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 that ran through the home place. These he had saved for a new beginning, but the exposure of his efforts to rescue his cattle cost his own life, leaving his wife and daughter in worse case than they would have been if the last head had perished in the storm.

Neither of the women—Eudora was nineteen then—knew anything about cattle, and they soon were to find that indifference working for ignorance is a wasteful combination. The seed saved from the wreckage at such great cost did not increase as it should have done. There were leaks somewhere which kept the herd down, and Mrs. Ellison, after two years of disappointment, wisely decided to sell what cattle remained before all of them leaked away.

She cleaned them out, to the last living hoof, and put the money aside for taxes and living expenses, Ellison having been a thrifty man and leaving no debts. But that fund from the sale of the remainder of the herd could not last a great while with nothing coming in to help. The fields which Ellison had tilled, growing his own corn, lay fallow, the encroaching prairie sod around their borders closing in on them like growing ice upon a lake.

Now the bone market had opened, and Eudora was gathering the dried skeletons, heaping a vast mound of them in the barnyard, her intention being to collect several carloads and then have them hauled to Drumwell, the nearest railroad point, some forty miles away. It was a melancholy business at the best, doubly so when every horned skull was a counter in the tale of their ruinous loss. If she had been picking up the bones of somebody else's cattle it would not have been so bad, even though

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 sympathy must have clouded the hope of gain in any case.

Eudora had posted notices warning homesteaders and roaming bone pickers to keep clear of their property. Such bones as were scattered along the little river and its tributary creeks and washes were her bones, no matter whose cattle had carried them around under happier conditions, and she intended to have them all. Surely there were bones enough for everybody if they would spread out over the country and find them.

So Eudora Ellison was unloading her bones that bright October morning after the rain, thinking, in the way of youth, that life is mainly hard and useless, and full of disappointment and defeat; thinking that it was a hopeless groping in a maze of difficulties out of which they never would find their way, and that it was an isolated and lonely land in which youth and romance would never meet. She looked up quickly at the neigh of a horse at the gate, and jumped down out of the wagon, running forward as eagerly as if romance had come riding, against all expectation, and she must hasten to tie it up to the hitching-rack before it changed its mind and galloped away.

The horse whinnied again when it saw her coming, stretching its neck, its ears set forward in eagerness, as plainly a hail of joyful greeting as horse ever uttered in this world. The girl's long legs twinkled like the spokes of a wagon wheel, she ran so fast. She bounded to the gate, her brown face flushed, where the horse thrust its head over to greet her with a little squeal almost like a sob of joyful relief. She threw the gate open and flung

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 her arms around the animal's neck, drawing its head to her bosom, fondling it, murmuring and exclaiming, as she might have caressed a lost child.

"You've got your nerve," she flashed up at the mudspattered rider, "coming here on my horse!"

"It would seem so," Tom Simpson replied. "But my intentions are honorable, miss, in spite of my appearance. I got separated from Mr. Coburn and the others during a little—a little mêlée in Drumwell last night. By inadvertence I took his horse. I am a stranger in this country, miss; I trusted the horse to come home, which he appears to have done."

The girl looked at him, the color fading out of her face, her eyes widening, her mouth standing open, amazement on every feature, as he calmly told this little story. She was holding the horse by the bit, so firmly her knuckles were white in their grip, and her breath was coming fast.

"Yes, he came home all right," she said, so coldly, so severely, so accusingly, that Tom Simpson began to think something had gone wrong.

"Then this is the Bar-Heart-Bar ranch?" Simpson said hopefully, more hopefully than he felt, throwing his stiff leg over, coming down out of the saddle like a wooden man.

"This is the Block E," she put him right with cold contumely.

"It's the horse's mistake, ma'am—miss—, not mine," said Simpson, feeling very much like the thief she doubtless took him for, or at least an accessory after the fact.

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 Claudio Monteverde, who is generally termed the founder of the orchestra, in his opera Orfeo (1607-8), introduces an instrument described as "Uno Flautino alia Vigessima secunda," which would strictly mean an instrument pitched an octave above the piccolo! Probably all the flutes mentioned in the above works were flutes-à-bec, the "flautino" being a little high-pitched whistle pipe.

Alessandro Striggio is said to have employed a transverse flute (along with two flutes-à-bec"Tenori de Flauti") in his La Cofanaria (1566). If so, he is to be credited with the first introduction of a transverse flute into the orchestra, a distinction usually attributed to Giovanni Battista Lulli, who beyond all doubt used the instrument in several of his operas, sometimes allotting it an independent part. Lulli has two such flutes in Alceste (1674), and gives solo passages along with bass in his Songe d'Atys (1676). In his Isis (iii.) two "German" flutes play in thirds in a minor key to

, Proserpine.


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 "It's no mistake—he's my horse, this is his home. I raised him from a colt, he's my horse!"

"I don't understand a bit of it," Simpson declared in honest bewilderment, "but I thought he was blood—bloomin' keen for a tired nag the last two or three miles."

"He's no nag!" she corrected him indignantly. "He's a blood-horse, he's a Hambletonian. I raised him from a colt and they stole him—they stole him!"

"The devil!" said Simpson. "Does he carry your brand?"

"I never would have him branded, except on the hoof, and that's grown out. Oh, but they did!" she said, following Simpson's eyes to the animal's left shoulder, a pang in her tone as if the iron had touched her own flesh.

"I noticed it," he said, "but didn't look for another brand. How long since you lost him?"

"About four months."

"Yes, that's a new brand," he said thoughtfully. "No doubt Coburn was an innocent purchaser?"

"Innocent! He knew it was my horse."

"Awkward for me," Simpson cogitated.

The girl was busy with the throatlatch of the bridle, which she stripped from the horse's head and threw to the ground.

"Get that saddle off, and be quick about it, mister!" she ordered him harshly.

"Dev-lish awkward for me!" Simpson muttered, making no start to carry out her command. "How far is it to Coburn's place, if you don't mind?"

"Twenty-five or thirty miles southwest of here," she

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 told him ungraciously, bristling with suspicion, watching him sharply, having already satisfied herself, as he could see, that he was unarmed.

"Oh, very well," said he, with a light stress on the "oh," giving it a care-free, indifferent, although somewhat lofty sound, as if to say such trifles as horses and their ownership were beneath him, and that he would not stoop to question a lady's word, let her be right or wrong.

Which was very much his mental state that moment. It was Coburn's business to prove his title to the horse, and no disinterested person would say the girl hadn't made her case so far. At least the horse had made it. The animal was looking at her with as loving expression as creature ever put into its eyes, following every movement she made, sticking to her as if it feared another separation. The horse had belonged there, no matter how it came to leave, and subsequent owners, honest or otherwise, would have to establish their claims and get possession of it without any help from him.

Simpson unsaddled the horse, his studious, serious face revealing nothing of his thoughts, which were galloping along at a pretty fair rate, in fact. While his chin was up in the soldierly way Sid Coburn had liked, his gray eyes had a shadow of perplexity in them, due to the double problem before him of getting Coburn's saddle, and the articles in the sack behind it, to the ranch and explaining the loss of the horse when he got there.

The relieved horse shook himself and began trampling around looking for a place to roll. Simpson stood just inside the gate holding the heavy saddle, wondering what next, running his eye over the place.

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 He saw a neat homestead, for Ellison had been as good farmer as range cattleman. The original part of the house was built of barked cottonwood logs which had gathered lint and turned a soft gray. It was low, long, comfortable and solid, with a good shingle roof. Flanking this older unit was an extension at right angle built of weatherboards, gray-painted to conform with the weathered logs, single-storied, with a wide porch running its entire length. The whole structure, old and new, was topped by a row of lightning rods with bright metal balls which gleamed in the sun, conspicuous enough to tempt any bolt, it would appear, that might be looking for a shining mark.

A thriving, but neglected, orchard grew up to the dooryard, which was a tangle of uncut bluegrass. A white picket fence fronted the house and ran along the side, dividing it from the shed-like barn and numerous corrals.

It was plain to Simpson's quick perception that Ellison had chosen his location as an agriculturist rather than stockman. The homestead lay in a fair valley through which a little river flowed, the land broadening out with the course of the stream toward the south, in which direction fenced and fallow fields were to be seen. These lands, once cultivated, were weed-grown now and desolate, further evidence of the slack-handed management in everything about the place.

While Simpson was making this quick, unobtrusive survey of a few seconds, the girl in her mannish attire stood watching the horse, which was kicking its heels to the blue sky as it rolled in the luxury of soft earth. It scrambled up, shook itself, and headed for the barn. The girl laughed, well pleased to see it had not forgotten the

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 usage of other days. She turned to Simpson, triumphant over him as if this last piece of evidence had put the rope around his neck.

"Now you see!" she said.

Simpson was spared the embarrassment of trying to answer with any kind of defense by the appearance of a woman on the sunny porch.

"Why, that looks like Frank!" she said.

"It is Frank, mother," Eudora assured her, that pitch of triumph still in her voice, her suspicious, accusing eyes resting a moment on Simpson where he stood encumbered with his load as if he intended to saddle himself and go.

"Well, of all things!" the elder woman marvelled. She came through the gate in the side picket fence and joined them, shading her eyes against the sun as she looked after the horse. "Did this man bring him home?"

"No, he brought this man home," Eudora replied, too indignant to grin over the undignified situation of the man, standing there with a muddy wet saddle under his arm.

"Of all things!" Mrs. Ellison wondered, looking now at Tom Simpson, an unfriendly question in her eyes.

Simpson touched his hat with his disengaged hand.

"Quite remarkable," he said.

"Who is he, Eudora?" Mrs. Ellison inquired, speaking over Simpson's head as completely as if he did not stand in plain sight.

"He's a green man belonging to Coburn's outfit, he says, mother. They got into some kind of a row down at Drumwell last night—what was it you got into down there?"

