of hope to raise. Whom does my friend resemble?"

"Why, Peter Maverick—just some ways."

For a moment he seemed startled, almost frightened, then he smiled indulgently.

"It only means they're both of Indian strain, have crooked eyes (a not uncommon combination), and happened to toy with the same invented name that is taken from the herds. Nothing more. . . . If I thought Blue Pete would throw himself through a window and down a bank like that at sight of me—"

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "He wouldn't, of course. But wouldn't it have been a story?"

"The sort of story that never happens even in books," he sighed.



CHAPTER XI

THE DESERTED CAMP

Three low taps sounded on the side of Koppy's shack. The underforeman rose and, standing well back in the gloom of the interior, peered through the open door to the boss's shack beside the grade. Then he went to the window that opened on the woods, swung it open, and without looking through whistled softly. Three men moved furtively across the opening and waited.

Koppy stepped to the door and carelessly examined the sky, drew tobacco and cigarette papers and rolled himself a smoke. Then, yawning lazily, he reached back and pulled the door shut and strolled away out of sight round the corner of the shack. With a nasty laugh to the three men waiting there he led the way back through the window.

"Boss watching. Door closed—me not here."

One of the three men, a pair of golden hoops dangling from his ears, lifted a listening hand. From below broke the loud music of the orchestra.

"Boss think-a me there," he sneered. "Boss easy guy. Morani's orchestra, he say. Morani here." He struck himself dramatically on the chest.

"Not so easy maybe, boss ain't," Koppy shook a doubting head. "Big and strong and—and thick here," touching his head. "Maybe—I don't know."

From a pouch of tobacco which Koppy had thrown on the table they were rolling themselves cigarettes; it seemed to be a common stock of which the Pole, in deference to his rank, had the guardianship. One of the men struck a match thoughtfully.

"Get it out of your noodles that the boss don't know nothing. He gets there mighty spry sometimes. He's had too much of things lately to keep his eyes shut. We got to work pretty slick, I say."

Koppy straightened with a show of resentment.

"He never had the Workers before. We take him like that"—he closed one big dirty fist with a relentless movement—"and we crush him, like we crush all our bosses."

"All right, Koppy." The other puffed a ring of smoke. "I wish you're right, if it makes you sleep better. I'm in on the crushing game. Course the Workers make a difference. All the difference in the world," he added hastily, catching Koppy's glowering glance. "But we got to go smooth, I say, all the same-e. He's getting suspicious. That whiffer he belted you to-day on the saloon-sign ought to about hold you for a while. When your toes curled over that log I thought we'd be measuring you for a coffin."

The face of the underforeman went livid; a flood of foul expletives clogged his utterance.

The one who had not yet spoken broke in soothingly:

"Lefty just means he hit you hard. Why no somebody knife him?"

The four men asked each other the question with their eyes and, receiving no answer, looked confused.

"Why no you, Heppel?" demanded Koppy. "I had no time."

"Time wasn't hanging about loose when he let drive," grinned Lefty Werner.

"Mr. Conrad took your knife, Koppy," soothed Heppel. "You couldn't."

Morani, unobserved, had drawn from some hidden part of him a long stiletto and was whetting it slowly on the palm of his hand. Fascinated, they watched.

"We were a hundred to two," reflected Koppy in a low voice; and his eyes were puzzled.

That was as far as they ever got in the solution of the eternal puzzle of how one man holds a hundred under his thumb and sleeps the sleep of the unafraid.

"Which ain't quite to the point," Werner reminded them, "with this meeting due in half an hour. In the first place, are you sure the boss ain't on?"

The Pole lifted his shoulders haughtily.

"I do it—I, the president of the Independent Workers of the World."

"All right, old cock, but what do you do?"

"The orchestra." Morani waved a satisfied hand toward the music. "It play. No come-a to meeting."

"Can't say I'm sorry," muttered Werner under his breath.

"Men—many men—they play cards where boss can see," said Heppel, mildly chiding the lack of faith in his fellow-conspirator. "Camp same, boss think. Meeting in bush same time. Everything fine."

The local president of the Workers of the World spread his hands out in modest deprecation of such applause. Werner seemed convinced.

"You'd pull the wool over the eyes of a professional burglar, Koppy, while you stole his jemmy. But what's the idea of the meeting to-night? A crash—right off the bat?"

Koppy shrugged his shoulders; everything was in the lap of the gods; inspiration was one of his holds on his followers.

"'Cause every damn one of them will do what you say," Werner assured him, "from waiting to say grace before tackling the soup, to blowing that trestle to perdition. That is, if they can do it in the dark."

"In dark—it is our way," returned the leader crisply. "Laws? Bah! For the bosses they are, like everything else. We work down here." He passed a flat hand low above the floor.

"A bit lower than that, ain't it?" said Werner, hiding a smile.

"We cut off the feet of our bosses so they fall."

"Everybody take a high seat and keep your feet out of the water!" cried the irrepressible one. "But you want to make sure you don't cut so low the bosses hop out of the way. But I guess you're right—you're always right, Koppy. We got to do things in the dark, till we get the Labour Unions at our back. But they're a glass of water when it comes to the real thing."

With an imperceptible movement Morani's knife was out again, swishing back and forward across his palm with a low hissing sound. And every eye was rivetted on it. Koppy dragged his away and spoke:

"You three, you go to boss—"

Werner gave a startled exclamation.

"Meeting for that," Koppy went on relentlessly. "We send you three to talk to boss—"

"I never was no talker, Koppy, you know that," protested Werner.

But Morani continued to whet his knife with smiling unction.

"You see boss," said Koppy, "and demand we boss ourselves—that I boss or job stops. We Workers know no boss; we please ourselves. We boss out here. If any one say no—slash!"

He struck downward with his right hand, as he would gladly strike when he had the chance. And Morani repeated the movement, only far more subtly and efficiently. Werner stumbled to his feet, his eyes on Morani's stiletto.

"Here, you butcher, I'm not a boss. Keep that sticker away from my shins. Put it up, Morani, for God's sake! You don't need practice."

Koppy motioned him roughly back to the bunk on which he had been lying.

"You three tell boss that."

"Like hell I do!" grumbled Werner, "when I'm off my nut."

"Like-a hell I do," repeated Morani fervently.

"Like hell I do," agreed Heppel solemnly.

"Like hell you all do," Koppy summed up acidly.

"And your precious skin—" began Werner.

"I order."

The unmistakable warning in the abrupt retort silenced Werner for the moment; the distant peril seemed the less ominous.

"There's no hurry," he suggested after an interval. "He thinks he's got the hole almost filled, but we can hold him up any time by pulling down some more of the trestle—"

"And I stand under!" snapped Koppy.

"Well, of course, you don't need to. You're president of The Independent Workers of the World."

Koppy glanced at him from beneath lowering brows, but Werner assumed a look of blankest innocence as he rolled himself a fresh cigarette.

"Or," he reflected, "we might leave some one behind to blow it up after it's finished."

