fire, found Mrs. Young and the
children standing in the water of a slough. He saw that they would be
suffocated when the fire encircled it, and so he plunged and carried the
children to the burnt ground, the mother following. From the settler's
grateful letter to headquarters we make this extract: "His pluck and
endurance I cannot praise too highly, fighting till he was nearly
suffocated, his hat burned off his head, hair singed and vest on fire.
My wife and family owe their lives to him, and I feel with them we shall
never be able to repay him for his brave conduct." Thus did the Police
make the settlers' work possible, that they in turn might make the
railway a reasonably safe investment. Then, when the Indians became
awkward and threatened to stop the progress of the transcontinental
railway across the prairie, it was the Mounted Police that stepped in to
see that the road was not blocked. Eastern contractors and workmen, who
had not been used to seeing war-paint, were somewhat alarmed when a band
of Indians would swoop down with the air of people who owned the earth,
and in all such cases the Police were quickly called by wire or
otherwise. Superintendent Shurtcliffe tells of a rather odd case in
which an Indian chief with the appropriate name of "Front Man" stopped a
railway contractor from getting out ties and caused the whole outfit to
leave the bush in a good deal of panic. Shurtcliffe, a capable officer,
immediately sent for "Front Man" and told him how dangerous a thing it
was to interfere with the progress of work authorized by Canada. "Front
Man" realized that he had rushed in where he had no business, and on his
promising Shurtcliffe that he would behave himself, the contractor and
his men went back to their peaceable but very important tie business.

Then there was the case of Pie-a-Pot, who from the earliest days of
treaty-making was crochety and rather defiantly opposed to the incoming
of anything or anybody that would interfere with his nomadic habits and
general inclination to please himself. He showed a disagreeable tendency
to leave his reserve and wander with his camp following and general
entourage, much to the discomfort of others who were not desirous of his
presence. One day this chief took it into his head that he would wander
on to the right-of-way being mapped out for the Canadian Pacific, and by
spreading his camp across it put a damper on the enterprise. And he
succeeded up to a certain poin