I tell you a man in the Police, if he has any head at
all, can control his own destiny. You'll be a heap more sane when you
get that old, wild-west notion, that every man should be a law unto
himself, out of your head. I'll venture to say that the Northwest will
be a safer and more law-abiding place five years from now than south of
the line will be in twenty--and the men in red coats will make it so.
Why, I wouldn't miss helping tame this country for half a dozen such
scrapes as I'm in now. This is merely the result of a rotten spot in the
personnel, a rotten spot that will soon be cut out if things come about
logically; it isn't the fault of the system. There never was any great
movement in developing a new country that didn't have a quota of damned
rascals to eliminate from within itself. If you didn't have such a
perverted idea of independence, you'd see that I'm in no danger of
losing either my identity or my self-respect simply because I've become
a unit in a body of six hundred fighting-men. I don't intend to remain
in the insignificant-unit class."

"Your intentions," I interrupted, "will cut a mighty small figure if
your friend Lessard gets hold of you in the next day or two."

"That's the melancholy truth," he returned seriously. "I imagine we'd
get a pretty rough deal; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that troop
has received orders, by now, to shoot first and arrest afterward. Still,
I'm willing to gamble that if we rode into Fort Walsh and gave ourselves
up, it would only be a matter of a few weeks in the guardhouse for us
before the thing was cleared up."

"Maybe," I responded skeptically. "If that's your belief, why don't you
act accordingly?"

"Because, confound it, that's just where they want to get us," he
declared. "Once we were safely penned, they'll drift, and neither you
nor Lyn Rowan nor the government would ever lay eyes on that bundle of
money again. I have a theory--but what's vastly more important, I think
those fellows can hardly get out of the country with their plunder
without crossing trails with us. It was smooth business to set the dogs
on us. I don't quite _sabe_--well, I do, too. You can probably realize
just how headquarters would take the sort of yarn we'd spin if we dashed
in and told them the truth. But I think we're smart enough to upset
these fellows' calculations. Lord! wouldn't it be a stroke of business
if we could trap that collection of buccaneers? Frankly, that would b