Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/38

36 The ring of Tempest's spurred feet along the balcony jerked Ducane out of his stooping, muttering talk with Robison. He flung himself back in the creaking chair and bawled out the jovial greeting which Tempest knew to be false as the man himself.

"Hillo, Sergeant, hillo. We were just talking about you; saying you'll want to keep the lead sounding to-night, eh?"

"I don't expect any trouble," said Tempest, sitting down. "They are good boys all right. And drunkenness is one of the honest sins up here. It seldom hurts more than the drinker."

Tone and words were casual enough, but Ducane shied from them uneasily. Tempest had a way of making his personality felt where he went, and there was much in Ducane's life which would not bear the inspection of those clear eyes. Robison grinned. He was long-armed and hairy-chested as an ape, and he had all the ignorant, resentful, cunning courage of an ape.

"Never thought such as you'd say as there was honest sins, Sergeant," he remarked, and Tempest smiled, lighting his pipe.

"That is a social problem, I suppose. But when it comes to a question of degrees of evil we must discriminate. I fancy Ducane will agree with me that a drunken breed may very often do less harm, morally and socially, than many a sober white-man."

Ducane's bloated, handsome face reddened. Tempest's casual sentences had a way of dropping straight into the well of a man's mind to trouble the waters.

"Oh, I guess all human nature is tarred with the same stick, more or less," he said. "We can't all be plaster saints, Tempest, or you'd be out of a job. But in lots of cases bad men sin and worse men talk about it. Those that like the taste of it on the tongue, and yet are afraid of the fires on their skin. Not going, are you? Robison was just telling me about some land he'd bought near Grande Prairie."

Robison was trader and trapper in a small mysterious way of his own, and of late he had become farmer also. He launched into vernacular technicalities which Tempest