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 have no knowledge of the Creator. Thus we must begin an inquiry into the universe systematically, such as we have learned from the trend of rational inference. It is also evident that this aim is to be attained by the investigation of one part of the universe after another, and that help must be derived from predecessors, as is the case in other sciences. Imagine that the science of geometry and astronomy had become extinct in our day, and a single individual desired to find out by himself the magnitude of the heavenly bodies, their forms, and their distances from one another. Even though he were the most sagacious of men, it would be as impossible for him as to ascertain the proportion of the sun and the earth and the magnitude of the other stars. It would only be attainable by aid of divine revelation, or something like it. If it be said to him that the sun is a hundred and fifty or sixty times as big as the earthy he would take it to be sheer mad-


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 head Laylander in, as Pap had put it, in railroad parlance.

"He was goin' to ship," Pap explained. "He'd 'a' been half loaded by now if somebody hadn't chanced along and let Withers go."

Banjo Gibson laughed. He was a little windmill that turned with every shifting breeze. He believed now that Pap's unfriendly feeling for Laylander indicated the current of railroad sentiment.

"Somebody sure put emery in his cylinders," he chuckled. "What's old man Withers goin' to do?"

"They say he's gone to pick up a gang and take the cattle away from the cow jerry," Pap replied indifferently. He stretched his arms, gaping prodigiously, to show how insignificant the thing was to him, and how greatly he was bored.

"I wonder where all the men are tonight?" Mrs. Cowgill speculated. "It's as quiet around here as the grave."

The row of chairs that stood in the street, that jury box from which the public and private affairs of McPacken were viewed and discussed, was empty. Those whose business or pleasure carried them past the Cottonwood Hotel walked in security.

"They're waitin' round to see if Withers comes back with his men," Myron said.

"Well, I wouldn't throw a hand to my gun in no squabble like that," Banjo declared.

"Me neither," said Pap.

"That cow jerry's got the name and fame of a

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 fightin' man," said Banjo, "but it don't look to me like it takes much nerve to stand off a mile and do your fightin'."

"Huh!" Angus Valorous snorted, turning from the door where he had been listening.

"There'll be bloodshed if he does come back," Myron said, pursuing his thought as calmly and evenly as if there had been no interruption. "The boys here in town they'll stand behind Laylander for all that's in 'em. They'll never see them cattle taken away from him, by law or personal individuals."

"Do you think so, Mr. Cowgill?" Louise inquired, leaning in her appealing way to look at him, just as she had leaned, on that same bench, to look into Banjo Gibson's face when she came trying to sell the Thousand Ways.

"There'll be bloodshed," Myron repeated, rolling the word out as if he enjoyed the strange feeling of it on his tongue.

"I'm cert'nly glad Bill's out on his run," said Goosie.

"Nobody'd hurt the big stiff," said Pap.

"Hurt him!" Goosie scorned the thought. "He'd clean up the whole gang in about two minutes."

"Which gang? What side'd he be on?" Banjo asked, a laugh in his words, a teasing sort of flattery about him that made his way with the girls an easy one.

"It'd be the right one, whichever one it was," Goosie retorted, rather haughtily.

Goosie left them, carrying the thought of Bill, his valor and his might, into the parlor, where she played

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 on the ornamented organ and sang her ballads. It was easy, alone in the dark room, to imagine herself on a bleak and rainy street, deserted by the Tempter, spurned by Bill. Her greatest pleasure always was in imagining herself sundered hopelessly from Bill's home, where the chenille curtains hung behind the ornamental lamp on the center table with its corded mat. It was a far happier arrangement to contemplate than domestic felicity and a roomful of kids. It was romantic; it was sweetened melancholy by the cup.

She sang Ma-ha-goreet, and We Never Speak As We Pass By, with a moving vision of Bill coming along in his diamond and prosperous checked suit, drifting by her where she stood in the drizzle with a shawl over her head, looking at him with sorrowful, penitent appeal. Bill would not pass by without speaking under such circumstances, she knew right well. He would say something, and say it hard.

Goosie had an enjoyable hour alone in the parlor, tears on her nose, inside her nose, creating a general dampness all around that stubby member, falling at times from the end of it down to the organ keys.

Louise slipped away to her room presently, where she sat in the dark by the open window, considering her culpability with bitterness and shame. She had shown humanity and tenderness where it was least deserved. At that very minute Withers would be gathering his men to come riding to McPacken, open the gates and drive the cattle away again to the range. Any man

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 who stood between him and his design would be overwhelmed by numbers and slain. If Tom Laylander should fall in defense of his property, as he would surely fall, his death would be on her own hands.

She had little faith in any help coming from the railroaders. She knew them by this time for a heady, impulsive class of men, easily moved to hot resentment, as quickly cooled by a little lapse of time. Only Windy Moore was down at the stock yards watching with Laylander, she knew; poor old Windy, who very likely would break and run at the first shot. It was a great scheme they had for blowing the whistle, but it would need more than a whistle sounded at an unseasonable hour to rouse a crowd of sleepy railroaders from their beds to take up their guns in defense of a man whom they so lately had contemned and mocked.

Louise was quartered on the side of the hotel that overlooked the road leading into town, the depot and the stock yards, as the loading pens were generally called. The pens were too far away to be seen through the dark; she could only imagine Tom Laylander sitting on the fence as she had seen him at dusk, voluble, vain Windy Moore beside him, doubtless more of a bore than a comfort in this hour of uncertainty.

