Raw Gold | Page 5

in the grass, and in a few moments was snoring energetically, his grizzled face bared to the cloudless sky. The camp grew still, except for the rough and ready cook pottering about the fire, boiling buffalo-meat and mixing biscuit-dough. The fire crackled around the Dutch ovens, and the odor of coffee came floating by. Then Mac hunched himself against a wagon-wheel and began to talk.
"I suppose it looks odd to you, Sarge, to see me in this rig?" he asked whimsically. "It beats punching cows, though--that is, when a fellow discovers that he isn't a successful cowpuncher."
"Does it?" I returned dryly. "You were making good in the cow business last time I saw you. What did you see in the Mounted Police that took your fancy?"
He shrugged his shoulders philosophically. "They're making history in this neck of the woods," he said, "and I joined for lack of something better to do. You'll find us a cosmopolitan lot, and not bad specimens as men go. It's a tolerably satisfying life--once you get out of the ranks."
"How about that?" I queried; and as I asked the question I noticed for the first time the gilt bars on his coat sleeve. "You've got past the buck trooper stage then? How long have you been in the force?"
"Joined the year they took over the Territory," he replied. "Yes, I've prospered in the service. Got to be a sergeant; I'm in charge of a line-post on Milk River--Pend d' Oreille. You'd better come on over and stay with me a day or two, Sarge."
"I was heading in that direction," I answered, "only I expected to cross the river farther up. But, man, I never thought to see you up here. I thought you'd settled down for keeps; supposed you were playing major-domo for the Double R down on the Canadian River, and the father of a family by this time. How we do get switched around in this old world."
"Don't we, though," he said reflectively. "It's a great game. You never know when nor where your trail is liable to fork and lead you to new countries and new faces, or maybe plumb over the big divide. Oh, well, it'll be all the same a hundred years from now, as Bill Frayne used to say."
"You've turned cynic," I told him, and he smiled.
"No," he declared, "I rather think I'd be classed as a philosopher; if you could call a man a philosopher who can enjoy hammering over this bald country, chasing up whisky-runners and hazing non-treaty Indians onto reservations, and raising hell generally in the name of the law. Still, I don't take life as seriously as I used to. What's the use? We eat and drink and sleep and work and fight because it's the nature of us two-legged brutes; but there's no use getting excited about it, because things never turn out exactly the way you expect them to, anyhow."
"If that's your philosophy of life," I bantered, "you ought to make a rattling good policeman. I can see where a calm, dispassionate front would save a man a heap of trouble, at this sort of thing."
"Josh all you like," MacRae laughed, "but I tell you a man does save himself a heap of trouble when he doesn't get too anxious whether things come out just as he wants them to or not. Six or seven years ago I couldn't have done this sort of work. I've changed, I reckon. There was a time when I'd have felt that there was only one way to settle a row like I just had. And the chances are that I would have wound up by putting that old boy's light out. Which wouldn't have helped matters any for me, and certainly would have been tough on old Piegan Smith--who happens to be a pretty fair sort; only playing the opposite side of the game."
As if the low-spoken sound of his name had reached his ears and electrified him, Piegan sat up very suddenly, and at the same instant the cook sounded the long call. So we broke off our chat, and getting a tin plate and cup and a set of eating-implements, we helped ourselves from the Dutch ovens and squatted in the grass to eat.
When we'd finished, one of the hunters rounded up the horses and we caught our nags and saddled them. MacRae was going back to his post that night, and I also was in haste to be traveling--that ten thousand dollars of another man's money was a responsibility I wanted to be rid of without the least possible delay. Pend d' Oreille was twenty-five or thirty miles south of us--a long afternoon's ride, but MacRae and I were glad of each other's company, and it was worth while straining a point to