“But the authority,” he protested.
Raymes took him up on the instant.
“I have power to enrol ‘specials.’”
The other’s grey eyes lit. Again his laugh rang out. “Yes. I forgot. Of course you can enrol ‘specials.’” Suddenly he sprang from the depths of the rocker, and left it violently disturbed. He stood erect, bulking largely, and a flush of excitement dyed his weather-stained cheeks. “Of course you can,” he cried. “Yes. I’ll get after it. A gold trail! A bunch of toughs! A girl—a white girl! Ye Gods! I’m after it. You can swear me in on any old thing from a Bible to a harvester. That’s all I need. I’ll find my own outfit, and I’ll get busy right away and collect up my old partner Chilcoot Massy. I’ll get right off now down to my office and start fixing things, and I’ll be back again after supper to-night. But I warn you you’ll need to answer a hundred mighty tiresome questions, and pass me all the literature you’ve collected on this subject when I come back. Say, the gold trail again! I’m just tickled to death.”
CHAPTER II
THE CHEECHAKOS
The man was standing at the edge of the river landing gazing out across the broad waters as they drifted slowly by, a calm, gentle flood undisturbed by the rushing freshet of spring, which had already spent its turbulent life leaving the sedate Hekor embraced in the gentler arms of advancing summer.
The landing was little better than a wreck. The green log piles were awry. There were rifts where last summer’s timbers had been carried bodily away by the crash of ice at winter’s break up. For the annual rebuilding necessitated by the tremendous labour at the birth of the Arctic spring had been dispensed with. There was no longer any need for it.
The man’s gaze was far-searching. It was seriously ruminating. Perhaps, even, it was regretful. For he knew that in a few hours all that he had looked out upon for the past seven years would lay behind him, possibly never to be looked upon again.
The mile-wide river lay open to the caressing sunlight. It was unshaded anywhere. The far bank rose in a gentle slope, a perfect carpet of wild flowers, and beyond, as the valley rose upwards, the shimmer of summer heat bathed the purpling distance in an almost dazzling haze. Away to his left, beyond the waters, stood the dark spread of Fox Bluff, which gave the place its name, a wide stretch of tattered forest, isolated on an undulating plain many miles in extent. And the ruins of the old Mission House, long since burned out by the Euralian marauders, still stood gaunt and bare, a monument to the tragedy that was now some fifteen years old.