There was nothing she could do to help him; there was no certainty that he would accept her help, if she could summon forty gun-clever men. Tom believed her a sort of minor crook, a person whose standard of rectitude was very ignoble and low. Her impatience

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 ness on the part of the speaker, though it is ail established fact in the science of astronomy, so that no one learned in that science will have any doubt about it. The science which needs most examples from other sciences is that of Law. For the study of jurisprudence cannot be completed except in a very long time. If a man today would himself learn of all the arguments discovered by the different disputants of diverse sects, in problems which have always excited contentions in all the big cities, except those of Al-Maghrib, he would be a proper object to be laughed at on account of the impossibility of the task, in spite of the existence of every favourable circumstance. This is similar not only in the sciences but also in the arts. For no one is capable of discovering by himself alone everything which is required. And if this is so in other sciences and arts, how is it possible in the art of arts—philosophy?

This being so, it becomes us to go


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 with him rose again, hot and indignant, with the thought. There was a queer moral bias in the man when he could refuse to take his cattle after they had been removed from the Kansas jurisdiction by a clever trick, but would pull his gun out and take them from Withers in a manner of open violence. Where the moral justification was stronger in one case than the other, she could not see.

Louise understood that Laylander believed, sincerely and honestly, that he had done the honorable thing in refusing to touch the cattle while the law's hand was upon them, and that he had moved only in accordance with his peculiar code in taking them from Withers. It was an audaciously admirable thing for one man to do, she admitted, not without pride in his partly successful stroke. Partly successful only on account of her meddling. She hoped Laylander did not know, and never would find out, who turned Cal Withers loose.

There was nothing she could do now to repair her misapplied kindness, nothing she could do to help Laylander out of the confusion she had made in his plan. She was as helpless as the night wind in holding back the force of destruction that was forming out there somewhere in the dark, vast, appalling, shudderful prairie.

She sat at the window while the night activities of McPacken subsided, until the cowboys quit their greedy swilling, took horse and rode away in noisy little bunches to their distant camps. She sat there until

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 the chill of the dewy hours before dawn made her shiver, and her face grow wan as a watcher beside a deathbed for whom there is no sleep.

Every hour that passed was a respite toward the hope of final escape for Tom Laylander, standing guard over his resting herd. For there is hope in the day; there is always hope in the day.

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NGUS VALOROUS always remained alert and A bristling, like a night-prowling spider, ready to seize upon any customer who might come his way, until the last cowboy's horse was gone from the hitching-rack in front of the saloon. Frequently one or two of the late stayers were too limber to be lifted to their saddles, in which case they were supported by their more sober comrades across to the hotel, to be given in charge of Angus Valorous, who received them with proper scorn.

Angus never gave a hand to hoisting these paralyzed specimens of the Creator's noblest work upstairs, although he usually followed along to block the plunging descent if the nerveless animals, which seemed to have no more bones than a sack of wheat, slipped through the hands of their guardians. This happened so often that Angus went along after the wavering figures with his sturdy arms and legs at tension, his keen eyes on every move. He was not so greatly interested in pre venting damage to the patrons as to the property of the

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 hotel, in which he seemed to feel something even more lofty than a proprietary interest.

The cowboys cleared out fairly early this night, the last of them being three who raised considerable disturbance when it came to leaving. This was due to the state of one of them, who gave his companions much labor getting him aboard his horse. It was accomplished in time, with great swearing and grave counselling. The fellow was able to ride, although his head wabbled about like a chicken that had suffered a wrung neck in the carpenterly grip of Myron Cowgill.

Angus watched them go their way, standing a little while on the porch after the soft plash of their horses' feet in the thick dust had passed beyond his hearing. He looked toward the stock yards, his pleasurably excited state of the earlier hours having given place to a feeling of sullen ill humor against Cal Withers for delaying his attack until the taste for a fight was crowded out of a man's mouth by the gaping desire for sleep.

Angus was arranging his folding cot in its usual place, having put out all lights except a small lamp, with curved tin reflector through which the top of the chimney extended, a convenient handle on the back of—it for picking it up and turning it upon the faces of late, arriving guests. This lamp Angus stood on the cigar I case, its beam bearing on the window, leaving the rest of the office in reposeful shadow. He spread his canvas cot across the passage leading to the stairs, in such a way that none could enter or depart without stepping

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 over him, a feat that he believed the most cautious prowler that ever slinked through the night could not accomplish without rousing him from the deepest slumber.

Windy Moore came in as Angus was taking off his shoes, having eased himself of his official collar already, and placed it bottomside up on the end of the counter, where he could reach it as a man doubtful of his security might reach his gun. Windy stepped over the cot with some difficulty, for there was no great compass to his short legs, swearing a little as he passed on. A few treads up the stairs he switched his bulldog from one hip pocket to the other, thus giving Angus Valorous a glimpse of the kind of a man he was, as well as a hint of the serious business that had kept him abroad to this unseasonable hour.

Angus Valorous was not much impressed. He had seen too much bluffing in his crowded young day to have any counterfeit valor passed on him by the shifting of a stocky, big-bore gun from one pocket to another. Disdain rose in him; scorn lifted his expressive lip. He grunted in his most contemptuous stress, a deep grunt, and a manly one.

