Bulldog Carney (short story)

by W. A. Fraser

BULLDOG CARNEY.

(A Story of Western Canada.)

TWO miles from Dan Stuart's whiskey dive, and eighteen from Golden, the Missoula trail took a sudden kink in its flesh-coloured ribbon and wound partly around the butt of a big fir stump. Behind the stump a man was kneeling that gladsome September day—all among the tawny gold and crimson of the dead rose leaves and the soft gray and cream of the bleached bunch grass. He might have been praying, so quietly was he kneeling there, but he wasn't—he was blaspheming softly to himself, as his impatient eye wandered in and out among the boulders and trees that fringed the trail.

The morning sun picked out little bright jewel-like spots on the instrument he had levelled across the top of the big stump. He seemed to be a surveyor taking levels. Just as three men riding bronchos came in sight at a sudden turn in the trail, he bowed his head to the level of the instrument and looked carefully along its smooth length. The bronchos were coming along at a swinging walk, their heads on a level with their withers, and the bridle reins hanging loosely in the hands of the riders.

Suddenly there was a nervous tightening of the right hand grasping the instrument; a sharp click close to it; a puff of smoke followed by a sharp crack, and the man riding the second broncho tumbled from the saddle, shot through the heart. He rolled over as he fell, and the bright blots of blood splashed over the rose leaves by the side of the trail.

The first cayuse, startled out of his sleepy lopa by the report and flash, reared and plunged madly forward. As he took the first bound in the air a bullet glanced from the high horn in front of the man and went tearing its corkscrew way through the leather flaps of the big Mexican saddle. The rider yelled and dug the spurs in the trembling flanks of the horse as he felt the hot lead scorching its way close to his skin.

"Mighty bad shot!" the man behind the stump jerked out between his square jaws, as he pumped the lever of his repeater forward and back. Evidently he had meant well, but the cayuse rearing had diverted the bullet from its intended way.

The third broncho and its rider were making good time in the other direction. The shot he sent after them did not increase their speed any, for they were doing their level best.

The animal the dead man had ridden did not move. He stood beside the fallen figure, waiting with dumb patience for his master to rise and mount again.

Throwing the empty shell from the breech of his rifle, the man who had fired the shots walked leisurely over to the figure tying on the ground.

"Well, Jack, old man," he said, addressing the horse, "you're a hanged sight honester than your master. If he'd stuck to his pals as close as you're doing he'd be ready for grub-pile at noon instead of bleaching out here. And I guess he cached the 'stuff' in this big apperajos, too," he added, shoving his hand down in the ample bag-like affair. Yes, it was there right enough; a whole bag full of it. Forty-four hundred dollars, as was found out afterwards.

Then he turned his attention to the man lying on his back, with the great ragged red gash in his chest where the circling bullet had plunged through.

"Well, pard, you've thrown down your mate for the last time. Whiskey drinkin' is bad business, but whiskey tradin' is away up in 'G,' to jedge by this wad." And he handled the bag of money lovingly.

"You might a known better than to throw me down," he added, reproachfully, as though he were trying to throw the blame of the murder upon the man himself.

"Come on now, Jack, I'll use you for a little," and he leisurely threw his leg over the cayuse and disappeared down the Missoula end of the trail.

He had not gone far before he turned short to the left up a dry water course. Here he stopped, and, dismounting, proceeded to wrap some old bags he pulled out from behind a rock about the feet of the cayuse.

"You're a tenderfoot, Jack; you've hit the trail so often that you're a bit sore in the toes," he remarked, in a dry monotone, as he worked at the bags. Then he mounted again, and went across country for about three miles, until he struck the big cedar swamp which runs for miles and miles from Golden. As he rode along he let his thoughts work themselves out in words, firing them at "Jack," and punctuating them with swinging digs from the big spurs which hung rather loosely on his rather high-heeled boots.

"They'll think that the prospector who laid your old man out has hit the trail for Missoula and lit out. They'll pick up tracks there all right enough, but they ain't yourn, Jack. Let me see," he added, pulling a watch from his pocket, "Whiskey Sanderson took that bad spell about ten o'clock. The jay on the cayuse will strike Golden about noon. Old Steel and his Jim-Dandies will pull out in half-an-hour, and pick up your tracks headin' for Missoula about three. There'll be a deuce of a row, and they'll run in some poor devil before night. They'll cop almost any one but me."

Just as they neared the edge of the "Big Cedar" a horse neighed a short distance within.

"I guess Blazes smells you, Jack," he said, chuckling softly. "He thinks we've been a long time over the job. I'll give you a drink," he said, as he dismounted, "and you'll hang out here until some one throws a line over you to-night. Bill'll cut you loose when it's time."

