The long arm of the Mounted

by James French Dorrance

Having sent Constable Mahaffy with the team to the railroad for supplies and a small shipment of furniture, Sergeant Childress slept in the half-roofed cabin alone, except for the hound. He had been slumbering for hours when the restless movements and low whining of the dog awakened him. Where his master was concerned, Poison never asserted himself without reason. This his owner had learned to consider, although sometimes he failed to fathom it. Half rising from out his blankets, he struck a match and looked at his watch. The hour was nearly one in the morning, and the light of the half moon poured in through the unfinished portion of the roof.

"Whimpering at the moon, you blithering old alarm clock?" he demanded; but, as he grew more fully awake, he realized that Poison was far too wise to be disturbed by Luna, even when she appeared in all her splendor. Pulling on his corduroys and boots, Childress slipped a .45 into his belt and went out to investigate, the hound licking his heels in approval of the move.

His first interest was Silver, picketed up the creek. As he approached the animal which, with association, was winning his increasing interest, he heard a whistling snort. The sergeant recognized in this not a sound of fright or defiance, but the beast's invitation to its kind. In the moonlight he saw that the horse's ears were pointing toward the upper rim of the cup in an attitude of eager listening, and that he pawed the prairie with an impatient forefoot. The possibility that strays, seeking a change of grass, had headed into his fertile basin was the first supposition. Under ordinary circumstances this need not have kept him longer from his blankets, as their dislodgment could have awaited the daylight. But he knew the horse bands that ranged thereabouts bore either the Andress or the Gallegher brand. In view of the double warning that he was under suspicion, he did not care to have them found on his newly-acquired property.

Taking up a rope that was looped over the firmly planted post to which the stallion was picketed, he strode toward the upper basin, the hound at his heels.

The dozen mares, with their colts, which he had bought and driven in as the foundation of the Open A herd, were grazing peacefully in the upper pasture, and his count showed the presence of no outsiders. He was about to turn back, in the belief that for once the hound had yielded to canine aversion for moonlight, when his nostrils detected a foreign odor in the air of the soft Chinook wind that blew.

He sniffed and sniffed again. "Plug cut!" he murmured under his breath. "Plug cut blazing in a pipe! Somebody's enjoying a smoke up that ravine."

At this time of night no other human should have been within miles of the spot. Indeed, at any hour the presence of a stranger in that side ravine, far removed from any trail, would demand explanation. As rapidly as possible he got out of the moonlight.

Under cover of the shadows thrown by the creek's cottonwood fringe, he advanced with cautious, noiseless tread to the edge of the ravine, which was really a miniature basin connected with the main one by a narrow gap. There he saw twelve or fifteen horses, most of them cropping the luxuriant growth underfoot.

At first his eyes discerned no human figure, though the scent of tobacco could be accounted for only by the presence of man. Then he detected a movement in the shadows on the far side of the ravine, near its mouth. The next moment a short, spare figure, which he did not recognize, stepped into view.

Childress saw the intruder tie a rope around a slender birch, run a line to its neighbor, and then start across the ravine, paying out the rope as he progressed. It was evident that he was improvising a corral for the strange stock in the gully; but why the animals were there was as much a mystery as the stranger himself.