my good fame to everybody."

Winston smiled dryly. "I fancy I shall," he said, and long afterwards
recalled the words. "You see, I had ambitions in my callow days, and
it's not my fault that hitherto I've never had a part to play."

Rancher Winston was, however, wrong in this. He had played the part of
an honest man with the courage which had brought him to ruin, but there
was now to be a difference.

CHAPTER III

TROOPER SHANNON'S QUARREL

There was bitter frost in the darkness outside when two young men stood
talking in the stables of a little outpost lying a long ride back from
the settlement in the lonely prairie. One leaned against a manger with
a pipe in his hand, while the spotless, softly-gleaming harness hung up
behind him showed what his occupation had been. The other stood bolt
upright with lips set, and a faint grayness which betokened strong
emotion showing through his tan. The lantern above them flickered in
the icy draughts, and from out of the shadows beyond its light came the
stamping of restless, horses and the smell of prairie hay which is
pungent with the odors of wild peppermint.

The two lads, and they were very little more, were friends, in spite of
the difference in their upbringing, for there are few distinctions
between caste and caste in that country where manhood is still esteemed
the greatest thing, and the primitive virtues count for more than
wealth or intellect. Courage and endurance still command respect in
the new Northwest, and that both the lads possessed them was made
evident by the fact that they were troopers of the Northwest police, a
force of splendid cavalry whose duty it is to patrol the wilderness at
all seasons and in all weathers, under scorching sun and in blinding
snow.

The men who keep the peace of the prairie are taught what heat and
thirst are, when they ride in couples through a desolate waste wherein
there is only bitter water, parched by pitiless sunrays and whitened by
the intolerable dust of alkali. They also discover just how much cold
the human frame can endure, when they lie down with only the stars
above them, long leagues from the nearest outpost, in a trench scooped
in the snow, and they know how near one may come to suffocation and yet
live through the grass fires' blinding smoke. It happens now and then
that two who have answered to the last roster in the icy darkness do
not awaken when the lingering dawn breaks across the great whi