CHAPTER XXVI.
CARTHEW OF “THE MOUNTED.”
This thought had hardly occurred to him when he was saved furtherpondering by the sight of Topsy coming flying back along the ledge. Hernostrils were distended in a frightened way and her coat was fleckedwith foam. For a flash he saw her as she turned a shoulder of rock, andthen she vanished again as the trail turned inward toward the cliffface. Ralph had only a second in which to act.
He glanced about him. It appeared impossible that two ponies could passon the narrow trail. Yet he would have to let Topsy get by or elsebe backed off into the depths below. In emergencies such as the boynow faced, the mind usually rises to the occasion and works with therapidity necessary to dictate quick action. It was so in Ralph’s case.
He swung his pony in toward the cliff face, clinging to it closely, asthe only possible salvation. In a flash Topsy came swinging around theturn, going at full gallop. Ralph held his breath as he felt her sidesgraze his right knee! But she galloped safely by with hardly a fractionof an inch to spare between her hoofs and the edge of the trail!
To his huge joy and relief the emergency was passed, and withoutaccident. In another minute he had swung his pony around, its small,nimble legs bunched together to make the turn, and was off down thetrail after the runaway. Almost at the bottom several riders wereadvancing toward the boy. The recreant Topsy was between him and thenewcomers, whom Ralph recognized as his camp mates. Mountain Jim was attheir head and they had set out in search of Ralph a short time before.
Topsy, thus hemmed in, allowed herself to be captured without makingmuch resistance, and a much chastened pony was led back into camp,where the professor was awaiting the return of the party.
“Lucky thing that she turned,” was Ralph’s comment, “for I don’t thinkthat ledge went much further up the mountain side.”
“Reckon it didn’t,” was Jim’s reply, “and if you had found a spot whereit was much narrower, you’d have been in an ugly fix.”
“Not a doubt of it,” commented Ralph as he thought of his feelings whenhe was uncertain whether Topsy would be able to pass him or not.
As to what had turned the runaway pony in such a fortunate manner,opinions were divided. Mountain Jim inclined to the belief that thetrail had come to an end and that the pony had had sense enough toturn. Ralph, with the recollection of the animal’s terror fresh in hismind, was positive that some wild beast had scared the recreant Topsyand caused her to dash back.
The discussion over the exciting incident had hardly ceased, when hoofbeats were heard coming along the trail by which they had arrived attheir camping place. All looked up with interest, for travelers werefew in that wild part of the Rockies. Their curiosity was not long inbeing gratified.
Through the trees came riding a stalwart figure on a big bay horse.The newcomer was clean shaven, bronzed and capable looking. He wore abig sombrero, riding boots, and trousers with a stripe down the sides.His appearance, for he carried a carbine in a holster and pistols inhis belt, was somewhat alarming to the boys, who exchanged hurriedwhispers. But Mountain Jim soon quieted their fears.
“It’s a trooper of the Northwest Mounted Police,” he exclaimed, andthen, as the rider drew nearer, he cried out in a glad voice:
“Great Blue Bells of Scotland, if it ain’t Harry Carthew!”
“By Jove! Jim Bothwell!” cried the new arrival in a gratified tone.“Upon my word, I’m glad to see you. But what brings you here?”
As he spoke, he gazed with some curiosity about the camp and at theyouthful faces of the young adventurers.
“Sort of piloting these lads and Professor Wintergreen through theRockies, Harry,” was the rejoinder. “Where are you mushing along to?”
“I’m bound for Muskeg Lake,” was the response, “just coming throughfrom Fort Grainger.”
“Won’t you rest here a while?” asked the professor.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said the big trooper. “The goin’s been rough andboth I and Dandy here”--he patted his horse--“are a bit fagged, don’tyou know.”
“Sit down and have a bite to eat,” said Jim hospitably. “I guess Dandycan shift for himself all right.”
The trooper unsaddled his mount and was soon seated in the shade of abig tree, his back against its trunk, while he dispatched with gustothe food Jim placed before him. When he had finished, he and Jimlit their pipes and began to talk, while the boys and the professorlistened interestedly. The man was a new type to them. Self-reliant,big-limbed, clear-eyed, and active as a cat in all his movements, heappeared a fit person for the hard and often dangerous work of thefamous Northwest Mounted.
He and Jim, it seemed, were old friends, the veteran guide having aidedhim in the years past to corner and make prisoners of a band of cattlerustlers. Jim told him about their experiences at the outlaw ranch andthe trooper promised to report the matter to his superior officers atonce.
“That red-bearded fellow is a character we’ve been after for a longtime,” he said, “and thanks to you, I guess we’ll be able to roundhim up at last. Nevins of Ours almost had him once years ago, but heslipped through his fingers.”
“What became of Nevins?” asked Jim interestedly. “That man always mademe wonder what a chap like him wanted to join the Northwest for.”
Trooper Carthew drew thoughtfully on his pipe. Then after a minute helooked up and spoke softly.
“Nevins has gone on a trail he won’t come back from, Jim.”
“Dead?”
The other nodded.
“How’d it happen?”
“What kills a lot of unseasoned men in the service: snow madness!” wasthe rejoinder. “It’s a thing I don’t often talk about, but if any ofyour young men here,” he nodded toward the boys, “think that life inthe Northwest Mounted is any cinch it might be a good thing to tell’em the yarn.”
“We wish you would,” said Ralph, scenting a story out of the ordinary.
