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Page 48
For more than two-and-twenty miles Jan loped along over the cocolike
dust of the trail, and never faltered once save at the side of a little
slough, where the two horsemen in his rear spent a few anxious minutes
while Jan paced this way and that, with indecision showing in each
movement of his massive head. And then, again with a rich deep bay--a
note of reassurance for the horseman, and of doom for a fugitive, if
such an one could have heard it--Jan was off again on the trail,
closely, but by no means hurryingly, followed by the captain and Dick.
In the twenty-second mile Jan brought his followers to the door of a
settler's little two-roomed shack, and then, within the minute, was off
again along the side of a half-mile stretch of wheat. Captain Arnutt
dismounted for a moment to speak to a woman who came to the door. Not
half an hour earlier she said, she had given a drink of tea and some
bread and meat to a dark, thin man with a red handkerchief tied over his
head. "A Dago he was," she said. And Captain Arnutt bit hard on one end
of his mustache as he thanked the woman, mounted again, and galloped off
after Dick and Jan.
As he rode, the captain turned back the flap of his magazine-pistol
holster; but the precaution was not needed. Jan was traveling at the
gallop now, and the height of his muzzle from the ground showed clearly
that he was on a warm trail, which, for such nostrils as his, required
no holding at all.
It was under the lee of a heap of last year's wheat-straw that Jan came
to the end of his trail; his fore feet planted hard in the dust before
him, his head well lifted, his jaws parted to give free passage to the
deep, bell-like call of his baying. The man with the red 'kerchief tied
over his head was evidently roused from sleep by Jan, and though the
hound showed no sign of molesting him, yet must he have formed a
terrifying picture for the newly opened eyes of the Italian. Almost
before the man had raised himself into a sitting posture Dick Vaughan
had jumped from the saddle and was beside him.
"Don't move," said Dick, "and the dog won't hurt you. If you move your
hands he'll be at your throat. See! Better let me slip these on--so! All
right, Jan, boy. Stay there."
When Captain Arnutt dismounted he found his subordinate standing beside
a handcuffed man, who sat on the ground, glaring hopelessly at the hound
responsible for his capture. Jan's tongue hung out from one side of his
parted jaws, and his face expressed satisfaction and good humor. He had
done his job and done it well. The thought of injuring his quarry had
never occurred to him, as Dick Vaughan very well knew, despite his
warning remark to the Italian. But although Jan had had no thought of
attacking the recumbent man he had trailed, he was very fully conscious
that this man was his quarry. The handcuffing episode had not been lost
upon him.
From the outset he had known that he and Dick were hunting that day. Why
they hunted man he had no idea. Personally, he had not so much pursued
an individual as he had hunted a certain smell. In coming upon the
sleeping Italian he had tracked down this particular smell. His
conception of his duty was, having tracked the smell to the man, to hand
the man over to Dick. That marked for him the end of his work; but not
by any means the end of his interest in the upshot of it.
XXIII
THE FIGHT ON THE PRAIRIE
Even without the confession he ultimately made, Jan's tracking, the
man's own empty leather sheath fitting the dagger he had left behind
him, and the watch, money, and rings found in his pockets, and proved to
be the property of the murdered couple, would have been sufficient to
condemn the Italian.
It appeared that the primary motive of the crime had not been theft, but
jealousy. At all events, the man's own story was that he had been the
lover of the woman he had killed. He paid the law's last penalty within
the confines of the R.N.W.M.P. barracks, and his capture and trial made
Jan for the time the most famous dog in Saskatchewan. Pictures of him
appeared in newspapers circulating all the way from Mexico to the Yukon;
and in his walks abroad with Dick Vaughan he was pointed out as "the
North-west Mounted Police bloodhound," and credited with all manner of
wonderful powers.
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