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 Simpson put down the saddle and told the story, beginning with his encountering Coburn on the train and accepting the provisional offer of a job, and ending with the adventure of Wallace Ramsey and his detective badge in Eddie Kane's saloon. He did not recount that story in detail, telling only as much as he did not figure in, and as he fancied would be agreeable to their ears. It had ended up with the row responsible for their hasty exit, and the confusion in horses, he explained.

"Why, it sounds reasonable, Eudora," Mrs. Ellison declared. "I believe he's telling the truth. So Sid Coburn had Frank all the time, did he?"

"I don't know whether he's had him all the time, but he had him," the girl replied, still sour and suspicious.

"And you've been ridin' all night in the rain, and without a slicker, as I live!" Mrs. Ellison said, looking Simpson over with motherly concern. "You come right in and get your breakfast—I'll rummage around and find you a change of clothes. Why, you're so soaked you wouldn't dry out all day!"

Eudora joined her mother, but somewhat coldly, in this offer of hospitality, a concession for which Simpson was not as grateful to her as he might have been under happier conditions. He was a bit scuffed in his tenderest place—that thin skin overlying his honor—by the girl's silly persistence, implied if not outright spoken, that he had borne a hand in the sequestration of her horse. Just as if a thief would ride a horse up to its owner's gate. Silly little hobble-de-hoy that she looked like, strutting around that way in man's pants, damn it all!

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 "Put your saddle over there on the end of the porch in the sun," Mrs. Ellison directed, "and I'll look you up some dry clothes."

"I'll be grateful for the breakfast, madam," Simpson said, rather high-horse and formal in his manner, "but the present clothing will serve me very-very well. I'm rather used to being rained on, you know,—I'll dry out in a little while. If you don't mind, I'll stand in the sun until you're ready for me."

"It wouldn't be any trouble, and you'd be welcome," Mrs. Ellison said, regarding him with puzzled eyes. "You don't talk like a cowboy," she blurted out what was in her mind, "any more than you look like one. Why, I haven't seen a pair of shoes on a man's feet before in I don't know when."

"Perhaps it's because I'm only an occasional cowboy," Simpson replied, not very much to the point of her plain bid for information, certainly, but sufficient for the moment, it seemed to all.

"Yes, go on in and eat," Eudora said, with something nearer the warmth of genuine welcome. "I've got to go back to my bones."

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Eudora did not go back directly to her bones. She ran off instead to serve the horse Frank a generous breakfast of oats, which she put in one of the feed boxes in the corral near the house. Then she got a gunny sack and rubbed him down, touching the brand, not yet calloused, on the animal's left shoulder with tender fingers, moaning over it, growing hot with resentment against the Bar-Heart-Bar and its owner, and all it represented.

The Bar-Heart-Bar brand was a device like this:

The brand was fully two hands' height, heavy in its outline, an easy one to read. It was a popular device in the southwest, and registered by various owners in several states, as was the case with many others. Ellison's brand, the Block E, did not signify a block letter, such as college athletes prize so highly on sweaters in these times, but a simple arrangement in this manner:

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 While Eudora never had suffered any pangs at seeing the family brand on cattle, she had stood flat-footed against it for her pet colt. The breed of the animal was its own identification, there being no other like it on that range. It was a present from an uncle in Missouri, a breeder of fine horses. To meet the requirements of custom on the range, which was equal to law, Ellison had made with his own hands a tiny replica of his brand, which he burned into the colt's hoof, close down toward the toe where it wouldn't hurt, renewing it from time to time as the hoof grew.

Without a brand or clipping mark, or crop, as it usually was called, in the ear it was next to impossible to establish a claim of ownership in those times. This rule extended even to hogs, and is still in full observance in the Ozark mountain regions of Missouri and Arkansas, and perhaps elsewhere in the south where hogs run wild.

Now Eudora's pet, stolen early in the summer from the fenced pasture where the household cattle grazed, had come home bearing their neighbor's brand, and it would be a hard matter for her, she fully realized, to prove the horse ever had belonged to her if Coburn should take it to law. She could prove easily enough that she had owned a similar horse, but without her brand on it, not that particular one.

But Coburn must have known when he bought it from the thief—she did not believe for a moment he had come by it any other way—that it was her horse. She had paid for posters the sheriff had put up and mailed around, and distributed over the range. Everybody on that range knew she had lost her pet Hambletonian.

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text: Index:Philosophical & Other Essays.pdf

authors: सुबोध कुलकर्णी

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 Coburn likely would say he never had heard of her loss, as he lived in another county, and his word would go as far as her own. He had the reputation of an honest man, but cattle honesty and bank honesty stood in different sections of the range moral code from horse honesty, she knew too well. Now her horse bore Coburn's brand. If he wanted to be mean about it, she didn't know where she'd come out. Maybe he'd replevin the horse, standing on his brand, with perhaps a bill of sale from the thief, whom nobody ever would see again.

But any honest observer would say the actions of the horse proved its ownership. That stranger with the queer, quick, deep-sounding voice could speak for Frank. Lost in the night, he had given Frank the reins, and Frank had come home, put his head over the gate and called her, as he used to call her on a hot day when he came up, thirsty and fly-plagued, asking her to put him away from his pestering little enemies in the cool dark barn.

So Eudora reflected, the unloaded bones put out of mind while she rubbed the mud from her pet's long slender legs. She had fed him in a corral manger where her father used to finish off his picked cattle on corn, wanting him out in the light so she could look him over for other marks of cruelty he must have suffered aside from the resented brand.

Meantime, Tom Simpson had been called in to breakfast by Mrs. Ellison, who sat at the table with him, as much through her desire to learn something about him, it must be owned, as through a sense of hospitality. Simpson had washed the mud off and combed his hair at the bench on the kitchen porch where many a cowboy before

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 him had sloshed and snorted in his ablutions, and his wet clothes were steaming on his back when he sat down to his meal.

At Mrs. Ellison's suggestion he had hung his coat in the sun and come to breakfast in shirt sleeves, as he had done in more or less notable company before that day. It was a conventional gray woolen shirt, such as range men wore from the Nueces to the Little Missouri, adorned by a narrow blue necktie, the ends of it tucked into his bosom.

Mrs. Ellison looked him over swiftly, keenly, with an eye to his good points, having come from a horse-breeding family. She noted his small, well-set head, his thin nostrils, his nose somewhat out of proportion in the general meagerness of his face and, withal, the somber, self-communing look of him which seemed to tell of hardships and penances which had refined him down from something of different type and made him a man.

That he was a man, in the range sense of the word, she was sure. However Sid Coburn had picked him up, she was certain he had not done it to give him sanctuary from the consequence of any misdeed by which man or woman had suffered. Plainly he was beneath his capabilities in a hired man's capacity on the range. That any man lost dignity in such pursuit she hardly would have admitted, not having the enlarged outlook upon life that her daughter had gained by broader contact with the world. Due to this narrowness of outlook, Mrs. Ellison was entirely satisfied with her lot.

She was a placid, deliberate woman of fifty, who bore her years well, with much of the grace of youth still on

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 her. She was slender, tall, with a certain aristocratic refinement of features, not too pronounced, but traceable, which told of good lineage. Her hair, rippled and dark like her daughter's, was slightly touched with gray.

"So you picked Sid Coburn up on the train, did you?" she said, the inquiry sharpened by her curiosity to know something of what had gone before that chance meeting.

Tom Simpson seemed to read her desire, which required no sharp intellect to reach, indeed.

"I was on my way to the Panhandle, where I have friends," he replied. "But I had nothing definite ahead of me, so I considered one chance as good as another. Coburn had lost one of his men in Kansas City, Waco Johnson by name. On the condition that the said Waco didn't show up in due time, I was to have his job. It was just a chance shot, you see."

"I don't know much about Coburn," she said, speaking in a manner of reserve; "he hasn't been down in this part of the country long—eight or ten years. Came from up around Wichita somewhere, I believe. Are you from the east?"

"Wyoming, and out that way, madam."

"The reason I asked you if you were from the east was we had a man workin' for us some years ago who came from Boston. He had the same twang to his voice you have, only he was a little mushy and nosey. He was Harvard educated, he claimed, always blowin' about it like it was something big. I never could see where it had done him any good, anyhow. He was out here for experience, and he got it, all right, a little more of it than he could pack. They shot him in the leg up at Wellington."

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 "Experience is a queer sort of thing that way," Tom Simpson said reflectively. "It flies up and hits a chap when he isn't looking, oftener than not."

"It sure does," she agreed, looking at him shrewdly, not at all surprised to hear him talk that way. "Was you born out there in Wyoming?"

"Far from it. I was born in Manchester, England. My father is a tanner there, a very good tanner as tanners go, madam."

"Is that so? Well, you don't tell me! And you didn't like the tannin' business, I guess. I don't blame you—I don't blame you. I used to pass a on my way to school back in Lexington, Missouri. I don't blame you a bit."

This piece of confidence about his beginning, which Mrs. Ellison did not question or doubt in any particular, put her on almost a confidential footing with Tom Simpson at once. It wasn't everybody in that country who would tell where he came from with the undoubted sincerity of that young man. He was far from home and kindred, and she began to have a motherly feeling for him, especially since his folks had something to do with a by-product of the livestock industry.

She went at once into a lively history of the Ellison ranch, its past prosperity and recent losses, to all of which he listened with genuine interest. Mainly on account of that extraordinary girl in man's pants. He had met plenty of cattle-ranch ladies in his wide roaming, but never one like her. There was something in the shading of her speech, there was something in her eyes—a

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 look of impatience, of a spirit curbed—that set a man's fancy moving.

Simpson stole a look out of the window to see if the girl was at her bones, and started, coming to his feet with that springy movement of the legs that had been Eddie Kane's undoing the night before. The girl was standing with one hand on the horse's withers, half straightened from her grooming, looking with every indication of alarm at four men who had ridden into the enclosure and were swinging from their travel-splashed mounts.

