But I revised my opinion when I came to know him better. Under the surface he was sensitive as a girl; one could wound him with a word or a look. Paradoxically, he was absolutely cold-blooded toward a declared enemy. He would fight fair, but without mercy. Side by side with the sensitive soul of him, and hidden always under an impassive mask of self-control, lay the battling spirit, an indomitable fighting streak; it cropped out in a cool, calculating manner of taking desperate chances when the sleeping devil in him was roused. He would sidestep trouble—and one met the weeping damsel at many turns of the road in those raw days—if he could do it without loss of self-respect; but the man who stirred him up needlessly, or crowded him into retaliation, always regretted it—when he had time to indulge in vain regrets. And you can bet your last, lone peso, and consider it won, that MacRae meant every word when he said to old Hans Rutter: "We'll make them sweat blood for this."
When we got down into the bottom Mac turned aside to the deep-worn trail and glanced sharply down at the ruts. The dust in them lay smooth, and the hoof-marks that showed were old and dim.
"I wondered if there had been any freight teams pass lately," he explained. "But there hasn't—not for a day or two, anyway. Let's look in the timber."
That was a long time ago, and since then I have seen much of life and death in many countries, but I can recall as distinctly as if it were yesterday the grim sight that met us when we rode in among the whispering cottonwoods. We found Hank Rowan in a little open place, where rifts of sunlight filtered through the tangled branches; one yellow bar, full of quivering motes, rested on the wide-open eyes and mouth, tinting the set features the ghastly color of a plaster cast. The horse he had ridden lay dead across his legs, and just beyond, a crumpled heap against the base of a tree, was the carcass of a mule, half-hidden under a bulky pack. The thing that sickened me, that stirs me even yet, was a circular, red patch that crowned his head where should have been thick, iron-gray hair.
"The damned hounds!" MacRae muttered. "They tried to make it look like an Indian job."
The pack-ropes had been cut and the pack searched. In the same manner they had gone through his pockets and scattered a few papers and letters on the ground. These we gathered carefully together, against the time of meeting Lyn, and then—for time pressed, and a dead man, though he may be your friend and his passing a sorrow, is out of the game forever—we dragged him from beneath the dead horse, wrapped him in the canvas pack-cover, and buried him in the soft leaf-mold where he lay, as we had buried his lifetime partner early in the morning. When we had finished, MacRae ordered his two troopers back to Pend d' Oreille, and we mounted our horses and turned their heads toward Fort Walsh.
It is seventy miles in an air-line from Stony Crossing to the fort. That night we laid out, sleeping without hardship in a dry buffalo-wallow, and noon of the next day brought us to Walsh, a huddle of log buildings clustering around a tall pole from which fluttered the union jack.
Off to one side of the fort a bunch of work-bulls fed peacefully. Down in the creek bottom a tent or two flapped in the mid-day breeze, and in their neighborhood uprose the smoke of half a dozen dinner fires. By the post storeroom, waiting their turn to unload, was ranged a line of the tarpaulin-covered wagons, wheeled galleons of the plains, that brought food and raiment to the Northwest before the coming of steam and steel.
"That looks to me like Baker's outfit, from Benton," I said to MacRae, as we swung off our horses before the building in which the officer of the day held forth. "They must have come by way of Assiniboine."
"Probably," Mac answered. "And over yonder's the paymaster's train. At least, he's due, and I can't account for a bunch of horses in charge of a buck trooper any other way."