egard of their own safety, though
it was not necessarily part of their ordinary duty.

How close an oversight was kept by the Mounted Police as to the
movements of people in that wild country is evidenced by the fact that
men could not "disappear" between the Police posts or elsewhere without
their case giving rise to swift inquiry. If they left one point for
another and did not arrive in a reasonable time the fact was in the
knowledge of the Police, and they immediately started to trace the
missing parties to see whether they had gone lost through missing the
trail or had vanished off the earth by the hands of murderous
characters. All this comes out in the famous case of one O'Brien who was
tried and executed at Dawson for one of the most cold-blooded crimes
imaginable. As I was writing, at this point a letter came from Mr. H. P.
Hansen, of Winnipeg, who said he had stayed at Fossal's road-house in
the Upper Yukon about two weeks before O'Brien committed his triple
murder. He and O'Brien were the only guests and had started out on the
trail together. Hansen says, "No doubt this man had murder in his heart
at the time," but as he had no knowledge of the fact that Hansen carried
money carefully concealed, O'Brien, probably with some disgust, did
nothing. That O'Brien "had murder in his heart" is more than likely,
because when his trial came off a "Bowery tough" who had been in prison
with him in Dawson for some other offence testified that O'Brien had
proposed that they should, when freed, go along the river and find a
lonely spot. Here they should camp, shoot men who were coming out from
Dawson with money, put their bodies under the ice, and thus cover their
tracks. This was too much of a programme for even the "Bowery tough,"
but it shows O'Brien's disposition. O'Brien, however, seems to have
decided to haunt that trail till he could make a killing, and so he
seems to have doubled back after leaving Hansen and landed at Fossal's
road-house again, whence he started out with three men on Christmas Day
of 1899. The three men were Olsen, a Swede, who was a telegraph line
repairer, and two men from Dawson, F. Clayson, of Seattle, and L.
Relphe, who had been a "caller-off" in a Dawson dance-hall. Clayson was
known to have a large sum of money on him, and he became the particular
object of O'Brien's attention, but because "dead men tell no tales" the
others had to share in the disaster, and O'Brien, at an opportune time
in a