"My lands!" said Mrs. Ellison, getting quickly to her feet, peering anxiously through the uncurtained window, "somebody's come. I wonder what in the world them men are after, comin' in here that way."

Before Simpson could answer three of the men came running toward the kitchen door, stiff-legged and heavy from their saddles, guns out, with grim and hostile demonstration.

"They're after you!" Mrs. Ellison said. "What have you done?"

"You're as wise as I am, madam," Simpson replied.

Which was true as far as it went. There was no time to explain that these were the four rascals who had mistreated the innocent joker in Kane's place last night, for the long man with the big mustache was at the porch, his feet on the step. Simpson started for the door, but Mrs. Ellison interposed, being nearer, stretching her arm to bar him. The fourth man was coming along after his companions, leading the horse Frank, the girl protesting vehemently.

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 "What do you want rushin' around here with them fool guns that way?" Mrs. Ellison inquired, indignantly severe, entirely cool, taking in every detail of the rude trespass.

"We're the sheriff's posse, we're after the horse that man in there behind you stole from Sid Coburn last night," the lanky leader replied.

One of them already had grabbed up the saddle and was cutting loose the bulky roll done up in the slicker. He dumped the contents of the sack on the porch as Eudora came running ahead of the fellow who was leading her horse.

"Look-a here!" said the man who had dumped the sack's contents. He was holding up the little handbag that Simpson had seen the cowman carrying around.

Simpson pushed past Mrs. Ellison, deliberate and unflurried, although he was raging inwardly at the high-handed robbery he knew it to be, still as innocent of the little brown bag's contents as Mrs. Ellison.

"What're you up to, you bloomin' pirates?" he asked, head up, chin out, eyes as steady as if he challenged a pack of thieving boys instead of four night-riding scoundrels with guns in their fists.

"Back up, and stay backed, little feller," the chief of the party said, boring the muzzle of his gun against that part of Simpson's anatomy which lately had become the receptacle of ham and eggs.

One of the others stopped Eudora on the steps; another edged around behind Mrs. Ellison and cut her off from the door.

"Stay right where you're at, children," the tall fellow

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 said with sardonic gentleness. "Open the damn thing and see if it's there, Noahy."

"You'll not take that horse!" Eudora panted, flushed and furious, making a start to break away.

Her guard intercepted the break, catching her arm, shaking her correctively.

"Won't we, britches? You just wait and see," he laughed. "If you don't behave yourself I'll turn you up and spank you!"

Simpson stiffened like a pointer in scent of the game. Mrs. Ellison, watching everything with cool, calculative eyes, read his intention of springing to the girl's defense and laid a detaining hand on his arm. The man addressed as Noahy was fussing with the lock of the little handbag, swearing not altogether under his breath.

"Oh, cut the damn thing open—cut it open!" the leader chafed impatiently. "See if it's there!"

The fellow called Noahy got the bag open just then. He gave a little whoop, and snapped the jaws of the bag shut again.

"It's there, all right!" he said.

"Then saddle up that horse," the leader directed. "Take a look inside there—" jerking his head to the one at the door—"and see if anybody's hangin' around. Step out there to the krel, you folks," with a directive motion of his gun.

Simpson knew words would be useless. Any protest, any argument, would only make his situation worse in the eyes of the two women, and perhaps provoke the rogues to violence. Any dealing that gang ever had with a sheriff was at as long range as they could make it. They

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 were thieves who had heard of Coburn's loss, and it must be considerably more than the horse, he knew, to set them so keenly on his trail.

It flashed to him that it was Coburn himself who had raced after hinr shooting last night. The damn fool must have been carrying money in that battered old brown bag.

This he summed up as two of the gunmen marched him with mother and daughter to the corral, which was fifty yards or more from the kitchen door. Eudora looked back dumbly to where they were throwing Coburn's saddle on her horse. The packages were scattered on the porch, but the leader had taken charge of the little handbag. He was standing by with the evident design of riding away on her horse.

"Git in there, and stay there till you see us ride out of that gate!" their guard ordered, herding them into the corral with his gun. He pulled the gate shut and stood by on guard.

Simpson was thinking a lot but getting nowhere. He saw the tall, mustached villain put the handbag in the grain sack, as Coburn had done last night. He was lashing it to the back of his saddle, the rest of the packages ignored.

"I'll not let them take my horse! They can kill me before I'll let them take my horse!"

Eudora pushed at the gate, which the fellow held laughing at her vehemence. She ran along the fence, defiant of his gun, threw a long leg to the top and scrambled over, heedless of her mother's sharp call to come back,

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 but landed in the grasp of another man who ran up as she struck the ground.

"I'll shake you out of your britches, you little hellion, if you try any more breaks like that!" he said. He thrust her back into the corral, his companion opening the gate.

Simpson had lived long enough in the proper sort of company for such an education, to know when it was time for a man without a gun to rush one that had. That hogeyed man at the gate was aching for him to make a jump; that was not the time.

Satisfied there was nobody lurking in the house who might take a shot at them as they rode away, the leader and the man whom he had sent to explore the interior joined the other two at the corral. Their horses stood by, heads down, jaded and dejected, for they had been ridden hard since Simpson's trail had been struck at dawn. Simpson looked for them to demand fresh horses, which they probably would have done if there had been any in sight. But from their eagerness to take the thoroughbred he reasoned they were not far from a refuge among friends.

With a parting caution to the three penned in the corral to stay where they were, the bandits mounted, the long fellow swinging up on Eudora's horse with a malicious grin. They started off, the spare horse running free with them, slamming back a jagged round of shots to give edge to their commands.

But while the long man's leg was in the air swinging over the saddle Eudora was off on a skulking run along the side fence of the corral, making for the long shed

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 like building in the rear, which Simpson knew to be the bunk-house of the ranch's old cattle days. He caught the motive of her move in a breath: she was going after a gun. Stooping, running swiftly, he was off after her, the parting shots of the robbers from the gate rattling the planks above his head.

Simpson heard them laugh as they rode away, feeling so safe they did not consider it worth while to turn back and stop this dash for arms as they must have known it to be. The girl was through the back gate and into the bunk-house before he could overtake her. She met him at the door with a rifle in her hands. He snatched it and started in a desperate, hopeless run, burning for a shot at them, one shot, before they disappeared over the hill beyond the corral.

"Cut through the orchard!" Eudora yelled.

"Through the orchard—through the orchard!" Mrs. Ellison shrieked, her voice breaking high in the vengeful passion that had mastered her cold self-control at last.

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The audacious rogues were in no hurry to get off, doubtless because they did not care to urge their winded horses away from no apparent danger when they might need all that was in them in case they should meet up with a true posse later on. Taking things as they appeared around the Ellison place there was little chance of anybody pursuing them in time to make trouble. There wasn't a horse around the place except the one they had taken, and nobody there that seemed very formidable.

The man who had used his dukes so effectively in the encounter with Eddie Kane seemed to go into a daze with the prod of gun in the tank. A fist man was not a gun man, as a usual thing. They rode off laughing loudly, well satisfied that they had nothing to fear from him. The little wildcat in boots and overalls had supplied them a pleasant diversion.

Their horses sank to the fetlocks in the road outside the Ellison gate, for it was bottom land, the rain had soaked it deep. The lucky retrievers of Sid Coburn's fortune, of which he stood slim chance of ever smelling a dollar again, rode boisterously toward the south, happy in their good luck, allowing their horses to take their own gait as the orchard trees cut them from view of the house and the discomfited three left penned in the corral. That was the easiest turn of fortune ever made in their adventurous

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 career. Good times were ahead of them; the border of the Nation was less than forty-five miles away.

They did not know that a man, whose naturally swift feet were urged on by the double desire to strike a vengeful blow and retrieve his toppled honor at one stroke, was cutting through the weed-grown forest of orchard trees with a high-powered repeating rifle in his hand. They probably would have welcomed the prospect of a little excitement and fun if they had known.

Simpson was careless whether they saw or heard him as he broke through the tangle of horseweeds and morning-glory vines still wet with rain. He angled to cut the road at the farther corner of the orchard, beyond which he could see where it topped the remembered rise. He could hear them, loud-mouthed in their feeling of security, happy over the easy way their ruse had worked. Their horses' feet were noisy in the mud as they trotted heavily on.

When Simpson broke through the wilderness of overgrown orchard the raiders were riding up the foot of the long slope, the top of which he had seen as he scrambled through branches and weeds. He was hot with blue-blazing wrath, which was based not so much on the outrage he had suffered as the affront and obscene familiarity of the scoundrels toward the girl in pants—as his disordered senses still designated her. He had been obliged to stand by and take it, humiliated by his impotency, ramming up against a gun every time he stiffened a muscle to interfere. Dying wouldn't have done either the girl or himself any good. It was one of those times in a fellow's life when he had to clinch his teeth and swallow.

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 Now there they rode, secure in their rascality, the bright sun glistening on the little puddles in the black road. Three hundred yards, he estimated it, picking the tall man on the stolen horse and letting drive. Too far; he overshot his mark. The raiders jumped and scattered at the crack of his gun, wheeled and began pitching lead in his direction. He stood in plain view beside the wire fence bordered with a growth of sunflowers and tall weeds; their shots came whining over his head, spattering among the orchard leaves.

They had pulled up, surprise in their attitude, which gave place quickly to contempt when they recognized him. Now they came riding back, pitching a rattling fire, yelping derisively. Once more, with steady hand, steady eye, Simpson picked the tall man and fired.

It was a true shot: the rascal weaved a moment, and slumped rather foolishly off into the muddy road. The horse Frank, free of his unwelcome rider, cut a streak for his home gate, two of the thieves, seeing their trickily won treasure galloping away, tight after him as they could urge their horses, banging away at him trying to kill or cripple him before he made the gate. Simpson crowded through the hedge of tall weeds nearer the fence, pumping away to cover the loyal animal's retreat, and there was the sound of battle in that quiet homestead such as had not echoed there in many a year.

