ut used it.

Then, he was Sergeant Foyle of the Royal North-West 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 Prince Albert, after six
months' hunt for him and a final capture in the Kowatin district, Foyle
resigned the Force before the Commissioner could reproach him or call
him to account. Usually so exact, so certain of his target, some care
had not been taken, he had miscalculated, and there had been the Error
of the Day. Whatever it was, it had seemed to him fatal; and he had
turned his face from the barrack yard.

Then he had made his way to the Happy Land Hotel at Kowatin, to begin
life as "a free and independent gent on the loose," as Billy Goat had
said. To resign had seemed extreme; because, though the Commissioner was
vexed at Halbeck's escape, Foyle was the best non-commissioned officer
in the Force. He had frightened horse thieves and bogus land-agents and
speculators out of the country; had fearlessly tracked down a criminal
or a band of criminals when the odds were heavy against him. He carried
on his cheek the scars of two bullets, and there was one white lock in
his brown hair, where an arrow had torn the scalp away as, alone, he
drove into the Post a score of Indians, fresh from raiding the cattle of
an immigrant trailing north.

Now he was out of work, or so it seemed; he had stepped down from
his scarlet-coated dignity, from the place of guardian and guide of
civilisation, into the idleness of a tavern stoop.

As the little group swayed round him, and Billy Goat started another
song, Foyle roused himself as though to move away--he was waiting for
the mail-stage to take him south:

"Oh, father, dear father, come home with me now,
The clock in the steeple strikes one;
You said you were coming right home from the shop
As soon as your day's work was done.
Come home--come home--"

The song arrested him, and he leaned back against the window again. A
curious look came into his eyes, a look that had nothing to do with the
acts of the people before him. It was searching into a scene beyond this
bright sunlight and the far green-brown grass, and the little oasis
of trees in the distance marking a homestead and the dust of the
wagon-wheels, out on the trail