“I?” fairly shouted Corporal Manan. “I arrest young Wolf-Willow?  No, sir!  You’ll have to get another policeman.”

“You’ll do as you receive orders,” blurted the captain, then added more graciously, “Why, Manan, don’t you see how much better it is to arrest him?  Scotty is after him with a shotgun, and he’ll kill the boy on sight.  Wolf-Willow is safest here.  You leave at daylight, and bring him in, if you have to handcuff him to do it.”

Corporal Manan spent a miserable night.  Never had a task been so odious to him.  He loved the bright, handsome Cree boy, and his heart was sore that he had gone wrong, after giving such promise of a fine, useful manhood.  But the white settlers’ cattle must be protected, and orders were orders—­a soldier must obey his superior officer.  So, at daybreak, the fastest horse in the service was saddled, and Corporal Manan was hard on the trail of the young Cree thief.

But Little Wolf-Willow knew nothing of all this.  Far away up the northern plains a terrible bit of news had come to him.  At the Hudson’s Bay post he had been told that his old grandfather had been caught stealing cattle, that the North-West Mounted Police were after him, that they would surely capture him and put him in Regina jail.  The boy was horrified.  His own old grandfather a thief!  He knew that old warrior well enough—­knew that he was innocent of intentional crime; knew that, should the scarlet-coated police give chase, the old Indian would never understand, but would probably fire and kill the man who attempted to arrest him.  The boy knew that with his own perfect knowledge of English, he could explain everything away if only he could be at his grandfather’s in time, or else intercept the police before they should arrest him.  His grandfather would shoot; the boy knew it.  Then there would be bloodshed added to theft.  But Big Wolf-Willow’s lodge was ninety miles distant, and it was the middle of a long, severe winter.  What was to be done?  One thing only—­he, Little Wolf-Willow, must ride, ride, ride!  He must not waste an hour, or the prison at Regina would have his grandfather, and perhaps a gallant soldier of the king would meet his death doing his duty.

Thrusting a pouch of pemmican into his shirt front, and fastening his buckskin coat tightly across his chest, he flung himself on to his wiry little cayuse, faced about to the north-east, and struck the trail for the lodges of his own people.  Then began the longest, most terrible ride of his life.  Afterwards, when he became a man, he often felt that he lived through years and years during that ninety-mile journey.  On all sides of him stretched the blinding white, snow-covered prairie.  Not a tree, not an object to mark the trail.  The wind blew straight and level directly down from the Arctic zone, icy, cutting, numbing.  It whistled past his ears, pricking and stinging his face like a whiplash.  The cold, yellow sunlight on the snow blinded him,