ed one.

"Yeh can't come aboard!" threatened another.

"Haven't yeh got a full passenger list a'ready, Captain?" demanded a
blustering, heavy-set man with beetling eyebrows, as he pushed himself
angrily through the crowding men to the deck-rail.

"Can't help it if I have, Burroughs," retorted the autocrat of the
river-boat. "These troopers are recruits for the North West Mounted
Police----"

"The hell yeh say!"

Philip Danvers noted the unfriendly eye, and realized that this burly
fellow dominated even the captain.

"Their passage was engaged three months ago," went on the officer.

"It's nothing to me," affirmed Burroughs, reddening in his effort to
regain his surface amenity.

The young trooper, superintending the loading of the horses, resented
the manifest unfriendliness toward the English recruits. A dreary rain
added discomfort, and the passengers growled at the slow progress
hitherto made against the spring floods of the turbulent Missouri and
this prolonged delay at Bismarck.

As he went up the gang-plank and walked along the deck, bits of
conversation came to him.

"He looks like an officer," said one, with a jerk of his thumb in his
direction.

"An officer! Where? D'yeh mean the dark-haired one?" The voice was that
of Burroughs again, and as Danvers met his insolent eye an instant
antagonism flashed between the roughly dressed frontiersman and the
lean-flanked, broad-shouldered English youth.

"Hello! 'F there ain't Toe String Joe!" continued Burroughs, recognizing
the last to come on board, as the line was cast off and the steamer
backed into the stream. "What you doin' here, Joe?"

"I met up with these here Britishers when they came in on the train from
the East, an' I'm goin' t' enlist," admitted the shambling Joe, his
breath confirming his appearance. "Where you been?"

"Back to the States to get my outfit. I'm goin' ter start in fer myself
up to Fort Macleod. So you've decided to be a damned Britisher, eh?"
Burroughs reverted to Joe's statement. "Yeh'll have to take the oath of
allegiance fer three years of enlistment. Did yeh know that?" He closed
one eye, as if speculating how this might further his own interests.
"You'll make a fine police, Joe, you will!" he jeered in conclusion.

"You goin' to Fort Macleod?" questioned Joe. "You'll git no trade in
Canada!"

"Don't yeh ever think it!" returned Burroughs, with a look that Danvers
sub-consciously noted.

Beyond the crowd he saw a