Three white foxes, two old ones and one half-grown cub, were sporting in the moonlight. How beautiful they were! And how they did romp! “No kittens could be half as cute,” she told herself.
Now they formed a circle and chased one another’s tails round and round. Now they piled into a heap and rolled about like balls of snow. And now, sitting in a row like choir boys, they sang their night song.
“Yap—yap—yap!”
In the midst of this Joyce thought of the stranger she had followed that day, and shuddered, she hardly knew why.
All this was forgotten as, half an hour later, she crept beneath her downy feather robe and fell asleep, dreaming dreams in which gold and radium were sadly mixed with Indians and traps, white foxes, wild buffaloes and moonlit night.
CHAPTER IX
EAGLE EYES
There are some who believe that, should one be so fortunate as to reach Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, he would be at an outpost of civilization. Nothing could be more false. Edmonton is not an outpost. It is a city.
There are those again who believe that all cities are alike. They, too, are mistaken. The city of Edmonton is not like any other city in the world.
No one knew this better than Curlie Carson. He was not a stranger to other cities. Chicago, New York City he knew. Belize, in British Honduras, had seen him on her streets. Paris he loved for her beauty. Yet none of these thrilled him more than did Edmonton. On his days off, between flights, nothing suited him quite so well as sitting in the narrow lobby of his own hotel, the old Prince George, listening to the scraps of conversation that drifted unbidden to his ears. For, while not an outpost, Edmonton is the gateway to a thousand outposts. All the vast Northwest lies beyond it.
And down from this Northwest, even in these conventional days when all men appear to think alike, talk alike, and dress alike, men still drift into Edmonton who are unique. They dress in strange ways and speak of affairs that are far from the minds of the commonplace men of the street.