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Page 87
From that hour Sourdough was never again seen in the precincts of the
R.N.W.M.P. barracks, and, though many people puzzled over the old dog's
disappearance, none ever knew what became of him. The sergeant had been
for some time entitled to retire from the service. That night he
obtained his commanding officer's permission to do so.
XXXIX
HOW JAN CAME HOME
Captain Arnutt proved himself a friend indeed to Dick Vaughan. Once he
had come to understand the position, he fully sympathized with Dick's
wish to leave the service at once and return to England. That sympathy
he proceeded forthwith to translate into action, and within the month
Sergeant-Inspector Dick Vaughan had received his discharge and booked
his passage--with Jan's--for England.
Despite his elation over the prospect before him, Dick found the actual
parting with his comrades in Regina a good deal of a wrench. They were
fond of him, and of Jan, and proud of both. And Dick found when the
packing was over and valedictory remarks begun that these men had
entered pretty deeply into his life and general scheme of things.
They were good fellows all, these hard, spare, long-limbed riders of the
plains, and they and the North-west had made of the Dick who was now
bidding them good-by a man radically different in a hundred ways from
the careless, irresponsible, light-hearted Dick who had come to them a
few years back direct from kindly, indulgent Sussex.
Dick had become a fit and proper part of his western environment and had
"made good" in it, as the saying is. We most of us like doing that which
we do well. Dick's mature and able manhood had come to him in the West.
He would never lose it now, however far eastward he might travel.
But--the West and the good folk tugged pretty hard at his heart-strings,
as from the rear platform of his car on the east-bound train he watched
the waving stiff-brimmed hats of his comrades, and a little later the
last of the roofs of Saskatchewan's capital fading out in the distance.
Hard land as many have found it, hard though it had been in many ways
for Dick, the North-west had forced its bracing, stimulating spirit into
his being and made him the man he was, just so surely as the northland
wilderness had made of Jan the wonderful hound he now was.
And Dick left it all with a swelling heart; not unwillingly, because he
was going to a great promised happiness, but with a swelling heart none
the less, and a kind of mistiness of vision, due in great measure to the
real respect, the sincere gratitude he felt toward the land and life and
people who had helped him to make of himself a very much bigger and
better man than any previous efforts of his had promised to evolve out
of the same material in Sussex, for example.
Winter ruled still in the land, and so the actual seaboard--Halifax--and
not the big St. Lawrence port, was rail-head for Dick and Jan. But for
Jan the enforced confinement of the journey was greatly softened by
regular daily visits from his lord. And in Halifax two and a half days
of almost unbroken companionship awaited them before their steamer left.
This homeward journey was a totally different matter for Jan from the
outward trip. It was true he gave no thought to England as yet. But he
perfectly understood the general idea of travel. He knew that he and his
lord were on a journey together, that certain temporary separations were
an unavoidable feature of this sort of traveling, and that, the journey
done, the two of them would come together again. The sum of Jan's
knowledge, his reasoning powers, and his faculties of observation and
deduction were a hundredfold greater now than at the time of his
departure from England.
Jan loathed the close confinement of his life at sea, but he did not
rebel against it, neither was he cast down by it. He knew that it was to
be no more than a brief interlude, and he understood quite well that
though, unfortunately, men-folk had so arranged things that he must be
kept out of sight of his sovereign, save during those daily intervals of
delight in which Dick visited him in his house beside the butcher's
shop, yet his lord was in the same vessel with him, at no great distance
from him, and bound with him for the one destination. He knew that he
and Dick were traversing the one trail.
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