crece.--I say it was like hell. It is not
much to kill or to die--that is in the game; but that other, 'mon Dieu!'
Little Hammer, you see how he hide his head: not because he kill the
Tarquin, that Brigley, but because he is a poor 'vaurien' now, and he
once was happy and had a wife.... What would you do, judge honourable?
... Little Hammer, I shake your hand--so--How!"

But Little Hammer made no reply.

The judge sentenced Little Hammer to one month in gaol. He might have
made it one thousand months--it would have been the same; for when, on
the last morning of that month, they opened the door to set him free, he
was gone. That is, the Little Hammer whom the high gods knew was gone;
though an ill-nourished, self-strangled body was upright by the wall.
The vagabond had paid his penalty, but desired no more of earth.

Upon the door was scratched the one word: How!

SHE OF THE TRIPLE CHEVRON

Between Archangel's Rise and Pardon's Drive there was but one house. It
was a tavern, and it was known as Galbraith's Place. There was no man
in the Western Territories to whom it was not familiar. There was no
traveller who crossed the lonely waste but was glad of it, and would go
twenty miles out of his way to rest a night on a corn-husk bed which Jen
Galbraith's hands had filled, to eat a meal that she had prepared,
and to hear Peter Galbraith's tales of early days on the plains, when
buffalo were like clouds on the horizon, when Indians were many and
hostile, and when men called the great western prairie a wedge of the
American desert.

It was night on the prairie. Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway of the
tavern sitting-room and watched a mighty beacon of flame rising before
her, a hundred yards away. Every night this beacon made a circle of
light on the prairie, and Galbraith's Place was in the centre of the
circle. Summer and winter it burned from dusk to daylight. No hand fed
it but that of Nature. It never failed; it was a cruse that was never
empty. Upon Jen Galbraith it had a weird influence. It grew to be to her
a kind of spiritual companion, though, perhaps, she would not so have
named it. This flaming gas, bubbling up from the depths of the earth on
the lonely plains, was to her a mysterious presence grateful to her; the
receiver of her thoughts, the daily necessity in her life. It filled
her too with a kind of awe; for, when it burned, she seemed not herself
alone, but another self of her whom she could not