The Three Scouts.

Let me now return and follow the fortunes of the three scouts, Cowan, Loasby and Quinn, who left Fort Pitt shortly before Big Bear and his men appeared on the hill behind it the morning of April 14th.

The trail from Fort Pitt to Frog Lake is a fairly good one in summer, but the scouts did not follow it. They went out along the river, which runs a few miles to the south. They travelled slowly, reconnoitring the ground ahead from commanding rises, and not until sunrise next morning were they looking through their glasses from the wooded slopes across the chain of lakes at the site of the Frog Lake settlement and the two hundred lodges a short way beyond.

They observed a number of things. First, that where the settlement had been there was no longer anything but a collection of charred and deserted ruins. Again, that the camp was still where Quinn had last seen it; at least the lodges. The most important thing of all they also noted, but unfortunately its significance did not strike them. This was the fact that very little life was observable about the camp. Why, the little scouting detail was to discover later to its cost.

When Corporal Cowan and his companions left Frog Lake on their return to Pitt - I give the story as Quinn told it to me - they again avoided the trail. The Indian camp was behind them, true, but there might be hostile parties prowling about the country and the white men had no desire to run into a band that would likely greatly outnumber them. As they drew near Fort Pitt, however, without having sighted an enemy, they put aside a caution they now considered unnecessary and struck over to the trail. Quinn always maintained this was contrary to his advice, but Cowan was in command.

They had not followed it far until they saw that the trail was marked with many hoof-prints. Quinn dismounted and examined it closely.

"I'm right, Cowan!" he exclaimed, looking up. "I said the Indians were ahead of us. Well, they are. They've come down the trail as we went out along the river. Here's the track of a shod horse - my uncle's mare that Wandering Spirit took the day of the massacre. I put those shoes on myself. I know them."

Cowan disagreed. "The police have been out during the day, rounding up the stock. That accounts for the tracks. The whole camp was at Frog Lake still, wasn't it?"

"The camp, yes - the lodges, but remember we saw mighty few Indians," Quinn returned. "Well, I'm not scared," said Cowan. "We're going on, anyhow. Funk, that's what's wrong with you, Quinn." To which Quinn retorted angrily that he could go anywhere Cowan dared. They rode on in silence. But as it happened, Quinn was right.

Fort Pitt was now little more than a mile away and just over the crest of the slope behind it, out of sight of the fort, four hundred blood-drunken and painted savages were discussing energetically plans for getting the police outside the walls of the fort so that they might shoot them down with no risk to themselves.

The camp lay just to the left of the trail. Behind it, a fringe of willows marked the course of a creek, and a break in this fringe at one point showed where the trail crossed the creek over a bridge.

When the three scouts looked from the bridge through the opening and saw the hostile camp ahead and to their left, they realized that they had made a mistake in quitting the river for the trail. But it was now too late to rectify it. Putting spurs to their horses, they dashed for the top of the slope.

The Indians saw them. Grabbing their guns, with wild cries of "Chemoginusuk! Chemoginusuk! (Soldiers! Soldiers!)" they rushed for the trail to head them off.

Along its crest to the right of the trail, the slope was thickly wooded, shutting off any chance of getting through to the fort in that direction. They had no option but to stick to the trail.

It has been said that a man does not die until his time comes, and the tragedy of that wild ride through the Indian camp rests in the fact that the three men had come unscathed through that hail of lead and then, with safety just ahead, Cowan's horse, crazed no doubt by the excitement, stopped suddenly and - bucked!

In vain Cowan spurred him - he would not budge. Cowan dropped to the ground and ran. An Indian, his gun levelled on the policeman, raced alongside. Cowan put out a hand. "Don't shoot, my brother!" he said in Cree, and the redskin turned and left him.

But a puff of smoke came from the wood on the right and, with a bullet through the heart, poor Cowan pitched his length along the dusty trail.

Henry Quinn's escape down the hill by way of the trail had been cut off, and answering the fusillade of which he was the target with repeated shots from his own rifle - fortunately for himself later without doing any damage - he swung at top speed off to the right along the wooded slope and disappeared among the poplar bluffs up the river. The hostiles were too intent upon the capture of Fort Pitt to go after him.

Meanwhile, Loasby was pounding down the slope in full view of the fort and safety as fast as his jaded mount would bear him. Lone Man - cool, crafty, daring, a human hawk whose clear brain never permitted his nerve or confidence to desert him - with the flapping pinion of the soiled white blanket, on the white racer that had unaccountably disappeared from his owner's stable one dark night a year before in Montana, followed swiftly after him.

A shot. The saddle seemed suddenly to have grown hot under Loasby. Blood trickled down his leg, but he rode on. Another shot. His horse stopped, swayed, a bullet in his neck.

