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THE DIRTY DOGS' CLUB.

BY ANGUS GRAHAM.

ACHILLE POULIOT, Chief of Police of the town of St Sauveur, was thirsty and tired. He had spent a hot unprofitable day fetching and carrying bricks in his Black Maria for the municipal water-works man; for though his badge was blazoned "Chef de Police," he was in fact the whole force in himself, and when crime was slack he had to make himself useful in other ways. So now it was evening, and he yearned for beer.

returned-we may suppose to stop. To this day they are unrelieved even by a grocer's licence, so that it would have been useless for ordinary men even to have toyed with the thought of beer; in fact, tormenting, after a day spent among exhaust gases and brickdust.

But Achille Pouliot had been sergeant of the morality squad in Montreal, and was not a man to be beat for beer, least of all in his own barnyard. The only question which arose in his mind was as to whether there was a "spotteur "1 in town or no-well, anyhow, he would go and see if they had a sentinel outside.

So he walked gently along the Avenue du Clergé until he reached its junction with the Rue Brodeur, and there he stopped to light a pipe, and at the same time had a good look along that noble thoroughfare. Nothing was happening: the plank side-walks and the verandas of the little wooden houses were quite deserted, and in particular there was

The present writer, being blameless, and his readers, who are presumed to be innocent and high-minded, though they might have yearned with the policeman, would have crushed their yearning down as useless sentimentality in view of the complete official drought that obtains in St Sauveur. For the history of drinking in this town has been a sad one. The Quebec liquor reforms reduced the place to a desert, in which nobody rejoiced except the curé. Then one Monday the Liquor Commission opened a store, and that evening two men no one hanging about outside died. On the Tuesday an Indian got mixed up in the thing, and six men died, four of knife wounds. On the Wednesday the curé closed the store, and desert conditions

the fifth house on the left. So Achille decided that it was safe, and went up and knocked at the door, over which was a fine new emblem of the Society of the Sacred Heart.

1 An official spy or detective.

On gaining admission he made his way without asking questions to a back room that was lighted only by a skylight. It was an odd room, resembling a bedroom as far as the bed and devotional pictures were concerned, but differing therefrom in respect of the numerous upright chairs, small tables, and spitting-mats with which it was equipped. There was also a peculiar smell.

Achille, however, was in no doubt as to the potentialities of the place. He advanced upon a large coloured print of Pope Benedict XI. that hung in a position where the architectural eye would have looked for a window, and swinging it aside revealed a little pigeon-hole, as of a bookingoffice. Then saying sternly "Molson's," he proffered fifty cents to the unseen, and in less than a minute was actually drinking beer!

Now Achille Pouliot was not the only arm of the law in St Sauveur : there was another in the person of Raoul Vezina, the "grand constable," who functioned as a kind of county detective, and had his jurisdiction outside the town as Achille had his within it. He was also charged with the interests of railway crooks.

This worthy was sitting in his parlour on the same warm evening when his telephone rang, and he was informed that "longue distance "wanted him. He listened, and was presently hailed"Hullo, Raoul?"

"Ouay, lui-même."
"Raoul, this is Louis speak-

ing. Look here, Raoul; there's some one going down your way by the express this evening."

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Good; many thanks.'

And then, after looking thoughtfully at his watch, he left the house and made his way towards the Rue Brodeur.

The door under the Sacred Heart was opened to him by an unpleasant-looking young man with a livid and muchspotted countenance, and hair clipped short in the Prussian manner. In fact, his unshaven and slatternly appearance would have suited a deserter escaping from bombardment much better than a citizen of a respectable Canadian town.

Raoul went straight to the point without preliminary courtesies.

"Look here, Charles,' Charles," he said, "a spotteur' is coming down this evening by the express!"

"It doesn't matter," replied the other; "the bottled beer is finished, and the barrel is still under the pile of hides at the tannery. There will only be the white whisky and rum to get rid of, and the hole under the stable will take the whole stock. There are not more than eight dozen bottles."

"Very good," said Raoul; "keep everything shut till I tell you to open up again, and put old Pitre outside to-morrow to warn people off."

"Correct, monsieur."

And then, having shown his board of directors out, Charles

Dumais, the general manager capital oysters and a bottle of bubbly. So for the moment he forgot the grimness of the Hôtel du Canada, already yawning to receive him into an undying smell of cabbage.

of the "Blind Pig," proceeded to put in a brisk two hours' work in disposing of the material evidence of the activities of his firm.

But it so happened that the maritime express of that evening was carrying towards St Sauveur a very gallant and imposing personage as well as the Liquor Commission's "spotteur" aforementioned, and this was a certain Major Andrews, late R.E., and now of the Federal Government's Hydrographic Service. The sensation of closer approach to St Sauveur, which was his station, usually had the effect of completely destroying this officer's morale, for he was by birth one of those Englishmen who must have things done properly, and into whose unbending temperament no sense of humour enters. (And when such a paragon is cast away in a French-Canadian village, he is certain to find it, or himself, or at any rate something, irksome).