Relieved of his contempt for Windy Moore, Angus Valorous stood his shoes down with the circumspection of a father setting the feet of his son on the highway of life, their toes pointing exactly toward the door, and stretched himself on his back to take his repose. Myron, husband of the house, was under standing orders to appear at 5 o'clock in the morning, at which

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 time Angus would take up his shoes and his collar and go upstairs to continue his refreshment until noon.

Windy Moore had a little room in the back of the house, the cheapest one that he could get. This was not so much due to penury or thrift as the necessity that Windy, like many other railroaders, was under of maintaining quarters at both ends of his run. A man could not afford to put all he made into the rent of rooms, neither of which he could call home, being here today and away tomorrow, with no knowing what greasy stiff sleeping in his bed, to the landlady's double profit, while he was out on his run. The sun hit hard on the one window of that room all afternoon, turning it into an oven fit to render down any little brakeman who might venture into it for hours after the last ardent beam had been withdrawn.

Windy found it very hot there, even at 2 o'clock in the morning, on this night that was comfortable out of doors. It was about that hour when he came in from his vigil with Tom Laylander, yielding to Tom's urgent solicitation to spare himself fatigue, and on no account lose any more sleep over his insignificant and unworthy affairs. Windy took off his shoes and his nellygee shirt, pulled the spindle-backed rocking chair up to the window and sat down to wait an abatement of the temperature, leaving the door open to create a draft.

He regretted that he had made himself so prominent as Tom's champion, so outspoken in his cause. Withers had measured him up—he had seen the old guy running his eye over him—and got wise. That was the answer

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 to the delay in his coming back with a gang of cowhands. Withers was not going to come. If he had not been certain in his own mind of that, Windy never would have left that boy alone down at the stock yards.

That was the way the whole situation sized up, said Windy. Withers was too wise a guy to run against him. He had seen that this poor simple cow jerry was standing in the shadow of a friend who would pitch a little hot lead around if anybody tried to take them cows away from him. And that wasn't no dream. Withers had seen enough to know the business was blocked for him, and he had thrown down his hand. Might as well go to sleep, all McPacken might as well go to sleep and put up its guns. Cal Withers was buffaloed; he never would come back.

It was a noisomely repellant shame, said Windy, in his usual elegant diction, that he hadn't been given a chance to use that old bulldog, which he believed to be a most faithful and efficient weapon, although neither its loyalty nor its efficiency ever had been tested, except in shooting at a telegraph pole. He took the gun out of his pocket, for it was not comfortable there when a man was sitting in a chair, and fondled it, holding it at half-cock, turning the cylinder caressingly with his thumb.

It was a double-action weapon, short, like a water moccasin, its parts oiled and limber, needing only a little pressure on the trigger with the finger to make it lift its head like the uncomely reptile after which it seemed patterned, and blow out its venom with a roar. Windy

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 was sorry, indeed, that he had looked so determined and menacing while Withers was stalling around at the depot with the sheriff that evening. He had queered the whole show by uncovering his hand.

Windy rocked gently, leaning back at ease, refreshed by the cool wind that was coming by little starts through his window. He had the large and comfortable feeling of a man who has made the pleasurable discovery that his fame is wider than he had known. With these pleasant fancies over him, the ease of virtue in his valiant limbs, Windy went to sleep, the pistol in his hand, and drifted into a disturbing and tumultuous dream.

Baldy Evans, the shops watchman, was a sleek, tightskinned large man, dark, unctuous, slow. He looked as if he had come out of black oil, and was on the point of going back into it, uncomfortable as a lobster every minute that he was constrained by duty from laving in its refreshing balm. Baldy was standing in the door of the engine room, consulting his oily watch, a little impatient of the slow-coming dawn, which was beginning to melt away the ground-darkness and show the switch-stands in the yards. Somebody was up, already, frying ham; the smell of it was pleasantly provoking to a hungry man, who had more than two hours yet to wait for his relief.

Baldy stood caressing his fat, sleek watch, running his thumb with circular motion over the glass, leaving an oily dimness. He was trying to correlate that pan of frying ham on somebody's early fire with the habits

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 of various railroaders, running them over lazily in his mind with slow, easy effort in keeping with the movement of his thumb on the crystal of his watch. It was an elusive question; he could not conjoin anybody in railroad circles with that aromatic dish.

Was there any ham on the pantry shelf at home? Baldy wondered, swallowing the anticipatory juices which gushed from his digestive springs with the desire for a plate of that pink delicacy. If there was not, and his wife hadn't already hammered a steak for his breakfast, one of the children could run down to Schauffler's market and get a layer or two of ham.

From that point Baldy began to reflect, according to the philosophical habit that had grown on him during 'his many years of solitary nights, that nothing among all the appetizing delights a woman could stand on a stove reached out and took hold of a man with such a pull as ham. Coffee and cabbage had their sensuous beguilements; onions and liver quickened a man's feet as he drew near home on a frosty autumn morning. Yet all these were only mild stimulants compared to the irresistible desire that laid hold of a hungry man with the first sniff of ham.

Baldy thought he should like to have a farm, where he would raise nothing but hams, although he had little notion whether each ham was a corporeal entity, or merely an adjunct of some creature that must be provided with corn and hay. He did not trouble over any question of biology or anatomy when he thought of ham; only that he had an insatiable appetite for it, and

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 that a state of ease and affluence would be one in which he could freely indulge it without having to think of the price.

