THE WOLF PACK

THE
WOLF PACK

By RIDGWELL CULLUM
Author of
“Child of the North,” “The Forfeit,” “The Golden
Woman,” “The Heart of Unaga,” “In the Brooding
Wild,” “The Law Breakers,” “The Luck of the
Kid,” “The Night Riders,” “The One-Way Trail,”
“The Riddle of Three Way Creek,” “The
Triumph of John Kars,” “The Twins of
Suffering Creek,” etc.

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with J. B. Lippincott Company
Printed in U. S. A.

COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

CONTENTS

PART I

THE WOLF PACK

CHAPTER I
THE RUNAWAY

THE ancient train was laboring heavily. It was climbing, and stated the fact vociferously to the wilderness of echoing hills. Its speed was little better than that of a weary team of horses on an outward journey.

It was passing through a broken, tattered world of wind-swept, stunted northern forest. There were bald crags, and open, water-logged flats. There was snow, too; melting snow, for the Canadian spring was hungrily devouring the last remnants of a fierce winter. The sun was brilliant. The cloud-flecked sky was a steely blue. And the crisp, mountain air even contrived to refresh the superheated atmosphere within the passenger coaches.

Luana’s dark eyes were without concern for the natural beauties beyond the windows of the fantastic old observation car. The small boy-child, who was her charge, occupied her whole attention.

The infant was sturdily clinging to a brass stanchion. He was peering out at the wonders of the endless panorama passing before his baby eyes. But his chubby hand was unequal to its task. He had spent much time and energy in falling down and scrambling again to his feet as the train lumbered drearily over its uneven track. However, he was quite undismayed. In fact, he seemed to consider every struggling effort to be an essential joy of his infant life.

He was only a few brief months beyond his second birthday. But he was wonderfully grown and sturdy. Perhaps it was his warm, woolly suit that helped the impression. But it certainly had nothing to do with the full, rosy cheeks, and the bright intelligence of his smiling black eyes.

In response to a fierce jolt of the train, Luana dropped her sewing in her lap and spoke warning in a deep voice of almost mannish quality.

“Hold fast, boy-man,” she cried. “Bimeby, you get hurt. Then your moma get mad with Luana. Maybe she send her right away. Then boy-man see her no more. And you not happy again. Yes?”

The boy smiled. Then he turned to the window and pressed the palm of his disengaged hand against the window-pane. He spread out his little fingers, and presently pointed at the slowly passing hill-crests as though counting them. Then, all in a moment, he squatted on the floor of the car with a bump.

A gurgle of laughter broke from him.

“Up-ee!” he crowed. And he scrambled again to his feet, and came with a rush to his nurse’s knee.

“Hurt, boy-man?”

The nurse was smiling happily as she put the unnecessary question.

“Bad ole puffer!” came the laughing reply, as two chubby hands clapped themselves on the dark-skinned hand that was held out to caress.

Luana fondled one of the little hands. She drew a deep breath.

“Bimeby we mak home on the big lake,” she said. “No more holiday. No more big city. No more old bad puffer. Boy-man see big lake. He see all the dogs. Nap. Ketch. Susan. An’ the Indian papooses at the mission. And all the mans. Yes? And Luana play the forest game with boy-man. She run an’ hide. Yes? Oh, yes. Maybe to-morrow—after boy-man sleep.”

“Why us jump like anything?” the child asked, as the train crashed its way over some uneven points.

Luana laughed.

“Cos it’s—bad ole puffer, eh?”

“Ess.”

The child nodded his dark tuque-enveloped head in solemn agreement. Then he turned away and grabbed again at his stanchion. Finally he lurched to his window in comparative safety and gazed out of it.

Luana watched him, a hungry light in her smiling eyes. The half-breed in her was passionately stirring. A creature of almost volcanic impulse and hot emotion, there was something lawless in her mentality. It was her heritage from savage forbears.

The long journey was nearing its end. More than half the continent had passed under train wheels since the Reverend Arthur Steele and his little family had set out to return from the cities of the East to his mission on Lake Mataba. Vacation came to him once in three years, and this was the end of his first holiday since taking up his appointment.

Luana was glad it was over. Civilization had no appeal for her. She was of the outlands. Bred in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, she had no love for the crowded streets of the city. She felt that only in the hills, in the twilit forests, on the wind-swept waterways, was it possible to breathe. It was only where Indians dwelt could she feel that she was at home.

No, she did not want the white folks’ cities, with their dazzling life and their paved roads, and where white women eyed her askance. She wanted the great lake, and the mission that was full of those whose blood she shared. She wanted that, and the knowledge that little Ivan Steele looked to her for everything necessary to his small life.

Luana loved the white child with all her woman’s soul. Hers had been the first arms to caress, to nurse him. Helen Steele was too deeply immersed in the work of her husband’s mission to fulfill all the natural demands of motherhood. She was one of those whose sense of duty would never allow her to be wholly satisfied with the simple felicities of her humanity. The domestic claims of home and wifehood came under the ban of her distorted view of all that which she looked upon as selfishness. So her boy-child, from the earliest moment of his small life, was relegated to the only too willing care of his half-Indian nurse.

In a woman of Luana’s temperament the result was inevitable. She looked upon Ivan as something of her very own. She even believed that the boy looked to her as his mother. And she rejoiced in the thought. She was consumed with jealousy when Helen Steele found time to notice the infant; and a frenzy possessed her at the sight of the white woman’s caresses. It was at such moments that she hated the white woman with all the savage in her. But she bore these trials without outward sign or protest, and consoled herself that the boy’s love was wholly hers.

Away from the mission, and on vacation, Luana’s emotional trials had been profoundly increased. During the four months of respite from the routine at the mission, Helen Steele, in a measure, had discovered her child. The mother in her had found opportunity to assert itself. The result to the half-breed had been almost unendurable. And so it came that within a dozen hours of the end of their homeward journey a certain sense of content and easement was already settling down upon the nurse’s passionate soul.

To-morrow! Yes, to-morrow the mother and father would have forgotten Ivan in the engrossing claims of return to their spiritual work. They would have forgotten the merry life gazing up at them out of the infant’s happy eyes. They would have forgotten the wonderful caress of his soft, white arms. But she, Luana, would remember.

The Reverend Arthur Steele looked up from the book on the table in front of him. His dark eyes scanned the broken mountain scene through which the train was passing. There was still a white skin of snow on the hilltops. But it was a moist, dank, dripping world, in spite of the brilliant spring sunshine pouring down out of a cloudless sky.

He was a tall, ascetic creature, who lived for his missionary work at Lake Mataba. He was desperately in earnest, and impatient of everything that interfered with his spiritual labors. His long vacation had been forced upon him. It had not occurred to him as a holiday. His mission needed money. And he had used his vacation for the purposes of raising it.

“We’re about at the divide,” he said to his wife beside him.

Helen Steele did not even look up from her book.

“I’m glad,” she said without interest. “It won’t take long to run down the gradient to the river.”

“No. And home to-morrow morning. We’re only about eight hours late.” The missionary laughed. “I should call it something like a record at this time of year. We’re in luck.”

He turned and glanced down the queer, little old-fashioned restaurant car in which the evening meal had just been served. There were only about ten other passengers, most of whom were well known to him. They included, in a remote corner, an Indian huddled in his parti-colored blanket, and two commercial men who were making the journey in the vain hope of selling farming machinery in a territory given up to fur-trading.

The missionary’s comment was not without justification. There was no time in the year when the hardy human freight which found itself compelled to use the Sisselu Northern Railroad but did so in a spirit of complete resignation. The road was the offshoot of a great line which bridged the Canadian Dominion from ocean to ocean. Its three hundred miles of ill-laid track, from Fort Sura in the south, to the shores of Lake Mataba, was one of those grudging concessions to a prosperous fur-trading industry.

The result was inevitable. The whole organization suffered from managerial unwillingness. There was only one train in each direction in each week, and the rolling stock was the decaying cast-off of the greater road. In winter, without regard to schedule, the train groaned and clanked its way to its home depot, provided always a snowstorm had not chanced to bury it on the way. In spring the hazard of its journey was added to by the chances of “washouts,” and the devastating ice jams on the rivers which crossed its track. Summer, of course, was its best season. But even in summer forest fires became a source of perilous interference.

The missionary’s comment was more than warranted. And his claim to luck was well enough founded. So he had eaten the uninteresting supper provided, with an appetite that was inspired by ease of spirit.

Now he was waiting for his bill and the next stop. Then he would make his way back to the end of the train, behind a dozen or more freight cars. There he would join his tiny son and the nurse, Luana.

The man closed his book as the waiter staggered towards him. The uniformed trainman stood at the table swaying to the merciless jolting of the car. And he scrawled a bill, and made change to the note which the missionary handed him.

“We’re doing well, Jim,” Steele ventured hopefully, as the waiter accepted his proffered tip. “If we pass the Sisselu down below without interference, we ought to make the lake by noon to-morrow.”

Optimism, however, was not the trainman’s strong point. He had been too long on the road.

“You just can’t say,” he doubted, with a shake of his gray head. “You folks have got Sisselu Ford bad. ’Tain’t that way with us. The ford ain’t a circumstance to the ‘washouts’ we ken hit on the flats. A ‘washout’ ken easy hold us up twenty-four hours. It’s true it don’t worry. We ken sit around dry, and I got food aboard fer a week. I just got to have it. The Sisselu gradient’s a dead straight run to the bottom and no water can worry. There ain’t a bend till you hit the river bank, and the timbers of the trestle’ll stand up to any old river ice. No. It’s the ‘washouts’ on the flats this time o’ year that holds us up.”

“Any news of them?” There was anxiety in Steele’s tone, and the pretty eyes of his wife were raised waiting for the trainman’s reply.

The waiter grinned sardonically.

“We don’t need noos,” he observed lugubriously. “You see,” he added, as he prepared to move on to the next table, “they happen along when the notion takes the flood water. Then you just got to set around.”

Helen Steele laughed outright and closed her book as the waiter passed on.

“He would hate to afford us comfort,” she commented, and glanced out of the window.

At that instant three prolonged blasts on the locomotive siren came back to them.

“Wait for the answer,” the missionary said listening. “We’ll see how right is our dismal friend.”

They waited in silence. And presently, faint and far off, came an answering single hoot from the signal station down on the river.

“All clear. Jim’s right, and our fears are groundless,” sighed Helen. “I do hope the flats will be all right, too. It’s good to be getting home.”

“Good?” Again came the man’s ready laugh. “Think of it, dear. From Montreal to Fort Sura we ran to transcontinental schedule. It’s taken us thirty-six hours already on the run home, and we aren’t there yet by more than twelve hours. It’s enough to depress a saint.”

The grinding of brakes under them added to their confidence.

“The descent,” the missionary commented, preparing to return to his reading.

But Helen wanted to talk. She was no less earnest in her work than her husband. And the journey home had been a time of profound yearning.

“I’ve been thinking, Arthur,” she said seriously, her pretty dark brows drawn in concentration. “Four thousand dollars! It isn’t much with which to found and build our church. You know our Society asks a lot of us. In a way they’re right. We should give all there is in us. But—but—it’s a pity money has to come into our lives at all.” She sighed. “Still, so it is. Beyond the barest necessities I don’t want us to touch that money they’ve given us for the actual building. I want to stir up the right spirit in our Indians, and the white folks on the lake. Surely the lumber can be felled, and hauled, and the whole church can be carpentered voluntarily? Can’t we stir up a spiritual pride that will rise above mere—— What’s that?”

The woman broke off and a quick apprehension lit her questioning eyes. Arthur Steele turned instinctively to the window beside him. The hold of the brakes under the car had suddenly been taken off. There had been a queer jarring and clanking under them. Then the train seemed to leap forward at great speed down the steep gradient.

Steele was gazing at the wooded slope which lined the track. In a moment it seemed the dark green of the trees had started to race by and become a mere continuous verdant smudge.

There was a restless stirring throughout the car. Every eye contained a look of sharp inquiry. A few passengers had risen from their seats the better to gaze out of windows. Then, too, a sound of urgent voices had risen above the rattle of the speeding train.

A railroader flung open a door. He hurried down the aisle of the rocking car and passed out at the other end. The door slammed behind the man’s overall-clad figure.

“Something’s—wrong!”

Helen spoke in a low tone, and her eyes searched the face of her man.

“We’re running—free,” the missionary replied. “It’s a gradient of one in forty.”

“And there’s a bend at the river bank.”

“It’s nearly two miles to the river. And by—I wonder?”

“You don’t think the brakes have gone wrong, Arthur?”

Helen’s voice was low. Her anxiety had leaped to something like panic.

The man shook his head, but without conviction. He knew well enough the quality of the rolling stock on the Sisselu Northern.

“If they have——”

He gestured hopelessly.

“And we can’t get back there to Ivan and Luana.”

“No, dear. We can’t do anything. Oh! Here’s Jim,” Steele cried in a tone of relief, as the waiter reëntered the car. “Maybe——”

In those brief moments the speed of the rocking train had become terrific, and the trainman staggered down the car with the greatest difficulty. The uneven track, combined with inadequate springing, set the wheels jumping perilously.

The man was grinning as he came. But, to the missionary, his grin was unreal, and wholly extravagant. His raucous voice made itself heard above the deafening clatter of the train as he replied to an urgent inquiry from one of the commercial men.

“No,” he shouted. “Guess ther’ ain’t nothin’ amiss. They’re lettin’ her rip some. Makin’ up time. We’re late,” he warned, as though it were something unusual. “You see, this gradient’s dead straight till you get to the bottom. There ain’t no chances. Jest kep your seats, folks. They’ll brake her at the right moment. Ther’ ain’t no worry.”

The man paused at the missionary’s table, and clutched it to steady himself. He bent over it, and anxious eyes looked into those of Arthur Steele.

“They’ve broke away, Mister Steele,” he said, in a tone intended for the missionary’s ears alone. “She’s doing sixty. And she’ll be doing a hundred and twenty when we hit the river. Ther’ ain’t a thing to be done but keep the folks from jumpin’. That way they’ll be killed sure. Ther’s a chance they’ll hold her up in time by reversing the ‘loco.’ I’m going forrard to the handbrakes. Will you kep ’em quiet? It’s the only chance. The vacuum’s petered plumb. We’ve got the boys on the freight brakes. It’s our best hope.”

The conductor hurried away. The panic he feared in the passengers was certainly looking out of his own eyes. Steele’s hand suddenly sought that of his wife as the man passed on with his sickly grin.

“Keep calm,” he said. “I must lie to them.”

Helen gave no outward sign of any fear beyond the anxiety in the eyes which clung to her husband’s face. The missionary stood up and turned to the panic-stricken passengers.

It was evident to him at once how desperately charged was the human atmosphere of the car. Scarcely restrained panic was in every face. And it was tugging at his own heart as he thought of the little son at the far end of the train, and of the helpless woman beside him. But he resolutely smothered his fears and lied in a voice that rang out above the din of the speeding train. He lied far beyond anything the trainman had attempted. And he had his reward.

Every passenger had resumed his seat when the missionary sat down.

“The bend can’t be far off.”

Helen’s voice was barely audible in the din.

“We shall jump the track if——”

The woman suddenly gestured.

“Oh, I wish I could get to the boy.”

“You can’t. Sit still.” Steele’s voice was harsh. The mention of his son had driven him almost beyond endurance. Then he said more quietly, “They’ll get the locomotive——”

But that which he would have said remained unspoken. There was a terrible crash ahead. There was a fierce rending. The train lurched, and Helen was flung from her seat and sprawled across the car. The floor rose up. A wild shriek rang out above the din. And in a moment pandemonium reigned.

The forward end of the car rose sheer. Then it flung over sideways and every window shattered. Then came hideous descent. The car was falling, falling.

It was all over in seconds. The restaurant car had fulfilled its last service. It was lying deep buried in fathoms of the ice-cold bosom of the Sisselu River.

Inspector Landan of the Mounted Police was standing on the rear platform of the caboose of the waiting “breakdown” train. He was weary with many hours of hopeless, depressing labor. The pipe in his mouth had burned itself out, and he had not troubled to refill it. Truth to tell, as he gazed out on the flare-lit scene of wreckage which was piled about the track where it approached the river, he was without inclination even to smoke. He was yearning to get away. For twenty-four hours he and his detachment had prosecuted their indefatigable search of succor, and he knew that the work remaining to be done was the ordinary routine for the breakdown gang.

For all his weariness, however, his mind and feelings were very active. He was contemplating the report he would have to send in to his headquarters. He had studied the disaster in its every aspect and had bitterly realized its cause. Then, too, he had obtained much information from the man at the flag station on the river bank.

From all he could discover the railroad company was criminally responsible. It was no case of “washout” or natural disaster. It was, according to the flag-station operator, a sheer case of old rolling stock and defective brakes. The operator, in horrified accents, had told him all he needed to know in a few poignant words.

“Ther’ ain’t a guess in my mind, sir,” he had said. “She came thundering down that gradient at a hundred miles. An’ that after I’d signalled ‘brakes’ to her, and got her answer. She was a ‘runaway’ and quit the metals at the bend, as she was bound to do at that pace.”

Well, the railroad management would hear something. Two injured, unconscious bodies, and ten corpses! That was the tally of human salvage. For the rest? A full-laden train completely wrecked. And as the inspector’s weary gaze searched the moonlit scene, he wondered shudderingly at the despairing horror of those who had found a grave beneath the frigid waters of the river.

Several figures were moving up beside the track, towards the waiting train. The inspector saw them, and breathed his relief. They were his four men returning. And they came empty-handed.

Three of the men passed on up the train, but the corporal in charge of them swung himself up onto the platform of the caboose.

The man saluted.

“There’s nothing more we can do down there, sir,” he said. “There isn’t an inch we haven’t explored. We’ve searched the woods along the track. And, beyond the locomotive man and his fireman we’ve already got aboard here, no one seems to have had time or nerve to make a jump for it. The rest of ’em are down there in the cars in the river, I guess. And we shan’t get them till the company salves the cars. It’s pretty sickening, sir,” he added with a sight of feeling.

“Sickening? It’s damnable, Perrin,” the officer cried. “By God! There’s going to be a red-hot report on this!”

“I’m glad, sir. I think I can hand you some stuff for it. I’m a bit of an engineer myself, and I’ve gone over all the running gear of the cars at the rear of the train. It’s all ‘scrap’ stuff. Has the doc pulled round that poor woman with her little kid?”

The inspector nodded.

“Yes. She’s come to, and the kid doesn’t seem to have had worse than a bumping. You see, she seems to have held him hugged tightly to her bosom when the crash came. Her body kind of acted as a buffer. She got all that was coming and saved her kid. And she’s only a poor half-breed.”

Corporal Perrin gazed out over the moonlit scene where the busy railroaders were indefatigably laboring.

“It’s pretty fine, sir, when you think of it. There’s nothing to beat a mother when her kid’s threatened. Took it all herself, eh? I’m glad for that woman. Is she going to come back all right, sir? Did the doc say?”

“He thinks so. You see, the observation car only went over on its side. It wasn’t wrecked. The mother was badly crushed about the head. Yes. The doctor thinks she’ll be right in a week or so. We’ll pull out seeing there’s nothing more for us.”

“Shall I go forward and give the trainman the order, sir?”

“Yes. I’m sick to death. Tell him right away.”

“Very good, sir.”

The corporal saluted and dropped off the car.

A few moments later the clang of the locomotive bell rang out on the night air, and the couplings of the train jolted taut. Then came movement. And the train labored heavily up the steep ascent.

CHAPTER II
THE WOLF PACK

IT was a baby girl. And she was sprawling in a sort of wallow in the dust-dry ground at the man’s feet. She was on her back, and her tiny legs were vigorously kicking the air. Her small hands were aimlessly clawing the loose soil on either side of her, and the while her solemn eyes were gazing darkly up at the sunlit sky without blinking.

Her dirt was deplorable. Her garments were negligible rags. Her round chubby face was stuck up with the dirt which she had somehow contrived to moisten into the consistency of mud. It was in her mouth, her ears. It was caked in the soft down of her dark hair. Nor had her eyes escaped contamination. But she was crowing and gurgling with the sheer infantile joy of well-being, and the sight of her held fast the thoughtful stare of the man’s black eyes. He was unsmiling.

Pideau Estevan was a half-breed and tough. He was anything and everything which made him a prospective inmate of the penitentiary, or even worse. But then Pideau sprang from stock that never failed to breed his kind, and the hallmark of his vices was deeply stamped on his cold, dusky face, and in the snapping black eyes which peered alertly from beneath shaggy brows.

Humanly speaking he had nothing to recommend him but a nimble wit and monumental industry. There was nothing unintelligent about him, and none of the usual half-breed laziness. But he was thoroughly bad, and utterly callous. And, as he sat on his upturned box, gazing down on his motherless infant, his black-bearded face was coldly considering.

