Chapter I
I
The time had come for the North-West Mounted Police to say goodbye to Lower Fort Garry, the home of the Force since its inception some months before.
In the clear spring dawn, the scarlet-coated column fell in, ranging behind it a long tail of ox-carts and wagons. Sergeant-Major Whittaker, of 'J' Division, a straight-backed, dapper, sinewy little man with a pair of fierce moustaches, called the roll. The Regimental Sergeant-Major, trotting over to the bearded Assistant-Commissioner, reported all ready to march. Orders cracked down the line. With a shout, a thunder of hoofs and the roll of heavy wheels, the cavalcade surged into motion.
In the rear of the column rode Constable Hector Adair.
II
A fine, big, handsome fellow, Hector, a splendid specimen of what the Province of Ontario could produce when it tried, and looking every inch what he was—the son of a hardy soldier-father, that Colonel Adair who had been one of the pioneers of old Blenheim County, at home, and who, before that, had served under the Iron Duke himself in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. This young giant's broad shoulders and deep chest would have been the envy of many heavy dragoons, and he was six feet tall. His face, bronzed, with straight nose, strong chin, firm mouth and steel-grey eyes, had in it a great power and yet an idealism unspoilt by contact with the rotten side of Life. Men—a keen observer felt—though knowing him still a boy—he was actually twenty—would regard him as a man, fear him intensely and follow him anywhere. Women would thrill at his physique, linger over his brown hair, know him a man, regard him as a boy and love him with a love largely maternal.
More than this, he looked the soldier-born. No finer school for the making of men ever existed than the old, partially developed Upper Canada where Hector had first seen the light and spent his childhood. It had been rough, crude and half civilized but also vigorous and strong. Its immense forests, its rapid streams, its solitudes possessed by dangerous wild animals, had given him resource, self-reliance, endurance, courage. The most ordinary affairs of life—a visit to the nearest settlement, the routine journey to church or school—tested the quality of many a grown man. The barest necessities were won only by the hardest of hard work. Even the pastimes of the district round about demanded much pluck and stamina. Blue blood went without luxuries and handled axe or plough. Men were men there, boys were men in miniature, and women were worthy of their sons and husbands—more could not be said in praise of them. Altogether, the natural environment which had been Hector's as a boy could not help but develop in him the first requisite of the born soldier—true manhood. And the sports to be enjoyed in Blenheim county—shooting, fishing, big game hunting in the heart of the great wildernesses—had made him a giant at last, with a heart that nothing shook and no nerves whatever.
If all this were not enough, Hector's boyhood associates had been of a character which must inevitably have shaped him into what he was. Take the Colonel, who, coming out to Canada to occupy land under one of the earliest settlement schemes, had built up prosperity for himself and constructed Silvercrest, his fine estate, from the trackless wild. The Colonel, from the first, had intended that his son should have a Commission in the Army and carry on the fighting traditions of a martial family. He believed, besides, in King Solomon's adage concerning the rod and the spoiled child, considered that boys should be seldom seen and never heard and held other ideas equally as uncomfortable.
The Colonel had not been able to spare much time to Hector, but, such as it was, it was well spent. He had not only thrashed him when he needed it, but had educated him. Knowing that the little country school could give his son only a rudimentary education, he expended an hour or so a day in teaching Hector many things in literature, geography, history and mathematics—particularly literature. By great effort, labouriously bringing many of the books all the way from England, the Colonel had formed a fine library at Silvercrest. The old classics were there, with later and contemporary writers—Scott, Coleridge, Dickens and Alfred Tennyson, the handsome lion of the Old Land. Father and son had toiled most studiously over these treasures and it was worth something to see the small, brown-haired boy struggling with the heroes of Greece under the stern eye of his white-haired parent. Hector had the run of the room and on rainy days all the giants of romance and chivalry took full possession of that book-lined haven in the wilderness. Such passages as this rang like far trumpets in his ears: