CHAPTER XVI
CONNIE PLAYS A HUNCH
Connie Morgan halted his great malamutes in the middle of the ice-locked Yukon and gazed wistfully toward the familiar outlines of Dawson. For a year the little sub-arctic city had been home to him. And as his eyes rested upon the buildings of B Division standing spick and span and clean in their coats of whitewash and paint, his lips pressed tight. Behind those walls from which, only a few minutes before, he had stepped for the last time, were the men who had been his friends—big men, those—great hearted and clean minded—the men who kept the Yukon good. He thought of the grey-haired Superintendent with the twinkling eyes and military moustache; of big Sergeant Dan McKeever, and Corporal Rickey; and Ick Far, the silent reader of signs. Then there were the constables: Beatty, and Dowling, and Shorty Peters—the boy's forehead puckered in a frown as he thought of Peters.
"I liked Shorty," he muttered. "He would do anything in the world for a friend. Everybody likes him. The Superintendent said this morning that all Shorty needs to make a first-class man is a good stiff jolt that will wake him up."
For three weeks past the men of B Division had mentioned Peters's name rarely, with grave faces and in the past tense, as men speak of the dead. "Trouble with Shorty was, he never stopped to think. He did the first thing that popped into his head. But just the same he was a fool to desert. His time will be up next month. Wherever he is I bet he is wishing that he was back this very minute." With a last look at the town Connie cracked his long whip and started the dogs northward down the Yukon.
It was a late spring, and as the sled slipped smoothly over the hard-packed snow the boy thought of that other day just a year ago when he had slashed the lashings of his pack and shot those same dogs out over the shore ice to rescue Big Dan McKeever from death on the floating ice-pan.
One by one, as he mushed steadily northward, the incidents of the past year crowded through his brain. It had been a great year for the boy—those twelve months during which he had served side by side with the men of the Mounted—a year that had rounded out and crystallized the hand-hammered principles that were his heritage from Sam Morgan and that his association with Waseche Bill and the rough men of the gold country had taught him to apply to life in its daily round.
Connie Morgan was not one whit less a boy than the day he stepped onto the wharf at Anvik with eight dollars in his pocket and abiding faith in his ability to find his father somewhere in the great white land of snow. But he was a boy trained now by experience. A boy whose nerve and grit and impulsive nature had become subserved to cool reason, and who had learned to probe deep into the heart in his judgment of men. Time and again in the big country, where only the fit survive, he had proven himself fit. Bearded men spoke his name with respect—as they had spoken the name of Sam Morgan. They called him a sourdough, and a tillicum—and north of sixty, above those words sounds no higher praise.
"Hello, Const'ble!" a man stepped from the trail and thrust out a dark hand.
"Hello, Tim!" cried Connie, as he grasped the hand.
"A-ha, Tim Big Martin, she got for say t'ank to Til p'lice. Som* day she mebbe-so git chanst to show she no fergit."
Connie grinned: "That's all right, Tim. How's the family?"
The half-breed's homely face stretched into a broad grin: "A-ha, bien! Das fambly she got wan more now—I'm not fergit das night you breeng de doctaire. Das li'l bab' w'ot com' in de night ob de beeg snow—she fine boy I'm tell you! We mak' de nam' Spes' Const'ble Mo'gan Big Martin," he announced proudly. "An' mebbe-so som' tam's he grow oop an' be kloshe p'lice, too, Ba Gos'!"
"You're all right, Tim," laughed the boy; "when he's old enough to go to school, let me know. We'll make a policeman out of him, you bet! With a name like that he'll just naturally have to break into the Service!" Connie called sharply to his dogs and as they leaped to their feet the half-breed stepped closer and laid a hand on the boy's arm!
"Oop on de head Coal Creek, two men, dey hunt de moose for sell."
"Poachers, eh!"
The man nodded and with his lips close to the boy's ear whispered: "Wan man you know—mebbe-so she gone kultus."
"A man I know gone kultus!" exclaimed Connie. "What do you mean? Who is he?" But the other only shrugged, and shifting his pack, stepped into the trail and swung off toward Dawson.
"Now what in thunder does that breed mean?" soliloquized the boy as the dogs strung out onto the trail. "One of those poachers is Brek Wiley all right, he's an old hand at the game and a mighty slippery customer—Big Dan McKeever has tried for years to catch him with the goods. But who is the other one—the man that's gone kultus? Tim didn't mean Brek Wiley—he always was kultus. Guess I'll just swing over onto the head of Coal Creek and see what's doing." Suddenly the boy stopped dead in his tracks: "Gee Whiz!" he exclaimed aloud, "I forgot I'm no longer in the Service!" He ran to catch up with the dogs. "I could turn the job over to Ewing at Fortymile," he muttered as he mushed northward; "but, somehow, I'd kind of like to handle this one myself. I've just got to know who that other man is. Maybe—By George! I'll do it! I haven't got any authority to, but they won't know my time's up. And if I can bring 'em in I'll take a chance on getting the authority afterwards.
"Wouldn't Dan roar if I should bring in Brek Wiley with a good clear case against him!"
Avoiding Fortymile, Connie swung from the Yukon and headed up a small tributary that flows in from the north-east. The long winter was losing its grip on the hill country and the surface of the snow softened at mid-day. On the first day after leaving the big river the boy camped and made moccasins for his dogs. With their feet protected from the flinty-surface of the crust that formed as the sun sank low the big malamutes made good time, and noon of the third day off the river found him camped on a spruce-capped ridge of the Ogilvie Range with the deep-gored valleys of the feeders of Coal Creek spread out before him like giant fingers reaching into the hills.