Lone Man was close behind - too close. The chest of the white racer hit like a hammer on the rump of the policeman's stricken mount and down they went, over and over, the dying animal and the living, falcon redskin and wounded trooper.

Loasby was first on his feet. Other riders, he could hear, were approaching. He ran, Lone Man had raised himself on one knee and at the crack of his rifle, Loasby tumbled with his face in the dust and the trail of a bullet through his body close to the spine.

And now the burst of fire which, since Loasby was apparently past the possibility of injury from it, there was no longer need to hold, came at the intrepid savage from the fort. But he writhed forward, on his belly like a snake, till he reached the policeman. He turned him over.

"I thought he was dead," Lone Man told me later, "or I would have finished him. But he ought to have killed me - he was first up."

Drawing his knife, he cut the belt, with its cartridges and revolver, circling Loasby's waist. Then he writhed back with it, gripping the grass with his crimsoned fingers, to his horse and galloped away up the slope. And all the while bullets from the fort plugged viciously into the sod around him.

Loasby got on his feet again. He staggered to the gate in the fort, flung out derisive fingers in the direction of Lone Man, and collapsed in the arms of the two men who come to meet him. They carried him into the fort.

Henry Quinn halted in a grove of poplars a mile up the river from the fort, dismounted and tied his horse to a tree. Night fell, and under cover of the riverbank, he crept cautiously down to the road leading from the fort to the stream. He could not approach the stockade in the darkness; the sentries would be nervous. Or a prowling redskin might write finis for him.

He drew his knife and dug and dug in the clay bank. The cold gripped him; he shook violently. He must have shelter from the blinding storm! At length, he had a hole, big enough to shield his body from the swirling snow, and the ferocious wind. He crawled in. If only he had something - a crust, even! He was ravenous.

The hours dragged on. At dawn he stood outside the stockade, calling for Sergeant Martin. The curling black head of Wandering Spirit appeared suddenly at an upper window of a fort building. Fort Pitt was in the hands of the Indians!

Again there was a cry of "Chemoginusuk!" and a moment later Wandering Spirit was following fresh footprints through the newly fallen snow. They led to the river; there ended abruptly. The war chief stood on the bank, studying the mystery of the vanishing track. Where could he have gone, this policeman? The riddle was unsolvable, and presently he walked on along the bank, rifle in hand, searching every angle of the surroundings with his hawk-like eyes.

Another Indian - Isadore Mondion - followed the footprints from the fort to the river and stopped. Just beneath him, a pair of legs stuck out of the bank. With one hand he motioned to the war chief; with the other, he pointed downward. Wandering Spirit started toward him, running. "Henry," said Mondion, "come out." The poor scout, hiding like an ostrich, trembled but he did not move.

"Come out!" Mondion repeated sternly. "Quick, before Wandering Spirit comes! I will protect you." Quinn crawled from his hole. The war chief, his rifle held threateningly before him, hurried up. Mondion stepped in front of Quinn.

"My prisoner, Kahpaypamachakwayo!" he said, meeting the war chief's glance with one equally truculent. "Payatik! Be careful! His life is mine - I give it to him. From today we are brothers, Henry and I."

The war chief's answer, Quinn thought, would never come. But at length, with a wave of his hand, "So be it, Neestas," he replied. "But the life you give him - if he loves it, he will know better than to work against us! He was with the police. And his rifle - that must be mine."

The rifle was surrendered and Mondion, his arm about his adopted brother, walked with him into the fort. The warriors crowded around Quinn.

"His medicine is strong!" they cried. "Mistahay musko-wow! Bullets will not pierce him - three times he has escaped!"

"How! How!" shouted the camp. And Quinn was safe. Following is a list of the men comprising the Fort Pitt Detachment, N.W.M.P.:

Inspector Francis J. Dickens, in command; Staff-Sergeant J. W. Rolph, Sergeant J. A. Martin, Corporal R. B. Sleigh, Constables Wm. Anderson, H. A. Edmonds, Robert Hobbs, Robert Ince, F. Leduc, George Leonais, Clarence Loasby, Laurence O'Keefe, J. A. Macdonald, Charles T. Phillips, Joseph Quigley, Fred C. Roby, B. H. Robertson, G. W. Rowley, R. Rutledge, W. W. Smith, F. E. Warren, John Tector, H. T. Ayre, Corporal David Cowan (killed).

Constable "Long John" Macdonald became Inspector Macdonald. He retired years ago and died in 1943 in Vancouver, B.C. Ex-Constable Smith was long postmaster of the town of Ferintosh, Alta. Ex-Constable, later Sergeant, O'Keefe, died recently near the town of Battleford.