"Never finished," declared Koppy. "The bosses must know the Workers have spoken."

"But three of us, I notice, are to do all the speaking," Werner growled to himself. "Next thing to being President of the United States I'd be president of the Workers of the World—and the last's the safest job."

Koppy went to the window and looked through into the darkening shadows. A man slid through the undergrowth out there and disappeared. Several more drifted in and out of sight. As he looked, a half hundred passed furtively, slinking along, silent, moving back into the bush and the shadows, a procession of guilty mutes, glancing neither to right nor left, held to their course by the promise of the coming gathering.

"Come," ordered Koppy. "We go."

He lit the lamp and opened the door, and they climbed through the way they had entered. Outside they became as part of their fellow conspirators, crouching, silent, grim.

Over the bank came the sound of the orchestra, blaring with forced lung the message of the ordinary camp life. Half a dozen small groups idled on the ground before the cook-houses. A few walked lazily about the stables, and two white-aproned cooks passed from cook-house to cook-house on the night preparations for the morning meal. Outwardly everything was above suspicion.

Tressa thought so, as she stood beside her father in the doorway and looked out over the scene, while behind them Conrad read aloud the newest book to reach them. But her father was not at ease.

"Morani's giving us more than our money's worth to-night," he muttered, during a pause in the reading. "It should be made a law that every dirty bohunk had to join an orchestra, so a fellow could keep an ear on 'em when he can't see 'em. They're not likely to do much harm with a tin whistle between their lips."

"It's a beastly quiet night," he complained, when Conrad paused to light the lamp.

"I thought it was noisier down there than usual," said Tressa.

Conrad came behind them and stood without a word, when the eyes of the two men met significantly.

"Guess I'll be turning in," the younger man yawned. "It's been a bit of a hard day."

He turned back to place the book on the shelf, carefully marking the page. Tressa was there beside him, and her father was standing on the step with his back to them; but the young lover did not seem to see her. She walked with him to the top of the path leading down to his shack, but he only muttered an absent-minded good-night and left her, hastening down the path, knowing nothing of the hot tears behind.

He did not stop at his own door but passed on to the camp, all the time listening intently. The camp clamour was there, but it was forced, less general. He hurried his steps.

In the shadow of the first canvas covered walls he knew what he would find. Pushing suddenly open the door of one of the largest bunk-houses, he faced an empty room, though the lamps were lit. In another were two men instead of twenty, both lustily and unmusically blowing mouth-organs. Further on three before a door were making the noise of ten.

And then over the whole camp fell a sudden silence. In some strange way all knew he was there. Some animal instinct—or was it a dim sound from the corner of a near-by shack—made the foreman leap further into the open. A knife whistled past his shoulder and thudded into a door-sill across the way, where it stuck, quivering. Without excitement he pulled his automatic and stepped into the light from the open door. But he did not pause or turn.

The full course of the camp he paced, whistling lightly through his teeth, and every ray of light he passed glinted on the barrel of his pistol. Sheer defiance it was, but it succeeded. At the stables he turned about and retraced the crooked street.

Reaching the edge of the camp, he quickened his pace and where the shadows permitted ran swiftly up the slope to the grade. There he paused to recover his breath. In response to his warble Tressa opened the door. Conrad looked beyond her to her father and nodded.

"Almost empty," he said. "They're holding a pow-wow somewhere. Look out for squalls. Better keep the doors locked these nights, and fasten the windows so no one can get in."

"I'll lock the stable." The only menace Tressa could realise was the stealing of the horses.

Conrad crept over the grade; but he did not drop down the path to his shack. Instead he entered the bush. It was not so dark yet that he could not make good speed, once his eyes became accustomed to it. The northern bush was not thick, and the foliage failed to hide a star-filled sky of wonderful brilliance that overhangs the earth nowhere as in the Canadian West. By some bush-sense, aided by much good luck, he kept straight ahead until he arrived above the camp. A few minutes of search found him Koppy's shack. Though the door was open and the light burning, no one was there. Conrad hurried on.

Even before he was conscious of assistance from his ears he knew he was approaching a great gathering of men. He was picking his way as carefully as he knew how, but he was no woodsman; now and then a twig snapped and his heart beat nervously.

The first hint that he was heard came with the winding of an arm like a band of steel round his neck, while another held his arms to his side so that he could not fight. The hand about his neck dropped instantly to his mouth, as he braced himself against the relentless grip. Then he knew that his captor was as anxious as he not to be heard.

He was lifted from his feet, his head still in chancery and his mouth closed. He could hear the meeting breaking up, the crunching passage of the silent bohunks returning to the camp. Suddenly he was dropped, and a shadow faded noiselessly into the other shadows of night.

"Mavy!" he called in a low voice. "Mavy!"

Only two dull taps came back to him from the shadows.



CHAPTER XII

SERGEANT MAHON SKIRTS DEATH

Blue Pete, alias Peter Maverick, alias anything that seemed to suit the varied occasions of his checkered career, thrust aside the curtain of foliage covering the hiding place of his new raft. There was no reason why he should visit the raft just then; he could have no possible use for it until he had in his hands those two horses up in Torrance's stable. But ever since he had been forced to knock Koppy's pointing rifle from his hands to save Juno the half breed had been oppressed by a thousand fears.

He did not understand the bohunks—he did not want to. In his vivid life he had met most kinds of men, but the wild Continental scum that took to railway construction as its own special line of effort was beyond his experience. Hitherto he had been able to anticipate the villainies of his enemies—and in some of them he himself had revelled—but no one had yet charted the designs of creatures like Koppowski and his comrades.

Even as the foliage parted Blue Pete knew why he had looked. The raft was gone. He was not surprised, but his anger was none the less for that. With a muffled oath he let the foliage fall and dropped to the ground with the intuitive sense of the wild at evidence of an enemy.

A moment's thought raised him to his feet again, to strike recklessly back along the river's brink into the bush. Koppy and his crew, he knew, were busy about the bridge at that hour; the whole out-of-doors was his.

Blue Pete, a name once on the lips of every rancher and cowboy, sheriff and Mounted Policeman, from the Montana Badlands to Medicine Hat—once cowboy and rustler, again cowboy and Mounted Police detective, then thrown back to rustling by the blindness of a political judge—was not now the model of physical fitness of a year ago when his rifle and rope were respected over a prairie Province and State. The bullet that had brought mistaken mourning to the Police, and particularly to Sergeant Mahon, the friend for whom it was intended, had come within a hair's breadth of avenging Bilsy and Dutch Henry, the Montana rustlers who had hated him so. What he had escaped was due to his wonderful physique and to the untiring care of Mira Stanton.

With her his sole nurse and doctor, he had lain in one of their many retreats in the Cypress Hills until he was strong enough to entrust himself to the pace of the faithful Whiskers for the slow and painful journey to more expert treatment across the border. There he recovered rapidly. But Bilsy's bullet had extracted its toll. The blue-black face was darker now and more leathery, as if the blood behind were running more sluggishly. His cheeks were fallen in, and great hollows showed beneath the squinting eyes. It made him more the Indian than ever in appearance. He had lost weight and bulk, and the shoulder above the wound was an inch lower than its mate.