Then he mounted Blazer and rode in a big circuit, skirting the cedar swamp, and upon the mountain side on his way back to Golden. It was dark when he got to the ford on Kicking Horse river, just opposite the town. Halfway across he took a slight pull to one side, letting Blazer feel his way carefully. Stopping the horse, he took his Winchester and threw it far out on the upper side of the ford; that is, he took a big swing at it, but the loose end of his hackle line caught in the breech and the rifle came splashing down at Blazer's hoofs.

"A very bad throw," he said, grimly; then he chuckled softly to himself, "I guess this outfit'll cut loose better!" and he commenced throwing 38.55 cartridges far out into the stream with vigourous swings of his long arm. "That's a cinch," he grunted complacently. "I wish the gun laid as deep, but it's bad fishing now, an' I guess they won't find it anyway."

When Blazer's hoofs lost the muffled sound of the water and struck with a sharp ring on the smooth-worn stones on the Golden side of the Kicking Horse, the rider gave his long legs a hitching swing and the horse broke into a lope.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

It was the night before the day that the whiskey smuggler lay out on the Missoula trail, stark and stiff, with his red lifeblood splashed all over the tawny mat of dried leaves and withered rose bushes, and a young English girl stood in Arvil Santley's bachelor quarters, not very sumptuous quarters were they either, showing much of careless misrule and absence of order.

Santley was astonished and said so, which was quite right, for he had not seen Grace—Grace Alton—since he had left England.

"I'm glad to see you, Grace," he said, "but you shouldn't have come here, all the same. You always had sense, but this is fairly foolish."

"That doesn't matter in the slightest, and, besides (with a fine touch of womanly inconsistency), no one saw me coming here, except the friend who is waiting outside; it's none of their affairs if they did,"

"Well, what's expected of me?" he asked, resignedly.

"You're wanted at home; your mother wants you."

"I suppose I ought to go, but I'm not going all the same," he added, taking a long breath as though the words scorched his throat a little.

"Yes, you must go, Arvil; I want you to go. This life is not the life for you. Your mother sent this money to you to take you back to her, so you must go now."

He stooped his tall, magnificent figure toward her a little that she might see better, and with his hand parted the heavy black hair which swept across his broad forehead in luxuriant abandon.

"Do you see that big red scar?" he asked. "Well, if I were back there my mother would put her hand upon my forehead, so, as she did when I was a little boy, and when that ugly scar met her gentle eyes, she would ask how came it there. I could not tell her, neither could I lie to her. And it is that way with all the scars, both on mind and body, they are too deep-—I cannot go back."

"Arvil! I do not believe that. You were good when we were together as children in England, and you are good now in spite of all you say, and you will go back. I promised your mother that I would find you here and tell you that she wanted to see you before she died. Father was coming here for a few days to look at his mines, and then we go on to the coast."

"You need not come back with me to the hotel. I have a good guide with me; the friend who got her to come with me called her Mammy Nolan. I know that you will go back, for you've promised me, and you never broke a promise with me yet," she said, as she slipped quietly out of the door.

A little roll of bills was lying on the table where she had left it.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

It lacked half an hour of 12 o'clock when a French half-breed, Baptiste Gabrielle, galloped into the square of the police barracks at Golden on a cayuse reeking with the wet which is from the inside. The constable on guard, pacing solemnly up and down in front of the major's quarters, thought the fanatical-looking rider was drunk or running amuck, and swore that he would put a hole in him unless he stopped.

But Baptiste wasn't drunk—he was only badly frightened. If there is any difference between a drunken man and a frightened half-breed, it is in favour of the former so far as coherence is concerned.

Baptiste was a weird-looking object as he slid from the hack of the jaded beast, standing there with all four legs braced like the posts of a sawhorse in sheer weakness, and flanks pumping in half spasmodic strokes as the wide open nostrils clutched at the air for which the lungs were clamouring.

"By Goss! that fell' Whisk' Sandson, he get keel," panted Baptiste, with a face the colour of a lemon in a bottle of alcohol. "By tam! a fell' wit' long neck he keep him bahint stump, an' he s'oot him soor."

"Is he dead, Baptiste?" queried Sergt. Hetherington, in a voice with a full flavour of peat bog about it. "Is he dead, or on'y hu-r-rt?"

"Bet you life, that Whisk' fell' he dead," replied Baptiste. "That fell' he s'oot tree, fo'e time; an' Sand'son he kill for soor, he dead w'atever. He try s'oot me, but I stan' him off, an' come quick tell police fell'."

