The trooper shook his bridle, and trotted behind the sleigh, while, as it swung up and down over the billowy rises of the prairie, Winston became sensible of a curious expectancy.  The bare, hopeless life he had led seemed to have slipped behind him, and though he suspected that there was no great difference between his escort and a prisoner’s guard, the old love of excitement he once fancied he had outgrown forever, awoke again within him.  Anything that was different from the past would be a relief, and the man who had for eight long years of strenuous toil practiced the grimmest self-denial wondered with a quickening of all his faculties what the future, that could not be more colorless, might have in store for him.

It was dark, and very cold, when they reached the wooden building, but Winston’s step was lighter, and his spirits more buoyant than they had been for some months, when, handing the sleigh over to an orderly, he walked into the guard-room, where bronzed men in uniform glanced at him curiously.  Then he was shown into a bare log-walled hall, where a young man in blue uniform, with a weather-darkened face was writing at a table.

“I’ve been partly expecting a visit,” he said.  “I’m glad to see you, Mr. Courthorne.”

Winston laughed with a very good intimation of the outlaw’s recklessness, and wondered the while because it cost him no effort.  He, who had, throughout the last two adverse seasons, seldom smiled at all, and then but grimly, experienced the same delight in an adventure that he had done when he came out to Canada.

“I don’t know that I can return the compliment just yet,” he said.  “I have one or two things to ask you.”

The young soldier smiled good-humoredly, as he flung a cigar case on the table.  “Oh, sit down and shake those furs off,” he said.  “I’m not a worrying policeman, and we’re white men, any way.  If you’d been twelve months in this forsaken place, you’d know what I’m feeling.  Take a smoke, and start in with your questions when you feel like it.”

Winston lighted a cigar, flung himself down in a hide chair, and stretched out his feet towards the stove.  “In the first place, I want to know why your boys are shadowing me.  You see, you couldn’t arrest me unless our folks in the Dominion had got their papers through.”

The officer nodded.  “No.  We couldn’t lay hands on you, and we only had orders to see where you went to when you left this place, so the folks there could corral you if they got the papers.  That’s about the size of it at present, but, as I’ve sent a trooper over to Regent, I’ll know more to-morrow.”

Winston laughed.  “It may appear a little astonishing, but I haven’t the faintest notion why the police in Canada should worry about me.  Is there any reason you shouldn’t tell me?”

The officer looked at him thoughtfully.  “Bluff?  I’m quite smart at it myself,” he said.