Time would perhaps return him his old form, as it had his strength. But time was the very thing Blue Pete could not wait for.

Recklessly as he commenced his return along the banks of the river, instinct won; in a few steps he was moving with all the old soundlessness. Twigs and crackling leaves seemed to evade his feet; eye and ear were ever alert. Though he knew he was alone in the bush, the way of a lifetime refused to sleep within him. By a circuitous route he approached a tangle of trees that hung out from a steep projection in the rising sides of the ravine. His eyes were flitting now about at his feet, and sometimes he carefully passed a boot over marks only he could detect. Once, whistling in soft surprise, he scattered a handful of spruce needles.

Into the heart of the thickest clump of trees he disappeared. The green fell behind him, the woods was lifeless again.

In the dim light of the cave Mira knew he was worried, but he would tell her when it was good for her to know.

"It's gone," he growled, after a long silence.

In their intimate way she understood.

"Perhaps it broke loose."

He looked his surprise that she should imagine he had not satisfied himself. She came to him and laid tender hand on his arm.

"I'm sorry, Pete, for your sake. Really it doesn't matter. We could go now—"

He moved away from her, not irritably; he just could not trust himself to refuse her anything.

"Thar's them two horses yet 'fore we got 'em all back."

"Can't we buy them? They ain't worth the trouble and risk."

He shook his head doggedly.

"Not now. They're after me—again."

There was a rending sadness about it, as if some overwhelming desire had escaped him forever, some dreaded fear returned.

"But you can give up the job on the trestle any time you like. They can't touch you for that, can they?"

He had told her of the incident at the trestle, and the hatred now boiling in the breasts of the bohunks. But of the scene in Torrance's shack, of Sergeant Mahon, he had not said a word; he felt he dare not. That the Sergeant should be there oppressed and threatened him. Loving Mahon with the full strength of his wild nature, he vaguely foresaw the complications that might arise; and he wished to save Mira the worry of it as long as he could. He had no conscious thought that Mira's early infatuation for the Sergeant continued; he knew that he, halfbreed though he was, had her whole heart. The Sergeant's fancy for the prairie girl had been but the reaching out of his fine nature for the beautiful, where so little of the beautiful existed. His marriage to Mira's Eastern-trained cousin had spelled the end of that.

What the halfbreed dare not face was the discovery by the Police that he whom they thought dead was alive. He was still on the Police black-books; in spite of their affection for him, he had months of rustling—if it was rustling—to pay for.

"Got to git them two horses—somehow," he persisted. "Then we kin start all over agin, you 'n' me. The P'lice can't hev anythin' agin us, when the horses are all back whar they belong."

He searched her face anxiously. So often they had talked it over, and always neither was quite satisfied. A conflict of emotions was in her face now; her life's dream was there, her great fear.

"They shouldn't be hard for you to get," she marvelled. "Far easier than the camp stables."

"I lef 'em to the last. The boss is cuter'n a thousand bohunks. I wanted to be able to git clear away 'fore he got thinkin' too hard. . . . Las' night the stable was locked. Suthin's scared 'em."

"I don't understand why he hasn't told the Police. But I guess he knew they were stole—stolen when he bought them."

Juno lifted her head, ears pointing, and rumbled in her throat. Blue Pete grabbed the revolver he had discarded on his entry and thrust it into his belt. Then he vanished into the trees that covered the entrance.

Worming along the ground, another clump a stone's throw distant swallowed him. There in the darkness of a second cave he pressed the noses of the two horses, the familiar command to silence, and a moment later he was outside again.

Somewhere above on the hillside was a sound only he and Juno could hear. Blue Pete looked through the leaves and saw Sergeant Mahon.

The Policeman was bent over the ground. Presently he moved slowly onward, eyes ever at his feet, dropping yard by yard down the tree-lined slope. Evidently dissatisfied with what his eyes told him, he stooped at times until his face was within a few inches of the dead leaves and moss; often he rose to full height and looked away toward the camp with a puzzled frown.

Lower and lower he sank toward the river's edge.

Blue Pete glided away before him. He himself had taught this man to trail, had roused in Mahon the quick eye of suspicion that questioned every turned leaf; and now he was to pay for it. Silently he cursed the luck of things. He was satisfied no prying eye about the camp could follow his tracks, but he had not counted on the Sergeant.

Down, step by step, moved Mahon, a zig-zag course that missed nothing. Nearer and nearer he approached the cave home of the one who was watching him with fevered eyes.

Blue Pete pictured the penalty he must pay were he taken now. Another week or two and it would be different. There were still the two horses in the boss's stable before his name was clear, and the bunch down in the Cypress Hills was waiting to be returned to their rightful owners. He could not face what the law would demand of him—Mira would not live through it. Imprisonment—disgrace—death to all the hopes that had sustained them both since his recovery!

On the trail of the unsuspecting Policeman he crept, and his face was grim and gaunt.

Where the river bottom ran more level, Mahon halted and looked about with a more general interest. The halfbreed felt safer, for he had taken greater precautions nearer the caves. But there was always the chance of a mistake, none knew it better than he who had profited so often from the mistakes of others. And Mira's horse might fail them at the vital moment; he had no fear of Whiskers.

Sergeant Mahon let his eyes fall to the ground again and started. Dropping to his knees, he bent close above the spot where the halfbreed had scattered the spruce needles not an hour before. With careful breath the Policeman blew. After a time he sank back on his heels and passed a hand across his forehead. All about him he peered with piercing eyes.

Blue Pete slowly drew the revolver from his belt.

Mahon came to his feet and moved forward, bent over the tell-tale moss and half overgrown sand. He was making straight for the cave.

The arm of the halfbreed lifted. Perspiration was breaking out on his swarthy face, and his left hand opened and closed. But his teeth were gritted, and the hand that held the gun was steady as steel. At least his old friend would never know who killed him.

A short ten yards from the cluster of trees that hid the cave Mahon stopped, a perplexed, self-deprecatory twist to his face, like a man who has been dreaming. Then he edged off toward the river, carelessly, smiling reflectively. The halfbreed wriggled after him. For several minutes the Sergeant stood looking out across the water, then, shrugging his shoulders, skirted to the east and slowly climbed the bank.

Blue Pete threw himself on the ground, dark face pillowed in a shaking arm.

Mira came to him and touched his shoulder.

"I saw, Pete," she whispered huskily. "I, too, had him covered. . . . We'll have to move again."

He looked up into the loving face, his heart thumping so fiercely that his ears drummed. Suddenly he realised how much it meant to him that now he was the only one that counted; she would have pulled the trigger rather than risk his capture by the Police.

"You knew he was here?" There was no reproach in her voice.

"I didn't want to skeer yuh," he replied weakly.

She smiled: she could read him so well.

