and the shingled roof—red. A strongly-guyed flagstaff jutting out from one gable, and copies of the "Game" and "Fire Acts" tacked on the door gave the abode an unmistakable official aspect. Over the doorway was nailed a huge, prehistoric-looking buffalo-skull, bleached white with the years—the time-honoured insignia of the R.N.W.M.P. being a buffalo-head, which is also stamped on the regimental badge and button.

Dumping off the kit-bags, the two men drove round to the stable in the rear of the main dwelling, where they unhitched and put up the team. The sergeant led the way into the house. Passing through a small store-house and kitchen they emerged into the living room. On a miniature scale it was a replica of one of the Post barrack-rooms, except that the table boasted a tartan-rugged covering, that two or three easy chairs were scattered around, and some calfskin mats partially covered the painted hardwood floor. The walls, for the most part were adorned with many unframed copies of pictures from the brush of that great Western artist, Charles Russell, and black and white sketches cut from various illustrated papers. Three corners of the room contained cots, one of which the sergeant assigned to Redmond. The room, with its big stove, in a way looked comfortable enough, and was regimentally neat and clean and homelike.

George peered into the front room beyond which bore quite a judicial aspect. At one end of it a small dais supported a severe-looking arm-chair and a long flat desk, on which were piled foolscap, blank legal forms, law-books, and the Bible. In front was a long, form-like bench, with a back to it. At the rear of the room were two strongly-built cells, with barred doors. Around the walls were scattered a double row of small chairs and, on a big, green-baize-covered board next the cells hung a brightly burnished assortment of handcuffs and leg-irons.

"'Tis here we hould coort," Slavin informed him, "whin we have any shtiffs tu be thried."

Opening the front door George lugged in his bedding and kit-bags and, depositing them on his cot, flung off his fur coat, cap, and serge. Slavin divested himself likewise and, as the burly, bull-necked man stood there, slowly filling his pipe, Redmond was able to scan the face and massive proportions of his superior more closely.

Standing well over six feet, for the presentment of vast, though perchance clumsy, gorilla-like strength, George reflected with slight awe that he had never seen the man's equal. His wide-spreading shoulders were more rounded than square; his deep, arching chest, powerful, stocky nether limbs and disproportionately long, huge-biceped arms seeming to fit him as an exponent of the mat rather than the gloves. Truly a daunting figure to meet in a close-quarter, rough-and-tumble encounter! thought Redmond. The top of his head was completely bald; his thick, straight black brows indicating that what little close-cropped iron-gray hair remained must originally have been coal-black in colour. His Irish-blue eyes, alternately dreamy and twinklingly alert, were deeply set in a high-cheeked-boned, bronzed face, with a long upper-lipped, grimly-humorous mouth. Its expression in repose gave subtle warning that its owner possessed in a marked degree the strongly melancholic, emotional, and choleric temperament of his race. There was no moroseness—no hardness in it, but rather the taciturnity that invariably settles upon the face of those dwellers of the range who, perforce, live much alone with their thoughts. Sheathed in mail and armed, that face and bulky figure to some imaginations might have found its prototype in some huge, grim, war-worn "man-at-arms" of mediaeval times. Redmond judged him to be somewhere in his forties; forty-two was his exact age as he ascertained later.

In curious contrast to his somewhat formidable exterior seemed his mild, gentle, soft-brogued voice. And with speech, his taciturn face relaxed insensibly into an almost genial expression, George noted.

Attracted by a cluster of pictures and photographs above and around the cot in the corner opposite his own, the young fellow crossed over and scanned them attentively. Tacked up with a random, reckless hand, the bizarre collection was typically significant of someone's whimsical, freakish tastes and personality. From the sublime to the ridiculous—and worse—subjects pious and impious, dreamily-beautiful and lewdly-vulgar, comic and tragic, also many splendid photographs were all jumbled together on the walls in a shockingly irresponsible fashion. Many of the pictures were unframed copies cut apparently from art and other journals; from theatrical and comic papers.

George gazed on them awhile in utterly bewildered astonishment; then, with a little hopeless ejaculation, swung around to the sergeant who met his despairing grin with benign composure.

"Whose cot's—"

"'Tis Yorke's," said Slavin simply. It was the first time he had mentioned that individual's name. He struck a match on the seat of his pants and standing with his feet apart and hands clasped behind his back smoked awhile contentedly.

"Saw ye iver th' like av that for divarsiment?" he continued, with a wave of his pipe at the heterogeneous array, "shtudy thim! an', by an' large ye have th' man himsilf. He's away on pay-day duty at th' Coalmore mines west av here—though by token, 'tis Billy Blythe at Banff shud be doin' ut, 'stead av me havin' tu sind a man from here. He shud be back on Number Four th' night."

His twinkling orbs under their black smudge of eyebrow appraised the junior constable with faint, musing interest. "A quare chap is Yorkey," he continued gently—shielding a match-flame and puffing with noisy respiration—"a good polisman—knows th' Criminal Code from A tu Z—eyah! but mighty quare. I misdoubt how th' tu av yez will get along." He sighed deeply, muttering half to himself, "I may have tu take shteps—this time! . . ."

A rather ominous beginning, thought George. But, curbing his natural curiosity, he resolutely held his peace, awaiting more enlightenment. This not being forthcoming—his superior having relapsed once more into taciturn silence—he turned again to Yorke's exhibits with pondering interest. Sounding far-off and indistinct in the frosty stillness of the bleak foothills came the faint echoes of a coyote's shrill "ki-yip-yapping"—again and again, as if endeavouring to convey some insidious message. George continued to stare at the pictures. Gad! what a strange fantastic mind the man must have! he mused—what rotten, erratic desecration to shove pictures indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of Cawnpore," Lottie Collins, scantily attired, in her song and dance "Tara-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," Sir Frederick Leighton's "Wedded," a gruesome depiction of a Chinese execution at Canton, an old-fashioned engraving of that dashing, debonair cavalry officer, "Major Hodson," of Indian Mutiny fame, George Robey, as a nurse-maid, wheeling Little Tich in a perambulator, the grim, torture-lined face of Slatin Pasha, a ridiculously obscene picture entitled "Two coons scoffing oysters for a wager," that glorious edifice the "Taj Mahal" of India, and so on. "Divarsiment" indeed!

To this ill-assorted admixture three exceptions only were grouped with any sense of reason. The central picture was a beautifully coloured reproduction of Sir Hubert Herkomer's famous masterpiece "The Last Muster." Lovers of art subjects are doubtless familiar with this immortal painting. It depicts a pathetic congregation of old, white-haired, war-worn pensioners attending divine service in the chapel of Old Chelsea Hospital, with the variegated lights from the stained-glass