So while the drinks went round once more the Blackguard snatched up his guitar, and caught the lilt of some grand old Andalusian dance—
"Sing with me,
Carita;
Dance with me,
Carita,
Let the mad world sing the lilt of our gladness!
Dance with me,
Carita;
Merrilie,
Carita,
Let the glad earth catch the lilt of our madness!"
The log-cabin allowed but space to swing a cat, as the saying is—although nobody had ever swung cats in it since its erection a month ago. Kept by a motherly negress, enterprising in the matter of illicit whisky, this shanty served as a canteen for the camp, levied half the available pay of D Troop, occasioned more trouble than all the Red Indians in Kootenay, and generally played the very deuce with public morals. As to the men who sat on soap boxes and barrels round the walls, or perched on the bar, giving cheek to Mother Darkness, well, of course, they should have been in bed long ago, and certainly they ought to have abstained from the trash which passed current at a shilling a drink for whisky; but then—the shanty was by proclamation "out of bounds"; to be found in it meant a heavy fine; to be caught beyond the limits of the camp after "lights out" meant punishment, and to drink illicit liquor was officially accounted worse than all the deadly sins; so, according to the natural history of man, there was every inducement for a roaring night. And the men? To the stature and strength of an English Life Guardsman add the intelligence, courage, and impudence of a Black Watch veteran, and you have the prescription for a constable of the North-West Mounted Police. There is not in all the Empire a more splendid corps than this widely-scattered regiment of irregular cavalry, in time of peace hare-brained, half-mutinous, almost beyond the power of human control; in many a time of instant danger approved for stern endurance, utter loyalty, and headlong courage. These men in the shanty, waking the night with song and chorus, had each of them done great deeds of arms, for which nobody in authority or otherwise had given as much as a "Thank you." The tale has been told at many a camp fire, how a constable was sent once to track down a mad Indian who had killed and eaten his children. Months afterwards the Officer Commanding at Fort Edmonton was interrupted in the midst of a muster parade by a bearded civilian in rags, who walked up to him and halted at three paces with a correct salute.
"What the deuce do you want?" said the Officer Commanding.
"Come to report, sir."
"Who the devil are you?"
"Constable Saunders, sir,—got my prisoner in the guard-room."
That was Mutiny Saunders, who had tracked his victim fearlessly into goodness knows what awful recesses of the northern forest, who had been struck off the strength of the Force as "missing," but who never deigned to report himself alive until he carried out an almost impossible order and vindicated the majesty of British Justice by making the most extraordinary arrest in all the annals of the Empire.
Tribulation Jones, now arguing with Mutiny about a horse, was one of the seventy-five men who took part in the "Poundmaker Racket," when Crozier's Troop, confronted by thousands of armed Indians, charged, rode them down, wheeled, charged again, scattered them and carried off a necessary prisoner, and all without a single shot being fired.
Billy Boy, now howling out the chant of "Old King Cole," once drove a team two hundred and ten miles in two days without killing his horses, and in the darkest days of the North-West Rebellion carried despatches right through the enemy's lines.