Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.69, No. 5, August 13, 1932

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.

Instead, he asked:

“How can you help it? You don’t happen by any chance to know where they’re heading, do you? It isn’t likely they told you, seeing how they double-crossed you.”

Koenig glared and uttered an oath.

“No, I don’t know where they’re heading,” he growled. “But I know something else.”

“What?” Nicholson inquired.

“Never mind what,” the horse thief answered. “But something that’ll pin a damn sight more serious charge against them double-crossing rats than hoss thieving ever will.”

Nicholson was all attention, but he didn’t allow Koenig to see that his words had aroused any particular interest.

“What you doing? Giving me a stall?” he drawled.

“No! It ain’t a stall.”

“What is it then?”

“If you want to find out, I’ll show you,” Koenig replied. “I’ll lead you to a place where you’ll find something worth while to work on.”

“It’s a go,” the sergeant told him. “Let’s get moving,”

II

Turning their horses’ heads toward the east, they rode off, Koenig in the lead, showing the way, and the Mounty close behind, his gun always in readiness in case the horse thief showed some sign of treachery. But this he did not expect. Koenig seemed too intent upon turning the tables on his two former companions.

For some time now the plain had been gradually dropping away to the left. The broken country encompassed them. They were traveling, Nicholson noticed, along a winding, dry watercourse from which arose, to right and left, low hills, soft and round. The surroundings were not unfamiliar to the trooper. He realized they had been traveling in a wide semicircle and were now somewhere in the vicinity of Ponoka.

Late in the afternoon they came to a weather-beaten but sturdily built shack in a clearing. It was shut off from the trail by a thick growth of foliage. The heavy door, built of logs, was padlocked.

“You’ll find the key down there,” Koenig said, pointing to a pile of dirt and refuse before the door. “Dig around in it a bit.”

While the horse thief looked on with a sneer, Nicholson did so, but with no success.

“Hell, I could find it in no time if you didn’t have me handcuffed,” Koenig declared. “Heard ’em tell where it was often enough. Can’t do it when you have me manacled.”

He paused and surveyed the trooper, his eyes wandering maliciously toward the Mounty’s rifle.

“Ain’t afraid of me, are you?” he jeered. “You got the gun, not me.”

There was truth in what he said. Common sense, too. Koenig was unarmed, while Nicholson had both revolver and rifle. Only a fool would attack a man so heavily armed. And the trooper was now firmly convinced that Koenig wasn’t that sort of a fool.

He unlocked the handcuffs and carefully stood guard while the horse thief knelt down to search for the key. He found it without difficulty, and a moment later the door was opened and the two men pushed their way into the musty, cold interior of the abandoned shack. Koenig led the way to a large, rusty iron stove.

Without hesitation, he removed all of the stove lids and, as Nicholson followed his actions, he saw that the stove was choked to the top.

“Take a shovel full of that and see what you find,” Koenig said, pointing to a small coal shovel that stood propped against the stove.

It did not take the trooper long to discover that it had been a grisly fuel, that had been burned in the stove the last time it was used.

As he took out the ashes and spread them methodically on the floor, he saw among them several partly burned bones, bones from a human hand unless he was greatly mistaken.

Digging deeper into the ashes, he came upon a large, round object, which, as he lifted it from the stove, drove from his mind any doubts that might have existed there. It was a human skull, with the top crushed in!

Koenig had indeed led him upon something far more serious than horse stealing. Murder!

Placing the skull on the floor, he turned to his captive.

“Who was it?” he asked.

Koenig shook his head negatively. “Don’t know,” he said somewhat wearily.

Then he told how he had chanced to overhear Burke and Skinner talking one night when they thought he was asleep. From what he had gathered from their conversation they had waylaid someone on the lonely trail near the shack, killed him and taken the body to dispose of it.

He yawned and stretched himself as he finished speaking. The contents of the stove did not seem to interest him in the least. He appeared tired and fatigued.

