One night in the midst of their journey from St Louis to Denver, while the members of the wagon train are camped by a stream, Jim approaches Gerta as she sits by herself gazing out into the night, and he begins talking about Orion and his dogs, which are — according to Jim — right by the tail of the Big Dipper.

Wrong! Those constellations are not nearly so close together! And so I figured somebody ought to point that out to Jim.

And it might as well be Gerta…

"Sweetly sleeps the moon on yonder bank," said Jim as he came up behind Gerta where she sat resting her back against a tree. "And there's Orion and his dogs, spending an eternity chasing the Great Bear."

With a slight chuckle, Gerta asked, "Where's Orion?"

"Right there," said Jim, taking advantage of the opportunity to slip just a bit closer to the pretty redhead, "by the tail of the Big Dipper."

This time she laughed outright. "Really? That's where you think Orion is?"

Jim blinked, his flirtatious smile evaporating. "Excuse me?"

"Well, I wondered what you were talking about when you said Orion and his dogs were chasing the Great Bear, because they aren't. They're chasing Taurus. Taurus the Bull, see?"

She pointed. "There's Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. It's also called the Dog Star, and it's part of Canis Major, Orion's bigger dog. And you're right: the dogs do follow on Orion's heels."

She pointed again. "Now there's Orion. He looks a bit like an hour glass: the two upper stars for his shoulders, the two lower stars for his legs, and the three stars across his middle for his famous Belt. But what he's chasing," and again she pointed, "is the Bull. See his red eye? That's Aldebaran. It makes a large V with the two stars that mark the Bull's horns. And there are the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, riding the Bull's back.

"Taurus is one of the signs of the Zodiac," she added. "And over there, back towards the East, those two stars are Castor and Pollux, the Twins, the main stars in Gemini. Beyond them is Cancer the Crab, and even farther East, that sickle shape — that's the mane of Leo the Great Lion. The signs of the Zodiac all lie on the Ecliptic, the band around the sky along which the sun, moon, and all the planets move against the backdrop of the stars. But look!"

And now she pointed at Orion again. "If you follow a line from between Orion and Sirius, up past Gemini and on towards the North." She traced her finger along that route, then stabbed at the distinct group of seven stars she arrived at. "That's the Big Dipper! See? Part of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Which is a northern constellation, a circumpolar one — meaning one that never sets. It's completely on the other side of the Ecliptic from Orion. It's only by the very stretchiest stretch of imagination that anyone could consider Orion to be by the tail of the Big Dipper. I'm really surprised you would tell me such a thing. Did you just figure that a 'girl' would know even less about the nighttime sky than you do?"

Jim stared at the pretty redhead for a long silent moment, then shook his head and walked away

…

Some days later, after they'd wrapped up that case and were steaming along on the train on their way to their next assignment — and just after Artie had gleefully raked in his winnings from his four kings beating Jim's full house of three tens and a pair of jacks, Artie paused while sorting and stacking his chips to say casually, "Oh, hey, Jim, there's something I've been meaning to ask you about."

"Yeah?" Jim was gathering the cards to shuffle them. "What's that?"

"Well, you know that night when Kohner got jealous over you talking with Gerta and sicced ol' Bardhoom on you?"

"While you were out on guard duty, right."

"Well, I noticed the next day El Bardhoom was avoiding you — which was understandable, of course, considering how you had mopped up the landscape with him during that little tussle — but I also noticed that you were avoiding Gerta. And I was wondering why? It's not like you to let a jealous boyfriend keep you away from a girl. And especially when the girl herself says to the boyfriend's face that he is, in fact, not her boyfriend."

Jim's hands froze in the midst of shuffling the cards. "So?"

"So… well… what gives? Gerta was still one of our remaining candidates for the elusive Topaz, right?"

"Yeah," Jim replied slowly.

"Ok, so how come you stopped flirting with her? I thought you were going to pump her for information."

Jim gave up on shuffling the cards and instead slapped them down on the table before him, nearly inverting the table top. "Oh, I got information from her all right!" he grumbled.

"Hey, you did? You never told me! What'd she have to say?"

Jim folded his arms and glared at his partner. "What she said was that my flirting technique had gone badly awry!"

Artie's jaw dropped. "Yours? You made a flirting gaffe? Inconceivable! What'd you do?"

Jim's answer was barely audible.

"What's that?" said Artie. "I didn't quite catch…"

"I said, 'I misplaced the Big Dipper'! Ok?"

"Misplaced? How do you misplace…?" Abruptly Artie started to chuckle. "Oh, wait a minute: you didn't pull that business about 'Orion and his dogs spending eternity in pursuit of the Great Bear' again, did you? Jim, I told you that was an awful line! Orion's a southern constellation, all the way on the other side of the Ecliptic from the Big Dipper, which happens to be a circumpolar asterism and is…"

"Artie…" There was just a hint of a growl in Jim's voice.

"Umm… yeah, Jim?" said Artie cautiously.

"Shut. Up," said Jim. And with a slap on the card table that sent the entire top flipping over to expose the drink service somehow suspended from the nether side, Jim surged to his feet and headed over to the baggage car to tend to the horses. At least they weren't likely to give him a hard time if he happened to lose track of where the Great Bear belonged!

FIN