_ CHAPTER I. MAHON ON THE TRAIL
Sergeant Mahon emptied the barracks mail bag on the desk before Inspector Barker and stood awaiting instructions. The Inspector passed his hand over the small pile of letters and let his eye roam from one to another in the speculative way that added zest to the later revelation of their contents.
One from headquarters at Regina he set carefully aside. With an "ah!" of satisfied expectancy he selected one from the remainder and placed it before him. Mahon was mildly interested. The little foibles of his superior were always amusing to him. Eyes still fixed on the envelope, the Inspector commenced to fill his pipe.
"Spoiling for a job, Mahon?"
"Depends."
"Hm-m! Beautifully non-committal."
Mahon's interest was rising. The Inspector went on calmly cramming in the tobacco. When the job was completed to his liking, he thrust the pipe between his lips, flicked a loose flake from his tunic, and forgot to apply a match. Instead, he picked up the envelope and examined it on all sides. Mahon began to grow impatient.
Twice the Inspector turned the letter over. Mahon fretted. He could see on its face the Division headquarters stamp--Lethbridge--but why all this ceremony and pother about an official note that came almost every day? He recalled suddenly that his wife would be holding lunch for him--with fresh fish he had seen unloaded little more than an hour ago from the through train from Vancouver. He could almost smell it sizzling on the natural gas cooker.
"Hm-m!" The envelope was not yet broken. "I imagine this will interest you, Mahon."
Suddenly the Inspector dived into a drawer and, taking from it an official looking envelope, passed it back to the Sergeant. The latter accepted it with fading interest. The Assistant Commissioner at Regina was unfolding to Inspector Barker's immediate superior, the Superintendent at Lethbridge, an unexciting tale of crime. Crime was their daily diet, and this was located far beyond their district.
Somewhere away up north, hundreds of miles beyond the jurisdiction of the Medicine Hat unit of the Mounted Police, events of concern to the Police were happening along the line of the transcontinental railway now under construction. Certain acts of sabotage--tearing down railway trestles and bridges, undermining trains, displacing grade, tampering with rails and switches--were not only hampering construction but endangering life. And things were growing worse. In addition there was complaint of horse-stealing at one isolated camp.
The point of the letter was contained in the last paragraph. Could Superintendent Magwood spare an experienced bushman and trailer to go north and take temporary charge?
Mahon handed the letter back with a laugh.
"Bit of a joke, horse-stealing from contractors who only last year grabbed every stolen horse offered them. Retribution!"
The Inspector swung about on his swivel chair.
"We never discovered who got those horses."
"The ones Blue Pete stole?" A cloud came to Mahon's face. "Not exactly the contractors who got them, but there was no doubt where they went."
"I always regretted we had to hand over the search just there to a Division that knows little about ranch horses," murmured the Inspector. "Still--perhaps--" He stopped and shifted the letter he held from one hand to the other, as if weighing it.
"We'd have made short work of it, sir."
"Even if we'd implicated your halfbreed friend?" The older man was peering beneath his iron-grey brows.
"I'm afraid nothing more was needed to implicate Blue Pete," sighed Mahon.
"For a halfbreed rustler he seems to have stamped himself on your imagination, Boy." They had called Mahon "Boy" almost since he joined the force seven years before as a young man, packed with youthful vitality, frankness and ambition, and the nickname was dear to him.
"But he wasn't always a rustler. I remember him only for the two years he spent unofficially in the Force, the best rustler-buster we ever had. That was the real Blue Pete. That he died a rustler was due to crooked 'justice.' Poor old Pete! If only he hadn't had the Indian strain!"
"He wouldn't have been so useful to us. His uncanny scent on the trail--By the way, Mahon, strange we never found trace of him--his grave or something--when you're so certain how and where he died. And where's that ugly pinto of his? Whiskers, he called her, wasn't it?"
"Mira found the body, sir--that last letter she sent us said as much. She'd hide him from us--it's exactly the thing she would do. She was a loyal wife--"
"Not quite a wife."
"A wife as truly as absence of formal ceremony can make one. He's lying out there somewhere in the heart of the Hills he loved. . . . They were a sentimental pair."
"Almost too much sentiment in Mira Stanton for you," chuckled the Inspector. "When I think of how near a thing it was--"
"I was a fool, sir." Mahon's face was red. "But it wasn't because I was too good for her. We'd never have pulled together; I know that now. She was born and bred in the wild ways. I respect her as much as I ever did--perhaps more because she has steadfastly refused even to let us know where she is--we who sent her down and indirectly killed the man she loved."
"I suppose you've talked all this over with your wife, young man?"
"Yes, sir. Helen, though reared in such a different atmosphere from her cousin, understands Mira better than I. She sympathises--"
"But where is she--Mira, I mean? We know she's drawing the profits regularly from the 3-bar-Y. But that foreman of hers is as mute as a clam. . . . And now Bert, her best cowboy, has disappeared. Hm-m! What d'ye make of it, Mahon?"
It was not like the Inspector to draw the opinions of his staff, and Mahon regarded him slyly.
"You have a theory, sir. I haven't. I only see what's clear. Mira's over in Montana--"
"And so you think Mira Stanton is living on her past in Montana--gamboling about with Whiskers, I suppose? And Blue Pete lies in the Hills? Comfortable disposal of the whole affair. I envy you."
"I've searched the Hills in all his old haunts, sir--"
"And I'm dam glad you didn't find him."
The Inspector tore open the letter in his hand, smiled, and passed it back.
"You have a copy of the Assistant Commissioner's letter to me of the tenth," it ran. "In observance of his orders I would suggest that you send Sergeant Mahon, who is, I believe, the best for the purpose in the Division."
Mahon flushed. A gleam of boyish excitement made him look five years younger. Eagerly he searched the Inspector's face.
"I'd like it, sir. I'd do my best. I've done bush work in the Hills, and Blue Pete knocked something into me about trails."
"It always surprises me," began the Inspector maliciously, "how eager young husbands are to get away--"
"May I take Helen, sir?"
"No--you--may--not! What do you think this is--a honeymoon? In the first place you'll probably be located in some defunct end-of-steel village where even the ghosts are abominable. In the next place you'll be too busy to know you're married. Horse-thieves? Bah! This is different stuff. You'll be up against something new. We've more than a suspicion that those devils, the Independent Workers of the World, are at the bottom of it. When you get on the trail of the I.W.W., Boy, there'll be no chivalry of the plains. It'll be knives, and poison, and dynamite . . . and darkness for deeds of darkness. All the criminals you've met are saints compared with these foreign devils. Thank the Lord, they've come no further from the States as yet than the construction camps!"
He rose and deliberately removed the tunic that was to him the badge of office.
"Speaking unofficially," he observed, "my advice is to shoot first and enquire after. Remember that every Pole and Russian and Hungarian there carries a knife or a slug--he has to in self-protection--and uses it as we do slang. Every foreign workman on a railway construction gang is a potential murderer. . . . I'd rather give evidence for you on a murder charge than strew flowers on your grave."
He reached for his tunic.
"You'll have a chance to do credit to Blue Pete's memory. . . . About Helen--wait till we see what size the cloud is."
He thrust his arms into the tunic and buttoned it tight to his chin.
"You leave on Saturday," he growled. _