day's routine
kept him on the grind. Hard work it was, but to Cameron a continuous
delight. For the first time in his life he had a job that seemed worth
a man's while, and one the mere routine of which delighted his soul. He
loved his horse and loved to care for him, and, most of all, loved to
ride him. Among his comrades he found congenial spirits, both among the
officers and the men. Though discipline was strict, there was an utter
absence of anything like a spirit of petty bullying which too often is
found in military service; for in the first place the men were in very
many cases the equals and sometimes the superiors of the officers both
in culture and in breeding, and further, and very specially, the nature
of the work was such as to cultivate the spirit of true comradeship.
When officer and man ride side by side through rain and shine, through
burning heat and frost "Forty below," when they eat out of the same pan
and sleep in the same "dug-out," when they stand back to back in the
midst of a horde of howling savages, rank comes to mean little and
manhood much.

Between Inspector Dickson and Cameron a genuine friendship sprang
up; and after his first month was in, Cameron often found himself the
comrade of the Inspector in expeditions of special difficulty where
there was a call for intelligence and nerve. The reports of these
expeditions that stand upon the police record have as little semblance
of the deeds achieved as have stark and grinning skeletons in the
medical student's private cupboard to the living moving bodies they
once were. The records of these deeds are the bare bones. The flesh and
blood, the life and colour are to be found only in the memories of those
who were concerned in their achievement.

But even in these bony records there are to be seen frequent entries in
which the names of Inspector Dickson and Constable Cameron stand side
by side. For the Inspector was a man upon whom the Commissioner and
the Superintendent delighted to load their more dangerous and delicate
cases, and it was upon Cameron when it was possible that the Inspector's
choice for a comrade fell.

It was such a case as this that held the Commissioner and Superintendent
Crawford in anxious consultation far into a late September night. When
the consultation was over, Inspector Dickson was called in and the
result of this consultation laid before him.

"We have every reason to believe, as you well know, Inspector Dickson,"