Keith found himself fighting to keep his eyes straight ahead when he met a girl or a woman.  Never had he believed fully and utterly in the angelhood of the feminine until now.  He passed perhaps a dozen on the way to barracks, and he was overwhelmed with the desire to stop and feast his eyes upon each one of them.  He had never been a lover of women; he admired them, he believed them to be the better part of man, he had worshiped his mother, but his heart had been neither glorified nor broken by a passion for the opposite sex.  Now, to the bottom of his soul, he worshiped that dozen!  Some of them were homely, some of them were plain, two or three of them were pretty, but to Keith their present physical qualifications made no difference.  They were white women, and they were glorious, every one of them!  The plainest of them was lovely.  He wanted to throw up his hat and shout in sheer joy.  Four years—­and now he was back in angel land!  For a space he forgot McDowell.

His head was in a whirl when he came to barracks.  Life was good, after all.  It was worth fighting for, and he was bound fight.  He went straight to McDowell’s office.  A moment after his knock on the door the Inspector’s secretary appeared.

“The Inspector is busy, sir,” he said in response to Keith’s inquiry.  “I’ll tell him—­”

“That I am here on a very important matter,” advised Keith.  “He will admit me when you tell him that I bring information regarding a certain John Keith.”

The secretary disappeared through an inner door.  It seemed not more than ten seconds before he was back.  “The Inspector will see you, sir.”

Keith drew a deep breath to quiet the violent beating of his heart.  In spite of all his courage he felt upon him the clutch of a cold and foreboding hand, a hand that seemed struggling to drag him back.  And again he heard Conniston’s dying voice whispering to him, “Remember, old chap, you win or lose the moment MCDOWELL first sets his eyes on you!”

Was Conniston right?

Win or lose, he would play the game as the Englishman would have played it.  Squaring his shoulders he entered to face McDowell, the cleverest man-hunter in the Northwest.

V

Keith’s first vision, as he entered the office of the Inspector of Police, was not of McDowell, but of a girl.  She sat directly facing him as he advanced through the door, the light from a window throwing into strong relief her face and hair.  The effect was unusual.  She was strikingly handsome.  The sun, giving to the room a soft radiance, lit up her hair with shimmering gold; her eyes, Keith saw, were a clear and wonderful gray—­and they stared at him as he entered, while the poise of her body and the tenseness of her face gave evidence of sudden and unusual emotion.  These things Keith observed in a flash; then he turned toward McDowell.