quite understand. Yet
she was no mere dreamer. Upon her practical strength of body and mind
had come that rugged poetical sense, which touches all who live the life
of mountain and prairie. She showed it in her speech; it had a measured
cadence. She expressed it in her body; it had a free and rhythmic
movement. And not Jen alone, but many another dweller on the prairie,
looked upon it with a superstitious reverence akin to worship. A
blizzard could not quench it. A gale of wind only fed its strength. A
rain-storm made a mist about it, in which it was enshrined like a god.
Peter Galbraith could not fully understand his daughter's fascination
for this Prairie Star, as the North-West people called it. It was not
without its natural influence upon him; but he regarded it most as
a comfortable advertisement, and he lamented every day that this
never-failing gas well was not near a large population, and he still its
owner. He was one of that large family in the earth who would turn the
best things in their lives into merchandise. As it was, it brought
much grist to his mill; for he was not averse to the exercise of
the insinuating pleasures of euchre and poker in his tavern; and the
hospitality which ranchmen, cowboys, and travellers sought at his hand
was often prolonged, and also remunerative to him.

Pretty Pierre, who had his patrol as gamester defined, made semi-annual
visits to Galbraith's Place. It occurred generally after the rounding-up
and branding seasons, when the cowboys and ranchmen were "flush" with
money. It was generally conceded that Monsieur Pierre would have made
an early excursion to a place where none is ever "ordered up," if he had
not been free with the money which he so plentifully won.

Card-playing was to him a science and a passion. He loved to win for
winning's sake. After that, money, as he himself put it, was only fit
to be spent for the good of the country, and that men should earn more.
Since he put his philosophy into instant and generous practice, active
and deadly prejudice against him did not have lengthened life.

The Mounted Police, or as they are more poetically called, the Riders
of the Plains, watched Galbraith's Place, not from any apprehension of
violent events, but because Galbraith was suspected of infringing the
prevailing law of Prohibition, and because for some years it had been a
tradition and a custom to keep an eye on Pierre.

As Jen Galbraith stood in the doorway lookin