For once in his life the man was seriously troubled. He was also fiercely resentful. And, deep in his heart, he knew he was helpless.

Crisis had leaped at him almost without warning. He saw ahead a position that threatened to overwhelm him. And such was his nature that he gave way to vengeful anger and fierce impatience. Sitting there before his dugout home on the hillside, he surveyed, without any enthusiasm, the ridiculous antics of his offspring wallowing in the loamy dust.

The tragedy had come so swiftly that it was only now in the moment of its accomplishment that Pideau realized its full measure. Three weeks ago there had been no cloud to mar his doubtful horizon. Three weeks ago he had lived in what he considered a smiling world. Spring had been breaking and his activities, like those of the rest of the world about him, were breaking into renewed life. His woman was there to minister to his comfort. Down in the valley below him his herd of stolen cattle was fattening and breeding satisfactorily. Then his hidden store of crisp currency was growing to proportions which satisfied even his avaricious soul. It was then that the swing of the pendulum of Fate moved against him.

Mountain fever!

It was always the dread lying at the back of his busy mind. It came subtly. It killed quickly. And it had stolen upon the mother of his child, a young woman of his own heart, and mind, and breed, and had slain her in those three swiftly passing weeks.

Only that morning had he completed the labor of her burial down in the valley below. Less than an hour ago he had returned, having shovelled the last of the soil into the deep grave that was to keep the woman’s cold body safe from the hungry activities of the scavenging timber wolves. He had returned to his noon meal, and the little life his woman had left behind her.

He was not mourning his loss with any spiritual sense. It was not in him to regard his woman as anything but a chattel. It was the material consideration of his position that stirred him to an unreasoning resentment against the dead Annette whose going had brought it about.

Alone with his babe, what was he to do? What must he do?

The great heart of the Rocky Mountains afforded him a safe enough hiding from the ubiquitous red-coats, but it also involved him in prolonged journeys and long absences from his home, in the prosecution of his nefarious traffic as a cattle thief. How could he carry on with a miserable brat of a child to be kept alive in his absence? There was not a living soul within three days’ journey of him.

Pideau’s fiercest savagery was apparent. Without shrinking or hesitancy he considered the alternative that naturally leaped to his callous mind. The little Annette. Why should he permit himself the burden she imposed? She was only a year old. She was fat, and happy, and knew nothing. Why should he let her grow to knowledge, and learn the harshnesses that life must ultimately show her?

It would be so easy. And she would never know. He could hold her to him and caress her. She would gurgle, and crow, and pull his whisker. And his hand could very gently feel her soft neck. And then—and then his grip could tighten swiftly. She would be dead, like her foolish mother, without a single cry. It would really be merciful to her. And to himself——?

That, in his position, he pointed out, was surely the sense of things. It certainly was the sense of things. He thrust up a yellow hand and pushed back the cloth-visored cap he was wearing.

The baby squirmed in the dust and rolled over on her little stomach. She gurgled out fresh sounds of delight. He eyed the rolls of healthy fat. He saw the scraping, dimpled hands picking at the dirt and conveying it to her moist baby lips. And the latter sight gave him a feeling of amusement in spite of his mood, while the inarticulate sounds that fell upon his ears were not unpleasing.

With the little life destroyed, and no tie holding him, Pideau considered further. He would be freer than ever before. He would be free to make his long journeys after cattle. He would not always have to hurry back. Then, too, he could go farther afield for his trade. Oh, yes. It would give him much wider scope and freedom. And then——

He glanced about him at the valley which had become his home.

His gaze took in the far woods across the valley. It shifted restlessly to the jagged uprising of snow-clad peaks which cupped the valley in every direction. Down below him lay a parkland of new-born grass and budding trees lit by flashes of sunlight that found reflection in the shining surface of the waters of a swift-flowing mountain river.

He glanced away over the great lake to his right that was the source of the river, and which spread out far as the eye could see till its confines became lost in the haze of the southern distance. He turned in the opposite direction, where the river and valley lost themselves in a maze of forest-robed hills, beyond which, many leagues on, lay the open sea of prairie land that was his great hunting ground. And then his quick eyes came back to the child who was the pivot of his thought.

No. The freedom he had it in his power to achieve for himself was not the freedom he sought. He would be alone, and he did not want to be alone. Solitude was something he abhorred. With his woman alive he had had the sort of partner with whom he could deal satisfactorily. He had been glad of her. She had been very useful. Somehow he felt the babe she had left behind her would also be some sort of companion. She would be a grievous burden. But——

The sea of woods claimed him again. They were limitless. They were forbidding. The mountains ... they were desperately lonesome. The winter, which had only just given way before the warmth of the new season, was one long nightmare of struggle for comfort, to keep the cold from his marrow, even to save life itself.

Yes. That crazy babe made for companionship. Besides, he liked the sound of her ridiculous crowing.

Pideau had no real understanding of the thing that was happening. Absorbed in a cold review of his own desires, he was without understanding of the subtle power with which Nature endows the weakness, the appealing helplessness of childhood. He had no realization that that dirty, dusky little life, from the very moment of its beginning, had been burrowing its way into the only really human spot which his savage soul possessed.

The half-breed kicked a stone with impotent impatience. He delved into a pocket in his rough tweed coat for his pipe. But he left it there. Then of a sudden he leaned down and lifted little Annette to his lap.

He would not destroy that life. He would keep his motherless babe. And queerly he found satisfaction that he would no longer have to share her with another—even her mother. She would be his—just his. And he would raise her somehow. But, in God’s name, how?

The tiny fingers seized his thick beard and tugged at it ruthlessly. The infant chuckled and made happy, inarticulate sounds. And Pideau laughed. He laughed outright.

The noon meal was over. The camp fire had been allowed to die down to smouldering ashes. The litter of Pideau’s activities lay scattered about. A plate had been flung aside unwashed. So, too, with a tin pannikin, and the cooking pot with its contents, sufficient to provide another meal or two. Then, near by, was an iron boiler half filled with soapy water, and beside it a little pile of the rags which had been removed from Annette’s body.

Pideau had spent a busy noon. Under his new-born resolve he had discovered new duties, which he had tackled in his naturally energetic way. He had eaten. And, having ministered to the comfort of his own stomach, he had done his best for the babe. New milk; rich, fat, creamy milk from his herd of stolen beasts. His understanding considered that milk was indicated. So forthwith he poured Annette’s rapidly expanding body as full of the creamy liquid as was conveniently possible.

Then came a burst of real inspiration. He heated water, and sought out the soap he never used on himself. Then he washed the infant all over from the downy crown of her head to the soles of her pretty feet. After that he raided the child’s scant wardrobe, and arrayed her small body in those clean garments which the dead mother had so jealously hoarded.

It had not been easy. No. But somehow the work had afforded Pideau a measure of amusement, and Annette seemed to regard it as an entirely new game. So it was, with the babe smelling reminiscently of powerful soap, that the man returned to his doorway, and, with a deep sense of satisfaction, prepared to attack once more the problems confronting him.

Annette fell asleep on his lap, and Pideau filled and lit his pipe.

The half-breed was a creature who believed in a carefully planned and well considered future. There was nothing that was haphazard about him. His desire for wealth knew no limits. And every dollar added to his store of currency was a further step on the road he designed to travel. It was money, money, money, all the time with him. He believed that money could satisfy every desire of his life. So every beast he could lay hands on, every beast he could sell safely across the southern border, was a step in the right direction. There was a bunch of ten Polled Angus cows he deeply desired to acquire. It would take some ten days to get them. How could——?

Pideau’s thought came to an abrupt termination. It broke off with a sharp sound like a sudden intake of breath whistling through the dense whisker obscuring his mouth. His eyes widened to their fullest extent. Then they narrowed. He leaned forward in his seat peering.

He remained unmoving, and the child slept on. He was peering down at a wide woodland bluff where it gave on to the open grass of the river bank. He had discovered movement at the edge of the bluff. And it was the movement of something or someone lurking, and, to his mind, spying. That at least was his inevitable conclusion.

For some moments there was no fresh development. Pideau’s searching eyes relaxed. He even thought of one of his own stray cows. Then, without warning, or thought for the slumbering Annette, he leaped to his feet, and the screaming infant lay kicking in the dust where she had fallen. A human figure had broken from the sheltering bluff. It was making its way uphill towards the dugout. Pideau had vanished into his hut.

When he reappeared it was with a Winchester sporting rifle, with telescope sights and a hair trigger. And he held it against his shoulder levelled at the intruder upon his hiding. His intent was plain. It was there in the fierce black eye that searched the sights, and in the lean, brown forefinger within a fraction of releasing the trigger. His purpose was death. And he had no intention of wasting a shot.

Moments passed, however, and the shot was withheld. Then of a sudden Pideau raised his head and lowered his weapon. The intruder was a woman. She was heavily burdened. And she was breasting the ascent to the dugout at a gait that told of the last stages of exhaustion.

Pideau Estevan was unimaginative. Romance, the miraculous, were things without a shadow of appeal for him. Yet the thing that had happened had stirred him to a queer, incredulous amazement.

While he set his cooking pot back on his fire, and laid fresh fuel under it, he flung backward glances at the figure of his sister, Luana, sitting wearily huddled in his doorway. Then from her he gazed at the two children squatting on the ground confronting each other with a calm stare of voiceless, infantile interest.

Pideau felt the whole thing was as crazily remarkable as it well could be. Only that morning had he buried his wife. Only a brief half-hour ago had he been planning the difficulties resulting from his loss. And now—now Luana had appeared from nowhere. And every difficulty seemed to have melted into thin air.

It was amazing.

Exhausted as she was, Luana had told him in brief outline the story of the disaster that had befallen on the Sisselu Northern Railroad.

She had told of the death of the missionary and his wife, for whom she had been working. She had told him how she and the boy-child she had brought with her were the only survivors of the disaster. And she had told him of the thing she had determined, and now, at last, had finally accomplished.

Pideau hurried again to the tired woman when the leaping flame assured him that her food would soon be ready for her.

“An’ so you steal him?” he said, gazing down at the weary figure of the girl as she leaned against the door-casing.

Pideau was thinking hard. And his manner had in it a sort of playful cunning.

Luana stirred into full mental activity. Her dark eyes lit with sudden passion. Her whole body seemed to thrill with emotion.

“Oh, it is the miracle, Pideau,” she cried. “Mine the eyes he look into first. Mine the arms that first hold him. His mother no. His father—tcha! They nothing. He knows me. He loves me. Always I make him love me. They both are dead. So I steal him. Yes. Why not?”

“This missionary. His folks? The police?”

Pideau was deeply considering. Luana laughed voicelessly in spite of her weariness.

“There are folks way east,” she said. “They hear of the death of them, an’ they think my boy-man killed, too. The police know nothing. How should they know? They find me. They say, ‘this woman an’ her child.’ When I wake they ask me. I tell ’em quick. I am a breed woman who goes on a visit to folk at Lake Mataba. Oh, yes. My boy. He’s dark like the half-breed mother. I say my man way south, at Calford. I ask ’em quick send me to Calford. They say ‘yes.’”

Luana shrugged her drooping shoulders contemptuously, and her gaze turned to the magnet that always held her. The children were stirring. Annette was reaching out towards the little bare feet of the boy. It was a gesture of infantile friendliness.

“An’ they bring you to Calford? They ask no more?”

Pideau wanted to be very sure. He must know it all before taking his final decision.

“I go before the inspector. He ask much,” Luana went on easily. “But I all ready. I think my story good. I tell him I go to High Creek, where is my man. I think they ask on the telephone. So I say quick he works on a farm ’way out on the foothills. The inspector, the fat inspector, says he send me in police wagon. I say, ‘Yes—you are so good to poor woman. When?’ He say, ‘to-morrow.’ I say, ‘yes.’ I go. I think hard. I buy food in the stores. I set it in a sack across my shoulders. Then I make the sling for my back, so boy-man ride easy. An’ I go quick. I walk. I walk far. One hundred—two hundred mile. I don’t know. Twice I nearly die in the muskeg in the hills. I’m scared of the timber wolves. I light plenty fires. I follow quick on the trail I know. And I say, ‘Pideau in the hills.’ I come to him. So I keep my boy-man.”

Luana drew a deep breath, and closed her tired eyes. Pideau watched her. Suddenly he looked away down into the valley below.

“I bury Annette this morning,” he said.

Luana’s eyes were wide open, and she sat up.

“Annette—dead?” Then she gazed at the child Annette. “I think she maybe at work somewhere. Dead?”

Pideau shook his head without a sign of emotion.

“The mountain fever kill her,” was all he said. “She go, an’ leave me with little—Annette.”

Both were gazing at the two children. And the silence between them prolonged.

At last the woman’s gaze was withdrawn, and she sought the man’s dark face with a question.

“It good,” she said at last. “Then I raise your Annette with my boy-man. Yes?”

Pideau eyed the two infants who had now approached each other more nearly. They were mixed up in the aimless way of babyhood. There were sounds coming from them. Gurgles from Annette. And leaping words from the boy. Pideau’s face had no smile, but he suddenly laughed with his voice.

“Yes,” he said. “You stop here while I mak good trade. You cook. An’ I teach you the work of the cattle. I go now. I get ten cows. It’s a farm ’way out on the prairie. Then I come back with them. You raise Annette with your boy-man. I am glad. The wolf pack grows!”

He moved off to the fire where Luana’s food was cooking. And as he went he laughed at his own humor.

CHAPTER III
ELEVEN YEARS LATER

ANNETTE was standing on the river bank. She was intensely preoccupied. Her willow rod swung up. It whistled through the hot summer air. Then her homemade fly struck the calm surface of the shady pool with a lightness, a dexterity, that displayed her child’s skill.

Her dark eyes were alight. There was eagerness in the pose of her tall, angular body. Her pretty lips were parted, and her breath came quickly. She was very happy.

The boy was watching from beneath the visor of the old cloth cap he had inherited from Pideau. He, too, had all the enthusiasm of a keen fisherman. But he was not fishing. He was squatting on the sun-dried grass of the river bank cleaning his rifle, the breech of which was dismantled, with its parts spread out on a grease rag on the ground beside him.

Two lean husky dogs were at the water’s edge near by. They were great creatures of the trail. But they were also hunting dogs, trained to an efficiency which only the limitless patience of the boy could have achieved. They were searching the distance with eager eyes. Their long muzzles were pointing at a far distant forest line beyond the river. And their bodies were a-quiver with that canine excitement which finds expression so readily.

Farther back from the river, where the haylike grass was abundant, a pinto pony was tethered, grazing. He was without saddle or bridle. He wore only an old rope head collar and the tether by which he was secured.

The valley was bathed in blazing sunshine which told of the summer’s height. Forest, grass, and shrub were ripe with the maturity of the season. The silence and solitude of the mountain world were profound.

The girl cast, and recast again. Then of a sudden her whole body stiffened. And a sharp little ejaculation broke from her. The boy watched the play. And as he waited, the whimper of his dogs broke into a howl that sounded full of mourning in the silence of the valley.

Annette struck sharply. In a moment there was a flash of wriggling silver in the sunshine. Then a large fish lay flapping on the grass, and the girl was on her knees with her strong, brown fingers busy salving her precious fly.

“Say, you!” she cried, flinging the words back over her angular shoulder. “Send your crazy dogs to home. They’re spoilin’ things. I hate ’em.”

The boy smiled. He made no attempt to obey. He turned to gaze at the creatures that had angered Annette.

They were standing in an attitude of savage threat. Their manes were bristling. The howl had given way to ferocious deep-throated snarls at a direction where the river lost itself in the dark forests to the northeast.

Annette stood up from her task of readjusting her fly. She had flung her capture amongst the round dozen of already stiffening fish that were lying on the grass. Her angry eyes watched the offending dogs.

She was tall for her twelve years; tall and lathlike. Her limbs were thin, and brown, and shapeless. Clad in a brief skirt that barely covered her bony knees, and in a dark worsted jersey, that seemed to flatten her body the more surely, there was little enough of the beauty of figure that might develop later.

It was different, however, with her dusky face, and the mass of raven-black hair that fell below her shoulders. Her hair was wonderful in its untrained profusion. And her face was already showing signs of a beauty that was almost classical. Her eyes were profoundly expressive of emotions that rarely knew discipline. Her whole expression was full of infinite possibilities. Certainly the half-breed was dominant in her, with all its potentialities for mischief.

The eleven years that had passed since an exhausted Luana had arrived at the door of Pideau Estevan’s dugout had brought little outward change in the half-breed’s mountain hiding, except for the development of Annette, and the boy the woman had brought with her.

The dugout showed no signs of the passage of years, or of the devastating mountain storms. For the rest the valley still served its purpose. The hills, the forests, the rivers, they were all as unchanging as the glacial fields and eternal snows that crowned the lofty summits where earth and sky met.

The unseen changes, however, were in the progress of Pideau’s fortunes. His illicit trade had gone on without interruption. He had bled the harassed settlers on the far eastern plains without mercy or scruple. And it was the smallness of his thefts which had assured his long success.

He never stole cattle in bulk. His thefts looked mean and small. But by a process of raiding in twos and threes, and never more than six head of cattle at a time, he had built up a herd which yielded him ample profit across the United States border to the south of him.

Pideau’s avaricious soul was comparatively satisfied. His fortune was growing and had already opened out pleasing visions of the future. But his astute mind was never resting, and he realized that his immunity from consequences could not continue indefinitely.

From across the southern border something more than rumor had reached him. The Americans down south were talking Prohibition. They were not only talking of it, they were moving on towards it in that thorough fashion in which they did most things. Well, Prohibition had served him more than well at different times in the Western Territories of Canada. It would be a poor bet if he could not turn this new trend of American politics to good account for himself. So, as he saw the end of his present traffic approaching, he was well enough satisfied.

His sister Luana had served her purpose. She had raised Annette for him with the boy he had long since dubbed “the Wolf.” She had done her best. She had taught them both to read, and write, and to figure simple sums, to the limit of her own stock of education. Then she had taught them to work, which was what Pideau most desired. The only thing that had offended him had been her partiality for the Wolf. But even that, he had been able to counter-balance in his own cruel way.

But the boy was approaching manhood now. He had outgrown Luana’s care, while Annette was still of an age to come under her controlling hand, which was often enough unsparing.

These things, however, were of no real concern to the boy and girl. They were inseparable playmates and had little enough thought for Pideau’s affairs. Besides Pideau was away on his trade. And Luana was sick—very sick with mountain fever.

Annette turned at last from the dogs to the boy.

“I said you’re to send ’em to home—you Wolf!” she cried, with that imperiousness which her sex and age seemed to justify. Then she became more vehement and her voice shrilled. “They’re curs, anyway. They ain’t dogs. Only curs.” Then as the boy’s eyes smiled with deeper derision she became still more furious. She stamped her bare brown foot on the grass. “So’re you!” she screamed at him. “Send ’em right back, or—or I’ll tell Pideau when he gets back to home, an’—an’ he’ll rawhide you for not letting me fish right.”

The Wolf glanced unconcernedly at the whimpering dogs.

“You got plenty fish. Wot’s worryin’ you?”

He snapped the breech of his rifle into place, and gathered up his tools and crammed them into the pockets of his breeches and stood up.

He was tall. The Wolf had developed far beyond his fourteen years. He was already taller than Pideau. But that which was far less usual was the fact that his physical strength had more than kept pace with his growth. He was lean, rawboned, and possessed of the activity of a wildcat. He was keen of mind and nimble-witted, and he possessed that which was denied to all his half-breed companions. His humor was the happiest thing imaginable.

For all that, however, he was as full of the spirit of the wilderness as the mountain world could breed him.

The Wolf’s indifference maddened Annette. But suddenly she smiled in a manner that should have warned him. Her whole attitude changed with her sly smile, and her tone was full of guile.

“You know why they howl—those curs?” she asked quietly.

“Wolves.”

Annette shook her head.

“No. Luana. She’s dyin’. Anyone knows curs howl when folks are dyin’. Pideau says so.”

The reality of the Wolf’s smile fell from him. But Nature had designed something like a perpetual smile in the fashioning of his eyes. He was staring at his playmate with trouble grievously shadowing his happy face.

“I tell you it’s wolves,” he cried, with sudden vehemence. “They’re yonder. They’re in the woods. I know. Luana ain’t dyin’. She’s—she’s getting better, sure. She said so. You’re talkin’ foolish. Guess maybe you want her to die.”

Annette wanted to hurt, and knew she had succeeded. She loved to hurt the Wolf at any time. It was her way to plague the boy. She was as ready to torment as to fight him with hands and teeth.

Usually the Wolf was satisfied and only laughed at her. Annette was Annette, the whole joy of his budding manhood. He worshipped the little whirlwind fury. But now, under the girl’s lash, he was only a boy, and one who loved the woman who had raised him with a boundless affection.