Simpson pumped several quick shots between that streak of bay horse and the two rascals who were trying to kill him to get the handbag, and whatever unlucky stuff it contained, from the saddle. He did not try to hit anybody, having accomplished the greater end of his de-

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 sign; only to keep them back, to frustre them, and make their shooting wild.

He was pretty well doing this when his gun went dry. He pumped and pumped, thinking it might have jammed, but there wasn't a kick out of it. The last cartridge was gone, and he had run off without asking that girl in pants for a handful to carry him over such an emergency. He was backing off to get under cover, for Frank was almost opposite him, the two pursuers hot behind, but a good distance behind, for Frank was fresh after his little rest and grooming, and he was heading home.

It was all off now, Simpson thought, wondering what chance he had to make it to the house, reload and get into the game before those fellows closed in on the horse at the corral, where he would run, shoot him, strip him of the stuff behind the saddle, and go. As he backed away from the fence, keeping under cover of the weeds, Frank dashed by, and somebody poked Simpson in the back with something that felt like a gun.

Simpson jumped, his hair as stiff as wire, something cold crawling over him, thinking one of them had got behind him, as such foolishly impossible things will flash into a man's thoughts when something jolts him off balance that way. It was a gun: Eudora Ellison was handing it to him, her eyes big and luminous, her hand pressed to her panting breast.

A long-barreled pistol with a rough rubber grip. Simpson grabbed it as a drowning man would have caught a float flung to him in the moment of his extremity. The two men who were chasing Frank turned and flung mud higher than the orchard trees at the first shot.

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 The man who had remained near their fallen leader was off his horse. He signaled to his comrades as they galloped back toward him; one of them caught the spare horse and took it back, while the other wheeled and faced Simpson to cover their operations. Simpson stopped shooting, not caring to do any further damage since Frank had made it safely through the gate.

They were loading the fallen man on the riderless horse. From the way they handled him Simpson judged he was through. They slung him across the saddle as they would have thrown the carcase of a calf, lashing him on with a rope. Simpson allowed them to depart without a shot to quicken them when they started away driving the horse with its limber burden ahead. In a few moments they were out of sight beyond the hill.

Simpson turned, meeting the girl face to face. She had picked up the rifle and had been cramming cartridges into its magazine. Now she stopped, seeing there was no further call for arms. Her eyes were still bright with the fire of combat, and she was breathing with a jerky little sound of hysteria as if about to cry.

"It will be all right, I fancy," Simpson said, in the fatuous way of one speaking when nothing that can be said will quite come up to the emergency.

"You saved my horse!" she said, the quaver of unexpressed gratitude in her tone. "I never could have got here in time."

"It will be quite all right, I am sure," he said, but not very convincingly, for he was far from sure whether it would be so.

"They didn't want you at all—they wanted that little

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 satchel and my horse. No sheriff ever deputized that gang to hunt anybody!"

"They're a set of bullying scoundrels," he said, this time with conviction, there being no reservation whatever in his opinion on that score. "I saw them in Drumwell last night."

Mrs. Ellison came up breathlessly, her composure greatly disturbed.

"Thank mercy! you're not hurt!" she said, vastly relieved to see Simpson on his feet. "They're gone—they're gone!"

"Yes, mother, they're gone," the girl said assuringly, gazing hard down the road, perhaps thinking of the limp burden across the saddle. "We've got Mr. Simpson to thank for saving Frank—I never could have done it—I never could!"

"We do thank you, Mr. Simpson—I can't tell you how much."

"You're under no obligation of thanks to me, madam. I brought the trouble with me."

"I couldn't see you—I couldn't see a thing through these trees and weeds—while all that shootin' was going on, my heart was in my mouth! When Frank came back I knew you'd got one of them, the thievin' scoundrels!"

"It was the one that took Frank," Eudora said, still gazing in that fixed stare of what emotion Simpson was not schooled enough in the subtleties of the human mind to read.

"He deserved it! If I ever saw murder, and worse than murder, in a man's face I saw it in his. I don't often trem-

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 ble, Mr. Simpson, but I shook to think what would happen if that man killed you and came back!"

"Never mind, mother; they'll never come back."

Eudora drew a long breath as she turned from gazing down the road; a flush of color came into her face, and she gave Tom Simpson such an open look of gratitude and admiration that embarrassment almost choked him.

Far from a hero in his own eyes Tom Simpson stood that moment. He had made a most distressing muddle of it all around, he thought, taking the wrong horse and getting himself hunted as a thief. For Coburn must have gone yelping around pretty loud over his loss to set the whole community, honest men and thieves alike, on his trail. And only the thieves had found it, apparently. It would have paid the stupid ass off properly if he had lost his money, taking it for granted that the bag contained money, carrying it around in that loose fashion.

"I'll go and unsaddle your horse again, miss," he proposed, thinking of the brown handbag in the grain sack behind the saddle, and the other packages, including the box of candy, thrown around on the porch.

They returned to the house, Mrs. Ellison turning many an uneasy look behind to see if the thieves had rallied and were coming back.

"I'm going to have this orchard cleared out and trimmed, so I can see down the road," she said.

Better as it was for a flanking movement such as he had carried out that morning, Simpson thought, but profoundly hopeful it might never be used as covert for anybody on such a mission again, himself last of all. He

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 gathered up Sid Coburn's scattered possessions and returned them to the sack.

Mrs. Ellison was frankly curious about the contents of the brown bag. It must be money, she said, or those rapscallions wouldn't have been so hot after it and nothing else. Not unlikely. Some cattlemen were as simple as children over money, packing it around as if nobody ever had been robbed in that country, when robbery had been the principal industry for a long time, and was pretty well followed yet. Ellison had kept as much as twenty thousand dollars in the house at times, making her so uneasy that it would have been a relief, she declared, if somebody had come and stolen it.

Simpson was not so much concerned over the contents of the bag. He was pretty well satisfied the thieves had not taken anything out of it, as it still was weighty and appeared to be fairly well filled. He did not take so much as a peep into it. He balanced the sack by putting the little bag in one end, the box of candy in the other, rolled it all up in the slicker as Coburn had done, and lashed it to the cantle rings.

He said he'd like to borrow a horse, if they felt they could trust him, to take the stuff on over to Coburn's ranch. He said nothing about the awkward fix he expected to find himself in there when it came to explaining what had become of the horse he had ridden away from Drumwell. Coburn might take it reasonably, and he might be mean. It would have to wait the issue, and no use worrying over it in advance.

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 value, offset the loss of the horse. At any rate, it was Coburn's business to come around and make his talk to that girl. And she was pretty certain not to be very far away from a gun for a good while to come.

Mrs. Ellison said he could have a horse, and welcome, although she advised against starting to Coburn's while those rascals were in the neighborhood. Eudora had little to say. She appeared to have become self-conscious and ill at ease, keeping in the background, although she offered to drive up the horses for Simpson to take his pick of them.

To this he would not agree, insisting on going on the errand himself. He'd find them in the fenced pasture, Mrs. Ellison said, indicating the direction, which in a general way was back of the barn. They were very likely to be over by the river among the trees.

But she would feel safer, Mrs. Ellison said, if he would stay around the house a while to see if that gang was coming back. Maybe that long-hungry wolf-eyed man was only nipped, and not badly hurt, for it took a lot to kill one of his kind. If so he was sure to rest up a little and return. While she and Eudora might do pretty well in a pinch, being forewarned and forearmed this time, a woman was not equal to a man in a fight. She seemed to come in so much better, so much more in her proper place, after the fighting was over and the hurts of it to be relieved. She sighed, as with many memories, when she spoke of that.

Simpson said she placed an estimate on his valor far in excess of his assets, yet he felt pleased at the confidence, as any man is gratified by the respect and reliance of en-

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 tirely competent people. He consented to wait around a while.

Eudora slipped away into the house while they were talking; Simpson went presently to the gate to take a survey of things. The road was empty; the broad landscape did not reveal a living soul. Ellison's ranch was miles from any other habitation, although homesteaders were edging up along its borders. Its own extent was so vast as to hold them in a manner isolated.

An alluring spread of land, thought Simpson; a land of fertility and rich agricultural promise. How much more profitable to turn it over to the plowman instead of the cowboy, whose contributions to society were so evanescent and insecure. What romance there was in it, lying there with its fecund breast to the sky, waiting the furrow and the sower. It was a land that seemed to offer the fulfillment of the heart's desire.

Just so, said he; when a man's desire was to leave off his roaming way of aimless seeking and make a home with elm trees beside it and broad chimneys at its lowgabled ends. He was not greatly concerned over the man who had fallen before his gun in the muddy road. No doubt the fellow was dead, which was just as well. He was not the kind that coroners' inquests were concerned with in the cattle country.

Confounded ugly fellow he was, as Mrs. Ellison had said, and a cunning rogue, as well. Think of him making that virtuous pretense of being a sheriff's man, and convicting himself for a rascal at once by taking the plunder and allowing the supposed thief to go to the

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 devil if he liked. Quite a joke; damned funny, for a fact, when a man looked at it that way.

Eudora came out to take a squint down the road, ostensibly; more than likely with the first and greater purpose of displaying herself in her proper garb, which she had assumed while Simpson stood speculating at the gate over many things. It was refreshing to behold the transformation, for no woman is made to look well, even the homeliest and roughest of them, in man's unlovely dress.

She had put on a checked something, very becoming to her, perhaps gingham, maybe something else. Tom Simpson, although from Manchester, was not learned in fabrics, being a tanner's son. Whatever it was it suited her admirably, and gave her a girlish grace which the baggy trousers, boots and all, had suggested, rather than revealed. She gave Simpson a broad, questioning, but altogether timid grin, as if she had come out on probation and stood doubtful of his approval.

