The inspector’s reference to hold-ups reminded me of a story of a highwayman I heard at the Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa. A road agent held up a man and a woman who were riding through the hills. He covered them with his revolver and made the man dismount so he could go through his pockets. The woman was sitting on her horse, congratulating herself upon her escape, when the robber stepped up to her, saying, “Beg pardon. Just a moment, madam.” He thereupon gently raised her skirt to her knees, thrust his hand into her stocking, and took out her money. He seemed to know just where it was, and there was no waste effort.
“One of the classics of our service”—it is the inspector who is speaking once more—“is the King-Hayward case. Edward Hayward, a young Englishman, was killed in the wilds around Lesser Slave Lake. He had gone up there from Edmonton to hunt with Charles King, an American from Salt Lake City. Some weeks later an Indian notified one of our sergeants that two men had come into the country and one of them had disappeared. The officer got on the trail, went to the last camp fire, where the Indian reported seeing both men, and sifted the ashes. He found three hard lumps of flesh and a bit of skull bone. Near the camp fire was a little pond. In this Indian women were set to work to fish up with their toes any hard substance they might find in the ooze. They brought up a stick-pin of unusual design and a pocketbook. The pond was drained and on the bottom was a shoe with a broken needle sticking in it. The sergeant then examined the ashes of the fire with a microscope, which revealed the eye of the broken needle.
“King was tracked down and arrested, and Hayward’s brother was brought on from England to identify the trinkets of the murdered man. It took the sergeant eleven months to complete his case, and he had to bring forty Indian and half-breed witnesses from Lesser Slave Lake to Edmonton to testify at the trial. But King was finally convicted and hanged. All this cost the Canadian government more than thirty thousand dollars, yet it was not considered a waste of money.”
I inquired of the inspector the cause of most of the crime in his division. He replied:
“One of our troubles is with smuggled liquor. We try especially to keep it from the Indians, but nevertheless it gets in. In one instance bottles of whisky were shipped to the Yukon inside the carcasses of dressed hogs. In another a woman contrived a rubber sleeve, which she filled with whisky. All one had to do for a drink was to give her arm a hard squeeze.”
I asked how it was that the Mounted Police are so feared by bad characters that this whole territory can be controlled by a handful of them. The officer replied:
“Every man in frontier Canada knows that if he is wanted by the Mounted Police, they are sure to get him. A fugitive from justice could very easily kill one of our men sent after him, but he realizes that if he does so, another will follow, and as many more as are necessary until he is brought in. I have seen constables arrest men of twice their weight and strength, and have had one or two men round up a mob and bring them all to jail. This is true not only of our own bad men, but also of those who come across from Alaska. They may be dangerous on the other side of the border, but they are always gentle enough when they get here.
“The big thing that helps us,” concluded the head of the police, “is that the government supports us up to the limit. For example, it cost us two hundred thousand dollars to convict in one famous murder case, but it was done and the guilty man hanged. Ottawa always tells us that it is prepared to spend any amount of money rather than have a murderer go unpunished. It is that policy that enables us to keep order here.”
THE END