little food, and Corporal Byng sittin' there at Fort Desire with a pipe
in his mouth and the fat on his back like a porpoise. It's famished I am
with hunger, and thirty miles yet to do; and she, standin' there with a
six months' welcome in her eye. . . . It's in the interest of Justice
if I halt at Galbraith's Place for half-an-hour, bedad! The blackguard
hid away there at Soldier's Knee will be arrested all the sooner; for
horse and man will be able the better to travel. I'm glad it's not me
that has to take him whoever he is. It's little I like leadin' a fellow-
creature towards the gallows, or puttin' a bullet into him if he won't
come. . . . Now what will we do, Larry, me boy? "this to the
broncho--"Go on without bite or sup, me achin' behind and empty before,
and you laggin' in the legs, or stay here for the slice of an hour and
get some heart into us? Stay here is it, me boy? then lave go me fut
with your teeth and push on to the Prairie Star there." So saying,
Sergeant Tom, whose language in soliloquy, or when excited, was more
marked by a brogue than at other times, rode away towards Galbraith's
Place.

In the tavern at that moment, Pretty Pierrre was sitting on the bar-
counter, where temperance drinks were professedly sold, singing to
himself. His dress was singularly neat, if coarse, and his slouch hat
was worn with an air of jauntiness according well with his slight make
and almost girlish delicacy of complexion. He was puffing a cigarette,
in the breaks of the song. Peter Galbraith, tall, gaunt, and sombre-
looking, sat with his chair tilted back against the wall, rather
nervously pulling at the strips of bark of which the yielding chair-seat
was made. He may or may not have been listening to the song which had
run through several verses. Where it had come from, no one knew; no one
cared to know. The number of its verses were legion. Pierre had a sweet
voice, of a peculiarly penetrating quality; still it was low and well-