"
"It is a temptation, the way things have come up in the last day or
two," he mused. "I'd like to be foot-loose, so I could work it out
without any string attached to me. But there are only two ways I could
get out of the Force, and neither is open. I might desert, which would
be a dirty way to sneak out of a thing I went into deliberately; or, if
they were minded to allow me, I could buy my discharge--and I haven't
the price. Besides, I like the game and I don't know that I want to quit
it. The life isn't so bad. It's your rabidly independent point of view.
A man that can't obey orders is not likely to climb to a position where
he can give them. What the dickens would become of the cow-outfits," he
challenged, "if every stockhand refused to take orders from the foreman
and owners? Do you stand on your dignity when La Pere tells you to do
certain things in a certain way?"
I shrugged my shoulders. There was just enough truth in his words to
make them hard to confute, and, anyway, I was not in the mood for that
sort of argument. But I was very sure that I would rather be a
forty-dollar-a-month cowpuncher than a sergeant in the Mounted Police.
"That fellow with her is the big gun here, is he?" I reverted to Lyn and
her affairs.
"Yes," Mac answered shortly, "that was Lessard.
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