The riddle of Three-Way Creek

Ridgwell Cullum
The Riddle of Three-Way Creek
by Ridgwell Cullum Author of “The Saint of the Speedway”
McClelland and Stewart Publishers : : Toronto
Copyright, 1925, By George H. Doran Company
The Riddle of Three-Way Creek —Q— Printed in the United States of America
The Riddle of Three-Way Creek
The Riddle of Three-Way Creek
THE trail fell away to the heart of a valley, which nursed in its bosom a watercourse that was frozen solid to its bed. The hummocks of the foothills rose up in every direction. Many of the hills were sheer slopes of tawny, sun-scorched grass that had lost the last of its summer hue. Some were barren crags; others, again, were covered with woodland bluffs of spruce, and pine, and the generous poplar, whose dead foliage lay thick upon the ground, stripped from parent boughs by the wintry breath of the late season.
It was a grim enough prospect. No snow had as yet fallen, but the air was cold and crisp; the grey sky was heavily charged with snow-clouds; and the stark arms of deciduous trees were sharply outlined against the skyline.
Two horsemen were moving down the frozen trail. They were riding at that distance-devouring lope which is native to the Canadian broncho. Both were clad in sheepskin coats and fur caps. And through the fog of steam that rose from the bodies of the sweating horses, on the head of one of them the yellow flash of a mounted policeman’s cap badge stood out strikingly. Corporal Andrew McFardell was escorting a prisoner to his headquarters at Calford, which lay some fifty odd miles to the south.
The policeman was in a hurry. Ten miles farther on lay Rock Point, a small farming settlement, which was to afford him a camping-ground for the night. There was little more than an hour of daylight left, and the banking snow-clouds left him anxious. It was a bad region in which to get snowbound.