Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police | Page 3

her--and half-a-dozen others he might name?
Her heart! Steele laughed softly as he lifted the letter so that the sweet
perfume of it came to him more strongly. How she had tempted him for
a time! Almost--that night of the Hawkins' ball--he had surrendered to
her. He half-closed his eyes, and as the logs crackled in the fireplace
and the wind roared outside, he saw her again as he had seen her that
night--gloriously beautiful; memory of the witchery of her voice, her
hair, her eyes firing his blood like strong wine. And this beauty might
have been for him, was still his, if he chose. A word from out of the
wilderness, a few lines that he might write to-night--
With a sudden jerk Steele sat bolt upright. One after another he
crumpled the sheets of paper in his hand and tossed all but the signature
page into the fire. The last sheet he kept, studied it for a little--as if her
name were the answer to a problem--then laid it aside. For a few
moments there remained still the haunting sweetness of the hyacinth.
When it was gone, he gave a last searching sniff, rose to his feet with a
laugh in which there was some return of his old spirit, hid that final
page of her letter in his traveling kit and proceeded to refill his pipe.
More than once Philip Steele had told himself that he was born a
century or two after his time. He had admitted this much to a few of his
friends, and they had laughed at him. One evening he had opened his
heart a little to the girl of the hyacinth letter, and after that she had
called him eccentric. Within himself he knew that he was unlike other
men, that the blood in him was calling back to almost forgotten
generations, when strong hearts and steady hands counted for manhood
rather than stocks and bonds, and when romance and adventure were
not quite dead. At college he took civil engineering, because it seemed

to him to breathe the spirit of outdoors; and when he had finished he
incurred the wrath of those at home by burying himself for a whole
year with a surveying expedition in Central America.
It was this expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele. He
came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an
Aztec--a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which
he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father's
millions as though they had never been. He possessed a fortune in his
own right, but as yet he had found no use for the income that was piling
up. A second expedition, this time to Brazil, and then he came back--to
meet the girl of the hyacinth letter. And after that, after he had broken
from the bondage which held Moody, and Fordney, and Whittemore,
he went back to his many adventures.
It was the North that held him. In the unending desolations of snow and
forest and plain, between Hudson's Bay and the wild country of the
Athabasca, he found the few people and the mystery and romance
which carried him back, and linked him to the dust-covered generations
he had lost. One day a slender, athletically built young man enlisted at
Regina for service in the Northwest Mounted Police. Within six months
he had made several records for himself, and succeeded in having
himself detailed to service in the extreme North, where man-hunting
became the thrilling game of One against One in an empty and
voiceless world. And no one, not even the girl of the hyacinth letter,
would have dreamed that the man who was officially listed as "Private
Phil Steele, of the N.W.M.P.," was Philip Steele, millionaire and
gentleman adventurer.
None appreciated the humor of this fact more than Steele himself, and
he fell again into his wholesome laugh as he placed a fresh pine log on
the fire, wondering what his aristocratic friends--and especially the girl
of the hyacinth letter--would say if they could see him and his
environment just at the present moment. In a slow, chuckling survey he
took in the heavy German socks which he had hung to dry close to the
fire; his worn shoe-packs, shining in a thick coat of caribou grease, and
his single suit of steaming underwear that he had washed after supper,

and which hung suspended from the ceiling, looking for all the world,
in the half dusk of the cabin, like a very thin and headless man. In this
gloom, indeed, but one thing shone out white and distinct--the skull on
the little shelf above the fire. As his eyes rested on it, Steele's lips
tightened and