XVI. "Stay at Your Post, Lad"

Relieved from his station at the Fort, Shock was able to devote himself entirely to the western part of his field, which embraced the Loon Lake district and extended twenty-five miles up to the Pass, and he threw himself with redoubled energy into his work of exploration and organisation. Long ago his little cayuse had been found quite unequal to the task of keeping pace with the tremendous energy of his driver, and so for the longer journeys Shock had come to depend mainly upon Bob, the great rangey sorrel sent him by the Hamilton boys, the only condition attached to the gift being that he should allow Bob to visit the ranch at least once a month. And so it came that Shock and his sorrel broncho became widely known over the ranges of all that country. Many a little shack in far away valleys, where a woman with her children lived in isolated seclusion from all the world, he discovered and brought into touch with the world about, and by means of books and magazines and illustrated papers brought to hearts sick with longing some of the colour and brightness from the great world beyond, so often fondly longed for. Many a cowboy, wild and reckless, with every link of kin-ship broken, an unrelated unit of humanity keeping lonely watch over his bunch of cattle, found in Shock a friend, and established through him anew a bond with human society. The hour spent with Shock in riding around the cattle often brought to this bit of human driftwood a new respect for himself, a new sense of responsibility for life, and a new estimate of the worth of his manhood. Away up in the Pass, too, where the miners lived and wrought under conditions wretched, debasing, and fraught with danger, and where in the forest-camps the lumbermen lived lives more wholesome, but more lonely, Shock found scope for the full energy of his passion to help and serve.

"A hospital is what they need up here, doctor!" he exclaimed one day after they had made a tour through the shacks and bunks where men sick and injured lay in their uncared for misery. "A hospital is what they want, and some kind of a homelike place where they can meet together. And by God's help we'll get this, too, when our hands are somewhat free. We have all we can do for the next few weeks." And so they had.

Shock had early recognised that the evils which were so rampant, and that exercised such a baneful influence in the community, were due not so much to any inherent love of vice as to the conditions under which the men were forced to live. Life was a lonely thing on the ranges, without colour, without variety, and men plunged into debauchery from sheer desperate reaction from monotony. Shock believed that, if there could be established a social centre offering intellectual interest and physical recreation, much could be done to banish the vices that were fast becoming imbedded in the very life and character of the people. And so he planned the erection of a building that