It was curious, he thought, how long it took daylight to get up a head of steam when a man was hungry. He had stood in that door other mornings and watched it grow from a little gray mingling with the night, enlarging before his eyes until things shaped out of it, sometimes as suddenly as if they came toward him. But he never had seen the beginning of it, he never had caught it at the trick, so to speak. That was curious, also, Baldy reflected. He wondered if anybody ever had seen the start of day, the very beginning, when its invasion struck over the edge of the world and pried like a lever under the rim of night. Or was the process too gradual for the human eye, too subtle for the human sense?

Baldy could not answer; he did not try. He switched off from that track to the junction of his main line of thought concerning the slowness of this particular day. He had been standing there seven minutes, conscious of breaking day, yet unconscious of any increase in the slow-spreading light. It would be a funny situation for a night watchman, Baldy thought, 1f things should go this far some morning, and no farther; if night and day should balance, neither able to get the bulge and flop the other over. That would be a funny situation for a night watchman, as sure as nails, not knowing whether to leave or stick, the day men—.

It was at that minute, that very second, that Windy

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 Moore was floundering in the distracting durance of a sanguinary dream; it was at that very second that he, in his vision, rose to his elbow, shot through in forty places by Cal Withers and his men, to lift his faithful bulldog and send a bullet into the cowman's mocking face. The roar of his big-bore gun snapped Baldy Evans's fantastic speculations as the sudden lunge of an engine breaks a coupling-link on a frosty morning.

Baldy had forgotten his arrangement with the shops and roundhouse men for blowing the whistle when the shooting began. This sudden roar of a gun in the gray of early morning reminded him of it with a sharpness so much like an accusation of neglect of duty that it was almoset tragic. Baldy jumped for the whistle, and pulled it wide open, jarring the windows of McPacken with the sound.

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 Ociosm, 1924 OREGON EXCHANGES ~Earl R. Goodwin, who covers the court house beat for the Oregon Journal and keeps a weather eye on the doings of civilian veterans, took time off from his toil to officiate as head linesman at the O. A. C.- Multnomah game. One of the most comprehensive of re- cent special editions is the Fourth An nual Apple Show edition of the Free water Times, E. Y. Sanderson editor and R. E. Bean business manager. Twenty two seven-column pages, dealing largely with the farms, orchards and gardens of the Freewater region and illustrated with halftone cuts, comprise the edition, which is issued in advance of the apple show, for the purpose of promoting in- terest in it. Fifty-one and one-half columns of reading matter, covering the news and a wide range of informative farm material, is included in the edition, issued October 10. The remainder of the space is taken up with most generous advertising patronage. John W. McDonald, operator for the Consolidated Press association in the Oregon Journal office, was married to Miss Mary Spangler, an Iowa girl, October 5, ‘at the First Congregational Church, Rev. Clement G. Clark officiat- ing. Reuel Moore, Northwest manager of the United Press, was best man for McDonald. Mrs. McDonald is niece of Mrs. Charles Farrington of Portland. The couple honeymooned in the moun- tains near Rhododendron for a few weeks. The latest addition to the reporting staff of the Coos Bay Times at Marsh field is Mrs. Katherine Watson Ander son, wife of John W. Anderson, who has been a member of the Times news staff for more than a year. Miss Watson became Mrs. Anderson early in Septem- ber. She is much thrilled at the new way of spending her spare time. She was formerly a student in the University of Oregon School of Journalism, of which Mr. Anderson is a graduate. The Cottage Grove Sentinel, live weekly of the “famous, fertile, fruitful” Wil- lamette valley, is to become a twice-a- week. Announcement to this effect was contained in a recent number of the Sentinel. In his announcement Editor Elbert Bede said: “While the advertising patronage probably will not increase noticeably in volume, advertisers will be enabled to advertise midweek sales and to get their advertising to the buying public more frequently and more advan- tageously. The readers will be the great- est beneficiaries. They will get their news twice as frequently as before. They will no longer read in a Thursday paper of things that happened the Thursday before.” Subscription price will he raised from $2 to $3 a year. The present model A Intertype, which has served the Sen- tinel for ten years, is to be replaced by an up-to-date model of the Intertype. The Sentinel is the second Oregon weekly to go on the twice-a -week basis within the last few weeks; E. A. Koen, on tak- ing hold of the Oregon City Banner Courier, turned that publication into a semi-weekly. James D. Olson, veteran city hall re porter of the Oregonian, will take a year’s leave of absence beginning the first of November. Jim, who can say “Hello Bill” with more true feeling than any other member of the antlered herd, has been appointed executive secretary of the 1925 Elks convention, which will turn things upside down in Portland next July. In the meantime he will have offices at the Elks temple. Jim has been a member of the Oregonian staff for seven years, most of which has been spent in covering the doings of the city administration. He worked on the Ore- gon Journal for a short time, and pre- viously with the Los Angeles Tribune. G. B. Nunn, publishing the Wheeler Reporter, has taken on promoting as a side line, and recently succeeded in financing a fine new fire-proof hotel building for his town. [3]

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EW people are endowed with that exquisite balance of the faculties which restores full consciousness at once when a profound sleep is broken by some rude dissonance, such as a shot in a room upstairs. Angus Valorous was not one of them. When the crash, or smash—it was not by any license of descriptive fancy a crack—of Windy Moore's gun struck his sleeping senses, Angus sat up on his canvas cot with the stiffness and celerity of machinery, his mind straddling, it might be said, over the chasm between consciousness and sleep.

