year, and the sense of humour that could speak
of this white wilderness as a "rural route" would be a saving
make-believe in the midst of Arctic blizzards. And the thought of
bearing a loving missive to solitary men from friends thousands of miles
distant, might well thrill the imagination of these knights of the
modern day.

CHAPTER XV

GLORY AND TRAGEDY IN THE NORTH

In the recent Great War a somewhat casual visitor was present when a
vagrant shell smashed the refreshment dug-out where a young Red Cross
man was handling some comforts for the khaki-clad boys near the front
line. And when the alarmed visitor explained to the dispenser of
refreshments, "I would not stay here for a hundred dollars a day," the
answer came back swiftly but kindly, "Neither would I." He was not there
for the hope of gain, but out of a sense of duty and adventure so strong
that both danger and remuneration were forgotten.

There was a good deal of this spirit manifest in Mounted Police history
from the beginning. Not the pittance in the way of pay drew men to the
corps, but the love of the adventurous and the desire to do work in the
out-of-the-way places, where new trails had to be blazed beyond the
accustomed sky-line. This was especially true of the men who served and
volunteered to serve again in the vast spaces of the white and frozen
North. Not for a hundred a day would they have so risked their lives, as
others risk them still in that region. It was because the jurisdiction
of their country's flag had to be asserted, and because lonely outposts
and scattered groups of sometimes starving natives challenged the best
that was in them, that these uniformed crusaders went out again and
again on their hazardous patrols.

And so, when in 1911 Inspector Fitzgerald, Constables Kinney, Taylor and
Special Constable Carter, four men of the finest type and the most
thorough experience in those desperate, trackless and frozen areas, men
cast in so fine a mould that some of them were to be selected for the
King's Coronation, perished on a patrol from Herschell Island to Fort
Macpherson and Dawson City, Canada was stabbed broad awake to what the
men of the Force had been doing for their country in those Arctic lands.
It seems as if such catastrophes are periodically required to make a
selfish world aware of what some men are enduring in order that others
may live in comfort and ease. But the world does not always receive such
lessons in