They were greeted jovially by MacDavid himself. Lounging behind his store-counter, with his back up against a slung pack of coyote skins, he was listening in somewhat bored fashion to a talkative individual opposite. He evidently hailed their arrival as a welcome diversion. In personality, Morley MacDavid was an admirable type of the western pioneer. A tall, slimly-built, but wiry, active man of fifty, or thereabouts, with grizzled hair and moustache. Burnt out and totally ruined three successive times in the past by the depredations of marauding Indians, the fierce, indomitable energy of the broken man had asserted itself and enabled him finally to triumph over all his mischances. Aided in the struggle by his devoted wife, who throughout the years had bravely faced all dangers and hardships with him, he had eventually accumulated a hard-won fortune. In addition to the patronage that he received from the local ranches, he conducted an extensive business trading with the Indians from the big Reserve in the vicinity. A man of essentially simple habits, through sentiment or ingrained thriftiness, he disdained to abandon the routine and the scenes of his former active life, although his bank-balance and his holdings in land and stock probably exceeded that of many a more imposing city magnate.
The newcomers, disposing themselves comfortably upon various sacked commodities, proceeded to smoke and casually inspect the voluble stranger. He was a tallish, well-built man nearing middle-age, with a gray moustache, a thin beak of a nose, and a bleached-blue eyes. He was dressed in an old tweed suit, obviously of English cut, a pair of high-heeled, spurred riding-boots and a cowboy hat. Vouchsafing a brief nod to the visitors he continued his conversation with MacDavid.
"Ya-as," he was drawling, "one of the most extraordinary shots you ever heard of, Morley! I was between the devil and the deep sea—properly. There was the bear—rushing me at the double and there was the cougar perched growling up on the rock behind me. I made one jump sideways and let the bear have it—slap through the brain, and . . . that same shot, sir, ricocheted up the face of the rock and killed the cougar—just as he was in the act of springing! By George, y'know, it was one of the swiftest things that ever happened!"
A tense silence succeeded the conclusion of this thrilling narrative.
MacDavid re-lit his pipe and puffed thoughtfully awhile. "Eyah," he remarked reminiscently, "feller does run up against some swift propositions now an' again. I mind one time I was headin' home from Kananaskis, an' a bear jumped me from behind a fallen log. The lever of me rifle jammed so, all I could do was to beat it—in a hurry—an' I sure did hit th' high spots, you bet! It was in th' early spring an' th' snow still lay pretty deep, but—I'd got a twenty yards start of that bear, an' I finally beat him to it an' made my get-away."
The stranger whistled incredulously. "Wha-a-tt!" he almost shouted, "D'ye mean to tell me that bear got within twenty yards of you and couldn't catch you? Why, man! It's incredible!"
"Fact," replied MacDavid calmly, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, "It was this way: It was near th' edge of th' bush where th' bear first jumped me, an'—just as we hit th' open ground—one o' them warm Chinook winds sprung up behind us, travellin' east. . . .
"Man!" He paused impressively. "The way that wind started in to melt th' snow was a corker—just like lard in a fryin'-pan. But—I just managed to keep ahead of it an' while I had a good, hard surface of snow to run on, the bear—why he was sloppin around in th' slush in my wake—couldn't get a firm foothold, I guess. . . ."
His keen blue orbs stared full into the bleached ones of his vis-à-vis.
"I figure that there Chinook an' me an' th' bear must have been all travellin' 'bout th' same line of speed—kind of swift. After a mile or two of it, th' bear—he got fed up an' quit cold," he ended gravely. "Why—what's your hurry, Fred?"