Raw gold

We were standing in a brushy pocket on the side of a hill, and as there was no immediate danger of our being seen, MacRae continued, by the aid of the glasses, to follow the mov...

Whereas Lessard had acted the martinet with MacRae, he took another tack and became the very essence of affability toward me. (I'd have enjoyed punching his proud head, for all...

Three days later MacRae and I scaled the steep bank at the west end of the cliff and threw ourselves, panting, on the level that ran up to the sheer drop-off. When we had regain...

I don't believe a detailed account of how we spent that night would be classed as wildly interesting; if memory serves me right, it was a bleak, hungry, comfortless passage of t...

It took us all of the next day to make the trip to Stony Crossing and back by way of the place where Rutter was buried. Goodell had no fancy, he said, for a night camp on the pr...

I sat where I was for a while, fingering my sore head and keeping my thoughts to myself, for I had a keen sense of the mood he was in. For the second time, through no fault of h...

It transpired, however, that before we reached Bat Perkins' cabin Mac got an unexpected answer to one of the questions he intended to ask. As we turned the corner of a rambling...

Being aware that it was near the time Goodell had named for starting, I returned to the stables, and, getting my horse, rode to the commissary. There I found Goodell engineering...

Piegan shortly proved that he made no vain boast when he asserted his ability to follow their track. A lifetime on the plains, and a natural fitness for the life, had made him o...

With that opposing force behind us, we bore away across the shrouded benches, straight for the mouth of Sage Creek. What method we would pursue when we got there was not altoget...

For the next hour or two I poked aimlessly around the post buildings, chafing at the forced inaction and wondering what I would better do after I'd gone with the squad of redcoa...

From then until near noon we worked our passage if ever men did. On the high benches it was not so bad for the springy, porous turf soaked up the excessive moisture and held its...

The policeman's shoulders stiffened, and he put one foot on the keg. He made no other move; but if ever a man's back was eloquent of determination, his was. From where I lay I c...

But they did not come. One of them must have seen Lessard fall, for at the crack of MacRae's gun men and horses, already half-hidden by the thickening smoke, vanished into the b...

We knew, even as our fingers instinctively closed on the handles of our six-shooters, that we had not come upon the men we wanted; in such a case there would have been an exchan...

"We appear to have got considerably the worst of this transaction," I observed. "The La Pere outfit is shy something like ten thousand dollars--we're afoot, minus everything but...

How many of us, I wonder, can look back over the misty, half-forgotten years and not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cut against the sky-line of memory? Years t...

At the foot of the long slope on which we stood Milk River glinted in the sunshine, deceptively beautiful--a shining example of the truth of that old saw about distance lending...

When I spoke of holding a council of war, I did so largely in a figurative sense. Literally, we set about reviving Hicks, with a view to learning from him what had become of Lyn...

Once clear of the buffalo-hunters' camp, MacRae and I paired off and speedily began to compare notes, where we had been, what we had done, how the world had used us in the five...

All things considered, it was a joyous knot of humanity that gathered on that sand-bar--if one excepts the two plunderers who were tied hard and fast, their most cheerful outloo...

Twenty minutes after the sunset gun awoke the echoes along Battle Creek we slipped quietly into Fort Walsh and drew rein before the official quarters of the officer of the day;...

We stumbled along, close up, for the thick-piled clouds still hung their light-obscuring banners over the sky. Three yards apart we became invisible to each other. I followed be...

When we reached high ground again the twilight was fading to a semicircle of bloodshot gray in the northwest. The wind still blew squarely in our faces. Down in the coulée we ha...