“But, hell!” he grunts disgustedly. “We could just as well had the whole thing. There wasn’t nothin’ the matter with that disguise. What do you suppose happened to that guy?”
“I got no idea,” I shakes my head.
“Well,” he growls, “I’d give a lot to know, because it looks damn funny to me. If you ever find out, let me in on it, will you, Smitz?”
“Sure,” says I, and he departs, slammin’ the door.
“All right, you fuzzy-brained, nitwitted jackass, come on out,” I bawls, and from under the bed crawls my aspirin’ partner and continues removin’ the presence of Herr Mussendorfer from his downcast countenance.
Bow Legs and Charred Bones
by James W. Booth
It was a horse thief Sergeant Nicholson went to get. It was an unknown man’s skull and a sinister mystery he brought back.
I
With the ease and grace one would expect from so experienced a horseman, Sergeant Nicholson swung into the saddle and a moment later was galloping out of Ponoka across the hard-frozen Alberta prairie.
A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he was out to “get his man.” Three of them, in fact, for word had been brought to patrol headquarters that three horse thieves had been caught at the Comstock ranch.
It was pretty much of a cut and dried matter of routine, as far as Nicholson could figure it. Not much to expect in the way of action, and he was one of those men who craved action. His system required it. It was essential to his well-being.
He had had little of it the past few months. Riding lone patrol far to the North had been a monotonous ordeal, with nothing to break the monotony except occasional visits to lonely woodsmen and now and then petty arguments among the Indians over trap lines.
He would have relished this assignment much more if it had been the task of catching the horse thieves. As it was, they had already been captured. All he was required to do was to take them manacled to Edmonton for trial.
Life in the Mounted was like that! It was all very well for story writers and the motion pictures to portray the scarlet-coated troopers as engaging in one continual man-hunt, with glamour, romance and gun-fire at every turn. But Nicholson knew it was the bunk. He knew that such cases were very few and very far between in the records of the force. He knew that the average detail drawn by the men in its ranks was drab and dreary and monotonous.
There was the case of the muskrat skin hat, for example. No particular action or glamour or romance there. Yet for nearly two years every member of the force in the region had orders to find the owner of the hat.
It had been found early in 1907, torn and blood-stained, on the snow-packed trail east of Ponoka, and turned in at beadquarters.
Who could tell what it might mean — perhaps a murder, some sort of a crime, at least.
But it hadn’t. The most exhaustive search had failed to bring to light either the owner of the cap or even the indication of a crime connected with it. No one was reported missing and no one reported an injury which would explain the torn and bloodstained headgear. So in the end the search was ordered abandoned and instructions given to destroy the now dust-covered cap.
It became just one of those things in the life of a Mounty.
It was of drab, bothersome details such as this that Nicholson was thinking as he reined in his horse before the Comstock ranch house that crisp autumn morning of September, 1908.
John Comstock, a big, raw-boned man with a weather-beaten face and usually a good-natured twinkle in his eye, greeted him as he dismounted. Today the twinkle was missing. His face was grave.
“Too bad you didn’t get here sooner, Sergeant,” he said, after shaking hands with the trooper. “Two of those devils got away early this morning.”
“Two, eh?”
“Yes. We’ve still got the other one. Have him tied up tighter than a drum. He’s a tough one, and sore as hell.”
“Let’s have a look at him.”
Together they walked to the wagon shed, where the Mounty found the horse thief securely bound with heavy rope and zealously guarded by an unsympathetic ranch hand.
He was a stocky, bow-legged ruffian, with scowling eyes and a tight-lipped mouth. At first he was sullen and refused to talk. But Nicholson knew how to handle that type, and it wasn’t long before the horse thief revealed that his name was William Oscar Koenig.
He also revealed why he was, as Comstock had put it, “sore as hell.”
“Them dirty two-timers,” he snarled. “Double-crossing me.”
“Two-timers! Who?” Nicholson wanted to know.
Koenig looked menacingly up at him.
“Them two buddies of mine, Burke and Skinner, if it will do you any good, which it won’t,” he sneered. “Buddies! Bah!” and with that he spat vigorously on the hard turf.
So that was it. Koenig’s grievance was due to the fact that he had been made the goat of the ill-fated horse thieving expedition.
Nicholson smiled to himself. He’d play this fellow along, humor him a bit, and perhaps… well, who could tell? He might get his three men after all. It would not be the first time that a man who had been double-crossed had earned his revenge by squealing.
“Well, that’s your tough luck,” he told the horse thief, as he cut the cords that bound his hairy wrists and snapped on the handcuffs. “No use crabbing about it. We got to get moving.”
But as they left the Comstock ranch behind and rode south toward Edmonton, Koenig continued his crabbing. His desire for vengeance, instead of lessening to any degree, increased steadily until it dominated him completely. Nicholson did nothing to reduce this sense of grievance. Everything he said, in fact, was said with the object of stirring up the wrath within his prisoner.
Once, when they stopped at a spring to water their horses and refresh themselves, he jokingly told Koenig. “Say, with those bow-legs of yours you’d never gotten away. And if you had — well, there’s not another pair like ’em in the Dominion. You’d have been spotted sure.”
The horse thief only swore.
Again when they urged their horses forward, he fell to grumbling. Another hour of steady riding over the lonely, wind-swept plains and Nicholson gave his prisoner to understand he had had enough of his continual complaining.
“For God’s sake, cut out the chatter,” he snapped. “Why not take it with your chin up and stop whining? There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Koenig turned abruptly in his saddle, his eyes narrowing as he faced the Mounty.
“Is that so?” he snarled.
He said no more. Instead, as they rode on, he relaxed into the sullen attitude he had assumed when Nicholson first saw him. No longer did he complain of his ill-fortune or swear vengeance on the two who had left him to face the law alone. The Mounty could tell that he was deep in thought.
At length, as they reached the top of a knoll overlooking the broad expanse of rolling prairie, he reined in his horse and waited for Nicholson to come abreast of him.
“Nothing I can do about it, eh?” he inquired. “Well, there is.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t think I’m going to let those two lice go free while I get sent up for a stretch, do you?”
This was what Nicholson had been hoping for. Koenig’s desire for revenge had gotten the better of him. He was going to give the trooper the clew he was waiting for. But the Mounty didn’t push him.