Angus sat that way a moment, wildly dishevelled, staring, mouth open; sprang from his bed, dashed to the middle of the office, where he turned round and round as if unwinding himself from the trammelling coils of some insidious thing that held his senses prisoner. He brought up presently with his shins against the cot, his balance in some measure restored, where he stood looking and listening, in posture of ludicrous strain, up the stairs.

"Wha's yat?" said Angus, thick with sleep and that

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 indefinable anxiety of fuddled intelligence which is the exaggeration of fear and alarm: "Wha's yat?"

"Who's that shootin'?" Mrs. Cowgill inquired, in fear-shaken, querulous loud voice.

Angus bounded up the stairs just as the big whistle in the shops began to blow the sound of it thrilling him with an instant understanding of the crisis that had come in the hour of McPacken's deepest sleep. He stopped, thinking to go down and put on his shoes, bristling with little chills of excitement that ran along the marrow of his spine. Mrs. Cowgill called again, demanding who was shooting, her voice now sounding in the hall outside her bedroom door. Angus dashed on and swung into the hall, using the newel post for his pivot, after his own distinctive and original way.

Mrs. Cowgill stood at her door, the light of the hall lamp with its tin reflector—a brother of the one in the window —strong on her dishabille. She was holding a skirt around her waist, the upper part of her insufficiently draped in a low-cut nightgown which discovered too much neck and collar-bone. Her hair was down, her eyes were big with the stare of wild astonishment that was too common to her countenance to be alarming now.

Louise Gardner was in the front end of the hall, her door open behind her. Angus was surprised and disappointed to see her fully dressed. She came running toward him, as if to shelter herself behind the fortification of his strength.

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 Windy Moore was at the farther end of the hall, his shirt off, his shoes off, his bulldog pistol in his hand.

"They took a shot at me!" he panted: "they took a shot at me through the winder!"

"My God! the whistle's a blowin'!" Mrs. Cowgill gasped.

"Who was it?" Angus demanded in rough, hoarse challenge.

"Feller on a horse—I saw him lopin' off!" Windy replied.

"I smell powder," said Angus, sniffing, alert as a hound.

"I was settin' by the winder—he rode right up," said Windy.

The railroaders were waking; deep voices were growling in the rooms. Windy ran back for his shoes; Angus swung around the newel post with admirable, agility, disappearing down the stairs.

"My God! listen to that whistle!" Mrs. Cowgill appealed.

Myron appeared in the door behind her, his simple toilet of overalls and shirt complete. He leaned against the wall to slip his feet into his congress gaiters, when he stood ready to observe from a discreet and neutral safety all that might come to pass.

"There's goin' to be bloodshed," he announced calmly, as if he spoke of rain.

Louise was unable to say anything at all. She stood staring as if she looked on the wreckage of some frightful disaster that her own meddlesome folly had caused.

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 It was as if she had set off dynamite in ignorance of its properties, or turned a switch and ditched a train.

Windy Moore passed her, bareheaded, suspenders over his undershirt, pistol in his hand; railroaders opened doors along the hall and came out buttoning their garments, sleep and alarm making wild confusion in their faces. They hurried away after Windy Moore, the call of the whistle urging them as Baldy Evans pulled it now in short, excited jerks.

Myron took the bowl of his pipe from his hip pocket, the stem from the ruler slip along his leg, fitting the parts together as he went deliberately downstairs. Mrs. Cowgill turned to her room with startled quickness, as if a screen had been pulled down revealing her incomplete array to the boarders' eyes. Louise went down to the office, dumbly frantic in her despair.

Angus Valorous was sittngsitting [sic] on the end of his cot, slewed around to give a clear passage, lacing his shoes. Myron had gone to the sidewalk; Windy Moore and the others had passed out of sight. Louise went to the edge of the walk and stood near Myron, who was filling his pipe with unshaken hand.

In the little while since Windy Moore's shot had brought this precipitate alarm over sleeping McPacken, daylight had increased rapidly. Louise could see the stock yards dimly, and the piles of railroad ties which lay at the corner of the pens. The cattle were moving about, uneasy in their confinement, lifting their highstrained, lonesome plaint of impatience and hunger. Louise could not see whether Laylander was on guard.

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 The whistle stopped blowing, rounding out the long alarm in one swelling, roaring, jarring blast, leaving a silence like the subsidence of a storm.

"Look at 'em come!" said Myron, thumb over the bowl of his pipe, match-head against his leg.

The railroaders were far more in earnest than Louise had believed them to be. She saw them running across the railroad yards, heard them clattering along the plank sidewalks, quick to leap at the summons of the whistle and rush to the defense of the cow jerry, who held their note of gratitude, payable on demand.

There was no insincerity, no bluff nor idle show in this quick response. They were assembling in the sober intention of killing somebody, not counting the cost of being killed themselves if it should turn out that way.

Angus Valorous came to the edge of the sidewalk, drawn between duty to the hotel and desire to be away. He was at such a high emotional strain that it seemed he would have given off sparks, like a cat, if touched even with the finger's end. Presently he dashed back into the office, to appear immediately with a small rifle. He laughed as he ran off to join the gathering forces, his deep, snorting noise of pleasure that sounded like nothing else in the world but the grunt of a little stallion.

Myron lit his pipe and stood smoking, Louise near him, both watching and listening. A few straggling railroad men were running toward the stock pens, which grew plainer momentarily as daylight spread.

