atsy mannie," cried his father quickly, coming from
behind the crowd where he had been standing dazed and stupid. "Stand
back there! Let me have my boy," he added savagely.

He swept both Perault and Shock angrily aside, gathered the little lad
tenderly in his arms and strode off into the house, the white face of
the child resting on his father's shoulder and his golden curls
mingling with the black, coarse masses of his father's hair and beard.

"Well, I'll be blanked!" said one of the men. "Wouldn't that pall you!"

"Blank cantankerous cuss!" said the cowboy. "Never a `thank you' for
gittin' half killed in place of his kid."

Perault walked up to Shock, and offering his hand, said in a voice
husky and broken, "Dat's two for you dis even'--me an' dat leele
feller. For me--I can't spik my heart," smiting himself on the breast,
"but my heart--dat's your own now, by gar!" He wrung Shock's hand in
both of his and turned quickly away. But before he had taken many steps
he returned, saying, "Come on wit me! I feex up your head." And without
further words Shock and Perault passed into the Stopping Place.

The men looked at each other in silence for a time, then the cowboy
said with unusual emphasis, "Boys, he's white! He's blanked white!"

X

THE TURF MEET

The great brown shadows of the rolling hills had quite filled the
hollows between and were slowly climbing up the western slope of every
undulation when Shock reached the lip of the broad river bed in which
lay, the little fort town.

The white clump of buildings standing by themselves he knew to be the
barracks of the North-West Mounted Police. The flag floating above
showed that, as well as the air of military neatness about them.

The town straggled along two intersecting streets, and then frayed out
over the flats in isolated and dejected-looking shacks. The more
imposing building on the main street Shock guessed were the hotels and
stores. One of the latter he recognised from its flag as that of the
ancient and honourable Hudson's Bay Company. On a back street here and
there stood a house surrounded by a garden and scrubby trees, a
pathetic attempt to reproduce in this treeless country what in other
lands had been fondly called home.

Away on every side stretched the vast sweep of rolling prairie to where
the amber of the sky-line mingled with the grey blue of the earth.

How insignificant, how miserable and wretched in the midst of this
expanse