CHAPTER III
THE SWING OF EVENTS

I

Before I left Fort French on my way to regimental headquarters I promised old Wormy to lead a better life. The first duty then was to provide for my Brat in hospital; so I raffled my war-horse, and sold off by public auction a dozen damsels to whom I had been postally engaged; then lost the whole of the money at cards with the hospital orderly. So I said good-by to Brat.

Parted from all my vices I felt like an empty box, all chiaroscuro and good intentions, yet in the stage sleigh caught by a two days' blizzard it was really too cold to reform. That autumn storm was a hundred and eight miles long from its tail at Fort French to its nose at Fort Calgary with a hundred degrees of cold and the nip of a crocodile. Then at Fort Calgary I had to wait in barracks, for the unfinished Canadian Pacific Railroad ran trains, weather permitting, or when the driver was sober. Anyway, I had time to lose my sustenance money over a game of poker, and when Rich Mixed and I got on board the train we had nothing to reform with except a tin of crackers. We were beastly pinched on the six hundred mile crawl east to Regina, the mounted police headquarters.

I had rather looked forward to seeing civilization after some eighteen months of the other thing, but the train was jammed with men coming down from the construction camps in the Rockies and most of them had forgotten to take a bath. The floors of the cars were swamped with tobacco juice, the stoves were red, there was no ventilation. The air made my head swim, and Rich Mixed was taken sick.

I had been pining for company, but—well, there were some Canadians—fine chaps, playing cards, the stakes in hundreds of dollars. I could only afford to look on for half a minute.

There were American commercial gents, pale, high-pitched, talking millions and millions of dollars. I could not afford to listen.

Then there were navvies busy getting drunk, and even their talk never went as low as ten cents. They, too, were above my station. I even heard a man say, "Catch on to all that for fifty cents a day!" I could not tell him my pay was fifty-five cents.

That was when I stood up to take off my buffalo coat, and all the people stared at the red tunic. Somehow these good folk did not belong to my tribe, but I did not know till then that the red coat shuts off the world like a wall. Only I felt they despised me, so I blushed. It was as though a flock of sheep stared with contempt at a collie, and that made me grin.