"March him in to the major," said Hetherington to a constable.

Before the major, Baptiste's harangue, boiled down, read: "Shot at 10 o'clock on the Missoula trail, about eighteen miles from Golden."

"What was the man like who did the shooting?" asked the major.

"Tall fell' wit' long neck," was the graphic description this query brought forth.

"Indian breed, or white man?" asked the major.

"Don't know; me tink he white. Tall fell'; tam long neck. That fell' he got Whisk' Sand'son stuff, too, you bet, Fo', five tousan' he get in appar'o."

That was all. Baptiste's face was the face of a man whose soul is in other gardens; his language that of a man too badly frightened to be anything but natural. The respect for the head of the force was even as a grain of mustard seed in the avalanche of fear which had swept him from that red-splashed spot on the Missoula trail to Golden.

There was no doubt he was telling the truth.

"Who's tall with a long neck?" asked the major shortly, turning to the sergeant-major, who was standing in front of his desk.

"I will find out, sir," replied the latter, saluting as he passed out.

"That long Englishman, Arvil Santley, has a neck like an eagle; an' Constable Grady says that he's been-workin' the racket to beat two of a kind lately, sir," was the sergeant-major's graphic report when he lined up in front of the desk again.

"Let Sergeant Hetherington take two constables and rations for two days, and get after this devil before his tracks get cold. Commence at the body. Send it back to Golden. Tell Corporal Ball to look up this Santley outfit in town. If he's got the stuff he'll have it cached somewhere about."

That was the beginning, all in one day; the dead body lying out on the silent trail so stiff and cold, with the glazed eyes staring straight up into the mountain blue of the shining sky, and the hurrying of men in brown jackets and dark, tight-fitting, yellow-striped pants, as they saddled and bitted the strong-limbed bay horses which were to gallop and gallop after—the wind.

Sergeant Hetherington and his merry men picked up the tracks the tall man told Blazes they would find, and followed them for many a goodly mile, which time thereof the tall man with the long neck was working his way along the mountain side to the ford. Many miles beyond Dan Short's place the tracks vanished. Perhaps some one else had put bags on his horse's feet and led him across country.

"Corporal" Ball was the official recognition of Mr. Ball's efficiency, but "Lanky" Ball was the goddess form of expression his lath-like super-structure provoked among the fellows.

"Lanky" Ball was more fortunate than the sergeant; he discovered something.

Twenty-four hours after he started out he discovered that he could not find the man with the neck like an eagle—Arvil Santley; therefore he had disappeard—had lit out—had hit the trail—had packed his outfit and dusted; these were the bits of local-coloured knowledge he picked up.

It was from Mammy Nolan, who kept a restaurant in a big tent, and sold whiskey on the side, that he found out about Santley. "He lit out south yesterday," she said. "He got steered up agen a skin game up to Dan Short's, an' they corraled his last remittance from home. It's about time he did get out, for they had him stone broke. But he was a gentleman, all the same," said Mammy, as he stood with her hands on her fat hips, and looked up and down the corporal's ungainly figure.

"What did you want him for? Has he been cracking some of the constables' heads? He'd do it quick enough for them if they bothered him."

"I guess he's done worse than that," said the corporal, as he mounted his horse and rode away.

"Looks as though he had done the trick," said the major, when Corporal Ball made his report.

"He's got a good start, and will likely head for the second crossing on the Columbia, and work his way down into the Montana. There's a rough town at the crossing, and he's dead sure to head for that."

And then because the sergeant was away with two men, and because the whiskey men and the gamblers, and those who were cussed simply because they couldn't help it needed much guidance in their daily life, and because the post was always short of men anyway, the major had to put a special constable on with "Lanky" Ball to go after Santley.

"You'll need a good man, a rustler, to help you take this Englishman, for he's a husky chap," said the major. "Who'll you get?"

"'Bulldog' Carney's the man, sir," replied Corporal Ball.

"Get him," commanded the officer.

"Lanky" Ball found Carney after much tribulous search; found him at Mammy Nolan's, found him amidst the glamour of many tin lamps, the smoke from which mingled with the odoriferous steam of frying pork, and filled the big tent with a soft, summer-like haze.

Looked at from some angles Carney was just the man to go after the slayer of "Whiskey" Sanderson. He was a big, powerful man, as big as the one they were after. He could handle "Pearl," that was his big Colt's, with a dexterity that commanded universal respect. Long since he had filed away the sights, and when it was necessary to place several bullets in a limited time, he "fanned" his gun—turned it into a miniature Gatling. Apart from his proficiency, and a certain irritability of temper, he was a high roller.

