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