CHAPTER XIV
IN THE POWER OF HIS PRISONER
"There was some high play that evening," he went on presently, "and most of the money that was lost went into Tough Kelly's pocket. Cheated? Well, yes, I suppose so. Anyway he vamoosed pretty quick when there was no more gambling going forward, and he hadn't gone many minutes when Lean Bear slipped out, as he said, to give his mustang a feed and find a bed in the stables.
"That same night Corporal Pretty John completed his chain of evidence against Tough Kelly, and on the following morning he rode off to Tough's lone cabin among the hills, to arrest him. But when he got there and went inside, it was to find Tough Kelly lying stone dead.
"Clearly it was an Indian who had killed him, for his scalp had been taken. But there was nothing to show who that Indian was—nothing excepting a little broken bead of crimson glass, which the trooper found on the mud floor.
"That bead was the only clue. But Pretty John didn't need to ask himself many questions. He remembered the look of savage enmity that had flashed from the eyes of Lean Bear, and although he didn't know anything of a motive, he just kind of guessed that the thing had been done by Lean Bear himself.
"So, leaving his subordinate in charge of the post at Rosetta's Crossing, he fixed up his outfit for a long journey and started off on the criminal's trail, or as much of a trail as he could find, which was precious little. Still, as you know, Dan, it's a point of honour among the Mounted Police that, once you go off on the track of a criminal, you've got to capture him. You mustn't slink back to barracks without your man.
"Pretty John was on that trail, not for days only, but for weeks. It led him far away into the snowy wilds of the Rocky Mountains, where there wasn't a whole lot of food for man or beast. There was so little that it came to a matter of either giving up the hopeless chase or else giving up his life, and the better prospect seemed to be that of saving his own skin.
"Accordingly, he turned back. But he'd got within a couple of hundred miles of home when suddenly and unexpectedly he came upon the fugitive's back trail. He followed it up, and with such good purpose that at last he located his man in a trapper's dug-out on the Green River.