The Specter at Serpent’s Cut

The Specter at Serpent’s Cut

By Frank L. Packard

Author of “The Blood of Kings” “Spitzer,” Etc.

From The Popular Magazine October 1911, No. 6, Vol. 21.

Digitized for Stillwoods.Blogspot.Ca by Doug Frizzle April 2018.

Our research has so far not attached this story to any of Frank Packard’s books /drf.

The “spook doctor” drops into Big Cloud and adds one more topic for the expatiation of the talkative railroad man, Matthew Agamemnon. He is still a talker, but the occult is taboo. There’s a reason.

SUMMED up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulas of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.

So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way performs gyrations that would not shame an acrobatic star. It sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of its cage, clings to cañon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below, burrows its way into the heart of things in long tunnels and short ones, circles a projecting spur in a dizzy whirl, and shoots from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers’ knees.

Some parts of it are worse than others naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is grand.

And what with cuts and fills and borings and trestles and bridges, in an effort to unsnarl a few knots in the tangle, the company has been tinkering with it pretty well ever since the last spike was sent home and the small army of consulting scientists, with a flourish of trumpets, bowed gracefully to the managing director of the Transcontinental —and withdrew to seek other worlds to conquer. However—

This is Terhune’s story; and it goes back to the time when “Royal” Carleton was superintendent and Tommy Regan, big-hearted as he was gruff, was master mechanic. Terhune was an engineer. His full name was Matthew Agamem­non Terhune—the only excuse for which seems to have been that his parents were possessed of a sense of euphony, or one of them, maybe, a first-grammar education in Greek.

Anyway, Terhune was dutifully appreciative—he signed in full.

Clarihue, the turner, swore at him at first for usurping more than the allotted space ruled off on the grease-smeared pages of the book in the roundhouse that recorded the goings and comings of the engine crews; but eventually he became wise enough to content himself with a snort of disgust amplified by a spurt of black-strap juice pitward. Terhune, given an opportunity, would argue that, or any other matter under the sun, with a calm and dispassionate flow of words that had Tennyson’s brook for continuity beaten seven ways for Sunday.

“Matthew Aggie-mem-gong Terhune!” choked Clarihue. “The fathead wind bag!”

Regan put it a little differently.

“Talk!” said the master mechanic. “Talk! The man’s a debating society, that’s what he is. He’ll talk when he’s dead. I don’t know what kind of springs he’s got on his tongue. I wish I did. I’d equip the motive power department with them. What?”

The division, however, being generally in a hurry, called him plain “Matt.”

With the exception of Clarihue, perhaps, no one ever got mad at Terhune. If it is true that obesity is a sign of good nature, Terhune is simply a case in point. He exuded it from every pore of his fat, dumpy body; and he dispensed it alike on the just and on the unjust.

Certainly, the man was more or less of a consummate ass; but any inclination to kick him on that score vanished with one glance at his great babyish moon face, with its two little, round blue eyes that stared out from under a straggling collection of sandy hairs, which fringed, much after the fashion of a monk’s tonsure, an otherwise bald and shiny head. After that glance it was all off. There was no getting mad at Matt.

Professionally, Terhune was all right as far as he went. Nothing startling, nothing out of the way—not even a regular run. Regan used him as a sort of ever-ready substitute for anything that might turn up. And, as far as Matthew Agamemnon Terhune was concerned, it appeared to be all one to him. Switch­ing, yard work, local freight, double heading, anything—he took it as it came, complacently, good-naturedly. So that it did not bar him from talking, he was happy.

He could talk in a cab; and there, perforce, he had an audience. The fireman had his choice between being the target for Matt’s views and theories on an astounding range of subjects—or jumping! From the Alaskan Boundary Question to the Fresh Air Movement Matt was posted—and, if not profoundly posted, his ideas, at least, had the merit of being original.

Now all of the above is, on the face of it, extraneous to the fact that, during a winter of pretty heavy running, the Serpent’s Cut had netted an appalling number of disasters, even for that bedeviled piece of construction that never under any circumstances was known to behave itself for better than a month at a stretch; but, extraneous as it may appear, it had, for all that, a very direct bearing on Matthew Agamemnon and his propensity for argument and talk.

However, in any event, the driven-to-desperation directors down East, when they got the cold figures that totaled up the claims and represented the amount of rolling stock reposing on the scrap heap from six months’ running in the Serpent’s Cut, voted, though they bit their lips when they did it, some sweeping and extensive alterations on that particular stretch of track. And when the plans came out in the spring, they called for a new bridge across the Muskrat River at the foot of the grade, and a rock cut from the mouth of Number One Tunnel to straighten the bridge approach.

It was a big piece of work—about the biggest the company had ever undertaken; everybody realized that. So, once the improvements were decided upon, they went at it with a rush; and the lower slopes and stretches of the mountains were just beginning to shed their winter coats, when a brigade of engineers, bridgemen, foremen, Polacks, Swedes, Russians, and what not moved into construction camp on the banks of the Muskrat.

Then the bridge material and the thousand and one other odds and ends of supplies began to pour into the Big Cloud yards—it was all out from the East then—and there followed, in the natural order of things, a daily-work special to the camp. Regan gave it to Terhune, of course; and gave him, besides, the various engines as they came out of the shops to break in after their overhauling. Also he gave him as fireman young Charlie Spence, brother, by the way, of the chief dispatcher.

Take it all around, it was an incongruous-looking outfit that Matt pulled out of the yards those days. Generally a big ten-wheeler, spick and span, glistening in fresh paint, with Terhune obliterating the cab window and bounc­ing up and down on his seat like a cheerful rubber ball; and little Spence, who had never run anything but “spare” be­fore, expanding his chest in the gangway fit to bust the buttons off his un­dershirt; while trailing behind, slewing, rattling, bumping, came a hybrid conglomeration of gondolas, reversible gravel dumps, flats groaning under blocked and shored-up steel bridge girders; maybe a box car here and there, by way of picturesqueness; and, to wind things up, on the tail end, a caboose that was out of the ark, and not much bigger than a baby carriage. That was Work Special 117 west, 118 east.

So, west to the Muskrat in the morning, lugging back the empties at night, became, for the time being, Terhune’s run—and it suited him as no job had ever suited him before. Except for the trip to the water tank and turntable at Beaver Tail, two miles west of the camp, he had the day pretty much to himself; and there were new men on the work, men he did not know. Or, perhaps, to put the matter in a truer perspective, men who did not know Matthew Agamemnon Terhune—for the engineer corps, like the material, came out from the East.

