The Law-bringers

Front matter

THE LAW-BRINGERS '

BY G. B. LANCASTER

AUTHOR OF "SONS O' MEN." "THE SPUR," "THE ALTAR STAIR." ETC.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

"TWO WHO WERE FRIENDS"

Over the firred hill-top, behind the squat freighter's shack the wind came, shouting strongly. It clattered the stiff saskatoon bushes, and thrust at the young poplars until they ran in yellow waves along the crest, and leapt down on the river with a bullying roar that drove the water into startled foam. All across the sky the clouds were reefing, tall as churches, to the westward where the sun lay, like a blot of red paint, on clouds livid as bruised flesh.

There was a moan in the air; an uneasiness, as though Nature was afraid, not knowing why. Down the grey line of the river a loon flew, low and swift. It cried out, turning its bold black head left and right; and the harsh, unearthly sound struck a note of warning to the man who shot round the cotton-wood promontory with the long, tireless, white-man paddle-stroke. He swung the canoe-nose for the shore by the shack and halted, gripping the bunch-grass with a strong hand, and glancing left and right with bold, keen eyes, even as the loon had done.

Up-stream the cut-banks veered in, rough rock and tall earth-faces seamed with forest. Across the river, where the spruces stood, black-shouldered against the west, the wind was stringing wild harmonies such as the seamen know, and in the clearing the yellowed grass sighed and shuddered, over-ripe for the scythe.

The man looked at the shack, bringing his eyes back, step by step, over the grass to the water-lip. Then he came ashore, hauling his canoe after him, and stood upright to fill his pipe. He had read all that the clumsily-hidden grass-trail had to tell, and all that was meant by the clumsily-hidden nose of that canoe in the brush-pile. This was a trap; laid skilfully, but not skilfully enough, for it explained itself to the keen-eyed man as a trap. It explained a little more; just enough to bring a tight smile to the sun-blistered lips as the man lit his pipe under the curve of a well-shaped hand scarred with rough work. This was the end of the long, stern chase through three full months of storm and sunshine. This was the end, with defiance to the Law in place of submission—and defiance with a solid log-and-daub shack wall before it.

There was not any doubt that he had been watched from the moment when the canoe nosed the sedgy bank of the clearing. The man smiled again, ground the match out under a moccasined heel, jerked his revolver into easy position for sharp work, and walked straight for the shack door with the springy, alert step that tells of the drill-yard. On his shoulders the pale khaki of his tunic had faded to a dirty blurr; one of the black buffalo-head collar-badges, which marked him as a unit of the Royal North-West Mounted Police of Canada out hunting, was missing, and his Stetson hat looked as though it had been slept in more often than his bed for these many weeks past.

His loins were cramped with the canoe-ache and his body dried up with heat. But he walked lightly, with the wind plucking at him petulantly and the sunset flooding into the clearing until the grass seemed to splash away in spurts of blood from his steady feet. And, behind that sagging door and those eyeless windows, the man whom he had hunted so long was waiting him at last. In the Blue Books the one man was down as Reg. No. 4769 Corporal Heriot, R. L., and the other as Samuel Moonias, half-breed, wanted on two charges of murder. But no living soul called Moonias by his first name, any more than they called Dick Heriot by his second, although there were many who used the same terms of disapprobation for both.

Dick's inner knowledge, that special gift to the roving men who guard their lives by head and hand, had put the situation crystal-clear before him. Moonias had a duck-gun only, one loaded with extra-heavy slugs and given to kicking. Moonias believed that Dick, thinking he had come ashore for sleep, would go in, swift and straightly, expecting to catch him unready. Because of these things Moonias would wait for a close shot. One in the face as Dick pushed the door open, most likely. He might try a potshot from the window. Chance would have to take care of the other man then. But if it was the door2 Dick leapt the last three feet like a slung stone, splintering the crazy door on its one hinge, and bearing down beneath the wood Moonias and his duck-gun. The exploding charge blew a turf of thatch off the roof, and on the earth floor the two men clinched grimly, dumb, sweating; with the net of death shaken out loosely to catch them, and that unhealthy red of the sunset spurting over wide-bladed knife and revolver-barrel.

