Apparition Trail, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

I could do was a tin of Hudson’s Bay Imperial Mixture, which I added to the rest of my kit.
    I rushed out to the stables and saddled up Buck, the bronco I’d been assigned upon my posting to the Maple Creek detachment two months prior. He was a good steady horse, bred on the prairie and accustomed to its extremes. He wasn’t much to look at: just a solid dun colour throughout, and not overly swift. But he was a solid trooper, nonetheless, and devoted to his duties as an NWMP mount. He’d been stolen shortly after my arrival by Indian braves, but he’d returned to the stables all on his own two days later, with an Indian’s handprint in ochre paint on his rump as a souvenir of his adventures. I could only assume that he’d bucked the thief right off his back, then ventured home again.
    That was when I’d changed his name to Buck, a colloquial term for an Indian warrior — and a damn fine pun, as far as I was concerned.
    Buck didn’t look any happier at our early departure than I did. He puffed out his stomach as I cinched the saddle tight, but a knee to the stomach put paid to that trick. I slid my Winchester into the saddle’s carry case, fastened my saddlebags in place, and mounted up.
    As I trotted out of the stable, Wilde cast a baleful eye on me and snapped the face of his pocket watch shut. He didn’t say a word to me, but instead just turned his horse, a high-tempered black, toward the trail that led to the west. He whistled for his dogs — a pair of fierce hounds that followed him everywhere — but they refused to follow him. Instead they hunkered down with their bellies to the ground, growling their refusal.
    Wilde addressed the dogs in a disgusted tone: “What, afraid of the wild Indians are you? Damn cowards.” He wheeled his horse around and spurred it forward. I had to spur my own horse to catch up with him. Buck snorted his displeasure, but picked up his pace. Still a little shaken by my dream, I was glad we’d left the dogs behind. They reminded me of the dead hound in my dream.
    “Where are we headed?” I asked.
    “To the head of the railway line,” Wilde said. “Chief Piapot and his band have placed their tepees in the way of the construction crews. We’re to give him official notice to move on.”
    We hadn’t far to go, then: no more than a morning’s ride. We trotted through the thickly forested hills, following the railway tracks. The freshly laid steel reflected the rays of the morning sun, twin slashes of red across the ground.
    As we rode, I mused upon what was to be done. The band of Cree that Piapot commanded had been assigned a reservation, but insisted, instead, on continuing to wander about the prairie. What an irony that, out of all this trackless wilderness, they had chosen a campsite directly in the way of the CPR line!
    As if hearing my thoughts, the Sergeant interrupted the silence.
    “They chose that camping spot deliberately, you know,” he said. “We’ve been having no end of trouble with those savages. First it was tomahawks, wedged in the spaces where the rails met, and then it was a tree trunk across the line. It’s only by the grace of God there hasn’t been a derailment, and lives lost. It’s time we put an end to Piapot’s mischief.”
    I nodded because the Sergeant seemed to expect it, but kept my own counsel. It wasn’t that I disagreed with Wilde: the acts of vandalism he’d listed were against the law and demanded a response. It was just that I wanted to see the right men punished for the crime. All sorts of Indians passed through the Cypress Hills: Cree, Assinaboine, Blood, Blackfoot, and Peigan. It could have been braves from any one of these bands that had committed the mischief. The North-West Mounted Police weren’t like the American cavalry to the south, pouncing upon any red man who happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. We were a police force, and we relied upon investigation, rather than brute force, to help us find and punish the