Raw Gold | Page 2

a ramrod under his tunic, and out on a
rickety wharf that was groaning under the weight of a king's ransom in
baled buffalo-hides.
"Huh!" old Piegan Smith grunted in my ear. "Look at 'em, with their
solemn faces. There'll be heaps uh fun in the Cypress Hills country
when they get t' runnin' the whisky-jacks out. Ain't they a queer-lookin'
bunch?"
They were a queer-looking lot to more than Piegan. Their uniforms
fitted as if they had grown into them; scarlet jackets buttoned to the
throat, black riding-breeches with a yellow stripe running down the
outer seam of each leg, and funny little round caps like the lid of a big
baking-powder can set on one side of their heads, held there by a
narrow strap that ran around the chin. But for all their comic-opera
get-up, there was many a man that snickered at them that day in Benton
who learned later to dread the flash of a scarlet jacket on the distant

hills.
They didn't linger long at Benton, but got under way and marched
overland to the Cypress Hills. On Battle Creek they built the first post,
Fort Walsh, and though in time they located others, Walsh remained
headquarters for the Northwest so long as buffalo-hunting and the
Indian trade endured. And Benton and Walsh were linked together by
great freight-trails thereafter, for the Mounted Police supplies came up
the Missouri and traveled by way of long bull-trains to their destination;
there was no other way then; Canada was a wilderness, and Benton
with its boats from St. Louis was the gateway to the whole Northwest.
Two years from the time Fort Walsh was built the La Pere outfit sent
me across the line in charge of a bunch of saddle-horses the M. P.
quartermaster had said he'd buy if they were good. I turned them over
the afternoon I reached Walsh, and inside of forty-eight hours I was
headed home with the sale-money--ten thousand dollars--in big bills, so
that I could strap it round my middle. I remember that on the hill south
of the post the three of us, two horse-wranglers and myself, flipped a
dollar to see whether we kept to the Assiniboine trail or struck across
country. It was a mighty simple transaction, but it produced some
startling results for me, that same coin-spinning. The eagle came
uppermost, and the eagle meant the open prairie for us. So we aimed
for Stony Crossing, and let our horses jog; there were three of us, well
mounted, and we had plenty of grub on a pack-horse; it seemed that our
homeward trip should be a pleasant jaunt. It certainly never entered my
head that I should soon have ample opportunity to see how high the
"Riders of the Plains" stacked up when they undertook to enforce
Canadian law and keep intact the peace and dignity of the Crown.
We had started early that morning, and by the time we thought of
camping for dinner we saw ahead of us what we could tell was a white
man's camp. It wasn't far, so we kept on, and presently it developed that
we had accidentally come upon old Piegan Smith. He was lying there
ostensibly resting his stock from the hard buffalo-running of the past
winter, but I knew the old rascal's horses were more weary from a load
of moonshine whisky they had lately jerked into the heart of the

territory. But he was there, anyway, and half a dozen choice spirits with
him, and when we'd said "Howdy" all around they proceeded to spring
a keg of whisky on us.
Now, the whole Northwest groaned beneath a cast-iron prohibition law
at that time, and for some years thereafter. No booze of any description
was supposed to be sold in that portion of the Queen's domain. If you
got so thirsty you couldn't stand it any longer, you could petition the
governing power of the Territory for what was known as a "permit,"
which same document granted you leave and license to have in your
possession one gallon of whisky. If you were a person of irreproachable
character, and your humble petition reached his excellency when he
was amiably disposed, you might, in the course of a few weeks, get the
desired permission--but, any way you figured it, whisky was hard to get,
and when you got it it came mighty high.
Naturally, that sort of thing didn't appeal to many of the
high-stomached children of fortune who ranged up and down the
Territory--being nearly all Americans, born with the notion that it is a
white man's incontestable right to drink whatever he pleases whenever
it pleases him. Consequently, every mother's son of them who knew
how rustled a "worm," took up his post in some well-hidden