The half-breed was brutally strong; but that finer, superber courage which God gives the gentlemen of His earth when they have absolved themselves from most of the other merits brought the handcuffs round Moonias' thick wrists at last. Then Dick rose lightly; breathed, but civil.

"You put up a good fight, Moonias," he said. "And though it's not manners to resist the Law, I don't blame you. No, not at all. But I do blame you for not seeing the strategic possibilities of that window, though I guessed you wouldn't. Get up."

He went through the half-breed's pockets, nodded, and turned on his heel.

"You likely know better than to try any game with those on you," he said, and the words broke with a yawn. "I think we can do with some sleep, Moonias. I haven't had any for three nights, and I'll swear you haven't either. That's why you made such a damned bad break in your judgment, maybe. Get right over into that corner."

The breed obeyed, and flung himself down straightway in that animal acceptance of the inevitable which was his heritage. Whistling softly, Dick crossed to what looked like a pile of old feed-sacks in the dark under the window, laid hold of them with both hands, and exploded into a sudden oath that straightened him up with the force of it. Then he stooped again; slid his arms round the man who lay huddled there, and carried him out into the thin slivers of light which were all the low sun sent through the spruces.

The man was dripping with water. His legs left a wet trail as Dick dragged him over the earth floor, and his long arms and bare head fell limp. Moonias stared out of his shock of coarse hair with a sudden eye-glitter.

"Him finish," he said, and the cluck of his tongue was pure satisfaction.

"I wish you were going to be lynched," said Dick unemotionally. "I'd invite every man along the river to mark you. I imagine you're responsible for this, eh? It's probably the Sergeant from Grey Wolf by his stripes. But2"

His voice broke short as he pulled the white face up across his knee in the red level track of the light. Stark river and clearing, and pines blackening in the night changed in a flash to an orchard of bees and apple-blossoms; to a scent of thyme that sickened his memory to this day, and to a girl's sobbing voice saying words that did not hold Tempest's name and that yet were full of Tempest. A cruel look came into his eyes as he stared down on the still face with the short drooped upper lip and the well-set jaw and throat.

"If you married her she made you pay for it, or you wouldn't be here," he said to it. "And if you didn't—was it she who lied, and not you?"

The face gave no answer. The red rays slid off it, leaving it ashen. And then Dick took in his hands the body of this man whose heart he once had known and tended it skilfully; binding the forearm that was broken just below the elbow, and strapping as best he might the flesh that a dead snag in the river had ripped open.

"Spilt out of his canoe, of course," he said. "You have a clean sheet there, Moonias. Unless—did you bring him in?"

The breed grunted. He seemed to feel no hate towards Dick, no interest in the man whom he had salvaged from the river.

"Aha," he said. "But him no gun. No use him."

Dick's brief smile had a little bitter twist to it.

"We are not all so frank regarding the reasons for our actions, my friend," he said, lightly. "Now, if2"

And then Tempest opened his eyes wide and wondering as a child's, and looked up at the man above him. He seemed like one in a waking dream, who hears the ghosts of other years light-heeled about his head.

"The wind is bitter bad across the Barren Lands , Dick," he said. "I saw a wolverine white as a leper just now."

The rowel of memory touched him. He sat up with his brown, sensitive face hardening, and the other looked at him through the mask of amused indifference which hid him when he cared to hide. For a lie lay between these two; high as a woman's yellow head, and unstable as the young love they both had given her. Tempest asked questions, and Dick answered civilly, according to his station. Then he turned his back on Tempest, and walked to the door, looking out. The sun was dead on the livid bowl of the sky and the pale river where the wind blew. His love for the yellow-haired woman had been dead long since. But his love for this man who had trodden the outer trails of the north with him was quick yet; how quick he had not known until he felt the shivering beat of Tempest's heart under his hand just now.

