er, I've succeeded. I have had to be a scoundrel and a cad,
but I've trapped them at last!"

He staggered forward then, sobbing like a child, and the old man's
arms closed round him, just as two heavy jaws of ice snatched the
dug-out, hurled it off shore and splintered it to atoms.

Well! I had made a bad blunder, which I attempted to rectify by
reaching Buffalo that night; but Tom Barrett had won the game. I
was arrested at Fort Erie, handcuffed, jailed, tried, convicted
of attempted assault and illicit whiskey-trading on the Grand
River Indian Reserve--and spent the next five years in Kingston
Penitentiary, the guest of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen
Victoria.

Mother o' the Men

A Story of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police

The commander's wife stood on the deck of the "North Star" looking
at the receding city of Vancouver as if to photograph within her
eyes and heart every detail of its wonderful beauty--its
clustering, sisterly houses, its holly hedges, its ivied walls, its
emerald lawns, its teeming streets and towering spires. She seemed
to realize that this was the end of the civilized trail; that
henceforth, for many years, her sight would know only the unbroken
line of icy ridge and sky of the northernmost outposts of the great
Dominion. To her hand clung a little boy of ten, and about her
hovered some twenty young fellows, gay in the scarlet tunics, the
flashing buffalo-head buttons, that bespoke the soldierly uniform
of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police. They were the first
detachment bound for the Yukon, and were under her husband's
command.

She was the only woman in the "company." The major had purposely
selected unmarried men for his staff, for in the early nineties the
Arctic was no place for a woman. But when the Government at Ottawa
saw fit to commission Major Lysle to face the frozen North, and
with a handful of men build and garrison a fort at the rim of the
Polar Seas, Mrs. Lysle quietly remarked, "I shall accompany you, so
shall the boy," and the major blessed her in his heart, for had she
not so decided, it would mean absolute separation from wife and
child for from three to five years, as in those days no railways,
no telegraph lines, stretched their pulsing fingers into the
Klondyke. One mail went in, one mail came out, each year--that was
all.

"It's good-bye, Graham lad," said one of the scarlet-coated
soldiers, tossing the little boy to his back. "Look your longes