Philip Steel of the Royal Northwest mounted Police, James Oliver Curwood [unputdownable books txt] 📗

much as look the wrong way out of your eyes I'll blow off your head. You and your friend are to answer for the killing of Pierre Thoreau and for the attempted murder of this young man, who will follow us to Fort Smith to testify against you."
It was evident that the half-breed did not understand, and the doctor added a few explanatory words in French. The man on the floor groaned and struggled until he was red in the face.
"Easy, easy," soothed the doctor. "I appreciate the fact that it is pretty tough luck, Dobson, but you'll have to take your medicine. Falkner, if you'll lend a hand in getting me off I won't lose much time in starting for Fort Smith."
It was a strange-looking outfit that set out from Pierre Thoreau's cabin half an hour later. Ahead of the team which had come that morning walked the breed, his left arm bound to his side with a babiche thong. On the sledge behind him lay an inanimate and blanket-wrapped bundle, which was Dobson; and close at the rear of the sledge, stripped of his greatcoat and more than ever like a diminutive drum-major, followed Dudley McGill, professor of neurology and diseases of the brain, with a bulldog revolver in his mittened hand.
From the door Falkner watched them go.
Six hours later Philip returned from the east. Falkner saw him coming up from the creek and went to meet him.
"I found the cabin, but no one was there," said Philip. "It has been deserted for a long time. No tracks in the snow, everything inside frozen stiff, and what signs I did find were of a woman!"
The muscles of Falkner's face gave a sudden twitch. "A woman!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, a woman," repeated Philip, "and there was a photograph of her on a table in the bedroom. Did this Dobson have a wife?"
Falkner had fallen a step behind him as they entered the cabin.
"A long time ago--a woman was there," he said. "She was a young woman, and--and almost beautiful. But she wasn't his wife."
"She was pretty," replied Philip, "so pretty that I brought her picture along for my collection at home." He looked about for McGill. "Where's the doctor?"
Falkner's face was very white as he explained what had happened during the other's absence.
"He said that he would camp early this afternoon so that you could overtake them," he finished after he had described the capture and the doctor's departure. "The doctor thought you would want to lose no time in getting the prisoners to Fort Smith, and that he could get a good start before night. To-morrow or the next day I am going to follow with the other team. I'd go with you if he hadn't commanded me to remain here and nurse my head for another twenty-four hours."
Philip shrugged his shoulders, and the two had little to say as they ate their dinners. After an hour's rest he prepared a light pack and took up the doctor's trail. Inwardly he rankled at the unusual hand which the little professor was playing in leaving Pierre's cabin with the prisoners, and yet he was confident that McGill would wait for him. Mile after mile he traveled down the creek. At dusk there was no sign of his new friend. Just before dark he climbed a dead stub at the summit of a high ridge and half a dozen miles of the unbroken barren stretched out before his eyes.
At six o'clock he stopped to cook some tea and warm his meat and bannock. After that he traveled until ten, then built a big fire and gave up the pursuit until morning. At dawn he started again, and not until the forenoon was half gone did he find where the doctor had stopped to camp.
The ashes of his fire were still warm beneath and the snow was trampled hard around them. In the north the clouds were piling up, betokening a storm such as it was not well for a man in Philip's condition of fatigue to face. Already some flavor of the approaching blizzard was carried to him on the wind.
So he hurried on. Fortunately the storm died away after an hour or two of fierce wind. Still he did not come up with McGill, and he camped again for the night, cursing the little professor who was racing on ahead of him. It was noon of the following day when he came in sight of the few log cabins at Fort Smith, situated in a treeless and snow-smothered sweep of the plain on the other side of the Slave. He crossed the river and hurried past the row of buildings that led to post headquarters. In front of the company office were gathered a little crowd of men, women and children. He pushed his way through and stopped at the bottom of the three log steps which led up to the door.
At the top was Professor McGill, coming out. His face was a puzzle. His eyes had in them a stony stare as he gazed down at Philip. Then he descended slowly, like one moving in a dream. "Good Heavens," he said huskily, and only for Philip's ears, "do you know what I've done, Phil?"
"What?" demanded Philip.
The doctor came down to the last step.
"Phil," he whispered, "that fellow we found with a broken head played a nice game on me. He was a criminal, and I've brought back to Fort Smith no less person than the man sent out to arrest him, Corporal Dobson, of the Mounted Police, and his driver, Francois Something-or-Other. Heavens, ain't it funny?"
