Jan: A Dog and a Romance Part 21

"Why, Jan--dear old Jan! Jan, come back to me--here! Good old Jan!"

It was with something strangely like a sob that the bearded sergeant, d.i.c.k Vaughan, sank down to a sitting position on the log, with Jan's head between his hands.

His beard was evidence of a longish spell on the trail; and the weakness that permitted of his catching his breath in a childlike sob--that was due, perhaps, to solitude and the peculiar strain of his present business on the trail, as well as to the great love he felt for the hound he had thought lost to him for ever.

"How d'ye do, Devil! How d'ye do! We were just hurryin' on for your place. Will ye take a drop o' rye? I'm boss here. That's only my ch.o.r.e-boy you're s...o...b..rin' over, Mister Devil. Eh, but it's hunky down to Coney Island, ain't it?"

These remarks came in a jerky sort of torrent from the second man, one of whose peculiarities was that his arms above the elbow were lashed with leather thongs to his body. There were leather hobbles about his ankles, and on the ground near by him lay a pair of unlocked handcuffs, carefully swathed in soft-tanned deerskin.

Sergeant d.i.c.k Vaughan's companion may possibly have accentuated the solitude in which he traveled; such a companion could hardly have mitigated it as a source of nervous strain, for he was mad as a March hare. But there was nothing else harelike about him, for he was homicidally mad, and had killed two men and half killed a third before Sergeant Vaughan laid hands upon him. And his was not the only madness the sergeant had had to contend with on this particular trip.

A strong and overtried man's weakness is not a thing that any one cares to enlarge upon, but without offense it may perhaps be stated that tears fell on the iron-gray hair of Jan's muzzle as he stood there with his soft flews pressed hard against d.i.c.k Vaughan's thigh. It seemed he wanted to bore right into the person of his sovereign lord; he who had never asked for any man's caress through all the long months of wandering, toil, and hards.h.i.+p that divided him from the Regina barracks.

His nose burrowed lovingly under d.i.c.k's coat with never a thought of fear or of a trap, although, for many months now, his first instinct had been to keep his head free, vision clear, and feet to the ground, whatever befell.

"My old Jan! My dear old Jan!"

d.i.c.k Vaughan paid no sort of heed to the jerky maunderings of his poor demented charge. But Jan did. Without stirring his head, Jan edged his body away at right angles from the madman, and the hair bristled over his shoulder-blades when the man spoke.

Jan did not know much about human ailments, perhaps, but he had seen a husky go mad, and had narrowly escaped being bitten by the beast before Jim Willis had shot it. He did not think it out in any way, but he was intuitively conscious that this man was abnormal, irresponsible, unlike other men. The homicidal devil was the force uppermost in this particular man, and that naturally left no room for emanations of the milk of human kindness and goodness. Jan was instantly aware of the lack. In effect he knew this man was killing-mad.

But remarkable, nay unique, in his experience as the contact was, Jan spared no thought for it. His hackles rose a little and he edged away from the madman, because instinct in him enforced so much. For his mind and his heart they were filled to overflowing; they were afloat on the flood-tide of his consciousness of his sovereign's physical presence, the touch of his body.

The night was far spent when d.i.c.k Vaughan proceeded to tether his prisoner as comfortably as might be and to stretch himself in his blankets for sleep. Jan may have slept a little that night, but his eyes were never completely closed for more than a minute at a stretch; and his muzzle, resting on his paws, was never more than three feet from d.i.c.k's head. It was to be noted, too, that he chose to lie between d.i.c.k and the madman, although the proximity of the latter was more than a little painful to Jan.

Toward morning, when the fire was practically out, the husky b.i.t.c.h came timidly nosing about Jan's neighborhood, and Jan breathed through his nose at her in quite friendly fas.h.i.+on. But when she happened to place one foot across the direct line in which the hound watched his sovereign's face--then Jan growled, so low and softly as not to waken d.i.c.k, and yet with a significance which the husky instantly comprehended and acted on.

"Anywhere else you like, but not between my lord and me, for he is mine, and I am his; not to be divided."