"We must cross the river and find a place over there," she decided. "The construction raft at the trestle will get the horses over. . . . If the Sergeant caught only a glimpse of Whiskers he'd know."

Blue Pete laughed. "When I git through with the ole gal her own mother wudn't know her. I ain't bin in the rustlin' game all these years not to pick up a few tricks to make a woman pinto look like a blood stallion."

"But if he ever saw us—either of us."

The halfbreed spent the evening pondering on that.



CHAPTER XIII

THE VISIT OF THE INDIANS

"Tressa! Quick!"

But Tressa was too busy in the kitchen.

"Tressa Torrance. It's a free show—I wouldn't miss it. It's an epoch."

She came skipping through the door. "If it's only the trestle again—"

Torrance pointed dramatically across the trestle to the far bank. "This time it's our first callers." He turned to the pair of saddled horses tied to rings in the wall beyond the front door. "No, we're not riding to-night. We're entertaining. That is, if the local nabobs over there don't funk the trestle. I'd run the speeder over if I thought it wouldn't give them a fit. You never know what scares an Indian."

On the distant bank an Indian and his squaw were seated like statues on horses as motionless as themselves. The former, his horse seemingly on the very brink of the chasm, was leaning forward, his eyes shaded by his hand. The squaw, on higher ground, outlined against the sky, waited phlegmatically.

"Are you sure they're alive, daddy?"

"Certain. I saw Mrs. Indian's horse's tail flicker. Like to have a close-up, wouldn't you? Staring at us like that, it makes a fellow feel as if he's been stealing something of theirs and they're taking a good look in time for the scalping season."

He climbed the loose sand of the grade and waved.

The response was immediate. At a jerk of the squaw's hand her horse cantered down to where her lord had taken his stand. And for a time they sat side by side watching the distant welcome of the white man.

Suddenly the Indian's heels flew out and in, and the odd little broncho wheeled on its hind legs and swung into a wide circle. The squaw did not even look interested.

"Some rider, eh?" applauded Torrance. "If your old dad could ride like that he'd never have taken up railway building. Funny nag, that of his. Looks like a hobby horse come to life. What's he trying to tell us? Regrets he can't come? Or is it a challenge to bring my bow and arrow and settle the old feud? Anyway, it's a rattling good stunt—and I'd like to know the answer."

"I think he wants time to consider your invitation."

"By hickory, Tressa, another year and we'd have missed this. It takes only about one season to muddle up their riding with the white man's booze—or the white man's treaty money. Why don't we leave well enough alone—that is, if they'd let us build railways?"

The horse continued to gyrate, its rider performing the familiar Indian tricks—now leaning far over until his twin braids brushed the ground, now leaping off in full flight and on again as the horse came round in the circle; lying flat along the horse's side until only one leg from knee to foot was visible, leaning far over to peer at them under the horse's neck. As a finale he stood erect while the broncho dashed headlong for the bank. At the very brink it dropped back with braced legs, and the Indian, leaping gracefully backward, turned a somersault and landed on his feet.

"By hickory!" Torrance whistled through his teeth. "I know a showman would swop his whole caboodle for half an hour of that. I wonder what I'm expected to do over here to hold up my end. I want to be civil. I don't know anything that wouldn't look cheap after that. Wish I'd done mine first. Hi, you!" He was adding voice to arms. "That trestle'll bear you anyway. Trot over and shake. Bring that little beast that looks like a horse, and I'll get you the biggest audience this side of Winnipeg."

Down in the camp half a thousand bohunks were watching every move.

The Indians had dismounted. He was pointing across the trestle. His squaw seemed to hesitate.

"If I made a sound like a bottle of fire-water," grinned Torrance, "he'd beat the record."

"You're not to let them have a drop. Now remember, daddy."

"The nearest bar's too far away to waste it on an Indian, my dear. But there's methylated spirits somewhere in the stores—and you've a bottle or two of flavoring extract, haven't you? All it needs is a smell. . . . They're tackling the trestle, Tressa. Bully for you, Big Chief! You got Murphy beat a mile. Must have heard us talking about fire-water. Wonderful ears, them Indians have."

Adrian Conrad, ready for his evening visit, slipped his automatic in his pocket and hastened up the slope. He arrived as the squaw, with a nervous little run, covered the last few yards of the trestle and stamped moccasined feet on solid ground. The Indian, frightened as he plainly was, stalked stolidly on to her side. "Nothing the white man can do," he seemed to say, "will flurry me."

Torrance met them with extended hand.

"I hope my little conversation with my daughter didn't raise false hopes, Big Chief. I haven't a drop that's fit to swallow."

The Indians stared at the extended hand in silence.

"I don't know whether they shake hands in your language," explained Torrance, "but it's all the rage with us. I'm straining to show how pleased I am. Ah—how's all the little papooses? Has the hired girl kicked for another afternoon a week, and who's the latest married man to run away with another woman? That may not be wigwam gossip, but it's all we know in our set; it's all the small-talk I have."

The Indian solemnly accepted the preferred hand, studying it curiously as his own brown one shook to Torrance's welcome.

"Me spik English," he grunted.

Torrance grinned foolishly. "Good—Lord!"

"Me spik English, too," murmured the squaw sweetly.

"Well, I'm bunco'ed!" Torrance rolled his eyes helplessly. "Take a hand, Tressa. Fancy meeting a family of redskins a thousand miles from nowhere and asking what make o' car they use!"

"Both spik English," said the Indian without a smile.

Torrance groaned. "Can you smile in English? This is getting on my nerves."

The Indians looked at each other, and as if one spring worked the mechanism their faces relaxed.

"Look at that, Adrian. That's prairie manners for you. I suppose if I asked him to jump off the trestle—"

The Indian shifted about and gravely regarded the long drop. Torrance clutched his arm and led toward the shack.

"Don't you do it, Chief. I ain't worth it."

He brought chairs from the sitting room.

"I don't even know whether you sit down. I haven't a pipe that would go round, but there's a fair tobacco you're welcome to. It don't make bad chewing. Tressa's awful glad to see you. We haven't had a caller since the new curtains went up."

The Indian was not listening; his eyes were on the two horses tied beyond the door. Gathering his blanket about him, he went to them, running a hand over them with the air of a connoisseur. He stooped to their feet, his two braids, twined through and through with bits of coloured cloth, falling over his ears.

"Good!" he grunted.

"Just what I said," agreed Torrance amiably, "—of course, after I'd paid for them. Best bits o' horseflesh this side of anywhere. Broke 'em myself, so I ought to know."

"Daddy!"

"Maybe not quite broke 'em," corrected Torrance easily, "but they nearly broke me. Picked 'em from a bunch of the finest animals ever came off a ranch—"

"Daddy!"

"That was a fine lot, Tressa—and those two were the best of the bunch."

"How much?" The Indian's face was expressionless.