“Mind if I lay down for a bit?” he asked, at the same time commencing to unbutton his fur coat.

It wasn’t surprising he was fatigued. Nicholson was himself, for they had been in the saddle most of the day.

Koenig threw off his coat and rolled it into a pillow before Nicholson had an opportunity to reply to the request.

After all, he figured he might as well let his prisoner lie down. It was at least a humane thing to do. And he wanted to gather together and study the gruesome remains he had taken from the rusty stove, and look about the place for further evidence. Later, he would handcuff his prisoner again and they would push on to Ponoka. There Koenig could be safely lodged at patrol headquarters, and Nicholson could get a good night’s rest before renewing the journey to Edmonton.

As he nodded assent, Koenig spoke again. “They talked about the store room, too,” he said. “ ’Bout something being left in there.”

With that he sprawled out on the floor, adjusted the coat under his head and closed his eyes.

Nicholson looked toward the store room that led off the main room of the cabin. He’d take a look in there. Not that he hadn’t intended to, anyway. Murder had been committed. It was evident that Burke and Skinner were the murderers. But how to catch them? The description of the pair was meager, and their names… well, Burke and Skinner were in all probability names they had adopted. If not, they were certainly names that could easily be dropped.

The essential thing was to discover a clew as to the identity of the murdered man. As long as his name remained a mystery, the odds were that it would be some time, if at all, before the murderers were caught.

Koenig’s last remark, however, caused Nicholson to stop and ponder. Then a light of keen anticipation came into his eyes. The store room might supply the essential clew!

He stood over his prisoner a moment, saw that he had fallen into a doze, and then crossed the room and pushed open the heavy store room door. It was dark inside. There was only a small window and twilight was gathering outside.

He would need a light before he could do any investigating. A search of the cabin, however, revealed that both of the lamps were dry of oil. He would have to use matches.

Resting his rifle against the store room wall, he struck a match. But just as it flared, the heavy door slammed shut and he heard the lock snap shut on the outside.

Koenig had not been asleep. It was Nicholson who had been napping.

With all the force at his command he threw himself at the door, but it did not budge. He heard Koenig running from the cabin.

Quickly he drew his revolver and tried to shoot out the lock, but although he emptied the gun into the heavy wood, it was no use.

The lone window in the room was the trooper’s only means of escape and pursuit. He rushed to it only to find that it was too small for him to squeeze through.

Even if it had been large enough, there would not have been time, for the horse thief, coat in hand, was running, as fast as his bow legs would carry him, across the clearing in the gathering dusk. As he ran he glanced excitedly back toward the store room window.

There was no time to lose. In another minute or so Koenig would reach the safety of the distant trees, where the horses were tied.

Nicholson didn’t wait. He snatched up his rifle, poked the muzzle through the window, took deliberate aim at the fleeing form and fired. It was his only chance.

Koenig dropped the coat, but kept on running. Now he was lost to sight behind the brush. The bullet had lodged in the rolled coat, and he had escaped uninjured.

A moment later Nicholson heard the receding beat of horses’ hoofs, two of them, for Koenig had taken both horses.

III

Nicholson received the punishment he expected when he returned to headquarters at Edmonton. He had allowed a prisoner to escape. There was no other alternative. He was reduced in rank on November 6. Sergeant Nicholson became Constable Nicholson.

Although his rank was taken from him, the opportunity to “get his man,” was not. Aside from the blot of the Koenig affair, his record was perfect, so his plea to be allowed to recapture the horse thief and try to solve the mystery of the charred skull and bones, which he had found in the stove of the abandoned ranch house, did not fall upon deaf ears.

He was detailed to “get Koenig” and to clear up the mystery.

On the surface of things, there wasn’t much to work on, but Nicholson had given considerable thought to the murder during his trek back to Edmonton, and the more he thought about it now that he was back, the more definite conclusions stood out.

