The Lot of a Policeman is Not Always a Happy One.

By HARRY E. TAYLOR

In Summer and Winter,

In Sunshine and Snow, Duty Sometimes Calls for Super-Human Endurance—
A Story of Immigrant Life in a New Country Where Solitude and a Guilty

JE BROWN BLANKETS, dirt-stif-
ned, were as warm and comforting as
o sheets of plasterboard. Whenever I
-aightened my legs my feet would push
co a pile of potatoes, cold, hard, and
itty. It was early February, and Rab-
ak kept the potatoes in his bed to pre-
nt them from freezing.

The one-room cabin was hot now, but
e wood fire, roaring in the litttle stove,
ould have short life. Long before morn-
e, the cold would come stealing, creep-
¢ through the cracks around doors and
indows, oozing through gaps in the log
inking. Nailheads would become white-
osted, the water in the drinking pail
ould grow solid. Dirt-filled air cells in
e unwashed blankets would retain but
tle of one’s body warmth, and half way
rough the night the cabin would be cold
ith that sour stuffy coldness which seems
uch colder than the outdoors.

But our impressions, our sensations,
e all relative. After stumbling around
r two long days, and a still longer night,
a prairie blizzard, the warmth of this
rt-ridden bachelor hovel was comfort
limited.

Rabchak sat upon a block of wood near
e stove, watching with dull eyes the
reaks of vivid red pulsing up and down
e rust-thinned stovepipes. Black hair,
ickly tangled, hung low on his narrow
rehead, half covered his ears, curled
out his coat collar. He wore a lot of

thes, and his vest was of home-tanned

Conscience Outwits the Law.

calfskin, with the hair on. It smelled like
a horse barn. Around his feet and wrap-
ped over his heavy fustian pants were
strips of gunny sacking. He unwound
these now, yards and yards of them, bar-
ing grimed feet which looked as hard and
dark as walnut. I wondered if, when he
got into bed beside me, his feet would
feel like the potatoes. But if they did,
I decided that they could not be any worse
than the fleas. I had watched the fleas
hopping around Rabchak’s collar all even-
ing. They would emerge, like forest ban-
dits, in little crowds, make hurried forays
into the open, then scurry back into the
warmer fastness of layers of unwashed
clothing. After Rabchak would be in bed
beside me, the fleas would get very lively,
but I did not care. All I wanted was heat.
Any kind of heat, for ever and ever.
After I once stopped shivering I knew
that, despite potatoes, fleas, and filth, I
would sleep the clock around. Each time
I closed my eyes I would still see a whirl-
ing void of whiteness, a swirling night-
mare of chaotic snowflakes. Thick flalxes
and little flakes, advancing, funnelling,
receding, driving horizontally, like a form-
less river, pouring vertically like a night-
mare waterfall, revolving like a gigantic,
misty wheel.

Give a horse his head in a blizzard, say
the wiseacres, and he will take you home
every time. Don’t you believe it! When
that roaring white cataract closes in, when
all sense of direction, all sense of smell

and hearing, is tossed and flung and
jumbled, a horse will turn tail to the
ever-changing wind and become as hope-
lessly lost as his rider. So, you ride on
until your horse’s knees buckle, then you
walk until your own knees buckle—then
you ride some more. You stumble into
drifts which you cannot see, you lift high
your feet, to step over drifts which aren’t
there—and all the time, un-meaning, dis-
connected fragments of thought keep re-
iterating, round and round, over and over,
in the cold, empty box that is your head.
Somehow, you mechanically remember
two things—to keep moving, and to hold
on to the reins. The drowsiness of utter
fatigue is intensified by the hypnotic spin-
ning of that ever-shifting wall of white

With Compliments to the
B. €. Police

¢

J. C. PIDGEON

+

Wells, British Columbia

Mine Office:

IGHTEENTH EDITION

The Cariboo Gold Quartz
Wining Company Limited

(Non-Personal Liability)

WELLS, B.C.

at “i
ce

PHONE 18

NY THE
| Famous
WHOLESALE ond RETAIL

FRESH QUALITY BREAD, CAKES
AND PASTRIES DAILY

Bakery

J. A. WILSON, Proprietor

*

WILLIAMS LAKE, B.C.

Page One Hundred and Forty-nine