North, the only good Indian chief she knew, or that anyone else on the
prairies knew. She loved all that was strong and untamed, all that was
panting with wild and glowing life. Splendidly developed, softly sinewy,
warmly bountiful, yet without the least physical over-luxuriance or
suggestiveness, Jen, with her tawny hair and dark-brown eyes, was a
growth of unrestrained, unconventional, and eloquent life. Like Nature
around her, glowing and fresh, yet glowing and hardy. There was,
however, just a strain of pensiveness in her, partly owing to the fact
that there were no women near her, that she had, virtually, lived her
life as a woman alone.

As she thus looked into the undefined horizon two things were happening:
a traveller was approaching Galbraith's Place from a point in that
horizon; and in the house behind her someone was singing. The traveller
sat erect upon his horse. He had not the free and lazy seat of the
ordinary prairie-rider. It was a cavalry seat, and a military manner.
He belonged to that handful of men who patrol a frontier of near a
thousand miles, and are the security of peace in three hundred thousand
miles of territory--the Riders of the Plains, the North-West Mounted
Police.

This Rider of the Plains was Sergeant Thomas Gellatly, familiarly known
as Sergeant Tom. Far away as he was he could see that a woman was
standing in the tavern door. He guessed who it was, and his blood
quickened at the guessing. But reining his horse on the furthest edge of
the lighted circle, he said, debatingly: "I've little time enough to get
to the Rise, and the order was to go through, hand the information to
Inspector Jules, and be back within forty-eight hours. Is it flesh and
blood they think I am? Me that's just come back from a journey of a
hundred miles, and sent off again like this with but a taste of sleep and