Matt buttonholed Ferguson, the chief, on the first morning, and opened on him with the Newfoundland Fisheries Dispute.

Ferguson, who was a receptive Scot, lifted his scraggy eyebrows and rose to the bait—Terhune’s introduction invariably carried a glimmer of sense; but, being busy at the moment, he invited Terhune to dinner to hear the rest of it; where incidentally he introduced his staff, which consisted of a couple of sea­soned assistants and another couple of embryonic engineers, whose names, plus a small edition of the alphabet recently forged on by a fond and trusting Alma Mater, were Podger and Clark.

It wasn’t an expensive invitation from the viewpoint of the exchequer of the engineers’ mess—Terhune was too busy to eat—and for about a week Matt had a standing invitation; but after that, whether some one tipped the Scotchman off, or the combined galaxy of mathematical talent got the answer for themselves, Terhune’s midday repast consisted of what he fished out of his own dinner pail.

Terhune might have been a little puzzled at this change of front; but certainly he was not abashed. Nothing, so far, in all of Matthew Agamemnon Terhune’s forty-three years of life had ever abashed him. Furthermore, if the construction engineers’ mess renounced him as an organization, certain units of it did not; for, while the canny Scotchman and his two assistants politely and unostentatiously avoided Matthew, the guileless and demure Podger and Clark continued to hang, and to all appearances to hang breathlessly, upon the words that fell from the engineer’s lips.

Things went on this way for some two weeks; and then suddenly, coincident with the advent to Big Cloud of one Senorita Vera Cabello, the Alaskan Boundary Question, the Fresh Air Movement, the Newfoundland Fisheries Dispute, and all other subjects of character, scope, and vital import similar, were blown away, as fluff is blown before a gale of wind, in the face of a new and weightier matter for research and discussion. That is, it was new, and therefore weightier to Terhune.

Regan, with ungracious bluntness, called her a “spook doctor”—but the master mechanic was always blunt. Miss Cabello—pardon, Senorita Vera Cabello, in her advertisements in the Big Cloud Weekly World’s Era, announced herself as a “seeress renowned on two hemispheres,” and followed with a modest compilation of her qualifica­tions and attainments.

She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter—of course. Under the great teacher Yagagama, she had studied the mystic laws of crystal gazing in the far Orient. At her command were, not one, but two familiars of the dread other world, with whom she was in constant communion for the benefit of those who consulted her; and further, by special arrangement and appointment —for which there was an extra fee— she would, for a brief space, recall the ethereal forms of any dear departed on request—always provided that the “rapport,” whatever that meant, was propitious and favorable, a risk to which the client subscribed in his accompanied-by-the-fee application for the seance.

The Senorita Cabello was clever— whatever else might be said of her, let that be understood. She gave a free public performance in the fire hall on the night of her arrival. Terhune attended this—and was impressed. There was a black cabinet on the stage and black hangings and misty, white shapes moving about, potent tributes to the senorita’s powers. Terhune bulked large in a front chair, his moon face puckered, his little, round eyes like pin points, as he stared into the Egyptian blackness in front of him.

For a wonder he didn’t say much that night; but the next night he presented himself at the senorita’s apartments, which she had meanwhile opened over Dinkelman’s clothing emporium on Main Street.

There wasn’t any silly business about it as far as the engineer was concerned; that is, there wasn’t any glamour of feminine charms exerting any undue influence upon him—the senorita was neither comely nor in the flower of her youth. Brought down to a simple equation, the idea of the occult and its mysteries caught Matthew Agamemnon hard; and the latter part of the senorita’s advertisement caught him harder.

Terhune had never forgiven his twin brother Sime for the inopportune and fatal attack of heart failure, some five years previous, with which the defunct had so arbitrarily terminated, at its most crucial moment, the argument upon which they had been engaged at the time. He most earnestly desired to converse with Sime.

The senorita agreed. It took her a few seconds to get the line clear and warm up to her work; but, inside of three minutes by the watch, she was writhing around on the floor like a serpent stung by bees, choking and squeal­ing and foaming at the mouth.

Terhune had seen a cat in a fit once; and there was one thing about him that was common to every engineer on the Hill Division—which was to act promptly in an emergency. There was a pitcher of water on the table. Terhune seized it, and heaved the contents violently into her face.

The stiffening limbs relaxed with amazing mobility, and the Senorita Vera Cabello sat up with surprising suddenness. What she said is not recorded, because Terhune didn’t quite get the rights of it himself; but when he left, he carried with him a sort of hazy realization that he had only himself to blame for sidetracking the “rapport” with Sime—and just at the psychological instant when it was about to be consummated, too.

Therefore, he tried it again the following evening. This time he sternly refrained from even a thought of the water pitcher—which incidentally had been removed—but Sime, perhaps because he had got close enough to witness the proceedings of the night before, seemed a little diffident about taking a chance on getting mixed up with the turmoil and strife of things terrestrial. Sime did not appear; but Mat­thew was still optimistic.

Blow much of the engineer’s last pay check, in a very brief interval of time, became the property of Senorita Vera Cabello is a personal matter, and Terhune’s own business. Terhune never said. If Sime was stubborn, so was Matthew Agamemnon. Being twins, it was natural; but let that go.

And the senorita was clever. Pend­ing connections with Sime, she fascinated Matthew by initiating him into the first degree of the mysteries of the Beyond—and hinted at much more. She spoke in a far-away voice of dwellers within the first and second and third spheres, wise counselors and mentors to mankind; of apparitions, wraiths, and specters, who appeared to mortals when something of dire moment was impending. But—the world was blind and gross and crass—few, very few, could see or understand. It was necessary to be attuned, to be sensitive.

“Zar are many t’ings in heaven an’ earth—” she quoted; and sold Matthew Agamemnon a little literature on the subject.

At first, Terhune, like a man feeling his way on a new run, and wary of getting his signals mixed, confined his reflections on this now all-engrossing matter to young Spence, his fireman.

Spence listened incredulously.

“I dunno what you mean,” said he, “ ‘bout visitations from the other world an’ appuritshuns an’ wreaths an’ that sort; but if it’s ghosts you’re drivin’ at, I don’t take no stock in ’em. Never saw one; did you?”