The contractor blinked. "You don't want to buy? I thought Indians always stole what— The worst of me is I talk too fast. You see I lost a lot of horses not long ago, and it's temporarily affected my judgment. I don't say it was Indians stole 'em—in fact I saw the guy, but it was too far to catch his pedigree. Anyway, he was dressed white. One of three got 'em—either my own men, or contractors out west, or the Indians. If I thought it was my men there'd be a new line of graves to-morrow—and I don't somehow think the contractors would risk it. It seemed safer to blame the Indians then. Now? Oh, I guess I must have been crazy. Them horses weren't stolen. They've taken a holiday to get a drink, or gone for the World's Series baseball games."

"How much?" repeated the Indian stoically.

"But you don't want horses like them, when you've a circus beast over there would make them look like a wheelbarrow without the wheel."

"How much?"

Torrance sighed. "Is that all the English teacher knew at your school? Conrad, he's making me name a price, because I don't know any other way to stop him. Indian-who-spiks-English, they cost me two hundred dollars each, and—"

"Daddy!"

"Oh, bother!" Torrance mopped his forehead. "That's the worst of bringing up a daughter too strict. A real liar hasn't half a chance. Did I say fifty dollars?"

"Fifty dollars," offered the Indian, unfolding a wallet from his blanket.

"One hundred dollars—in cold cash—out here in the bush! Say"—he walked reverently round the Indian, looking him over—"where d'you keep his scalp? I warn you I haven't ten dollars in the shack—and I'm getting bald about the crown."

"Fifty dollars!" grunted the Indian.

"I got to turn it down, old friend. They're the only saddle horses, bar the Police, within a week's journey."

"One hundred dollars."

Torrance walked reverently over to the horses and stared at them.

"I bet they're a damn sight better'n I thought."

"Two hundred each!" There was a finality about the extravagant offer that impressed Torrance.

"Big Chief," he murmured, "let's see that bank again. To tell you the truth, I paid exactly ten dollars each for them—and I couldn't rob a decent citizen. So you see the deal's off: I wouldn't take the money, and you couldn't go back on your offer."

The Indian was holding out a huge roll of bills. Torrance blinked at it and turned to Tressa.

"You can't sell, daddy. One is mine, and I'm learning to ride. But we'll give them the horses for nothing when we leave."

Torrance extended his hands helplessly. "That ends it, you see. She's boss. We can't sell, but we'll hand 'em over f.o.b. when we go—and if you've oats enough in your tribe for that red fellow I wish you'd give me your address and let me know when nobody's home."

The eyes of the Indian and his squaw met. The latter sighed. The Indian slowly thrust the wallet within his blanket. Then without another word he took her hand and they started back across the trestle.

Torrance watched them with amazement "Hi—say!"

The Indians stalked on.

"I might be able to scare up a bottle of fire-water—"

No response. Torrance sank into a chair and drew his sleeve across his forehead.

"Talkative? By hickory, they reek with it. They sure got my goat. All the squaws I ever saw before were so thick with grease, and the things that stick to it. . . . I'm beginning to feel for the squaw-man after seeing that girl."

"Wasn't she pretty?" Tressa was staring regretfully after the receding couple. "I didn't know they were so dainty—-"

"Wasn't I telling you they aren't—"

Conrad spoke for the first time: "I've seen that chap before."

"Me, too," said Torrance. "But I can't imagine not picking him out of any Indians I ever met. They don't grow 'em like him. Our fire-water, with here and there a missionary for good measure, sees to that. Oh, hello, Sergeant!" Unheard, Sergeant Mahon had come along the soft grade and was watching the Indians now almost at the other end of the trestle. "You missed the fun. Highest velocity conversation on two words ever."

The Sergeant whipped out his binoculars. He did not move again until the Indians had galloped out of sight.

"What d'you make of 'em, Sergeant?"

"Strange!" muttered the Policeman, slowly replacing the glasses.



CHAPTER XIV

THE FIGHT IN THE SHACK

Big Jim Torrance was thrilling with incipient twinges of a great triumph, though the superstitions of his kind struggled against their display. For two weeks his eager, hopeful eyes had been fixed on those twin lines of steel above the trestle, and not an atom of bend could he detect.

What if at last he had choked that insatiable maw on the river bottom! What if his great task was nearing its end!

A timetable, against his inclination, began to form in his mind. Another week of foraging for those omniverous jaws, of bolstering up the structure of the trestle. If by that time its appetite had not revived, only the new foundations and the light task of filling in. Perhaps then he would relieve himself of half his staff; he was suddenly aware of the strain of such a lawless crew. Unexpectedly and without precedent he found himself anticipating the six months' winter rest.

His excited joy had been assuming peculiar expression. Sitting down for more than a few minutes at a time became a strain. He insisted on helping Tressa with the housework, and his interest in the books they were reading was so perfunctory that Conrad and Tressa went on to the end without bothering about his attention. Not infrequently he strolled down to the river bottom and paced up and down beneath the trestle. Again he would walk out on the sleepers above the quicksands and glory in the solidity beneath his feet.

One evening when Conrad had gone to the Police barracks to make a report on recent trifling but significant occurrences, and to complete plans for a more systematic protection of the trestle now that it was nearing completion, Torrance moved his chair to the open doorway and sat dreaming.

"You haven't locked the stable yet," Tressa reminded him, breaking a long silence.

He laughed recklessly. "What's the need? We'll be away in a month. Big Chief gets 'em then. Funny if they were stolen. You bet the Indian would find them."

"Don't be too sure of things, daddy. Adrian doesn't feel as comfortable as you do—or want to make yourself think you do."

He whirled about in his chair, scowling. "What do you mean—'make myself think I do'?"

She looked him steadily in the eye. "I don't believe you're as easy as you make out. The trees are thick ahead yet."

"It's you, saying things like that, makes me moody," he returned sulkily.

Tressa rose to find something in her room, and her father turned back to the out-of-doors with an impatient exclamation.

In reality he was no more easy about things than Adrian. It was the gripping anxiety of it made him struggle to convince himself. But it was not the quicksands he feared, as Tressa supposed, but the bohunks. Things were going too smoothly in bulk—the disturbing incidents were so trifling and ineffectual. Accustomed to difficulties, the absence of friction since the tragedy of the falling log was oppressive to him. It was unnatural. Koppy was too tractable, the camp too peaceful. In the idleness of those days he had time to brood over that.

But he set his face stubbornly against the fears her words aroused. He could see the trestle sound and solid as a rock. The camp lay beneath him, as quiet as a country village. Only a week or two and everything would be settled. He scoffed at his fears. As he looked out over the tumble of log and canvas, he vowed that when it was all over he would provide a bang-up feed that would send the bohunks away with one pleasant memory at least. Murphy and his engine would scurry off to Saskatoon and fetch such grub as bohunk never before tasted. It would be a finale befitting—

And just then three men topped the grade a score of yards away.

Torrance's sky suddenly darkened—Lefty Werner, Chico Morani, and Heppel, Koppy's special cronies. But he hid his concern beneath a grunt.