“Maybe I do,” Annette admitted. “I hate her. She beats me when Pideau’s not around. When he’s away she makes me work while she sits around with you, an’ acts foolish. It’s all you—you! I’ll be glad when she’s dead. She’s got mountain fever. Pideau said so. Same as my mother did. An’ she’s goin’ to die, too. What’ll you do when she’s buried so the wolves can’t eat her fool body? Guess Pideau’ll fix you.”

But the Wolf’s bad moment had passed. He understood. It was just Annette. So he grinned.

“I’m not scared any,” he said, making a sound with his lips that brought the dogs to his caressing hand. “I’m as big as Pideau, an’ he can’t rawhide me. He wouldn’t anyway. Maybe he daren’t. I can shoot as quick as Pideau. He can’t worry me a thing—now.”

Annette stared. To her childish mind the boy’s spoken defiance of her father was something almost terrible. She knew Pideau’s temper. She knew something of his cruelty. She knew he had no love for her white playmate, and had often seen him lay the rawhide on his bare shoulders.

She glanced back up at the dugout as though she feared Pideau might be there to hear the boy’s defiance. Then she pointed at the youth with a thin, brown finger.

“You’re crazy,” she said, in a low tone. “Pideau could just—kill you.”

The Wolf only shook his head and smiled.

“Maybe it’s you that’s crazy. Who hunts pelts for Pideau? Who gets meat fer him to eat? Who rebrands his stolen cows, an’ herds ’em? Pideau’s no fool, kid. He hates me. But he needs me. An’ he knows I can shoot quick an’ straight. Soon I’ll be a man. Then you’ll see.”

The dogs had gone back to the river bank, and Annette was watching them again. She felt that the Wolf had got the best of the talk, and her wicked mind was searching for fresh mischief.

“He said Luana’d die,” she declared, returning to the thing she knew was a sure hurt.

But the Wolf refused to be drawn again. He shrugged.

“I don’t care what Pideau says. He’s a liar, anyway. And a thief, too! He’s thinkin’ of quittin’.”

Annette forgot the dogs. She forgot her fishing. She dropped the line she was holding, and, with it, the fly she treasured. She eyed the boy for a thoughtful moment. Then:

“Who’s the liar now?” she cried, but with a quick look of doubt flashing in her big eyes.

“Only Pideau,” the Wolf grinned.

Annette turned away to the distance. She was disturbed. Her child’s mind knew only the mountains. They were her whole world. She was part of them. And the thought of quitting her beloved playground was devastating.

“Pideau wouldn’t quit,” she argued. “He’s safe here. He’s doing swell. He said so. Why’d he quit, anyway?”

“Cos he’s scairt. He reckons the p’lice’ll get him soon. They’re hot on his trail. He figgers they’ll get his tracks in a while, an’ then——”

The Wolf broke off with a look of profound meaning, and the girl was impressed. But her fear passed as she considered the source of her information. Her scorn leaped again.

“Guess you like to think Pideau’ll get trailed by the p’lice,” she sneered. “Maybe you’d set them wise. It was a bad day Luana brought you. You’d be dead, starved, if it wasn’t for Pideau. Yet you hate him. You’re a skunk. A cur like—like them,” she flung at him, nodding at his howling dogs. “You ken shoot quicker than Pideau! Psha! I tell you Pideau’ll beat the life out of you when he comes, an’ I tell him the things you said.”

“He won’t.”

The Wolf shook his head.

“You can tell him all you want,” he went on. “I don’t care. Pideau’s quittin’. He’ll make you quit with him. If I fancy I’ll stop around. I ken make as good as Pideau right here. Maybe you’ll have to go live in some dirty town, where you can’t fish, an’ you ain’t got a pony to ride. Maybe——”

“I won’t go!”

The girl’s voice had something in it that was not all anger. There were tears of real grief behind her hot denial.

“You’ll have to—’less——”

“’Less what?”

The Wolf had become seriously thoughtful.

“Pideau reckons the furs I took last winter gave him more’n five hundred dollars,” he said meaningly. “That’s a deal of money. It ’ud have been more—a lot more—only I cached haf my catch. I got ’em ’way off in the forest. I ken make big money. An’ I don’t need to steal.”

“You hid ’em from Pideau? That’s talk. Fool talk,” Annette cried.

“’Tain’t. I’m a swell hunter. I ken get foxes all the time. That’s why I don’t worry with Pideau. You want to stop around when Pideau quits?”

Annette’s eyes widened. And the Wolf saw the thing he desired as she mutely nodded her answer.

The boy straightened himself up. His fine eyes were shining.

“You ken if you feel that way. An’ I’d be glad to have you around. I’ll be a man soon. An’ you’ll be a grown woman. When Pideau quits we can make a big getaway into the forests so he can’t locate us. We can marry then. An’ I’ll hunt pelts, an’ make big money, an’ you can stop around an’ fish trout. It ’ud be swell. An’ we’d be quit of Pideau, who’s a thief.”

The boy was serious. Deadly serious. And Annette eyed him curiously. Then of a sudden she began to laugh. The boy’s cheeks flamed with sudden anger.

“Oh, you great, big, swell hunter!” Annette cried maddeningly. “Oh, you brave fool man! You! You! Say, Wolf, you beat it an’ hunt gophers, an’ leave me to my fishing. You take your curs with you, and the gun you can shoot so good with. Marry you? Why, I hate you, you fool kid.”

She turned and picked up her rod, and the Wolf heard it whistle through the air. Then, out of his hot anger, he did the thing she had ordered. He shouldered his rifle and flung his answer back at her as he went.

“Hate all you reckon to, Annette,” he cried, as he made towards the tethered pony, with his dogs leaping about his moccasined heels. “It won’t help you. You’ll marry me, sure. I fixed that. See?”

He grinned back at her, his anger swept away by that humor that was never long at fault. Then he added:

“Guess I’ll get after them wolves so you’ll know it ain’t Luana dyin’.”

Annette forgot her fly, and the trout rising at it. She craned round, her face flaming.

“Look at him. Great big hunter!” she jeered after him, as he vaulted to the bare back of his pinto and set off at a run.

Left alone, however, Annette found no further interest in her fishing. Her sport only appealed as long as it was shared with the Wolf. It was the same with everything in her life. She would not have admitted it even to herself. On the contrary, she told herself fiercely that she hated her playmate worse, much worse than she hated the dying Luana. She never wanted to see him again. She hoped his pinto would fall in a gopher hole and kill the Wolf. She wished him every harm her vicious mind could think of. And she swore to herself that she would tell Pideau everything he had said.

For all that, however, it was with a quick sigh she quit her fishing, and reeled in her line, and detached her precious fly and stuck it in the worsted of her clothing. Then, after bending over her fish, and gathering them up, and stringing them together, it was with a desperate inclination to tears that she faced the hill for her dugout home and her dying foster mother.

She told herself again and again of the hate with which the Wolf inspired her. But long before the door of the dingy dugout was reached she was thrilling with the vision of the mountain life in the woods, alone with the boy, as the Wolf had promised it to her.

CHAPTER IV
THE “KILL”

WITH the picket line half-hitched in its mouth the pinto dashed off at the distance-devouring gait of the pacer.

The Wolf had boasted his prowess to a derisive Annette, and the girl’s jeer was still pursuing him. But his boast was no idle one. And the girl who had derided knew well enough that was so. The Wolf, like his namesake, was a hunter, and brimful of the elemental life that was his.

He rode like an Indian on his splash-coated pinto. The Indian was there in his makeshift equipment. It was in the loosely dangling, moccasined feet; in the half-hitched, single rawhide line; in the close seat on a razor-like back. Then it was in his old buckskin suit, inherited from Pideau’s decaying wardrobe. It was in his acute, sunburned features, and in the all-seeing keenness of his fine, dark eyes.

Vanity helped to foster the likeness. The boy was proud of it. Nevertheless it was by no means artificial. It went deep. There were the long years of association with half-breeds to account for it. There was the wild life of the mountains, with their dour solitudes and vicious storms, and their everlasting call to the primitive. Then there were those pastimes, savage pastimes, which in early years, make so deep an impression. Without doubt the boy’s white-man heritage was deeply submerged.

The dogs had set off at their long-gaited, wolfish lope. They lived only for the chase, and the rare caresses of their youthful master. They were obeying now. For their movements were inspired by the inarticulate command which had fallen from the Wolf’s lips as he vaulted to the back of his pony.

The boy went without even a glance in the direction of his playmate. His whole interest had become absorbed in the two fierce creatures who had done their best to wreck the girl’s fishing, and create discord between their human companions. His mood was the enthusiasm of the hunter. For the chase of the timber wolf never failed in its vivid appeal.

But that which he had foreseen failed to mature. He had looked for a swift heading for the ford, a few hundred yards farther down the river. He had expected a crossing to the distant woods beyond, on the eastern slopes of the valley. That had clearly been the direction of the dogs’ concern.

Nothing of the sort happened. Rene, the bitch, had, as always, taken the lead. The less responsible Pete had boisterously attempted to head her. But the lady would have none of him. She slashed at him with vicious teeth, and flung him savagely back to her shoulder. She passed the river ford as though she had no knowledge of its existence, and headed down the valley in the determined manner of one whose mind is clearly made up, and refuses to be deflected from her purpose.

The boy speculated. Why? His mind was acutely questioning. Why this sudden and unaccountable abandonment of the direction which had stirred the dogs to such profound disquiet? Had Annette been wiser than he? Had the dogs been concerned for something which had nothing to do with wolves? He was inclined to doubt his own first judgment.

The chase carried him on down the valley along the course of the meandering river. And it was a run that appealed to all that was primitive in him.

The day was brilliant, and the world about him was vividly gracious. The still, hot air was full of that tang which only ten thousand feet of elevation could give it. And the limitless spreads of forest on the valley slopes, and the dense woodland bluffs, which dotted the park-like bosom of the vast hollow, were a ripe monotony of green.

It was a panorama of wild beauty. And from the snowy glaciers on the mountain tops, which shone in the summer sun, to the verdant delights of the valley’s heart it was a world the Wolf claimed for his own.

They raced over the open. They searched their way down the leafless aisles of shadowed pine woods. Sometimes they were hugging the river bank. And again they were often a mile and more away on the higher ground, avoiding swamps of perilous muskeg. There were times when the hunting dogs were quite lost to view, and only an occasional whimper afforded a clue to their whereabouts. There were others when the pinto was close on their heels sharing the enthusiasm of the chase despite the sweat streaming into its lean flanks.

On, on they went towards the goal which the wise old Rene had so determinedly selected for the run.

In the Wolf’s mind there was no longer any doubt. The husky was heading for the decoy shelter which the cunning mind of Pideau had designed, and his hands had set up years before.

It lay beyond the muskeg defences of the valley, and was at once a resting place for the spoils of Pideau’s cattle raids, and a carefully designed bluff to fool any chance pursuer to whom ill luck might have revealed his trail.

Why had the dog chosen such a destination, and run for it till she was ready to drop from sheer exhaustion?

Stiff and sore from the lean back of his pony, the Wolf had dismounted. He had tethered the weary beast, and now stood gazing down upon the dogs crouching at his feet.

It was the bitch, Rene, that held his attention. She had sprawled herself on the rotting underlay of the forest, and her slavering jaws were resting on outstretched forepaws. Her fierce eyes were searching the cover in the direction of the clearing which lay ahead.

The boy’s dark eyes wore an indulgent smile. To his mind there was something almost humorous in the dog’s attitude. Her whole pose seemed to be saying:

“Well, here I am, and I go not a step farther. I brought you here, and now it’s up to you.”

For some moments he stood considering. Then of a sudden he stooped.

Rene remained unresponsive. But Pete, with the male dog’s greater demonstrativeness, drew himself nearer to the hand whose caress he sought. The Wolf, however, gave him no heed. His hand fell gently on the narrow head of the bitch, and he talked to her in a fashion she seemed to understand.

Once she raised her head and licked the caressing hand. And her narrow eyes told plainly she was doing her best to interpret his every spoken word.

At last the boy stood up again and turned away. The dogs would obey him. They would remain just where they were until they received his fresh commands.

The Wolf was carrying his rifle ready for immediate use. What he expected to discover as he moved towards the edge of the clearing he did not know. Speculation, wonder; these things had passed from him. And in their place had come a feeling of profound disquiet.

It was just a little queer, that sense of apprehension. It was quite foreign to him. Young as he was, the Wolf’s nerves were tuned to the worst the mountain wilderness could show him. Never in his life had he known real fear. Not even in his earliest days, when Pideau’s savage hand had fallen heavily upon him.

He moved on, a shadow amongst the leafless trunks, and, like a ghost, he glided over the intervening quarter of a mile which brought him to the tangle of undergrowth in the midst of which lay the clearing.

He paused and considered. Ordinarily he would have thrust his way through it without any hesitation. It would have been the simplest, most direct method of approach to his goal. But the thought of Rene still clung, and its influence refused to be dispelled.

He considered deeply and searched with all his eyes. Then he took his decision. There were two openings into the clearing. The one which Pideau had cut to the eastward, and the other, a natural, obscure pathway, on the westward side, not easy of discovery by the uninformed. He decided upon the latter.

It was at the moment of turning to move on that he became motionless. A terrific hubbub crashed through the silence. Grasping his rifle in both hands ready, he stood with eyes fearfully wide. Then he smiled a boyish grin at his own absurdity. It was only cattle. The sudden lowing of driven beasts. It was not a solitary bellow either. But a booming chorus. And it came from the heart of the bush in front of him.

Then his smile passed. Oh, he understood. Pideau had returned with a full bag from his raid. He was there in his hiding with his spoils. He was resting the beasts, and probably feeding them hay in the corrals from the stack that was kept stored for that purpose. Again he considered. And considering, he remembered his dog.

Then he thought of Pideau himself. He knew Pideau would resent intrusion; his intrusion more than anyone’s. His life in the doubtful shelter of Pideau’s home had taught him so much of the man. The half-breed’s veneer of tolerance was very thin. The man was desperately suspicious, too. He was suspicious of his own sister, Luana, and certainly contemptuously suspicious of himself. The only person who enjoyed his trust was Annette.

The Wolf was under no illusion. He knew well enough his sudden confronting of Pideau in his hiding would most certainly bring down an outburst of the man’s savagery upon his head.

So he set out for the pathway upon which he had decided.

From behind a leafy screen the Wolf surveyed the scene of the clearing. He was spying now, and he knew it. For the first time in his life he was using his hunter’s skill to discover Pideau’s secrets.

The clearing was small. It was just that area which had been sufficient to supply the necessary building materials for the small hut and the corrals which occupied it. The hut with its gaping doorway occupied the northern side. And facing it, in the centre stood three small corrals. Beyond these, at the southern extremity, stood the remains of a half-consumed stack of hay.

For the rest there was the smoulder of a dying camp fire before the doorway of the hut. And littered about it were the cooking chattels which had served their purpose. A saddled pony, streaked with sweat, and with its flanks badly tuckered, was hungrily feeding hay near by.

But the Wolf, in his hiding, had eyes for none of these details. It was the corrals, and the cattle they contained, and the hurried movements of the man who was feeding them, that held his interest.

The number of cattle staggered the boy. From where he stood it was impossible to estimate their numbers accurately as they surged and crowded for the hay that was being flung to them. Roughly, he thought there must be at least fifty. Pideau had stolen and driven fifty head of steers and milch cows from the plains single-handed! The fact was almost unbelievable. Never in his life had the Wolf known Pideau to attempt so large a haul.

From the cattle the Wolf turned to the half-breed himself. And if the former had inspired amazement, the latter startled him even more.

Pideau’s every movement told of haste and something else. He almost ran on his journeys between the hay and the corrals. Every now and then his dusky, bearded face was turned, and the Wolf could see its expression. Anxiety was written in every line of it.

But there was something about his doings of far deeper significance to the boy’s quick mind. Pideau’s work took him past the eastern entrance to the clearing on every journey. And every time he went to the stack empty-handed, he paused, searching the distance with eyes and ears.

Pursuit! The Wolf read the answer. Pideau was looking for pursuit, and pursuit meant either the red-coated police, or those who were far less to be feared, the settlers whose cattle Pideau had stolen. The half-breed was clearly in the grip of real fear.

The Wolf had no love for Pideau. But loyalty to him was almost as strong a bond. He realized instantly the thing he must do. If Pideau needed assistance it was for him to afford it.

In those moments an extravagant sense of his own manhood came to the boy. His soul was uplifted with a great joy, a superlative pride. He felt that his days of boyhood were over. He would be fighting beside Pideau on an equal footing.

The police? The Wolf knew what it meant to war with the police. Outlawry! Penitentiary! Even, possibly, hanging, if his weapon chanced to slay. Well, so be it. He grinned in complete disregard of all consequence.

Pideau was at the head of the eastern cutting. He had been standing there for many moments. He was listening. He was searching, too, with every faculty alert. Of a sudden he moved. The Wolf saw him make for his horse, snatch his rifle, which was slung on the horn of his saddle, and hastily mount.

The next moment horse and rider crashed their way through the undergrowth behind the hay store.

The Wolf made no movement. He, too, was watching and listening with every faculty alert. The sounds of Pideau’s hasty retreat died out abruptly. The boy was under no misapprehension. Pideau had not fled. He was not the man to abandon fifty head of cattle without a desperate fight. What next?

Fresh sounds came swiftly. They came out of the opposite distance. It was a low, soft hammering of hoofs over sun-baked soil, and the sound of it grew in volume, almost at the moment the Wolf first discovered it.

He was given no time for conjecture. In a moment, it seemed, the flash of red came to him a few yards down the forest cutting. In another, two red-coated horsemen raced into the clearing, and almost flung their horses on their haunches as they reined them up.

The Wolf’s rifle was pressed hard against his shoulder. His finger was on the trigger, that deadly hair trigger that needed little more than a breath of wind to release.

But his finger remained unmoving, and a wave of panic swept over him. His stomach nauseated as he realized the thing that had so nearly been accomplished. Death! Another instant and his rifle would have spat death at one of those red-coats. And he knew it would have been murder. Cold, deliberate murder without the extenuation of a battle in self-defence.

He lowered his rifle as one of the men flung recklessly out of the saddle. Then it happened.

The crack of a rifle broke the stillness, and the Wolf knew whence it came. The policeman in the saddle pitched headlong, and his horse reared and flung its dead rider to the ground.

The Wolf gasped. His breath whistled in his throat. A queer horror looked out of his eyes.

The man who had dismounted ran. He had drawn a revolver and was charging in the direction of the hay store. His revolver rang out. Then came two shots in swift succession. And the sound of them was identical with that of the shot which had emptied the other policeman’s saddle.

The Wolf saw the second man crumple. He pitched headlong on the sweet-scented grass, clutching at it as he fell. Then, face downwards, he lay quite still.

CHAPTER V
THE WISDOM OF THE WOLF

THE Wolf was still in hiding with the screen of foliage sheltering him. There was not a movement in him beyond the tumultuous beating of his heart. He was thinking with all the rapidity of a mind driven to feverish activity. And the speed of his thought left his subconscious mind free to become aware of the glowing sunlight out there in the open, and the cloud of flies and mosquitoes besetting the restless cattle in the corrals.

He turned at last to the horses grazing with their mouths full of cumbersome bits, and their forelegs entangled in trailing reins. Then the red coat of the second policeman obtruded itself, and he considered the murdered man. It was at that moment he became aware of movement in the bush behind the hay. And he turned to discover Pideau’s dark face thrust beyond it, peering.

It was the cue which brought the boy to sharp decision. This time, with a jerk, he flung the breech of his rifle open and emptied its magazine of cartridges. Then, his tall body erect he moved out from his cover, and advanced towards the man to whom his loyalty, if not his affection, was bound.

Pideau was gazing down at the dead man on the hay. His brutish face expressed no emotion whatever, not even satisfaction. His gimlet eyes were fiercely bright and evil. That was all. He stooped, caught the body in his strong arms, and flung it over in the same rough fashion which he might have used in handling a heavy sack.

Lying face upwards the body revealed the thing the slayer sought. There it was. A minute puncture in the red jacket, with the dark ooze of blood staining the scarlet cloth. Pideau sucked in a breath of extreme satisfaction. It was a shot of which he felt he could be reasonably proud.

“A swell shot, Pideau.”

The half-breed straightened up with a jerk. He swung about to look into the smiling eyes of the Wolf. He stared, startled beyond words. Then, in a moment, fury leaped.

“You?” he cried fiercely. Then, with malevolent savagery: “You—you spyin’ swine! I’ll kill you!”

Pideau’s rifle came up with his threat. Murder, more murder, was in his gimlet eyes. The dusky flush of his cheeks further added to his threat.

