“What about the nurses?” enquired the Inspector gravely.
“Oh, I don't know them. Never knew but one. A good bright little soul she was. Saw me through a typhoid trip. Little too clever sometimes,” he added, remembering the day when she had taken her fun out of the slow-footed, slow-minded farmer's daughter.
“Well,” said the Inspector, “we shall possibly come across them in our round-up. This is rather a big game, a very big game and one worth playing.”
A bigger game it turned out than any of the players knew, bigger in its immediate sweep and in its nationwide issues.
For three months they swept the plains, haunting the reservations at unexpected moments. But though they found not a few horses and cattle whose obliterated brands seemed to warrant confiscation, and though there were signs for the instructed eye of evil doings in many an Indian camp, yet there was nothing connected with the larger game upon which the Inspector of Police could lay his hand.
Among the Bloods there were frequent sun-dances where many braves were made and much firewater drunk with consequent blood-letting. Red Crow deprecated these occurrences, but confessed his powerlessness to prevent the flow of either firewater or of blood. A private conversation with the Inspector left with the Chief some food for thought, however, and resulted in the cropping of the mane of White Horse, of whose comings and goings the Inspector was insistently curious.
On the Blackfeet reservation they ran into a great pow-wow of chiefs from far and near, to which old Crowfoot invited the representatives of the Great White Mother with impressive cordiality, an invitation, however, which the Inspector, such was his strenuous hunt for stolen horses, was forced regretfully to decline.
“Too smooth, old boy, too smooth!” was the Inspector's comment as they rode off. “There are doings there without doubt. Did you see the Cree and the Assiniboine?”
“I could not pick them out,” said Cameron, “but I saw Louis the Breed.”
“Ah, you did! He needs another term at the Police sanatarium.”