"Good!" said he. "Very-very good."

He admired her frankly, a smile in his eyes, but his lips as hard-set as if they never had been broken in to bend. She was a comely brown lass, taller by a hand, it appeared, for her girlish dress, which was daringly short for that conventional age, reaching only to the tops of her buttoned shoes.

"When I work around picking up bones a dress is in the way," she explained.

"Just so," said he, full absolution for her masquerade in his warm friendly tone.

Her excitement over the recovery of her horse had

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 subsided. She was nervous now, and apprehensive of reprisal.

"I think they'll come back," she said, her anxious watch upon the road resumed. "That man must have been—he must have been pretty badly hurt, don't you think?"

Tom Simpson had loaded his pipe. He had it clamped in his teeth now with an expression of deep determination rather than anticipation of enjoyment, his metal match-case in his hand. He nodded, lighting a match on the end of the box with a quick little dig.

"Very likely"—puffing hard to get the damp tobacco started, a cloud of smoke enlarging around his head—"very-very likely."

There was a sort of detached indifference in his words, as if he spoke of something he had witnessed but had no direct concern in, a passing incident of his day. The girl looked at him strangely, a volume of unsatisfied curiosity in her wondering dark eyes.

"There are a lot of bad men over in the Nation," she said. "I think that gang came from down there."

"I'm not acquainted with the lairs of such gentry in this part of the country, Miss Ellison, but I dare say you're right. This is a beautiful home-setting you have here; there's a feeling of comfort in the atmosphere I've seldom found in western ranches—they're generally so raw, you know, so confounded bare. They take everything out of tins in Wyoming, even onions, if you will believe me, Miss Ellison."

He looked at her so seriously, so steadily, that Eudora was obliged to laugh in spite of the gloom that had suc-

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 Kalat

THE State of Kalat which is situated in western Baluchistan is a confederacy of tribal groups. These originally consisted of three great divisions, (1) the Khan's ulus or following, which was scattered throughout the country; (2) the Sarvan tribesmen living to the north of Kalat under their hereditary Chief, the Raisani Sirdar; and (3) the Jhalawan tribesmen living to the south of Kalat under the Zahri Sirdar. The Khan of Kalat, though no more than one of these chiefs, has been, more or less, recognised as their leader, whose authority, however, was hitherto very loose. In internal managemet, each tribal group has the fullest right of self-government, but by an unwritten rule, fixed by lapse of time, the Khan of Kalat has a right to interfere in the affairs of each tribe, while in regard to external matters he is supreme.

Tradition says that the original rulers of Kalat were Hindus who were connected with the Rai dynasty of Sindh; but they must have flourished long before the seventh century, since from that time, forward Baluchistan has been uninterruptedly under Mahommedan sway.

The Ahamadzai clan, to which the Khans of Kalat belong, traces its descent to the Mirwaris who claim an Arab origin. In their earlier legends we find them living near Kalat and extending their power on all sides. The first effort at consolidation and coherence to form an organised State out of the several tribes commenced really during the time of Mir Ahmad, who came into power in 1666 A.D.

The rulers of Kalat have never been independent. There has always been some paramount power or other to which they have been subject. Their first over- lords were the Moguls; then came in the rulers of Kandahar, to whom the Khans of Kalat supplied military levies on demand; and lastly the British, who are the suzerain lords. Their relations with Kalat are governed by the treaties of 1 854 A.D. and 1 876 A.D. The treaty of 1876 A.D. re-affirms the former one, except that the subsidy payable to the Khan has been raised from fifty thousand to one lac of rupees. The Khan has agreed to act in subordinate co-operation with the British Government, and to permit the presence of British troops in Kalat. Likewise, the construction of railways, laying of telegraphs, and freedom of trade have been provided for. The cession of jurisdiction on the railways and in the Bolan pass, as also the permanent lease of Quetta, Nushki, and Nasirabad have been secured to the British Government.

As mentioned above Mir Ahmad established a fairly firm control over his feudatories. It was not, however, until the reign of Nasir Khan 1 (1750 A.D.) that the tides of Belgar-Begi (Chief of Chiefs) and Wali-i-Kalat (Governor of Kalat) were conferred on the rulers of Kalat by the Kings of Afganistan.

It is not possible to give a full account of the vicissitudes through which the State passed and how it expanded under successive Khans. Suffice it to say that the work of expansion, which began with Mir Ahmad, went on till the time of Mir Mahammad Nasir Khan I.


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 ceeded the exultation of victory. It was as if he had laid a serious indictment against the habits of Wyoming ranchers before a high court of appeal.

"I never heard of canned onions," she admitted, "but nearly everything else is canned in this country. Mother never could stand the stuff. That's why we've got the only orchard—and we had the only garden before the homesteaders came—anywhere in this part of the country. But we're degenerating into farmers, Mr. Simpson; we're not regular cowmen now. We haven't got a head of stock left over from the big winter kill three years ago. We're out of the game."

"It looks more like a farmstead than a cow-ranch," he said, but with undisguised approval. "This looks like excellent wheat land to me. Why don't you plow up this valley and seed it?"

"Some of the homesteaders are trying it out," she said, plainly not greatly interested in the experiment, "but the old-timers say they'll fail. What do you suppose they'll do with that man if he's—if—if a doctor can't do him any good?"

"Um-m?" Simpson grunted it with surprised inflection, pipestem clenched tightly in his teeth, as if some extraneous subject had been interposed, the meaning of it not clear. "Oh, that chap. Put him in a wash somewhere and kick the banks in on him, I fancy. Convenient way to bury a fellow. I've known—at least I've heard it said they do it right along in places."

Simpson smoked along calmly, a humorous glimmer in his far-seeing gray eyes, as though he might be such a hardened rascal that death by violence, even dealt by

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 his own hand, offered only a slight diversion, not sufficient, indeed, to provoke a laugh. Eudora Ellison looked at him again with unfathomable astonishment in her not altogether unsophisticated eyes. She had heard many tales of violent deeds, she had known men who had taken the lives of others in more or less fair combat as such things were considered in the ethics of the range, but she never had imagined a man who could turn from shooting even a thief and put it out of his mind as easily as this strange Englishman.

She wondered if he had killed so many men that he had grown hardened to it, like the town marshal of Dodge City, who had been known to rise in the middle of his dinner to remove one or more discordant members of his wild society, and return to his steak with appetite unshaken. It was said he was a mild-spoken man, such as this one, with a humane and kindly smile.

Certainly the man who had fallen before Simpson's gun—or rather her gun in Simpson's hands—had stolen her horse, insulted her and her mother and treated the stranger with a contempt that only blood would atone. She was not sorry for the thief, but in cooler mind now she regretted the necessity that had forced this mild-mannered stranger to such hard measure.

If it had been one of the cowboys of the range her concern would have been slight. They were of the type who could slay and sheathe their guns with a laugh. They were crude unlettered men, schooled in the hard usages of frontier life, their sensibilities so embryonic or so atrophied from disuse as to be proof against remorse. Not so this thin-visaged stranger who bore the stamp of refine-

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 ment in his serious face. It would seem that killing a man, even under the pressure of necessity, with every legal and moral justification, should oppress him somberly.

She admired him for his courage, his aggression, and she was thankful beyond words for his defense of her rights along with his own, but she was mystified, she was troubled, she was even not a little saddened, to see him pass it off with such apparent lightness, that glimmer of a smile in his shrewd, wise eyes.

Mrs. Ellison joined them at the gate, where the shadow of an elm tree fell across the uncut lawn. She was still much disturbed by the expectation of some venegeful [sic] stroke by the routed thieves, being of the opinion, as her daughter, that they had come from the Nation, where all manner of refugees from the law skulked among the hills. It was their custom to raid banks and steal horses along the Kansas border. She feared her place would be especially plagued by their depredations now, but thank goodness they hadn't much to lose, even if the rascals drove off everything.

There was not much for Simpson to say in the way of assurance. She knew the country, and the kind of men who rode in it, and while she was concerned for the future she was not afraid. She suggested that Eudora saddle Frank when he had rested a while, and drive up the horses, as she would know just about where to look for them in the pasture, which embraced several hundred acres. Simpson agreed to this after some protest. Eudora said she would drive such animals as they possessed up to the corral, and he could take his pick of them to carry him on his way to Sid Coburn's ranch.

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Simpson reached the Coburn ranch about sundown, where he was greeted by a sudden irruption of tow-headed children who wheeled and surged back into the house to announce him with the cry:

"Mother, mother! here's a man!"

They made such a noisy demonstration over it, they were so excitedly jubilant, one might have thought some long expectation of their mother, or some family prophecy, had been fulfilled by the coming of a man. Mrs. Coburn came to the door winding an alarm clock, a slow, cautious curiosity evident in her face. She returned an indifferent greeting to Simpson's polite salute, and stood looking the visitor over with the bold boorishness of one who saw the shadows of few strange men at her door.

She was a large-boned young woman, tall and ordinary, her light hair frowsy, her face not overly clean. She spoke with a nasal drawl. Apparently a slow, small-thinking creature whose interest in life did not extend beyond her door, and was not very lively even within its confines. She told Simpson her husband had not come home yet, and asked him bluntly who he was and what he wanted.