The Wolf remained unmoved. He simply shook his head.

“You’d be crazy to make a third killing, Pideau,” he said, ignoring the gun, but remaining watchful. “You need help. My help—now. You’ve killed two red-coats, an’—more’ll come.”

Pideau’s gun lowered. It was a hardly perceptible movement. But the quick eyes of the boy saw it, and he snatched his advantage.

“I ain’t spyin’,” he went on quietly. “I don’t have to spy on you, Pideau. I’ve no need. I came right here because my crazy dogs led me this way. They hit a trail. I guessed it to be a wolf trail. But it wasn’t. It was Rene. Maybe she figgered you’d need my help.”

“You’re lyin’!”

Pideau’s snarl was ugly enough. But his anger was abating, and the Wolf realized it.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t need to lie, either.” He glanced significantly down at the body of the dead policeman. Then he looked at the corrals behind him. And farther on at the grazing horses, and the other of Pideau’s victims. “Not till more police get around, anyway.”

Pideau’s gun had come to rest with its butt on the ground.

“What d’you mean?” he cried roughly. “Ther’ ain’t more red-coats to come. Ther’s only them two on Maple Coulee post. An’,” he laughed harshly, “they’re both mutton dead.”

“Sure.” The Wolf’s gaze came back to the gloating face of the man who was the father of Annette. “They’re dead. That’s the reason more’ll come. The red-coats don’t let up. That’s how you always say. We got to make it so ther’s no trail for them to hunt. We got to make it so they think these boys have just quit. Maybe lit out across the border. An’ we can do it.”

The half-breed’s face was a study. As the boy talked, his smiling eyes containing nothing but seeming good humor, the man’s eyes lost their cruel sparkle. The flush of fury completely faded from his cheeks. Surprise, and then amazed incredulity took possession of him. In the end there was the dawning of satisfaction on his unsmiling face.

“How?” he asked, with a contempt that could not conceal his curiosity.

“We’ll need to strip ’em first,” the Wolf said, eyeing the body on the hay. “Then we’ll need to bury ’em—deep.” A little frown of concentration drew his finely marked brows together. “Then we’ll have to burn their clothes—all of ’em.”

“An’ their cayuses?”

“We can turn ’em loose. The wolves’ll get ’em before sunup to-morrow.”

“An’ the saddles?”

“Burn ’em, too. We ken sink the iron trees in the muskeg ’way back. An’ their guns. An’ everything else that won’t burn. We ken just cover your tracks right up so an Injun couldn’t smell it out.”

“Gee!”

The half-breed’s exclamation was an involuntary expression of admiration. If the Wolf understood it he made no sign. He simply gazed at the father of Annette with unfathomable eyes.

“We best get to it before—— You see, Pideau,” he went on, in his quick way, “you just can’t tell what message these boys left behind ’em. I’ve heard you say you haven’t any sort of use for ’em, but you’ve always allowed they’re slick. Maybe they sent word to their headquarters. Maybe they’d hit your trail. Maybe they passed word for folks to foller right along. See?”

Pideau nodded. And the boy watching him saw at last that which lay beneath the surface. The narrowed eyes had lost their confidence. There was fear in the swift movement of the furtive glance that swept over the clearing and finally came to rest at the entrance to it.

And as the Wolf realized the truth, boy as he was, he would have been less than human had he not experienced a thrill of contempt. Pideau! Pideau, the ruthless tyrant who had never more than tolerated his presence in their mountain hiding, was afraid! He was scared! Scared like a pitiful gopher!

Rene had done him good service that day in bringing him there. Never again would he submit to the bully. Never again would he tolerate even the man’s authority. Pideau was just a murderer. Something of which he had no personal fear.

No. In future they would be equals. Equals in council and in the traffic that gave them livelihood. Partners. Yes. He would even be a partner if it suited him. But——

He suddenly dropped on his knees and began to strip the body of the dead policeman.

The half-breed was still watching the entrance to the clearing with thoughts of pursuit troubling him. But at last he became aware of the boy, and the work he was engaged upon.

The Wolf looked up as a harsh laugh jarred the quiet of the summer day.

“You got hell beat a mile, kid,” Pideau cried, as their eyes met. “You certainly have. Of all the cool—— Say, you surely are the Wolf! Gee!”

The boy went on with his work.

“Sure,” he replied indifferently. “That’s how you always said.”

CHAPTER VI
PARTNERSHIP

THE Wolf had eyes only for the distance. He had a profound revolting for his companion, and all that in which he had found himself so amazingly involved. The cleanness of his boyish innocence had been badly fouled, and he would have given all he possessed to be able to forget.

Pideau was riding beside him, morose, silent. His expression was brooding. His eyes were narrowed to mere slits as though striving to conceal the evil of the mind behind them. He, too, was gazing far ahead, but he was concerned with nothing he beheld.

Every now and again a quick sidelong glance took in the youth at his side. And apparently the Wolf remained unconscious of the attention, which was without a shadow of friendliness or good will.

But, in fact, the boy was acutely alive to his companion’s glances. And, moreover, he possessed full understanding of the reason and purpose lying behind them. Years of bitter experience had taught him so much of Pideau. He understood the mire of evil that filled the man’s soul. Well enough he knew that the name with which he had himself been dubbed rightly should have been bestowed on the father of Annette. For there was no attribute of the fierce marauder of the forest that Pideau did not possess. Right down to the queer, haunting cowardice which is a fundamental of it.

The Wolf knew that dire threat was overshadowing him. And in Pideau the nature of such a threat could only possess one interpretation.

The cattle were moving ahead, herded with the skill of trained sheep dogs by Rene and Pete. It was the boy who controlled their work. Pideau took no hand. It was the boy, in fact, who had controlled everything from his first confronting of Pideau in the act of his crime, to the ghastly work which had occupied the long hours of night.

It was little wonder that the boy longed for forgetfulness. Clean, wholesome, imbued with a frank delight in the simple fact of existence, and the exercise of a keen, natural intelligence, he had found himself wallowing in a sink of horror, driven to it by circumstances which had been beyond his power of escape. He had realized that Pideau, for the sake of Annette, must be saved from the consequences of his own savage, blundering crime. And, with a generosity he could not deny, he had hurled himself to the man’s support.

The reaction of the horror of the night still crowded down upon him. It was all utterly unforgettable. The two murdered policemen. Their two horses. Then the ghastly task to which his hunter’s training and instinct had been put.

He had seen the fire devouring equipment and clothing till not a single recognizable shred remained to betray. He had seen the stiffened human bodies hurled to the hungry maw of the bottomless mire of the muskeg. Then there had been that worst of all necessity. Two fine-mettled bronchos, full of life and equine beauty, had been turned adrift in the forests with the reasonable certainty that they would hardly survive more than a few days.

And all the while there had not been one moment when he had dared relax his vigilance for his own personal safety. Pideau was a coward. And the boy’s woodcraft, hunting the timber wolf, had long since taught him the treachery of which the coward is capable.

The Wolf had learned so much since he had parted from Annette the morning before. In a few short hours he had learned his own strength. And he knew that what he had done had placed Annette’s father in the position of a trapped fox. He had a shrewd understanding. And the sum of possible consequences came to him easily. He was, metaphorically, watching the snapping jaws of the trapped fox, and knew that his own safety lay in his wit in avoiding them.

Pideau’s mood as he rode beside the Wolf on the homeward journey was full of ugly possibilities. His thought was searching. It was the guilty, fearful searching of a mind poisoned by terror and hate.

The Wolf—knew!

That was the man’s dominating thought. It had leaped to that fact in its panic. And it overshadowed every other consideration.

The boy—knew!

Pideau summoned the wit that had always served him. What did it mean? What could he do? And he found answers to those questions swimming through his brain like noxious vapors rising from the bowels of evil which were his. The meaning was deadly, and there was only one thing to do. Now was his opportunity. Annette and Luana were still unaware that the Wolf and he had met at the corrals. They were utterly unaware of the boy’s whereabouts. He had carefully ascertained that fact. Well? The boy must never reach the homeward journey’s end.

The Wolf—knew!

He would become a lifelong scourge, a deadly threat. He would become more. The lash of power would remain in the Wolf’s hand to use at any moment he desired to impose his will in any matter.

It was an unthinkable position. It was a thought that maddened. Pideau’s forehead sweated under his cap, and stark red almost blinded him. It should not be. His mind was made up.

He glanced at the youth from the tail of his eye. And as he did so the Wolf’s voice grated in the queer fashion which comes in youth’s approach to manhood.

“Guess you killed enough, Pideau,” he said. “You murdered them p’lice boys. You killed their hosses. Leastways you passed ’em to the wolves. You best finish right ther’. It ain’t any sort o’ use wantin’ to kill me. An’ you can’t anyway.”

The Wolf’s eyes were smiling as he gazed at the man he read like an open book. There was no fear in him. But there was something in his smiling gaze that Pideau could not face.

The half-breed’s eyes fell away and sought refuge in the cattle ahead of them.

The boy permitted his pony to drop back slightly, to a position of advantage. The beast’s nose was abreast of the withers of Pideau’s horse.

“I guess we need to square things up,” the Wolf went on, as Pideau attempted no verbal response. “Just cut murder right out till we’re through talkin’. Maybe you’ll see sense then. Since ever we quit back there you bin worried thinkin’ I knew the thing you’ve done. You bin guessin’ you couldn’t stand for it. You’re scared I’ll hold you up—when it suits me.”

Pideau still remained watching the cattle.

“I’m not out to hold you up, Pideau,” the boy went on quietly. “We ain’t friendly. We never bin. Maybe it’ll always be that way. It don’t matter. You gave me shelter when I couldn’t find it for myself. You handed me food, too, when there wasn’t a deal lying around for me. Well, I haven’t learned a deal. But ther’s jest one thing I have got back of my head. I’d hate worse than death to hurt the feller that did those things for me when I couldn’t do ’em for myself. If you get that you’ll see it’s crazy to kill the feller that can help you now, and is willing to. Just as crazy as killing those two police boys.”

Pideau experienced a soothing of his murderous spirit as he listened to the raucous, confident tones. His hate was unabated. But his fear knew a relief that had seemed well-nigh impossible. A curious calm spread through his senses and eased his tension.

“I had to kill ’em,” he growled morosely. “It was that or the penitentiary. A fool ’ud see it.”

“Was it?” The boy’s smile was full of shrewdness. “They’d trailed you, but they hadn’t got you. They’d never have got you in these hills. They’d have got the cattle. But that wouldn’t have hurt a thing. No. It was foolish to kill. Now you’ll get no more cattle. There’ll be a thousand police to say so. They’ll watch for you day an’ night. They’ll never quit your trail. There’s a big bunch of cattle stole from boys who know they’ve lost ’em. And the police know that two men on that station are missing. You’ve got to quit cattle now, because you killed those boys. It was foolish.”

There was no offence in the Wolf’s manner. Only argument. And somehow the argument took hold of the cattle thief, and made him want to hear more.

“Ther’s less chance trailin’ me—now,” he said sharply.

“An’ less chance getting cattle,” the Wolf retorted. “You’re safe—dead safe—if you quit cattle right away.”

“I was reckonin’ to—soon,” Pideau admitted, his gaze wandering southwards in the direction of the United States border.

“Well, it’s got to be right away, if you aren’t yearnin’ for penitentiary an’ a hangin’. We best git farther back into the hills for awhile. The police search is dead sure to come. It won’t be good if chance should show ’em our outfit. So it’s best not killin’ me, Pideau, as you were reckonin’. You’ll need me farther up in the hills. We got to trap, an’ hunt pelts to get our food. Then later——”

The fear and hate in Pideau had receded still further. A grin lit his fierce eyes as he interrupted.

“The Yanks are goin’ dry,” he said, meaningly, with a swift reaction to the needs of the new position. “Last time I was across I heard tell. The border folk are gettin’ busy. They figger it’ll not be for a year or so yet, but when they do——”

“When they do?”

The Wolf was frankly intrigued.

“Why, liquor’ll fetch all sorts of dollars.”

The boy was gazing out ahead over the familiar scene of the valley. His eyes were thoughtful.

“It ’ud be a swell trade,” he agreed at last. “An’ honest.”

“From this side the border.”

Pideau had forgotten the murder he had contemplated. He had forgotten everything in the prospections it contained for him.

“I got the dollars, too,” he went on eagerly. “I could set up a still, an’ brew rotgut fer big money.”

“An’ it would need the two of us to handle it.”

“Yes.”

“As partners.”

“Ye-es.”

The Wolf laughed. He read the meaning of the hesitation.

“We need to be partners—now, Pideau,” he said firmly.

The half-breed turned and frowningly contemplated the boy’s smiling face. All the old murderous feelings had leaped out of the background again. And for some moments he looked into the fearless eyes that challenged him. Then he shrugged and inclined his head in submission.

CHAPTER VII
THE HEART OF THE WOLF

THE noon sun was right overhead, a molten globe of merciless fury. The heat of the valley was fierce. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed in the still air. The cattle were munching wearily, indifferent to the dogs harrying them, indifferent to the luxurious knee-deep grass through which they were ploughing their somnolent way.

The Wolf’s eyes were anxious. There was no smile in them now. The child in him was uppermost. His whole thought was for that home on the hillside which had just come into view, and the human associations it contained for him.

Annette was there. Annette, and his sick mother, Luana. It was of Luana he was thinking most. And his thought was pregnant with grave anxiety. Mountain fever. It was fierce, and deadly, and very swift. Would he find her better, or worse? Would he——?

He wished the smoke from the fire were showing. Surely it should be, with noon at hand. Had Annette forgotten? She might have forgotten. Then perhaps Luana had no need of food.

He glanced at the figure of Pideau, who had uttered no word since his earlier submission. The morose creature displayed no interest whatsoever in the home that was now so very near. He displayed no interest in anything. Not even in the cattle which would ultimately make him a handsome return for the trouble in which they had involved him. The man saw nothing but the visions of his busy brain.

The Wolf understood. And it turned him from his own natural anxieties to the big thing that had taken possession of his life. He knew where he stood with Pideau now. From now on, until full manhood came to his rescue, a chasm of disaster would always be gaping at his feet. He had nothing to save him from it but his own wit and courage. So he watched, for the time, the thing lying back of the half-breed’s eyes and revelled in the thought of the battle in which they had joined issue.

It was an amazing transformation that twenty-four hours had wrought in him. Outwardly he was just the same, lank, muscular, developed out of all proportion to his years. The simple directness which had always characterized him had undergone no change. The wilderness with its battle for survival was deep in his soul. He feared nothing. He feared no human creature. And least of all, he feared Pideau.

Spiritually his development had been in the nature of the miraculous. He had leaped from childhood to real manhood in one amazing stride. A few short hours ago he had talked to Annette of marriage, and of a primitive life lost in the hills he loved. Now he knew that all that had been the talk of a child’s mind.

Annette? Yes. Annette was still the centre of everything for him. But the setting in which she stood was changed. He had tasted of real life, human life, in the past few hours, and he wanted more. He wanted it all. He wanted to measure his strength in the world of men, where every grain of success must be fought for and won over the fallen body of some human adversary. For the moment his adversary was the man riding beside him. That was all right. It was good to try his ’prentice hand on such easy material. Later would come the real thrill, the real battle.

At the foot of the slope, on which the dugout stood, Pideau drew rein. He indicated the cattle about which the dogs circled, a needless guard.

“You best set ’em in the corrals,” he grated harshly. “Feed ’em hay. Later we’ll fix the brands. When you’re through we ken eat.”

Pideau spoke with the confidence of authority. He spoke as though nothing had changed their relations, as though nothing could change them.

The Wolf never hesitated. There was no sign in him of any rebellion. There was nothing provocative in his manner. He turned his pinto towards the hillside and replied over his shoulder.

“I must go to Luana—first,” he cried, and breasted the hill.

Pideau gazed after him. His eyes were calculating, and one brown hand was gripping the small of his rifle, and his fingers felt the trigger.

He saw the slim body swaying to the eager gait of the pinto as it raced up the sharp incline. He saw the boy’s hand, which, like his own, was grasping his rifle. And for several furious moments he was yearning. Then he, too, began the ascent of the hill.

The Wolf was standing at the side of the rough bed in the inner room of the dugout. It was the same rawhide-strung bed built of spruce saplings from which years ago Pideau had carried his dead wife to her grave far down in the valley.

It was a poor enough room. It had one natural earth wall formed by the hill into which it was dug, and the rest of the walls were of laterally set green logs that were stripped of their bark in years of habitation. There was no light except that which was admitted through the doorway communicating with one of the two front rooms. But it was all sufficient to reveal the squalor in which those mountain folk lived. The floor was dust-dry earth, and the furnishings were the makeshift of barest necessity. It was sheer half-breed squalor of the poorest type, suffering under the indifference of those who lived in it.

The Wolf saw none of the poverty. He knew it. He had never known better. So it failed to offend. He had eyes only for the bed, with its worn, colored blankets, and the still ominous ridge that centred it. The blankets had been drawn up till that which lay beneath was completely hidden.

The silence was profound. It was a stillness different from any other the boy had ever known. And its effect on him was a sort of paralysis, from which he had neither power nor will to release himself.

He knew. There was no need for him to look. There was no need for him to raise even a corner of those blankets. The mountain fever had claimed its victim as he had been warned it would. The mother he had always known and loved, the one creature in all his young life who had never spoken a word of blame to him, whose whole thought had been always for his well-being and happiness, had gone. She was dead—dead. She had died alone. Utterly alone. And he would have given all the world to have been there to comfort her, and tell her of his boy’s love.

The stun of it held him helpless. He could only gaze. He could only eye that grim outline under the blanket and wonder like a child.

The sound of voices penetrated the silence. What they said the Wolf cared not. His ears were dead to all but a confusion of sound. But they had an effect of which he was wholly unaware. He moved. He reached out in an uncertain gesture. His fingers closed on the blanket cover near the head of the bed. And as they did so, thought bestirred. Some one must have drawn that blanket so. Who? Annette? Yes, it was Annette. And a new warmth crept into his heart.

The Wolf drew the blanket hesitatingly. His hand was shaking. He saw the black of the dead Luana’s hair. It was still shining as it had shone in life. Then came the waxen features without a blemishing line or wrinkle. Yes, they were like carved marble, a sort of soft-tinted marble that was very beautiful in his eyes. The whole of the dead face lay revealed. And the shaking hand steadied and held the blanket still.

The sound of the voices beyond went on. He gave them no heed. The boy’s whole soul was held by that upon which he was gazing—Luana—his mother. And she was dead—dead. Suddenly he took a step nearer to the bed. He leaned over it. He lowered his head and gently pressed his young lips against the marble-cold forehead. It was his farewell.

The blanket was back in its place as Annette had set it. The Wolf breathed a deep sigh. Then he turned away and moved out to join those, the sound of whose voices had reached him.

The Wolf appeared in the doorway of the dugout.

The fire was lit, and smoke was rising sheer on the still air. Pideau was at the fire, crouching down feeding it, and making ready for the noon food. The Wolf’s pinto was precisely where he had left it, its rawhide picket rope trailing but unsecured.

Annette was there. She was standing apart, and her bold, beautiful eyes were fixed on the youth the moment he appeared. There was no disguise; no pretense. Woman’s curiosity dominated her expression and hid any sign of feeling that may have been lurking.

The Wolf looked her way at once. His look told nothing. It told nothing of the shock he had endured. It told nothing of the passionate grief ravaging his boy’s soul. It was full of a calmness that must have disappointed the impish spirit of the girl.

“You covered her up, Annette,” he said, without a tremor of that which he felt. “You sure did that for—me?”

The girl stirred uneasily. Her gaze averted to Pideau at the fire, who had not looked up.

“She was dead,” she said in a low voice.

“You covered her up for—me?” the Wolf persisted.

“No!”

Pideau looked up from the fire at the sound of Annette’s fierce denial.

The Wolf smiled. Even in his grief Annette was still the little fiend he loved.

“You did it for me, though,” he said, with that maddening assurance which drove the girl.

“She died last night,” Annette cried. Then her eyes lit fiercely. “I did it so the flies ’ud keep from her.”

Pideau grinned. The Wolf saw the grin. He understood the malice of it. He ignored the man and his grin. He turned to the girl for whom his love had never been greater than at that moment. His eyes were smiling.

“I’m kind o’ glad you kept the flies off’n her,” he said. “I can’t ferget you did it, Annette. You see, you didn’t love her, and she didn’t love you. I’ll need to bury her.”

Pideau stood up from his fire abruptly. For one unsmiling moment he looked from the girl to the boy. Then he moved from his cooking pot and came across to them. The Wolf watched him while he seemed only to be looking at the girl.

Annette saw Pideau’s movement but continued to eye the boy. Then came the half-breed’s harsh voice.

