Chapter III. A-Fishing We Will Go

But Sergeant Cameron was done with the Service for ever. An accumulating current of events had swept him from his place in the Force, as an unheeding traveler crossing a mountain torrent is swept from his feet by a raging freshet. The sudden blazing of his smoldering love into a consuming flame for the clumsy country girl, for whom two years ago he had cherished a pitying affection, threw up upon the horizon of his life and into startling clearness a new and absorbing objective. In one brief quarter of an hour his life had gathered itself into a single purpose; a purpose, to wit, to make a home to which he might bring this girl he had come to love with such swift and fierce intensity, to make a home for her where she could be his own, and for ever. All the vehement passion of his Highland nature was concentrated upon the accomplishing of this purpose. That he should ever have come to love Mandy Haley, the overworked slattern on her father's Ontario farm, while a thing of wonder, was not the chief wonder to him. His wonder now was that he should ever have been so besottedly dull of wit and so stupidly unseeing as to allow the unlovely exterior of the girl to hide the radiant soul within. That in two brief years she had transformed herself into a woman of such perfectly balanced efficiency in her profession as nurse, and a creature of such fascinating comeliness, was only another proof of his own insensate egotism, and another proof, too, of those rare powers that slumbered in the girl's soul unknown to herself and to her world. Small wonder that with her unfolding Cameron's whole world should become new.

Hard upon this experience the unexpected news of his father's death and of the consequent winding up of the tangled affairs of the estate threw upon Cameron the responsibility of caring for his young sister, now left alone in the Homeland, except for distant kindred of whom they had but slight knowledge.

A home was immediately and imperatively necessary, and hence he must at once, as a preliminary, be married. Cameron fortunately remembered that young Fraser, whom he had known in his Fort Macleod days, was dead keen to get rid of the "Big Horn Ranch." This ranch lay nestling cozily among the foothills and in sight of the towering peaks of the Rockies, and was so well watered with little lakes and streams that when his eyes fell upon it Cameron was conscious of a sharp pang of homesickness, so suggestive was it of the beloved Glen Cuagh Oir of his own Homeland. There would be a thousand pounds or more left from his father's estate. Everybody said it was a safe, indeed a most profitable investment.

A week's leave of absence sufficed for Cameron to close the deal with Fraser, a reckless and gallant young Highlander, whose chivalrous soul, kindling at Cameron's romantic story, prompted a generous reduction in the price of the ranch and its outfit complete. Hence when Mandy's shrewd and experienced head had