The long arm of the Mounted

by James French Dorrance

Strathconna considered itself a metropolis and, indeed, it was one such, in a budding, modified degree. There were electric lights, a gas plant, street cars, business buildings of brick more than two stories in height and the "Hunt Club." It had more of civic spirit and local pride than most towns of a million souls.

There was nothing old about it in the sense that Montreal and Quebec are aged. Even Winnipeg was patriarchal in comparison. But let any visitor mention "mushroom growth" and every loyal citizen, which included all who had lived more than three months within its bounds, took to verbal arms. To prove that there was nothing "over-night" about the situation, proud boosters took the stranger to the fork where Rowdy River met the Placid. There for more than a century the Hudson's Bay Company had maintained a trading post. The log walls of this still stood, considered as the town's most sacred relic, although the tremendously expanded business of the supply concern now was conducted from a three-story brick building at a prominent crossroads—pardon, at a prominent intersection of wide, paved streets. Strathconna was no toadstool. Strathconna was phenomenal. Strathconna deserved all the adjectives that might be coupled with a city. In addition, its skirts were draped with the grounds and race-track of the "Provincial Fair Association for the Breeding of Better Horses."

In Canada's Wonderland there are a dozen new towns quite like, and quite as ambitious as Strathconna—new as a Christmas gift clock and ticking as vigorously. With five years of Arctic patrol immediately behind, to Sergt. Jack Childress the town was sufficiently vital. He was disinclined to dispute the claims of its most ardent booster. It seemed to him that he had been but a moment out of the Frozen North. His visit to Ottawa, where, at the Mounted Police headquarters on Rideau Street, he had delivered a prisoner of international importance, seemed like a dream. So brief was it that he had not even crossed the bridge to Hull, the factory city in the "wet" province of Quebec which is the near-Broadway of the Dominion capitol and only five minutes away.

"One last detail, Jack," the commissioner of the Royal had suggested. "I know you've earned a rest, but this Fire Weed game has me puzzled. Take it and solve it and I can promise you an inspectorship."

They had been friends for years in the M.P. service and the fact that the one had risen to the topmost rank that The Force possesses had not changed their Jack-and-Jim intimacy. The commissioner envied Childress the years on the French battlefront, and the sergeant, returned to his old service, would have disputed with his competent fists any one who dared say that Jim Maltby's promotion had not been earned.

Early this afternoon, after parting from Major MacDonald, Childress had at last found a stable among many garages and negotiated a stall-without-bath for Silver. In many ways he was satisfied with the ride into town, having managed to ask more questions than he had answered. Evidently Poison did not understand that he was to remain at the stable with the wonder horse. Two blocks away from the barn Childress had found the hound at heel and had been forced to execute a personally conducted return of the beast.

Despite the fact that his time was limited, the scene at the intersection of King and Prince Streets, the hub of this self-nominated metropolis, held him for a time, an interested, wondering spectator. After years of sledding with dogs or behind reindeer broken to harness, he felt a certain thrill in watching automobiles, taxicabs and horse traffic struggle with electric cars for road room on the well-paved street. He found an eddy in the jostling throng of pedestrians and looked his lonely fill, marveling that the traffic officer, a municipal man, was able to keep from under.

The sidewalk crowd was the personification of bustle and particularly striking in its cosmopolitan qualities. Englishmen in loose-hanging tweeds rubbed elbows with the motley throng; the Whitefoot brave, his black hair in a ribbon tied braid, shuffled along in moccasined feet, followed by his squaw wrapped in a gaudy blanket; a Chinese with a basket of laundry upon his shoulder narrowly escaped collision with a Japanese truck farmer who staggered under the weight of his load of tubers; Canadians and Americans, indistinguishable in their similarity of feature and garb and gait; nor wanting were the disabled ex-service men, some still in uniform and on the crutches of continuing pain. Indeed, this was a world's melting pot on a smaller scale than he had noticed in Paris, London, New York, Montreal or Chicago.

But here in Strathconna, the self-styled "City Where Dreams Come True," he missed the hopeless faces that had so impressed him in other similar crowds, for here every countenance appeared expectant. It seemed to be a city of buoyant youth, yet it was a city and therefore not for him. Already he felt a return of the stifling sensation that always came to him with paved streets and towering walls of brick and stone. He was eager to return to the open country, to throw his leg across saddle leather and feel under him the easy pace of Silver skimming the prairie. He rejoiced that two days at most should see the end of the business which called forth his present visit to town. Life in cities was all right for those who liked it, he reflected, but activity of another sort appealed more to him.

Several members of The Force wearing the brilliant uniforms of the "Mountie" off duty, passed by with the crowd. Two of them, with whom he had served on desperate cases, came so near that he could have touched their shoulders by reaching out with one of his long arms. As he was in civilian clothes, following the invariable rule of the Force, there was no recognition, and he gave no sign, such being the nature of his mission.