e epic of the lost scow--how
there were men who saw it disappear from under their very eyes,
floating upward and afterward riding swiftly away in the skies--is told
and retold by strong-faced men, deep in whose eyes are the smoldering
flames of an undying superstition, and these same men thrill as they
tell over again the strange and unbelievable story of Hartshope, the
aristocratic Englishman who set off into the North in all the glory of
monocle and unprecedented luggage, and how he joined in a tribal war,
became a chief of the Dog Ribs, and married a dark-eyed, sleek-haired,
little Indian beauty, who is now the mother of his children.

But deepest and most thrilling of all the stories they tell are the
stories of the long arm of the Law--that arm which reaches for two
thousand miles from Athabasca Landing to the polar sea, the arm Of the
Royal Northwest Mounted Police.

And of these it is the story of Jim Kent we are going to tell, of Jim
Kent and of Marette, that wonderful little goddess of the Valley of
Silent Men, in whose veins there must have run the blood of fighting
men--and of ancient queens. A story of the days before the railroad
came.

CHAPTER I

In the mind of James Grenfell Kent, sergeant in the Royal Northwest
Mounted Police, there remained no shadow of a doubt. He knew that he
was dying. He had implicit faith in Cardigan, his surgeon friend, and
Cardigan had told him that what was left of his life would be measured
out in hours--perhaps in minutes or seconds. It was an unusual case.
There was one chance in fifty that he might live two or three days, but
there was no chance at all that he would live more than three. The end
might come with any breath he drew into his lungs. That was the
pathological history of the thing, as far as medical and surgical
science knew of cases similar to his own.

Personally, Kent did not feel like a dying man. His vision and his
brain were clear. He felt no pain, and only at infrequent intervals was
his temperature above normal. His voice was particularly calm and
natural.

At first he had smiled incredulously when Cardigan broke the news. That
the bullet which a drunken half-breed had sent into his chest two weeks
before had nicked the arch of the aorta, thus forming an aneurism, was
a statement by Cardigan which did not sound especially wicked or
convincing to him. "Aorta" and "aneurism" held about as much
significance for him as his perichondrium or the