That same afternoon Corporal Dobson and the half-breed set out again in quest of Falkner, and this time they were accompanied by Pierre Thoreau, who learned for the first time what had happened in his cabin. The doctor disappeared for the rest of the day, but early the next morning he hunted Phil up and took him to a cabin half a mile down the river. A team of powerful dogs, an unusually large sledge, and two Indians were at the door.
"I bought 'em last night," explained the doctor, "and we're going to leave for the south to-day."
"Giving up your hunt?" asked Philip.
"No, it's ended," replied McGill in a matter-of-fact way. "It ended at Pierre Thoreau's cabin. Falkner was the third man to work out my experiment."
Philip stopped in his tracks, and the doctor stopped, and turned toward him.
"But the third--" Philip began.
The little doctor continued to smile.
"There are more things in Heaven and earth, Philip," he quoted, "than are dreamed of in your philosophy. This love experiment has turned out wrongly, as far as preconceived theories are concerned, but when I think of the broader, deeper significance of it all I am--pleased is not the word."
"What I can't see--" Philip was stopped by the doctor's lifted hand.
"You see, I am relying on your word of honor, Phil," he explained, laughing softly at the amazement which he saw in the other's face. "It's all so wonderful that I want you to know the end of it, and how happily it has turned out for me--and the little woman waiting for me back home. It was I and not Falkner who cried out just before you turned the lamp-wick down. A letter had fallen from his coat pocket, and it was one of my letters--sent through my agent. Understand? I sent you for the ice, and while you were gone I told him who I was, and he told me why I had never heard from him, and why he was in Pierre Thoreau's cabin. My agent had sent him north with five hundred dollars as a first payment. To cut a long story short, he got into a card game in Prince Albert--as the best of us do at times--and as a result become mixed up in a quarrel, in which he pretty nearly killed a man. They've been after him ever since, and almost had him when we found him, injured by a blow which he received in an ugly fall earlier in the night. It's the last and total wrecking of my theory."
"But the girl--" urged Philip.
"We're going to see her now, and she will tell you the whole story as she told it to me," said the doctor, as calmly as before. "Ah, but it's wonderful, man--this great, big, human love that fills the world! They two met at Nelson House, as I had planned they should, and four months after that they smashed my theory by being married by a missionary from York Factory. I mean that they smashed the bad part of it, Phil, but all three couples proved the other--that there exist no such things as 'soul affinities,' and that two normal people of opposite sexes, if thrown together under certain environment, will as naturally mate as two birds, and will fight and die for one another afterward, too. There may not be one in ten thousand who believes it, but I do--still. At the last moment the man in Falkner triumphed over his love and he told her what he was, that up until the moment he met her he drank and gambled, and that for his shooting a man in Prince Albert he would sooner or later get a term in prison. And she? I tell you that she busted my theory to a frazzle! She loved him, as I now believe every woman in the world is capable of loving, and she married him, and stuck to him through thick and thin, fled with him when he was compelled to run--and her faith in him now is like that of a child in its God. For a time they lived in that cabin above Pierre Thoreau's, and perhaps they wouldn't have been found out if they hadn't come up to Fort Smith for a holiday. Falkner told me that his pursuers would surely stop at Pierre's, and d his wife. By this time he has a good start for the States, and will be there by the time I get his wife down."
Philip had not spoken a word. Almost mechanically he pulled the photograph from his pocket.
"And this--" he said.
The doctor laughed as he took the picture from his hand.
"Is Mrs. William Falkner, Phil. Come in. I'm anxious to have you meet her."


Chapter XV. Philip's Last Assignment
Philip, instead of following the doctor, laid a detaining hand upon his arm.
"Wait!" he said.
Something in the seriousness of his manner drew a quick look of apprehension over the other's face.
"I want to talk with you," continued Philip. "Let us walk a little way down the trail."
The doctor eyed him suspiciously as they turned away from the cabin.
"See here, Phil Steele," he said, and there was a hard ring in his voice, "I've had all sorts of confidence in you, and I've told you more, perhaps, than I ought. I don't suppose you have a suspicion that you ought to break it?"
"No, it isn't that," replied Philip, laughing a little uneasily. "I'm glad you got away with Falkner, and so far as I am concerned no one will ever know what has happened. It's I who want to place a little confidence in you now. I am positively at my wits' end, and all over a situation which seems to place you and me in a class by ourselves--sort of brothers in trouble, you know," and he told McGill, briefly, of Isobel, and his search for her.
"I lost them between Lac Bain and Fort Churchill," he finished. "The two sledges separated, one continuing to Churchill, and the other turning into the South. I followed the Churchill sledge--and was wrong. When I