This was the challenge direct. Terhune blinked his little eyes fast, and proceeded to get his hand, or, rather, his tongue, in on Spence—and scored cleanly. Spence, on the evening run back that night, took to dodging, between shovelfuls, the shadows of the telegraph poles as they flitted across the gangway; and, as Work Special 118 pulled into the Big Cloud yards, he confessed to a “creepy, cricidy feelin’ up an’ down his spine.”

With this victory as a credential of proficiency, Terhune opened fire the following day on the construction camp. And on that day, and for some ensuing ones, he bombarded it pitilessly. He caught Ferguson on the narrow ledge of an excavation where the chief couldn’t get away. He cornered the assistants more than once. He labored patiently with excitable Russians, staring Swedes, and half-witted Polacks, whose knowledge of English was summed up in the few choice and polite phrases with which they were accustomed to be addressed by their lords and masters, the road bosses and foremen. He talked to everybody; and no man, except perhaps Sime, who was dead, could pace Matthew Agamemnon on talk.

But of all his audience, Podger and Clark alone were solicitious and sympathetic. At the start, like Spence, they asked him if he had ever seen a ghost himself. Matthew regretted that he had not; but, in lieu of personal testimony, offered an imposing array of authentic statistics, which he now had at his fingers’ ends, of people who had.

Clark was unquestionably impressed. So was Podger. But their conversion was a lower and more stubborn matter than Spence’s. They yielded a point here and there from time to time, as men whose convictions are reluctantly overridden; but it was several days before they made a full and unconditional surrender.

However, if it took longer than it did with Spence, once converted, having been trained in a mathematical school of hard fact, their conversion was not the passive conversion of the fireman. Instead, it was practical, and—but the red is against us, and we’ll have to slow up till we get the track.

To-day, now that Ferguson has built his bridge and gouged his cut through the mountain walls, you can see the mouth of Number One Tunnel staring at you like a little black eye up the grade all the way from the bridge; but you couldn’t then, for the right of way swept out of the tunnel into a long half-mile curve close up against the bare gray rock of the mountainside following the river bend; and, still curving at the bottom, where it crossed the Muskrat, hit the old wooden trestle on the tangent.

This didn’t leave much room for a siding anywhere; but, what with Terhune and his dump carts and the work in general, a siding there had to be from the first, so they tapped the main line as far up as they could squeeze in, paralleled it down to the trestle, and left the last two rails bent up and sticking out over the water, with the river for a bumper.

About the only rights Terhune and his Work Special had were this same Muskrat siding and the three-mile stretch from there to Blazer, the first station east of the camp; the latter be­cause, once Matt had pulled out, he was in the clear, with nothing on earth to reach him till the operator at Blazer could wave a tissue in his face.

So, also, because there was quiet in the Serpent’s Cut and a lull in the traffic for an hour or so around six o’clock, Terhune was scheduled to leave the Muskrat at six-fifteen each night and run to Blazer for orders. After that, if he wasn’t laid out more than two or three times by the wayside, he would eventually make the Big Cloud yards by eight or eight-thirty—in time to keep a one-sided appointment with his tantalizingly elusive relation, and imbibe mystic lore from the senorita, after her customary earnest, if unproductive, fit was at an end.

Matthew Agamemnon Terhune had become a busy man, take it all round; for the more he listened to the senorita on subjects touching the dread familiars across the Styx, the firmer became his belief and the stronger grew his desire to enlighten the unenlightened—so the harder he talked.

And possibly there is a moral here. Certainly no one ever had a less fertile soil for the sowing of seed than was the field wherein Matthew Agamemnon labored; and yet, to-day, the first canon in the creed of the Hill Division, bar no man among them, not even the pick-swinging Russians and Swedes and Polacks, is ghosts.

It simply goes to show what sincerity and unbounded perseverance will do; for, on the Friday night when Terhune pulled out from the Muskrat siding, a week after Senorita Vera Cabello’s arrival at Big Cloud, the only disciples he had were young Spence, his fireman, and those two learned bachelors of science, Clark and Podger.

In the first flush of spring the days are still short, and it had already shut down pretty black when Terhune, on the dot of six-fifteen, moved up the siding and cautiously negotiated the mainline switch for the bumping, groaning, rattling string that trailed behind him.

You can come down the stretch from the tunnel to the trestle at a fairly stiff clip, for the arc of the curve is wide; but going up is quite another matter, with a trifle better than a four-per-cent grade to climb. Terhune had a heavier load than usual that night; and his pace was little faster than a man’s walk as he crawled up for the tunnel’s mouth, his engine entering her protest in long, hoarse, growling barks from her exhaust, and coughing a hemorrhage of sparks and red-hot cinders from her stack.

There wasn’t much of the right of way in sight, for the beam of the electric headlight, with the curve of the track, just cut the left-hand rail a few yards ahead, and then shot away like a truant child to play among the trees and foliage of the Muskrat Valley that was opening up below. The effect of this might have been pretty, but it did not appeal to Terhune—he had seen it before; and, besides, he had other things on his mind. So, by the time they were well up to the tunnel, having got snugly and comfortably settled on his seat, he cast, after a professional glance at his gauges, an introspective eye across the cab at Spence,

“There’s none so blind,” said he, with originality, “as them as won’t see. There’s hundreds and hundreds of cases with evidence enough to back ‘em up that no one with any sense could turn down. Now take that drummer ghost somewheres over in Scotland that always plays his drum as a warning when one of the family’s going to die. No one disputes that, do they? Well, then, how about that?”

“I think they’re horrid things,” said young Spence uncomfortably.

“I don’t say they’re not,” admitted Terhune, wagging his head sapiently. “I don’t say they’re not, but— What’s that!” The words burst from his lips in a dull, frozen gasp of terror, followed on the instant by a wild, incoherent yell from the fireman.

With a lurch as it struck the straight, and the roar of the deep-toned exhaust swelling into a thousand thunders that reverberated hollow and cavernous from the vaulted roof, the big ten-wheeled mogul had shoved her nose into the round, inky black mouth of the tunnel; and the headlight, wavering back to its duty, was throwing its beam far into the opening. And there, where the shaft of light focused ahead upon the rails, was a sight that made Terhune’s blood run cold.

Full in the right of way, facing the train, one hand upheld, as though in warning, the light shimmering through his ghostly body onto the rail beyond, stood the white, shadowy specter figure of a man.

