The long patrol

Near the foot of the valley slope lay an inanimate, drab-colored object of some sort, barely defined against the smooth sweep of the snowy mountainside. From the wooded ridge above, it appeared as a faint speck upon the panorama of wintry landscape. Ninety-nine travelers in a hundred might have passed that direction and never noticed any break in the monotonous waste of white. But on that evening, a little before the fall of dusk, there rode by chance, from out of the pass and over the trail, the one man of a hundred. There were few things worth seeing in the wilderness that escaped the restless scrutiny of Corporal David Dexter of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

A glance ranging across space, as the eagle gazes, and the horseman tightened rein and checked his pony on the brow of the slide. He sat immobile, looking downward. The dun-tinted shape could have been mistaken at the distance for a hillside bowlder or a rotted stump or a tussock of dried grass. But Corporal Dexter was not deceived. October's first snow had swirled over the ranges that day, and the three inch fall spread its covering impartially over mountain and forest and open park. The brownish object below should have been sheeted white, like everything else in view. Whatever it was it must have fallen there in the new snow, some time after the last flurry had passed, not more than a couple of hours before.

The place was a lonely, isolated spot, deep-shut among the remoter fastnesses of the northern Rockies: a haunt of big horn sheep and wandering grizzly bears. Probably there were not five white men alive who had ever sighted the line of unnamed mountain peaks that jutted like broken saw teeth against the eastward sky. The evidence of any recent visitation was of interest to the police.

The rider paused only to reconnoiter the ground below him, and then thrust his knee into his horse's withers, and urged the animal over the shoulder of the declivity. The slope was steep and slippery, but the wise little mountain pony was used to hazardous going. She settled back almost upon her shaggy haunches, and with forelegs reaching stiffly before her, she went scrambling and sliding to the bottom. A quick jog carried the horseman across the snow-smoothed level beyond, and then he knew what it was he had come out of his way to find.

At his pony's feet lay the drab-colored object that had caught his attention on the heights. It was a stiff-brimmed hat--a banded uniform Stetson, such as he himself wore tilted to the crease of his straight drawn brows. The hat had fallen crown up in the snow, and near by, half buried in the white drift, was sprawled a motionless human figure, clad in the familiar summer tunic of the Northwest police.

Corporal Dexter slid out of his saddle, and a second later was kneeling on the ground. He raised the body to a sitting posture, with one of his arms supporting the lolling head, and it needed no further scrutiny to apprise him of the fact of death. His hand pressed against the wet, still-warm face, and he looked at the closed eyelids and tight-locked lips of a man he knew. It was Constable Tommy Graves, R.C.M.P., from the inspection post at Fort Dauntless, two hundred miles to the south.

Corporal Dexter was attached to the barracks at Crooked Forks on the old Dawson road, far across the ranges. But he had met young Graves now and then on long patrol, and remembered him as a gay and gallant comrade. Skirting the edge of a juniper clump there approached from the southward a line of nearly effaced footprints. Thus, after devious wandering, Constable Graves had come to the appointed hour and place, and here his life's trail ended.

The hair at the base of the boy's skull was matted red, and Dexter's probing finger discovered an ugly opening where a bullet had entered from behind. The skin over the forehead was bunched and broken, and the corporal, using a delicately wielded penknife blade, a moment later came into possession of a flattened chunk of lead, .30 caliber size.

The words "vengeance" and "reprisal" are never spoken by a mounted officer. Nevertheless, there is no place on earth where the murderer of a policeman may feel safe from the menace of the reaching hand. Dexter at present was on long patrol in the wilderness, seeking two fugitives who were wanted in the settlements for a brutal case of assault and battery. But now his plans must change. New and more urgent business called him.

Crouching on his heels beside his fallen comrade, he took off one of his gloves, and blew his breath to warm his finger tips. From his pocket he brought forth pencil and notebook, and, with calm, steady hand he wrote his brief report. He himself might be summoned at any time to meet a similar fate, and as a member of a methodical organization it was his duty to leave the written record behind. The bullet was sealed in an envelope with the scribbled page, and the packet then buttoned securely in his tunic pocket.

