Buckie's respectable soul was in full revolt at my enormities. I tried not to flinch.
"I ain't much on soldiering"—he was so nice in the vernacular!—"but I been taking stock of the men who count, who do things and get the outfit a good name."
I thought of Buckie's first advent on the charging steed, and how I halted his trooper, so that the cavalier sped at me through the air, gun still in hand and resolute for duty.
"The real men," said he, "keep their mouths tight except when they've something to say. That gives 'em time to think; you don't get any. They obey orders, and there's nothing else in life until they've done their job. So they've no time to show off; you have. You'd make a showman, or a clown in a circus, whereas this outfit is something serious."
I reminded Buckie of being really serious once when Rain stole his clothes and he paraded around in my painted cow-skin robe tracking a malefactor.
"Now, Sarde," he went on, "was only a corporal when he took a prisoner out of Big Bear's camp in face of two thousand guns. He's a man, and he'll be superintendent before he's through. You'll never get your stripes. Why, Blackguard, Sarde wouldn't be a man at all if he allowed you to monkey with his wife."
I told Buckie to pet me, or I'd cry. He said he couldn't because he was using his foot to hold the canvas down.
Then, stitching away with sail-needle and palm thimble, he looked up at me with just the expression of some prim old maid. "Did you ever hear tell," he asked, "of old Fort Carlton?"
Rather! Fort Carlton stood on the bank of the ice-clad North Saskatchewan, a cluster of framed log houses inside a stockade with bastions on the two rear corners. How well I remembered the picture! It was a trading post, strong against bows and arrows, but from the high edge of the plains even a trade musket had range enough to pick men off in the square. All that, I had read as a boy in fine adventure books, longing to ride with the French half-breeds and the Cree Indians running buffaloes up there on the plains above the fort. I wanted to taste the pemmican made by their squaws of bison beef and berries, to sail with the gay brigades which carried that food to other Hudson's Bay posts all down the great Mackenzie. But now the bison herds were swept away, they and the hunters and the brave voyagers.
"We're going there," said Buckie.