Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/288

270 the incidents of the past year crowded through his brain. It had been a great year for the boy—those twelve months during which he had served side by side with the men of the Mounted—a year that had rounded out and crystallized the hand-hammered principles that were his heritage from Sam Morgan and that his association with Waseche Bill and the rough men of the gold country had taught him to apply to life in its daily round.

Connie Morgan was not one whit less a boy than the day he stepped onto the wharf at Anvik with eight dollars in his pocket and abiding faith in his ability to find his father somewhere in the great white land of snow. But he was a boy trained now by experience. A boy whose nerve and grit and impulsive nature had become subserved to cool reason, and who had learned to probe deep into the heart in his judgment of men. Time and again in the big country, where only the fit survive, he had proven himself fit. Bearded men spoke his name with respect—as they had spoken the name of Sam Morgan. They called him a sourdough, and a tillicum—and north of sixty, above those words sounds no higher praise.