Sometimes the police were hot on his trail as leader of a big whiskey outfit, and sometimes he was on their side fighting shoulder to shoulder to put down some tough gang. He didn't approve of toughness as a pastime.

"Be gentlemen," he used to say. "Gentlemen can't work and gentlemen must have money, but don't be tough for the fun of the thing—there is no fun in it."

When "Lanky" Ball explained to him what he was wanted for, and that there was a reward of $500, half of which he would get If they captured the man who did the job, he replied: "Cert, I'll go, for I'm getting stale here. The game's ahead of me here, and I need a stake to start in again."

They rode out ten miles that night so that they would be sure to have an early start on the trail next morning. Over their pipes, between "grub pile" and "blanket time," they drifted on to the subject of the dead man and Arvil Santley.

"I'll bet you an even fifty," said Carney, "that Santley didn't do this job."

"I've got good cause to have a down on him myself, for I've got his signature across the bridge of my nose, where his big sprawlin' English fist caught me unawares one night. But he'll show my trade-mark right enough every time he parts his hair," he added, by way of vindicating his outraged honour, "for I carved his lofty brow for him, and if his skull hadn't been so damnably thick, perhaps we wouldn't be chasin' him now. All the same, he's not the sort to lay a man out for the fun of the thing; he never had any dealin' with Whiskey Sanderson, for he wasn't in the know. He was all right for sport, but the boys hadn't any use for him when they were runnin' the stuff in."

"I'll just go you fifty, Carney," said the corporal. "The old man doesn't make many mistakes, and if we can get to the second crossin' of the river before Santley, we'll bring back the man that laid Sanderson out."

"It's a bet, then?" said Carney; and there was a queer smile about the regular lips, set so firmly in the square

Then they chipped in with their two blankets and slept under one cover, back to back, with their feet toward the small smouldering campfire; slept soundly, as just men should—"Bulldog Carney," gambler, whiskey smuggler and special constable, and "Lanky" Bail, plain corporal in the N. W. M. P.

"He's ahead of us," said Carney, as they galloped side by side the next day; "I picked up some tracks back there and here they are again. He doesn't seem to be in any hurry, though, for, according to the tracks, his cayuse has been taking it pretty easy."

That afternoon when they struck the crossing they couldn't find anybody who had taken Santley across the river.

"He must be on this side somewhere yet," said the corporal. "If you stop here and watch the crossing I'll try and look him upon this side. He'll be about some of the gambling dives, likely."

He looked him up. He found him. In the Queen's name he was made prisoner. Santley laughed when the corporal told him he was wanted for murder.

"It's some blawsted debt, I fancy," he said, "and the murder racket is only a blind; but I'll go all the same. I'm half sorry I left the beastly hole anyway, it's so beastly slow down this way."

When they came back to the crossing Carney was gone—gone, cayuse and all, over the river; he had given the ferryman $50 to take him across, so the ferryman told the corporal.

"He's a queer fish," said the boatman. "I didn't want to cross till the morning; but he got me down there by the boat, and gave me my choice between $50 and a plug of lead from that gun he spun around on his forefinger."

The corporal was dumbfounded. "It's devilish queer," he muttered, "but orders are orders, and I've got my man, and I don't see as I've any call to go after this crook;" and he thought of Pearl, and Carney's beautiful marksmanship and various matters, and went thoughtfully back to Golden with his prisoner.

"Lanky" Ball had a good head for obeying orders, which is a good thing for a corporal to have; but he hadn't much of a head for solving just such problems as this, which was, perhaps, good also; perhaps that was why he was corporal after twenty years of service.

"I'll bet you fifty cases that 'Bulldog' did that trader up," said Santley, as they rode side by side,

"That's queer," said the corporal. "Carney bet me fifty that you didn't do it, and now you want to lay me the other way. If he did it I don't suppose that he'll come back for the stuff—the fifty he laid that you didn't do it."

"I got the long Englishman, sir," reported the corporal to the major when they got back to the barracks; but the other one lit out—took his hook when I was lookin' up the prisoner."

"What other one?" queried the major.

"Bulldog Carney, sir. He skipped across the river."

"That looks suspicious," thoughtfully replied the major as he pulled at his iron-gray mustache.

"It would be a bad one on us if it turned out that he had done this, and we had carted him out of the country—given him an escort; eh, corporal?"

Of course there was a trial, with Arvil as the centre of attraction. The other had gotten away, and they had to hang somebody if they could; so they devoted their energies to proving Avril guilty, and the chances are they would have succeeded if it hadn't been for one person.

