There were rumors that it was soon to be changed—the trade legitimatized; that is, for Alberta to the Athabasca border. With a small army of clever whisky traders, no licenses, no supervision against them, it was a matter of impossibility to keep liquor from the half-breeds who were a sort of carry-on station to the Indians.
To trail murderers, gunmen, cattle and horse thieves, day after day across the trackless prairie, or the white sheet-of-snow buried plain, was an exhilarating game—it was something to stimulate the espirit de corps; a Mounted Policeman, feeling, when he had landed his man, full reward for all his hardships and danger; but to poke around like an ordinary city sleuth and bag some poor devil of a breed with a bottle of whisky, only to have him up before the magistrate for a small fine was, to say the least, disquieting; it made his men half ashamed of their mission.
Of course the present incident was not petty; it was like Bulldog Carney himself—big; and the Major would have given, right there, a half-year's pay to have bagged Bulldog, and so, perhaps have broken up the ring.
But determined as the force was, the British law was greater still. Without absolute, convicting evidence Carney would have been acquitted, and the Major perhaps censured for making a mistake.
At headquarters was a fixed edict: "Take no position from which you will have to recede," really, "Don't make mistakes."
As the little man sat thinking over these many things, sore at heart at the quirky thrust Fate had dealt him, for he loved the Mounted, loved his duties, loved the very men, until sometimes breaking under the strain of service in the lonely wastes they cracked and a weak streak showed—then he was a tiger, a martinet; no sparing: "Out you go, you hound!" he would snap; "you're a disgrace to the Force, and it's got to be kept clean."
Then "Dismissed" would be written opposite the man's name in the annual report that went from the Commissioner at Regina to the "Comptroller at Ottawa."
Suddenly the chorus of a refrain floated to his ears from the guard house—it was "The Stirrup Cup."
"God, England!" the little man groaned. "That's Cavendish singing," he muttered.
How long and broad the highway of life; how human, how weakly human those who travelled it! Cavendish, a younger son of a noble family, a constable at sixty cents a day! They were all like that—not of noble family, but adventurers, roamers, men who had broken the shackles of restraint all over the world. That was largely why they were in the Mounted; certainly not because of the sixty cents a day. And, so, how, even in his bitterness of set-awry-authority, could the incident of the tub be a heinous crime on their part.