Sergeant Dick of the Royal Mounted Police : $b A thrilling story of the Canadian woods

Sergeant John Dick, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was leading his horse up a steep and rugged gorge in the great southwest region of Canada. It was close by the United States border, and practically in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. A fine, military-looking figure, Sergeant Dick cut, in his scarlet tunic, riding-breeches, and “Stetson” or broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat. He carried his rifle at the trail in his left hand, and had the bridle of his horse looped over his right arm. The animal was limping painfully. It had got a thorn in its hoof lower down the trail, where this was on the open prairie, and had gone dead lame before its master discovered its injury and could extract the thorn. The accident was particularly annoying to Sergeant Dick, for it was almost imperative he should be at the Paquita Island Reservation, just over the United States border, by sundown, and the lord of day was already well down the western sky. A howling hurricane of wind made progress still more difficult, blowing dead in his teeth as it was. No ordinary gusty gale was this, but a ceaseless avalanche of wind tearing with a terrific howl along the gorge, raging against man and beast in insensate fury. At times Sergeant Dick would turn his back to the storm, and the horse, with head also turned, would sidle along almost broadside to it, the better to keep its feet and hold its own. Man and horse were thus maneuvering one of the turns in the gorge when, high above the howl of the hurricane, rang the sharp, air-splitting crack of a rifle close by—just in front—and simultaneously Sergeant Dick staggered and nearly fell, feeling a sudden numbing, burning pain upon the right side of the head, above his ear. His Stetson hat, which had so long resisted the tugging of the wind, was whirled from his head, and went rolling like a wheel, on its brim, away down the pass before the gale. With a thrill of anger, rather than of any bodily fear, the sergeant promptly dived behind his horse, drawing it by the reins at the same time fully broadside across the rocky pass. As he did so, he beheld for the first time a startling tableau or drama being enacted ahead, round the bend in the gorge. The track still ascended, but the precipitous,…