But on this occasion Major Andrews was at peace with all the world. He had been on leave, and had distinguished himself greatly, first by killing a moose at unconscionably long range when visiting at a millionaire's hunting club, and afterwards by wearing a new tophat and monocle ribbon, and generally showing a leg, at a very smart wedding in Montreal. Then in the train that afternoon he had won forty dollars at poker, and had finished up at dinner with some

His spirits rose yet higher when he found, at St Sauveur, that it was necessary for him to share the only taxi on the drive from the station with two pretty girls, the daughters of the deputy. One girl, it is true, would have suited him better in some ways than two, especially as the pair with their bags and boxes and hat-boxes left no room in the taxi for his own luggage, which was itself rather voluminous, as it contained his hunting outfit, his dress clothes, and his wedding garment. However, this was of no great consequence, so he handed his big pack-sack and his suit-case to an old carter who happened to have a waggon at the station, and telling him to deliver them next morning, set himself to improve the shining hour in the taxi.

Next morning, in hurrying out to his office, the major noticed that there was no luggage in the hall, which meant that old Morin, the carter, had for some reason not delivered it in passing on his way to meet the seventwenty. But he paid little heed to this, as it was still early. On returning to lunch, however, he was surprised and rather annoyed to find that it was still not there; the old man had overlooked it again when he went to the eleven

fifteen, and the major strode through German, and then rather threateningly towards settled down into the English the telephone, beginning to monologue that relieves presmutter against the slackness sure but does not advance a of people who had never known subject. discipline, and so forth, in the style for which he was becoming famous. But the old carter's son, who answered the telephone, apologised for the oversight with such delightful courtesy, and expressed such pained surprise thereat, that the major quite relented and begged him not to make a special trip, seeing that it was raining very heavily, but to leave the luggage at the hotel as he found convenient in the course of the evening.

"Never fear, sir; you shall have it this evening without fail.'

But when the major came back at seven o'clock, soaked and chilled to the bone after spending the afternoon taking soundings in the harbour from an open boat, and found his luggage as obstinately absent as before, he prepared to become really angry, and descended on the telephone as the provost-sergeant descends on a defaulters' parade. But this time, far from repeating his apologies for the old man's carelessness, young Morin chirruped in a bright and interesting tone

"Your clothes have been stolen, sir; some one stole them off our waggon yesterday evening at the station."

The major's French, which was never strong, failed under the strain. He side-slipped

"Wie? Volé? Warum dann I mean why the hell didn't you let me know at once instead of carrying on like this all day? Hell's bells, man, the thief has had a night and a day to get away in, and we ought to have put the police on to him right off! What? What's that? What do you mean? I never heard anything like it in my life! Don't answer me, I tell you! You're a damned young puppy, and your father's a damned old fool, and you're as good as a damned pair of thieves the two of youyou"

Young Morin was very sorry. His chirpy tone had only been assumed to carry him through the breaking of the bad news, and he did not know enough of English majors to understand the danger of such a tactic.

He explained that he and his father had had suspicions against a young man who had been helping with the waggon the night before, and that they had spent the day in putting moral pressure upon him, in the full belief that he would cough the goods up before night. But the innocence of the young man proving unconquerable, they were going immediately to the police. The major then recollected enough of the vernacular to remind young Morin that the luggage was worth five hundred dollars,

and to offer some remarks on the liabilities of common carriers, at which the conversation ended with what sounded like a sob at the other end of the line.

The major naturally did not dream of leaving the conduct of such an affair in the palsied hands of any Morins, and, boiling over with sentiments about swift decision, hammer blows, and how "half-measures never achieve success in war," he immediately telephoned himself to Achille Pouliot, that thirsty Chief of Police, and demanded everybody's head on a charger. But here he reckoned without the traditions of the service. Achille could not move without warrants, and as it was then after six o'clock the court-house was closed and the processes of law were at an end for the day. The next day, then, at nine o'clock The next day would be Sunday. But the magistrate lived in the town: could they not get a warrant somehow, even though it was Sunday? No, monsieur; there was the clerk to be considered, for example. Monday, then did the court-house open at nine o'clock? No, monsieur, at half-past nine. Well, halfpast nine, then, and the major would come round to talk things over with him on Sunday afternoon.

The major spent the evening fuming, and woke up to a Sunday of blasphemous gloom. He had suffered from railway thieves in Europe, and believed them to be a fraternity of ex

perts: there was little enough chance of catching such persons at any time, but now that they had been given thirty-four hours' start the thing was hopeless. Nor did he feel the least confidence in Achille Pouliot. That round red face and those grey mutton-chops-the picture of a family policeman for all his talk of desperate doings with the morality squad

could never be expected to compete with an up-to-date crook. And what could one think of a system of criminal justice that closed at six, because the clerk had gone home to tea?

But the bitterest pill of all to the major was to have been thwarted by two fools like the Morins. It was unbearable to think how he could have spent Friday night dealing hammer blows, telephoning up and down the line, and chasing about the countryside in cars of vengeance, if only he had known at once!

His only solace was to write to the insurance company to make a claim. He had always been proud of his courtmartial work, and now, suffering fools furiously, he described the outrage with the venom of a hanging judge. And then he went out to plan a campaign with the police.

But at this point he began to discover that it is easier to fume about fools than to plan a campaign when one has no information whatever about the enemy. There were already three theories to be weighed, all of which were of an equal,

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