Later, he brought food from his canoe; lit the rusty, broken stove, and spread his thin waterproof mattress and his blanket for Tempest. This was bare duty only because of that extra stripe on Tempest's sleeve. Then, using still the language of passers-by, they lay down; Tempest in restless pain by the stove, and Dick on the threshold, with cheek on arm and his revolver pushed like the nose of a dog into his palm. And beyond their sleeping bodies stretched that great land which had fashioned and hardened them; which had known the tread of their moccasins along the forest-trails beaten asphalt-smooth by the passing of many generations, and had heard their voices call each other across rivers that had never parted them as the after years had done.

In the morning Dick found a sturgeon-head scow in the reeds, and he went to Tempest, suggesting with colourless civility the advisability of tracking her up river with Tempest aboard.

"She has probably got loose from Pitcher Portage," he said. "Moonias has ripped the side out of his canoe, and you've lost yours. We could freight all we have left on the scow."

Tempest nodded consent. He walked and moved with the crisp strength Dick knew of old, and his eyes were vital, forelooking, despite the pain in them. He was dreamer still; dreaming mightily, as he had once dreamed with Dick in those long-past mornings of life, that the other man would not think of now. But sudden memory of them roughened Dick's easy manner a little as he fitted his breast to the strap that clipped him from shoulder to arm-pit, even as, two yards further along the thin tow-line, a similar strap clipped Moonias.

When the two men had first fallen apart at the touch of the yellow-haired girl, a desperation of pain had driven Dick into more evil than the straight clean work of these latter days would wipe out of his face again. Then he sickened of it; sickened of what the town-cradled men and women could give him. And then, because he had denied all law and all gods in his madness of soul, he chose to fit the yoke of the Law to his neck, and to take his oath to it in the name of God. And after that he did his penance daily.

For the Wild was the only mistress who could ever hold Dick's soul for long, and the Wild had whistled him back to her so many times of late. Whistled him back in the long, far, sharp-smelling sedges where the wild duck fly south in thin, black, broken lines, and the red sun sets alone in the silence; whistled him back where Lake Athabaska and the Great Slave roll their stately deep-sea harmonies below horizon; where the rivers brawl, driving their jetsam north to meet the ice; where the snow-tang savours the air with its promise, and the caribou lift their heads, winding man, and the keen wolf-cry drifts over the stilling land.

To-day that haunting, heart-pulling whistle was silent. To-day, when he leaned in the traces as canal-horses lean, side-stepping the rough track irregularly, with the humped shoulders of Moonias before him. All the sun of these last breathless fall days was cast down into the thin gut of the river. The far sky was sick-white with heat. The coulées were brimful of it. Along the mighty web of water-veins that bring blood to Canada's heart it reeled in giddy mirage, and it danced in the clearings like a thing alive. The smell of heat was abroad on the earth; sharp, clean and resinous in the tang of spruce and jack-pine; warm and dusty in the grass that seeded where a burn had run last year; evil in the rotting weed above the water-line, and strangely intoxicating in the dry breath of forest-fires that made haze of the blue tumbled hills to westward.

Dick stooped as he pulled, taking the smite of the heat on his burnt forehead, and his sweat ran down to the earth, as each tangled loop of river was rounded, and each bold breast of forest slid by. He was tough as the men of the north needs must be; brown, and wiry, and spare. But the long months of canoe-work had slacked his leg-muscles more than he knew, and Moonias, setting his untiring pace in the strength of a half-breed nursed on the river, became a living instrument of punishment. But if Moonias was punishment to Dick, the man who trod the thwart of the blunt-nosed scow which left a wake like a liner was hell. For he was What Was, and What Might Have Been, and What Couldn't Be. He jerked into life again memories which Dick had buried with care, and their resurrection was a shameful and unpleasant thing.

