ING PARADE

By HARRY E. TAYLOR

In His Own Inimitable Style, Mr. Taylor Deals With Policemen, Past and Present
—In the Words of Sir Henry Newbolt, “Take Them for What They Are... Your

AACK THROUGH THE years in retro-
rect, I recall still others of the B. C. Police
fellows I have travelled with, argued
ith, roughed it with, some not seen since
0 years agone, but thought of them still
reen in memory’s garden.

SAM SHOT A PORCUPINE!

Chance news that Sam Service is now
ergeant in charge at Port Alberni, on the
Island, recalls the
dim days of the
post-war °2 0’s,
when that long,
gaunt sleuth so-
journed at Me-
Bride, the biggest
hamlet betwixt
Prince George
and Jasper. A
serious chap in
those days, Sam
always gave dil
igent ear when
duty called. I
yonder if he remembers our collaboration
ver the Case of the Missing Man, who
lisappeared from the Dome Creek country.
Ve have both foot-slogged, more than once,
he twelve miles across country to the Clear-
vater River—through a log-bestrewn chunk
f jungle which certainly raised (a) a swell
rop of devil-club, and (b) hob with our
ootgear and tempers. Between the thorn
ushes and the tangled bracken and the
vindfalls, there were times when I made
$ fast progress as a one-legged skier in a
ravel pit. It was at a trapper’s cabin up on
he Clearwater that the once-in-a-million
gincidence was demonstrated before Sam.
‘rom his cabin door, the trapper lifted rifle
0 shoulder and shot a porcupine, perched
igh up in a nearby tree—this particular
orky had set himself up in the excavating
usiness in the trapper’s vegetable patch,
ence the shooting—well, the trapper’s dog,
learing the shot, dashed out from the com-

‘OURTEENTH EDITION

Sergt. S. Service

Comrades in the Service.”

fortable shade of the cabin, to take a looksee
around, like all good dogs will when any
shooting is going on. He whisked in high
gear under the tree at the selfsame instant
that the porky fell. The dog never saw it—
he felt it. It landed, bristle side down, ker-
flop upon his neck. The fraction of time it
took all this to happen dragged into hours

before the last of the quills was extracted,

with Sam pinning the poor hound’s head
down between the prongs of a hayfork, and
voicing sympathy, whilst the trapper acted
as surgeon. Water travel, handcar on the
railway, pack dog or Shank’s mare, it was
all the same to Sam Service. I have a snap-
shot of him outside a shack up in that Clear-
water country, with a pack dog beside him,
and I am sorry it is too dark with heavy
sun-shadows to reprint. I think Sam was
very like that legendary constable must have
been who did duty at the 150 Mile House,
on the Cariboo, a very, very long time ago
before the B.C. Police were really organ-
ised. This particular policeman was a local
fellow who accepted the job for a very small
stipend, plus what he could make out of
supplying meals to his prisoners. Incident-
ally, he had no uniform, and provided his
own clothes, and figured out any knotty
legal problems by the good old system of
trial and error. It is related that he was
holding a murder suspect in his little one-by-
two hoosegow which was tacked on to his
living quarters. The evidence against the
languishing one, who was reputedly a wild
and woolly hombre, was overwhelming save
for one rather vital point—the body of the
murdered man had not been found. The
constable had a deep and abiding suspicion
that it was buried somewhere out in the
remote Whitewater country, but suspicions
won't hang malefactors, and to endeavour
to pry such important information out of
an incarcerated suspect — well, it simply
wasn’t done. Anyway, the constable did not
try. He merely happened to have a deep
and abiding liking for Rudyard Kipling’s
melancholy ballad, Danny Deever. He also
had a wheezy gramophone. And he played

that ballad day and night, night and day.
There is no escaping the impact of such a
musical recital in a very little cabin, and,
after many consecutive hours of listening
to the “anging of Danny Deever, with all
the ghoulish trimmings, the wild and woolly
hombre threw in the towel, and, strictly of
his own volition, told where the body could
be found. A dour silence and a strict atten-
tion to his own business did the trick for the
constable. Yes, I always think of Sam
Service when I think of that other one.

BILL SERVICE

Recollections of Sam bring naturally to
mind his brother Bill, whose tragic passing
must have brought to many hundred of
lips, “Good night, sweet Prince.”

Bill was a sergeant in Smithers in those
olden days of post-war boom and bustle,
when only a minor backwash of the turmoil
eddied into the placid country of the
Bulkeley and the Skeena. Amongst his so
many stellar qualities, I shall always re-
member Bill Service for his irrepressible -
good humour, his wide understanding, and
his willingness to co-operate, even at cost
of hard work and discomfort to himself. Par-
ticularly do I recall his thoughtful help
when it was necessary to yank a handful of
misled Indians from out the legendary For-
bidden Valley near Kitwanga. Through
many years, by foolish rumour and exag-
gerated headlines, there had developed a
quite distorted build-up of fabulous bogey-
talk about this valley, through which no
white men were reputed to be allowed to
pass. A crisis developed when a Dominion
survey party was ordered by the Indians to
desist from carrying out authorised work on
the Indian reserve. Attempts by the natives
to impound the surveyor’s transit and to
otherwise impede the work resulted in the
arrest of the main malcontents. When we
brought them by train to Smithers, Bill was
there at the train with a couple of cars, and,
during the subsequent trial, which attracted
a lot of publicity, he gave all possible assist-
ance. I kept in touch with him when he

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