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 looking abstractedly at the beacon,
her fingers smoothing her snowy apron the while, she was thinking thus to
herself: "Perhaps father is right. If that Prairie Star were only at
Vancouver or Winnipeg instead of here, our Val could be something, more
than a prairie-rider. He'd have been different, if father hadn't started
this tavern business. Not that our Val is bad. He isn't; but if he had
money he could buy a ranch,--or something."

Our Val, as Jen and her father called him, was a lad of twenty-two, one