“You ken fix them beasts down along in the corrals,” he said in his domineering way. “I’ll bury her when we’re through eatin’.”

The quiet of the boy’s eyes became suddenly disturbed. They lit with passion.

“No,” he said in a tone of finality. “I bury her. She’s my mother.”

A little sound broke from the girl. The boy’s eyes flashed in her direction. But for once Annette’s eyes contained no taunt. For once there was something in them that told of feeling other than of her habitual antagonism.

Pideau’s voice came again. Its tone further maddened the Wolf.

“Mother? She’s no mother o’ yours,” the man sneered. “She never was an’ couldn’t be. She never had a man. She stole you. She stole you from your folks. You’re a white spawn. An’ you’ll never know your folks now she’s dead.”

The Wolf remained in the doorway. He stood without a movement. His long rifle was still in his hand beside him. And in that moment his longing was almost beyond restraint.

The girl watched him. She missed nothing. She read the frantic passion to which her father had goaded the boy. And suddenly she forgot her own love of tormenting. Suddenly all desire to hurt him left her. The woman in her found its natural expression. Her prerogative had been usurped. He had been smote by another. Her father.

She moved. She came to the doorway where the Wolf was standing wild-eyed, gazing on the man who had so brutally hurt him. She laid a slim brown hand on his arm. And a half-tamed softness was in the beautiful boldness of her eyes as she looked up into his face.

“We’ll bury her, Wolf—you an’ me,” she said, in a low voice that was full of something the boy had never heard in it before. “She loved you. She beat me. It don’t matter. She was a mother to you, whatever he says. And you got the right. I—I just want to help you. Father ken see to the beasts himself. They’re his, anyway. Luana belonged to you. An’ I guess you belong to—me.”

A heavy mattock and a digging fork lay on the ground near by, and the child picked the former up and stood with it across her shoulder. Again she laid a brown hand on the boy’s arm.

“We don’t need food till we’re through with—her. Let’s go get her an’ carry her down.”

The Wolf bestirred. He took possession of the appealing hand and crushed it fiercely in his while his glance held the man who had goaded him. Quite suddenly he spoke. He spoke coldly in spite of his passion.

“She wasn’t my mother, Pideau?” he said, and somehow his teeth seemed to clip over each word he spoke. “Then I don’t owe you no blood duty. Ther’ ain’t blood of yours in my body, an’ I’m glad. I won’t say the thing I might, with Annette right here. She’s your kid. You’re her father. But I’ll say this—she’s right; dead right. We’re goin’ to bury Luana, who was a good woman who served you a sight better than you’d a right to. An’ your hands ain’t goin’ to touch her. They ain’t fit. An’ my gun here says that’s so. Them beasts you stole down there are yours to see to. You can go to it. There’s bad blood in you for me when you only need to hand me thanks. An’ while that’s so you ken play your own dirty game. I ain’t scared a thing, Pideau. You want to kill me. You’ve wanted that way ever since last night. Just get it good, if there’s to be a killin’ ther’s two of us in the game.”

Pideau moved as though to rush in on the lank figure whose reckless fury had flung so desperate a challenge. But as he did so the boy’s gun leaped to his shoulder, and his eye fell to the sights.

Pideau made no further movement. Only his narrowed eyes looked yearningly on his own rifle propped against the dugout wall close beside the Wolf.

Then it was that Annette took a great decision. Her untamed spirit flared up. She remembered the Wolf’s boast down on the river bank. Here she was witness to its truth and reality. In that moment the Wolf had grown to the proportions of the hero of her woman’s worship.

“Lay a hand on him, father, an’ I will help him beat you,” she cried, with all the violence she was accustomed to fling at the boy. “You’re just my father. But he’s my—Wolf.”

The Wolf’s gun had held the man. But the girl had achieved something more. Her violence had no part in it. It was something deeper, something of which she was all unaware.

Whatever Pideau’s crimes, whatever his evil, Annette was the child of his body and blood. She was the child whose appeal had saved him from his greatest crime years before. And now the nature between them went for nothing. She had flung herself into the arms of the boy against him.

Pideau was alone; outcast; and he felt that the world of mankind was now completely arrayed against him.

The overwhelmingness of it was too much for his hardihood. He could not face it. His bluff failed him. Without a word he turned away. He moved off. And passing down the hillside on his way to the cattle a sound came back to the two who stood watching him. It was the sound of a bitter, jarring laugh.

They were inside the outer room of the dugout. The Wolf had possessed himself of the old six-chambered revolver which Pideau kept hanging on the wall. He had just finished loading its chambers from the cartridge belt hanging beside it. The spare cartridges he had already stuffed into his hip pocket. His rifle was laid aside with its breech-block removed.

“He won’t do a thing, Wolf.”

Annette’s tone was almost one of humility as she addressed the boy who had suddenly become her hero.

“I’m takin’ no chances.”

The Wolf spoke roughly. There was only the outline of his smile left.

“That why you slipped the pin from his rifle?”

“Sure.”

The girl sighed. Her eyes were gazing at the inner room of death.

“Then we ken carry her down?” she suggested.

“I’ll carry her, kid,” the Wolf said gently. “You don’t need. You haul that mattock an’ fork. She was good to me, an’ I loved her. She didn’t act so good to you. You’ll jest help—me—that’s all.”

Annette nodded. Her big eyes were shining. She wanted to help the Wolf now. That was all.

The Wolf took both her hands in his. They were small and smooth for all their strength.

“Say, kid, you do want to help me?”

Suddenly Annette snatched her hands free and flung her arms about the Wolf’s neck. She clung to him.

“Yes, yes,” she cried. “Anythin’ for you, Wolf. Anythin’—anythin’ at all.”

The boy stooped and kissed the face so near to his. Then as the girl still clung to him he released himself from her embrace.

“We got to be quick, kid,” he said without urgency. “It ain’t Pideau worryin’. It’s the police. They’ll get along. Pideau’s played a fool game, an’ we can’t stop around here. We got to beat it farther into the hills. An’ we aren’t going to get more cattle. We’ll need to hustle for pelts in the future, till—till—— Say——?”

He turned sharply to the inner room.

Annette followed him through the open doorway.

Minutes later Pideau at work amongst his cattle saw the queer little procession. The tall youth was staggering under the burden of death. And behind him came Annette carrying the necessary tools for a burial.

He watched them till they reached the river bank. He saw the Wolf gently set his burden down. Then he turned back to his cattle and morosely continued his work of feeding.

PART II

CHAPTER I
TEN YEARS OF PROSPERITY

PIDEAU ESTEVAN had spent a busy morning in his long, low, iron-roofed store at Buffalo Coulee, which for ten years had become the home of his partnership with the Wolf.

It was the time of year when the prairie winter was the most uncertain. Christmas and New Year’s had been left behind, but as yet there was little easing of conditions and no sign of coming spring. There was a momentary respite in the depths of cold, but that was all. The temperature had been relaxed by a softening wind and the threat of snow.

Pideau’s busy morning had nothing to do with custom. Buffalo Coulee was not buying. It was the time of year when local trade was practically stagnated to the purchase of the barest necessities of life. He had been distributing about his shelves a large shipment of new season’s goods.

He hated the work of his store. Ten years of weighing, and measuring, and endeavoring to retain his customers’ good will had inspired him with an utter detestation of the work which bored his ruthless temperament to extinction. He only submitted to it because it was his share in a carefully considered plan which the Wolf and he had evolved in their pursuit of fortune.

Now he was standing warming his body at the central stove, gazing at the result of his work without a shadow of enthusiasm.

At last he moved away and passed down towards his open doorway, through which no customer had passed since it had first been unfastened that morning. His purpose was part of years of habit. He would lounge there lazing until the cold or an arriving customer drove him back to his counter.

There was nothing in the outlook to attract. Buffalo Coulee was a primitive prairie township that had grown up as a whim of a handful of settlers seeking some sort of companionship, and a community upon which to centre their lives. Just now it consisted of an open space buried under snow that was churned by sled-runners and the wheels of a few decayed automobiles, fringed about by a straggling of mean habitations heavily encrusted with snow. There were no trees in view. The woods lay somewhere behind the store where the solidly frozen river was wrapped in its winter slumber. There were, however, the tattered crests of the distant mountains beyond the houses. And over all the gray dour of a leaden sky.

Pideau concerned himself with none of these things as he approached his doorway. His gaze became focussed on the instant upon two figures standing at the gateway in the lateral log fence surrounding the police quarters on the far side of the town. A man and a girl were there talking together.

For a moment Pideau remained in full view. Then he drew back and partially closed the door. For some reason he had become desirous of remaining unseen. The sight had stirred him to the profoundest anger. It was Annette, now grown to full womanhood, and Constable Ernest Sinclair of the Mounted Police.

In the ten years since Pideau had abandoned the mountains for the open life of the prairie the change in his fortunes was considerable. The man himself was incapable of change, except possibly in his outward appearance. In that he had done his best to disguise the hill tough and cattle thief, and not without a measure of success. But there were so many features that admitted of no disguise and would dog him to the end of his days.

His color—nothing could alter that, even though he had introduced himself to the luxury of a daily application of horse soap and water. Then his eyes—those beady, snapping eyes, which never really smiled, whatever his mood. They would remain a permanent indication of the man behind them.

Prosperity, however, had made some outward impression. It had forced on him a limited concern for at least some of the decencies of life. His lank hair was no longer a greasy mat. His beard was trimmed close to his brutish face and looked clean. Then his greasy buckskin had given place to store tweeds. And a weekly, clean, variegated shirt produced a striking contrast against the dark skin where its rolled sleeves left his dusky forearms bare.

The man was consumed with greed for money. It had always been so. And it was his money hunger that had made him grudgingly yield to a show of uplift. He had forced himself, in the prosecution of his schemes, to avoid outraging the community in which he had pitched his camp. He had for ten years contrived to fling dust in the eyes of those with whom he contacted in Buffalo Coulee. And even the watchful eyes of the police, in the person of Constable Ernest Sinclair, had failed to discover the full depths of his iniquities.

A storm was raging behind the man’s eyes as he watched the two figures at the police quarters. Annette was a beautiful woman, and the only spark of humanity in Pideau made him glad of her. Those two were philandering. He knew. It had been going on for months. His girl was philandering with a red-coat! To Pideau the thought was simply maddening. Anyone else, no matter who, amongst his civilian neighbors, would have given him no concern whatever. But a red-coat!

But then Annette had developed as she had been bound to do. The beauty of her mother had come to her, just as she had inherited through those channels which had created Pideau, himself. The result was no easy blending. She was alive with headlong, passionate impulse; she possessed a spirit of unthinking recklessness; all the sex in her was a demonstration of her mixed blood. She knew no authority but her own will and dismissed the father, who had once purposed to destroy her, from her consideration. She went her own headlong way and only served the plans of her menfolk in so far as they did not clash with her own.

Suddenly Pideau spat and turned from the sight that infuriated him. And as he did so a man approached his door, and a cheerful voice greeted him.

“It’s thirst, Pideau. The thirst of a desert! I’m going right across to hew old Amos Smith. Give me support. The biggest, yellowest schooner of lager your capacious, if reprehensible cellar, can provide. Thank the good Lord we Canadians aren’t quite dry yet. Thank the good Lord for a disreputable Pideau.”

Doctor Alec Fraser was tall, and fair, and new to the prairie. He was not long from the hospitals and unmarried. He was more than welcome in Buffalo Coulee for other reasons than his medical skill. The township had never before had a doctor of its own, and Fraser came as something of a luxury.

With the collar of his fur coat flung back, and the heavy garment itself unfastened, Doctor Fraser was eyeing Pideau behind his counter, over the rim of the schooner pouring its cool amber liquid down his throat.

“That’s good stuff, Pideau,” he said with a sigh of content, as he set his glass down on the counter. “It’s better than—‘homebrew,’” he added slyly.

Pideau shot a suspicious glance at his visitor who vaulted to a seat on the counter.

“Ther’s worse’n ‘homebrew’ under Prohibition,” he growled.

“Is there?”

Fraser laughed and shook his head.

“Never on your life!” he went on. “There’s nothing out of hell worse. ‘Homebrew’s’ sending half the States crazy.”

Pideau shrugged. He leaned back against his newly arranged shelves.

“That don’t need to worry us across here,” he retorted. “They’ll pay big money for all they can get of it. They lap it up same as if they was weaned on it. You can’t blame folks makin’ it to sell ’em. Blame the crazy guys who threw a hand fer Prohibition. I’d drink the salt of the sea if you made it I mustn’t. ’Tain’t our worry. I’d feed ’em prussic acid if they’d pay me fer it.”

The doctor’s eyes hardened.

“I believe you would.”

“Would? Sure! It’s their funeral.”

“Yes.”

Fraser glanced down the store. It was not really any matter of drink that had brought him there.

“I’m wondering about that bright police boy across the way,” he said abruptly. “When’s he going to pull you and your Wolf partner?”

Pideau looked up. He shot a swift glance into the serious eyes watching him.

“Never,” he growled shortly.

“No? You’re wrong,” Fraser went on contemplatively. “He’ll pull your Wolf anyway. He’s hot on the work. He’s looking for quick promotion. And he sees it in your Wolf, and his ‘homebrew.’ That boy’s yearning.”

Fraser eyed the unlovely creature behind his counter. He had no liking for the half-breed. He understood him too well. But he was not thinking of Pideau. He was not even thinking of the Wolf. He was thinking of the girl he had seen talking out there in the cold, dallying with the man, Sinclair, over the fence. And she was the sole cause of his visit to the store.

“Let him yearn,” Pideau cried roughly. “I don’t care a curse.” He shook his ugly bullet head. “Here, doc,” he went on bestirring, “I know you. We ken talk like men. That boy’s welcome. He’ll never locate our cache. We folk, the Wolf Pack, as you around here call us, came to Buffalo Coulee ten years back fer jest one thing. We’re needin’ good American dollars, an’ we know how to get ’em. We ain’t crooks agin our law. We’re jest here to feed them crazy Prohibitioners all the booze they’re yearnin’ to pay for. And they’re payin’ good. We’re goin’ right on doin’ it. Ther’s no law yet agin it. Let him yearn.”

“But there’s ‘homebrew.’”

“You mean the makin’?”

“Yes. There’s a pretty severe penalty for making that dope, or any other poison, up in the hills—if they get you in the act. If you boys shipped in bonded liquor, the right stuff that didn’t do more than make a feller glad, and sold it at a swell profit down south, there’d be no kick beyond that the Prohibition officers could pass you. But a poison still, ’way up in the hills, is different. If they get you making ‘homebrew’ it’s right up against good Canadian law. And one day you’ll all be sitting around in penitentiary wishing you hadn’t. The police aren’t Prohibition officers. There’s no graft to them. They’re right out after their jobs, and there’s no human bunch I know can do it better. One day your play will end suddenly. And I think I’ll be sorry.”

“Why?” Pideau laughed unsmilingly.

Fraser gestured.

“Why ’ud you feel that way?” Pideau asked, a little eagerly, thinking of Annette and estimating this white doctor who was unmarried.

Fraser’s gaze turned on the far door of the store.

“Because I’ll be sorry when that girl of yours hasn’t her menfolk around to see she don’t skid.”

“You mean—Sinclair?”

“Certain, sure. That feller’s a good policeman but that’s all. He’s tough on dames. Doesn’t it worry you seeing a girl kid of yours standing over a fence, on a cold winter day, dallying with him? If I was a father, with a girl of mine falling for that boy, I’d get the best shotgun dollars could buy, and all the shells belonging to it. You’re taking a big chance. A hell of a chance. I just hate to see it. She’s a kid. She’s a babe—in a way.”

Fraser paused, and thrust his cap back from his brow. He saw the fierce smoulder in Pideau’s eyes.

“Say,” he went on, “I said Sinclair was tough on dames. It’s not enough. There was Molly Gros. You remember. I had to bring her kid into the world for her. She was a half-breed and a goodlooker. But nothing to your swell girl. Poor little devil, she never opened her mouth. She quit without giving him away. I did my best to make her talk. I’d have had him up to Calford and seen he got his promotion in the neck. The swine! But she wouldn’t say. She was all for him. And now she’s traipsing the world with his kid, deserted, alone. Tcha! It sets me crazy thinking. If Annette belonged me I’d see he didn’t get within ten miles of her.”

Pideau leaned over his counter. His eyes were hot as they looked up into the doctor’s face.

“If she belonged you, doc, you’d jest have to stand around cursin’ the p’lice the same as me, an’ leavin’ it there,” he snarled. “Without that shotgun a fool father don’t cut ice. Annette? When that kid’s on the jump ther’ ain’t the man born who could hold her.”

“Not even the Wolf, if he stopped around instead of making poison up in the hills?”

Pideau’s gaze broke away.

“The Wolf might keep her clear of Sinclair,” Fraser persisted.

“You think so?” Pideau shook his head decidedly. “I’d be glad for someone else to do it tho’.” Then his manner became eager. “You see, I ken fix her good—dollars.”

There was no mistaking his meaning. The doctor suddenly slid himself from the counter and hastily began to fasten his coat. Pideau watched him for a moment or two, and the eagerness died out of him. He turned to his shelves, and the back of his bullet head, with its coarse black hair growing low on the nape of his neck, came under the other’s consideration.

Then came a sound. It was the padding of moccasins down the store. Pideau turned an ear.

“The Wolf,” he said.

“From the hills?”

The doctor was smiling.

“I didn’t say,” snapped Pideau.

“No. Well, I guess I’ll get right over to Amos Smith.”

Pideau watched him go. And friendliness gave place to something else in his look as he gazed after him.

Pideau and the Wolf were standing with the counter between them.

“Wal?”

The half-breed’s question came in a tone that conveyed no welcome.

The Wolf looked up from the granulated tobacco he was rolling into a cigarette.

“Five hundred gallons,” he said.

He spoke quietly, and his eyes wore their unmeaning smile as he twisted the ends of his paper and set his cigarette between his lips.

Pideau breathed deeply. In a flash his whole expression had transformed. Greed, incredulity, even satisfaction, had replaced the look he had worn at Fraser’s going.

“Fi’ hundred gallons!” he echoed. Then came the inevitable. “You’re lyin’! You couldn’t make it in the time!”

The Wolf moved away. He stood himself over against the stove, and lit his cigarette.

The Wolf was good to look at. His hard, rough clothing and well-worn, fur-lined pea-jacket gave him an air. He looked capacity, energy, resolve, in every line of figure and feature.

He had fulfilled his early promise. In manhood he was superbly grown. He was big. He was large of bone and muscle, yet of a slim grace that suggested almost feline activity. His face was clean-cut without great beauty. His nose was too Indian in its sharp aquilinity. His cheek bones were a shade too prominent. But his expression more than compensated. His dark eyes contained the wonderful smile which Nature had fixed there when she moulded them.

He stood regarding his partner behind the counter. And Pideau returned his look with eyes that shone inscrutably. The Wolf’s announcement was incredible to him because of his desire that it should be true.

He searched the youth’s face while he waited. And strangely enough his profoundest dislike and distrust of his partner was uppermost in his mind. He should have been glad. He should have warmed to the man. He should have been grateful. For it was the genius of the Wolf that had brought him prosperity and poured the dollars he loved into his greedy hands.

But in ten years of association Pideau had known no peace of mind, no content. Unease was the keynote of his life with the Wolf. He had never been able to rid himself of his original suspicions. And now they had become an obsession. From the beginning the Wolf had been a threatening shadow brooding over his life. Now he gazed at him with the desperate feeling with which a devastating storm about to break might have inspired him. He never looked at the Wolf without the memory that his partner held over him the power of life and death.

The half-breed’s weakness had grown with the years. Violent, inhuman, ready murderer as he was, cowardice had completely undermined such manhood as he had originally possessed. In years of association with the fearlessness and confidence of the Wolf it had fallen away like a hill mist before a rising sun. There was not a single day that had passed, since the Wolf had set his authority at defiance, that Pideau had not regretted his failure to defy the merciless gun which the boy had levelled at him while he claimed his right to bury the dead Luana.

Even now, as the man calmly smoked beside the wood stove, with every sign of their prosperity surrounding him, Pideau remembered more poignantly than ever that the Wolf knew!

But never was a spectre more surely a figment of distorted imagination. The Wolf had neither desire nor intent to take advantage of his knowledge of Pideau’s early crimes. Pideau to him was just a necessary evil in his life. He was an unlovely cross which he must bear. He was Annette’s father. Then, of lesser importance, the Wolf could never forget that shelter had been afforded him, however hatefully, in the days when he could not help himself. It was Pideau who had made possible his early childhood.

The Wolf spread his hands to the warmth.

“I shut her down at that,” he said. “It’s ther’, kegged. The liquor. It’s ready fer the teams right away. An’ we need to act quick.”

