he thought of a table of his own in a home of his own,
and the same words spoken everyday, but without the "Sergeant,"--simply
"Tom."

He ate heartily and sipped his coffee slowly, talking meanwhile to Jen
and Galbraith. Pretty Pierre watched them all. Presently the gambler
said: "Let us go and have our game of euchre, Galbraith. Ma'm'selle can
well take care of Sergeant Tom."

Galbraith drank the rest of his coffee, rose, and passed with
Pierre into the bar-room. Then the halfbreed said to him, "You were
careful--thirty drops?"

"Yes, thirty drops." The latent cruelty of the old man's nature was
awake.

"That is right. It is sleep; not death. He will sleep so sound for half
a day, perhaps eighteen hours, and then!--Val will have a long start."

In the sitting-room Sergeant Tom was saying: "Where is your brother,
Miss Galbraith?" He had no idea that the order in his pocket was for the
arrest of that brother. He merely asked the question to start the talk.

He and Jen had met but five or six times; but the impression left on
the minds of both was pleasant--ineradicable. Yet, as Sergeant Tom often
asked himself during the past six months, why should he think of
her? The life he led was one of severe endurance, and harshness, and
austerity. Into it there could not possibly enter anything of home. He
was but a noncommissioned officer of the Mounted Police, and beyond
that he had nothing. Ireland had not been kind to him. He had left her
inhospitable shores, and after years of absence he had but a couple of
hundred dollars laid up--enough to purchase his discharge and something
over, but nothing with which to start a home. Ranching required capital.
No, it couldn't be thought of; and yet he had thought of it, try as he
would not to do so. And she? There was that about this man who had
lived life on two continents, in whose blood ran the warm and chivalrous
Celtic fire, which appealed to her. His physical manhood was noble, if
rugged; his disposition genial and free, if schooled, but not entirely,
to that reserve which his occupation made necessary--a reserve he would
have been more careful to maintain, in speaking of his mission a short
time back in the bar-room, if Jen had not been there. She called out the
frankest part of him; she opened the doors of his nature; she attracted
confidence as the sun does the sunflower.

To his question she replied: "I do not know where our Val is. He went on
a hunting expedition up