He had no intention of making his grunt an invitation, but the three came on without pausing, and Werner greeted him with an embarrassed "good-evening, boss." Torrance rose and stepped back into the sitting room. Some instinct made him wish to move things beyond the eyes of the camp. For a moment the men hesitated, then, pushed into the lead, Werner led the way inside.

"Now," snapped the contractor, "get it off your chests. Where's Satan himself—Koppy, I mean?"

The most intelligent of the visitors, the most capable of estimating the underlying significance of tone and inflection, was Lefty Werner. The other two, maintaining their usual expression of phlegmatic and stubborn sullenness, left the delivery of their message to him, the glibbest talker. And plainly he had taken a dislike to it. A wild and fleeting wish that civilisation were nearer, wherein to hide himself, struggled with a goading appreciation of the comforts in Torrance's shack; for Werner often of late was oppressed with the futility of his present sphere as malcontent.

His aberrant reflections were interrupted by Torrance's rising impatience.

"Here, Werner, what is it? Speak up!"

Werner removed his hat and twirled it in his hand. Twice he cleared his throat before he could bring himself to speak.

"We've been sent—sent by the general body of workmen—"

"The bohunks, you mean," drawled Torrance with deliberate insult. "Drop the gush, Lefty. What do you want? . . . And you won't get it."

Werner turned anxious eyes on his two stolid friends for moral support. He noted Morani's hand slide to the waistband of his trousers, and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

"They appointed us to tell you—to tell you that the time has come"—he was stammering, his eyes fastened on the Italian's supple hand—"the time has come when we, the workers, have decided—have decided that—"

Torrance lounged round the corner of the table that separated them, but Werner had eyes only for Morani's hidden hand.

"—have decided that we must be freed from the yoke of bondage. We demand the right to control ourselves, under our own leaders—"

He saw the wall of the room rush toward him—felt it strike him dizzy; and he lay wondering what had happened. Gradually he became aware of a great tumult about him, and he knew he was vitally concerned. His idea of fighting happened to centre in a knuckle-duster with an ugly dagger on the end of it. He drew it mechanically before his scattered wits told him where to direct it.

The tumult increased. With the roar of a bull Torrance had turned his attention to the other two. But they had taken surprisingly swift measures for self-protection, and Torrance was momentarily baffled. Morani glided behind the table, and Heppel, roused to unheard-of activity, kicked a chair before the impending peril.

Torrance stumbled over the chair and crashed into the table, smashing it flat, fortunately carrying Morani down with it. He was on his feet before Heppel's slow wits realised the opportunity. Always the contractor had handled these men with his big fists; other weapons only dignified their resistance. These two fists of his, these great muscles—they were made for a game like this.

From her room Tressa heard the entrance of the delegation but not their message. At the first blow she ran to the door and peeped through. Was it vengeance for the devastation her father had wrought in the big camp riot? But she had faith in him almost equal to his own, and she knew she would only be in the way out there. But as the fight progressed, Torrance's bull voice rising with the fury of the fray, she lifted a small automatic from a drawer and hastily examined it.

As she turned, her window was raised from the outside and some one leaped through. Instantly the pistol was covering the intruder.

"No shoot! Indian come to help."

"Father don't require it," she returned stiffly. And she did not lower the gun.

"I come by window," explained the Indian. "Camp watching. White girl stay here. Indian help—maybe kill."

A loud crash from the sitting room drove the blood from the girl's face.

"Go then—go!"

In the room beyond, Torrance was enjoying himself, though not without painful reminders that it was a real fight. Heppel had secured a table leg and was wielding it as never sledge or axe. Werner, having recovered his senses, had joined Morani and was circling the room for a chance to strike at the boss's back, in the meantime throwing chairs, books, loose parts of the stove, anything that came to his hand. A flower pot on the elbow brought a howl from Torrance, and for a moment he pulled himself together.

Bringing himself up short in the centre of the room he started out relentlessly to corner Werner, ignoring the others. The threatened man fled shrieking before him.

"Knife him, Morani! For God's sake, give it to him on the head, Heppel!"

A bright line slid down the Italian's hand and flashed like a gleam of lightning. Torrance drew up with a shooting pain in his left arm. Heppel leaped in behind and swung the table leg with all his cruel strength.

Morani and Heppel saw a figure launch itself through the bedroom door. It swept them crashing together and shot them through the outer door before they could use their weapons. Werner leaped after them.

Torrance started to give chase, mouthing great curses. But a pair of arms encircled and held him as if he were a child. Shifting bloodshot eyes to the new foe, he looked into the face of the Indian.

"You damned redskin! You're at the bottom of this, eh?"

The Indian tightened his grip. "White man a fool. Indian save him. You chase—whole camp come. Two no fight five hundred—almost killed once trying it. The girl in there."

The last four words brought Torrance to his senses. He ceased to struggle. The Indian's hands fell away. Tressa lifted her father's left arm; blood was dripping from it.

"Sit still, daddy. Hold your arm like that till I get the water and bandages—there's still hot water, I think. It's only a scratch. Grip your arm there."

Torrance, suddenly weak at the sight of his own blood, sank into a chair, staring at the stained sleeve.

"Say, Big Chief, you're a good sport. I guess you came in time—Say! Where's he gone?"

The window in Tressa's room rattled.

"By hickory! If that fellow don't owe me something I don't know about, he's running up a big bill against me."



CHAPTER XV

KOPPY MAKES A THREAT

Though he had emerged from a perilous situation with little damage, Torrance was nursing a keen sense of injury when Conrad returned from his visit to the Police and saw a light still burning in the shack. The foreman listened to the story with more concern than anger. The danger lay not in what the bohunks demanded—they could resist that—but in the insolent confidence that put the demand into words. Therein, was displayed a disturbing sense of power, a reckless daring to strike the boss in his most sensitive convictions. It could only mean that they were prepared to bring matters to a head without loss of time.

And the trestle was just ready for the final touches!

That the incident increased the difficulties of his own position did not enter Conrad's head. Thoughtful eyes moving from father to daughter, his first words betrayed his main anxiety.

"Tressa can leave right away for the East."

Surprise and indignation were added to the cloud of fury that twisted Torrance's face; he was speechless. Tressa herself settled the question:

"I'm not going."

"Send her out of the country for a few filthy bohunks!" sputtered her father. He spat into the sawdust box and crammed a charge of tobacco into his pipe with his uninjured hand, though the pain of holding the pipe in his left hand made him wince. "I won't recognise them by so much as a wink. They have my answer, and I imagine it was a bit convincing—"

"The Indian can't always be on hand," said Conrad stubbornly.

Torrance screwed up his eyes.

"He's getting the habit of popping up unexpectedly. I wonder what's the game. I thought I was strong, but that chap could whistle 'God Save the King' and truss me up like a partridge at the same time. His arms felt like them two trees that fell on me down Thunder Bay way. I'd hate to have him on the other side in a fight."

The practical Conrad brought him back to the point.

"And now what?"