He sucked his cigarette and inhaled. Then a faint cloud of smoke escaped his nostrils.

“Teams?”

Pideau’s question was sharp. The Wolf nodded.

“It’ll mean two trips else,” he said. “The folks down ther’ are shoutin’ fer it. Their dollars are good. You got to make the trade this time—alone.”

“Alone? What’s the play?”

“Ther’s no play.” The Wolf shook his head.

Pideau licked his lips. The other’s cool manner of authority maddened him.

“Quick, ain’t you?” he growled. “Why not you, too, same as we always fix it? Five hundred ain’t a one-man play. Are you startin’—another five hundred?”

“No, I’m not.”

The Wolf turned. With a fierce gesture he flung his cigarette away and trod it underfoot. Then he came to the counter, and Pideau saw the transformation. The eyes he was looking into were the eyes that had once faced him over the sights of a rifle.

“You’ll run those cargoes,” the Wolf said, but without any change of tone. “I stop right here in town.”

“Why?”

Pideau leaned over the counter, his folded arms supporting him. The Wolf’s control came back to him and he sought his tobacco.

“She’s there with Sinclair,” he said frigidly. “I’ve just seen her. She’s still with him. I’m goin’ to stop it.”

“How?”

The Wolf shrugged. But his movement carried no conviction.

“That’s for me,” he said. “It’s enough to say it’s goin’ to stop. You’re her father. You know Sinclair. Yet you just stand around. Well, I know Sinclair, too. Maybe I’ll stop around. But I’ll fix things—the way you haven’t.”

Pideau’s eyes blazed.

“An’ what ken you do?” he snarled. “Ken you jump in? Ken you set a man an’ a gal actin’ diff’rent when life looks good to ’em? Who’re you to do it, anyway? Hev you right? Is Annette your woman? Is she the sort to set around an’ say ‘Yes’? Not on your fool life.” Pideau held up a clenching hand. “She’s got you right there, an’ she’ll squeeze till you gasp for your man’s crazy life. Get busy. See an’ try to stop her. She’ll beat you like a kid, an’ set you with your face to the wall.”

The man’s harsh scorn was withering. But the Wolf smiled maddeningly into his face.

“You’re forgettin’ Sinclair,” he said soberly.

Pideau’s eyes bored.

“He’s a p’liceman,” he snapped.

“It don’t matter the way he’s dressed.”

Pideau sucked in a whistling breath.

“You daresn’t!”

The half-breed’s challenge came in a hoarse whisper. The thing in his mind seemed to him to be too good to be true—the Wolf—Sinclair—Annette. Fierce glee had replaced every other emotion. If the Wolf took a hand——

He breathed deeply and waited.

“You don’t get it, Pideau,” the Wolf said quietly. “I’m your pardner, and you’ve to play your hand right now. You’ve got to run those cargoes while I stop around here. I’m goin’ to marry Annette. Get that firm in your mind. She belongs me. She’s always belonged me, right from the days we scratched dirt together ’way back in the hills. Do you think that scum Sinclair’s goin’ to take her from me? Do you? I’d think you knew better. Just make your mind up, Annette’s fer me. Annette’s my little play-girl, an’ she’s goin’ to be my wife. Ther’s nothin’ out o’ hell to stop it.”

The Wolf refastened his coat, stuck his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, and lit it. Then his smile became a laugh, and he turned and moved off swiftly in the direction of the door of the store.

Pideau watched him go. His mood was jubilant. But before the other had reached the door his joy had departed.

His suspicious mind was at work again. Suddenly he beheld everything in a different light. The Wolf’s threat. It was not only against the man, Sinclair. What did his last words mean? It was plain, quite plain. They could only have one meaning. The youth had delivered an ultimatum. It was an ultimatum to him, Annette’s father. He had demanded that Annette should be his wife. And he, Pideau, must do his share in achieving that end.

CHAPTER II
SINCLAIR MEETS THE ACCOUNT

PIDEAU was hard on the heels of the Wolf. Instinct warned him that the youth must not be allowed to depart without further word.

The Wolf was standing in the open doorway when the other reached him. And together, for a moment, they stood peering out over the snowy waste in the direction of the police quarters.

They were still together—Annette and the fur-clad figure of the policeman. They were in just the same position on either side of the rough gate. There were other fur-clad figures moving over the snow in various directions. But the gray bitterness of the winter day offered small enough inducement to any but those answering the call of their day’s work.

Pideau was slightly behind the Wolf.

“It don’t need a heap of guessin’,” he said in a considered tone. “You reckon to do the thing her father ain’t. I kind o’ wonder the thing you reckon a father could do. You’re goin’ to stop it? An’ I ast you how? It ain’t fer me to know, eh? You’re just goin’ to wait around an’ stop it.”

Pideau was jeering. He was determined to provoke. He was looking for angry retort. But as none was forthcoming he went on.

“She’s to be your wife, eh?” he said, in a low, harsh tone. “Ther’s nothin’ out of hell to stop it? Maybe ther’s something deep down in hell that will. We know Sinclair. But ther’s no man can know the stuff that lies back of Annette’s pretty head. Will you marry Annette when Sinclair’s through with her?”

The Wolf turned. The half-breed’s goading had achieved its purpose. Pideau saw the fierce light in the eyes that sought his. He saw the sudden distention of the veins on his forehead and at his temples.

When the Wolf spoke, however, it was still in his cold, even tone.

“Cut that stuff right out, Pideau,” he said. “You’re her father, and the last man with the right to talk that way. You haven’t the manhood to get it right. If you had you’d have fixed Sinclair before this. I told you I’d marry Annette. Whatever happens that goes. But if hurts come to my little play-girl through him, I’ll—kill Sinclair.”

Pideau’s eyes narrowed till the triumph in them was hidden.

“Does that go, too?” he asked. Then came a hoarse laugh. “If it does then you need to get after him right away. The hurt’s done. If you’d the eyes of a blind mule you’d have seen it in her, weeks back. It’s been in her dandy eyes. It’s been in everything about her. Maybe my manhood don’t leave me understandin’. But I’m her father, and I guess I know Annette. ’Tain’t me that don’t understand, boy. It’s you. You’re late by weeks. That’s why I haven’t jumped. I’m waitin’. I’m waitin’ because she’s playin’ her hand, and ain’t thro’ yet. Well, if your stuff goes, get right out after Sinclair an’ kill him. He’s robbed you. But it ain’t nothin’ to the way he’s robbed her.”

Pideau’s eyes were wide enough now. He had nothing now to conceal. There was neither taunt nor goad in his words. He was just sheer feeling. The father in him had risen above everything else. Bad as he was he still had the humanity of the father. In his crude fashion he loved Annette with all that was in him.

They stood looking at each other. Then, at last, the Wolf gestured. Pideau saw the clenching hands, so strong, so merciless in their movement. Then as the Wolf moved away without a word, he looked after him.

With the Wolf’s going Pideau’s manner underwent complete transformation. The father in him faded out giving place to all the evil that was more than nine-tenths of the man’s being. His eyes narrowed again. And the gleam in then was one of unholy triumph.

The Wolf’s purpose was plain to him. Pideau knew he had sent him off a potential killer. It was what he desired. It was the realization of his fondest hope. He meant the Wolf to stand on the same plane as himself. Then, at last, he would know that peace of mind which for ten years had been denied him.

The gray of the winter day was without any impression upon the man and the girl lingering at the gateway of the police inclosure. The cold was penetrating. But was not the winter cold at Buffalo Coulee always penetrating? Sinclair and Annette were young and vigorous, and completely absorbed in that which lay between them. So they gave heed to nothing so unimportant as weather conditions.

Annette was clad in a knee-length fur coat. It was of Persian Lamb, a recent birthday gift from the Wolf, who had been at pains to purchase it in one of the big cities of the East. Her round cap, low-pressed over her pretty ears, was of similar fur. Then her small feet were hidden within the ugly proportions of Arctic overshoes, which reached knee-high over warm stockings.

She was very attractive as she peered out from between the enveloping folds of her high storm collar. The dusk of her face was lost against the black fur. Her black eyes were alight and flashing between their long curling lashes. And her ripe, parted lips were intensely alluring.

She was gazing up into the full, youthful face of the policeman with an intentness that robbed her eyes of any softness.

Sinclair was unsmiling, too. Sensible of the girl’s beauty, at that moment he was without any appreciation of it. He was not even looking at her. His blue eyes were on the iron-roofed store on the far side of the township, and he was thinking hard.

The policeman knew that the moment had come when life was presenting him with one of those ugly bills which it never fails to produce for settlement after the indulgence of youthful follies which have crossed the borderline of crime. And in that moment the last thing capable of making appeal to him was this woman’s charm, which, for weeks and months now, had so badly inflamed his unbridled soul.

He was a largish man and good-looking enough, until close study revealed certain physical imperfections which can betray so much. He was of the fair, florid type. He was by no means unimposing under his regulation fur cap, and in his black sheepskin fur with the yellow stripe of his breeches showing below its lower edge.

But his eyes had that queer glisten in them which so curiously denotes the sensual. His nether lip was too full, and even loose. Then he had an ugly, short laugh that betrayed no good will, and a way of gazing afar while he talked.

Just now he had much to conceal. He was concerned as he listened to the low rich tones that were somehow so different from that which he knew they could be when the mood behind them was soft and yielding. And his concern was twofold.

He was searching to discover the easiest means of meeting and countering the bill which was being presented through the lips of the beautiful half-breed, and, at the same time, wondering how best it could be used to further his official plans.

“Do we need to worry, kid?” he asked, in reply to her spoken fear of her father and the Wolf when they finally discovered the truth of the thing lying between them. “I don’t guess so. You’re not a child. You’re a woman with the right to love where you feel like it. Pideau’s your father all right. But fathers don’t count with a grown woman. As for Mister Wolf, where does he come in anyway? He’s not even a brother.”

Annette turned away. She stood with one arm spread out on the top rail of the fence gazing across at the store.

“That’s the worry of it,” she sighed, and her brows drew in a thoughtful pucker.

There was an intake of breath. The man watched the heave of a bosom that fascinated him. He was wondering what still lay waiting for him behind those eyes, that studied quiet, which was so unlike the girl as he knew her.

Annette’s purpose was quite definite. She knew her mind on every subject that concerned herself. She saw that opportunity was looming, the opportunity she had deliberately sought. And she meant to grab it, and hold it, and hug it to herself.

For ten years she had been dragged in the wake of the machine which her father and the Wolf operated. For ten years she had been compelled by Pideau to do her share in the work that was pouring dollars into the coffers of a partnership in which she had no place. She knew she was a mere chattel in the life of her parent. And she believed she was no better than a property, to be cared for, cajoled, and teased, and fought, where the Wolf, her old playmate, was concerned. She told herself she was forced to live and act as her menfolk dictated. And it was her life to work without pay or interest and to content herself with such dole as might come her way.

The girl’s volcanic temper frantically rebelled. For her father she possessed no regard whatsoever. She knew him and read him like an open book. He sickened her, not for his crimes, but for the brutishness that rendered him so unlovely. Hitherto the bond of simple relationship had been strong enough to hold her. Hitherto she had yielded to her serfdom. But with the coming of Ernest Sinclair into her life the Rubicon had been crossed. She was a child no longer.

Now she was alive with flaming passions. The irresistible laws of Nature had proclaimed themselves in no uncertain fashion. Like the offspring of the beasts of the forest, whence she hailed, her life was her own. She was as ready as they to turn and slash with gleaming teeth the parent who had given her being.

The Wolf occupied a wholly different plane from the father. The Wolf had always been Annette’s playmate. He had been more—much more. Only the girl refused to realize it. He had been the most intimate participant in her life. He was part of it. There was no moment in it, whether of joy, or sorrow, or anger, that had not in some way been associated with the Wolf. He was as much a part of her being as the warm breath that passed her pretty lips. But because that was so, because he was the Wolf, because she could think of nothing in her life without him, she the more surely resented him.

The whole position was one of warfare between conflicting wills, active on her part, and on his confident, smiling passivity. The battle had begun far back in their earliest childhood. It had gone on ever since. Its fundamental was without hate. On the contrary a wealth of affection and loyalty lay lost under the débris of conflict they had succeeded in piling upon it. They had always been inseparable. They were verily twin in soul. And for that very reason the war between them had always been the more bitter.

It was strange. Neither seemed to be capable of penetrating the fog that blinded them. And so the bitter antagonism went on and would continue to go on to its logical, human conclusion.

And with conditions prevailing, with Annette’s reckless impulse always driving her, a man like Ernest Sinclair was bound to find a part in the play of it all. He was a policeman, and so in direct opposition to Pideau and the Wolf. He was white and personable in a passionate, impulsive woman’s eyes. The Wolf resented him and said so. Then what more was needed? It infuriated the Wolf to know of Annette’s friendliness with Sinclair. So Annette had seen to it that she was very, very friendly.

The result was foredoomed. Annette was beautiful. She was superb in her youth, and full of the sexual potentialities of her race. And the man? Well, Sinclair was what he was without pretense. And so the Nemesis. Annette believed she loved. Sinclair only needed to raise a beckoning finger for the girl to follow him to the world’s end.

“They’ll kill us when they know.”

Annette spoke with a little catch of breath that was something feigned. The man responded with derisive laughter. He leaned down with his arms folded on the rail, and one hand fondled the slim fingers of the girl.

“They’ll kill us, will they?” he said, in a low, amused, but wholly watchful manner. He shook his head. “Not on your life. Pideau can hate all he pleases, but he’s not figgering to quit his play for the end of a rope fixed around his dirty neck. And he’ll see to it the Wolf don’t cut off the tide of dollars pouring into his bank roll. No, kid. Beat that stuff out of your pretty head. How’re they to know, anyway? Guess we aren’t shouting things.”

For some moments Annette submitted to the caress of the man’s fleshy hand. She was thinking hard. She was calculating. But more than all, she was battling with the woman she was powerless to deny.

At last she turned. Her big bold eyes were hidden. She drew a sharp breath which had no pretense in it. She had finally made up her mind. It was a tremendous moment, and she would willingly have escaped it. But reckless purpose was all too strong.

“They’ll know—come fall. Everybody’ll know.”

The man’s caresses ceased. But the girl’s clinging hand retained his. Sinclair had straightened up with a jolt. The low-spoken confession had startled him. For want of other attraction his gaze sought again the trader’s store, and derision had faded out of his eyes. The bill was bigger than he had believed possible.

Annette released his hand. Her movement was quick. It was almost rough. She turned her face up and her black eyes were no longer hidden. They were wide and alight with the fire of passion.

“Oh, Ernie,” she cried, her small hands clenching. “I never thought. I just loved you to death. You said there’d be no harm, an’—an’ I believed you, an’—an’ anyway I didn’t care so you loved me. Now I know. Now I can see. An’—an’ I’m scared. Oh, they’ll know before next winter. All the folks’ll know. You don’t know Pideau. You don’t know the Wolf. They’ll kill you. Maybe they’ll kill me, too. If they don’t shoot me to death they’ll turn me out into the snow to herd with the wolves, with—with—our baby. It’s no use. You needn’t shake your head. Say, I know the Wolf.”

“Ernie,” she urged with increasing vehemence, her hands unclenching and grasping the fur covering of the man’s powerful arm, “ther’s just one way. You got to fix it so they can’t. Don’t hand ’em a chance. D’you see? Married, with our baby thing born right, they can’t do a thing. Ther’ ain’t a man or woman in Buffalo Coulee but’ll be right on our side. An’ your folks, your superintendent, all the police. They’ll be for us, sure. It’s——”

Sinclair released his arm without gentleness. There was a queer look in the glassy eyes that looked down into the girl’s.

“You’re rattled, kid, plumb rattled!” he cried.

Then of a sudden his whole manner underwent a change. He knew now the full extent of the bill he had to meet, and in one revealing flash he had discovered the means whereby he could settle it.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds, little kid,” he said, as he again took possession of the only too willing hands. “Oh, I can marry you all right. I’ll be crazy glad to. But—but you’ve got to help me.”

The girl’s eyes reflected the effect of his ready assent. They were shining with a great light. She was thrilled.

A time-worn phrase flashed through her mind.

“You’ll marry me, sure!”

Not once but many, many times she had been forced to listen to it. It was the Wolf’s unfailing retort to her fiercest challenge.

Her sense of triumph now became supreme. It was triumph in her everlasting battle with the Wolf. Married to Sinclair, her baby born in wedlock, she felt that at long last she was to wrest the victory her fiercest impishness had failed so far to yield her. Help? Help? It was her lover’s without the asking.

“Tell me?” she cried eagerly in the uplift of the moment.

But Sinclair hesitated. It was necessary for her to urge him a second time.

“Well?” she demanded, with a flash of swift impatience.

Annette missed the meaning of Sinclair’s hesitation. She missed the cunning that grew in the man’s smile. She failed to realize that his gaze had wandered and was searching the distance. She saw nothing in that moment but her own triumph, and her own desire for him to go on.

“You know, kid, I’ve wanted all along to have you marry me,” the man said. “I’ve wanted that since ever I saw your dandy eyes that couldn’t help telling me all a feller yearns for in life. I bin crazy for you. I’ll go right on being crazy for you all my life. But—but I haven’t a thing but my p’lice pay. And that wouldn’t buy a right feedin’ bottle for our swell kiddie. Then there’s regulations. Oh, I don’t mean they forbid a constable getting married. They don’t. But the government makes it hard as hell for that to happen. And when it does it’s queer how quick the married boy finds himself quitting the Force. You got to be a corporal at least. Then the Superintendent, the Inspector, the Sergeant-major, they’ll all hand you all they know, so you can fix yourself and your wife right. I’m not a corporal. I’m only a constable. But I’m going to be a corporal. Later, I’m going to be a sergeant-major. And maybe, even, in a while, an inspector. I’ll get to be all those things later, if—you’ll help me right now.”

The girl’s expression changed with every phase of her feelings as she listened to the man’s carefully considered words. And as he ceased speaking her eagerness was beyond her control.

“Say, Ernie! How? You only need to say how. Help you? Why, ther’ ain’t a thing I wouldn’t do.”

“Isn’t there?”

Sinclair came close up to the rail. He bent down so that his face was on a level with Annette’s. He looked squarely into the eyes which peered out from her storm collar, and he used all the force of will he possessed.

The girl gestured eloquently.

“Not a thing.”

“It’s easy—if you’ve the grit?” he warned, noting the unease that crept into the girl’s eyes in response.

“The grit?”

“Grit, little kid. Something that don’t rightly belong to a girl’s ordinary make-up.”

Annette’s eyes flashed dangerously.

“I got grit—plenty. Try me,” she snapped.

Again came Sinclair’s laugh.

“You got no use for Pideau,” he said. “And the Wolf sets you crazy mad. You’ve said so. You guess you hate the Wolf, who reckons to force you to marry him whether you like it or not. That’s so, isn’t it? That’s how you’ve said.”

He waited for Annette’s responsive nod.

“They bulldoze you between ’em,” he went on. “They set you working to hand ’em dollars. They hold you to a play that stands you in reach of penitentiary. That’s so. You’re as deep in as them. Well, in one play you can cut it all out. In one play you can make it so I can marry you right off. And it’s a play that’ll bring those two boys up with a round turn before they reach for the rope they’re surely heading for. Sooner or later there’ll be a shoot-up. And that means the rope. Well, you can help me. You can fix things. And when we’re married, and your little kid, our little kid’s born right, you’ll be glad for what you’ve done. And you’ll see your man with swell gold chevrons on his arm, and the pay that hands you the sort of stuff you need from life. You can do it, kid. You surely can.”

The man was watching. His eyes never left the girl’s.

“How?” Annette asked in a whisper.

The man spoke on the instant. His whole manner was sharp and compelling.

“Show me the location of that darn still! That’s all. Just show me.”

Annette started back as though he had struck her in the face. Her lips sucked in the cold air, and the color faded out of her cheeks.

“Me hand them—penitentiary? Me?” she gasped.

“Do you want to herd with the wolves in snow-time? Say, there’ll be no marrying talk when the Wolf knows. The Wolf, who reckons you’re marked down his chattel. The Wolf, who you can’t ever hope to stand up to.”

The manner of it was wanton in its ruthlessness.

“The still? Tell you? God! No, Ernie! I just can’t do it!”

The girl stood off, staggered by the enormity of the thing he had demanded of her. Horror and a fierce reaction were surging.

But Sinclair had played his card to take the trick. The values lay on the table for the girl to see. He could afford to wait while she studied them, before the cards were turned and shut away.

His manner softened. But he did not look in her direction. He was watching a quick-moving figure in a pea-jacket that had just left the store across the township.

