To save the horses we walk the hills, and I try to match giant steps with Sergeant Anderson.  Kennedy, Junior, joins us and has a knotty point to settle regarding “the gentleman wot murdered the man.”  It is hard to induce a Mounted Policeman to talk.  However, to be striding Athabasca Trail with the hero of the Hayward-King murder-trial is too good an opportunity to lose, and, reluctantly rendered, bit by bit the story comes out.

Most people looking at a map of Northwest Canada would think it a safe wilderness for a live man or a dead man to disappear in with no questions asked.  In reality, it is about the worst place in America in which to commit a crime and hope to go unpunished.

In September, 1904, the Indians reported to the Mounted Police that they had seen two white men in the early summer, and that afterwards one man walked alone, and was now at Lesser Slave.  An observant Cree boy added, “The dog won’t follow that other white fellow any more.”  Sergeant Anderson, going to their last camp, turned over the ashes and found three hard lumps of flesh and a small piece of skull bone.  Convinced that murder had been done, he arrested the suspected man and sent him to Fort Saskatchewan for trial.  No one knew the identity of either the dead man or the living.  In front of the old camp-fire was a little slough or lake, and this seemed a promising place to look for evidence.  Sergeant Anderson hired Indian women to wade in the ooze, feeling with their toes for any hard substance.  In this way were secured a sovereign-case and a stick-pin of unusual make.  The lake was systematically drained and yielded a shoe with a broken-eyed needle sticking in it.  Sifting the ashes of the camp-fire and examining them with a microscope, Anderson discovered the eye of the broken needle and thus established a connection between the camp with its burnt flesh and the exhibits from the lake.  The maker of the stick-pin in London, England, was cabled to by the Canadian Government, and a Mr. Hayward summoned to come from there to identify the trinkets of his murdered brother.  A cheque drawn by the dead Hayward in favour of King came to the surface in a British Columbia bank.  Link by link the chain of evidence grew.

It took eleven months for Sergeant Anderson to get his case in shape.  Then he convoyed forty Indian witnesses two hundred and fifty miles from Lesser Slave to Edmonton to tell what they knew about the crime committed in the silent places.  The evidence was placed before the jury, and the Indians returned to their homes.  A legal technicality cropped up and the trial had to be repeated.  Once more the forty Indians travelled from Lesser Slave to repeat their story.  The result was that Charles King of Utah was found guilty of the murder of Edward Hayward and paid the death penalty.

This trial cost the Canadian Government over $30,000,—­all to avenge the death of one of the wandering units to be found in every corner of the frontier, one unknown prospector.  Was it worth while?  Did it pay?  Yes, it paid.  It is by such object-lessons that to Indian and white alike is forced home the truth that God’s law, “Thou shalt not kill,” is also the law of Britain and of Canada.