His own terse statement tucked away for safe keeping, he bent over to learn if Tommy Graves' journal sheets were inscribed to date. The young constable's notebook held the usual daily report, beginning three weeks back, when he had set out on his last journey from Fort Dauntless; but the record told only of trivial matters, of miles traveled and landmarks sighted, and did not mention the errand that fetched him to this far, lonesome valley of the British Columbian mountains. Possibly it was a secret mission that he dared not particularize by written words.

A single clew was afforded by a photograph found in the constable's inside pocket. It was a double Bertillon card, carrying the stamp of detective headquarters of Chicago, Illinois, and showing full-face and profile portraits of a man whose name was written down as "Roy ('Pink') Crill." The subject of the police photograph was a gross-featured man with no eyebrows and very little hair. It was a repellent physiognomy: thick, pendulous jowl, puffy cheeks, eyes sunk in deep sockets. The cranium was flat on top, with a peculiar indentation behind the temples that somehow made Dexter think of the pits in a copperhead's skull.

Whoever this "Pink" Crill might be, the existence of a Bertillon picture at least proved a criminal record. It was not an unnatural assumption to suppose that he was in flight from the other side of the border, and that young Graves had been assigned to the fatal business of stalking him down.

Crill's body and facial measurements had been jotted down in the columns allotted for the purpose of identification, and after running his glance over the card the Corporal was able to form a vivid mental picture of the man. He would know him if he met him.

Pocketing the Bertillon card for future reference, Dexter stood up, his hands balanced on his hips. With his underlip thrust slightly forward, he moodily scanned the ground where the tragedy had taken place.

The re-staging of the crime presented few difficulties for the experienced observer. Behind the fallen body was a snow-shrouded log. Fifty paces beyond the course of a frozen creek ran past. The banks of the stream were thickly fringed with junipers, but at this one point there was a break in the cover. Winding up from a distant notch in the mountains, the creek afforded the logical trail for any voyageur making in that direction from the southeast. The log commanded the opening in the juniper bushes, and Constable Graves had been sitting on the log.

Even under the covering of fresh snow, the marks were legible. The policeman's rifle lay buried as it had fallen in the cold drift near the log. Graves evidently had sat there for a long while, with his rifle across his knees. Like a deer hunter he had chosen his place in the open and allowed the falling flakes to cover him, while he waited, motionless. The still hunt needs patience, but usually it is the surest way.

In this instance, however, something had gone wrong with the hunter's plans. No one had come along the course of the brook. The snowy stream surface was as smooth and level as placer sand. Dexter contemplated the lower stretch of ground, and then turned with meditative eyes to search the slope behind him.

A stand of densely growing cedars climbed upward along the mountainside. Obeying the trailer's instinct, he walked straight across the open ground and entered the nearest point of cover. And there he found, as he was sure he must find, the imprints of booted feet.

Somebody who wore a criss-cross pattern of hob nails had stood concealed in a fairy bower of frost-rimed branches. The furrowed snow in a breast-high crotch indicated the place where a rifle barrel had been rested for steady sighting. And from the powdery drift at his feet the corporal picked up an empty cartridge case, .30 caliber, that smelled of freshly burned powder. The story was complete.

The trail of the departing hob nails went northward through the cedars, and thence Corporal Dexter's future pathway lay, inevitable, unswerving, relentless as the summons of fate.

A policeman does not desert a policeman, in life or death. Dexter returned to his fallen comrade, and as gently as though he feared the hurting of sensate flesh, he gathered the pitiful human shape into his arms. He was not a big nor powerful man, but there was a lithe, cougar-like adequacy hidden in the muscles of a lean and hard-trained body, and he made little effort of his task.

Susy, the pony, objected to her new burden, but Dexter had no time to parley. He crowded into the horse with his shoulder, and before she could really think of acting skittish, the limp weight was deposited across her saddle. Dexter bent a few turns of a lashing thong under the cinches, and after that she could do nothing but submit to the arrangement.

As coolly as a workman taking a needed tool from his kit, the corporal pulled his carbine out of the saddle holster. Then, with the reins twisted in his fingers, and the pony shambling at his heels, he turned back afoot into the cedars and started northward, following the hobnail boots.