"Well, you needn't worry; astronomers are beaten by Canopus."
"If you-alls aims to surprise me by that statement, you don't succeed. I bet a stack o' blues them astronomy sharps goes locoed or beds down in their coffins 'fore they has time to round up the tally o' Canopus," declared the cowpuncher.
"He's so far off," continued Jack impressively, "that if they used up all the oughts in the world, they couldn't get his distance down on paper."
"Tell us some more about Sirius," said Curly, his eyes bulging with Jack's stupendous statements.
"Well, there is another queer thing about Sirius. He's got a big companion-star fussing round him, which gives such a dim light it can only be seen by the very biggest of astronomical telescopes. There is no reason why there should not be many invisible as well as visible stars in the firmament. As Bessel said, 'No reason exists for considering luminosity an essential property of stars.'
"Just imagine, then, that it is quite possible that the heavens are not only full of those bright globes we see night after night, but besides them a multitude of dim, ghostlike stars, unseen by us, but there all the same, are pacing along their allotted paths like the rest."
"Are these invisible, unlighted stars allowed by scientists, Jack?" asked Curly, in a subdued voice of awe.
"Hinted at, hinted at," returned the rover carelessly. "But I'll tell you something more wonderful to think of than that—the systems of double, treble, and quadruple suns. Now, our solar system is at the bottom rung of the social ladder in the heavenly world. We just have a plain white sun, which we revolve round with regular seasons and fixed day and night; but take a system that revolves round a double star, and thus has two suns, and say these suns differ in colour,—as is often the case, for every star has a colour of its own—Sirius is a pale green, Aldebaran rose-red, Betelgeuse orange-red, Rigel a blue-white, Capella a pearly white, and so on.