And Tempest, breasting the sweep through the long hours, had memories too. He was thinking of something which Molson of Regina Barracks had once told him concerning a certain Corporal of E Division who had offended Molson.

"For absolute cold-drawn callousness and impudence you can commend me to him," said Molson. "He has the blackest sheet of any man in the Force, and yet he's the best man we've got on the trail. You can't whip him off it once he has sensed it. He'll go till he's dead and after. And he knows his worth, and takes advantage of it. Eh? Oh, well; what's the matter with all of this sort? Drink, cards, women—anything at all. He takes his pleasures where he likes, and he's completely indifferent to punishment. We give him all the lone patrol work we can, and he's superb at it. I should imagine he has been pretty effectively through the mill in his time."

"Gentleman, of course?" said Tempest.

"Sure. A lineal descendant by right of spirit from 'the Worshipful Company of Gentleman-adventurers trading with Prince Rupert in the North Seas' in the days when the Hudson Bay Company was born. And he is certainly one of the drift of the world—one of the homeless men."

"We need those men," said Tempest. "They break out the new flags of Empire, and beat the new trails. And die the old deaths when all's done. What's his name?"

Molson gave it. And thereafter Tempest had sat silent as he stood silent now, thinking of the man who had been his friend.

He had known Dick with rather unusual intimacy in the days of their raw boyhood and adolescence, and even then he had known of the inner fastness in the big, humorous, good-looking boy who flashed so swiftly from lazy indifference to a blaze of temper. An inner fastness which he never could penetrate, for all the real love they bore each other. Now, in the light of later knowledge, Tempest wondered if Dick had held that fastness, ashamed and half-afraid, knowing it for the embryo of his future life; the thing which the world was to make him.

He glanced from Dick's tattered tunic in the scow to Dick himself, treading the tracking-step with loose-swung arms and slack hips and head low. Where dried grass was slippery under heel; where branches whipped their faces, and cut-banks broke under their hands; and where the track led them hip-high in the snow-shed water, the two men passed, silent and uncomplaining. Half-breeds live this life six months in the year for perhaps eight years. Then they drop out, crippled and helpless, and the water-ways of Canada forget them, and for them the roaring hotels at the "Landings" and the jovial talk and laughter are gone by. A white man usually suffers in the lines. He is not fitted for them, and the quarter-hour rest every forty minutes does no more than give his over-strained muscles time to stiffen.

Knowing all this, Tempest spoke to Dick at the next halt; choosing his words carefully, as is needful with the man who has been one's friend.

"I fancy we'd best camp on the trail to-night," he said. "The Portage is going to be rather a long stunt for one day."

Dick looked at him through half-shut eyes, and the smile on his lips was unpleasant. He was too tired to allow it to any man—least of all to Tempest.

"You have got the right spirit for the North-West," he said suavely.

Tempest flushed. The golding western light was in his thick, bright hair, and the eager face which no weariness could blurr. He looked curiously vital with the shaggy forehead of the bank behind him in its red and yellow glory.

"Exactly," he said quietly. "I know when we have had enough."

"Ah," said Dick, and the sneer of his smile had got into his voice. "I have heard vulgar men call that knowledge cold feet."

He turned on his heel, with a contemptuous swing, climbed the low bank, and flung himself down in shade of the young poplars and tall raspberry bushes. But his dark bold eyes were not contemptuous; they were angry, as a man has a right to be angry when forced into contact with a better man than himself. Dick had been a drunkard of Life all his days. He had wronged men and fought with them; he had loved women, and wasted the wine of his heritage; and if he had found huge joy in the doing of these things he found little in the remembrance. But Tempest was the same fine, gallant soul of earlier years; still climbing his way upward, with eyes lit and hair blown back by the wind of the heights. He had governed himself in wisdom while Dick's temper had governed him as a fool; and the difference lay stark and wide between them now for all men to understand. But the little canker of cynical laughter which lived in Dick's heart came to his aid.

