man dismissed from Lapierre's
service entered no other.

Moreover, he invariably contrived to implicate one whom he intended to
use, in some crime of a graver nature than he would be called upon to
commit in the general run of his duties. This crime he would stage in
some fastness where its detection by an officer of the Mounted was
exceedingly unlikely; and most commonly consisted in the murder of an
Indian, whose weighted body would be lowered to the bottom of a
convenient lake or river. Lapierre witnesses would appear and the man
was irrevocably within the toil. Had he chosen, Pierre Lapierre could
have lowered a grappling hook unerringly upon a dozen weighted
skeletons.

Over the head of the recruit now hung an easily proven charge of
murder. If during his future activities as whiskey-runner, smuggler,
or in whatever particular field of endeavour he was assigned, plans
should miscarry--an arrest be made--this man would take his prison
sentence in silence rather than seek to implicate Lapierre, who with a
word could summon the witnesses that would swear the hemp about his
neck.

The system worked. Now and again plans did miscarry--arrests were made
by the Mounted, men were caught "with the goods," or arrested upon
evidence that even Lapierre's intricate alibi scheme could not refute.
But, upon conviction, the unlucky prisoner always accepted his
sentence--for at his shoulder stalked a spectre, and in his heart was
the fear lest the thin lips of Pierre Lapierre would speak.

With such consummate skill and finesse _did_ Lapierre plot, however,
and with such Machiavelian cunning and _eclat_ were his plans carried
out, that few failed. And those that did were credited by the
authorities to individual or sporadic acts, rather than to the work of
an intricate organization presided over by a master mind.

The gang numbered, all told, upward of two hundred of the hardest
characters upon the frontier. Only Lapierre knew its exact strength,
but each member knew that if he did not "run straight"--if he, by word
or act or deed, sought to implicate an accomplice--his life would be
worth just exactly the price of "the powder to blow him to hell."

A few there were outside the organization who suspected Pierre
Lapierre--but only a few: an officer or two of the Mounted and a few
factors of the H.B.C. But these could prove nothing. They bided their
time. One man _knew_ him for what he was. One, in all the North, as