When Koenig was grumbling about being double-crossed, it seemed logical enough. But now as Constable Nicholson had occasion to view the horse thief’s actions from long range, so to speak, it seemed to him that Koenig’s desire for vengeance had been somewhat overdone.

Calling upon his long experience as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he asked himself:

Would the average criminal act as Koenig had done? Wouldn’t he wait and when released from jail seek revenge in his own way?

Nicholson decided he would.

Why then, he asked himself, had Koenig acted as he had if he was not sincere?

In endeavoring to discover a reason, Nicholson went back over the events leading up to the discovery of the human remains in the cabin stove.

The more he thought of them, the more two questions perplexed him.

If Koenig, as he had said, had only heard bits of the conversation that passed between Burke and Skinner regarding the murder, would he have been able to know exactly where to find the key to the cabin and where the remains had been disposed of?

On the second question, Nicholson decided that it was altogether possible. After all, there was only one stove in the shack.

But the key! The murder wasn’t a recent one. All the evidence pointed conclusively to that fact. But how much time had elapsed since it was committed, the trooper wasn’t certain. From the appearance of the interior of the cabin, however, he judged that it had not been used for at least six months. Perhaps longer. At the minimum though, the murder had been committed six months before.

During the intervening period, autumn had passed into winter and winter into spring. It had rained and it had snowed. Much of the pile of dirt and refuse in which the key had been hidden had undoubtedly been washed away, leaving the pile no larger or any different in appearance from those near it.

Certainly no man could have known just where to look for the key simply by hearing snatches of conversation. It didn’t ring true.

When this fact impressed itself upon Nicholson’s mind the reason for Koenig’s professed bitterness to the two escaped horse thieves stood out in bold relief.

Koenig, and not Burke and Skinner, had committed the murder. He had built up the story of double-crossing so that suspicion would fall on his two former companions and not on himself. He, and not Burke and Skinner, was doing the double-crossing.

It was all supposition, of course, and the Constable knew it. Even if he should arrest Koenig, there was no way of pinning the murder on him. Supposition and direct evidence were two entirely different things.

Why, the identity of the murdered man was still unknown! Even if it was possible to charge Koenig with murder, whom would one charge him with having killed?

Nicholson decided to let suppositions go by the board for the time being and to put all his efforts on trying to learn the identity of the murdered man.

But though he engaged in an exhaustive investigation, it was of no avail. No evidence was brought to light. No one, apparently, was missing from the whole province of Alberta who could not be accounted for.

Then it was that Nicholson had a break — the sort of a break that so often crops up unexpectedly to play an important role in the solving of a mysterious crime.

He happened to think of the muskrat skin hat that had been found some two years before on the snow-covered trail east of Ponoka.

The Mounted Police had never learned to whom the hat belonged.

Could it be possible that it had belonged to the man whose crushed-in skull had been found in the rusty stove?

Nicholson’s heart beat fast as he rushed from the barrack to seek the trooper who had had charge of the hat.

“Had orders to destroy it,” the Mounty told him. “Guess I burned it with the rubbish.”

Nicholson’s heart sank.

“No — wait a minute,” his companion went on. “Seems to me I didn’t, though. I think it’s down in the basement somewhere.”

A search of the barrack basement was undertaken at once. And after a time the headgear was found, thick with dust, lodged in back of one of the overhead beams.

Nicholson’s hands trembled ever so slightly as he pulled the cap over the broken skull. Would he discover what he wanted to find? Yes, the torn part of the hat, its edges ruffled with dried blood, corresponded exactly with the break in the skull.

One mystery had been solved.

The man who owned the hat was the man who had been murdered. But his identity remained as much of a mystery as before.

Still, there was something definite to work on now. The hat had been found near Ponoka.

But no one in or around Ponoka had been able to shed any light on the torn, blood-stained headgear when the Mounties had made their investigations there two years before. Was it reasonable to expect that they would now?

However, Constable Nicholson did not go to Ponoka to ask questions about the muskrat skin hat.

