hit the target and the actual distance from the gun to the
target."--_Admiralty Note._

A great naval gun never fires twice alike. It varies from day to day,
and expert allowance has to be made in sighting every time it is
fired. Variations in atmosphere, condition of ammunition, and the
wear of the gun are the contributory causes to the ever-varying
"Error of the Day."

"Say, ain't he pretty?"

"A Jim-dandy--oh, my!"

"What's his price in the open market?"

"Thirty millions--I think not."

Then was heard the voice of Billy Goat--his name was William Goatry----

"Out in the cold world, out in the street,
Nothing to wear and nothing to eat,
Fatherless, motherless, sadly I roam,
Child of misfortune, I'm driven from home."

A loud laugh followed, for Billy Goat was a popular person at Kowatin, in
the Saskatchewan country. He had an inimitable drollery, heightened by a
cast in his eye, a very large mouth, and a round, good-humored face; also
he had a hand and arm like iron, and was altogether a great man on a
"spree."

There had been a two days' spree at Kowatin, for no other reason than that
there had been great excitement over the capture and subsequent escape of
a prairie-rover who had robbed the contractor's money-chest at the
rail-head on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Forty miles from Kowatin he
had been caught by, and escaped from, the tall, brown-eyed man with the
hard-bitten face who leaned against the open window of the tavern, looking
indifferently at the jeering crowd before him. For a police officer, he
was not unpopular with them, but he had been a failure for once, and, as
Billy Goat had said, "It tickled us to death to see a rider of the plains
off his trolley--on the cold, cold ground, same as you and me."

They did not undervalue him. If he had been less a man than he was, they
would not have taken the trouble to cover him with their drunken ribaldry.
He had scored off them in the past in just such sprees as this, when he
had the power to do so, and used the power good-naturedly and quietly--but
used it.

Then he was Sergeant Foyle, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, on duty
in a district as large as the United Kingdom. And he had no greater
admirer than Billy Goat, who now reviled him. Not without cause, in a way,
for he had reviled himself to this extent that, when the prairie-rover,
Halbeck, escaped on the way to Princ