Torrance considered a moment.

"First we'll tell the Police. I was going to fire them off the bat, but I'm too mad for that. I want to see them get a couple of years in jail. I want the law to take a hand now; I've taught them my law."

"What can the law do to them?"

The contractor eyed his foreman belligerently.

"What can it do? Don't you think coming up here and trying to rough-house me is worth a year or two? Say, you don't think it was a slapping match, or a pink tea sociable! Take a look about the room." The sarcasm of it was pleasing to his jangling nerves. "If you don't guess right the first time, take another. If you're off the track then, I'll get a doctor for you—or show you this arm of mine."

"Who started it?"

Torrance leaned forward and searched Conrad's face as if he considered him demented.

"O' course," he sneered, "you'd go into court and swear I went on the rampage and cornered them. You'd say I caught 'em at their evening devotions and smashed their crucifixes over their heads and tackled 'em with a cutlass in my teeth and two revolvers—"

"You might have a little on Morani for using a knife," Conrad agreed calmly, "but you'd have trouble finding a lawyer to take such a case. They made a request, without violence—"

"Yah, they knelt down on their marrow-bones and begged His Highness to grant them the small boon of letting them put their feet on his neck. They humbly petitioned me to kick over the trestle, pay them ten dollars a day, raise the allowance of pie, and then give them certificates of character. You'd have done it, I suppose. Only that isn't the way I've made a success of railway construction, my lad."

Conrad took it cheerfully. "Then imagine you take it to court. Have you time? It'll mean Battleford for the Police trial. And what would you win? They don't jail men even out here for defending themselves. And what would happen the trestle in the meantime?" He saw hesitation in Torrance's eyes. "Besides, I'd hate to be called to prove the sweetness of your temper and your unprovocative ways."

Torrance took it out on his pipe for three minutes. "Then off you make for the camp," he decided, "and fire them. Don't let 'em even spend the night here. If I set eyes on one of them again there'll be murder; I won't be responsible for myself if that cur Werner's smirking physog gets in front of me; and I'll punch Morani on sight, just for safety-first."

Conrad rose and went to the door, where he stood in silence a long time looking through the darkness to the camp lights.

"I'm thinking of the work," he said gravely.

"Oh!" snapped Torrance. "I'm not, of course!"

"Sometimes I question it. Werner and Morani and Heppel were sent by the bohunks. With Koppy they have the whole bunch in the hollow of their hands. We couldn't face a strike at this time of the year; we'd never get another crew now till next spring—and you couldn't stand that. . . . Don't imagine you've cowed them through their delegation. I'm willing to wager the camp never hears of the fight; it might disillusion them of a fancied power. Koppy knows better than to let them know they're licked."

"I said to fire them." Torrance spoke so calmly that Conrad searched his eyes with unaccustomed concern. Yet the foreman did not falter.

"There are other things to consider—"

The contractor raised himself to his full height and frowned down on the smaller man. "You seem to misunderstand your position, Adrian Conrad. What did I hire you for?"

"For quarter what I'm worth," replied Conrad caustically.

Torrance blinked twice, then, coldly:

"From the first of this month your pay will be four hundred a month. Now do what you're told—or your pay stops instanter."

"Then I'll have to work for nothing," said Conrad serenely. "I'm not working for you—or you'd have been paying me four hundred for the last two years, and some one else to look after me." He examined the contractor up and down with frank disgust. "I don't know how any daughter of yours keeps me here."

Tressa came to them then and seized a hand of each. They made a pretty picture in the lighted doorway—the big, frowning father in the rear, the smaller foreman with one foot on the step, and between them this sweet girl whose whole horizon was bounded by them, holding a hand of each, now dimpling, now pouting, always pleading and certain of herself.

Down in the camp the peace of night had fallen. Weary and gorged, quieted by the evening's lounge and the music they loved, the crude off-scourings of a dozen nations had retired to their bunks and were sleeping as peacefully as if their consciences were clean. Here and there a light twinkled, but as the three in the doorway looked, they blanked out one by one. The soundless night had closed in.

Torrance moved uncomfortably. He would have yielded to anything but disobedience, and a disobedience that entailed the retention of men who had made a ridiculous demand and then attacked him when he refused it. Would it look as if he feared to discipline, as if the flash of a knife could cow him? Anything rather than knuckle down to such creatures!

"May I speak to the boss?"

A familiar voice came out of the darkness not a. yard from Conrad. They heard it with an inward start; the training of their lives had been never to exhibit alarm—it was one of the muscles whereby they controlled men like these.

"I hear what happen. I come for truth."

Torrance, at the first sound, had slipped the bandage and lowered his shirt sleeve, stained as it was. He brushed the other two aside and filled the doorway. A sudden disgust filled him lest the Pole should enter.

"You know the truth already, you skunk! You knew what would happen before it happened—or you thought you did. I guess I disappointed a few of you."

"I find Lefty with sore head and I ask why. I make them tell. My men tell when I command. He say—"

"I don't care a tinker's cuss what he say. It's what I say counts on this job."

"Did they hurt boss?" Koppy's voice was servilely anxious. "Lefty tell me Morani stab."

Torrance laughed contemptuously. He was stroking his moustache with the injured hand; now he threw both arms out and repeated the sneering laugh.

"Chico's knife is more dangerous to himself than to me." He turned back and picked up the stiletto from the table. "Here"—tossing it on the ground before the Pole—"tell him he dropped his needle in his hurry; and I guess he didn't want to come back for it. It's no use to me. Your five hundred Chicos, with all their knives and knuckle-dusters, can't come up here and give orders."

"I fire them to-night," promised Koppy.

"No, you won't." Torrance's mind was working with unusual celerity. "They got what was coming to them from my fists this time. Next time they'll need a doctor—or an undertaker. Besides, it's not your business to fire. That's all. Good-night."

"Ignace Koppowski hope young missus not frightened," came the voice from the darkness.

"Why should she be? There ain't enough men in the camp to hurt her. If you doubt it, refer to Werner and Morani."

Koppowski coughed. "Indian strong man. Indian save your life. Godd! But he hurt my men. Indian look out. They never forget. You tell him?"

"Tell him yourself," jerked the contractor. "And I'd like to be around when you're at it. I fancy he can look after himself."

"Indian need to," said Koppy from the darkness.



CHAPTER XVI

THE HEART OF A HALFBREED

Blue Pete glided in and tossed aside the blanket of his Indian disguise with a gesture of irritability. With a petulant kick his beaded moccasins struck the ceiling of the cave, and, sighing, he sank his feet into the more familiar high-heeled cowboy boots.

Mira, moving busily about the camp stove in a recess, noted it all without turning her head—noted, too, that there the usual routine of his return was interrupted. The great two-inch spurs, his individual twist to cowboy attire—great spiked wheels which he never used, but whose glitter and rattle seemed to satisfy him—were forgotten. Instead, he sank to the rocky floor and meditatively drew from his belt the beloved corncob pipe.

