issioner's office. The murder of
a Hudson's Bay Company's man had been committed in the Cree country.
The stranger whom Jim and Sally had seen riding across the plains
had brought the news for thirty miles, word of the murder having been
carried from point to point. The Commissioner was uncertain what to do,
as the Crees were restless through want of food and the absence of game,
and a force sent to capture Arrowhead, the chief who had committed the
murder, might precipitate trouble. Jim solved the problem by offering to
go alone and bring the chief into the post. It was two hundred miles to
the Cree encampment, and the journey had its double dangers.

Another officer was sent on the expedition for which Jim had been
preparing, and he made ready to go upon his lonely duty. His wife
did not know till three days after he had gone what the nature of his
mission was.

IV

Jim made his journey in good weather with his faithful dogs alone, and
came into the camp of the Crees armed with only a revolver. If he had
gone with ten men, there would have been an instant melee, in which
he would have lost his life. This is what the chief had expected, had
prepared for; but Jim was more formidable alone, with power far behind
him which could come with force and destroy the tribe, if resistance
was offered, than with fifty men. His tongue had a gift of terse
and picturesque speech, powerful with a people who had the gift of
imagination. With five hundred men ready to turn him loose in the plains
without dogs or food, he carried himself with a watchful coolness and
complacent determination which got home to their minds with great force.

For hours the struggle for the murderer went on, a struggle of mind over
inferior mind and matter. Arrowhead was a chief whose will had never
been crossed by his own people, and to master that will by a superior
will, to hold back the destructive force which, to the ignorant minds
of the braves, was only a natural force of defence, meant a task needing
more than authority behind it. For the very fear of that authority put
in motion was an incentive to present resistance to stave off the day
of trouble. The faces that surrounded Jim were thin with hunger, and
the murder that had been committed by the chief had, as its origin, the
foolish replies of the Hudson's Bay Company's man to their demand for
supplies. Arrowhead had killed him with his own hand.

But Jim Templeton was of a different calibre.