it does not?"

"If it does not?" she insisted.

The Inspector appeared to turn the matter over in his mind.

"Well," he said slowly and thoughtfully, "if it does not there will be a
deuce of an ugly time."

"What do you mean?"

The Inspector shrugged his shoulders. But Mandy waited, her eyes fixed
on his face demanding answer.

"Well, there are some hundreds of settlers and their families scattered
over this country, and we can hardly protect them all. But," he added
cheerfully, as if dismissing the subject, "we have a trick of worrying
through."

Mandy shuddered. One phrase in the Superintendent's letter to the
Commissioner which she had just read kept hammering upon her brain,
"Cameron is the man and the only man for the job."

They turned the talk to other things, but the subject would not be
dismissed. Like the ghost at the feast it kept ever returning. The
Inspector retailed the most recent rumors, and together he and his host
weighed their worth. The Inspector disclosed the Commissioner's plans
as far as he knew them. These, too, were discussed with approval or
condemnation. The consequences of an Indian uprising were hinted at, but
quickly dropped. The probabilities of such an uprising were touched upon
and pronounced somewhat slight.

But somehow to the woman listening as in a maze this pronouncement and
all the reassuring talk rang hollow. She sat staring at the Inspector
with eyes that saw him not. What she did see was a picture out of an
old book of Indian war days which she had read when a child, a smoking
cabin, with mangled forms of women and children lying in the blackened
embers. By degrees, slow, painful, but relentlessly progressive, certain
impressions, at first vague and passionately resisted, were wrought into
convictions in her soul. First, the Inspector, in spite of his light
talk, was undeniably anxious, and in this anxiety her husband shared.
Then, the Force was clearly inadequate to the duty required of it. At
this her indignation burned. Why should it be that a Government should
ask of brave men what they must know to be impossible? Hard upon this
conviction came the words of the Superintendent, "Cameron is the man and
the only man for the job." Finally, the Inspector was apologizing for
her husband. It roused a hot resentment in her to hear him. That thing
she could not and would not bear. Never should it be said that her
husband had needed a friend to apologize for him.

As thes