Jack Green did not die. Every morning for a fortnight Constable Cameron felt it to be his duty to make enquiry--the Sergeant, it may be added--performing the same duty with equal diligence in the afternoon, and every day the balance, which trembled evenly for some time between hope and fear, continued to dip more and more decidedly toward the former.
"He's going to live, I believe," said Dr. Martin one day. "And he owes it to the nurse." The doctor's devotion to and admiration for Nurse Haley began to appear to Cameron unnecessarily pronounced.
"She simply would not let him go!" continued the doctor. "She nursed him, sang to him her old 'Come all ye' songs and Methodist hymns, she spun him barnyard yarns and orchard idyls, and always 'continued in our next,' till the chap simply couldn't croak for wanting to hear the next."
At times Cameron caught through the tent walls snatches of those songs and yarns and idyls, at times he caught momentary glimpses of the bright young girl who was pouring the vigour of her life into the lad fighting for his own, but these snatches and glimpses only exasperated him. There was no opportunity for any lengthened and undisturbed converse, for on the one hand the hospital service was exacting beyond the strength of doctor and nurses, and on the other there was serious trouble for Superintendent Strong and his men in the camps along the line, for a general strike had been declared in all the camps and no one knew at what minute it might flare up into a fierce riot.
It was indeed exasperating to Cameron. The relations between himself and Nurse Haley were unsatisfactory, entirely unsatisfactory.
It was clearly his duty--indeed he owed it to her and to himself--to arrive at some understanding, to establish their relations upon a proper and reasonable basis. He was at very considerable pains to make it clear, not only to the Sergeant, but to the cheerful little nurse and to the doctor as well, that as her oldest friend in the country it was incumbent upon him to exercise a sort of kindly protectorate over Nurse Haley. In this it is to be feared he was only partially successful. The Sergeant was obviously and gloomily incredulous of the purity of his motives, the little nurse arched her eyebrows and smiled in a most annoying manner, while the doctor pendulated between good-humoured tolerance and mild sarcasm. It added not a little to Cameron's mental disquiet that he was quite unable to understand himself; indeed, through these days he was engaged in conducting a bit of psychological research, with his own mind as laboratory and his mental phenomena as the materia for his investigation. It was a most difficult and delicate study and one demanding both leisure and calm--and Cameron had neither. The brief minutes he could snatch from Her Majesty's service were necessarily given to his friends in the hospital and as to the philosophic calm necessary to research work, a glimpse through the door of Nurse Haley's golden head bending over a sick man's cot, a snatch of song in the deep mellow tones of her voice, a touch of her strong firm hand, a quiet steady look from her deep, deep eyes--any one of these was sufficient to scatter all his philosophic determinings to the winds and leave his soul a chaos of confused emotions.
Small wonder, then, that twenty times a day he cursed the luck that had transferred him from the comparatively peaceful environment of the Police Post at Fort Macleod to the maddening whirl of conflicting desires and duties attendant upon the Service in the railroad construction camps. A letter from his friend Inspector Dickson accentuated the contrast.
"Great doings, my boy," wrote the Inspector, evidently under the spell of overmastering excitement. "We have Little Thunder again in the toils, this time to stay, and we owe this capture to your friend Raven. A week ago Mr. Raven coolly walked into the Fort and asked for the Superintendent. I was down at stables at the time.
As he was coming out I ran into him and immediately shouted 'Hands up!'
"'Ah, Mr. Inspector,' said my gentleman, as cool as ice, 'delighted to see you again.'
"'Stand where you are!' I said, and knowing my man and determined to take no chances, I ordered two constables to arrest him. At this the Superintendent appeared.
"'Ah, Inspector,' he said, 'there is evidently some mistake here.'
"'There is no mistake, Superintendent,' I replied. 'I know this man. He is wanted on a serious charge.'
"'Kindly step this way, Mr. Raven,' said the Superintendent, 'and you, Inspector. I have something of importance to say to you.'
"And, by Jove, it was important. Little Thunder had broken his pledge to Raven to quit the rebellion business and had perfected a plan for a simultaneous rising of Blackfeet, Bloods, Piegans, and Sarcees next month. Raven had stumbled upon this and had deliberately put himself in the power of the Police to bring this information. 'I am not quite prepared,' he said, 'to hand over this country to a lot of bally half-breeds and bloody savages.'
Together the Superintendent and he had perfected a plan for the capture of the heads of the conspiracy.
"'As to that little matter of which you were thinking, Inspector Dickson,' said my Chief, 'I think if you remember, we have no definite charge laid against Mr. Raven, who has given us, by the way, very valuable information upon which we must immediately act.
We are also to have Mr. Raven's assistance.'
"Well, we had a glorious hunt, and by Jove, that man Raven is a wonder. He brought us right to the bunch, walked in on them, cool and quiet, pulled two guns and held them till we all got in place.
There will be no rebellion among these tribes this year, I am confident."
And though it does not appear in the records it is none the less true that to the influence of Missionary Macdougall among the Stonies and to the vigilance of the North West Mounted Police was it due that during the Rebellion of '85 Canada was spared the unspeakable horrors of an Indian war.
