Mr. Marriott proved to be most interesting and amusing, anything but eccentric; but I shall never hear the last of my mistake, and to this day he and Jack tease me unmercifully about my "dangerous maniac!"
Jim Rattray, Trooper
BY
Kelso B. Johnson
A story of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police, founded on fact.
"Our Lady of the Snows" resents the title. It is so liable, she complains, to give strangers an utterly wrong idea of her climate. And yet, at times, when the blizzard piles the swirling snow over fence and hollow, until boundaries are lost, and the bewildered wayfarer knows not which way to turn, he is apt to think, if he is in a condition to think at all, that there is some justice in the description.
But there was no sign of the stern side of nature as Jim Rattray made his way westward. The sun shone on the wide, rolling plains, the fresh green of the pasture lands, and the young wheat; the blue sky covered all with a dome of heaven's own blue, and Jim's heart rejoiced within him.
A strapping young fellow was Jim, not long out from the Old Country—the sort of young fellow whose bright eyes and fresh open face do one good to look at. North-country farming in England was the life to which he had looked forward; vigorous sports and hard work in the keen air of the Cumberland fells had knit his frame and hardened his muscles; and his parents, as they noticed with pride their boy's sturdy limbs, and listened in wonder to the bits of learning he brought home from school, had looked forward half-unconsciously to the days when he in his turn would be master of the farm which Rattrays had held for generations.
Bad days, however, had come for English farmers; the Cumbrian farm had to be given up, and Jim's father never recovered from the shock of having to leave it. Within a few years Jim was an orphan, alone in the world.