Simpson's news that he had left Drumwell with her husband and become separated from him on the road

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26 Nasir Khan has been known among the tribesmen as 'the Great'. The forty-four years of his rule were years of hard work, of organisation and formation of a cohered State out of a number of turbulent clans. Nasir Khan was both a soldier and a statesman. His reign was free from internecine conflicts. During the reign of his successor, Mir Mahmud Khan, Henry Pottinger visited Baluchistan in 1810 A.D. and has written a full account of his travels in that country. Mir Mehrab Khan, the successor of Mahmud Khan, was a thoughtless and weak ruler. He had not the tact to keep the turbulent tribesmen under control, and he made up what he lacked in wisdom, by barbarity and by selection of ruthless counsellors. In the year 1840 A.D. a rebellion of the Sarwan tribesmen forced him to give up his masnad; and, Mir Mahamad Hasan, afterwards known as Mir Nasir Khan II, was placed on it. Nasir Khan died, probably by poison, in 1857 A.D.; and was succeeded by Khudadad Khan who was a heartless tyrant. One of his first acts was to open fire with his guns on the chiefs who lay encamped near the city of Kalat; and from this time till 1876 A.D. the history of Kalat contains little but one continued chronicle of anarchy. revolt, and outrage. Revolt after revolt followed, and the endeavours of the Commissioner of Sindh to arbitrate proved useless. The British Resident, who had been at Kalat since the treaty of 1854 A.D., was withdrawn. Major (afterwards Sir Robert) Sandeman undertook the task of bringing about a reconciliation between the Khan and his feudatories. By his tact and firmness, the Mastung agreement,—the Magna Charta of the confederacy, was drawn up and read out formally in Durbar, and the British Government accepted the responsibility, as the Paramount Power, of preserving the peace of the country, and a new treaty was concluded in 1876 A.D. In 1893 A.D. Mir Khudadad Khan had to abdicate in favour of his son, Mir Mahmud, the present Ruler, whose reign has been marked with very few events of importance.

The political connection of the British Government with Baluchistan commences with the out-break of the first Afgan War in 1839 A.D., and the importance of the position acquired by the British in Baluchistan has been illustrated on various occasions.

The area of the State of Kalat is 71,593 square miles with a population of nearly 4| lacs. The total revenue of the State is close upon 8 lacs of Rupees The political authority in the State is shared by the Khan with the heads of the tribesmen under the general supervision of the British Political Agent, who exercises the right of arbitration in matters regarding inter-tribal disputes, or differences between the feudatory chiefs and the Khan of Kalat.

The army of Kalat proper is an irregular force, consisting of 300 infantry, 500 cavalry, and 90 artillery with 29 old-fashioned guns, costing the State in the aggregate about Rs. 82,000 per annum.

The present ruler H. H. Beglar-Begi Sir Mir Mahmud Khan G. C. I. E.. Wali of Kalat, is entitled to a salute of 19 guns.


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 pricked her to considerable show of interest. Her languid eyes opened wide; signs of trouble appeared on her shallow forehead.

"Well, he ain't come," she said, with a twang of vindictive meanness. "I guess he's foolin' along somewhere on the road. You said he give you a job?"

Simpson explained again the condition on which he had hooked up with Coburn's outfit on the train. He thought it best to leave all other explanations to Coburn, saying nothing at all about the fight or the trouble he unwittingly had run himself into by taking the wrong horse.

No doubt Coburn was tearing around over the country looking for him, Simpson thought, contemptuous of the cowman's wild belief that he had been robbed. How would he take it when he came home and found his handbag and everything else in the sack? That remained to be seen. Mrs. Coburn said if he wanted to wait around until her husband came he could stay "back there," vaguely indicating the region behind the house.

From experience Simpson knew about what he would find. The men's quarters were neither better nor worse than he had expected. The bunk-house was in keeping with the rest of the place, which was bare, trodden, rundown and slovenly. Coburn was a cattleman, first and last; not a home-maker in any sense. His house was a low, gloomy sod affair, little more than a hut, witha lean-to of vertical planks slammed hit-or-miss up against one end. A smoking stovepipe sticking through the roof of this apartment identified it as the kitchen. Where that woman and her five children kept themselves when they

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 were not eating, Simpson wondered as he unsaddled his borrowed horse before the bunk-house door.

This bunk-house was a small log pen with a roof over it. The floor was original earth; the door, hung on leather hinges, had torn loose at the bottom. It swung crankily out of plumb, half blocking the entrance. There were bunks along the walls for ten or twelve men, their hay mattresses thrown around untidily. But it was no worse than many a cowman's home that Tom Simpson had seen during his years in the west, and little below his expectations of Coburn.

Simpson rummaged around till he found hay in a shed, put his horse in a corral, of which there were several, threw Coburn's saddle with its supposedly precious roll into a bunk, propped the crazy door out of the way with a board and sat down to have a smoke. There had been quite a violent smell of something burning on the stove as he talked with Mrs. Coburn at the front door, mingling with the unmistakable savor of fried ham. Supper was either getting or got. Taking the faces of the children as the foundation for a guess, Simpson guessed no. They were uniformly dirty all over. There would have been some high lights around their mouths if they had been fed.

He was sitting in the bunk-house door, twilight creeping around him, speculating on whether Mrs. Coburn would invite him to supper or expected him to apply, when the largest of the children, a boy of about seven, a swaggering, freckled, slit-eyed little replica of the cowboy type, came shooting out of the kitchen door, heading for, the visitor. He pulled up short a few rods away, where he

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 Kolhapur.

KOLHAPUR claims a very high rank among Native States, as the ruler is the direct descendant of Shiwaji the Great, the founder of the Mahratta Empire, and bears the distinctive and honorific title of "Chhatrapati Maharaj ". The Rajas of Kolhapur are the representatives of the junior branch of the family of Shiwaji as the Rajas of Satara were of the senior branch. After the death, in 1 700 A.D., of Rajaram, ( Shiwaji's younger son, who was the head of the Mahratta power during the captivity of his nephew Shahu in the Mogul camp ) his widow Tara Bai placed her son Shiwaji en the gadi. In 1707 A.D. Shahu, the rightful heir, was released from the captivity of the Moguls, and came to Satara to claim the Mahratta Raj. After a short struggle, Shahu was successful in his object, and fixed his capital at Satara. Shiwaji, with his ambitious mother, repaired to Kolhapur and established a separate principality for himself. He died in 1712 A.D. and was succeeded by Sambhaji, son of Rajaram's younger widow. The Kolhapur family, supported by Ramchandra Pant Amatya, Sarje Rao Ghatage of Kagal, and other powerful chiefs, endeavoured hard to retain its supremacy among the Mahrattas; but tbey were compelled to yield precedence to Shahu, who, by the treaty of 1731 A.D., recognised Kolhapur as a distinct and independent State.

On the death of Sambhaji in 1760 A.D. the direct descendants of Shiwaji became extinct. A member of the Bhonsle family was adopted as his successor under the name of Shiwaji II., and the dowager Rani, Jijabai, conducted the administration during the minority of her adopted son. After her death in 1772 A.D., the young Raja, was for a long while, engaged in war with other states, particularly with the Patwardhans, the Sanwants, and the Nipanikars; and, moreover, his government was weakened by internal factions. On several occasions, during these struggles, the British Government were requested to interfere but they declined. In 1811 A.D. during a war between the Nipanikar and Kolhapur, when the British Resident at Poona was engaged in the settlement of the Southern Mahratta Country, a peace was negotiated between the contending parties, and the Raja of Kolhapur concluded a treaty of friendship with the British Government. Shiwaji II died in 1812 A.D. and was succeeded by Sambhaji II or Abasaheb (1812' 1821 A.D.) He was followed by Shahaji 'or Bawasaheb (1821 to 1837 A.D.) who was a quarrelsome and extravagant ruler. On his death in 1837 A.D. a Council of Regency was formed to govern the State during the minority of his successor Shiwaji, 111 or Babasaheb, who ruled till 1866 A.D.; but the members of the council fell out and the British Government appointed a minister of its own selection in 1844 A.D.

It was only after this that Kolhapur enjoyed some peace and happiness. It remained a faithful ally to the British Government during the critical times of the Munity in 1857 A.D. A treaty, whereby the Maharaja of Kolhapur agreed to be guided by the advice of the Paramount Power in all important matters, was concluded with the British Government in 1 862 A.D. when the administration of the State was handed over to its ruler Shiwaji IV, who died shortly after in 1 866 A.D. He was succeeded by Rajaram, who died at Florence in 1870 A.D. during his tour in Europe. His widow adopted Shiwaji V who also did not survive long. He died in 1884 A.D. at Ahmednagar and was succeeded, by adoption, by the present Maharaja H.H. Shahu Chhatrapati Maharaj.


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 stood with hands in the pockets of his long, barrel-legged overalls, legs spraddled, impertinent and challenging.

"Say, kid; you got anything to eat?" he inquired.

"Not a smell," Simpson replied.

"Well, mother said you'd better come on in and eat what's left, then," the kid announced.

It was an ungracious invitation, but a welcome one. Simpson sat at a corner of the table in the kitchen where his supper had been assembled out of the leavings, as the boy had frankly said. There was no indignity intended, no affront of inferiority implied. Mrs. Coburn would have treated her husband in exactly the same indifferent way.

There were beans and biscuits, and potatoes in the jackets—which had boiled dry, accounting for the smell of burning rags—with fried ham and coffee. There was a yellow bowl of preserves, made especially for railroaders and cowmen out of apple cores, coal tar and gelatin, ringed around by a rim of flies. The boy who had carried the dubious invitation pushed it along the oilcloth-covered table out of the stranger's reach, and stood pursing his mouth and drawing his brows belligerently as if inviting remarks on the hospitality of that house. Mrs. Coburn had disappeared. Simpson could hear her moving around in the other part of the house, and wondered whether she was morose and resentful of his intrusion, or merely dumb.

The children stood around looking at the stranger in their kitchen, every mother's son of them—they all appeared to be boys—upright on his own proper legs, although tthe smallest could not have been two years old. Nature had equipped them well for their environment.

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 Simpson wondered if they hadn't struck the ground running and kept it up ever since. They didn't say a word; Simpson made no effort to engage them in talk, knowing the breed very well. They stood eyeing him like wild creatures ready to pitch into him at the first unfriendly movement, as untidy and mean-looking mess of brats as ever came his way.

