"No," said Winston quietly, though he still held his team across the way. "Still, I've got the same right as any other citizen to walk or drive along it without anybody prowling after me, and just now I want to know if there is a reason I should be favored with your company."
The trooper laughed a little. "I guess there is. It's down in the orders that whoever's on patrol near the settlement should keep his eye on you. You see, if you lit out of here we would want to know just where you were going to."
"I am," said Winston, "a Canadian citizen, and I came out here for quietness."
"Well," said the other, "you're an American, too. Any way, when you were in a tight place down in Regent there, you told the boys so. Now, no sensible man would boast of being a Britisher unless it was helping him to play out his hand."
Winston kept his temper. "I want a straight answer. Can you tell me what you and the boys are trailing me for?"
"No," said the trooper. "Still, I guess our commander could. If you don't know of any reason, you might ask him."
Winston tightened his grip on the reins. "I'll ride back with you to the outpost now."
The trooper shook his bridle, and trotted behind the sleigh, while, as it swung up and down over the billowy rises of the prairie, Winston became sensible of a curious expectancy. The bare, hopeless life he had led seemed to have slipped behind him, and though he suspected that there was no great difference between his escort and a prisoner's guard, the old love of excitement he once fancied he had outgrown forever, awoke again within him. Anything that was different from the past would be a relief, and the man who had for eight long years of strenuous toil practiced the grimmest self-denial wondered with a quickening of all his faculties what the future, that could not be more colorless, might have in store for him.
It was dark, and very cold, when they reached the wooden building, but Winston's step was lighter, and his spirits more buoyant than they had been for some months, when, handing the sleigh over to an orderly, he walked into the guard-room, where bronzed men in uniform glanced at him curiously. Then he was shown into a bare log-walled hall, where a young man in blue uniform, with a weather-darkened face was writing at a table.
"I've been partly expecting a visit," he said. "I'm glad to see you, Mr. Courthorne."