Cattle shipping, as any other event that collected cowboys, was a time of some anxiety in Medicine Hat. Stores closed early, citizens with any claim to being old-timers—and that was the leading ambition locally—retired unobtrusively to their homes, and even the bars, which stood to profit materially from the visit of lively young bloods whose veins had been swelling for months without outlet—or inlet—contemplated the occasion with misgiving amounting almost to trepidation.
The daily life of the West in those days, especially the part of it that dealt with law enforcement, was sufficient training in itself to arouse something like indifference to ordinary perils. Still, everything considered, it was well not to be associated with the maintenance of peace when broad-brimmed sombreros and sheepskin, angora, or leather chaps careered down Main or Toronto Streets on bronchos that seemed as appreciative of the excitement as their riders themselves.
At such time it was no matter of regret among the Mounted Police that the policing of incorporated towns in the Canadian West was in an equivocal position to which they bowed. According to the strict interpretation of the law, the jurisdiction of the Mounted Police was without geographical limits within the prairie provinces; but no town policeman would admit that such a reading was not blind prejudice. Thus it came to pass, to avoid endless squabbling and overlapping, that the red-coats confined their attention to the great stretches where man was seldom seen breaking the law—until such time as the town police, in shamefaced recognition of their physical limitations, called in their better known brethren.
When the cowboys ran amok in town, he was a tenderfoot red-coat who envied the town policeman his monopoly.
There is little inherently bad about the cowboy. Normally he is fairer, more gallant and honest than the ruck of Westerners who have gone West with their eyes blinded by dollars. Often a shocking cold-bloodedness marks his revenge or anger, but it is usually frank and fair, according to his lights, a development of the hard life he lives.
Out there on the prairie no house is locked. There, where the nearest neighbour may be hours of hard riding distant, no decent woman need be afraid.
But lope the same gallant, honest cowboys into town in a group of a fine evening, and it is best to be where they aren't. To them town is the visible epitome of all they contemn: luxury, inexperience, flaccidity, nervousness; the source of that impending peril, the farmer. Town has its uses, the admissible ones being the amusement and accommodation of visiting ranchers and their outfits.
And one of the readiest amusements, and usually the cheapest, is impressing the townsman.
Dakota Fraley and his gang were peculiarly trained to enjoy this form of amusement. Over in Montana, where they came from, the law was less confining—a mere matter of solitary sheriffs, probably recruited from among themselves after the excitement of punching palled. This side of the border it was more relentless, depending upon straight-shooting, fearless, hardriding, uniformed officials who scorned the assistance of posses and were only the human representatives of an overwhelming force that could not be stayed by a thousand rifles or reputations. To have a chance to break loose in such a tight-laced country was like rolling out a pent-up oath when the parson's back is turned.
Dakota and his mates hated Canada, as a burglar hates an electric alarm, because a flesh-and-blood gunman hadn't a chance. They hated the townsman especially because of his insulting confidence in the protection of the law.
Most of all they hated the Mounted Police.
When the last steer had lumbered up the gangway and been locked in the last car, Dakota and his companions lingered on the trail to town. They knew their unpopularity with the other outfits and resented it. The Mounted Police knew, in the course of their intimate investigations into the past of everyone who ever came West, that this feeling was no novelty to Dakota's comrades. They were almost as unpopular in their own country. Indeed, under adequate pressure Inspector Barker might have told an interesting story of the reason for Dakota's change of climate.
On South Railway Street the H-Lazy Z outfit pulled up. Here were the most bars, and since these were crowded they split into small groups and divided their patronage. The Royal, the Commercial, the European, the Cosmopolitan were treated impartially, for they all served equally potent liquid. Disregardful of toes and elbows and prior rights, they dived into the crowds and for fifteen minutes kept the perspiring dope-slingers busy on recklessly juggled concoctions.
From Inspector Barker's window across the tracks four Mounted Policemen sighed; they read the story of the night ahead, without being within sight of the labels on the bottles.
After that a breathing space of ominous quiet, for the cowboys were gorgeously hungry after two days of mess-wagon fare.
Every hotel in town was prepared, though they had nothing to fear but hunger. Not one of the cowboys was likely to impose in the dining-room. They might, within the last two minutes, have been shooting up the town, filling themselves on rot-gut, cursing each other and everything else with fraternal abandon or fighting with the ruthlessness of fiends. In the dining-room they became more formal than the freshest "remittance-man" from "back home." They might hanker to seize their soup plates and gulp the contents into impatient throats, but they genteelly spooned it up, tilting it daintily to the last drop. They might tackle poached eggs with a knife, but they contemplated their comparative failure with gravity and patience. They never smiled or spoke above a whisper; and before they appeared at the table each and every one had stood in line in the hotel lavatory for a turn at the common brush and comb—unchained, because there was no danger of theft.