His clearing out looked very suspicious, and they found quite a sum of money on him when he was arrested, although it was known that he had been cleaned out before he went away. He would not tell where he got it, either. "None of their blessed business," he told them.

"It may hang you," said a friend, "if you don't tell."

"Hang it is, then," he replied doggedly.

But worst of all was Baptiste Gabrielle's evidence.

"Yes" by Goss! Dat fell', he s'oot t'ree, fo' time me. Steek has head up f'om dat stump. See him me soor."

Then Mammy Nolan went out to the place where Whiskey Sanderson had met his fate, and she found something, too. The bullet that had killed poor Sanderson had been in a terrible hurry, and had gone clean through and through him.

Mammy Nolan followed up the line of sight from the stump across where Sanderson had fallen, and luckily located the bullet in a sand knoll 30 yards beyond. It was a case-hardenad 38.55 Winchester bullet.

"That's the bullet that killed him right enough," mused Mammy; "but it might possibly have been fired there some other time," It wasn't quite conclusive.

Then she found the bullet that had scorched the leg of the foremost rider that day imbedded in his saddle. That was conclusive.

Then commenced the search for the rifle itself. There was only one such rifle owned in Golden, and it had belonged to Bulldog Carney.

Now, Carney had been back in Golden after the murder, and as he hadn't taken his rifle with him when he went away with "Lanky" Ball, he must have hidden it somewhere. To return to Golden after killing Sanderson he would cross the ford at Kicking Horse. It was a forlorn hope, but she made up her mind to drag the ford for the rifle.

When Mammy found the rifle where it had dropped she knew she had forged one of the strongest links in the chain of evidence which fastened the guilt on Carney.

It was Mammy, too, who introduced a new witness to the court in the person of Grace Alton. She had come back from Vancouver in obedience to Mammy's telegram. Her evidence was very simple, but effectually cleared up the mystery of the money.

"I gave it to him," she said simply, "to pay his passage home to his mother. I told him a falsehood; I told him it was from his mother. He wouldn't have taken it from me if he had known the truth, but I wanted him to go home to his mother, who was asking for him every day. We were children together—Arvil Santley and myself. "

It was a revelation to that wild western life, this sweet, womanly girl, and the man who would rather hang than compromise her by telling that she had given him the money.

"I had too bad a name," he said, when his friends rounded on him for a chivalrous goat.

Mammy didn't know about the money when she sent for Grace; she only knew that Grace and Santley had met when Grace was in Golden.

In the face of the new evidence, not much stock was taken in Baptiste Gabrielle's saying that Arvil Santley was the man who had shot at him. He had been too badly frightened to know what the man who had done the shooting really looked like. Besides, the other, the man who had galloped on in front, swore that it was a fair man who had shot, while Santley was dark.

It came out that Mammy Nolan was a Pinkerton detective, and the business of running a restaurant and selling whiskey on the side was only a blind. Nobody but the major had known this before.

After many moons of anxious tracing, word of Carney came to hand. He was at St. Vincent, just over the borders from Manitoba.

"The extradition law is slow," mused the major, "likewise is it uncertain. Now, if we had Carney on this side the line, we could arrest him."

At this the sergeant, who was standing by, pricked his ears.

"It moight be managed, sor."

"Perhaps, perhaps," said the major, reflectively. "Corporal Ball knows his man. He escorted him out; perhaps he'll escort him back again. You will need considerable money, for it's a long trip," and he wrote out a fairish-sized order.

"Lanky" Ball and the sergeant located Carney at a small hotel at St, Vincent, not a stone's throw over the line.

A little preliminary arrangement with the hotel-keeper, and that night as Carney gently slept the sleep of the just two figures stole up the narrow stair which led to his room, and silently slipped through the door.

How still and dark the room was. Ah! not so dark now, for, like the headlight of an engine, a bullseye lantern was throwing its full glare upon them, and they were looking into the dark depths of two murderous-looking revolvers as Carney held them above the counterpane.

"O, that's you, 'Lanky,' is it?" he said, cheerfully. "Glad to see you. Come to pay that fifty, I suppose. Just put it on the table there. I don't feel like getting up. That's right, you can take one hand down," he said. "Just lay your gun down on the table first, though. Quick, now, cough up that fifty, for you see you're burglars in my room, and if I let daylight through the pair of you it will be all right, you know."

Then "Lanky" put up fifty cases of the good Government money he had brought to pay the expenses of taking Carney back.

That was the nearest they ever got to Carney, for he is still living the life of a "gentleman,"

W. A. Fraser