Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/368

366 Ottawa one man would read it. In the printing-room and proof-room one or two more would run over it with skilled eyes and brain elsewhere before it went to swell the size of the yearly Blue Book of the Royal North-West Mounted Police. Some day in argument a clerk or a minister might turn up the report and find that the Hudson Bay Customs could conveniently be collected from Churchill. If a police map were near he might run his finger north until, between fifty-eight and sixty degrees of latitude, he found the little red flag which proclaimed that Fort Churchill was a post of the police. It might even interest him to see that it was just two thousand nine hundred and twenty-five miles from Liverpool, England. But this was not likely; nor was it likely that he or any other man would read, word by word, the report-sheets which lay on the floor round Dick's feet.

In Dick's black decided hand some of the headings showed on those scattered papers. Game; Topography; Temperature; Inhabitants; each slip filled up with curt, direct sentences which said nothing of the dreams under a blue sky with a fair wind in the sails; of the struggles and the suffering; of the solitude when the sound of a little bird calling floods the heart with a longing for home. The actual mileage was added to the foot of the report, as witness to the labours of four white men in the unconsidered areas; but few would heed it, although it ran well into the thousands. For this patrol was to stand with so many others among the things which do not matter particularly, and both men knew it as they patiently built up the report, page by page; Tempest in his chair, reading from blotted note-books and diaries; Dick at the table, with his tunic-collar loosed and his forehead knit and the rough edge of his hand making a little scratching sound on the paper as he wrote.

It was Tempest who sat crippled in the chair, but it was Dick's face which showed the burden of those past days. Ducane had been worse than useless in the canoes, and the journey down the Beverley Lake and along Chesterfield Inlet had dragged on until Dick was maddened beyond thought or speech. A cold, driving rain which no coverings could keep out had put rheumatism into that ricked back