So said Jan's low, throaty growl. And the husky, comprehending, withdrew, and dug herself a place in the snow under Jan's lee, which, as the big hound thought, was well and fittingly done. He gave the b.i.t.c.h an approving glance from the tail of one eye.

The pride of Jan, like his happiness, was just now deep beyond all reach of plummets.

x.x.xVI

"SO LONG, JAN!"

The way in which Jan brought Jim Willis and d.i.c.k Vaughan together that morning was notable and strange.

In finding d.i.c.k, Jan had found all he wanted in life. But at the back of his mind was a sort of duty thought which made it clear to him that he must let Willis know about these things, if possible. Willis had undoubted and very strong claims upon the leader of his team, and Jan, at this stage of his North American life and discipline, was not the dog to ignore those claims. He wanted Jim Willis to know. He desired absolution. And, short of letting d.i.c.k out of his sight--a step which no threat or inducement would have led him to take--Jan was going to set this matter right.

The outworking of his determination, in the first place, caused a number of delays, and then, when by affectionate play of one kind and another he could no longer keep d.i.c.k from the trail, he set to work to try and drag or seduce his lord back over his tracks of the previous day. Now d.i.c.k was far too well versed in doggy ways to make the mistake of supposing that Jan was indulging mere wantonness. He knew very well that Jan was not that sort of a dog.

"H'm! And then, again, old chap, as I said last night, you can't have dropped from heaven upon the trail beneath. There must be somebody else where you've come from. I see the collar and trace marks on your old shoulders--bless you! What would Betty say to them, old son? So don't excite yourself. We'll wait a bit and see what happens. I could do with the help of a team, I can tell you, for my own shoulder's bruised to the bone from the trace. You take it from me, Jan, one man and one husky are no sort of a team. No, sir, no sort of a team at all. So sit down, my son, and let me fill a pipe."

Naturally enough, d.i.c.k thought he waited as the result of his own reflections, to see what things the trail Jan had traveled by would bring forth. But, all the same, he would not have waited but for Jan's artful insistence on it. Sometimes, but not very often, a dog acquires such guile in the world of civilization. In the wild it comes easily and naturally, even to animals having but a t.i.the of Jan's exceptional intelligence and wealth of imagination.

d.i.c.k Vaughan had not waited long there beside the trail when his ears and Jan's caught the sound of Jim Willis's voice and the singing of his whip. Evidently, in the absence of their leader, Jan's team-mates had not settled down very well to the day's work. In the distance, away back on the trail, could be heard now and again the howl of a wolf.

Jim Willis showed no surprise when, in response to a wave of d.i.c.k's hand, he drew up his team alongside a R.N.W.M.P. man and his own missing team-leader. Jim was not much given to showing surprise in the presence of other men. He nodded his comprehension, as d.i.c.k told the story of Jan's appearance on the previous evening, and of his disappearance, many months before, from Lambert's Siding in Saskatchewan.

"It's a bit of a miracle that I should find him again--or he find me, rather--away up here, isn't it?" said d.i.c.k.

"Ah! Pretty 'cute sort of a dog, Jan," said the laconic Jim.

He was noting--one cannot tell with what queer twinges, with what stirrings of the still deeps of his nature--the fact that, while Jan lolled a friendly tongue at him and waved his stern when Jim spoke, he yet remained, as though tied, with his head at Sergeant Vaughan's knee.

The two men leaned against Jim's sled and exchanged samples of tobacco while d.i.c.k briefly told the tale of his travels, with his mad charge, from a lonely silver-mining camp near the Great Slave Lake. It seemed d.i.c.k had had some ground for fearing that he had stumbled upon some horrible kind of epidemic of madness in the lone land he had been traversing. At all events, one of the team of seven huskies with which he started had developed raging madness within a day or so of the beginning of his journey, and had had to be shot.

