as a big life while it lasted--primitive, exhilarating, spiced with
dangers that added zest to the game; the petty, sordid things of life
only came in on the iron trail. There was no place for them in the old
West, the dead-and-gone West that will soon be forgotten.

I expect nearly everybody between the Arctic Circle and the Isthmus of
Panama has heard more or less of the Northwest Mounted Police. They're
changing with the years, like everything else in this one-time buffalo
country, but when Canada sent them out to keep law and order in a
territory that was a City of Refuge for a lot of tough people who had
played their string out south of the line, they were, as a dry old
codger said about the Indian as a scalp-lifter, naturally fitted for the
task. And it was no light task, then, for six hundred men to keep the
peace on a thousand miles of frontier.

It doesn't seem long ago, but it was in '74 that they filed down the
gangway of a Missouri River boat, walking as straight and stiff as if
every mother's son of them had a ramrod under his tunic, and out on a
rickety wharf that was groaning under the weight of a king's ransom in
baled buffalo-hides.

"Huh!" old Piegan Smith grunted in my ear. "Look at 'em, with their
solemn faces. There'll be heaps uh fun in the Cypress Hills country when
they get t' runnin' the whisky-jacks out. Ain't they a queer-lookin'
bunch?"

They were a queer-looking lot to more than Piegan. Their uniforms fitted
as if they had grown into them; scarlet jackets buttoned to the throat,
black riding-breeches with a yellow stripe running down the outer seam
of each leg, and funny little round caps like the lid of a big
baking-powder can set on one side of their heads, held there by a narrow
strap that ran around the chin. But for all their comic-opera get-up,
there was many a man that snickered at them that day in Benton who
learned later to dread the flash of a scarlet jacket on the distant
hills.

They didn't linger long at Benton, but got under way and marched
overland to the Cypress Hills. On Battle Creek they built the first
post, Fort Walsh, and though in time they located others, Walsh remained
headquarters for the Northwest so long as buffalo-hunting and the Indian
trade endured. And Benton and Walsh were linked together by great
freight-trails thereafter, for the Mounted Police supplies came up the
Missouri and traveled by way of long bull-trains to their destination;
there was no othe