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The “Error of the Day” may be defined as the “The difference between the distance or range which must be put upon the sights in order to hit the target and the actual distance from the gun to the target.”–Admiralty Note.

A great naval gun never fires twice alike. It varies from day to day, and expert allowance has to be made in sighting every time it is fired. Variations in atmosphere, condition of ammunition, and the wear of the gun are the contributory causes to the ever-varying “Error of the Day.”

“Say, ain’t he pretty?”

“A Jim-dandy–oh, my!”

“What’s his price in the open market?”

“Thirty millions–I think not.”

Then was heard the voice of Billy Goat–his name was William Goatry—-

“Out in the cold world, out in the street,
Nothing to wear and nothing to eat,
Fatherless, motherless, sadly I roam,
Child of misfortune, I’m driven from home.”

A loud laugh followed, for Billy Goat was a popular person at Kowatin, in the Saskatchewan country. He had an inimitable drollery, heightened by a cast in his eye, a very large mouth, and a round, good-humored face; also he had a hand and arm like iron, and was altogether a great man on a “spree.”

There had been a two days’ spree at Kowatin, for no other reason than that there had been great excitement over the capture and subsequent escape of a prairie-rover who had robbed the contractor’s money-chest at the rail-head on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Forty miles from Kowatin he had been caught by, and escaped from, the tall, brown-eyed man with the hard-bitten face who leaned against the open window of the tavern, looking indifferently at the jeering crowd before him. For a police officer, he was not unpopular with them, but he had been a failure for once, and, as Billy Goat had said, “It tickled us to death to see a rider of the plains off his trolley–on the cold, cold ground, same as you and me.”

They did not undervalue him. If he had been less a man than he was, they would not have taken the trouble to cover him with their drunken ribaldry. He had scored off them in the past in just such sprees as this, when he had the power to do so, and used the power good-naturedly and quietly–but used it.

Then he was Sergeant Foyle, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, on duty in a district as large as the United Kingdom. And he had no greater admirer than Billy Goat, who now reviled him. Not without cause, in a way, for he had reviled himself to this extent that, when the prairie-rover, Halbeck, escaped on the way to Prince Albert, after six months’ hunt for him and a final capture in the Kowatin district, Foyle resigned the Force before the Commissioner could reproach him or call him to account. Usually so exact, so certain of his target, some care had not been taken, he had miscalculated, and there had been the Error of the Day. Whatever it was, it had seemed to him fatal; and he had turned his face from the barrack-yard.

Then he had made his way to the Happy Land Hotel at Kowatin, to begin life as “a free and independent gent on the loose,” as Billy Goat had said. To resign had seemed extreme; because, though the Commissioner was vexed at Halbeck’s escape, Foyle was the best non-commissioned officer in the Force. He had frightened horse-thieves and bogus land-agents and speculators out of the country; had fearlessly tracked down a criminal or a band of criminals when the odds were heavy against him. He carried on his cheek the scars of two bullets, and there was one white lock in his brown hair where an arrow had torn the scalp away as, alone, he drove into the Post a score of Indians, fresh from raiding the cattle of an immigrant trailing north.