Troubled, Mira went about the preparation of their evening meal with a plaintive quietness. Juno, too, seemed oppressed, for after a tentative wriggle of her stump of a tail she settled back on her haunches, eyes fixed on her mistress.

Mira struggled to hold back the tears, struggled harder to hide them when they persisted. To celebrate their return to the old cave under the river bank she had spent hours that afternoon scouring woods and river bottom for wild flowers; and a dozen old tin cans rescued from the camp garbage heap gleamed confused colour in the candle light. For more hours she had been rasping her little hands with scrubbing the rude table and the blocks that served as seats; and over the table she had draped after much experiment a gaudy Indian blanket, thereby approaching more nearly the atmosphere of home they both craved so eagerly. About the wall depended picture papers, meaningless in story but heavy with pathetic longing.

Hitherto he had always noticed so quickly and eagerly her efforts toward their comfort. From the first it had been one of the rites of their association—he beaming wordlessly at the touches of decoration with which she busied herself about their wild homes, she glowing with vocal pleasure at the things he carved with his own hands—the chair back in the Cypress Hills cave, the shelves for her stores, the drawer in the table, the box for Juno to sleep in.

And now he did not seem to notice—and she had worked so hard.

Presently the odour of the cooking venison beat its way to his brain and he lifted his head from his chest. He saw then the flowers in the old tomato and butter tins, the Indian blanket hanging from the table, the fresh spruce boughs of their bed; and his neglect was to him akin to sacrilege. Rising, he made for the door and the darkness beyond.

Without turning she saw him leave, and in part she understood.

He was suffering—Blue Pete was suffering these days in mind as never in body. The accumulation of the intense longings since she had been torn from him down in the Hills to serve her sentence for rustling was struggling with other hopes and fears; and the fight was rending. Until only a few days ago he had been heading with certain and speedy success for the day when Mira might return with head held high to the 3-bar-Y, her own ranch. Only his guilt intervened, for she had already paid the penalty of her own rustling. It was the knowledge that she would never return without him that made the aim such a sacred one. To free her he must clear himself with the Police. And that could be only when every horse with whose stealing he had been connected was returned to its rightful owner. In his simplicity he imagined the law would be satisfied then.

So near had been the attainment of his one great ambition that his head sometimes whirled. Only two horses yet to recover! Then so many things had happened.

Throughout his engagement as a common bohunk Blue Pete had been happily unconscious of the embarrassing forces working subtly within him to thrust to the background his own redemption. He only knew he was uncomfortable, that strange processes were cropping to the surface in his once firmly fixed mind. It seemed treason to Mira—Mira, for whom everything was done—to delay a task so simple.

Yet he could not take the last two horses that alone, he imagined, stood between him and freedom, and relieve himself of new responsibilities.

Doubly miserable, he sank on the needle-strewn sand and sighed.

"Pete!"

Mira's gentle voice came to him through the darkness, filled with trembling entreaty. Conscience-stricken, he hurried back to the cave. She met him at the edge of the candle light and took his hand.

"Can't you tell me about it, Pete?"

With angry self-accusation he replied: "I cud 'a' got the horses, Mira, an'—an' we'd 'a' bin back in the Hills long before this. Thar was jes' a padlock to smash . . . an' I didn't smash it."

She smiled sadly and wound a small arm about his neck.

"I know," she whispered. "We can't help it. . . . There are so many reasons why we can't go yet."

She turned swiftly away to the stove that he might not see how it tore her. Never in his gloomiest suffering had Blue Pete longed as she had for a home. For he had never known home as she had. Her efforts to brighten up their days were the expression of a desire to plant in his inexperienced mind the picture of home that kept passing before her eyes. Her nights were but one long dream of a fireside, with Blue Pete in the other chair. And as the time of their penance seemed to be nearing an end the ugly ranch-house at the 3-bar-Y became to her a palace. Over and over again she planned the fresh home they would start—every chair and table and picture and rug had a place. Helen Mahon, the Sergeant's wife—her own educated cousin—would help her, would supply the art Mira herself, in her prairie upbringing, only groped for. She would make of the 3-bar-Y a home for the whole Cypress Hills district. Every day of delay was agony.

Yet she spoke cheerfully. "It wouldn't be just—just right to go till the trestle's done, Pete, dear."

He looked at her sharply. It was the conviction he had been fighting many a day—that it seemed to be only his own had made it so much harder for him. From the silence he had forced on himself of late he spoke fiercely:

"That damned Pole! We can't let him win. We got to lick them bohunks."

"And Mr. Torrance—after all, Pete, he's only a tenderfoot. . . . Then there's Tressa."

He nodded slowly. "Yes, there's Tressa." A chivalry he would never have acknowledged had been thrusting the girl more and more into the foreground. From the ordinary perils of isolation father and lover might defend her, but in the great calamity that Blue Pete knew was planned to overwhelm her two protectors she would inevitably fall.

"But yuh shudn't have to wait, Mira," he burst out. "An yuh wudn't," he added miserably, "if I wasn't jes' a common rustler."

She came to him with quick steps and ran her fingers through his coarse hair.

"I wasn't no better, Pete—me and my brothers." In her emotion she had dropped back into the old looseness of speech.

He seized her hand in both his own and crushed it to his lips so that it hurt pleasurably.

"I know why yuh stole them horses," he murmured. "Yuh cudn't bear to see the Sergeant thinkin' he loved yuh—an' yuh knew he cudn't love a rustler."

"I guess I knew I was going to love you, Pete."

He wrapped his arms about her and buried his face in her neck; and she could feel him trembling.

Presently she spoke again softly:

"And there's the Sergeant."

"God help me!" he groaned. "I think that's what's holdin' me."

From the moment of his leap through Torrance's window the half breed's mind had been disquieted. At any risk, until he could go to them with clean hands, he would not let the Police know he was still alive. He knew their relentlessness in the chase; and he must be free in order to redeem himself.

That very night, straight from eaves-dropping at the bohunks' meeting, he had crept back to Torrance's stable and found it locked. The padlock in itself was nothing, but it implied suspicion—possibly entangling precautions. And so he had slunk away.

A night's reflection had warned him how fortunate was the instinct that held his hand. As Mira lay sleeping heavily beside him on their bed of spruce, he had lived again the happy days of his unofficial Police duties with Sergeant Mahon—on the prairie, at the barracks and the Police post, but more vividly than all, in the fastnesses of the Cypress Hills. He saw once more the kindly eye, felt the friendly hand, heard the soft voice of the one man above his class who had treated him as equal and friend. He saw again the old tobacco pouch spilled on Inspector Barker's desk in the barracks at Medicine Hat.

He knew why Mahon had come north.

"I can't see him fail, Mira," he groaned. "He's did fer if he does. We got to stay an' see him through."

"Perhaps he's after the horse-thief too."

Blue Pete started. Then his head sank in one arm. "We can't help him thar, Mira. We can't be caught—yet. . . . An' the Sergeant wudn't want to get us—yet."