"Somewhere in that tangle of ridges and canyons I'm going to find Brek Wiley and the kultus man," gritted the boy, as he boiled a pot of tea over a tiny smokeless fire. "I've got to be mighty careful, too, 'cause they say Brek Wiley can pick up a trail like an Injun."
For three days Connie busied himself snaring rabbits and ptarmigans to eke out his slender larder and provide food for his dogs, and always he strained his ears for the sound of a shot that would disclose the whereabouts of the poachers.
The first day he surprised a moose at close range, and on the third day a huge bull and two cows crossed the divide a half-mile to the eastward and descended into the valley of Coal Creek.
"That ought to help 'em out," muttered Connie as he watched the huge animals disappear in the scrub.
An hour later, sharp and clear, from a point some two or three miles below where the moose had entered the timber, rang the sound of a shot swiftly followed by another, and after a short interval of silence four or five more in rapid succession.
"Three less moose and two less poachers in the Yukon," grinned the boy, as he slipped into the valley and hurried in the direction of the shots. On and on he went, following the trail of the three moose. At the end of an hour he slackened his pace and began to advance cautiously from boulder to boulder, pausing every few moments to listen and reconnoitre the foreground. At length the sound of voices reached his ears, and throwing himself fiat upon the crust, he wriggled forward into the shelter of a huge rock that jutted sharply from the shoulder of a low ridge.
In an open space formed by a bend of the creek two men were busily engaged in quartering the carcass of a cow moose. The bull had already been quartered and loaded upon a sled, with the huge antlered head bound securely upon the top of the load. The other cow lay where she had fallen. The smaller of the two men straightened himself, glanced cautiously about him, and cleansed his sheath knife by drawing the flat of it across the sleeve of his coat. "I tell yeh, Brek Wiley, it's rotten business, an' I wisht I was well out of it." Something in the man's voice caused Connie to strain forward for a closer view as Wiley paused in the act of cleaving the backbone of the moose with an axe.
"Cold feet, eh," sneered the poacher. "Ye're 'fraid the Mounted'll grab ye an' take ye in out o' the cold. Well, they won't. I be'n doin' 'bout as I pleased ever sence I hit this here country, ten year back. An' I hain't allus pleased to do jest what the law says, neither. Take the moose business, I be'n sellin' 'mountain beef fur goin' on three year, an' I hain't be'n nabbed fur it nuther. They's good money in it—beats gougin' fer gold where they hain't none no more, an' it beats crankin' win'lasses an' choppin' cord wood fer wages."
"They ain't got yeh yet—but they will, sure as shootin'—an' me, too. Yeh don't know 'em like I do. I served with 'em its goin' on five year an' I ought to be with 'em yet—would of, too, if it hadn't be'n fer you—" Connie caught a glimpse of the man's face. It was Shorty Peters!
"There ye go! Still chawin' over that ol' cud!" cried the other—"ef yer so blame anxious to be in the Mounted why 'n't ye go hack to 'em then. Ye don't dast to, that's why! Ye're a deserter, an' they'd stick ye in the pen 'til yer hair turned white 'cause ye happened to quit 'em a couple months afore yer time was out. An' now yer blamin' me 'cause ye hain't back doin' time! I tell ye ye was a 
"In an open space the men were quartering the carcass of a cow moose."
deserter 'fore I hooked up with ye! An' 'cause I tol' ye ye was a fool to go back, yer tryin' to shove it off onto me!"
"I wisht I was back in the service right now. An' if I done what's right I'd take you in."
The other laughed shortly: "Jest you try it onct an' see how fer ye'd git! Ye're 'fraid to try it. Ef ye did happen to fetch me in, what'd happen? I s'pose ye didn't kill none of the meat that's in the cache. An' I s'pose ye hain't helped sell none. Guess I didn't know what I was doin' when I tuk ye along to dicker with Swede Johnson down to No Luck, an' Tom Ashley, an' them contractors down on the river? An' I guess ye didn't help deliver none of it neither! An', of course, if ye tuk me in, I'd take my medicine an' shet up about it, wouldn't I? An' I wouldn't put up no holler fer them other fellers to testify that me an' you was pardners, would I? No, sure not! I'd jest shet up an' let ye git credit fer fetchin' in Brek Wiley. I tell ye, Shorty, yer in too deep. Ye'd git it worser'n what I would, 'cause on top of yer game-law sentence, ye'd git soaked good an' proper fer desertin'. They's more money in meat than they is in policin'. Wild game is as much mine an' yourn as it is any one else's an' they hain't no one got no right to tell us when we kin kill it or how many we kin kill, nohow. Buck up, now, an' git to work on that there other cow—an' when the meat business plays out I got another little scheme up my sleeve."
Shorty set to work upon the carcass of the dead moose. "When the meat business plays out I'm through," he retorted sharply. "I ain't no crook an' I'm goin' outside an' live decent. I won't go in on no other scheme."
Once more Brek Wiley laughed. "Won't ye? We'll see when the time comes. Guess I'm the boss o' this outfit. Ye'll do as I say. Fat chanst ye've got o' gittin' outer the Yukon if I slip the word to the Mounted."
A half-hour later their task was finished, and the two men turned their attention to the sled. With Wiley in the trace ropes and Shorty pushing behind, the heavily loaded sled was worked over the hard crust to a point scarcely a quarter of a mile away where it was halted before the cleverly concealed door of a dug-out. Connie managed to follow, keeping well within the shelter of boulders and scrub timber, and from the vantage point of an old shaft dump watched the men carry the quarters into the cache.
The boy noted that the abandoned cabin of a miner had been patched up and made habitable, and when the men returned for the remainder of the moose meat, he made a wide detour which brought him to the creek far above, from which point, after a hard climb, he regained his camp on the ridge.