served to bring about a state of things that is nearly unbelievable
when viewed in the light of modern love for efficiency. Young men,
with the fire of ambition burning in them and a proper scorn for mere
superficial ceremony, had to sweat their tempers and bow down beneath
the yoke of senile pompousness.

Strong, savage, powder-weaned Hill-tribesmen--inheritors of egoistic
independence and a love of loot--laughed loud and long and openly at
System that prevented officers from taking arms against them until
authority could come by delegate from somebody who slept. By that time
they would be across the border, quarrelling among themselves about
division of the plunder!

They had respect in plenty for the youth and virile middle age that
dealt with them on the rare occasions when a timely blow was loosed.
Then they had proof that from that strange, mad country overseas there
came men who could lead men--men who could strike, and who knew
enough to hold their hands when the sudden blow had told--just men,
who could keep their plighted word. No border thief pretended that the
British could not rule him; to a man, they laughed because the
possible was not imposed. And to the last bold, ruffianly iconoclast
they stole when, where, and what they dared.

Things altered strangely soon after Ralph Cunningham, with the
diffidence of youth but the blood of a line of soldiers leaping in him,
took charge of his tiny force of nondescripts. They were neither
soldiers nor police. Nominally, he was everybody's dog, and so were
they; actually he found himself at the head of a tiny department of
his own, because it was nobody's affair to give him orders. They had
deliberately turned him loose "to hang himself," and their hope that he