a few potatoes had during the last few months provided him with a sustenance. It was of course a trifle, but it tipped the beam, as trifles often do, and the man who was tired of all it symbolized straightened himself with a little mirthless laugh.
“On your word of honour there is nothing beyond the risk of a few days’ detention which can affect me?” he said.
“No,” said Courthorne solemnly, knowing that he lied. “On my honour. The troopers could only question you. Is it a deal?”
“Yes,” said Witham simply, stretching out his hand for the roll of bills the other flung down on the table, and, while one of the contracting parties knew that the other would regret it bitterly, the bargain was made.
Then Courthorne laughed in his usual indolent fashion as he said, “Well, it’s all decided, and I don’t even ask your word. To-morrow will see the husk sloughed off and for a fortnight you’ll be Lance Courthorne. I hope you feel equal to playing the rôle with credit, because I wouldn’t entrust my good fame to everybody.”
Witham smiled dryly. “I fancy I shall,” he said, and long afterwards recalled the words. “You see, I had ambitions in my callow days, and it’s not my fault that hitherto I’ve never had a part to play.”
Rancher Witham was, however, wrong in this. He had played the part of an honest man with a courage which had brought him to ruin, but there was now to be a difference.
CHAPTER III – TROOPER SHANNON’S QUARREL
There was bitter frost in the darkness outside when two young men stood talking in the stables of a little outpost lying a long ride back from the settlement in the lonely prairie. One leaned against a manger with a pipe in his hand, while the spotless, softly-gleaming harness hung up behind him showed what his occupation had been. The other stood bolt upright with lips set, and a faint greyness which betokened strong emotion showing through his tan. The lantern above them flickered in the icy draughts, and from out of the shadows beyond its light came the stamping of restless horses and the smell of prairie hay, which is pungent with the odours of wild peppermint.
The two lads, and they were very little more, were friends, in spite of the difference in their upbringing, for there are few distinctions between caste and caste in that country where manhood is still esteemed the greatest thing, and the primitive virtues count for more than wealth or intellect. Courage and endurance still command respect in the new North-West, and that both the lads possessed them was made evident by the fact that they were troopers of the North-West police, a force of splendid cavalry whose duty it is to patrol the wilderness at all seasons and in all weathers, under scorching sun and in blinding snow.
The men who keep the peace of the prairie are taught what heat and thirst are, when they ride in couples through a desolate waste wherein there is only bitter water, parched by pitiless sunrays and whitened by the intolerable dust of alkali. They also discover just how much cold the human frame can endure, when they lie down with only the stars above them, long leagues from the nearest outpost, in a trench, scooped in the snow, and they know how near one may come to suffocation and yet live through the grassfire’s blinding smoke. It happens now and then that two who have answered to the last roster in the icy darkness do not awaken when the lingering dawn breaks across the great white waste, and only the coyote knows their resting-place, but the watch and ward is kept, and the lonely settler dwells as safe in the wilderness as he would in an English town.
Trooper Shannon was an Irishman from the bush of Ontario, Trooper Payne, English, and a scion of a somewhat distinguished family in the old country, but while he told nobody why he left it suddenly, nobody thought of asking him. He was known to be a bold rider and careful of his beast, and that was sufficient for his comrades and the keen-eyed Sergeant Stimson. He glanced at his companion thoughtfully as he said, “She was a pretty girl. You knew her in Ontario?”
Shannon’s hands trembled a little. “Sure,” he said, “Larry’s place was just a mile beyont our clearing, an’ there was never a bonnier thing than Ailly Blake came out from the old country – but is it need there is for talking when ye’ve seen her? There was once I watched her smile at ye with the black eyes that would have melted the heart out of any man. Waking and sleeping they’re with me still.”
Three generations of the Shannons had hewn the lonely clearing further into the bush of Ontario and married the daughters of the soil, but the Celtic strain, it was evident, had not run out yet. Payne, however, came of English stock, and expressed himself differently.
“It was a – shame,” he said. “Of course he flung her over. I think you saw him, Pat?”
Shannon’s face grew greyer, and he quivered visibly as his passion shook him, while Payne felt his own blood pulse faster as he remembered the graceful dark-eyed girl who had given him and his comrade many a welcome meal when their duty took them near her brother’s homestead. That was, however, before one black day for Ailly and Larry Blake when Lance Courthorne also rode that way.
“Yes,” said the lad from Ontario, “I was driving in for the stores when I met him in the willow bluff, an’ Courthorne pulls his divil of a black horse up with a little ugly smile on the lips of him when I swung the wagon right across the trail.
“‘That’s not civil, trooper,’ says he.
“‘I’m wanting a word,’ says I, with the black hate choking me at the sight of him. ‘What have ye done with Ailly?’
“‘Is it anything to you?’ says he.
“‘It’s everything,’ says I. ‘And if ye will not tell me I’ll tear it out of ye.’
“Courthorne laughs a little, but I saw the divil in his eyes. ‘I don’t think you’re quite man enough,’ says he, sitting very quiet on the big black horse. ‘Anyway, I can’t tell you where she is just now, because she left the dancing saloon she was in down in Montana when I last saw her.’
“I had the big whip that day, and I forgot everything as I heard the hiss of it round my shoulder. It came home across the ugly face of him, and then I flung it down and grabbed the carbine as he swung the black round with one hand fumbling in his jacket. It came out empty, an’ we sat there a moment, the two of us, Courthorne white as death, his eyes like burning coals, and the fingers of me trembling on the carbine. Sorrow on the man that he hadn’t a pistol, or I’d have sent the black soul of him to the divil it came from.”
The lad panted, and Payne, who had guessed at his hopeless devotion to the girl who had listened to Courthorne, made a gesture of disapproval that was tempered by sympathy. It was for her sake, he fancied, Shannon had left the Ontario clearing and followed Larry Blake to the West.
“I’m glad he hadn’t, Pat,” said Payne. “What was the end of it?”
“I remembered,” said the other with a groan, “remembered I was Trooper Shannon, an’ dropped the carbine into the wagon. Courthorne wheels the black horse round, an’ I saw the red line across the face of him.
“‘You’ll be sorry for this, my lad,’ says he.”
“He’s a dangerous man,” Payne said thoughtfully. “Pat, you came near being a – ass that day. Anyway, it’s time we went in, and as Larry’s here I shouldn’t wonder if we saw Courthorne again before the morning.”
The icy cold went through them to the bone as they left the stables, and it was a relief to enter the loghouse, which was heated to fustiness by the glowing stove. A lamp hung from a rough birch beam, and its uncertain radiance showed motionless figures wrapped in blankets in the bunks round the walls. Two men were,