As befitted his rank, Dakota selected the Provincial, taking with him his crony, Alkali Sam. They would meet the others in the market-place after "dinner"—for the Provincial alone, run by a venturesome and popular Englishman, insisted on that untimely designation for its night meal.
Having introduced to their plated interiors all the liquid refreshment the remainder of the evening's entertainment could handle with steady aim, they recalled the assignation. Thither they repaired, solemnly studying legs and hands to verify their good judgment, nevertheless exhilarated by anticipation.
In the market-place Bean Slade, Muck Norsley, General Jones, the Dude, and a few lesser lights of the H-Lazy Z outfit, together with kindred spirits from other ranches, were impatiently cursing the wasted time, with the bars still open and their thirst unquenched. When the foreman arrived they cursed him and his companion with unaffected impartiality, tightened the cinches, rubbed the noses of their mounts, and climbed to the saddles.
When they dashed through the narrow exit to Toronto Street the fun was on.
Dakota struck straight for the Provincial opposite—a brilliant idea that staggered them all.
Now, the front door of the Provincial was attainable only by climbing fourteen steep steps and crossing a deep verandah. The height enabled loungers to expectorate in comfort over the railing to the sidewalk without inconveniencing themselves, and to some extent discouraged the visits of the too heavily loaded, who naturally gravitated to the more accessible bar door, situated lower down the street and on the street level.
Those fourteen steps had acquired a reputation that subdued the wildest spirits—like a Mounted Policeman's uniform. But one of Dakota's favourite amusements back in Montana—a stereotyped one in a cow country—was to ride through the saloon doors. To-night he was in the precise humour for shocking convention. Accordingly eight confirmed loungers were much scandalised by the nose of Dakota's horse thrusting itself in their midst.
Judas—Dakota's own name for his mount, because, as he said, you never know when he's going to sell you—lowered his head in response to the swift lash of Dakota's quirt, fixed his eyes on the centre step of the flight and ate up the climb in two leaps, drawing up with a slide as nose and neck protruded through the front door. Thereupon Dakota gently urged him into the rotunda, dodging the chandelier, and pulled up before the dining-room door, where he leaned forward, Stetson in hand, to see what the diners were making of it.
Somewhat subdued by the simplicity of the proceeding and the loneliness of the adventure, he lay back on Judas' rump to negotiate the descent, and a bit shamefacedly rejoined his companions in the street.
Perhaps it was to cover his embarrassment that he opened the night's performance without loss of time.
Whirling Judas on his hind legs, he dashed spurs into him and roared down Toronto Street, shooting into the air as he went, with eight or ten shrieking, shooting companions behind him.
At the corner of South Railway Street the gas-lamp caught his eye. A quick shot scattered the globe, but Medicine Hat's gas, that gushed from an unlimited sea of natural supply six hundred feet down in the earth, continued to blink at him from an undamaged mantle.
"Thunder!" he snorted. "I must be drunk."
The next shot re-established his self-confidence.
Someone beside him banged a bullet through the transom of a store entrance, another brought down fragments of a telephone insulator, and two or three, catching sight of an open window, imprinted their valentines on the ceiling beyond.
Every door was closed and bolted, not for fear of looting—no cowboy would stoop to that—but in instinctive exclusion of lawlessness. So that the few caught on the street had no way of escape. Dakota recognised it first. Two or three well-directed shots into the pavement about their feet invariably drove pedestrians back against the wall, hands raised, a mere act of polite acceptance of the fact that the cowboys owned the town.
Two women scurried in a panic for a locked door, screamed, and turned blanched faces to the terror. Dakota raised his arm, shouted, and on the instant every mouth closed, every finger was held. With doffed Stetsons, guns pointing to the sky, a band of dare-devil cow-punchers trotted meekly past the terrified women, bowing as they went, and twenty yards beyond broke loose with redoubled vigour.
At the corner of Main Street every eye flicked across the tracks to the barracks, but things seemed lifeless there.
Up a deserted Main Street they blazed their way. A couple of small store windows "holed" before them, one, struck at an angle, falling to pieces. More gas lights went dark.
