CHAPTER XXVII. THE TROOPER’S STORY.

“However, I put the best face I could on the matter and even tried to talk cheerfully to Nevins. But he would have none of my conversation and zig-zagged along on his snow shoes with his queer, swinging gait in the same silent way. It began to grow dusk, and I saw that we should never make the lake that night. I halted Nevins and told him so.

“He gave an odd kind of laugh.

“‘Not make it? Man alive. I’m going to make it’ he grated out in an odd, rasping sort of a voice.

“‘Don’t talk like a fool,’ said I. ‘Come, here’s a place under this ledge that’ll make a good camp, and bright and early we’ll hit the trail again.’

“He whipped round on me with blazing eyes.[269] If ever a demon shone out of a man’s optics it blazed out of his.

“‘I’m going on, I tell you,’ he snarled, ‘and what’s more, you’re going with me.’

“I’ve been in some pretty tight places, but take my word for it, right then I began to think that I hadn’t begun to know what a tight corner was. I could see by the way that poor crazy Nevins gripped his rifle that he meant to have company on his night ‘mush,’ even if he had to shoot him to get it. I felt as if somebody had dropped a chunk of ice down my back.

“‘All right, Nevins,’ I said, ‘I’ll go along. Don’t get excited.’

“‘I’m not excited,’ he said. And then he added, ‘It’s only that they’ll get us if we don’t keep on going.’

“‘Who’s them?’ I inquired.

“‘Those things that have been following us,’ he whispered.

[270]

“Then he came quite close to me and caught my arm.

“‘They live back there up in the snow, and they’re trying to get me and take me back with them, but they won’t.’ He broke into a wild laugh that made my scalp tighten till I could almost feel my hat lift on my hair.

“‘Don’t talk nonsense, Nevins,’ I snapped. ‘We’re far ahead of them. They’ll never catch us now.’

“He looked sharply at me.

“‘You’re more of a fool than I thought you,’ he said contemptuously. ‘They’ve been following us all day. They’re close behind us now!’

“I confess that his manner was such that I jumped nervously and looked behind me as he spoke. Of course there was nothing there but the trail, and I told him so, but a contemptuous laugh was all that I got.

“Well, in the course of my career as a trooper I’ve handled some pretty bad characters and been[271] into some tight places and faced some situations where things looked mighty bad, but I never felt such a feeling of real scare as I had at that moment. Having made this outburst, Nevins started off again. After a while, when it began to get dark, I determined to make a last try to check his crazy plan. I stopped dead.

“‘Here’s where I stop, Nevins,’ I said. ‘I’m dead beat.’

“He faced round like a wild man, and before I could lift a hand he had his rifle raised, and with the yell of a maniac he fired blindly in my direction. I felt the bullet fan my ear.

“‘What on earth are you trying to do, Nevins?’ I asked in as firm a voice as I could assume, but I’m afraid it was as wobbly as a dish of jelly. ‘Are you crazy?’

“‘Crazy!’ he echoed with a wild laugh. ‘It’s you that are crazy. Come on, follow me. I’ll save you from those creatures that are after us.’

“There was nothing to do but to obey. Up I[272] got and started on again after Nevins, who went staggering along, edging from side to side of the trail like a dizzy man. I found myself wondering how it was all going to end. I’m pretty tough and hard to tire, but I felt almost all in, and Nevins, not nearly so strong as I was, must have been going solely on the unnatural strength lent him by his insanity.

“By and by it got dark, but Nevins kept on. He kept shouting back at me, and I’d answer him from time to time. I couldn’t let him go on alone, although I was almost dead. After a while his shouts grew less frequent and finally they died out altogether. I guessed what had probably happened. I thought that by and by if I kept on I would stumble over his body lying in the snow.

“For a long time I walked slowly, every minute expecting to come upon him, but he was nowhere on the trail. I don’t like to recall that night nor the next day when I went on staggering down[273] the trail till I began to get crazy, too, and hear odd things and voices.

“If it hadn’t been that a party from the station out hunting found me I don’t like to think of what might have happened. I soon came round and told all I could about Nevins. A search party started out at once, but returned the next day empty-handed. They had found and then lost tracks of many snow shoes in the woods near the trail. We always suspected that Nevins had wandered off the trail when I missed him, been found dead by Blood Indians, robbed and buried in a drift.... And that, boys, is one incident in the life of a trooper of the Mounted.”

“It’s a ghastly story,” shuddered Ralph, while the others looked grave and sober.

“Chum around with a bunch of troopers some time and you’ll hear stranger yarns than that,” said Trooper Carthew. “And,” he added thoughtfully, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, “the worst of it is, they are all true. There’s no need to do any fancy color work on ’em.”

[274]

Not long after, the trooper rose with the remark that he must “mush along.” The party intended moving on, too, so they rode with him till their trails parted. The last they saw of Trooper Carthew was his broad back as his horse surmounted a brow of the trail and disappeared. He turned in his saddle and waved, and then was gone.

It was a new experience to the boys and it was long before they forgot his story, but such men are met with frequently in the wild places. Real heroes, worthy of world recognition, die fighting a good fight, without hope of reward or praise beyond that bestowed by their mates.