"It's you for it now," he said to his horse as he leaned forward and stroked the warm neck.
Only once after that did his voice break the silence of the long ride. The first drops of rain brought him suddenly out of his dreaming.
"If you could only talk!" he said to himself, and his voice was full of impatience.
But King Howden was no talker.
CHAPTER FIVE
The town was in a state of excitement that was not altogether new. In fact, the few score of permanent residents in the place always looked to Saturday night to furnish some little change from the humdrum existence of the week. There is nothing very stirring about sitting in a village—even if it is an outpost of civilization a hundred and twenty-five miles from anywhere—with nothing to do from day to day except to greet the newcomers who arrive from the outside to begin their search for land. But when a couple of red-coated men wearing blue breeches striped on either side with gold, their heads covered with wide-brimmed Stetsons, their feet stoutly booted and spurred—when two such men ride in from over the Saskatchewan border and go clanking down the one street in the place a certain amount of shuffling is almost inevitable.
Nor was the flutter of excitement due to any fear that the "Mounties" were on business bent. Since the jurisdiction of the famous riders of the plains did not extend any farther than the border, their sudden appearance set no one guessing as to who, among the men of the town, was being entertained, a criminal unawares. The place had served as a week-end retreat for the men of the force before, and all such occasions had turned out more or less eventful.
No previous arrangement had been made that would have explained the sudden influx of men who came into town from all over the district to spend the week-end together. But small groups had begun to arrive before the sun had set—some of the settlers had come in during the day from their shacks on lonely homesteads and made a fair-sized reception committee to greet the later arrivals. There were men there from Rubble's survey gang, and a dozen or more from the camp of Keith McBain.
That they should make their rendezvous late in the evening at Mike Cheney's was only natural. There was MacMurray's lodging house, of course, that stood at the end of the street near the river, but no one came to town to eat. Cheney's place stood at the other end of the street—discreetly apart. And those who came and went exercised considerable discretion and talked very little when others were in hearing.
Mike Cheney himself treated his business very philosophically. In a man's country where men were in the habit of taking life none too seriously, there must needs be some place to foregather—so he thought—on the days when the rain drove everyone indoors, and on nights when the rest of the town had gone to bed. Furthermore, there was need of a place of last call for the men on their way to the railway camps or the homesteads. Besides, what were men to do in the winter, with the thermometer dancing back and forth between thirty and forty degrees below zero, if they had to depend solely upon bad tea and weak coffee? Mike declared, and to all intents and purposes he believed, that he served the community in proportion as he was successful in dispensing conviviality among its members. It didn't occur to him to feel abashed that a few held him and his business in abhorrence. Nor did it worry him that he was conducting his business without legal sanction. It would have caused him as much trouble to win the regard of such as held him in contempt as to procure an official document setting the seal of the government's approval on his business. He was content to give little or no heed to either.