And the brigade loved O'Doone, though it beat him, for these men of the strong north love courage and daring. The epic of the lost scow--how there were men who saw it disappear from under their very eyes, floating upward and afterward riding swiftly away in the skies--is told and retold by strong-faced men, deep in whose eyes are the smoldering flames of an undying superstition, and these same men thrill as they tell over again the strange and unbelievable story of Hartshope, the aristocratic Englishman who set off into the North in all the glory of monocle and unprecedented luggage, and how he joined in a tribal war, became a chief of the Dog Ribs, and married a dark-eyed, sleek-haired, little Indian beauty, who is now the mother of his children.
But deepest and most thrilling of all the stories they tell are the stories of the long arm of the Law--that arm which reaches for two thousand miles from Athabasca Landing to the polar sea, the arm Of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
And of these it is the story of Jim Kent we are going to tell, of Jim Kent and of Marette, that wonderful little goddess of the Valley of Silent Men, in whose veins there must have run the blood of fighting men--and of ancient queens. A story of the days before the railroad came.