Simpson returned to the bunk-house when he had finished supper and, there being nothing else to engage him, picked out the cleanest-smelling bunk and went to bed. He was pretty thoroughly beaten out by last night's cold ride and to-day's experiences. It was unlikely his adventures would pursue him to that place, he thought, although he tied the cinch of Coburn's saddle, the roll still behind it, around the pole that formed the foundation of his bunk, and thrust the big black-handled revolver which Mrs. Ellison had pressed him to take, under the end of his hay-stuffed pillow.

The smell of ham was in the air when he woke, and the sun was shining in at the open door. He gave his horse more hay, that being the only animal provender to be found, or expected to be found, around Coburn's shiftless sheds, made his ablutions in the trough and was looking hungrily toward the house when Coburn drove up in a muddy buggy, accompanied by a youngster who had come to take the rig back to the livery stable at Drumwell.

Coburn got out of the buggy slowly, letting himself down cautiously, keeping his eyes on Simpson with a dumbfounded, astonished expression on his face that went farther than anything he could have said. Simpson real-

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 ized at once that the cowman felt himself sold, and in a ridiculous situation.

The children came racing out of the house, swooping down on the buggy, stopping as abruptly as a flock of blackbirds a little way off, where they stood silently expectant. Mrs. Coburn appeared in the kitchen door, wiping a dish, a little more towsled than she had looked the evening before. She said nothing. Coburn did not greet her, but he put out his hand towards his tow-headed flock in a sort of benedictory motion of recognition, then advanced on Simpson with suspicious caution, evidently hardly crediting his own eyes. Simpson was drying his hands on a big red handkerchief in front of the bunk-house door.

"When did you git here?" Coburn asked.

He was looking Simpson up and down and through and through, stern displeasure displacing his astonishment, a surly challenge in his voice.

"Last evening," Simpson replied. "It was an unfortunate mixup—I blundered around all night."

"Where's my saddle?"

"Inside."

Coburn made a break for it, unfastened it from the bunk with nervous haste and came carrying it out into the sun. He threw it down and stood looking at the bundle in the slicker behind it.

"That's been opened! them ain't my knots," he said.

He whirled on Simpson with a look that charged conversion of property and larceny by night at the very mildest interpretation. The young man in the buggy drove a

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Rh The Maharaja was installed on the gadi with full powers, except in regard to capital punishment, on the 2nd of April 1894 A.D., by His Excellency Lord Harris, the then Governor of Bombay. The restriction in criminal powers requiring the sanction of the Bombay Government to sentences of death, was removed in the year 1895 A.D.; and in the same year the title of G.C.S.I. was conferred on His Highness by Her Majesty the Queen-Empress. In 1900 A.D. His Excellency the Viceroy and Governor-General of India conferred upon His Highness the title of "Maharaja" as a hereditary distinction. In the year 1902 A.D. His Highness was invited to be present in England, on the occasion of the coronation of His late Majesty Edward VII, King-Emperor. During His Highness' sojourn in England, the University of Cambridge conferred upon him the honorary degree of L.L.D., and the Royal Agricultural Society of England marked their appreciation of His Highness keen interest in agriculture, by making him an honorary member of their Society. The high distinction of G. C. V. O. was conferred upon him at Delhi in 1903 A.D.

The Military force of the State consists of two separate establishments: (1) the Kolhapur Infantry officered by 2 Europeans and 553 strong, and (2) the Cavalry known as the Red-coated Risala with 156 horsemen, under the command of a Native Officer designated Risaldar. There are 57 guns in all, of which only 10 are mounted and used for purposes of salute.

The gross revenue and expenditure brought to account during the year 1909-10 amounted respectively to Rs. 54,30,161 and Rs. 52,31,733; while the net receipts exclusive of alienations, debts, deposits Ere. amounted to Rs. 23,83,464, and the net expenditure to Rs. 22,51,414.

Inclusive of its Feudatory States, the area of Kolhapur is 3165*3 square miles comprising 1,079 villages, with a population of 8,33,440 according to the Census of 1911 A.D. The captial town is Kolhapur, originally called Karwir.

The Maharajas of Kolhapur are entitled to a salute of 19 guns and hold a patent or sanad of adoption. His Highness the present Maharaja's salute was increased by two guns on the 1st of January 1909 as a personal honour, in recognition of His Highness' loyalty to the British Throne.


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 little nearer to get in on everything. Simpson went on drying his hands.

"No, they're not your knots," he replied calmly; "they're mine. A bunch of men claiming to be a sheriff's posse overhauled me yesterday morning. They said they'd been sent to recover the property I'd stolen from you, which was the first news I had that you thought I'd jumped with your stuff. They got hold of your handbag and I had a little brush with them before I got it back. I don't believe they took anything, but you'll find it jumbled up a bit."

Coburn had stooped over the saddle and was cutting the bundle loose while Simpson made his unhurried explanation.

"Who in the hell was they?" he asked, looking up sharply.

"The four gentlemen who put over the joke on your man Wallace in the saloon."

"Like hell you'd ever git it back from them fellers!" Coburn scoffed. "You're slick, all right, but you ain't slick enough to put a yarn like that over on me. If you've hid that out thinkin' you'll go back and"

Coburn had the sack open; eagerness to come at its contents cut off his ignoble innuendoes. He dumped the stuff on the ground, grabbed the brown bag, took a hurried squint into it and turned threateningly to Simpson, who was standing by filling his pipe.

"Don't make a break to leave this place till I check up on this," he warned.

Coburn poled off to the house, his tribe at his heels, the rest of the sack's contents scattered about as they had

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 fallen. The young man in the buggy put his foot out on the little iron step, his face a lively reflection of completely baffled understanding. He looked at Coburn's retreating figure, screwing around slowly then to stare at Simpson. He didn't have enough sense left in one place to make up a word.

What would that remarkable ass of a cowman say when he learned he was out a horse? Simpson wondered. Coburn had not seen the animal Mrs. Ellison had supplied him on his word that he would return it as soon as possible. There was money in that fool bag; Simpson had a glimpse of it when the cowman tore it open and thrust his hand into it, turning the bundles of banknotes to make sure no substitution had been effected. If he had it in him to be so meanly suspicious when his money was in his hands, he doubtless was small enough to kick up a rumpus over the horse.

Working for a man like that was out of the question, even though Coburn would want him after that experience, which was not likely. Simpson dismissed the possibility of a job on that ranch then and there. He went in and got the belt and holster of his borrowed gun from under the bunk where he had slept. When he came out the livery driver was unharnessing the weary team.

"Hell! That damn gripsack was full of money!" the young man said.

"Was it?" said Simpson, unmoved and unconcerned.

"It sure was! I seen it when he was rammin' his hand down in it. Sa-a-y man!"

The young fellow looked at Simpson as he made that

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 explosive utterance of astonishment, as if to say it was beyond him to understand why a man with that much cash in hand didn't keep right on going. Which would have been in accord with the ethics of Drumwell, in which the stripling had been thoroughly schooled.

"He's in there countin' it—got it spread all over the table—him and the old woman. I bet you he's got fifty thousand dollars in that pile!"

"Lucky dog," said Simpson. "Did you see a cowboy named Wallace, who works for this outfit, over at Drumwell?"

"Yeah, him and the rest of the gang come in with the boss last night. Stayed over to rest their horses—comin' on out to-day. That was a hell of a good joke they pulled on that tin-horn detective, pinnin' his damn badge to his damn ear."

"Um-m-m," a noncommittal grunt. "Did one of Coburn's men named Waco Johnson come in?"

"Waco? Yeah, I know Waco. He come in last night. Say! You're the feller that beat up Eddie Kane, ain't you?"

"So, Waco arrived?"

"Well, I tell you, kid, you'd better be hittin' the high places out of this damn country! Eddie Kane's got a double-handed gunman standin' around waitin' for you to show your snoot in Drumwell."

"Well, well," said Simpson, apparently about as much interested in the news as he would have been in the most remote gossip of the town.

Coburn was coming out, his money-counting quickly

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 disposed of, his weather eye on the horse that was taking its deliberate breakfast in the corral beside the bunk-house. Simpson turned to him questioningly.

"Estimatin' by bundles, it's all there, lucky for you, pardner," Coburn announced. "What in the hell did you do with that horse of mine?"

"I gave him his head when I lost you, and he carried me home. But it turned out that he knew the road to the Ellison ranch better than here."

"If you're hintin' I stole that horse"

Simpson lifted a warning hand.

"That's a matter you'll have to discuss with Miss Eudora Ellison. She laid claim to the horse as stolen property, and held it. She loaned me that one to bring your possessions on to you, and as our business seems to be concluded, I'll be on my way back."

"You don't take that horse out of that krel, pardner, till you fetch me back my own!"

Coburn laid it down forcefully, red and raging, shaking a fist at Simpson, his humor not sweetened any by the loud whoop of laughter that burst from the livery stable driver when he heard about the horse carrying its rider to the wrong place.

That laugh was the first in a roar of merriment that would roll over the range at his expense, Coburn knew, for it was a joke such as a cowman would appreciate above all others. The man whom he had raised the hue and cry against as a thief had turned out honest as far as the money was involved, but the horse he had ridden had laid a charge of thievery at the cowman's own door.

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 It was a joke that Sid Coburn would not hear the end of for many a hilarious day.

"You can't steal no horse of mine and git away with it!" Coburn blustered foolishly, put to it hard to save his own face before that ribald witness from the seat of scoffing Drumwell, the debauched.

Simpson stepped quickly up to the cowman when he made that fighting remark, so close his eyelashes almost brushed his face.

"When you talk that way, talk low!" he said.

Coburn dropped his hand to his gun, white to the gills. He felt iron in his ribs before he had snaked the gun an inch. Simpson relieved him of it with deftness that told of considerable practice at that art.

"Throw a saddle on that horse, and be damn quick about it!" Simpson ordered, his words so cold and hard that the threat behind them struck even the driver, sending a little crinkle of chill along his backbone.