Morton Stamford, busy in his scrubby little office on the weekly accounts of publication day, heard the shooting and threw up his window to watch the cowboys thunder past. When Dakota whirled in his saddle and sent a bullet on either side of his head, Stamford cudgelled his panicky brain for a reasonable and dignified excuse for retirement from the limelight. Failing to find one, he stuck there, with his head through the window. After the clamour had passed on into Main Street he carefully traced the bullets through the partition to the outer office and tried to hoke them as souvenirs from the brick wall with a paper knife. Then he tiptoed to the window and, standing well back, pulled it down and locked it, though by that time the shooting had dimmed away.
Thrilled with the incident, Stamford hastily planned a letter to an old newspaper friend down East who could make use of vivid little bits like that, with sundry touches of imagination that would be certain to rouse an Eastern outcry. He could draw pictures like that any time he wanted, and his friends back East had long since decided that he was either a fool or a hero.
Suddenly he remembered that he had not dined. It was then he became aware of a revival of the clamour in another direction. And as it did not seem to be coming to him, he went out to it. On Toronto Street he stood for a minute to locate the disturbance, but, hunger getting the better of his curiosity, he began to trot toward the Provincial Hotel.
Round the corner above him careened the cowboys into Toronto Street, now lifeless save for the little figure of Morton Stamford hurrying to dinner.
Dakota saw him. It was nothing short of insult, this indifferent little tenderfoot waggling his legs down the street before them. Stamford was only half way to safety when Dakota whirled up behind him on the sidewalk and, expecting him to duck to the shelter of a doorway, wheeled off to one side only in time to escape riding him down. Judas' sides brushed Stamford's shoulder, so near a thing was it for the editor.
In a flash Dakota was around, and three shots in quick succession close to Stamford's feet were sufficient to warn any but the rankest tenderfoot what was expected of him. A fourth removed his stiff hat. The next struck the edge of his boot sole. Something told him he was dangerously unconventional. He looked up with a smile into the faces of the crowding cowboys.
"You don't seem to like me, Dakota."
"Like you, you little sawed-off! Never paid so much 'tention to a tenderfoot in my born days afore. I fair love you. Same time, I'd like to see you back again that wall and h'ist your hands. These is our streets to-night."
Stamford continued to grin about him.
"I was just on my way to dinner, Dakota," he said, and stooped to pick up his hat.
"You won't need any—ever!" yelled Dakota furiously, reaching for his second gun.
But certain slow processes in the brain of the solitary town policeman had evolved the decision that the town's peace was being breached at last. From the shadow of an adjacent doorway he stepped and seized Judas' bridle.
"Stop it, Dakota! You get right away home. There's a good-sized bill against you already. There'll be another not so easy to pay if you don't vamoose."
But Dakota's anger was riding the crest of his liberal potations; and anyway this was only the town policeman. Clubbing his gun, he leaned over Judas' neck and struck. As he did so, he was bumped into on the off side and in the effort to retain his seat the gun dropped to the sidewalk.
"Cut that out, Dakota, you tarnation ijut!" growled Bean Slade. "This ain't no skull-crackin' holiday. Neither it ain't Montany. Not by a damn sight!" he added, with sudden excitement, pointing down the street with his quirt.
Round the corner from South Railway Street four Mounted Police were riding nonchalantly.
Dakota looked from the red town-uniforms of the Police to the little figure hurrying up the Provincial steps. But the sudden burst of life behind him decided him for discretion. Up the street, faster than they had ridden in their orgy, a group of satisfied cowboys tore.
Medicine Hat reopened its windows. The loungers reappeared on the Provincial verandah. Evening strollers returned to the streets. Inspector Barker locked his office door and went home to a tardy supper.
Three days later a khaki-coated Policeman loped up to the cook-house door of the H-Lazy Z, stooped to look inside, and spoke:
"Dakota, I want you."
Six cowpunchers gasped. Dakota opened his mouth and closed it without speaking, but his face reddened.
"Come here!"
Dakota stumbled to his feet and came to the doorway. Constable Hughes handed him a blue paper and waited for the reading. Dakota's anger flamed. With an oath he tore the paper in two—but as the two parts separated, his hands stayed.
"Now you're coming with me, Dakota Fraley!"
The Policeman dismounted without haste and stepped up to the part-owner of the best paying ranch in the Medicine Hat district, the boss of the toughest outfit of cowpunchers in Western Canada.
"Well, this is one h—l of a country!" growled Dakota, putting on his Stetson and starting for the stables.
"It might be," said Hughes.