or his
beer and mutton--and white whiskey.

Charley stepped on briskly, his shining leather shoes, straw hat, and
light cane in no good keeping with his surroundings. He was thinking
that he had never been in such a mood for talk with Suzon Charlemagne.
Charlemagne's tavern of the Cote Dorion was known over half a province,
and its patrons carried news of it half across a continent. Suzon
Charlemagne--a girl of the people, a tavern-girl, a friend of sulking,
coarse river-drivers! But she had an alert precision of brain, an
instinct that clove through wastes of mental underbrush to the tree of
knowledge. Her mental sight was as keen and accurate as that which runs
along the rifle-barrel of the great hunter with the red deer in view.
Suzon Charlemagne no company for Charley Steele? What did it matter!
He had entered into other people's lives to-day, had played their games
with them and for them, and now he would play his own game, live his own
life in his own way through the rest of this day. He thirsted for some
sort of combat, for the sharp contrasts of life, for the common and the
base; he thirsted even for the white whiskey against which he had warned
his groom. He was reckless--not blindly, but wilfully, wildly reckless,
caring not at all what fate or penalty might come his way.

"What do I care!" he said to himself. "I shall never squeal at any
penalty. I shall never say in the great round-up that I was weak and I
fell. I'll take my gruel expecting it, not fearing it--if there is to be
any gruel anywhere, or any round-up anywhere!"

A figure suddenly appeared coming round the bend of the road before
him. It was Rouge Gosselin. Rouge Gosselin was inclined to speak. Some
satanic whim or malicious foppery made Charley stare him blankly in the
face. The monocle and the stare stopped the bon soir and the friendly
warning on Rouge Gosselin's tongue, and the pilot passed on with a
muttered oath.

Gosselin had not gone far, however, before he suddenly stopped and
laughed outright, for at the bottom he had great good-nature, in keeping
with his "six-foot" height, and his temper was friendly if quick.
It seemed so absurd, so audacious, that a man could act like Charley
Steele, that he at once became interested in the phenomenon, and
followed slowly after Charley, saying as he went: "Tiens, there will be
things to watch to-night!"

Before Charley was within five hundred yards of the tavern he could
hear the laughter and