Great clammy beads of perspiration sprang to Terhune’s forehead, his fat, florid cheeks paled to ivory, and the fringe of hair around his head seemed to rise up until it stood out straight and stiff; then, working like a madman, he jammed in the throttle, applied the “air,” shot the reversing lever over the full segment into the last notch, whipped the throttle wide open again, released the “air,” and, for all the world like huge pinwheels, the sparks flying from the tires, the drivers began to race backward.

No train before or since on the Hill Division ever came to as abrupt a stop as did Work Special 118 east on that night. The jerk threw Spence halfway up the coal on the tender; and Terhune spit blood from loosened teeth for a week afterward. With any initial speed, the flats and the gravel dumps and the box cars would have telescoped them­selves to splinters. As it was, they came together with a rattle and bang and crunch and grind of battered buffers that would have put a park of artillery in the toy pistol class.

Then the mogul began to bite into the rails, and the train began to back out of the tunnel and down the grade; but, ahead of it, leading the way, the coupler shivered like a bit of pastry from the terrific snap-the-whip wrench it had received, sailed the ancient caboose. And swaying, writhing, squeaking, squealing, followed the rest of the Work Special, with Terhune, all flabby fat now, hang­ing from the cab window, his whistle, from pure nervousness, going like a chattering magpie, and his teeth, after one last sight of the apparition as they swung clear of the tunnel, going like a pair of castanets.

The train crew in the caboose, by the time they got their scattered senses together from the shock that had bowled them like ninepins over the stove and left them wrestling with the stovepipe, found themselves halfway back to the trestle, with the speed of their crazy conveyance increasing at every foot. They let out a concerted yell, and jumped.

Down below, at the din infernal, lights were flashing all around the camp. Some one rushed to the switch, and threw it for the siding. The caboose, for all its age, took it like a young colt, whisked the length of it, shot off the up-canted end rails, and, describing a neat parabola in the air, plumped, in a clean dive, into the bosom of the Muskrat. And it was only the fierce swing and jolt of the engine as it took the switch, and the wild yell of the man beside it as he swung the main line open again, that momentarily restored Terhune’s wits sufficiently to check the train and save the rest of his outfit from the same fate.

As he came to a stop, men clustered around him; but for the first time in his life Matthew Agamemnon’s tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he was dumb. He could only hang weakly in the gangway as the volley of questions came at him thick and fast.

Then suddenly, from the tunnel’s mouth, came the long, shrill siren scream of a 1600 class mountain racer, then the pur of steel, the dull rumble of beating trucks growing louder and louder; and, bursting like a cannon’s tongue flame from the curve, the glare of a headlight shot streaming into the night. A roar, a whirl, a row of lights flashing like diamonds from a solid string of brass-vestibuled Pullmans swept by, took the trestle with a tattoo that echoed far up and down the valley, and was gone. And behind her, the questions silenced, men with blanched, awed faces saw Matthew Agamemnon Terhune, with a hysterical sob, collapse limply on the floor of his cab.

Just a series of illogical, disconnected happenings? Perhaps. It depends on the way you look at it. Queer things happen in life. If it had not been for the mechanical bent that enabled Podger and Clark to tinker so effectually with bits of wire and gauze sheeting, and Matthew Agamemnon’s propensity for talk that inspired them to do so, and the advent of Senorita Vera Cabello, who inspired Matthew Agamemnon, the be-Pullmaned Convention Special with clear rights to Glacier Junction, twenty miles west of the Muskrat, which would, none the less, have hit Blazer on the tick of her schedule, with no reason on earth for holding her up, since she had time and to spare to get past the siding before Terhune pulled out, and which would just as surely have had a breakdown a mile west of Blazer, delaying her fifteen minutes, a delay that, in the face of her rights through, her crew were concerned only in making up, would—but what’s the use!

Chance, or luck, or something more than that, if you’d rather, whatever you like to call it; that was all that stood between three hundred conventionites, to say nothing of two train and engine crews, and a shambles quick and absolute, that night.

However, that as it may be, it was a week before Matthew Agamemnon climbed into a cab again; and in the meantime, at the polite solicitation of the town marshal incident to a few unpaid bills, the senorita had departed from Big Cloud. This, from the standpoint of the psychologist, was a misfortune. His visits perforce ended. There was no telling whether the Specter of Serpent’s Cut, as they came to call it, had enhanced or shattered Terhune’s belief in her and, concretely, in the occult. Not that Matthew Agamemnon was silenced; far from it. He talked harder than ever, as far as that goes, only he talked exclusively on such subjects as the Alaskan Boundary Question, the Fresh Air Movement, and the Newfoundland Fisheries Dispute.

THE SCIENCE OF THE FLAPJACK

NOW twist your wrist

And bow your back,

And learn to turn

The good flapjack.

Give it a flip

When rich and brown,

Catch it kerslap!

When it comes down.

Give it a coat

Of sorghum thick,

Or bacon grease

Will do the trick;

Or even plain—

Not near half bad,

If a day’s tramp

Or hunt you've had.

Flapjack, you helped

The trail to clear

Through all the wilds

Of the frontier.

Well your humble

Part you played,

For by your strength

The West was made.

Robert V. Carr.

Greater Love

This may be Lacey Amy’s (Luke Allan’s) first Western story and the real precursor to the popular series of books that made him famous, Blue Pete. This was a difficult and costly little story to acquire—it took about two months and over $50 Canadian dollars to get the Library of Congress to digitize a very poor microfilm copy (5 pages). Anyhow I am pleased since it predates the Blue Pete, short story by almost a year./drf

Greater Love

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Popular Magazine, 15 April 1910.

The turning point in the life of Blue Pete, a half-breed mounted police detective. He put his destiny in the hands of a judge; and the pity was that his Honor was too small a man to recognize greatness of his opportunity

WHEN it came to a matter of brands, Blue Pete, the half-breed mounted police detective was in a class by himself. He never told all he knew about them. Indeed, it was doubtful if he could have explained how he arrived at conclusions that were unerring. It was one of his stock ex­hibitions before cattlemen, to examine a brand and tell to within a few months when it had been made, the condition of the iron at the time, and the skill of the brander.

Blue Pete could have joined the outfit of any rancher in the Medicine Hat district, and drawn higher pay than the police gave him. He could have made his fortune in rustling, with his knowl­edge of brand manipulation. But he preferred casual employment with liber­ty to leave at a moment’s notice, and secret pay from the mounted police. Money was of very little use to him, but the excitement of man hunting and horse tracking came up to his idea of a perfect existence.

