In the afternoon, as they lounged in the tent with the genial warmth of the brush fire playing upon them, Seymour broached one of the mysteries of the eventful winter.
"Mind telling me, Moira, what brought you on this wild, unseasonable dash into the North?" he asked her.
"It was fear, Sergeant Scarlet—fear for my brother."
He was surprised. "You mean that you had a premonition that something was going to happen to him?"
"Not that exactly," the girl amplified her first response. "There was a motion picture I chanced to see in Ottawa. It was a dreadful thing called 'The Perils of the North' or something like that. The young man in the picture, away from all of his own kind—well, you know what might happen. He became a—a squaw man. I got to thinking of Oliver. He had dashed off while I was on a visit in Montreal and hadn't even said good-bye. There was nothing really to keep me in the cities and I decided my place was with him. That was why I came and not in time——" she broke off with a sob.
Sergeant Seymour assured her that her apprehensions of her brother becoming a squaw-man were absolutely unfounded. A cleaner specimen of young Canadian, he declared, had never fared to the Arctic foreshore. But he did not tell her, then, the real reason behind Oliver O'Malley's ill-starred venture.
CHAPTER XIII
HIS MONTREAL PROMISE
The scene in the rotunda of Montreal's impressive Windsor Station was as lively as it was metropolitan. Trains arrived with their outpourings of passengers, baggage laden, rejoicing at journey's end in the Paris of Canada. Immigrants, queerly dressed, stood about in huddled groups, waiting to be herded into the cars that would carry them to the wheat lands of Saskatchewan or the green forests of British Columbia. "Red caps" bustled about with the expensive looking luggage of tourists bound back to their own United States with their thirsts, for once, thoroughly quenched sans any violation of law.
At one gate to the train shed, an explosive Frenchman bade a tearful farewell to a brother ticketed for Winnipeg. At another, behind a brass guard rail, a tall, upstanding citizen waited with impatience the coming of the Ottawa express. His fur coat was unbuttoned and an open-faced suit of evening clothes showed beneath. In fact, even his oldest friends in the far North might have passed him by without recognizing Staff Sergeant Russell Seymour, on special detail.