The Devil's Making by Seán Haldane Page B

go.’
    â€˜Yet he came with us willingly. He even fetched us.’
    â€˜The savage mind is strange. Who knows what tortuous mental processes led to him sending the other man for the police? He might have wanted to place the murder on the other man. Perhaps that’s why Smgyiik ran away. These are not, among the Indians, what we might call affairs of the heart – although they talk all the time about their blessed ‘tum tum’. These feelings are of an animal nature, so far from our own ways of perceiving things, that it’s useless to speculate. We must go on the evidence. Circumstantial evidence can convict this man Wiladzap, and undoubtedly will.’
    â€˜Hear hear’, Parry interrupted. ‘I’ve never seen such a devilish deed, and the devil who did it will be hanged.’
    â€˜Indeed, Superintendent. You must forgive my musings to Constable Hobbes who is, after all, a legal man. We shall keep the Indian in jail and charge him within a day or so. There will no doubt be an unholy hubbub in town tomorrow. Our friend McCrory may have been a somewhat dubious character, with credentials which the other medical men in town don’t find impressive, but he was an American. We can’t let an Indian go unpunished for murdering an American in an English Colony.’
    â€˜To hell with him being a Yankee’, Parry burst in. ‘Forgive me, Sir. I mean, it’s as a foully butchered man that I see him, whose murderer must pay the price – and be seen by the others to pay.’
    â€˜I agree’, Pemberton said blandly. ‘But the crime is not fully proved, even if we must lay a charge. Mr Hobbes here has a mandate, as it were, to occupy himself with criminal detection. He must make a very thorough investigation of this case. Remember, we don’t want to be as rash as the Americans so notoriously are. You know how Sitting Bull, when he was defeated by the Americans, came for refuge into the North West territories with a few hundred braves, armed to the teeth, and was disarmed by Sergeant Dickens, son of our great novelist, with only a few men, on the promise that the Great White Mother would look after them. We want, as the Canadians say, much as we may dislike their aspirations to take over this Colony, ‘peace, order and good government’ – not frontier wars like the Americans in their selfish pursuit of happiness. We must be seen to have left no stone unturned and to have treated these peculiar people from further North in British Columbia with the dignity of British subjects. Yes they have savage minds, but we have to live with them. Look how we went wrong in Ireland, in the past, in treating the Gaelic Irish, with their own civilisation, as savages. But we have been making progress, Gentlemen, I am an Irishman who is proud to be British also, and proud to be here administering British law.’
    Neither of us could say anything to this unexpected peroration. Parry turned to me and said, ‘You did well today, my lad, and I trust you to use your brains – which I must say are better trained than mine – to work the case out as far as you can.’
    â€˜Thank you, Sir. I must say I thought you handled the situation at the Indian camp most courageously’, I said. I meant it.
    â€˜I imagine this berdash business may be a red herring’, Pemberton remarked. ‘As I said, it’s characteristic of the Indians of the Plains such as the Pawnees and the Sioux. The word ‘berdash’ was brought here, I regret to say, by HBC men and French Canadian traders, who were looking for such services. A clever implication, though, on the Tyee’s part. You might check, Hobbes, if there is any evidence of McCrory having been a pathic. Search his house, follow his route out to Cormorant Point, ask the people along the Cedar Hill road whether they saw him and who may have been with him. Send an electric telegraph to Fort Simpson to