He went to pick up the trail of Koenig, for he was convinced that Koenig was the murderer.

It was several weeks before Nicholson picked up the trail he was seeking. In a crowded city it would have been a well-nigh impossible task, but in the sparsely settled regions around Ponoka it was a different matter. In such localities ordinary activities are subjects of common gossip.

So it was that at length the Constable stumbled upon two German settlers who recalled that two years before they had seen two men set out from Ponoka in a sleigh drawn by a team of shaggy bays.

Now it is nothing unusual for one to see sleighs or bay horses, for that matter, in Ponoka in winter time. It is a common sight. Nothing one would be expected to remember for over two years. But in this case the Germans had remembered.

They had remembered one of the men had ugly, scowling eyes, a hostile mouth and bow legs.

What had fixed the instance in their minds was that later they had met the bow-legged man returning alone in the sleigh. He had a bulky object covered with tarpaulin in the bottom of the sleigh.

This was the first definite proof that Nicholson’s supposition that Koenig was the murderer was correct. The bow legs cinched the matter.

The next thing was to check up on the team of bay horses and the sleigh. It was not hard for Nicholson to do, because just as one’s comings and goings are a matter of general knowledge in sections such as Ponoka, so is the matter of teams and vehicles.

The owner of the horses was found. He had bought them two years before — from a bow-legged man.

He told Nicholson that the man had put up at the Ponoka hotel for the night, had left town the next day and upon his return several days later had sold the team and sleigh.

He did not know the man’s name. It was an out-and-out cash transaction.

“It was Joe Hindahl, though, that left town with him. I knew Joe,” the farmer offered. “The fellow I bought the team from said Joe went back home to the States.”

“Know where he lived?”

“Let’s see now. I did know. Yes — Bemidji, Minnesota.”

IV

A week or so later Nicholson, posing as a Canadian wheat grower desirous of purchasing a farm in the neighborhood, appeared in Bemidji.

He was working on a hunch — a hunch that told him it was Hindahl who had been murdered on the lonely trail outside of Ponoka and whose crushed skull had been found in the rusty stove.

Furthermore, his hunch told him that through some queer quirk of fate the murderer had succeeded in successfully posing as Hindahl.

A few inquiries and Nicholson learned that the Bemidji Bank was holding overdue mortgages on several farms and was desirous of selling the properties.

He went to the bank and there he had another break. Among the mortgages was one in the name of Joseph Hindahl.

Nicholson feigned interest in the Hindahl farm. But first, he told the bank, he wanted to see the place and talk with the owner. The bank officials agreed that this was only natural, told him he would find Hindahl out at the farm most any time, and assured him that if the place met with his approval they would be glad to close the deal with him.

Nicholson waited until nightfall before he drove out to the Hindahl farm. As he cautiously made his way through the darkness toward the house, he was anxiously wondering whether fate was playing a trick on him or whether his hunch was right.

Well, it wouldn’t be long before he knew.

With utmost care not to make any noise he approached a window from which the light of a kerosene lamp cast a pale glow, and looked in.

A man was standing before the stove. Now he turned toward the table. He had a beard, while Koenig had been smooth shaven. But the beard could not disguise the man Nicholson was seeking. Furthermore, he had bow legs.

When Nicholson pushed open the door, Koenig whipped about. Seeing the Mounty, he uttered a snarl of rage, snatched up a butcher knife and swept the kerosene lamp from the table.

He had the advantage in the darkness because he knew the room, but Nicholson had his revolver and he did not hesitate to use it. His second bullet found Koenig’s leg. He dropped the knife as he fell to the floor. A moment later Nicholson had snapped handcuffs on him. This time he did not take them off until Koenig was safely lodged in jail.

Koenig was hanged early in 1910 for the murder of Joe Hindahl, while Nicholson was restored to the rank of sergeant and with the rank went a sergeant’s back pay for the time he had spent in clearing up the mystery of the torn and blood-stained muskrat skin cap.