Meantime, those who had gathered at the alarm for

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 back to the Ancients, and to sec what observations and considerations they have made into the universe, according to the tests of inference. We should consider what they have said in this connection and proved in their books, so that whatever may be true in them we may accept and, while thanking them, be glad to know it, and whatever be wrong, we should be warned by it, be cautioned, and hold them excused for their mistake.

From what has been said, it may be taken that a search into the books of the Ancients is enjoined by the Law, when their meaning and purpose be the same as that to which the Law exhorts us. Anyone who prevents a man from pondering over these things, that is, a man who has the double quality of natural sagacity and rectitude in the Law. with the merit of learning; and disposition—turns away the people from the door by which the Law invites them to enter into the knowledge of God, and that is the door of observation


text: Weird Tales/Volume 13/Issue 4/The Damsel and Her Cat


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 which Windy Moore's dream was responsible, found nobody lined up to fight. They questioned each other, wondering how it started. Windy told his story again, enlarging a bit with his repetition according to his way, and the way of mankind in general.

Windy knew very well that he had pulled the trigger of his pistol in his dream, and that the bullet had gone through the open window instead of his leg, or the wall, or anywhere that would have left a mark of evidence that would have been difficult to deny. There is no knowing whether he would have been so quick to rush to the front if his alarm had been genuine, his activity not prompted by the necessity of saving his face.

As it was, Windy did not believe Cal Withers was within twenty miles of McPacken. He could tell his story, and blow it up as big as it would go without popping, and come off a hero almost as grand as he was in the frustrated vision.

"He was right under my winder," Windy declared, "so clost to me my room was full of smoke. Baldy heard the gun and turned the whistle loose."

Nobody questioned that a gun had been shot off, but some of the men who knew Windy better than most of the rest did express doubt that it had been shot off at him. If it had been, where did the bullet strike?

Windy said he hadn't waited to examine the walls of his room, but he was sure they'd find it there somewhere.

Well, what did anybody want to kill him for? they wanted to know. It was Laylander they would be

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 after, not Windy Moore. The doubters appealed to Laylander. Didn't he think it was some fool cowboy leaving town late, who had fired a parting shot as he passed the hotel?

Laylander was saved the necessity of replying to this question by the arrival of Angus Valorous, who burst among them with his rabbit rifle in his hand, snorting as if he was one of Pharaoh's horses broken out of the picture on Mrs. Cowgill's parlor wall.

"They're comin'!" Angus announced. "They was just leavin' the square a minute ago!"

Angus's alarm was a true and valid one. Cal Withers was hauling up in front of the saloon that moment, with eight men at his back, having made a hard ride of it from his nearest camp to arrive at that slack hour of dawn, when most men would rather sleep than get up and fight.

Withers had felt the hostility of the railroaders the evening before. He believed there was some kind of a scheme on foot to stand behind the cow jerry, who had become such an admirable figure in the railroad eye. Withers did not want to have any trouble with the railroad men. He knew that a feud once established would take a long time to quiet; that every excursion of his men into town would be attended by brawls and jailings, which would react on him in appeals for bond, and lawyers' costs, and all kinds of trouble in getting cars when he wanted them. The best thing to do was hang back on that move to get his cattle by force until the railroaders had gone to bed.

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 which leads to the perfect knowledge of God. Such an action is the extreme limit of ignorance and of remoteness from God.

If, by studying these books, a man has been led astray and gone wrong on account of some natural defect, bad training of the mind, inordinate passion, or the want of a teacher who might explain to him the true significance of things, by all or some of these causes, we ought not on this account to prevent one fit to study these things from doing so. For such harm is not innate in man, but is only an accident of training.

It is not right that a drug which is medically useful by its nature should be discarded because it may prove harmful by accident. The Prophet told a man whose brother was suffering with diarrhea to treat him with honey. But this only increased the ailment. On his complaining, the Prophet said: "God was right and thy brother's stomach was wrong."

We would even say that a man who


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 But he was determined to have his cattle, if he had to fight the whole town. If any railroaders were foolish enough to stand in his way, they'd have to take the medicine he was in town that morning to dispense. He got down at the saloon for a bracer all around, and to find out what the whistle had blown for so early in the morning.

There were between thirty and forty railroad men assembled at the stock yards, most of them young fellows about Laylander's age. The conductor who had been prominent the evening before in his official coat and unofficial trousers, was present, unofficial throughout; and Bill Pinkerton, foreman of the night switching crew; together with three young engineers and a few firemen, a clinker-puller from the roundhouse, some wipers and shopmen. Orrin Smith's gang of jerries was not represented.

Laylander seemed embarrassed and reluctant, standing among them with his rifle. He wanted to say something that stood so big in his mind the dumbest of them could see it. They pressed around him, waiting for him to speak.

"Gentlemen," Laylander began, slowly, as if it hurt, "I beg of you to leave this little matter of personal business to me. I can't expect, I can't ask you, to take up my troubles in this generous way."

"If that's all you've got to say, you'd better go down to that gate and stand there with your gun," the conductor suggested kindly. "That'll be the point they'll break for to let the cattle out."

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 prevents another fit for it; from studying the books of philosophy, because certain worthless people have been misled by them, is like a man who refused a thirsty man cold and sweet water, till he died, because some people under the same circumstances have been suffocated by it and have died. For death by suffocation through drinking cold water is accidental, while by thirst it is natural and inevitable.