Although for more than a year he had been able to conceal his connection with the mounted police, the inquest into the death of two rustlers whom he had been forced to shoot, had made his position public. Thereafter the ranchers found little use for him, the inconveni­ence of performing the spring round-up and branding under the keen eyes of a police official, overbalancing his ability to assist in the work.

Their resentment and their fear of what Blue Pete might know were all the greater from the fact that for all these months they had been treating him as one of themselves.

Inspector Parker, therefore, sent word to the Lodge detachment, from which headquarters Blue Pete usually worked, to keep the half-breed engaged in regular rides around and into the Cypress Hills, a large  tract of wildly wooded hills a hundred miles long and ten wide, whose devious paths and pas­sages he knew as none other in the country. Several times the half-breed was shot at from ambush, but his recklessness seemed to save him, and when he had brought in two cowboys from across the border and had convicted them of attempted manslaughter, these attacks, ceased.

To tourists, his presence at the bar­racks in the city, was a source of en­tertainment. His revolver shooting was little short of marvelous.

His favorite amusement was a start­lingly dangerous one. He would place the muzzle of his six-shooter in his mouth, his squint eyes wandering twinklingly over the visitors, and almost as fast as he could work the trig­ger, would revolve the cylinder as long as you wanted to look at him. A hair’s breadth farther and the cartridge would explode, but just at that point between the revolving of the cylinder and the explosion, his finger would stop.

When the weak-nerved spectators were closing their eyes in fear, the re­volver would ring out, and the ensuing screams invariably brought a burst of laughter from the half-breed as the bul­let whizzed harmlessly past his ear.

Blue Pete’s best friend—in fact, the only one he seemed really to care about,—was Corporal Mahon, a young Eng­lishman, who had worked with him on many of his most difficult cases. The two men were the best of comrades, the young policeman reading his week­ly letters from his mother in England to the half-breed, the latter listening reverently, and taking care that the son never neglected to send the weekly answer.

On their long rides, or when curled up behind a sagebush on the prairie. Mahon would read and reread the last letter, Blue Pete listening with an in­tensity of interest that would have surprised any one who knew the dusky-skinned half-breed only as a daring, illiterate cowboy detective.

On Friday of each week—the day when the little backboard drove up to the detachment door with the few letters, papers, and parcels for the half dozen policemen stationed there—Blue Pete usually contrived to do Mahon’s work as well as his own, in order to allow the young man to be on hand when his mother’s letter arrived. And then as soon as his duties were over the half-breed would seek him out, as if accidentally, and hear the latest tokens of a fond mother’s fears and forebodings, her love and hopes.

Once the half-breed begged for one of the old letters to carry. Mahon handed it to him wonderingly. Blue Pete felt an explanation necessary, and in a sheepish tone, he stammered: “Kind uh think I’d like t’ have a letter on me always. Ain’t never had no mother m’self.”

A few weeks later, he had returned the letter minus the heading. “My dear boy,” which the young policeman noticed without a word. All the home letters began with “my dear boy.” and the half-breed had taken to, calling him “Boy” when they were alone.

When work was not pressing, or when riding in the Hills, Blue Pete often took the corporal to a cave which he had fitted up with pine needles for beds, two stalls for the horses, a make-shift stove, and what was an apparently inexhaustible supply of canned goods. The police detective’s, work sometimes took him away for weeks, and only Mahon knew that he made this cave his headquarters.

One day in late summer a rancher reported to the police the loss of a roan mare. He had purchased it from a dealer out near Irvine and, missing it later, made inquiries. A cowboy said he had seen it in a bunch being driven south by a young cowboy working for the rancher who originally owned the mare.

The mounted police had long had their eyes on a rancher named Peterson, and seized this evidence gladly. Blue Pete received his instructions, and three weeks later rode into the barracks corral with a roan mare dragging behind, and a glum-looking cowboy riding in front. He had completed a bundle of evidence that meant sure incarceration for Peterson.

Unfortunately, however, the glowering individual, who snarled out a curse when ordered to dismount, had been brought over the border by the half-breed at the point of a revolver.

The police were willing to take chances on the horse forcibly taken, but the man was a different matter. He was reluctantly allowed to go, and it became evident that conviction must come from other quarters. The receiver of stolen horses would not appear willingly at the trial.

The evidence rounded up was sufficiently complete to convince any fair-minded judge. The young cowboy who had driven the bunch south was in the hands of the police, but he was only fourteen years old, and a good criminal lawyer like that employed by Peterson might angle him so that his evidence would he of little use.

But the principal difficulty lay in the fact that a new judge was to sit. Judge Ritchie had been lawyer and insurance and real-estate agent. He had qualified for his position by some political work that betrayed a conscience not over-sensitive. As a criminal lawyer before his elevation he had often run foul of the police and bore them no good will.

The cowboy who had seen the roan mare in the bunch gave his evidence, and the purchase of the mare was also sufficiently proven. Blue Pete was put on the stand to identify the stolen mark. It was purely a matter of brands, and there the half-breed was at home.

“Your name?” asked the clerk.

“Pete.”

“But your whole name?”

The half-breed hesitated a moment. “Blue Pete,” he answered.

“Here now!” interrupted the judge with all the dignity of a new official. “We want your full name—your surname.”

Blue Pete looked helplessly around at Inspector Parker. “Pete Maverick,” he answered.

A titter ran through the courtroom, and Blue Pete’s face wrinkled.

“Order! Order!” shouted the sheriff. The lawyers—everybody but the self-important judge—had smiled.

The crown prosecutor immediately plunged Blue Pete into a maze of detail on brands and brand detection: The half-breed told of the colors of brands put on at different times, of the state of the scar and the skin, the length of hair over it, the way the skin would wrinkle, the various stamps of different branders and irons, and the varieties of brands made by irons at different heats.

The judge looked very learned, though he had no more knowledge of what was being explained than he had of Blue Pete’s surname.

The half-breed told when the original brand on the roan mare had been made, when the vent had been put on, and when the alteration was branded on to conceal the original brand. The police were delighted.

Then Paddy Nolan, the big criminal lawyer from Calgary, rose.

“How long have you been with the police?” he asked.

“ ‘Bout three years.”

“Where were you before that?”

The crown prosecutor objected, but the judge upheld Nolan.

“In th’ States,” came the answer.

“What were you doing there?”

Another objection refused consideration.

“Workin’ on ranches.”

“What was your work on the ranches?”

“Takin’ care uh cattle.” Another laugh in the courtroom.

