The fact that the region was that selected by Moira's father for his missionary activities and that she proposed soon to join the parent did not make the summer prospect less attractive for the big policeman. The lovely creature riding beside him, however, was not the Irish girl but another he had overtaken entirely by chance.
"Of course," he was saying to her, "it wouldn't be a worth-while gold rush if there wasn't plenty of crowds and excitement. Do you think I'm in time?"
"Oh, there's still a chance for you to locate a pay claim—if luck's riding with you," she said cheerfully. "Scarcely a day passes without someone reporting a new 'discovery.' But you're just three days too late for our first real excitement. One of the B.C.X. stages was held up and robbed last Monday."
Almost did the sergeant give himself away at this crime report. In more ways than his fair informant could possibly imagine, he felt too late.
At a recent conference in Hazelton, a railroad town on the Grand Trunk Pacific, Assistant Commissioner Baxter, in command of the division in which the new diggings lay, had decided that the sergeant should remain incognito until he had had opportunity to study the field of his new important command. In the role of one of the gold-crazed "rushers" the news of the camp would float unrestrained in his presence. He should be able to get an advance line on those who were prone to lawlessness, as well as identify the element which might be counted on the side of law and order. Moreover, he could form an unbiased opinion as to the prospective permanency of the camp and the number of constables needed to police it satisfactorily.
He had shipped a "war bag" containing his uniforms and personal effects by the stage line of this same British Columbia Express which the girl had just mentioned. The charges were prepaid and the baggage was to be held until called for. Then he had set out on a rangy police horse, Kaw, over the Old Sun Trail, a time-blazed path into the Yukon country, from which a cross-cut had let him into Argonaut Valley.
"Did the robbers get—make their escape?" he asked, remembering in time to cut the professional tone from his question.
"Clean as a whistle. They killed the driver at the reins so there isn't a clew even to what they looked like or how many there were."
"But the passengers?" he ventured to ask.
The girl shrugged shapely shoulders. The face that looked from beneath the shielding brim was framed in ash-blond wavelets. The figure that had looked so boyish from a distance, while he was overtaking her, was now rounded into exquisite feminine lines. Her corduroy riding trousers were frankly worn without hint of a skirt, but her gray flannel shirt was V'd at the neck to show a marble throat such as no boy could have endured. And in the belt that pouched a man-weight automatic was the final touch—a small bouquet of waxen snowflowers.