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“In all the wide border his steed was the best,” and the name and fame of Terence O’Ryan were known from Strathcona to Qu’appelle. He had ambition of several kinds, and he had the virtue of not caring who knew of it. He had no guile, and little money; but never a day’s work was too hard for him, and he took bad luck, when it came, with a jerk of the shoulder and a good-natured surprise on his clean-shaven face that suited well his wide gray eyes and large, luxurious mouth. He had an estate, half ranch, half farm, with a French-Canadian manager named Vigon, an old prospector who viewed every foot of land in the world with the eye of the discoverer. Gold, coal, iron, oil, he searched for them everywhere, making sure that sooner or later he would find them. Once Vigon had found coal. That was when he worked for a man called Constantine Jopp, and had given him great profit; but he, the discoverer, had been put off with a horse and a hundred dollars. He was now as devoted to Terence O’Ryan as he had been faithful to Constantine Jopp, whom he cursed waking and sleeping.

In his time O’Ryan had speculated, and lost; he had floated a coal-mine, and “been had”; he had run for the local legislature, had been elected, and then unseated for bribery committed by an agent; he had run races at Regina, and won–he had won for three years in succession; and this had kept him going and restored his finances when they were at their worst. He was, in truth, the best rider in the country, and, so far, was the owner also of the best three-year-old that the West had produced. He achieved popularity without effort. The West laughed at his enterprises and loved him; he was at once a public moral and a hero. It was a legend of the West that his forebears had been kings in Ireland like Brian Boroihme. He did not contradict this; he never contradicted anything. His challenge to all fun and satire and misrepresentation was, “What’ll be the differ a hundred years from now!”

He did not use this phrase, however, toward one experience–the advent of Miss Molly Mackinder, the heiress, and the challenge that reverberated through the West after her arrival. Philosophy deserted him then; he fell back on the primary emotions of mankind.

A month after Miss Mackinder’s arrival at La Touche a dramatic performance was given at the old fort, in which the officers of the Mounted Police took part, together with many civilians who fancied themselves. By that time the district had realized that Terry O’Ryan had surrendered to what they called “the laying on of hands” by Molly Mackinder. It was not certain, however, that the surrender was complete, because O’Ryan had been wounded before, and yet had not been taken captive altogether. His complete surrender seemed now more certain to the public because the lady had a fortune of two hundred thousand dollars, and that amount of money would be useful to an ambitious man in the growing West. It would, as Gow Johnson said, “Let him sit back and view the landscape o’er before he puts his ploughshare in the mud.”

There was an out-door scene in the play produced by the impetuous amateurs, and dialogue had been interpolated by three “imps of fame” at the suggestion of Constantine Jopp, one of the three, who bore malice toward O’Ryan, though this his colleagues did not know distinctly. The scene was a camp-fire–a starlit night, a colloquy between the three, upon which the hero of the drama, played by Terry O’Ryan, should break, after having, unknown to them, but in sight of the audience, overheard their kind intentions toward himself.

The night came. When the curtain rose for the third act there was exposed a star-sown sky, in which the galaxy of Orion was shown with distinctness, each star sharply twinkling from the electric power behind–a pretty scene, evoking great applause. O’Ryan had never seen this back curtain–they had taken care that he should not–and, standing in the wings awaiting his cue, he was unprepared for the laughter of the audience, first low and uncertain, then growing, then insistent, and now a peal of ungovernable mirth, as one by one they understood the significance of the stars of Orion on the back curtain.