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 process of his stylomastoid.  But Kent possessed an unswerving passion to grip at facts in detail, a characteristic that had largely helped him to earn the reputation of being the best man-hunter in all the northland service.  So he had insisted, and his surgeon friend had explained.

The aorta, he found, was the main blood-vessel arching over and leading from the heart, and in nicking it the bullet had so weakened its outer wall that it bulged out in the form of a sack, just as the inner tube of an automobile tire bulges through the outer casing when there is a blowout.

“And when that sack gives way inside you,” Cardigan had explained, “you’ll go like that!” He snapped a forefinger and thumb to drive the fact home.

After that it was merely a matter of common sense to believe, and now, sure that he was about to die.  Kent had acted.  He was acting in the full health of his mind and in extreme cognizance of the paralyzing shock he was contributing as a final legacy to the world at large, or at least to that part of it which knew him or was interested.  The tragedy of the thing did not oppress him.  A thousand times in his life he had discovered that humor and tragedy were very closely related, and that there were times when only the breadth of a hair separated the two.  Many times he had seen a laugh change suddenly to tears, and tears to laughter.