ful creed on the Upper Missouri; and the old frontiersman still
lives on the Saskatchewan, one of the most picturesque and heroic
figures in the West to-day. I may say that both missionaries support
their schools as incidentally revealed here, without Government aid
through their own efforts. Also, it was the stalwart man from
Saskatchewan who was sent searching the heirs to the estate of an
embittered Jacobite of 1745; and those heirs refused to accept either
the wealth or the position for the very reasons set forth here.
Calamity's story, too, is true--tragically true, though this is not
all, not a fraction of her life story; but her name was not Calamity.

PART I

THE MAN ON THE JOB

FREEBOOTERS OF THE WILDERNESS

CHAPTER I

TO STRADDLE OR FIGHT

"Well," she asked, "are you going to straddle or fight?"

How like a woman, how like a child, how typical of the outsider's
shallow view of any struggle! As if all one had to do--was stand up
and fight! Mere fighting--that was easy; but to fight to the last
ditch only to find yourself beaten! That gave a fellow pause about
bucking the challenge of everyday life.

Wayland punched both fists in the jacket pockets of his sage-green
Service suit, and kicked a log back to the camp fire that smouldered in
front of his cabin. If she had been his wife he would have explained
what a fool-thing it was to argue that all a man had to do was fight.
Or if she had belonged to the general class--women--he could have met
her with the condescending silence of the general class--man; but for
him, she had never belonged to any general class.

She savored of his own Eastern World, he knew that, though he had met
her in this Western Back of Beyond half way between sky and earth on
the Holy Cross Mountain. Wayland could never quite analyze his own
feelings. Her presence had piqued his interest from the first. When
we can measure a character, we can forfend against surprises--discount
virtues, exaggerate faults, strike a balance to our own ego; but when
what you know is only a faint margin of what you don't know, a siren of
the unknown beckons and lures and retreats.

She had all of what he used to regard as culture in the old Eastern
life, the jargon of the colleges, the smattering of things talked
about, the tricks and turns of trained motions and emotions; but there
was a difference. There was no pretence. There was none of the
fire-proof self-complacency--S