“Say, little kid, don’t worry a thing,” he soothed her. “Forget it,” he went on, with a short laugh. “Don’t try to say a thing now. I wouldn’t have you to. You see, I just love you to death. I’m crazy to have you my wife. If I don’t get that promotion, why, we’ll just have to wait around till I do. See? Maybe that’ll mean a year or so. Still I just want you, kid, and I’ll wait sure. Now beat it. It’s time I fixed my plugs back in the barn. And anyway, I’ve just seen that darn skulking Wolf slide out of the store. Beat it, kid, and think things out in your own cute way.”

CHAPTER III
THE MARCH OF EVENTS

ANNETTE returned to the home of the wolf pack in a desperate mood. She was terrified.

It was a small frame house on one floor only, standing in the shadow of the iron-roofed store. It contained three sleeping rooms, a living-room, and adjoining the main building was a lean-to kitchen place.

It was an abode without any refinement. It had all the makeshift of those whose culture belongs to the primitive. It was the only sort of home which Pideau understood. And his had been the provision of it and its designing, on their first arrival in Buffalo Coulee.

It had been improved not one iota since that time, in spite of an abounding prosperity. Its whole furnishing was of the crudest. And its decorations were a survival through years of rough use and comparative disregard for cleanliness. It possessed, too, that unclean atmosphere which no half-breed habitation ever escapes.

Annette flung the door closed behind her to cut off the stream of cold that might well have had good effect upon the stale human atmosphere of the place. It was the careless, violent act of a mind distraught. She crossed the living-room, which was littered with the evidence of her menfolk. And, passing a second door, she slammed that behind her as well, and sighed relief as she gazed about her at the familiar surroundings of her own sleeping room.

A moment or two later her fur cap was lying on the patchwork coverlet of her bed, and her coat was tumbled beside it.

She moved across to the makeshift dressing chest which was still the same piece of furniture which had served her in childhood. Its only development since that time was its litter of toilet articles, which from time to time had been bestowed upon her by the Wolf. It was truly a litter, in which was displayed none of that pride and refinement of taste usually associated with a woman of youth and real beauty. Everything remained just where its user had chanced to set it down.

The girl gazed at her reflection in the cheap swing mirror. It was no act of vanity, it was in no sense a desire to admire the wonderful dark-haired reflection she discovered there. It was a simple expression of her mood; an involuntary impulse which had no other meaning than to supply her with an object upon which to concentrate while she thought.

Annette was breathing quickly as she stood there. She made no effort to conceal her agitation here in the privacy of her own room. Her brain was almost reeling.

She knew she was face to face with a real crisis. And she knew the magnitude of it. In whatever direction she looked, from whatever angle, the position was always the same. Motherhood was hers. Only was it a question of time before it was physically accomplished. The future—her future—the whole of everything that counts in a woman’s life was trembling in the balance.

She wanted to think. She told herself she must think with all her might, but coldly, calmly. She must leave all feeling out. She must beat down all emotion.

In practice, however, none of these things were possible to her. It was not real thought that came to her. Only a headlong tumbling of feeling and emotion which urged her blindly and without reason.

Then came the Wolf.

It was a sound in the living-room. It was the padding of moccasined feet on a boarded floor. And, in a moment, Annette found herself back in the living-room with her slim back turned to the comforting wood stove and confronting the smiling creature whose undesired presence spurred her further to hasty impulse.

The Wolf’s eyes were frigid.

“Say,” Annette greeted him, “Pideau didn’t reckon you’d be along back for days yet. What’s brought you?”

The ungraciousness was more than usually accentuated. Annette had no thought for their years of childhood together. Only she remembered her bitter antagonism and her present need. Her lips closed tightly over her words, giving them the sharpness to which the Wolf was accustomed.

The only sign in the man was a deep intake of breath.

He saw the girlhood he worshipped under its simple covering of silk, and a brief, knee-length cloth skirt that revealed flesh-hued stockings below it, and he was satisfied. It was all sufficient. Annette’s moods were her own. They were of no serious matter. He knew them all. He had known them in her as a babe. He knew them no less in the grown woman. He accepted her now as he would have accepted the wayward child of years ago. It was only the man with whom he had seen her who would learn the measure of the devil that was driving him.

“I’m through,” he said. He unbuttoned his coat and began to roll himself a cigarette. “There’s five hundred gallons standin’ ready for the teams. It goes across to-morrow night.”

Annette was startled. But she watched the moving fingers, missing nothing of the Wolf’s expression.

Her mind had leaped back to her lover, and the thing he had said to her. It was almost like Fate. Five hundred gallons, the Wolf had said. And it was to be passed across the border to-morrow night.

“Five hundred gallons?”

Her echo of the Wolf’s announcement was much in the manner of Pideau’s. She watched the thrusting of the cigarette into the man’s mouth, and the lighting of it.

“It’s a swell bunch,” he observed easily. “It’s the biggest brew yet.” He inhaled deeply. Then he gestured with an expressive hand. “I’ll run you into Calford so you can make a big buy for yourself out of my share. That’s right after to-morrow night, when we’ve pouched the dollars, an’ got away with it.”

Annette regarded him in silence. She saw in him the most picturesque creature in Buffalo Coulee. His tall figure, his dark, intelligent eyes. His clean-cut features and shining black hair. But then there was his manner, his maddening assurance. Now, as always, it stirred the flame of her stormiest resentment.

The Wolf looked for no gratitude, and found none. Annette occupied his whole soul. It was not only his privilege to minister to her pleasure, it was not simply a right, a happiness; it was his most treasured duty.

She was Annette. She was utterly desirable. She was a deep feminine mystery that fired his every sense, and made him glad. She was his whole worship. All his being was centred on that sublime ultimate which he intended should be theirs.

For the rest? What did it matter that she preferred to anger him? Then her power to hurt was infinite. However she drove him, however deeply she hurled him into the abyss of soul-despair, it was all a part of the transcendent whole of his man’s adoration.

But Annette’s manner abruptly changed. It became eager. She forgot her desire to hurt.

“Say, boy,” she cried eagerly. “You must have run the old tank night an’ day.”

The Wolf nodded.

“Sure. I needed to get through quick.”

“Why?”

“Why?” The Wolf glanced round. His gaze encountered the frost-rimmed window. He could see through it a doubtful outline of the distant police quarters. Then he jerked it out. “To get right back to—here.”

Annette ignored the significance of his reply.

“How’re you goin’ to handle such a dope of juice as that?” she asked sharply. “You can’t make it in a single jump. An’ the trail’s red hot with those who’re yearning. Five hundred gallons? You’ll never get away with it. They’ll never let you pouch those dollars. How? Tell me.”

And the Wolf told her. He told her in rough outline without a shadow of concern. He only withheld the hour of dispatch because it was not yet settled. And Annette listened to him with all her ears. Again, she forgot to scorn when he had finished. Her eyes simply hardened, and she shook her head.

“Why leave it to Pideau?” she asked. “He hasn’t your slickness.”

Then she broke into a laugh. It was the return to the mocking and jeering which were overdue.

“Say, you aren’t as wise as you reckon, boy. Not by a lot. Pideau? Psha! Pideau’s a mule. An’ his sense is about equal. Five hundred? And you’d risk a big bunch of money to his hands? If you mean to hand me that buy in Calford you best tote the stuff yourself. If you’ve two grains of sense in your fool head, that’s what you’ll do.”

“No!”

The Wolf flung the remains of his cigarette under the damper of the stove. Then he rolled a fresh one. And while he considered the work of his fingers his eyes grew hot. He was thinking of the man, Sinclair, and the blood surged through his veins.

He lit his cigarette and it hung on his lower lip. Then he returned his tobacco sack to his pocket and looked up. As his eyes encountered hers, Annette read the challenge in them. Instantly she was caught in a whirlwind of passion.

“Why?” she demanded roughly. Then she turned away to the stove with her hands outheld to it.

But it was only for a second. The next moment she found herself flung about with a force that nearly threw her off her balance. The eyes of the Wolf were blazing as he gripped her and held her where she stood.

“Because ther’s a heap too much Sinclair to this fool township when I’m out of it,” he cried savagely. “Say, if I thought Sinclair ’ud hit my trail, an’ pull police med’cine on me, I’d trade the dope myself, surely, an’ cut Pideau right out of the play. But he wouldn’t. With me on the trail he’ll stop around here handin’ you all the stuff that comes natural to his sort, the same as I found him to-day when I pulled in from the hills. That’s why. Pideau’ll trade. I’ll stop around to see Sinclair—don’t.”

The Wolf’s hold relaxed. It was as though his sudden storm had expended itself. He flung the cigarette away and looked into the girl’s furious face as she hurled the madness of her moment at him.

“Too much Sinclair?” she shrilled, striving for derision but accomplishing only violence. “I’ll see all of Sinclair I fancy to. All! You get that? I like Ernie Sinclair. I like him good. He’s a man. He’s a decent police boy, an’ not a crook ‘homebrew’ runner. He’s not the sort to brew poison up in the hills, an’ send folks raving crazy into the bughouse down across the border for the rotten dollars they haven’t more sense than to pass you. Who’re you? What sort of a man? You Wolf! I’ll tell you,” she raved. “A no-account. A poor ‘stray’ roped by the fool woman who stole you. God! I hate you! You ain’t a thing to me. Nothin’. I wouldn’t stand for you a brother. You hear? I’ll see Sinclair when I fancy. I’ll see him all I choose. If I feel that way I’ll marry——”

“You won’t kid!”

The storm in the man broke again. The Wolf’s face was ashen against his dark cap. Suddenly he leaped. It was like the noiseless spring of a puma, so swift, so sudden. The girl was caught by her shoulders and held by hands that crushed the flesh under them. And she stood there struggling for release while the man’s passion burned in eyes that seemed to be reading every secret of her soul.

“You won’t, kid,” the Wolf reiterated, through gritting teeth. “You’re goin’ to quit him right away. I know him. You don’t. You can’t know the scum he is. He isn’t for your sort. Only—— Say, you’re from the hills, clean as God made you. You’re not Molly Gros. If he gets around you after this, as sure as it’s snow-time in Buffalo Coulee, I’ll shoot him to death so ther’ ain’t enough meat left over to make a burial. That goes.”

The tenacious hands bruised mercilessly. Annette’s efforts to escape were unavailing.

“Quit, kid,” the Wolf went on. “It’s just no sort of use kickin’. I’ve got you now, an’ you’re goin’ to hear it all. I tell you ther’s only room for me around you. Not another livin’ soul. I’ve told you that years. I’ve told it ever since we fished together in the darn hills. You’re goin’ to marry me whatever he thinks, whatever you think. I love you. I love you to death. Say, I love you so I could beat the life out of your beautiful body rather than see it for another. You ken rave an’ shout. You ken claw with your darn mean hands. You ken raise all the hell your dandy notions set you to. It don’t matter a curse. Not a curse. Get it right now. Get it good. You’re mine. An’ you always will be. Psha!”

The girl reeled and nearly fell on the blazing stove. It was a sweeping gesture that came with the man’s final exclamation. It was the storm of his passion finding physical outlet. It was the man swept by the violence of the sex in him.

He stood there a wonderful figure of manly beauty, straight, and clean. And his burning eyes never left the face of the girl. He saw the violence behind it. He realized the fury in the heaving bosom for which he yearned. He remained silent and waiting.

And Annette came at once. But it was a different Annette from that which he knew. With superhuman effort the girl choked back the fury that well-nigh strangled her. She even forced a smile. The Wolf stared in amazement.

“Wolf!”

In place of anger there was something like humility. Then the smile Annette had forced deepened. It looked even more real.

“I hadn’t thought you’d the guts, Wolf,” she said.

The man stared.

“No,” he said helplessly. “That’s how you’ve most always said.”

Annette nodded. Her smile broadened still further. But the sight of it only gladdened the man when it should have warned him.

“I did it because I thought that way,” the girl went on humbly. She drew a deep breath. “Say, I don’t care a curse for him. I never did. He couldn’t ever be a thing in my life. I’m not Molly Gros.”

Reaction swept over the man.

“Say, kid, I’m—I’m sorry——”

He stood with his long arms outheld. But Annette shook her head.

“No, Wolf,” she said gently. “Not that. But—but you’re dead right. There’ll be no more fool’ry and Sinclair. I’m thro’. It was a crazy game, and I’d ought to’ve known better. He’s dirt when a woman’s around, an’ I’m not looking for dirt.”

She sighed profoundly.

“Say, you can go right on an’ trade that dope yourself. I’m all for that buy in Calford. An’—an’ I won’t get it if you trust father. Say, boy, it’s a deal? Our trade’s bigger to me than even gettin’ you mad. You go to it, an’ put that trade thro’. An’ I’ll swear to cut Sinclair right out from between us—here an’ now.”

The Wolf had no learning. He only had his own understanding of loyalty and love, and the invincible courage of utter fearlessness.

Annette had achieved with her smile what no raging could have done for her. And she knew that that was so as she watched the Wolf pick up and relight his cigarette.

CHAPTER IV
SCHEMING

ANNETTE was standing at the window of the living-room. She was alone and glad to be so. Never in her life had she been more thankful for solitude and the shadows about her.

The room was in darkness, except for the ruddy glow under the damper of the wood stove. Beyond the window it was inky black, for night had fallen, and a silent, windless snowstorm was burying the prairie outside under a new white shroud.

The girl’s day had been long and difficult. She had found it prolonged purgatory.

After those swift-moving events about noon the period of waiting and dissembling had taxed Annette’s impatient nature to the uttermost. But she had forced herself to endure. She had smiled on her father, and even more upon the Wolf. She had ministered to them and watched them eat the frugal meals it was her work to prepare. And she had betrayed nothing. With all her strength she had struggled that no suspicion should find place in the minds of her menfolk. Now, now at last, she was free, and there was no longer need of disguise.

Her eyes were shining with a cold, hard reflection of the ruddy firelight. Her cheeks were drawn by the set of her jaws. Her lips were pressed tight, so that her breathing dilated her delicate nostrils. Annette was never more the untamed half-breed than at that moment. The hot blood in her veins was as full of mad impulse as a freshet in springtime.

But Annette’s passionate mood was not all that the firelight revealed. There was something else. Deep in her soul something was striving for place, something which no resolve could altogether shut out. It was not doubt. It was not weakness. Yet it conveyed something of them both.

Unhappiness? Possibly. Or was it grief? Whatever it was the result was there in a queer dissatisfied frown which marred the even marking of her brows. In another woman that frown would surely have indicated the nearness of tears. But Annette had known no tears since childhood.

But softer emotions were resolutely dealt with. Annette was too surely a young human animal; she was too surely bred of debased and calamitous stock to yield to the gentler spirit of her sex. She was potential for good or evil in just such measure as those who claimed her affections were powerful to influence her. And just now her whole desire was for the man Ernest Sinclair, and to do his bidding.

Sinclair’s bidding! But Annette saw nothing of its enormity. She was blind to everything but the bait which the man had held out to her. Her faith, her credulity, these were the woman in her. Her lack of all scruple was a reaction of the unlovely father she was called upon to betray.

Standing there in the play of the firelight, Annette’s thought flowed on unchecked, unguided. Her frown remained. And that which struggled so vainly for place in her soul continued its impotent striving.

At last her thought settled, and she found herself gazing upon a mental picture of the Wolf. And as she gazed an angry, scornful, half smile drove the frown from her face.

Memory was astir. It was memory of that which had passed between them only that morning. The man’s violence. His hectoring. His disregard of anything she might desire or feel. He was a fool. A vain, crazy fool, whose confidence ran away with him. Well, he would soon learn where his vanity was to lead him.

Penitentiary! She thought of it coldly, grimly. The Wolf. Why not? Oh, it would serve him right. She wondered. What sentence would the Court pass on him when she delivered him into Sinclair’s hands? She remembered the men’s talk when considering their risk. Five years. It had always been of five years in penitentiary.

Five years! They would both get five years. A shiver passed through her body. But she did not pause. Penitentiary for her father had no power to quicken a single pulse beat. He was of no account in her life in spite of his affection for her. But the Wolf was different. The fate of the Wolf could never be a matter of indifference to her. She told herself fiercely that she hated him too much for that. She assured herself of the satisfaction his penalty would give her. She was glad. Very glad. It would break his conceit. It would smash his crazy insolence. It would be the ending of their long drawn-out conflict with victory, complete victory, for her.

She sighed.

But her sigh was gone on the instant. She could still feel the hurt of the Wolf’s crushing fingers, first on her arms, then on the soft flesh of her shoulders. Then the brutal way he had hurled her from him, as if she were something he hated and loathed.

Marry him? Marry the Wolf? Would she? Never, never, never! He could go to penitentiary. It would be she who sent him there, not Sinclair. And after five years, when he came out, she would be a wife. Ernie Sinclair would be her husband, the father of her child. And maybe even, by that time, the Wolf would find her crowned by a generous motherhood.

It would be triumph. What a triumph for all he had done to her. Yes, it certainly would be a triumph.

But even as Annette thought of her triumph that queer stirring in the deep of her heart became more insistent, and her pretty brows frowned the more surely.

It was at that moment it came. That which she had been awaiting. It was a light shining through the snowfall outside. The office window of the store had lit up. And she knew that the Wolf and Pideau had foregathered to complete their plans for the conveyance of those five hundred gallons of liquor.

She turned from her window. She picked up her fur coat. She clad herself against the storm. Then, closing down the stove damper for safety, she passed out of the home of the wolf pack.

Pideau was lounging back in his hard square chair in the office of the store. His ill-shod feet were thrust up on the desk which was the repository for such accountings as his partnership with the Wolf necessitated. His mood was more than usually suspicious. He was chewing, and the cuspidor, more than a yard away from him, testified revoltingly to his habit.

The Wolf was in happier heart than he had known for a long time. He was contentedly smoking, sprawled in a low rocker-chair. He understood Pideau. He read the working of his mind beyond all doubt, and it disturbed him not at all.

The half-breed, however, was in a dangerous mood. Suspicion with him was symptomatic. It was always a danger signal. He was guessing and disturbed. The Wolf had left him that noon a potential killer. Now killing never seemed farther from his mind.

He knew the Wolf had searched out Annette after leaving him. He had made it his business to know all the Wolf’s movements. He knew their meeting had been violently stormy. Then why this change? Why had hours passed, and the Wolf made no attempt to carry out his threat? The position had not changed. Sinclair was still Annette’s lover.

Pideau’s temper was on edge. The Wolf was still the Wolf of old to him. He was still the one witness of his own earlier crimes.

Pideau spat with a splash.

“Well?” he demanded, his ill humor never less disguised.

The Wolf sucked his cigarette and pondered the face before him.

“Guess we need to make our plans right away,” he said after a while. “The liquor needs to go right off to-morrow night for a clean-up. I fixed it eight o’clock. That’s to hand us the best of the night to get through. Ther’s no moon. If it storms, the better. We’ll have to get right back before daylight.”

“We?”

Pideau was startled. And the Wolf, as he watched him, noted the sparkle of his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “I make the trip with you after all.”

“Why?”

The Wolf pitched the stump of his cigarette away, and pulled out his tobacco sack.

“You guessed it was a two-man job—five hundred gallons,” he said quietly.

“An’ you didn’t.”

“No, you put me wise.” The Wolf’s laugh was derisive.

“Guess you need to tell me,” Pideau said sharply. “It’s one thing now, an’ another when your belly eases.”

“Sure!” The Wolf was intent on the cigarette he was rolling. “Talk’s waste. I’m goin’ to make the cache, an’ haul those kegs ready. You’ll make the creek bank under the bluff with the teams, an’ I’ll tote ’em over. That’ll be eight to-morrow night. You best have Pete an’ Kat with the teams. They’re red hot in a scrap. Then you’ll be in one sled, an’ me in the other, an’ we’ll pick up the O’Hagan bunch at the border to hand over, an’ pouch the stuff. O’Hagan’s had word and is crazy for the dope. He’s wanting it bad. Say,” he paused. And the smile in his eyes hardened to a glitter, “when O’Hagan’s yearnin’ he needs watchin’ most. We’ll need a bunch of guns. A whole blamed arsenal. That boy ’ud shoot up his dying mother for the gold in her teeth.”

While the Wolf talked Pideau made no sign. He just listened to his orders without any change of expression. But he was still guessing.

He nodded. Then he suddenly turned an ear. The movement was so apparent that the Wolf gave a final twist to his cigarette and thrust it quickly to his mouth, and searched in the direction of Pideau’s gaze.

“What’s up?” he asked after a moment.

For answer Pideau’s feet came down from the desk without a sound. He stood up. He passed swiftly to the door, and opened it noiselessly and peered through a narrow aperture. Then he passed out, closing the door gently behind him.

The Wolf remained where he was smoking. But he watched the door through which his partner had passed.

Presently Pideau returned. The Wolf asked no question. He sat eyeing him.

