Pierre and his People, Volume 2

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 / tavern sitting-room and watched a mighty beacon of flame rising before / her, a hundred yards away. Every night this beacon made a circle of / light on the prairie, and Galbraith's Place was in the centre of the / circle. Summer and winter it burned from dusk to daylight. No hand fed / it but that of Nature. It never failed; it was a cruse that was never / empty. Upon Jen Galbraith it had a weird influence. It grew to be to / her a kind of spiritual companion, though, perhaps, she would not so have / named it. This flaming gas, bubbling up from the depths of the earth on / the lonely plains, was to her a mysterious presence grateful to her; the / receiver of her thoughts, the daily necessity in her life. It filled her / too with a kind of awe; for, when it burned, she seemed not herself / alone, but another self of her whom she could not quite understand. Yet / she was no mere dreamer. Upon her practical strength of body and mind / had come that rugged poetical sense, which touches all who live the life / of mountain and prairie. She showed it in her speech; it had a measured / cadence. She expressed it in her body; it had a free and rhythmic / movement. And not Jen alone, but many another dweller on the prairie, / looked upon it with a superstitious reverence akin to worship. A / blizzard could not quench it. A gale of wind only fed its strength. A / rain-storm made a mist about it, in which it was enshrined like a god.