This state of things is not peculiar to this science only, but is common to all. How many jurists there are in whom jurisprudence has become the cause of worldliness and lack of piety? We should say that a large majority of jurists are of this kind, although their science should result in better action than other sciences which only lead to better knowledge.

So for, then, the position is established. Now, we Muslims firmly believe that our Law is divine and true. This very Law urges us and brings us


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 "I can't tell you, gentlemen, how much I appreciate your kind and noble spirit," said Laylander, warming up to his argument, which was a grave and earnest one to him, "but I can't allow you to put yourselves in danger for this little fool business of mine. You don't owe me anything, gentlemen; you don't owe me a thing."

"Get around behind that pile of ties, men," the conductor ordered, in calm, authoritative voice, assuming command by a sort of natural selection. "Duck so you can't be seen, and wait till I say go."

Laylander followed the crowd behind the long pile of oak ties, where no more than the top of his old white hat could have been seen by Withers if he had come charging down on the pens that moment.

Withers and his men were still in the saloon, trying to get out of the bartender, but with little success, the reason for the early morning alarm. Withers knew it could not have been to warn of his coming, for it had started to blow while he was a mile from town. The bartender said he hadn't been able to learn what the whistle had blown for, although he knew well enough. He was considering that there would be plenty of railroaders left to buy beer after the last cowman was gone from the Arkansas Valley range.

Almost two score bulldogs were out of pockets behind the pile of ties. There was a clicking of triggers, a whispering and loading. Ammunition was being passed from hand to hand with very serious and business-like intent; there was a constrained eagerness

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 over the young men, who would sooner have a crack at somebody than not. Tom Laylander tried to make his case again.

"Colonel Withers has come here to take these cattle away from me if he can, boys," he began.

"Sure thing—if he can," said a cheerful voice. This brought a laugh. It was quite an early morning lark for the railroad men.

"He's not the kind of a man that stops for anything in the road," said Tom, trying to impress them with the gravity of the situation, which they seemed to underrate in their confidence. Perhaps the sight of so many bulldogs had much to do with Tom's earnest solicitation. He shuddered at the innocent confidence of a man who would go into a fight with such an implement in his hand.

"He'll stop, all right all right," the conductor said, with bland assurance.

"If we can't stop him, what're you goin' to do alone?" one of the young engineers inquired, with a sort of friendly tenderness as if he considered a younger brother's plight.

"I'll do the best I can," Tom replied, "but I don't want you gentlemen to run any risk on account of me."

The conductor put his hand on Tom's shoulder and turned him to look him squarely in the eyes. He was a big man, with a little gray showing in his beard, old enough to be Laylander's elder brother, and wise in the experience of many a frontier fray.

"This has passed out of your hands, son," he said.

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 that blessing which is known as the knowledge of God, and His creation. This is a fact to which every Muslim will bear testimony by his very nature and temperament. We say this, because temperaments differ in believing: one will believe through philosophy; while another will believe through dogmatic discourse, just as firmly as the former, as no other method appeals to his nature. There are others who believe by exhortation alone, just as others believe through inferences. For this reason our divine Law invites people by all the three methods, which every man has to satisfy, except those who stubbornly refuse to believe, or those, according to whom these divine methods have not been established on account of the waywardness of their hearts. This is why the mission of the Prophet has been declared common to the whole world, for his Law comprises all the three, methods leading men towards God. What we say is quite clear from the following saying of God:


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 "It's McPacken's business, and McPacken is out here to take care of it. If you want to help, we don't mind. Go on down to that gate, and stand behind the post. If any of them get by us, you can have what's left."

Tom saw that their gay determination was inflexible. There was nothing to do but go to the gate, and he went. Instead of getting behind the thick post upon which the heavy gate was swung, he climbed up and sat on top of it, his rifle across his thighs. He was the most prominent object in the landscape, yet quite undisturbed by any thought for his own peril.

Laylander was profoundly concerned, however, over what might happen when Withers and his crowd came charging down the road. They'd come at a gallop, determined to have it over quickly. Part of them would cut in behind the pile of ties at the first shot from that, quarter, and clean out those generous, but foolishly mistaken boys.

"They're comin' out!" Angus Valorous announced.

Windy Moore was feeling himself over, with the look of consternation in his face of a man who had lost his all.

"I left my catridges in my room—my gun's empty!" he said. He showed his bulldog to prove it, looking like a man undone.

"Is it a thirty-eight?" somebody inquired.

"I'll bust over to the hotel and git 'em," said Windy, with desperate eagerness, "I'll only be a minute."

"Is your gun a thirty-eight?" the young man who had spoken inquired again, with a sharp challenge, a

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 sharper look into Windy Moore's pale, cowardly eyes.

"It's a special make, special size; I had it made to order," Windy said.

The young man laid hold of the gun with unexpected start, twisted it out of Windy's reluctant hand, broke it and peered into the chambers.

"It's a forty-four," he announced. "Special! You're a special! Who's got some forty-fours?"

The need was supplied immediately, the gun loaded and put back into Windy Moore's nerveless hand.

Windy was white to the gills. His legs were so weak he had to sit down on the protruding end of a tie, his hand shaking so he could not have hit anything more than the ground under him. The piquant flavor of life was gone out of his dry mouth; there was no desire in him any longer to be seen as a general of men.

"Here they come!" said Angus Valorous, who had climbed up the pile of ties to see over it. He came down with the report, his quick, grunting, hoarse little stallion laugh snorted out through his nose.

