ders. It would be shameful after the hardship he's endured in getting here to refuse to enlist him."
"We may have trouble with Ottawa over it, sir, but I'll give him a chance. These wild ones take a lot of drilling; they don't like discipline. They want to see fighting at once because they can ride and shoot. You remember those cattlemen from Calgary, sir?"
"Yes, but give the Indian a trial; I'll take the responsibility."
So Joe Lecroix was enlisted into the—th Canadian Infantry, then at Salisbury Plain, England, a reserve unit of which was still stationed at Valcartier awaiting removal to Halifax.
When the red recruit stripped for the physical examination the surgeon grunted in admiration as muscles, steel-hardened on the white waters and the portages and sled-trails of Rupert Land, rippled and bulged under the bronze skin.
"The handsomest big man I've seen at Valcartier, colonel," he told the gray-haired officer who inquired for his protégé. "He's got the back and arms of a Greek wrestler."
Then, after much heart-burning, mumbling in guttural Cree, mauling of hairy heads and pointed ears, and rubbing of wrinkled noses, Lecroix sold his friends, loyal since puppyhood—friends which no winter trail, however bitter, had daunted—to a resident of Quebec, disposed of his furs, and became a soldier of the King.
But great as was his joy in the attainment of the goal which had lured him out of the white north, his
