This prohibition of whisky, combined with the mounted police, has kept the North-West Territories from becoming, like Montana and Texas, a land full of “gun-plays” and “bad-men.” Not but what there has been whisky smuggled in in carloads of kerosene cans; there have also been “gun-plays” and “bad-men,” but they are the exception and not the rule, as further south. How easily a “bad-man” is made the following will show. A young fellow, well known and well liked round Calgary, got on a spree, and, after mounting his horse, proceeded yelling down the street. A city policeman (distinct from the mounted police) tried to arrest him. The puncher (cowboy) took down his rope, and galloping past the officer, roped him, and dragged him down the street at the end of the rope; finally he dropped the rope and rode off, leaving the officer seriously hurt. So far, only a Western version of what the university students used to do to the English police. But the sequel was different. The young fellow, instead of coming in the next morning, giving himself up, and taking his medicine, took to the hills, and it was up to the mounted police to bring him in. The open-house system I have mentioned before made it easy for him to live. But living in the hills and being hunted is demoralising, and the next thing was a “hold-up” of the Edmonton stage, for funds to leave the country, in which a man was killed. A reward was then offered for him, and people were warned not to harbour him. He was finally killed one night in town, shot from behind as he stood against the lighted window of a saloon looking in. Whether he was killed for the reward—which the killer was afterwards afraid to claim because of the young man’s friends—or whether it was a private grudge, no one ever knew, as the man who did it never came forward; or possibly he was killed for the money he took off the stage. There is something peculiar about the air of the West which makes a man take readily to a gun and wish to be a law unto himself; but it is a strange fact that the worst “gun-men” the West has produced were easterners, and generally city-bred. Though in this case the mounted police had no success, they are generally on the spot when needed, as I saw on the Calgary racecourse one day. One of the onlookers called one of the jockeys a thief, and accused him of pulling a horse in the race. He had hardly finished speaking when the jockey, riding close up to the fence, slipped his stirrup-strap, and cut him over the head with the stirrup. They were both punchers, and their friends took it up, and two or three guns were drawn. But before anything occurred three mounted police rode up; one arrested the jockey, and the sight of the others soon restored peace.