childish frankness and said that it was terribly embarrassing to
have one's friends know that one was engaged to a consumptive.

Philip laughed as he thought of that. The laugh came so suddenly
and so explosively that Bram could have heard it a hundred yards
away, even with the wind blowing as it was. A consumptive! Philip
doubled up his arm until the hard muscles in it snapped. He drew
in a deep lungful of air, and forced it out again with a sound
like steam escaping from a valve. The NORTH had done that for him;
the north with its wonderful forests, its vast skies, its rivers,
and its lakes, and its deep snows--the north that makes a man out
of the husk of a man if given half a chance. He loved it. And
because he loved it, and the adventure of it, he had joined the
Police two years ago. Some day he would go back, just for the fun
of it; meet his old friends in his old clubs, and shock baby-eyed
Mignon to death with his good health.

He dropped these meditations as he thought of the mysterious man
he was following. During the course of his two years in the
Service he had picked up a great many odds and ends in the history
of Bram's life, and in the lives of the Johnsons who had preceded
him. He had never told any one how deeply interested he was. He
had, at times, made efforts to discuss the quality of Bram's
intelligence, but always he had failed to make others see and
understand his point of view. By the Indians and half-breeds of
the country in which he had lived, Bram was regarded as a monster
of the first order possessed of the conjuring powers of the devil
himself. By the police he was earnestly desired as the most
dangerous murderer at large in all the north, and the lucky man
who captured him, dead or alive, was sure of a sergeantcy.