"For though it might frighten him to live with my memories it would certainly bore me to death to live with his," he said; and got up and went down the bank again in obedience to the long guttural cry of the breed. On the beach he found Tempest standing in the traces with Moonias a thicker bulk before him, and he halted, smiling.

"When a man shows he is stung there is generally reason for it," he said.

"Get into the scow and pole," said Tempest quietly. "We're wasting daylight."

"Get out of that strap," said Dick in sudden roughness. "You know you can't pull." And then Tempest looked him between the eyes.

"You're in a lone patrol, my man," he said. "But when you come in contact with your superiors you'll do them the honour of remembering that they are your superiors. Now, get into that scow—sharp."

He fitted the belt to his waist, for the broken arm was strapped over his breast, and trod forward to take up the slack. And in the trace before him Moonias bowed his black bullet head with the groan of a bull. Dick flung himself over the thwart and laid hands on the idle sweep; and behind his amusement at Tempest's moral reproof stood the uneasy knowledge that he was not obeying the superior officer only, but the superior man.

The hour dropped through brief twilight into dark. Sharp bush-scents moved on the quickening chill of the air. Stars opened wide and calm over the forest, laying reflections as calm on the river until the scow burst them into a myriad meteors. Back in the trails a brown bear swung his clumsy way and a red dog-fox flicked like a passing thought. That tense silence which is the essence of sound strengthened as the forest-life waked and walked. In the dusk the crashing of the two men on the bank marked their way. In the scow the third man trod the treadmill step to the sweep. But their bodies were hid from each other even as their hearts were hid.

Past a snake-fence and a clearing three Indian dogs came racing, pallid blurrs like strayed souls on the dark. A white-man's voice roared at them, and a white-man tread came down the river over the level-laid swathes of hay. And then Dick heard Randal of Pitcher's Portage calling:

"Give us a holt there. My—is that you, Sergeant? Well, I've got a fire an' some grub up to the shack. Turnin' cold, ain't it?"

The scow felt the new vigour of the pull and made a squattering, snuffling haste through the water. Round the bend Randal's home-lights swung in sight, and to Tem- pest, heavily staggering over the beaten trail, came the vision of what home-lights mean to a man in this land of the last West. For these are very truly the home-lights of Canada; of the mother who breeds and binds her sons from the East to the West and takes into sonship those who come to her from the outer seas. By the naked frame-house on the ocean of prairie she sits waiting; by the lone shack of yellow pine in the Rockies; at the door of the Indian tepee in the forest; at the white tent in the white silence of the Barren Lands. And night by night they come home to her, those sons; going with the tread of tired men across the blowing prairie-grass, stepping sure-foot among the towering glaciers of the ranges, brushing quick feet through the fallen gold of the forest-trails, kicking powdered dust or snow as powder-dry before them out where the trees fail and the winds stand up and scream at the silence and the tent-ropes squeal to the strain.

They come home: to sleep, and to tell of the day's lessons in the knowledge of men who have learnt first-hand in this merciful, merciless great nursery of beginnings which we call Life. And she sits and listens, the mother; heartening the weak, who fear and slide round the edges of understanding, scarifying the cheat in the night when the big lonely places do their talking, giving comfort to the gallant courage that could not win out, and boisterous laughter to the daring men who have stripped themselves naked that they may buy broadcloth and joy of the gambler Chance.

Tempest stood aside with his heart watching those home-lights while the scow was run up, the freight unloaded, and Moonias put into a large shed with a lock and a running door.

"Reckon that'll holt him safe," said Randal. "The linemen kep' all their lumber into it when they was layin' this section. Come right along to the shack."

Over the door-sill Dick trod on something soft that gave, making no sound. Lifted up it proved itself an Indian baby, staring with black, placid eyes and round, pursed mouth.

"Yours?" he asked idly, and saw Randal's eyes go suddenly bloodshot.

"Mine! What d'yer take me for? It belongs to that tepee acrost the clearing. They're e-ternally crawlin' in here, the little—beasts like they was flies—or bugs. Chuck it down, an' let it crawl home."

