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Jan: A Dog and a Romance, a fiction by Alec John Dawson |
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Chapter 36. "So Long, Jan!" |
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_ CHAPTER XXXVI. "SO LONG, JAN!" The way in which Jan brought Jim Willis and Dick Vaughan together that morning was notable and strange. In finding Dick, 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 Dick 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 Dick from the trail, he set to work to try and drag or seduce his lord back over his tracks of the previous day. Now Dick 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, Dick 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 tithe of Jan's exceptional intelligence and wealth of imagination. Dick 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 Dick'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 Dick 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 Dick. "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 Dick briefly told the tale of his travels, with his mad charge, from a lonely silver-mining camp near the Great Slave Lake. It seemed Dick 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 bitch, the only one left, break out. However, she seems to have escaped it." Dick 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 Dick's coat, and he knew without any telling all about the corresponding mark that must be showing on Dick'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, Dick 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 Dick's neck. That, though Dick 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 Dick 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. Dick 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 Dick. 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 Dick, 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 Dick's sled, with the madman and Dick's rugs for its load. The remainder of Dick's pack was loaded on Jim's sled and drawn by Jim's other three dogs, aided by the sole survivor of Dick'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 ownership. He told how Jock, back there on the edge of the North Pacific, had informed him as to Jan's name and identity from a picture seen in a newspaper. Then Dick 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," said Dick, "because it isn't mine. It's an R.N.W.M.P. gun. But you wait another day or two, my friend, and when we've got shut of this gentleman in Edmonton"--with a nod in the direction of the madman--"you and I will give an hour or so to finding out the best gun in the city; and when we've found it we'll have your name engraved on it, and underneath, 'From Jan, the R.N.W.M.P. hound, to the man who saved his life.' I know you'll take a keepsake from Jan, boy." And so it was arranged. Jim would not hear of any selling or buying of the hound; but in Edmonton, where he sold his sled and team, preparatory to taking train for the western seaboard, he accepted, as gift from Jan, the best rifle Dick could find, inscribed as arranged; and, as gift from Dick, a photograph of himself and Jan together. Their parting was characteristic of life in the North-west. Each man knew that in all human probability he would never again set eyes upon the other. Yet they parted as intimate friends; for their coming together--again most typical of north-western life--had been of the kind which leads swiftly to close friendship--or to antipathy and hostility. Dick, greatly impressed by the other man's solid worth, urged upon him the claims of the R.N.W.M.P. as offering a career for him. "For you," said Dick, "the work would all be simple as print; plain sailing all the way." Jim Willis, like most northland men, had a very real respect for the R.N.W.M.P., but he smiled at the idea of joining the force. "But why?" asked Dick. "It would be such easy work for you." "Aye, I'll allow the work wouldn't exactly hev me beat," agreed Jim. "But--Oh, well I ain't a Britisher, to begin with, an', what's more to the p'int, a week in barracks 'd choke me." "But they'd be wise enough to keep you pretty much on the trail; and you're at home there." "Yes, I guess the trail's about as near home as I'll ever get, mebbe, but I'd have no sorter use for it if I j'ined your bunch." "How's that?" "Well, now, I guess that 'd be kinder hard to explain to you, Dick." (In the northland, between men, it is always either Christian names or "Mister.") "You see, we was raised different, you an' me; an' what comes plum nateral to you would set me kickin' like a steer, first thing I'd know. The trail suits me, all right, yes. But I hit it when I want to, an' keep off it when I'm taken that-a-way. I'm only a poor man, but ther' isn't a millionaire in America can buy the right to say 'Come here' or 'Go there' to me, Dick, an', what's more, ther' ain't goin' to be, not while I can sit up an' eat moose. It's mebbe not the best kind of an outfit; an', then again, it's mebbe not jest the worst; but, any ol' way you like, Dick, it's the only kind of an outfit I've got." Dick nodded sympathetically. "Why, yes, you can see it stickin' out all over. Look at that little dust-up with the lunatic. Well, now, I should jest 've pumped that gentleman as full o' lead as ever he'd hold. 'You'd bite me,' I'd ha' said. 'Well, Mister Lunatic,' I'd ha' said, 'I count you no more 'n a mad husky; an' when I see a mad husky, I shoot. So you take this,' I'd ha' said, an' plugged him up good an' full. But for you--well, I see how it is. He's a kind of a sacred duty, an' all the like o' that. Yes, I know; only--only I'm not built that kind of a way, ye see." And Jim was right, and Dick knew he was right. As white and straight and true a man as any in the north, and able to the tips of his fingers and toes, but--but not the "kind of an outfit" for the R.N.W.M.P. And so they parted, on a hard hand-grip. And to Jan Jim Willis gave a grim, appraising sort of a stare, and (spoken very gruffly) these words: "Well, so long, Jan! The cards is yours, all right, an' I guess you take the chips!" He did not touch the big hound as he spoke. But then, despite their long and close association, he never had touched Jan in the way of a caress. _ |
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