The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail Part 8

No better word could he have spoken.

"You poor boy," she cried. "I'll have supper ready by the time you come in. I am silly, but now it's all over. I shall go in and face the Inspector and dare him to arrest you, no matter what you have done."

"That's more like the thing! That's more like my girl. I shall be with you in a very few minutes. He can't take us both, can he? Run in and smile at him."

Mandy found the Inspector in the cozy ranch kitchen, calmly smoking his pipe, and deep in the London Graphic. As she touched the latch he sprang to his feet and saluted in his best style.

"Never heard you ride up, Mrs. Cameron, I a.s.sure you. You must think me rather cool to sit tight here and ignore your coming."

"I am very glad to see you, Inspector d.i.c.kson, and Allan will be delighted. He is putting up your horse. You will of course stay the night with us."

"Oh, that's awfully kind, but I really can't, you know. I shall tell Cameron." He took his hat from the peg.

"We should be delighted if you could stay with us. We see very few people and you have not been very neighborly, now confess."

"I have not been, and to my sorrow and loss. If any man had told me that I should have been just five weeks to a day within a few hours' ride of my friend Cameron, not to speak of his charming wife, without visiting him, well I should have--well, no matter--to my joy I am here to-night.

But I can't stay this trip. We are rather hard worked just now, to tell the truth."

"Hard worked?" she asked.

"Yes. Patrol work rather heavy. But I must stop Cameron in his hospitable design," he added, as he pa.s.sed out of the door.

It was a full half hour before the men returned, to find supper spread and Mandy waiting. It was a large and cheerful apartment that did both for kitchen and living room. The sides were made of logs hewn smooth, plastered and whitewashed. The oak joists and planking above were stained brown. At one end of the kitchen two doors led to as many rooms, at the other a large stone fireplace, with a great slab for mantelpiece.

On this slab stood bits of china bric-a-brac, and what not, relics abandoned by the gallant and chivalrous Fraser for the bride and her house furnishing. The prints, too, upon the wall, hunting scenes of the old land, sea-scenes, moorland and wild cattle, with many useful and ornamental bits of furniture, had all been handed over with true Highland generosity by the outgoing owner.

In the fireplace, for the night had a touch of frost in it, a log fire blazed and sparked, lending to the whole scene an altogether delightful air of comfort.

"I say, this does look jolly!" cried the Inspector as he entered.

"Cameron, you lucky dog, do you really imagine you know how jolly well off you are, coddled thus in the lap of comfort and surrounded with all the enervating luxuries of an effete and forgotten civilization?

Come now, own up, you are beginning to take this thing as a matter of course."

But Cameron stood with his back to the light, busying himself with his fishing tackle and fish, and ignoring the Inspector's cheerful chatter.

And thus he remained without a word while the Inspector talked on in a voluble flow of small talk quite unusual with him.

Throughout the supper Cameron remained silent, rallying spasmodically with gay banter to the Inspector's chatter, or answering at random, but always falling silent again, and altogether was so unlike himself that Mandy fell to wondering, then became watchful, then anxious. At length the Inspector himself fell silent, as if perceiving the uselessness of further pretense.

"What is it, Allan?" said Mandy quietly, when silence had fallen upon them all. "You might as well let me know."

"Tell her, for G.o.d's sake," said her husband to the Inspector.

"What is it?" inquired Mandy.

The Inspector handed her a letter.

"From Superintendent Strong to my Chief," he said.

She took it and as she read her face went now white with fear, now red with indignation. At length she flung the letter down.

"What a man he is to be sure!" she cried scornfully. "And what nonsense is this he writes. With all his men and officers he must come for my husband! What is HE doing? And all the others? It's just his own stupid stubbornness. He always did object to our marriage."

The Inspector was silent. Cameron was silent too. His boyish face, for he was but a lad, seemed to have grown old in those few minutes. The Inspector wore an ashamed look, as if detected in a crime.

"And because he is not clever enough to catch this man they must come for my husband to do it for them. He is not a Policeman. He has nothing to do with the Force."

And still the Inspector sat silent, as if convicted of both crime and folly.

At length Cameron spoke.

"It is quite impossible, Inspector. I can't do it. You quite see how impossible it is."

"Most certainly you can't," eagerly agreed the Inspector. "I knew from the first it was a piece of--sheer absurdity--in fact brutal inhumanity.

I told the Commissioner so."

"It isn't as if I was really needed, you know. The Superintendent's idea is, as you say, quite absurd."

The Inspector gravely nodded.

"You don't think for a moment," continued Cameron, "there is any need--any real need I mean--for me to--" Cameron's voice died away.

The Inspector hesitated and cleared his throat. "Well--of course, we are desperately short-handed, you know. Every man is overworked. Every reserve has to be closely patroled. Every trail ought to be watched.

Runners are coming in every day. We ought to have a thousand men instead of five hundred, this very minute. Of course one can never tell. The chances are this will all blow over."

"Certainly," said Cameron. "We've heard these rumors for the past year."

"Of course," agreed the Inspector cheerfully.

"But if it does not," asked Mandy, suddenly facing the Inspector, "what then?"

"If it does not?"

"If it does not?" she insisted.

The Inspector appeared to turn the matter over in his mind.

"Well," he said slowly and thoughtfully, "if it does not there will be a deuce of an ugly time."

"What do you mean?"

The Inspector shrugged his shoulders. But Mandy waited, her eyes fixed on his face demanding answer.

"Well, there are some hundreds of settlers and their families scattered over this country, and we can hardly protect them all. But," he added cheerfully, as if dismissing the subject, "we have a trick of worrying through."

Mandy shuddered. One phrase in the Superintendent's letter to the Commissioner which she had just read kept hammering upon her brain, "Cameron is the man and the only man for the job."

They turned the talk to other things, but the subject would not be dismissed. Like the ghost at the feast it kept ever returning. The Inspector retailed the most recent rumors, and together he and his host weighed their worth. The Inspector disclosed the Commissioner's plans as far as he knew them. These, too, were discussed with approval or condemnation. The consequences of an Indian uprising were hinted at, but quickly dropped. The probabilities of such an uprising were touched upon and p.r.o.nounced somewhat slight.

But somehow to the woman listening as in a maze this p.r.o.nouncement and all the rea.s.suring talk rang hollow. She sat staring at the Inspector with eyes that saw him not. What she did see was a picture out of an old book of Indian war days which she had read when a child, a smoking cabin, with mangled forms of women and children lying in the blackened embers. By degrees, slow, painful, but relentlessly progressive, certain impressions, at first vague and pa.s.sionately resisted, were wrought into convictions in her soul. First, the Inspector, in spite of his light talk, was undeniably anxious, and in this anxiety her husband shared.

Then, the Force was clearly inadequate to the duty required of it. At this her indignation burned. Why should it be that a Government should ask of brave men what they must know to be impossible? Hard upon this conviction came the words of the Superintendent, "Cameron is the man and the only man for the job." Finally, the Inspector was apologizing for her husband. It roused a hot resentment in her to hear him. That thing she could not and would not bear. Never should it be said that her husband had needed a friend to apologize for him.