before the man had raised himself into a sitting posture Dick Vaughan
had jumped from the saddle and was beside him.

"Don't move," said Dick, "and the dog won't hurt you. If you move your
hands he'll be at your throat. See! Better let me slip these on--so! All
right, Jan, boy. Stay there."

When Captain Arnutt dismounted he found his subordinate standing beside
a handcuffed man, who sat on the ground, glaring hopelessly at the hound
responsible for his capture. Jan's tongue hung out from one side of his
parted jaws, and his face expressed satisfaction and good humor. He had
done his job and done it well. The thought of injuring his quarry had
never occurred to him, as Dick Vaughan very well knew, despite his
warning remark to the Italian. But although Jan had had no thought of
attacking the recumbent man he had trailed, he was very fully conscious
that this man was his quarry. The handcuffing episode had not been lost
upon him.

From the outset he had known that he and Dick were hunting that day. Why
they hunted man he had no idea. Personally, he had not so much pursued
an individual as he had hunted a certain smell. In coming upon the
sleeping Italian he had tracked down this particular smell. His
conception of his duty was, having tracked the smell to the man, to hand
the man over to Dick. That marked for him the end of his work; but not
by any means the end of his interest in the upshot of it.

XXIII

THE FIGHT ON THE PRAIRIE

Even without the confession he ultimately made, Jan's tracking, the
man's own empty leather sheath fitting the dagger he had left behind
him, and the watch, money, and rings found in his pockets, and proved to
be the property of the murdered couple, would have been sufficient to
condemn the Italian.

It appeared that the primary motive of the crime had not been theft, but
jealousy. At all events, the man's own story was that he had been the
lover of the woman he had killed. He paid the law's last penalty within
the confines of the R.N.W.M.P. barracks, and his capture and trial made
Jan for the time the most famous dog in Saskatchewan. Pictures of him
appeared in newspapers circulating all the way from Mexico to the Yukon;
and in his walks abroad with Dick Vaughan he was pointed out as "the
North-west Mounted Police bloodhound," and credited with all manner of
wonderful powers.

It was natural, of course, that he should be called a bloodhound; and it
did not occur to any one i