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“I saw a woman get an awful fall once,” Jim said, suddenly. “Her bones were broken in twelve places, and there wasn’t a spot on her body without injury. They set and fixed up every broken bone except one. It was split down. They didn’t dare perform the operation; she couldn’t stand it. There was a limit to pain, and she had reached the boundary. Two years went by, and she got better every way, but inside her leg those broken pieces of bone were rubbing against each other. She tried to avoid the inevitable operation, but Nature said, ‘You must do it, or die in the end.’ She yielded. Then came the long preparations for the operation. Her heart shrank, her mind got tortured. She’d suffered too much. She pulled herself together, and said, ‘I must conquer this shrinking body of mine by my will. How shall I do it?’ Something within her said, ‘Think and do for others. Forget yourself.’ And so, as they got her ready for her torture, she visited hospitals, agonized cripple as she was, and smiled and talked to the sick and broken, telling them of her own miseries endured and dangers faced, of the boundary of human suffering almost passed; and so she got her courage for her own trial. And she came out all right in the end. Well, that’s the way I’ve felt sometimes. But I’m ready for my operation now whenever it comes, and it’s coming, I know. Let it come when it must.” He smiled.

There came a knock at the door, and presently Sewell entered. “The Commissioner wishes you to come over, sir,” he said.

“I was just coming, Sewell. Is all ready for the start?”

“Everything’s ready, sir, but there’s to be a change of orders. Something’s happened–a bad job up in the Cree country, I think.”

A few minutes later Jim was in the Commissioner’s office. The murder of a Hudson’s Bay Company’s man had been committed in the Cree country. The stranger whom Jim and Sally had seen riding across the plains had brought the news for thirty miles, word of the murder having been carried from point to point. The Commissioner was uncertain what to do, as the Crees were restless through want of food and the absence of game, and a force sent to capture Arrowhead, the chief who had committed the murder, might precipitate trouble. Jim solved the problem by offering to go alone and bring the chief into the post. It was two hundred miles to the Cree encampment, and the journey had its double dangers.

Another officer was sent on the expedition for which Jim had been preparing, and he made ready to go upon his lonely duty. His wife did not know till three days after he had gone what the nature of his mission was.

IV

Jim made his journey in good weather with his faithful dogs alone, and came into the camp of the Crees armed with only a revolver. If he had gone with ten men, there would have been an instant melee, in which he would have lost his life. This is what the chief had expected, had prepared for; but Jim was more formidable alone, with power far behind him which could come with force and destroy the tribe, if resistance was offered, than with fifty men. His tongue had a gift of terse and picturesque speech, powerful with a people who had the gift of imagination. With five hundred men ready to turn him loose in the plains without dogs or food, he carried himself with a watchful coolness and complacent determination which got home to their minds with great force.

For hours the struggle for the murderer went on, a struggle of mind over inferior mind and matter.

Arrowhead was a chief whose will had never been crossed by his own people, and to master that will by a superior will, to hold back the destructive force which, to the ignorant minds of the braves, was only a natural force of defence, meant a task needing more than authority behind it. For the very fear of that authority put in motion was an incentive to present resistance–to stave off the day of trouble. The faces that surrounded Jim were thin with hunger, and the murder that had been committed by the chief had, as its origin, the foolish replies of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s man to their demand for supplies. Arrowhead had killed him with his own hand.