Dick arranged the baby wth its nose in a direct line with the tepee; watched its progress for two yards towards the band of light, then followed into the shack.

The shack was more crowded than most shacks; for, besides the inevitable black stove, narrow bunk, box with tin basin, boots, team-harness, gun, axes, and other necessaries, there was a telephone battery in the north wall and a counter behind which Randal had served the line-camp running east under the window. Outside were some thousand miles of sweeping forest and plain, of river and lonely ranges. Beyond lay big, glowing, noisy towns, where men hived, humming and throbbing with vivid life, and Randal held on to them by the little steel key of the battery. Through the winter he would guard his line-section from fallen trees and snow as best he might. Through spring and fall and summer he would be there; selling tinned foods and cereals and chewing-gum to the line-camps, and taking and transmitting messages concerning the on-going work. And in between he watched half-breed Indian babies crawl into his shack, suck his team-harness in the simple belief that it was moosemeat, and crawl out again. Besides, he chewed a great deal of gum, and passing freighters generally stopped to talk.

Dick kept his eyes from Tempest through the meal of beans and bacon helped out with Randal's sodden bannock. He knew that the man was suffering acutely, and he was glad of it. For hate still held, iron-hard, against the love that had been. Then Tempest got in a corner with his pipe, dropping out of the talk and out of the smudge of light from the dirty coal-oil lamp. Randal sat full in the gleam of it, chewing in slow content. He was like a cow in his great, awkward strength, and like a cow in his indifference to most subjects until Dick chanced on the one concerning which Randal was morbidly rabid. He sat up, thrusting his rugged face forward.

"Who lives in the tepee?" he said. "Who orter live in a tepee but a Injun an' his squaw? An' who do live there but a heathen Russian Jew an' his squaw?" He flung out a stubby hand where the thumb was blackened by the pipe-dottel. "What right or call have we wi' heathen foreigners in this land?" he said. "Give me the men o' my own breed. They're rotten some, but I know how an' why. I can deal wi' them. But I'll have no dealin's wi' a Russian Jew what's gotten a squaw for wife, an' a bunch o' papooses nasty as hisself. What do we want wi' his breed in our country? What do we want wi' him?"

"We must colonise," said Dick derisively.

Randal sat back with a grunt.

"Colonise be2 What for do we want to colonise wi' the alien for? Why arn't England sendin' us more of her own? By all accounts she's got about a couple or more too many in that London o' hers. Why arn't she sendin' them to us—an' why arn't we waitin' on her?"

Dick spoke with intimate remembrance of some men whom he knew.

"They are not entirely immaculate either," he suggested.

"What o' that? They come o' like blood. You can reckon what they'll do if a man hits or curses them. But the Lord A'mighty couldn't reckon on a Russian Jew—what's gotten a squaw to wife. That Russian acrost there—he took my axe last week, an' I tole him bring it back. Sakes, he had the woman an' kids into that tepee like he thought I was goin' to eat the whole bunch. I don't know how to handle his sort, an' I don't want." Randal spat out of the door; solemnly, reflectively, like one performing a rite. "Give me the men o' my own breed," he said again.

"Does he ill-treat the squaw?" demanded Dick.

Randal shrugged his shoulders.

"Not more'n nat'ral," he said.

"Which means—not more than the men of our own breed." Dick laughed. "Lord knows what the Canadian of the future is going to be," he said. "But he won't be that crawling baby with the high cheekbones, and he won't quite—be you or me. If he has luck he may be a better man than either of us. Where are you going to bed us down to-night, Randal?"

"Sergeant can have the bunk—I reckon he's asleep right now, ain't he? An' you can spread your kit behind the counter. I'm goin' to sleep in the extension."

He nodded and went out, and Dick heard his heavy tread round the shack-corner, among the refuse of spent bottles and tins. It ceased with the slamming of a door somewhere, and Dick crossed the floor to Tempest.