But, man, I never thought to see you up here. I
thought you'd settled down for keeps; supposed you were playing
major-domo for the Double R down on the Canadian River, and the father
of a family by this time. How we do get switched around in this old
world."
"Don't we, though," he said reflectively. "It's a great game. You never
know when nor where your trail is liable to fork and lead you to new
countries and new faces, or maybe plumb over the big divide. Oh, well,
it'll be all the same a hundred years from now, as Bill Frayne used to
say."
"You've turned cynic," I told him, and he smiled.
"No," he declared, "I rather think I'd be classed as a philosopher; if
you could call a man a philosopher who can enjoy hammering over this
bald country, chasing up whisky-runners and hazing non-treaty Indians
onto reservations, and raising hell generally in the name of the law.
Still, I don't take life as seriously as I used to. What's the use? We
eat and drink and sleep and work and fight because it's the nature of us
two-legged brutes; but there's no use getting excited about it, because
things never turn out exactly the way you expect them to, anyhow."
"If that's your philosophy of life," I bantered, "you ought to make a
rattling good policeman. I can see where a calm, dispassionate front
would save a man a heap of trouble, at this sort of thing.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28