know what it is to be knifed socially. It's different with you; you're
an American citizen, a countryman of hers. You understand?"

"Yes," I answered tartly. "But I don't understand how you can stomach
this sort of existence. What is there in it? Where is the profit or
satisfaction in this kind of thing, for you? Will the man in the ranks
get credit for taming the Northwest when his work is done? Why the devil
don't you quit the job? Cut loose and be a free agent again."

"It is a temptation, the way things have come up in the last day or
two," he mused. "I'd like to be foot-loose, so I could work it out
without any string attached to me. But there are only two ways I could
get out of the Force, and neither is open. I might desert, which would
be a dirty way to sneak out of a thing I went into deliberately; or, if
they were minded to allow me, I could buy my discharge--and I haven't
the price. Besides, I like the game and I don't know that I want to quit
it. The life isn't so bad. It's your rabidly independent point of view.
A man that can't obey orders is not likely to climb to a position where
he can give them. What the dickens would become of the cow-outfits," he
challenged, "if every stockhand refused to take orders from the foreman
and owners? Do you stand on your dignity when La Pere tells you to do
certain things in a certain way?"

I shrugged my shoulders. There was just enough truth in his words to
make them hard to confute, and, anyway, I was not in the mood for that
sort of argument. But I was very sure that I would rather be a
forty-dollar-a-month cowpuncher than a sergeant in the Mounted Police.

"That fellow with her is the big gun here, is he?" I reverted to Lyn and
her affairs.