“Good.  Have to borrow your horse till we reach Whoop-Up.  You won’t mind walking?”

“Not at all.  Some folks think that’s what legs were made for,” answered Morse, grinning.

As he strode across the prairie beside the horse, Morse was still puzzling over the situation.  He perceived that the strength of the officer’s position was wholly a moral one.  A lawbreaker was confronted with an ugly alternative.  The only way to escape arrest was to commit murder.  Most men would not go that far, and of those who would the great majority would be deterred because eventually punishment was sure.  The slightest hesitation, the least apparent doubt, a flicker of fear on the officer’s face, would be fatal to success.  He won because he serenely expected to win, and because there was back of him a silent, impalpable force as irresistible as the movement of a glacier.

Beresford must have known that the men who lived at Whoop-Up were unfriendly to the North-West Mounted.  Some of them had been put out of business.  Their property had been destroyed and confiscated.  Fines had been imposed on them.  The current whisper was that the whiskey-smugglers would retaliate against the constables in person whenever there was a chance to do so with impunity.  Some day a debonair wearer of the scarlet coat would ride out gayly from one of the forts and a riderless horse would return at dusk.  There were outlaws who would ask nothing better than a chance to dry-gulch one of these inquisitive riders of the plains.

But Beresford rode into the stockade and swung from the saddle with smiling confidence.  He nodded here and there casually to dark, sullen men who watched his movements with implacably hostile eyes.

His words were addressed to Reddy Madden.  “Can you let me have a horse for a few days and charge it to the Force?  I’ve lost mine.”

Some one sniggered offensively.  Barney had evidently reached Whoop-Up and was in hiding.

“Your horse came in a while ago, constable,” Madden said civilly.  “It’s in the corral back of the store.”

“Did it come in without a rider?” Beresford asked.

The question was unnecessary.  The horse would have gone to Fort Macleod and not have come to Whoop-Up unless a rider had guided it here.  But sometimes one found out things from unwilling witnesses if one asked questions.

“Didn’t notice.  I was in the store myself.”

“Thought perhaps you hadn’t noticed,” the officer said.  “None of you other gentlemen noticed either, did you?”

The “other gentlemen” held a dogged, sulky silence.  A girl cantered through the gate of the stockade and up to the store.  At sight of Morse her eyes passed swiftly to Beresford.  His answered smilingly what she had asked.  It was all over in a flash, but it told the man from Montana who the informer was that had betrayed to the police the place of the whiskey cache.

To the best of her limited chance, Jessie McRae was paying an installment on the debt she owed Bully West and Tom Morse.