The cause of this settled hatred was as simple and unreasonable as that which lay at the root of most of Cockney's emotions.
Early in his career in the Medicine Hat district, when he was "going the pace" more recklessly than since his marriage, one of his uncontrolled orgies of drinking and gambling had brought him hard against the red-coats, and he had learned what a ruthless wall they are for wrong-doers to butt against.
Medicine Hat was not a wild town, as cow-towns go. Drinking that threw a man on the street in a condition dangerous to himself or others was discouraged with a firm hand, but gambling, so long as it kept under cover, was winked at by the town policeman as the least objectionable of the many vices common to a section that lived largely on its nerve.
Whether there was more in it than that for the policeman was open to question. Poker, and other card games of less skill and more manipulation, were available to anyone who knew the ropes. A daring stranger to town had reported to a local friend, who happened to be an usher in the Methodist Church, that the town policeman himself had directed him to a game in progress—but this was challenged when it came up before the town council. One resort, the basement under a barber shop on Toronto Street, was Cockney's favourite den; and, with the gambling instincts of the Englishman, and copious additions developed within himself, his evenings in the fetid atmosphere of smoke and whisky were times of fever to more than himself.
One night, unlucky, urged to stake more than he had ready money to meet, he emerged from the den in a vile temper, convinced that the cards had been stacked but unable to prove it before a crowd of blood-suckers frankly hostile to him. At the moment the town policeman happened to be on his rounds in that quarter, and in sheer wantonness, Cockney banged his helmet into the roadway; and when the policeman seemed to show resentment, he was tossed after his helmet. But a Western policeman, town or Mounted, faces such contingencies with the donning of his uniform, and Mason returned to the attack with drawn baton. Mason, baton and all, proved scarcely exercise for big Cockney Aikens.
Unfortunately two Mounted Policemen, attracted by the crowd that had trickled up from nowhere, arrived on the scene.
It was a brave struggle while it lasted, and four bodies ached from it for several days, but it ended with Cockney securely locked in the cells. In the cells! The big fellow came to himself and cried like a child.
But his shame was only commencing. Next morning the scene of his disgrace was transferred to the police court, where Cockney, with bowed head, scarcely heard the sentence of fifty dollars or thirty days. He realised it when he discovered that his account at the bank was drained to the last ten dollars to pay the fine, owing to heavy recent drafts thereon in settlement of his winter accounts and the purchase of new stock for the ranch.
And there remained unpaid his gambling losses of the previous night.
That was most terrible of all. When that afternoon he slunk from town with forty dollars of gambling debts recognised only in IOU's, his shame was complete.