“Now I want you to tell the court whether you were or were not rustling over there.”

Blue Pete hesitated. “I was.” he answered.

The criminal lawyer looked at the judge.

“How long were you rustling?”

Blue Pete sat down lazily on the edge of the witness box. “Ten years I rustled for th’ biggest rustlers in th’ Bad Lands.”

“Who were you with?”

“Clark Brothers—Sidney an’ Conn—Hughson—Nanton’s—Want t’ know any more?”

“No, that will do. So that explains how you profess to know so much about brands! I suppose you did lots of brand switching yourself?”

Blue-Pete grunted an affirmative.

“And I suppose you could change a horse by its brand and otherwise, so that its best friends could not know it. Tell us how you would do it apart from the brands.”

The half-breed entered willingly into the discussion. He told of the carbolic-acid marks, the effects of ordinary scars in changing color, and even shape, of marking a horse’s face, and changing the shape of its ears.

Then the judge stopped him.

“I do not think you need go farther,” he said. “Besides, it would be an unwise thing to permit such criminal knowledges you possess to be disseminated. This court cannot accept the evidence of a man who acknowledges that he has been a rustler for ten years. The police have no right to employ such a man. I cannot convict on such evidence.”

Blue Pete’s mouth opened in bewilderment for a moment. Then he stood straight up and looked at the judge. “Does yer honor mean I’m lyin’?”, he asked.

“That’ll do.” the judge answered. Turning to the lawyer, he asked: “Is there anything you want to ask of this man.?”

Blue Pete spoke, “jedge, f’r ten years I rustled with th’ biggest rustlers, not ‘cause I wanted t’ steal cattle, but ‘cause every one ‘round me rustled. Three years ago I came t’ Canady, an’ since then I’ve got hundreds uh horses an’ cattle back t’ their owners. I like th’ work, an’ there’s this about it, jedge—just as long as I’m with th’ police; I’m straight. Ain’t got no reason for lyin’ now. I guess mebbe I’m a little use t’ th’ country, but if yuh turn me down like that, jedge, I may’s well go back t’ rustlin’. Got to live ‘mong th’ cattle an’ horses. Or’nary cow-boyin’s too tame fer me. D’yuh want me t’ be a detective or a rustler? Yuh have it in yer hands, jedge."

“Next witness.” said Judge Ritchie briefly.

Blue Pete strode silently out of the courtroom. Corporal Mahon laid a detaining hand on his arm. “Don’t take it that way, Pete.” he said sympathetically. “We believe you, and we know Judge Ritchie.”

The half-breed walked on unheedingly, his lips working, and his hands clinched.

The next morning a boy brought into the barracks Pete’s horse and saddle, his Stetson hat, and his shoes—every­thing he possessed that had been supplied by the mounted police. The inspector read the message, and roundly cursed the judge. He gave orders to his men to send Blue Pete to him as soon as they could find him.

But it was months before they found him—and then they brought him in reverently.

The week after the trial, rancher after rancher began to come in with reports of lost animals. The police scoured the prairie, but the rustlers knew Blue Pete was no longer on their track, and for weeks, until winter set in, the police had hardest riding they had ever known. Then in the spring the inspector himself was forced to join the chase. It was evident that rustlers from across the line were laughing at the police and Canadian law. By tireless riding, several bunches of horses were captured and, stiff sentences meted out to a few of the rustlers who were captured.

But still there was rustling that baffled the police. A constant patrol south of the Hills led to no discoveries, and for a time the N. W. M. P. were at a loss to know how the horses were slipped out of the country.

One day a rancher who had taken a lease of land away north on the Red Deer, came to town, and in conversation with the police, spoke of a couple of bunches of horses he had seen going north. At first the police were inclined to disbelieve him, for the north trail led through two hundred miles of unknown prairie where no man lived. Then beyond it was the line of towns and farm lands along the Canadian. Northern.

One of the policemen suggested that the horses were driven north to go east or west by a roundabout way and then down into the States. The entire police force in the west was notified to be on the lookout, and the Medicine Hat patrol spread itself out to cover more territory. But nothing resulted.

Mahon, who was now a sergeant, reached one conclusion that later became a clue—instead of the horses disappearing in bunches, only the larger ones were selected. This seemed to be invariably the case, and the sergeant spent many days, as he wandered up and down the prairie, trying to make out what it meant.

Blue Pete had not been heard from since the day of the trial. The police had been constantly on the search for him, at first to assist them, and later it had been forced upon them that the half-breed had accepted the alternative which he put squarely up to the judge.

The inspector and Sergeant Mahon were reluctant to believe that Blue Pete had gone back to rustling. That he was in the district was attested by information collected from several cowboys who had seen him. Once or twice Mahon, had even suspected that the capture of bands on the way across the border had been rendered easier by some third party who had placed clues with what looked like studied carelessness.

A raw young recruit who was lost in the Cypress Hills had been piloted on his way by a half-breed, whom they readily recognized from the description as Blue Pete, and once Mahon, himself, after four days of almost ceaseless riding, had found three cans of meat and a loaf of rough bread beside him when he arose famished from his grass couch on the morning of the fifth day.

He had never visited the cave which he knew had been Blue Pete’s home in the Hills. Somehow he felt that he should not take advantage of the knowledge gained on those little trips of theirs. If any other member of the force discovered it, it would not be through any hint from him. If Blue Pete were rustling, he would have to be taken in the open, and in fair fight. Mahon would help in that, as was his duty. He knew, too, that Blue Pete would feel that the location of his cave would not be exposed by the man who had gained his knowledge through the kindness of the occupant.

Sergeant Mahon’s biggest surprise came when a dirty piece of paper was found under the detachment door with the word “Boy” scrawled on the outside, and inside a rough drawing of a cowboy with a pointed revolver. Underneath was the word “Billsy.” Mahon knew it was a warning from Blue Pete that “Billsy,” a notorious Bad Land’s rustler, would shoot him on sight. The sergeant had captured a bunch of cattle from Billsy only a short time before, and had almost taken the rustler with them. The surprise of the warning was that the half-breed was learning to write. The next month he received three notes from Blue Pete that showed advancement in his writing, and gave the police valuable clues on stolen animals.

Why the half-breed, who had scorned letters, was now passing through the intricacies of the alphabet and writing, Mahon could not guess. That it would not be so hard for the man who could read brands where other men could decipher nothing, he knew, but he also felt sure that the latest acquirement was for some definite purpose.

