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“It’s clear,” said Halby, “that they trespassed, and they haven’t proved their right to her.”

“Tonnerre, what a thinker!” said Pierre, mocking. Halby did not notice. His was a solid sense of responsibility.

“She is of age?” he half asked, half mused.

“She’s twenty-one,” answered the old man, with difficulty.

“Old enough to set the world right,” suggested Pierre, still mocking.

“She was forced away, she regarded you as her natural protector, she believed you her father: they broke the law,” said the soldier.

“There was Moses, and Solomon, and Caesar, and Socrates, and now…!” murmured Pierre in assumed abstraction.

A red spot burned on Halby’s high cheekbone for a minute, but he persistently kept his temper.

“I’m expected elsewhere,” he said at last. “I’m only one man, yet I wish I could go to-day–even alone. But–“

“But you have a heart,” said Pierre. “How wonderful–a heart! And there’s the half a lung, and the boneset and camomile tea, and the blister, and the girl with an eye like a spot of rainbow, and the sacred law in a Remington rifle! Well, well! And to do it in the early morning–to wait in the shelter of the trees till some go to look after the horses, then enter the house, arrest those inside, and lay low for the rest.”

Halby looked over at Pierre astonished. Here was raillery and good advice all in a piece.

“It isn’t wise to go alone, for if there’s trouble and I should go down, who’s to tell the truth? Two could do it; but one–no, it isn’t wise, though it would look smart enough.”

“Who said to go alone?” asked Pierre, scrawling on the table with a burnt match.

“I have no men.”

Pierre looked up at the wall.

“Throng has a good Snider there,” he said. “Bosh! Throng can’t go.”

The old man coughed and strained.

“If it wasn’t–only-half a lung, and I could carry the boneset ‘long with us.”

Pierre slid off the table, came to the old man, and, taking him by the arms, pushed him gently into a chair. “Sit down; don’t be a fool, Throng,” he said. Then he turned to Halby: “You’re a magistrate–make me a special constable; I’ll go, monsieur le capitaine–of no company.”

Halby stared. He knew Pierre’s bravery, his ingenuity and daring. But this was the last thing he expected: that the malicious, railing little half-breed would work with him and the law. Pierre seemed to understand his thoughts, for he said: “It is not for you. I am sick for adventure, and then there is mademoiselle–such a finger she has for a ven’son pudding.”

Without a word Halby wrote on a leaf in his notebook, and presently handed the slip to Pierre. “That’s your commission as a special constable,” he said, “and here’s the seal on it.” He handed over a pistol.

Pierre raised his eyebrows at it, but Halby continued: “It has the Government mark. But you’d better bring Throng’s rifle too.”

Throng sat staring at the two men, his hands nervously shifting on his knees. “Tell Liddy,” he said, “that the last batch of bread was sour–Duc ain’t no good-an’ that I ain’t had no relish sence she left. Tell her the cough gits lower down all the time. ‘Member when she tended that felon o’ yourn, Pierre?”

Pierre looked at a sear on his finger and nodded. “She cut it too young; but she had the nerve! When do you start, captain? It’s an eighty-mile ride.”

“At once,” was the reply. “We can sleep to-night in the Jim-a-long-Jo” (a hut which the Company had built between two distant posts), “and get there at dawn day after to-morrow. The snow is light and we can travel quick. I have a good horse, and you–“

“I have my black Tophet. He’ll travel with your roan as on one snaffle-bar. That roan–you know where he come from?”

“From the Dolright stud, over the Border.”

“That’s wrong. He come from Greystop’s paddock, where my Tophet was foaled; they are brothers. Yours was stole and sold to the Gover’ment; mine was bought by good hard money. The law the keeper of stolen goods, eh? But these two will go cinch to cinch all the way, like two brothers–like you and me.”