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Jan: A Dog and a Romance, a fiction by Alec John Dawson |
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Chapter 22. Murder! |
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_ CHAPTER XXII. MURDER! A day or so after Jan's first meeting with Sourdough a thing occurred in Regina which, for a little while, occupied the minds of most people, to the exclusion of such matters as the relations between any two dogs. A woman and her husband were found murdered in a little fruiterer's and greengrocer's shop. Evidence showed that the murder must have occurred late at night. It was discovered quite early in the morning, and before the first passenger-trains of the day stopped at Regina the line was closely watched for a good many miles. It was believed that the murderer could not be very far away. Suspicion attached to a compatriot of the murdered pair, a Greek, who was found to be missing from his lodging. Within three hours Sergeant Moore had rounded this man up a few miles from the city, and placed him under arrest. But the man had been found in the act of fishing, and there was not a tittle of evidence of any kind against him. Then a neighbor called at the R.N.W.M.P. barracks with word of an Italian, now nowhere to be found, who had done some casual work for the murdered couple, and had more than once been seen talking with the woman in the little yard behind their shop. As it happened, the bearer of this information imparted it to Dick Vaughan, who promptly went with it to Captain Arnutt. "Look here, sir," said Dick, with suppressed excitement, "my Jan is half a bloodhound, and a splendid tracker. Will you let me take him down to the shop and--" "Why the deuce didn't you think of that earlier, before all the world and his wife began investigating the place? Come on! Bring my horse and your own." Within half an hour, Captain Arnutt, Dick Vaughan, Jan, and one town constable were alone in the little littered room of the tragedy, where the dead lay practically as they had been discovered. Two incriminating articles only had been found: a sheath-knife with a carved haft, and a black soft felt hat. There was no name or initials on either, and both might conceivably have belonged to the murdered man. As yet no one had identified either article with any owner. The hat had been trodden down by a boot-heel in a slither of blood on the floor-cloth of the squalid little room. Some chances had to be taken. Dick believed the hat and knife belonged to the murderer, who had apparently ransacked the till of the little shop and broken open a small carved and painted box which may have contained money. It was perhaps impossible that Jan could understand that murder had been done. But there was no shadow of doubt he knew grave matters were toward. The concentrated earnestness of Dick Vaughan had somehow communicated itself to the hound's mind. It was the hat and not the knife to which Dick pinned his faith--the cheap, soiled, crimson-lined felt hat, with its horrid stains and its imprint of a boot-heel. "It may have belonged to this poor chap," said Captain Arnutt, pointing to the body of the shopkeeper. "It's just the kind nine Dagoes out of ten do wear." "That's true, sir, but the missing man's a Dago, too, you know; an Italian. Italians are fond of knives like this and hats like that. Let's try it, sir. Jan knows. Look at him." Jan had sniffed long and meaningly at the bedraggled hat, and now was unmistakably following a trail to the closed back door. The trouble was that many feet had trodden that floor during the past few hours. Still, there was a chance. Dick carefully wrapped the hat in paper, for safe-keeping in his saddle-bag. Then the door was opened, and with eager care the two men followed Jan out into the yard. Here it was obvious that the confusion of fresh trails puzzled Jan for some minutes. Again Dick showed him the hat, and again Jan sniffed. Then back to earth went his muzzle, and all unseeing he brought up against the yard gate with a sudden deep bay. "That's the tracking note," said Dick, with suppressed eagerness. "We'd better get our horses, sir." Through the town streets Jan faltered only twice or thrice, and then not for long. Within ten minutes he was on the open prairie, heading northwestward, as for Long Lake, his pace steady and increasing now, his deep-flewed muzzle low to the ground. For more than two-and-twenty miles Jan loped along over the cocolike dust of the trail, and never faltered once save at the side of a little slough, where the two horsemen in his rear spent a few anxious minutes while Jan paced this way and that, with indecision showing in each movement of his massive head. And then, again with a rich deep bay--a note of reassurance for the horseman, and of doom for a fugitive, if such an one could have heard it--Jan was off again on the trail, closely, but by no means hurryingly, followed by the captain and Dick. In the twenty-second mile Jan brought his followers to the door of a settler's little two-roomed shack, and then, within the minute, was off again along the side of a half-mile stretch of wheat. Captain Arnutt dismounted for a moment to speak to a woman who came to the door. Not half an hour earlier she said, she had given a drink of tea and some bread and meat to a dark, thin man with a red handkerchief tied over his head. "A Dago he was," she said. And Captain Arnutt bit hard on one end of his mustache as he thanked the woman, mounted again, and galloped off after Dick and Jan. As he rode, the captain turned back the flap of his magazine-pistol holster; but the precaution was not needed. Jan was traveling at the gallop now, and the height of his muzzle from the ground showed clearly that he was on a warm trail, which, for such nostrils as his, required no holding at all. It was under the lee of a heap of last year's wheat-straw that Jan came to the end of his trail; his fore feet planted hard in the dust before him, his head well lifted, his jaws parted to give free passage to the deep, bell-like call of his baying. The man with the red 'kerchief tied over his head was evidently roused from sleep by Jan, and though the hound showed no sign of molesting him, yet must he have formed a terrifying picture for the newly opened eyes of the Italian. Almost before the man had raised himself into a sitting posture Dick Vaughan had jumped from the saddle and was beside him. "Don't move," said Dick, "and the dog won't hurt you. If you move your hands he'll be at your throat. See! Better let me slip these on--so! All right, Jan, boy. Stay there." When Captain Arnutt dismounted he found his subordinate standing beside a handcuffed man, who sat on the ground, glaring hopelessly at the hound responsible for his capture. Jan's tongue hung out from one side of his parted jaws, and his face expressed satisfaction and good humor. He had done his job and done it well. The thought of injuring his quarry had never occurred to him, as Dick Vaughan very well knew, despite his warning remark to the Italian. But although Jan had had no thought of attacking the recumbent man he had trailed, he was very fully conscious that this man was his quarry. The handcuffing episode had not been lost upon him. From the outset he had known that he and Dick were hunting that day. Why they hunted man he had no idea. Personally, he had not so much pursued an individual as he had hunted a certain smell. In coming upon the sleeping Italian he had tracked down this particular smell. His conception of his duty was, having tracked the smell to the man, to hand the man over to Dick. That marked for him the end of his work; but not by any means the end of his interest in the upshot of it. _ |
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