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40 closing so unusually early this year. You'll never get back."

The brawny Scotchman laughed, reaching a hand over the rail.

"Listen till I tell ye," he said. "I wadna hae daured bring her, but Harris swore I couldna. He swore it in company, ye see, an' I waur bound tae gie him the lie." His heavy shoulders shook with his rumbling laugh. "Every dommed pund o' freight I tracked over those rapids in York boats," he said. "An' I go back by trail. The 'Northland Flower' is sleepin' in that backwater for her winter bed, an' I thought more than aince she'd be sleepin' on the rapids. It waur sure enough close skatin'. But the fairies was wi' us." He lit his pipe, and jerked the match overboard. "Ha' ye heard tell that Tom Saunders is tae pu' out East for good?" he said. "What div ye mak' o' that, now?"

"Cold feet, perhaps. Marriage, perhaps. But he'll break his neck breaking horses some day before long."

"The wildest o' us slack oop when we mairry," remarked Mackay. "’Cept Ducane. I hear things about him. Things as you don't hear, ye ken. In the nature o' life ye have to go around wi' your ridin'-lights up."

Tempest dropped his whip lightly across Gopher's crest.

"Come in and have a smoke up this evening, Mackay," he said only. But Mackay winked long and slowly after the cloud of dust.

"And do ye think Ducane will hold any course straight enough for you or me to catch him on it, Sergeant?" he said.

In his office at the barracks Tempest opened his mail; read a part, and then sat still for long, very long, until the notices and memorandums, and the few photographs on the opposite wall were a blur, and Poley, the old red-headed cook, came in with the lamp.

Tempest roused himself, and his eyes were strange as the eyes of a man who has been seeing what he did not think to see again.

"Is Baxter in?" he said. "Send him to me, then."

There was dislocation and promotion of which to speak