Andy McFardell made no reply. He stared straight out into the falling snow. He was a good-looking, black-haired, black-eyed man of about twenty-eight years. But his good looks had nothing of the frank openness and smiling good-nature of his prisoner. The two men were in sharp contrast. The whole cast of Andy McFardell’s face had something of the narrow sleekness of a fox, with a mouth hidden under a carefully trimmed black moustache that was heavy-lipped and ugly. It was a face to inspire confidence in the work that was his. But the best tribute his associates in the Police cared to pay him was an unanimous opinion that he was surely marked out for promotion.
His prisoner was a larger man in every sense. His furs only left visible a strong face, and the light of philosophical good-humour that looked out of his eyes. And this for all he was on his way to Calford to serve five years’ hard labour in the penitentiary.
As they reached the top of the hill, Andy McFardell turned to his companion again.
“You know I can’t get a boy like you, anyway,” he said, in a tone of frank impatience. “What in hell! Five years’ hard pan up in Alaska. Five years’ sweating blood to collect a bunch of dust that’s to hand you all the things you’ve ever dreamed about. Five years of a climate that’s calculated to freeze the vitals of a brass image. Then you pull out. And the first thing you do is to pitch everything to the devil by hitting up against the law. You’ve done worse than five years’ penitentiary up there in Alaska, and collected a big fortune; and now you’ve got five years’ real penitentiary ahead of you while your gold rots. Why? For the fool notion of helping a boy who didn’t need your help. Say, there’s times I reckon human nature’s the darnedest fool thing God A’mighty ever created.”
“Is it?”
Jim Pryse’s reply came with perfect good-temper. He was one of those blessed creatures who can always contrive to find a smile lurking in the worst tragedy with which they are beset.
“Take a hunch man,” he went on amiably. “The only fool thing God ever created is the white-livered coyote that wants to snivel its way through life, instead of getting a grip on the throat of things. I knew just the thing I was doing. You see, that boy was my brother, and the best feller I know. The skunk he’d killed was the feller who’d robbed him of a wife, and done the unholiest thing any low-down bum can do by any woman, married or single. Well, I was with him, just as though my two hands had choked the life out of that skunk instead of his. Was I going to risk seeing that boy the centre of a hanging bee? Not on your life. I held you boys off while that kid feller got away. And I held you good. And I’d have shot to kill rather than you should have laid hands on him. He’s got clear away. And, for all the law doesn’t reckon to let up once it camps on a feller’s trail, you’ll never get him. The gold you reckon is going to rot will see to that. That boy was no murderer. His act was sheer justice. I didn’t butt in. No, boy, it was better than that.”
“Man, you’re plumb crazy!” McFardell urged his horse on under his impatience. “No, no. Life’s a pretty tough proposition, anyway. And it’s only a crazy man sets out to make it tougher, whether it’s for a brother or anybody else. I s’pose there’s folks would call that sort of junk ‘loyalty.’ I guess they need to get a fresh focus. ‘Duty’ I know. Duty’s the thing demanded of us boys in my calling. That’s all right. It’s always within the law, and if you carry on, and keep an eye well skinned, it’s going to help you to the sort of things we all worry for. But the other stuff is a crazy notion, that’s as liable as not to get you hanged. I tell you you were dead wrong. You were butting in like some fool kid. That boy would never have hanged if he could have proved his case. It was the Unwritten Law, and he’d have got clear away with it. And you—you wouldn’t be riding these darned hills in a snowstorm.”
The policeman’s view only had the effect of deepening his prisoner’s smile. And the blue eyes watched the officer tolerantly as he brushed the snow from about his fur collar.
“Maybe he’d have got away with it,” Pryse said quietly, emulating his companion, wiping the snow from about his eyes with his mitted and shackled hands. “I don’t know, and I’m not worried. He’s away now, and I’m feeling good about it. Five years in penitentiary is going to hand me an elegant spell for quiet reflection, and maybe I’ll be able to locate where our viewpoints are wrong. Just now it seems to me that duty’s a sort of human-made notion that mainly has self for its principal calculation. Loyalty, as you choose to call it, seems to me to be something we can’t help. Maybe it’s built in us, the same as the things that set us crazy for the dame that seems good to us. I’m not yearning to worry it out, anyway. The thing I know is, Eddie boy is clear beyond the reach of any Mounted Police Patrol, and, that being so, I feel as good as a skipping lamb in springtime. Alaska handed me a deal better than a million dollars, and, if necessary, the whole of that bunch of dust will go to say you boys are nothing to give that boy a headache. I——Hold up, you!”