Even in those days, Buckie suffered from a respectable soul, which made him a bit of a prig for routine, a glutton for etiquette, a shop-walker for deportment, and most maidenly particular about his clothes. He kept us at work for hours cleaning kit before he would get into uniform, then mourned aloud because for all my evening dress I had lost my opera hat and ought not to go bareheaded. In the end we departed riding his big horse tandem with me behind, pursued by Rain's howls, malicious, derisive, devilish little howls. Were these for her poor father?
CHAPTER II
THE AGE OF KNIGHTHOOD
I
Rain was a little brown hen-angel, the half-grown, all fluffy chicken of a seraph, with a tang of earth about her, just deceptively human and alluring enough to tear my heart-strings when she flew off leaving me to bleed.
To guard her, I forsook my Brat whom I care for. But when she seemed to love another man, and laughed a good-by to me I could only go. A boy may love a maid and yet love life. So I loved Rain, but not as yet more than I loved my life. That was to come, but in those days, life was calling me, yes, tugging hard.
Certain fabulists have alleged that I joined the mounted police in evening dress. This is not true, for when Buckie was escorting me to Fort French, my place of enlistment, we lunched by the trail-side with an American cowboy who had a quart of pickets. Afterward, we played cards, my kit staked against his. He won, riding away in my dress suit with the tie under his off ear, and the near end of the collar pointing S.S.E., while through his nose he sang a hymn beginning, "Oh say, can you tell?"
I still had my broken heart, and a dog, but as to the costume in which I joined the police, my modesty forbids particulars.
One of the greatest difficulties in the writing of this book is that my publishers have a craze for particulars. They say that the story is too vague. I ought to state the facts. Now if, to take an example, I give my regimental number in the mounted police, I shall be identified, extradited and hanged just as I have begun to settle down. I have borrowed Buckie's number, a cruel humiliation for me because he was always so durned respectable that he had scarcely any defaulter sheet.
"Regimental Number 1107 Constable la Mancha, J., is hereby taken on the strength of the Force from the 20th instant, and posted to C Division."