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Updated: June 14, 2025
The pioneers and ranchers of the frontier would never have made the West habitable had it not been for these wild cowboys, these hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-living rangers of the barrens, these easy, cool, laconic, simple young men whose blood was tinged with fire and who possessed a magnificent and terrible effrontery toward danger and death.
In Bill Brudenell he had a willing and sagacious lieutenant. In Abe Dodds, and in the hard-living expert prospector, Joe Saunders, he had a staff for his enterprise on Bell River beyond words in capacity and loyalty. But the "outfit." It was called "outfit," as were all such expeditions. It resembled an army in miniature, white and colored.
And, curiously, as he read a feeling of wonder filled him at the excellence of the writing and composition. He did not seem to remember having seen Bill's writing before. And here the rough, hard-living gambler was displaying himself a man of considerable education. It was curious.
Between these corner posts sat the less distinguished sailors. They might have been notable cutthroats in any other assemblage of hard-living men, but here they granted precedence willingly to the four more notable heroes. Around the circle walked Jerry Hovey like a shepherd about his flock. It was apparent that they all held him in high favor.
Then, when the machine guns had been silenced, they had witnessed the rage with which these hard-living jacks had meted out their ideas of just punishment upon the murderers of their comrades. The wanton inhumanity of the whole thing had sickened them both. Both knew and were indifferent to the roughness of the fierce northland.
For most of them were illiterate, hard-living folk, rendered desperately serious in the struggle for existence. And back to this place Tresler came one day. He was a very different man now from what he had been on his first visit. He looked about him as he crossed the market-place. Quickly locating Doc. Osler's little house, he smiled to himself as he thought of the girl waiting for him there.
The gentleman used to his bath and linen sheets and the hard-living farmer or labourer both had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they were lodged and in the dug-outs of the trenches when it was their turn to occupy them through the winter. Any "snob" had his edges trimmed by the banter of his comrades.
And I fell wondering, as I had not wondered for long, at the forces that had brought me to this occupation and the strangeness of this game of war which had filled the minds and tempered the spirit of a quarter of a million of men for two hard-living years. I fell thinking of the dead. No soldier in a proper state of mind ever thinks of the dead.
With an extraordinary frankness, not at all in the perfumed manner of that eternal philanderer, Pierre Loti, this one-time sailor before the mast, this explosive, dissipated, hard-living Paul Gauguin became as a child, simulating as well as could an artificial civilised Parisian with sick nerves the childlike attitude toward nature that he observed in his companions, the gentle Tahitians.
Then, when the great door had closed behind him, he gathered up the skirts of his cassock and hurried down the narrow street. In such thoroughfares as were deserted he ran with the speed and endurance of a spare, hard-living man. Woman-like, Julia had, after all, done things by half. She had timed her confession too late.
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