erley handed the bugle to Lawless, who looked at it with deep
interest and passed it on to Pierre. "When he died," Adderley continued,
"he left the house, the fittings, and the stores to the officers of
the Company who should be stationed there, with a sum of money yearly,
provided that twice in twelve months the bugle should be blown as you
have heard it, and those words called out."

"Why did he do that?" asked Lawless, nodding towards the point.

"Why do they swing the censers at the Mass?" interjected Pierre. "Man
has signs for memories, and one man seeing another's sign will remember
his own."

"You stay because you like it--at King's House?" asked Lawless of
Adderley.

The other stretched himself lazily to the fire and, "I am at home," he
said. "I have no cares. I had all there was of that other world; I've
not had enough of this. You'll come with me to King's House to-morrow?"
he added.

To their quick assent he rejoined: "You'll never want to leave. You'll
stay on."

To this Lawless replied, shaking his head: "I have a wife and child in
England."

But Pierre did not reply. He lifted the bugle, mutely asking a question
of Adderley, who as mutely replied, and then, with it in his hand, left
the other two beside the fire.

A few minutes later they heard, with three calls of the bugle from the
point afterwards, Pierre's voice: "John York, John York, where art thou
gone, John York?"

Then came the reply:

"King of my heart, king of my heart, I am out on the trail of thy
bugles."

THE SPOIL OF THE PUMA

Just at the point where the Peace River first hugs the vast outpost
hills of the Rockies, before it hurries timorously on, through an
unexplored region, to Fort St. John, there stood a hut. It faced the
west, and was built half-way up Clear Mountain. In winter it had snows
above it and below it; in summer it had snow above it and a very fair
stretch of trees and grass, while the river flowed on the same, winter
and summer. It was a lonely country. Travelling north, you would have
come to the Turnagain River; west, to the Frying Pan Mountains; south,
to a goodly land. But from the hut you had no outlook towards the south;
your eye came plump against a hard lofty hill, like a wall between
heaven and earth. It is strange, too, that, when you are in the far
north, you do not look towards the south until the north turns an iron
hand upon you and refuses the hospitality of food and fire; your eyes
are