Coburn wisely realized that the place for words had passed and he had been too careless with them while he had his chance. He headed for one of the sheds, Simpson tight at his heels taking no risk of a gun that might be hanging around. The cowman reached in from the door and grabbed a saddle and blanket at random, it appeared, and quickly completed his enforced job.

Simpson broke the gun he had taken from Coburn, throwing out the charge, swung into the saddle, looked hard at the ungenerous cowman, and said:

"I'll not promise to return this saddle, Coburn, but you'll find it at the Ellison ranch when you come after your horse."

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 With that Simpson gave the horse rein and started on his way at a gallop, which he checked momentarily as he passed Coburn's door to throw the empty revolver at the threshold, as if he unburdened himself of his contempt for a being of such poor and despicable heart.

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There was nothing unique to Tom Simpson in filling that very popular rôle of a man without a job. He frequently had played in the great drama of life as one of the supernumeraries in the same capacity before. He carried his part easily as he rode on toward the Ellison ranch to deliver the borrowed horse and gun. There was something new and diverting, however, in the experience of meeting such a supreme ass as Sid Coburn. How such a man could run at large, carrying on even the primitive business of grazing cattle, without somebody backing him up and taking everything away from him, passed all understanding.

Simpson wondered if the fellow would have the gall to come to Eudora Ellison with a demand for the return of the horse. He concluded it was altogether probable. No doubt Coburn had bought the animal from the man who stole it, without troubling over title in the case. Very likely he never had heard of Eudora's loss, or had not heeded it, a thing quite natural in a country where reports of stolen horses must have been as thick as flies.

It would be interesting to see how far he'd get with a demand on the girl for her valuable pet. Probably to the front gate in double-quick, with a flock of bullets cooing around his ears. Simpson stole a little grin from himself, and looked around apprehensively as he committed the

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 indiscretion, as if he feared somebody had caught him at it and would bring it up against him in due time.

While he was not troubled over his own situation to any worrisome extent, he could not forbear speculating on the future, or wonder where he was to take up the lost reins of his somewhat erratic destiny and begin driving a straight course again. If the livery driver had it right, there was trouble waiting for him at Drumwell. Certainly there was nothing else, the business possibilities of the town for a man out of a job being next to nothing at all.

The town marshal would have a grudge against him as well as that crab of a man who carried his head on his shoulder, as if it were another man's head that he had picked up on the road and was bringing home. Drumwell was a good enough place to avoid.

He considered Wellington, where he might resume his original intention of adventuring into the Panhandle, the trunk railroad line running through that place; and of Wichita, famed throughout the southwest as a cattlemen's centre. He had only a few dollars, a very few dollars. And there was no way for a man without a horse to travel except by rail. He might be obliged to return to Drumwell, it appeared as if he would be forced to do so, to resume his indefinite way.

At Drumwell he might get a ride on a stock train as far as Wellington or Wichita. He plotted a definite course, ending satisfactorily at either place. That would be the program: Wellington or Wichita. So much decided, he left it there.

They accepted his return at the Ellison ranch as a

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 (Mewar) Udaipur.

THE Maharanas of Mewar rank foremost among the Rajput Chiefs of India and trace back their descent to Kush, the elder son of Rama, the King of Ayodhya, and the hero of the Ramayan.

Little is known of the earlier rulers of the Mewar dynasty. With Rahup's accession at the close of the 12th- century A.D. the records become clearer and more authentic. In the time of Karan Singh I, Mewar was invaded by Mokal Singh, the Parihar Rana of Mandar, the old capital of Mewar. Mahup the eldest son of Karan Singh marched against him but was himself defeated, and it was Rahup the younger son who conquered Parihar and brought him back as prisoner. This exploit led to the younger son being declared heir-apparent, and won for him the title of 'Maharana' ever since held by his descendants ; while the elder brother left the State and conquered the territory now known as Dongarpur where he ruled as Rawal. The honor of being the first Maharana of Mewar thus fell to Rahup, who changed the name of his clan from Gohlad to Sesodia, an appellation derived from Sesodia the village where he lived. Ninth in descent from him was Rana Lakhamsi whose reign is memorable for the famous sack of Chitor by Alla^ud'din Khilji in 1303 A. D., to gain the beautiful Padmini, when ' johur ' or sacrifice of women was for the first time performed preparatory to valiantly leading, against the enemy, those who had been seized with desperation. Several attempts were made during the succeeding reigns to recapture the fort of Chitor until Rana Bhavan Singh succeeded in recovering it, but it was almost immediately retaken by Mahomed Tughlak during the time of Rana Lachman Sing.

Rana Hamir gave a crushing defeat to Mahomed Tughlak, took him prisoner, and did not release him till the latter bought his freedom by a ransom of fifty lacs of rupees, one hundred elephants, and the cession of several districts. Rana Hamir during a reign of 64 years retrieved the fortunes of his family, and died in 1364 A.D. The power and prosperity of Mewar continued to steadily increase during the next century and a half, and at the battle of Bakrol, Rana Khait Singh successfully defied the power of the Emperor of Delhi. Still more notable were the military achievements of Rana Kumbha. He erected a pillar (jayastambha) at Chitor, on which all his glorious deeds are recorded. He strengthened the defences of the kingdom by the construction of numerous forts, the chief of them being Kumbhalgarh. He was succeeded by Rana Raimal (1473-1508 A.D. )

Mewar attained the zenith of its prosperity under Rana Sangram Singh or Sangh, and according to Col. Tod, the historian of Rajasthan, 80,000 horses, seven Rajas of the highest rank, nine Raos, and 100 chiefs bearing the title of Rawal, with 500 war-elephants, marched under his standard into the field. He won eighteen decisive battles over the rulers of Marwar and Delhi, before he was called on to contend with the house of Timur, and successfully stormed the almost impregnable forts of Runkumbha and Kandhar ( now belonging to Jaipur. ) He was defeated by Babar, the Mogul Emperor, in 1527 A.D. at the battle of Kanna, in which many Hindu Princes who had acknowledged the suzerainty of the Rana were slain. He was


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 matter of course. Tom would have been deeply affronted if they had taken it otherwise, and he would have been greatly surprised. It was only a little past noon when he arrived and, as he had left Coburn's inhospitable house without breakfast, the cordial invitation to dinner was doubly welcome.

Yet it was hardly an invitation, for Mrs. Ellison was calling him Tom as naturally and easily as if she had known him all his life. It was more like the pleasurable bustling around setting out things for one of the family who had arrived a little late. The two women sat at table with him, although they had finished their meal before he arrived, carrying out that comfortable feeling of family reunion after adventures afar upon the road.

They inquired of his reception at Coburn's, neither shocked nor surprised, apparently, to learn that it had been a little cold. Simpson made it a humorous recital, stressing far more the defiant strategy of the son and hope of the Coburn house in removing the bowl of preserves beyond the hungry stranger's reach than Coburn's surprise at finding him there. He passed over entirely the incident which had led up to the gun-pulling, only saying that Coburn was wrathful over the horse. He might be expected to appear with a demand for it, he was so hot over the shame the horse had brought on him in going to the wrong home.

In reply to Mrs. Ellison's inquiry on his future plans, Tom admitted they were not so fixed as to admit no revision, and at present they were laid out only as far as Wichita at the uttermost. He might pick up a job with some outfit down in the Nation if he went to Drumwell

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 and stayed around a while, she said, but going to town would subject him to the danger of running into the surviving members of the gang that had raided them. Which, Tom admitted with no apparent concern, was true.

Mrs. Ellison regretted that misfortune had reduced them to such straits that they could no longer offer anybody work, although there was enough of it needed around the place, in all conscience. Some of the neighbors would be driving to Drumwell in a few days, very likely; as for herself and Eudora, they seldom made the trip. It took two days, and they hadn't much to go for, although Eudora was planning big things in the bone trade, which would keep her on the road all the time if her project developed as she hoped.

Simpson proposed to work around the place, putting things to rights, until somebody came along with a conveyance bound for town. Mrs. Ellison agreed to the proposal eagerly, suggesting a scythe among the undergrowth in the orchard.

So it came around that Tom Simpson found himself hitched to an Irishman's razor among the tall horseweeds in the orchard that afternoon. It was a blue October day; the ground was sown with apples ripe and fragrant, apples fermenting and cidery and squashy under foot, apples enough to have supplied the entire population of that township. There was not even a hog on the Ellison place to profit by a little of the waste.

It was pleasant in the orchard, although mowing thickstemmed weeds which stood higher than his head was a new experience for Tom. There was no sound of human activity in the neighborhood, although Mrs. Ellison said

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 homesteaders were settling around them rapidly and there would be no more range left in a little while. A condition greatly to be desired, Tom thought. The nobler purpose of that land would be served by the plowman rather than the cowman. How much better a man felt swinging a scythe in a quiet, fruit-scented orchard than riding the long watches on the range! How much more a man!

That night as he sat in the comfortable kitchen after supper, feeling very much at home in the company of the two women who had accepted him on his face with such generous and open trust, Tom got to wondering if he didn't owe it to their hospitality to tell them something of himself. They must think it strange of him to go roving around with not so much as a change of clothing when the poorest cowboy on the drift had his roll behind the saddle. A polite consideration, unusual delicacy for people in their position, had restrained their curiosity on the turn of affairs which had led to his leaving his last stoppingplace without so much as an extra shirt.

They did not know whether he was a fugitive from justice or misfortune. He did not want to appear mysterious, but he had the inherent reluctance of his nation in making a public display of private difficulties. And now Mrs. Ellison was regarding him with motherly tenderness as he smoked his pipe, the filling supplied by Eudora from a large tin somebody had left on the kitchen shelf. Rather indifferent filling at that, but his own pouch was empty, and any man will agree that poor tobacco is far ahead of no tobacco in such a distressing contingency.

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