The mate of the Vancouver

by Morley Roberts

Now, as far as I have gone in this story, I have related nothing which I did not see or hear myself, which is, as it seems to me, the proper way to do it, provided nothing important is left out. But as I have learnt since then what happened to other people, and have pieced the story together in my mind, I see it is necessary to depart from the rule I have observed hitherto, if I don't want to explain, after I have come to the end of the whole history, what occurred before; and that, I can see, would be a very clumsy way of narrating any affair. Now, what I am going to tell I have on very good evidence, for Dave at the Forks, and Conlan's stableman told me part, and afterward, as will be seen, I actually learnt something from Siwash Jim himself, who here plays rather a curious and important part.

It appears that the day after I was at the Forks (which day I spent, by the way, with Mr. Fleming, riding round the country, returning afterward by the trail which led from the Black Cañon down to my house) Siwash Jim, who had to all appearance recovered from the injuries, which, however, were only bruises, that I had inflicted on him, began to drink early in the morning. He had, so Dave says, quite an unnatural power of keeping sober—and Dave himself can drink more than any two men I am acquainted with, unless it is Mac, my old partner, so he ought to know. And though Jim drank hard, he did not become drunk, but only abused me. He called me all the names from coyote upward and downward which a British Columbian of any standing has at his tongue's end, and when Jim had exhausted the resources of the fertile American language, he started in Siwash or Indian, in which there are many choice terms of abuse. But in spite of his openness, Dave says it was quite evident he was dangerous, and that I might really have been in peril at any time of the day if I had come to town, for Jim was deemed a bad character among his companions, and had, so it was said, killed one man at least, though he had never been tried for it. But though he sat all day in the bar, using my name openly, he never made a move till eight in the evening, when he went out for awhile.

When he returned he was accompanied by a thin dark man, wearing a slouch hat over his eyes, whom Dave took to be a half-breed of some kind, and they had drinks together, for which the stranger paid, speaking in good English, but not with a Western accent. Then the two went to the other side of the room. What their conversation was, no one knows exactly, nor did I ever learn; but Dave, who was keeping his eye on Jim, says that it seemed as if the stranger was trying to persuade Jim to be quiet and stay where he was, and from what occurred afterward there is little doubt his supposition was correct. Moreover, my name undoubtedly occurred in this conversation, for Dave heard it, and the name of my ranch as well. Soon after that some men came in, and, in consequence of his being busy, Dave did not see Jim go out. But Conlan's stableman says Jim came to the stable with the stranger and got his horse. When asked where he was going, he said for a ride, and would answer no more questions. And all the time the strange man tried to persuade him not to go, and to come and have another drink. If Jim had been flush of money there might have been a motive for this, but as he was not, there seemed then to be none beyond the sudden and absurd fondness that men sometimes conceive for each other when drunk. But if this were the case, it was only on the stranger's side, for when the horse was brought round to the door Jim mounted it, and when the other man still importuned him not to go, Siwash Jim struck at him with his left hand and knocked off his hat as he stood in the light coming from the bar. And just then attention was drawn from Jim by a sudden shriek from the other side of the road where Conlan's private house stood. When Dave came out and looked for him again, both he and the other man had disappeared down the road, which branched about half a mile out of town into two forks, one leading eastward and the other southward to the Flemings'.

Now, as I said before, most of that day I had been out riding with Mr. Fleming, who left me early, in order to go to the next ranch down the road, and I had told him the whole story about Mat's escape, and my brother's death; which he agreed with me were hardly likely to be connected. Yet he acknowledged if they were I was in much more danger than one would have thought before, because such a deed would show the Malay was a desperado of the most fearless and dangerous description; and besides, if he had robbed Will, it was more than likely he knew where I was from my own letters, or from my address written in a pocketbook my brother always carried, and which was missing. Of course, this conversation made me full, as it were, of Mat; and that, combined with the unlucky turn affairs had taken with regard to Elsie, made me more nervous than I was inclined to acknowledge to her father. So before I went to bed, which I did at ten o'clock—for I was very tired, being still unaccustomed to much riding—I locked my door carefully, and put the table against it, neither of which things I had ever done before, and which I was almost inclined to undo at once, for it seemed cowardly to me. Yet I thought of Elsie, and, still hoping to win her, I was careful of my life. I went to sleep, in spite of my nervous preoccupation, almost as soon as I lay down, and I suppose I must have been asleep two hours before I woke out of a horrible dream. I thought that I was on board ship, in my own berth, lying in the bunk, and that Mat was on my chest strangling me with his long lithe fingers. And all the time I heard, as I thought, the sails flap, as though the vessel had come up in the wind. As I struggled—and I did struggle desperately—the blood seemed to go up into my head and eyes, until I saw the fiend's face in a red light, and then I woke. The house was on fire, and I was being suffocated! As the flames worked in from the outside, and made the scorching timbers crack again and again, I sprang out of bed. I had lain down with my trousers on, and, seeing at once there must be foul play for the house to catch fire on the outside, and at the back too, where I never went, I drew on my boots, snatched my revolver up, and leapt at the front window, through which I went with a crash, uttering a loud cry as I did so, for a piece of the glass cut my left arm deeply. As I came to the ground, I saw a horseman in front of me, and by the light of the fire, which had already mounted to the roof of the house, I recognized Siwash Jim. Then, whether it was that the horse he rode was frightened at the crash I made or not, it suddenly bounded into the air, turned sharp round, and bolted into the brush, just where the trail came down from the Black Cañon. As Jim disappeared, I fired, but with no effect; and that my shot was neither returned nor anticipated was, I saw, due to the fact that the villain had dropped his own six-shooter, probably at the first bound of his horse, just where he had been standing.

I was in a blind fury of rage, for such a cowardly and treacherous attack on an unoffending man's life seemed hardly credible to me. And there my home was burning, and it was no fault of his that I was not burning with it, or shot dead outside my own door. But he should not escape, if I chased him for a month. I was glad he had been forced to take the trail, for there was no possible outlet to it for miles, so thick was the brush in that mountainous region. Fortunately, I now had two horses; and the one in my stable, which I had only bought from Fleming a week before, was not the one I had been riding all that day. I threw the saddle on him, clinched it up tightly, and led him out. I carried both the weapons, my own and Jim's, and I rode up the narrow and winding path in a blind and desperate fury, which seldom comes to a man, but it when it does it makes him careless of his own life and utterly reckless; and as I rode, in a fashion I had never done before, even though I trusted a mountain-bred and forest-trained horse, I swore that I myself should die that night, or that Siwash Jim should feel the just weight of my wrath. But before I can tell the terrible story of that terrible night I must return once more, and for the last time, to Thomson Forks.

I said, some pages back, that attention had been drawn from Siwash Jim and his strange companion by a sudden shriek from Ned Conlan's house. That shriek had been uttered by Helen, who was still staying with Mrs. Conlan, as she and her hostess were standing outside in the dying twilight, and, after screaming, she had fainted, remaining insensible for nearly half an hour. When Dr. Smith, as he called himself—though an Englishman has natural doubts as to how the practitioners in the West earn their diplomas—had helped her recovery, she spoke at once in a state of nervous excitement painful to witness.

"Oh, I saw him—I saw him!" she said, in an hysterical voice.

"Who, my dear?" asked Mrs. Conlan, in what people call a comforting way.

"Where is Mr Conlan?" was Helen's answer. He came into the room in which she was lying. Helen turned to him at once.

"Mr. Conlan, I want you to take me out to my brother-in-law's house—to Mr. Ticehurst's farm!"