P.
quartermaster had said he'd buy if they were good. I turned them over
the afternoon I reached Walsh, and inside of forty-eight hours I was
headed home with the sale-money--ten thousand dollars--in big bills, so
that I could strap it round my middle. I remember that on the hill south
of the post the three of us, two horse-wranglers and myself, flipped a
dollar to see whether we kept to the Assiniboine trail or struck across
country. It was a mighty simple transaction, but it produced some
startling results for me, that same coin-spinning. The eagle came
uppermost, and the eagle meant the open prairie for us. So we aimed for
Stony Crossing, and let our horses jog; there were three of us, well
mounted, and we had plenty of grub on a pack-horse; it seemed that our
homeward trip should be a pleasant jaunt. It certainly never entered my
head that I should soon have ample opportunity to see how high the
"Riders of the Plains" stacked up when they undertook to enforce
Canadian law and keep intact the peace and dignity of the Crown.
We had started early that morning, and by the time we thought of camping
for dinner we saw ahead of us what we could tell was a white man's camp.
It wasn't far, so we kept on, and presently it developed that we had
accidentally come upon old Piegan Smith.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25