Another report of horses going north led to the dispatch of three mounted police away up to the Red Deer. As they worked north they came upon unmistakable signs that the reports were true. Old camp fires, trodden mud around drinking pools and fords, and here and there temporary corrals showed that the route was regularly organized. Any plainsman could tell without the corrals that the bunch were under direction.

Mahon, who was at the head of the expedition, had by this time learned many of the tricks of tracking. He was aware that the tracks were all too old to warrant following. But, being on the frequented track, he knew he had but to wait until another band would come. So he crossed the Red Deer, and camped beside a small stream, where the trees would hide him and his men from view.

For three days they waited. Then Mahon riding back over the trail found evidences that showed that a bunch had been driven north since they had pitched their camp. In chagrin he returned to his men after following for a short distance the trail which ran around them. Evidently the rustler was an old hand who had been aware of the police, and had simply ridden around. The sergeant was in doubt whether to follow the new trail to the end or trust to waiting. Then his course was decided for him.

A lone rider appeared on a rise far to the south east. He was sitting quietly in his saddle and appeared to be gazing at something. It was too distant to make out whether he was looking toward them or away from them. A horseman so far from civilization could mean only one thing.

The men quietly led their horses farther into the trees in the hope that they had not been seen, and in a few minutes were riding along the stream toward the Red Deer. As they topped a roll in the prairie the rider was more plainly visible, looking straight toward them. Not a move did he make. Even when they splashed through the river with the unknown less than half a mile away, he maintained his immobility. He was looking down on them almost absently.

With a pang of something like disappointment, Mahon recognized Blue Pete. At the same moment the horseman rose in his stirrups, and waved his hat in the air. Then whirling his horse around on its hind legs, he disappeared over the edge.

Mahon had long dreaded having to participate in the actual chase of his old friend, but when the time came, he determined to do his duty.

For an hour they rode hard without a glimpse of the half-breed. Then, as they mounted an elevation, they saw him sitting quietly on his horse nearly a mile to the southwest. The pursuit was renewed, only to find at the end of another hour that the half-breed was still keeping his distance. Mahon saw the uselessness of wildly pursuing a man who knew the country like Blue Pete. He spread his men out, and for rest of the day pursuer and pursued bore directly south. As it grew dusk the half-breed drew away, and when last seen was several miles to the south and riding hard.

Mahon drew his men in for the night, and setting the proper changes of guard, went to sleep. There were only about four hours of luminous darkness at this time of the year, so the guard was directed to take his stand on a ridge close at hand with a pair of night glasses. Not a sound disturbed the night.

In the morning, Mahon rose early. On his blanket was a square of paper, and on it the words, “ef i hed been Billsy.” Mahon looked at the note and then to where one of his companions lay a few feet distant and just waking up. Only fifty yards to the right the guard sat lazily stretching, and preparing to come down. Blue Pete was still protecting him—Blue Pete, the man his duty called him to follow to the death, the man for whose capture a good price would be paid as soon as he could return to headquarters and report what he now knew.

It seemed terrible to be forced to capture, dead or alive, a man who was systematically guarding his pursuer. For a moment it came into his head to call off the pursuit. After all, he had nothing definite about the half-breeds horse stealing, and certainly the police had been assisted in preventing rustling by Blue Pete’s scarcely legible notes. But he was morally certain, and the hot pursuit of yesterday verified his suspicions.

Breakfast was hurriedly eaten, and an early start made southward. Mahon knew Blue Pete would turn to the Cypress Hills as naturally as a gopher makes for its hole. There was no hurry, therefore, and the capture of a man so well acquainted with every hollow and hill in the country would be impossible with his present small force.

As they crossed the railway between Medicine Hat and Irvine, one of Mahon’s companions, glancing back over the trail, observed a rider galloping furiously toward them. He became visible as a fellow policeman, and in a few minutes had told his story. He had been sent out from the city to bring them back, and, meeting their trail, had turned and followed it, Mahon was to report with his men at the Lodge. A band of rustlers had driven off some cattle from the Reversed 3 Bar ranch, and had taken to the Hills pursued by four mounted police. Reinforcements had been rushed to there, but further help was needed to surround the hills as far as possible and make a desperate attempt to stop the rustling for good.

By nightfall, Mahon and his men had arrived at the Hills on fresh mounts and had spread out over a directed course. During the night, shots were heard to the south, showing that the rustlers knew their predicament and were making an effort to escape across the border.

In the morning, Mahon rode around and received the report that his men had been successful in driving the rustlers back into the Hills. Blood marks showed where one of them had been hit, but the danger of sharpshooting from the trees prevented following the trail immediately.

Mahon, as the policeman to whom the Hills were best known, determined to take one of his men, and to work his way in, and thus try to get the drop on the rustlers. It was a risky piece of work, but success from lying around the Hills seemed impossible with the small force at his command. They had kept the rustlers back one night, but the attempt would probably be renewed on the following evening at some unguarded spot. He selected a coulee some distance east of the blood trail, intending to work back to the trail when he got into the cover of the Hills.

Leaving two policemen near the edge of the Hills to rush to his assistance if shots were heard, and selecting the most experienced of his men, he followed the ravine into the silence of the great wildness, and carefully crawled back to the trail. Only his training under Blue Pete enabled him to discover the faint blood marks among the dead leaves and branches that covered the ground everywhere.

Giving his companion orders to confine his attention ahead and around, Mahon settled down to trailing the spots that here and there showed on the leaves. Deeper and deeper into the Hills they led, and down to the edge of a small lake. Here they vanished, and Mahon could find no traces that afforded him any clue.

Under the circumstances it might have been wiser to withdraw, for any tree might hide the enemy, and there would be no mercy for the police. Once or twice as he stopped suddenly to verify his course, Mahon imagined that he heard a slight rustle in the leaves to his right, but careful scrutiny had revealed nothing.

The position of the two men was an unenviable one. They could not free themselves of the feeling of a presence following, and they knew no rustler would spare them.

They sat down on opposite sides of a tree to decide upon a course, every nerve alert to detect an enemy. Mahon’s companion was a dare-devil young fellow equal to any risk and possessing implicit confidence in himself and his superior. Neither was for turning back. The lake lay in front of them, peaceful as any mountain lake. Not a sound was to be heard near at hand, and only an occasional call from an unknown bird from a great distance broke the dense silence. That silence increased the belief in the presence of men around them, and an overpowering feeling of helplessness impelled both men to action.

