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 camping-place, as afterwards transpired, shot all three men first through the body and then through the head to make sure. There was no human witness to the event. But when these men did not turn up at the next point on the trail, and O'Brien did, the Police began rapid investigation. If there were no eye-witnesses in the case a web of circumstantial evidence would have to be woven around the figure of the fourth man of the party if the facts that would emerge justified it. This was done with consummate skill but with absolute fairness by the Mounted Police, Inspector Scarth, officer commanding at Fort Selkirk,