“Tho’t I heard someone movin’ around in the store,” Pideau said quietly when he had closed the door. “But—I’d say I was wrong. Maybe it’s the darn rats chasing the crackers an’ cheese.”

He sat down, and his feet again went up on to the desk. The Wolf watched him bite at his black tobacco plug but offered no comment.

For some moments there was complete silence, and Pideau’s face was heavy with thought. Then his eyes snapped.

“That stuff’s all right,” he growled suddenly. “It’s the usual play, only two teams. But I got to know the other boy. What’s the big thing? You cooled off, ain’t you? You ain’t killin’ Sinclair? Maybe that don’t seem the joy it did? Annette? You aren’t worried fer her any more? She turned you down? Or hev you jest—weakened? You wer’ stoppin’ around to kill Sinclair. It was a swell talk of killin’ you handed me. I was a fool. I figgered you’d the guts. I’d ought to’ve guessed better.”

The Wolf’s easy humor was impervious to the jibe. He laughed.

“Maybe the father would like good to have me do the killin’ that rightly belongs him.”

“It was you talked killin’.”

Pideau’s eyes sparkled angrily.

“Yes.”

“An’ now?” Pideau threw into his manner all that was foulest in him. “Sinclair’s leave-over’s good enough without a kick, eh? I surely made a poor guess.”

The Wolf gestured.

“It don’t matter what you guessed, Pideau,” he said coldly. “It’s wrong, anyway. Cut out the ‘leave-over’ though. Ther’ ain’t no ‘leave-over’ where Annette’s concerned. Annette’s the greatest thing ever stepped this crazy wilderness. An’ I don’t know how it comes she belongs a father like you. I’d kill Sinclair same as I’d kill you, if either of you hurt body or soul of Annette. You can get that right now. Annette’s cut Sinclair out fer me. Fer me! Do you get that, too? Ther’s no sort of need fer a killin’ now—none. I’m not goin’ around killin’ police boys fer pastime or to hand you joy.”

The Wolf looked for an outburst. But Pideau only shook his bullet head.

“She cut him out fer you?” he scorned. “She can’t!”

The Wolf’s eyes glittered.

“Why?”

“Molly Gros.”

The Wolf stood up. It was almost as though a spring had been released under him. He stood there, his tongue passing slowly across his lips. Then his jaws shut tight with a snap. His eyes were blazing. And the manner in which he searched the face confronting him stirred a deep feeling of unease in the pit of the half-breed’s stomach.

Just for a few moments the lash of his fury beat upon the Wolf’s brain. Then the crisis passed.

He turned away. He moved swiftly to the door. It was flung open. Then it closed behind him with a slam, and the Wolf was gone.

Pideau made no move to leave his seat. He remained precisely where the Wolf had left him with his feet thrust up on the desk. The only difference was that now he was staring thoughtfully at the empty rocker-chair. He was considering the Wolf’s refusal to kill Sinclair.

Pideau had built on it. Pideau had seen murder in the Wolf’s eyes that noon. And the sight had rejoiced him as could nothing else on earth. He had believed then that at long last the shadow of the Wolf was to be removed from his life.

So in his disappointment the man pondered morosely. He searched the position through and through, and it took him hours.

But his work was not unfruitful. And there was something like a smile in his wicked eyes when he finally left the store. In the long hours he had sat there he had solved several problems. And among them was that one which related to “rats chasing the crackers and cheese.”

CHAPTER V
PAYMENT

CONSTABLE SINCLAIR sealed and addressed his last letter. He sat back in his Windsor chair and, for some moments, pondered the address he had just written.

Then he turned and glanced over the ill-lit room that was his official home.

It was a bare enough place. It was no more than sufficient for the simplest human needs. But then no more was asked of it. Police life was never made easy.

The room was narrow and low-ceiled, and its walls were boarded. At one time in their career they had been varnished, but that was long ago. Now they were dingy with the smoke of many winters. A bed-cot of trestles and boards, with a straw palliasse and brown blankets on it, was the man’s sleeping place. A well-polished wood stove abated some of the winter cold. The only thing that could have been considered luxury was a washbowl on a makeshift table with a water bucket standing beside it. As for the writing table at which Sinclair was seated, it was small, of white wood, and served its purpose with nothing to spare.

There was no floor covering of any sort. There was not even a curtain over the double windows to afford privacy. A couple of old grain sacks were jambed at the foot of the door, but these were only for the purpose of shutting out some of the penetrating bitterness of the winter cold. The Spartan severity was extended even to the illumination. The single oil lamp was just sufficient to stir up shadows even in those narrow limits.

Sinclair was indifferent to bodily discomfort and found no fault with his quarters. But he hated the office work which he performed with meticulous thoroughness. That was his way. He was looking for promotion and knew how much that branch of his work counted with those in whose hands his official future lay. So he had spent a long and dreary evening completing his weekly report of ten foolscap pages. And after that he had written two private letters.

There was not much choice for him with the snow falling heavily outside. It was either work or his blankets. And as yet he was in no mood for sleep. So he had written a dutiful epistle to an aged mother in Toronto and a letter of several pages to a girl who occupied the position of governess to two very young children in the household of one of Calford’s leading citizens.

It was all very characteristic of Ernest Sinclair. He was sure of his own efficiency; quite certain of it. And furthermore he took good care never to leave undone any of those things which might serve his ambitions.

It was his way to spend a lot of spare time in calculation. No interest of his own was too small that it should not be fully weighed and measured. It was his aim in life that his sums should always prove. And if things did not always work out as his figures indicated it was not for lack of strenuous effort. When things went wrong with them he usually assured himself of the inevitability of the failure. Never, in his frankest moments did he admit the unfailing discount demanded by his own besetting weaknesses.

He rose alertly from his desk and crossed the room to the stove in the corner. Habit set him raking it. Then he generously replenished it from his store of cord-wood. Automatically he closed the damper and stood up, wiping the wood ash dust from his hands.

He felt almost elated. He was wondering and speculating as to the outcome of his morning’s interview with Annette. He felt that things should certainly come his way. He assured himself he was entitled to such a result. It had been hard work. It had made him sweat in spite of the cold. The inspiration that had leaped to his mind in the nick of time was something which tickled his vanity mightily.

But as he began to fill his pipe he found himself resorting again to his habit of calculation.

He knew Annette’s headlong temper, her impulse. He felt he knew by heart the nature of the clay he was seeking to mould. Annette had no real cleverness. She had a measure of nimbleness. In truth she was just a beautiful young animal full of a glorious joy of life. She was utterly desirable, of course, but nevertheless, a brainless, hot-blooded animal. That was all.

He forgot to complete the filling of his pipe. Instead he returned it to his pocket and rubbed his hands.

Then what would be the result, he asked himself? What must be the result? Annette had come to him with her woman’s purpose of forcing his hand. She meant him to father her child in the eyes of her world in Buffalo Coulee. She was a half-breed and he was white. And full well he knew the crazy desire of her kind for a white husband. She—yes—she would sacrifice anything—anybody—for the thing she wanted. She had been shocked in those first moments of the big idea. But——

Sinclair started. He shot a swift glance at the door of his room, which opened into his outer public office. For an instant he eyed it questioningly. Then he looked at the cheap clock hanging on a nail over his table. But, in a moment, he turned again to the door.

Several moments passed. Then he moved. He moved swiftly. And as he came to the door and flung it wide, the snub nose of an ugly small gun was poking out from the grip of his palm, which an instant before had been quite empty.

The yellow lamplight revealed a fur-clad figure. For an instant Sinclair’s gun hand was raised. Then it lowered. And it resought his pocket as he laughed.

“Say, kid,” he cried a little boisterously, “you gave me quite a scare. I sort of figgered you were some guy looking for my scalp. I was all for perforating your swell furs with a gun that don’t usually quit under ten rounds. Say, you faced this darn storm to see me? Why?”

He held out his arms, and for all the melting snow that was saturating Annette’s furs she was caught and held tightly to him while his hot lips caught hers.

The girl yielded. Then, with a little struggle, she released herself and stood breathing quickly. The dusky blood flushed up to her beautiful cheeks, and a flash of resentment to her eyes.

“I didn’t come around fer that,” she said sharply.

And Sinclair laughed in the confidence of success.

“Sure you didn’t. Say, is there a girl in the world ready to admit the things she wants from a man? No, no, kid. You didn’t come around for fooling. It’s a mighty important proposition to set you turning out on a night that’s only fit for starving timber wolves. Here, come across to the stove. Shake the snow off you, and thaw out those pretty fingers. I’ll close the door in case there’s any wolves chasing around.”

He laughed at his own pleasantry while he closed and fastened the door. Then, as the girl undid her fur coat beside the stove, her voice came sharply.

“That window,” she said. “Can’t you set a blanket across it?”

Sinclair paused half-way to her side. His eyes were still smiling the elation he felt. The girl gestured impatiently and spread out her hands to the warmth.

“You must,” she said. “I—I daresn’t stand around here with that window uncovered.”

“I see.”

In half a minute one of the brown blankets from Sinclair’s bed was hung on two nails that were already in the window casing for just such a purpose.

“You think anyone saw you come out?”

The policeman was at the stove. He was at the opposite side of it looking across into the pretty face that had lost something of its usual confidence. Annette’s gaze was unsteady. There was a distinct droop at the corners of the mouth that Sinclair knew could caress so hotly. He realized from the swift rise and fall of a tumultuous bosom that she was disturbed and apprehensive.

“They’re abed,” she said. “They’ve been abed an hour. But I—I think I’m scared.”

Sinclair shook his head.

“No, kid,” he said. “Not scared. That’s not you. I tell you I’d hate to stand up to the thing that could scare you. But you’ve nothing to be scared for anyway.”

He moved round the stove to the girl’s side, his pulses stirring. He sought to take her into his arms again, but, with a swift movement, the girl eluded him.

“What’s amiss?” he asked sharply.

“Nothin’, Ernie. Only—only—ther’ ain’t time to fool now.”

The man’s eyes were hot. All the worst in him was uppermost. His cooler, calculating mind was befogged by that passionate weakness he was powerless to deny. He wanted the girl more than he desired advancement at that moment.

“Why?” he cried, with a petulant snap of disappointment.

Annette gestured impatiently.

“Because I’ve got what you want, an’ must beat it right back to home before—before——”

“Kiss me first, then, so I can listen right. Say, I can’t listen, I can’t think till—till you kiss me.”

The man was beside himself. The whole expression of his face had transformed. It was rather terrible. The hot blood was madly surging to his head, and veins were standing out on his forehead. He watched her devouringly.

The girl understood. And curiously there was no responsive feeling in her. It was as if something she saw in him reacted adversely. Her own passions were for once quiescent in proportion to the extravagance of his. She turned to the stove.

“Quit fool’ry, I tell you,” she said, so coldly that Sinclair grew angrily calm. “What sort o’ man are you anyway? Can’t you quit that sort of thing when—when we got business to fix? I tell you I got what you need, an’ I’ll go clear through with it. But you can’t get it till you quit foolin’. An’ you can’t get it till you swear before God you’ll marry me right away when it’s thro’.”

For some moments the man stood a prey to the madness of his passions. For a while desire set him yearning to lay violent hands on the beautiful creature who so furiously inflamed him. Then, at last, the cold stare of the girl’s eyes reduced him to sanity. But it was a surly sort of sanity.

“You’re a cool devil, Annette,” he sneered. Then he tried to laugh. “Go right on,” he added sharply.

Annette stared down at the stove.

“You swear ’fore God?”

The man made no answer. And Annette shook her head.

“You got to hand me that,” she insisted.

“Say, kid that’s all right, but I just hate the notion of a—a bargain between you an’ me.”

Sinclair was master of himself again. And his brain was working on those calculations which came so naturally to him.

“See, Annette, I’m just crazy for you, and always will be,” he went on. “Bargaining with you is like playing the Jew game. There’s no sort of need for a bargain. Of course I’m goin’ to marry you. Do you think I’d leave our little kiddie without a father? I’m no skunk of that sort. I just love you to——”

“But you got to swear that Ernie, all the same,” Annette persisted. “It’s your own bargain. You made it that way this mornin’. You figgered you’d marry me if you got your promotion. An’ I was to make it so you could get it. Well, I figger I ken do all you want. I ken make it so you get them at the still with five hundred gallons of liquor lyin’ ready to ship. But when I’ve done that I’d say I can’t draw back. Can I? Once you got your hands on ’em you got what you need. Well, I got to get from you what I need. You’ve got to swear on the Gospel. You got to swear by the swell mother that bred you. You got to swear by all that figgers a thing in your life. If you don’t——? Well, we’ll leave it right there.”

Sinclair realized from the tone, from the cold of her manner, that he had come very near to blundering. He even feared that her suspicions were already aroused. The remedy must be instant.

He nodded and smiled with all the good will he could summon.

“I’ll swear by every god that was ever worshipped,” he said eagerly. “I’ll swear it by my dear old mother ’way East on her farm. It’s my dying oath, kid. The oath every school kid knows, and would hate to break. Do you feel good about it now? You know, little girl, there isn’t a thing in the world I want like you. Not even that promotion we been worrying over. It hurt you didn’t trust me without that oath. But I sort of see now. You got to have it for our—kiddie. Well, now you’ve got it you can pass me mine.”

Annette gestured nervously. She turned from the man’s challenging eyes.

“It—it seems tough,” she demurred.

“What? To fulfil your side of the bargain?”

Annette raised her eyes to the glassy watchfulness of his.

“It sure means penitentiary?” she cried suddenly. “How long?”

“Five years at most, I’d say.”

“Five?”

“Yes.”

Sinclair saw the struggle going on behind the girl’s eyes. He had everything to gain by patient persuasion. So he held strong check upon himself.

“I don’t guess your father’ll get more than a year. It’s the Wolf,” he said, watching the effect of his words. “He’s the feller with the still. He’s the real boss. That’s his way. He runs the still. He’s got your father where he needs him. And treats him to the same bull-dozing he does you. He’s a swine of a bully. He’s made your life tough as well. Five years in penitentiary’ll hand him an elegant lesson not to bet on a ‘full house’ when he’s barely ace high. He’s got a hell of a stiff neck. But five years of penitentiary’ll change all that.”

A bitter laugh answered him.

“Yes, yes,” Annette cried eagerly. “That’s it. It’ll smash his fool conceit. It——”

She broke off with a sharp intake of breath.

“Well? Where is it? The still?”

The girl flung out her hands.

“The Coulee. Spruce Coulee. Back to the hills.”

Sinclair stared.

“Why Spruce Coulee’s only eight miles back to the hills, and I ride that trail every month of the year.”

“I know. That’s his bluff—the Wolf’s. He figgered you’d never locate it if it was right under your nose.”

The man had forgotten Annette entirely. He was thinking of the men. He was furious at the bluff which the Wolf had flung at him.

“Just where?” he asked, with a sharpness that sounded harsh in the stillness of the half-lit room.

Annette’s slim hands came together sharply. There was a queer straining in the eyes that gazed up at her lover. She drew a deep breath as she remembered the child that was to be born to her.

“’Way back of the big bluff of jack pine wher’ the freshet cuts out o’ the hills into the coulee. It’s the break in the hillside that’s full o’ water come spring, an’ snow in winter. You seen it, an’ passed it, and reckoned it wasn’t worth a thought. It’s just a split in the rock wher’ it starts. But it opens out to a widish cañon right inside, an’ it goes back miles. The still’s set up in a cave west o’ the third bend, a cave big enough to drive a team an’ spring wagon into. It needs findin’ even at that, for it’s hid up close by a fall of loose rock and a wall of scrub. But it’s ther’. An’ ther’s five hundred gallons kegged an’ waitin’ shipment. They’re to tote the stuff eight o’clock to-morrow night.”

The girl’s words came torrentially. It was as if she dared not pause lest her purpose should fail her. At the finish she confronted the policeman, with her rounded bosom heaving.

“Eight o’clock?” Sinclair nodded. “They’re shipping five hundred gallons?”

Suddenly he laughed. And a look of fear in Annette’s eyes replied to him.

“Ernie!”

But again the policeman laughed.

“Don’t worry, kid,” he cried.

“But they’re desperate. They’ll fight like devils. They’ll shoot to kill. They mustn’t kill you. They——”

“Kill nothing!” the man scorned. “There’ll be no killing. Just penitentiary. I want ’em both. And now I’ll get ’em. And——”

The girl’s hands were prisoned.

The next moment her body was caught in the man’s arms, and Annette submitted to fierce caresses. She submitted but did not respond. A queer desperation seemed to have taken hold of her. It was reaction. And it robbed her of the power to think connectedly. In those moments the one thing she knew was an awful despair, and a pitiful desire to fall a-weeping.

For Sinclair it was a wonderful moment of triumph. At last the whole game was in his hands.

An hour later Ernest Sinclair was alone. Annette had passed out again into the silent deluge of snow.

The girl’s going left him unconcerned. It meant nothing to him that she must make her way alone across the township in a blinding snowstorm. He had obtained from her all he wanted, and that was all that mattered. She had served her purpose. She was a half-breed. Just a half-breed. A mere chattel to be discarded when his end was achieved.

He sought his bed, and pulled the blankets up about his neck and ears. His stove was well banked for the night. And now he had a pleasant stock of thoughts which would occupy him till sleep overtook him.

Oh, yes—there was going to be no mistake. He was winning all along the line. It would be strange indeed if his efficiency failed him in the moment of success. At eight o’clock to-morrow night there would be no shipment of five hundred gallons of “homebrew.” No—but there would be two prisoners who had long been “wanted” to his credit. And then—and then——

CHAPTER VI
THE CACHE

THE moon was at its full. Its cold brilliance was a perfect match for the temperature prevailing. It was a clear, bitter night, without a breath of wind out of the western hills sufficient to lift it, however slightly, from the depths below zero into which it had plunged.

The frigid melancholy was broken only by odd nature sounds. They came from afar. They echoed near at hand. There was the rarer boom of frost-bitten forest trees. There was the occasional moan from the hungry bowels of some lonesome creature of the wilderness. There were other sounds, too. Mysterious, unaccountable sounds that only served to express more surely something of life’s last hope lost in the cold heart of a merciless winter.

East and west a frozen watercourse wound its way. It lay at the foot of a shouldering of sharp, rough-hewn cliffs, which represented the last barrier where the world of western hills gave on to the undulations of virgin prairie.

Even under snow the course of Spruce Coulee was sharply outlined. The snow-laden limbs of conifers sagged heavily for miles along its banks. So, too, with the lower scrub, and the rime-decked branches of leafless trees. Otherwise it would have been indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

The woods on its far bank were tight-packed against the sheer of the cliffs. In places they even hid the rocky wall entirely. Doubtless in summer they were gracious enough. But just now their only service seemed to be to lend the gleaming white of their burden to hide up the careless roughnesses of Nature’s quarrying.

At one point along the course of the coulee the woods broke on either bank. One break was natural. But that was where an irresistible freshet had driven a way for itself through the rocky barrier of the hills in a boisterous effort to reach and swell the waters of the superior stream. Its achievement was doubtless the work of ages. But it was complete. A deep rift split the face of the gray stone cliffs to a breadth of something over twenty feet.

On the prairie bank the break was a narrow enough opening, barely sufficient for the passage of a horse-drawn vehicle. It had nothing of the naturalness which had split the face of the opposite cliff. But so cunning was its design, so insignificantly winding its course through the trees, and with so much care had obstructing tree-boles been removed, that its presence betrayed not the smallest indication of the human handiwork that had fashioned it.

Directly between these openings a figure on foot was floundering through the bed of snow which obscured the coulee. It stood out sharply in the moonlight in its dark furs. Nor was there the smallest indication of any means, other than afoot, by which it could have arrived there. Neither horse, nor vehicle were in evidence anywhere.

Half-way across the coulee Sinclair paused to consider his surroundings, and to clear the icicles from about his lips, and even the lashes of his eyes. Eyes and ears were equally well trained to the haunting silence of the world about him, and, after a prolonged survey, he knew there was nothing to disturb. It was just the shadowy white world he knew and hated. And the sights and sounds that came to him were of the things he could interpret beyond any question.

So his whole attention became concentrated upon the gap in the rough wall of the cliffs ahead. Again he knew it all by heart. He had seen and ignored it so frequently. It was just one of those spring watercourses feeding the coulee. But now it had assumed an importance in his mind that demanded for it his closest attention.

That which he beheld filled him with a certain admiration for the astuteness which had seen in the rift a safe hiding place for a secret traffic. The bed of the spring watercourse was hidden up by trees, and scrub, and was choked with drift snow. From a distance it was only high up where the opening was at its narrowest that the place could be detected at all.

He moved on. With the coulee well behind him there came a battle with the snow-buried undergrowth. But after a while the trees hid him up, and forthwith the world he left behind him forgot the intrusion upon its frigid solitude.