“Well, it happened a dozen winters ago,” began Trooper Carthew, “andit must be fifteen since I’ve seen Jim. Time slips by here in themountains. Well, as Jim here said, Nevins was a man who ought never tohave gone into the Mounted. He was a nervous, harum-scarum kind of man.I don’t know where he came from or what made him join, but anyhow therehe was, and it fell to my lot to look after him.
“We were sent on detachment duty up to a place called Bear Rock. Jimknows where it is, and as you don’t, the best way I can describe it toyou is to say that a one-horse board-and-canvas town anywhere in thewilds you’ve a mind to place it, would have been a metropolis alongsideof it.
“There were a few Cree Indians around--I forgot to say it was up inthe Yukon Country--and that was all the society we had. Not even skinthieves or horse rustlers ever came up there. It was too poor pickin’seven for them.
“Things began to go wrong the first winter. I saw that the lonelinessof it all was beginning to prey on young Nevins’ nerves. I call himyoung, but I expect he was older than he looked. Mind you, he neversaid anything in the way of complaint, but I’d seen men go that waybefore, and I saw that he was not built for the job. I tried to gethim to go back to division headquarters and report sick, or ask to betransferred or something. But he was a proud cuss, and ‘No,’ says he,‘I’ll stick it out.’
“Well, if you’ve never been stuck off in the Yukon, sixty miles fromany place, with a man whom you suspect is beginning to get snowmadness, you’ve no idea what a business it is. Nevins had a nice littlehabit of getting up in the middle of the night and saying that he sawfaces looking at him through the window, and voices calling down thechimney, and little things like that.
“By the middle of the second winter he got so bad that it began to geton my nerves, too, and I’d begun to look about and listen and think Iheard things. I soon saw that this wouldn’t do, and so decided to rideinto White Lake, the nearest station, and explain matters. Besides,Nevins was really in need of a doctor. His face was drawn and pale andhe could hardly be trusted out by hims
elf on the trail, for he wasalways shooting at something or other that he thought he saw, but whichwasn’t there at all. Oh, he was a bad case, I tell you. I began to bescared that some night he might take a fancy to get up and shoot at me.I began to lose sleep and get pretty nearly as peaked as he was.
“When I broke the news to him that we were going back to the station hegot mad as a hornet. He was no kid, he said. He could stick it out. Allhe wanted was to shoot the enemies that were after him, and then he’dbe all right. I quieted him down by telling him that our time at thepost was up anyhow, and that we were due to report back at White Lakewithout delay.
“As soon as he saw, as he thought, that we were not leaving on hisaccount he brightened up wonderfully. He took an interest in gettingthe shack in order for the next comers and talked about our trip almostall night. I patted myself on the back. He seemed like a cured manalready, and when we started out with our parkees on our backs and oursnow shoes on our feet, you’d have thought that there wasn’t a thingthe matter with him.
“Sometimes there was a queer glitter in his eyes, though, that showedme that he wasn’t as right as he seemed to be by any means, and that adoctor and some companionship were needed before a thorough cure couldbe effected. As we left the shack he turned and shook his fist at itwithout saying a word, but his face showed me how much he had sufferedthere and how glad he was to be saying good-by to it all.
“Mushing, as they call traveling in the Yukon, is slow work on a brokentrail, and that one from the shack to White Lake was about as bad aspecimen as I ever traveled over. But Nevins didn’t seem to mind it. Hewas so eager to get back to civilization--as if you could call WhiteLake civilization--that he was always ahead of me. But I didn’t likehis gait. It was awkward, zig-zaggy, not the trail of a man who is sureof himself. Nevins was living on his nerves. I caught myself prayingthey didn’t explode before we reached White Lake!
“Once I offered to take a turn at breaking the trail. But, ‘No, whatdo you think I am? A baby?’ says he angrily, and after that we pluggedalong in silence. Nevins’ head was poked forward and he appeared to bein a desperate hurry to get along, almost as if he was afraid somethingwas after him.
“‘You’ll blow up if you don’t slow down, Nevins,’ I said once, but heonly made an irritable reply and kept right on.
“I began to be worried. If he did break down I would be in a nasty fix.I’d seen snow madness before and knew what it was. That night I fairlyforced him to halt. He was getting so crazy that he wanted to keep onin the dark, but I stuck out at that and he finally quieted down. Yetevery now and then as we ate our sough-dough flap-jacks and gulped downour tea before turning in, I saw him keep looking back along the trailwe’d come, as if he was scared somebody or something was coming afterhim to take him back to that shack.
“The next day we mushed on, Nevins still in the lead. We were due atthe Lake that night, but I began to doubt if Nevins would make it. Hestarted to talk and mutter to himself, and finally he turned around onme and asked me if I heard anything coming after us down the trail.I laughed the thing off as best I could, but I tell you it’s no jokebeing out in those wilds with a snow-crazed man, especially when he hasa rifle, and maybe might take a crazy notion to try his marksmanship inyour direction! I watched Nevins mighty close, you can bet.
“At noon we stopped and ate a half frozen meal, with Nevins staringback up the trail. As we resumed our march he was still muttering tohimself and I noticed that he was fumbling with his rifle in a way thatwas not at all reassuring. I tried to get him to give it to me, makingthe excuse that it would lighten his load. He looked at me cunningly.
“‘I half believe that you’re in league with those fellows that want totake me back to that shack,’ says he, in a way that made me feel sick,for I knew then that he was crazy, sure enough--and me alone with anarmed maniac and miles from any human being!”