"I couldn't find that the brute had bitten any of the others, but next day two of 'em suddenly went clean off, and they certainly did bite another pair before I shot them. Next day I had to kill the other pair, and was expecting every minute to see the b.i.t.c.h, the only one left, break out. However, she seems to have escaped it."

d.i.c.k said nothing of the weary subsequent days in which he himself had toiled hour after hour in the traces, ahead of his one dog, with a maniac wrapped in rugs and lashed on the sled-pack. But Jim Willis needed no telling. He saw the trace-marks all across the chest and shoulders of d.i.c.k's coat, and he knew without any telling all about the corresponding mark that must be showing on d.i.c.k's own skin.

"Well, say," he remarked, admiringly, "but you do seem to 've bin up against it good an' hard."

Very briefly, and as though the matter barely called for mention, d.i.c.k explained, in answer to an inquiry, why he had to make a dead burden of the madman.

It seemed that when first his team had been reduced to one rather undersized dog he did arrange for his charge to walk. And within an hour, having cunningly awaited his opportunity, the demented creature had leaped upon him from behind, exactly as a wolf might, and fastened his teeth in d.i.c.k's neck. That, though d.i.c.k said little of it, had been the beginning of a strange and terrible struggle, of which the sole observer was a single sled-dog.

To and fro in the trampled snow the men had swayed and fought for fully a quarter of an hour before d.i.c.k had finally mastered the madman and bound him hand and foot. He was a big man, of muscular build, and madness had added hugely to his natural capabilities as a fighter. d.i.c.k Vaughan's bandaged neck, and his right thumb, bitten through to the bone, would permanently carry the marks of this poor wretch's ferocity in that lonely struggle on the trail.

"Don't seem right, somehow," was Jim Willis's comment. "I guess I'd have had to put a bullet into him."

"Ah no; that wouldn't do at all," said d.i.c.k.

He did not attempt to explain just why; and perhaps he hardly could have done so had he tried, for that would have involved some explanation of the pride and the traditions of the force in which he served, and those are things rarely spoken of by those who understand them best and are most influenced by them.

"And where might you be making for now?" asked Jim.

"Well, I'm bound for Edmonton. But since I got down to this one little husky I'd thought of making Fort Vermilion, to see if I could raise a team there."

"Aye. Well, I was bound for steel at Edmonton, too, an' I've bin reckoning on some such a place as Fort Vermilion since I lost my gun,"

said Jim. "I'm wholly tired o' makin' trail for these gentlemen behind"--the howling of the wolves was still to be heard pretty frequently--"without a shootin'-iron of any kind at all."

"It seems to me we're pretty well met, then," said d.i.c.k, with a smile, "for I want what you've got, and you want what I've got."

"Well, I was kind o' figurin' on it that sort of a way myself," admitted Jim. "If it suits you, I guess we can make out to rub along on your Jan an' my dogs right through to Edmonton."

In the end the order of the march was arranged thus: two of Jim Willis's dogs, with Jan to lead them, were harnessed to d.i.c.k's sled, with the madman and d.i.c.k's rugs for its load. The remainder of d.i.c.k's pack was loaded on Jim's sled and drawn by Jim's other three dogs, aided by the sole survivor of d.i.c.k's team. And in this order a start was made on the five-hundred-mile run to Edmonton.

From the first Jim showed frankly that there was to be no question as to Jan's owners.h.i.+p. He told how Jock, back there on the edge of the North Pacific, had informed him as to Jan's name and ident.i.ty from a picture seen in a newspaper. Then d.i.c.k broached the question of how much he was to pay for Jan, seeing clearly how just was the other man's claim as lawful owner of the hound. Jim laughed quietly at this.

"Why, no," he said; "I haven't just come to makin' dollars out of other folks' dog-stealin'. No, sir. But it's true enough I have paid, in a way, for Jan; an' I guess there's not another son of a gun in Canada, but his rightful owner, with money enough to buy the dog from me. I'd not've sold him. And I'll not sell him now--because a sun-dried salmon could see he's yours a'ready. But I'll tell you what: I'm short of a gun, an' I've kinder taken a fancy to this one o' yours--I reckon because I'd had such a thirst on me for one before I struck your trail.

Jan is yours, anyway, but if you'd like to give me your gun to remember ye by I'll say 'Thank you!'"

"Well, I'm sorry, but I can't make out to give you the gun, anyway,"