Mahon determined to take one direction, and Forbes the other, meeting at the opposite side of the lake. A shot from either would summon the other, and bring help from the two companions listening for that signal at the edge of the Hills.

Mahon crawled carefully through the brush at the edge of the lake, his eyes more to his right than in front. He could not shake off the feeling that there was something alive there within a few yards, something deliberately stalking him. But in spite of all his moves, his sudden stops, his intense listening, he could hear nothing. He thought of rushing toward the point, but his good sense showed him that the noise would expose him to every enemy within five hundred yards.

He had proceeded halfway around the end of the lake, when he heard a distinct hiss of warning coming from a clump of bushes where his sensitive nerves told him that the stalker was concealed. Instinctively he crouched low. Then surprise at his action, and at the noise, made him raise his head—to look in front of him straight into the barrel of a rifle, and a yellow hair above it. His heart beat fast as he recognized the anger-distorted visage of Billsy, his sworn enemy.

At the same instant a figure leaped into the open from the clump of bushes, and two rifles spoke almost as one. A cry of a man mortally wounded came from in front, and the one on his right fell slowly to his knees, then sank lower and lower, and rolled down the bank. With a gasp of surprise, Mahon recognized the dark face of Blue Pete. He knew it all now. The half-breed had jumped into the open to draw Billsy’s shot, and he had fired just as he was himself hit.

Mahon rushed to him. Billsy’s nearness did not trouble him; he knew Blue Pete’s shot had gone home. The half-breed was lying on his side, his eyes closed, and a stain growing larger on his breast. As Mahon bent down, the squint eyes opened, and a smile went over the dark face.

“Guess Billsy got me—that time,” he murmured, not a quiver showing any feeling.

“Pete, old boy, why did you do it?” Mahon asked, his voice quivering. He turned the half-breed over carefully, and commenced to unfasten his shirt.

“No use, Boy,” said Blue Pete, smiling up in the anxious sergeant’s face. “Know when I’m done fer. Better get out uh here. Billsy’s mates too many fer yah.”

Mahon interrupted, but Blue Pete went on. “Don’t stop me.” he said. “Can’t talk much. Seems t’ leak out here.” He held his hand over the wound. “Billsy’s bunch is under th’ big pine in Pine Coulee. Get ‘round them at night.” He stopped for a moment. “Rustlin’s over fer me, Boy. Hed yuh goin’ though—eh? Took ’em up north t’ Grand Trunk Pacific 'struction camps. Sold’em up thar.”

Another pause while Mahon raised himself to bring water from the lake. There was a noise at the top of the bank, and something hit him heavily on the head.

He fell like a log, but in a semi-conscious helplessness felt Blue Pete lean over him and feel his face and pulse. Then crashing in the bushes, and the half-breed disappeared.

Forbes, who had rushed around at the sound of the shots, found Mahon unconscious and bleeding from a head wound inflicted by a large stone that lay near. In a few minutes the two policemen who had been placed to listen for shots arrived, and between them they carried the wounded sergeant out, his senses coming gradually back to him under cold water and chafing. That night the big pine was the scene of an almost bloodless capture of four rustlers, the remainder of Billsy’s band.

As the police left the scene they were mystified by a rifle shot back in the Hills, but they dared not stop.

Mahon was placed under a doctor’s care at the Lodge, while policemen searched the Hills near the scene of the tragedy for Blue Pete’s body. On the second day they returned to report failure. Mahon, with the bandages around his head rose from the couch where he lay, saddled his horse, and with Forbes entered the Hills. Straight to Blue Pete’s cave he led the way. He pulled back the screen of leaves and Forbes entered.

On the pine bed was a stain and nothing more. Yes! Held down by the corner of a box was a sheet of paper, and in the daylight, with his eyes streaming until he could scarcely see, Mahon found stuck across the sheet the heading of his mother’s letter:

My Dear Boy.

The corner of it was stained with blood, roughly wiped off. Below it Blue Pete had scrawled, in a trembling, wandering hand:

i no youl find me. Ken trust you to tek care of blue Peets boddy. larned to rit for you Boy. gled i did now. you dout think i hit you with that stun do you. Bilsy got me whar it hurts en i kent last it out long kent breeth rit.

The writing scrawled off crookedly over the paper. Then down near the bottom it became more readable, as if the writer had become stronger:

i heer shots neer big pin. hop our oil rit. dont get shot Boy dont.

Then a firmer hand had written:

Tel your muther i sevd you agen, wish i could live now for a while and ill try for it. ef i scent good by Boy.

It ended there. Mahon leaned blindly against the big stone at the door of the cave. But where was the poor half-breed now? It scarcely seemed possible that any man could have lived till night with such a wound. Then the heedless devotion of Blue Pete gave him a clue. Together the two men rode rapidly down the coulee toward the big pine. Just a few yards from the cave they came upon it.

The half-breed, whom a simple mother’s letter turned into a hero, heedless of his own life, lay on his side, the last of his life’s blood congealed on his breast which he had bared in an effort to stop the flow. The old rifle with an empty cartridge was clasped in his hands, one finger on the trigger and bent so hard that the rifle could scarcely be removed. The face was fixed in a look of anxiety that went to Mahon’s heart. The day had been too much for the battered head, and the grief-stricken sergeant tumbled limply beside his protector.

It was simple story Mahon wrote that week to his mother, whose little notes to Blue Pete had always been faithfully delivered until he left the police. It was a story of devotion that comes to few men, of love that passes the love of man for women, of unselfishness that led to death, of misapplied justice that threw a man back to his instincts, of regret for the life that sacrificed itself so willingly.

Mahon read the agony and weakness that had stopped Blue Pete’s last note before the big-pine capture. He saw the waning life flicker up at the sound of the shooting—a flicker that strengthened his hand for the farewell to his mother and himself—the awful struggle as the torn and dying half-breed dragged himself out of the cave and toward the big pine, in a last vain effort to be on hand to protect the man he was dying for. And then the rush of blood, the ebb of life, and, the last shot as the ugly, cross-eyed half-breed sent his dying message of attempted succor to the mother’s boy.

In Windy Coulee, just where it enters the Hills, there is a handmade slab that only the police and a few cowboys, ever see. On it are the words “Greater Love” and nothing more. Mahon would have spent all his earnings on a stone, but he knew the rustler, detective, rustler again, always hero, would sleep better under the work of the hand of “My Dear Boy.”