g.
For Stonor to tell him would have been to defeat his object; to lie
would have been to lower himself in their eyes; so Stonor took refuge in
an inscrutability as polite as the old man's own.

Stonor made a house-to-house canvass of the village, inquiring as to the
health and well-being of each household, as is the custom of his
service, and keeping his eyes open on his own account. He satisfied
himself that if there had been whisky there, it was drunk up by now.
Some of the men showed the sullen depressed air that follows on a
prolonged spree, but all were sober at present.

He was in one of the last houses of the village, when, out of the tail
of his eye, he saw a man quietly issue from the house next in order,
and, covered by the crowd around the door, make his way back to a house
already visited. Stonor, without saying anything, went back to that
house and found himself face to face with a young white man, a stranger,
who greeted him with an insolent grin.

"Who are you?" demanded the policeman.

"Hooliam."

"You have a white man's name. What is it?"

"Smith"--this with inimitable insolence, and a look around that bid for
the applause of the natives.

Stonor's lip curled at the spectacle of a white man's thus lowering
himself. "Come outside," he said sternly. "I want to talk to you."

He led the way to a place apart on the river bank, and the other, not
daring to defy him openly, followed with a swagger. With a stern glance
Stonor kept the tatterdemalion crowd at bay. Stonor coolly surveyed his
man in the sunlight and saw that he was not white, as he had supposed,
but a quarter or eighth breed. He was an uncommonly good-looking young
fellow in the hey-day of his youth, say, twenty-six. With his clear
olive skin, straight features and curly dark hair he looked not so much
like a breed as a man of one of the darker peoples of the Caucasian
race, an Italian or a Greek. There was a falcon-like quality in the
poise of his head, in his gaze, but the effect was marred by the
consciousness of evil, the irreconcilable look in the fine eyes.

"Bad clear through!" was Stonor's instinctive verdict.

"Where did you come from?" he demanded.

"Up river," was the casual reply. The man's English was as good as
Stonor's own.

"Answer me fully."

"From Sah-ko-da-tah prairie, if you know where that is. I came into that
country by way of Grande Prairie. I came from Winnipeg."

Stonor didn't believe a word of this, bu