To have it over in a second; that was Withers's plan. If the law wouldn't help a man, damn the law. Laylander's fame, reputation, notoriety—according to the way one esteemed him—was nothing to Withers. He was confident in numbers. It was his way, always, to do his fighting with somebody flanking him, somebody at his back. There was a feeling of security in force that made him audaciously brave.

Withers came on at a gallop, a man on each side of him, six of them spread across the road behind him.

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 He rode with his gun in his hand, swinging it up and down, up and down with a little movement of his bent arm, as if he held himself calculatively in reserve.

On the hotel sidewalk Louise Gardner and Myron stood watching the riders charge the cattle pens, the dust their horses flung up cutting them off for a moment now and then in a cloud. Myron turned to the door.

"There's goin' to be bullets flyin' around here in a minute; you'd better come in," he said.

Myron went in, pausing at the door to knock the ashes out of his pipe on the arm of the green bench. He was not concerned that Louise did not follow him. She heard the screen door slam, dimly conscious that Myron had gone.

Withers gathered speed as he rode, his dust rising thicker behind him. There was nobody in sight but that fool Tom Laylander, sitting like a crow on the fence, lifted up a fair mark, a contemptuous defiance in his attitude, it seemed. This got under Withers's hide. The sight of Laylander sitting on the gatepost, his rifle across his thighs in a restful posture of security, just as if he had no need for it that moment, nor expected to have for some peaceful time to come, roiled the old man up to such a pitch of anger that he forgot his lifelong rule, threw down his gun and fired the first shot. It was too long a shot to do him any good, or Laylander any harm, but it tumbled Withers into the trap that the crafty conductor-general of McPacken's bulldog forces had set for him.

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 "Invite men unto the way of the Lord, by wisdom and mild exhortation, and dispute with them in the most condescending manner."

As this Law is true and leads to the consideration of the knowledge of God, we Muslims should believe that rational investigation is not contrary to Law, for i truth cannot contradict truth, but verifies it and bears testimony to it. And if that is so, and rational observation is directed to the knowledge of any existent objects, then the Law may be found to be silent about it, or concerned with it. In the former case no dispute arises, as it would be equivalent to the absence of its mention in the Law as injunctory, and hence the jurist derives it from legal conjecture. But if the Law speaks of it, either it will agree with that which has been proved by inference, or else it will disagree with it. If it is in agreement it needs no comment, and if it is opposed to the Law, an interpretation is to be


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 McPacken had the law on its side, as far as grand juries, and petit juries, and coroner's juries were concerned. Nothing else in or about the law concerned McPacken. If a man could get past those barriers, he was safe. Withers had fired the first shot; he was outlawed.

At that moment Withers was not yet quite abreast the long pile of ties which concealed the force of which he knew nothing. The conductor lifted his hand in a high-sign.

"Go!" he shouted.

They went. They did not stop to breathe, or think, or look, until their guns were empty and the dust and smoke began to lift and clear. It was only a few seconds in passing, that storm of fire and lead, with its trampling and confusion, its wild yells of terror and triumph, its mad galloping away.

When the railroaders paused to reload, Angus Valorous was discovered standing on top of the breastworks, putting a cartridge in his rabbit gun. There was a man down in the road. A little way beyond him, where it had dropped at it turned to follow the retreating cowboys, the fallen rider's horse lay motionless. That was all.

The sound of the retreat passing through the town was drawing rapidly on towards the square. Fathers of families, and other cautious men who had sprung out of bed and armed, but were restrained by prudence or wives from joining the combat, took shots at the wildriding cowboys as they galloped by. Windy Moore

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 sought. Interpretation means to early the meaning of a word from its original sense to a metaphorical one. But this should be done in such a manner as will not conflict with the custom of the Arabian tongue. It is to avoid the naming of an object, by simply mentioning its like, its cause, its attribute, or associate, etc. which are commonly quoted in the definition of the different kinds of metaphorical utterances. And if the jurist does so in many of the legal injunctions, how very befitting would it be for a learned man to do the same with his arguments. For the jurist has only his fanciful conjectures to depend upon, while a learned man possesses positive ones.

We hold it to bu an established truth that if the Law is apparently opposed to a truth proved by philosophy it admits of an interpretation according to the canons of the Arabic language. This is a proposition which a Muslim cannot doubt and a believer


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 climbed to the top near Angus Valorous, and fired off his bulldog into the dust the flying men had raised, putting a period by this defiant deed to the battle between railroad and range that had been hovering in dark imminence over the head of McPacken for so many years.

Cal Withers was the man whom retribution had laid hold of and thrown down in the dust. There was a black wound in his forehead, much blood on his face. They bent over him, lifted his arms, moved his head, and pronounced him dead. Tom Laylander came from his place on the gatepost. He knew more about men who met the mischance of fight. He said Withers was alive.

They picked him up and carried him to the hotel, and laid him on the sofa in the parlor. He was dusty, grisly, senseless and limp; a shudderful and fearful thing to see.

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OBODY else had fallen in that outpouring of lead and fire; nobody else was hurt. One hundred yards away from the scene of the battle, in a direct line, with nothing intervening but space, the Cottonwood Hotel stood. There was not a bullet in it. Where all that lead went, nobody knew; nobody knows to this day.

But nobody was thinking about this extraordinary feature of the fight just then. The railroaders were crowding into the office and parlor of the hotel, intent on knowing whether Cal Withers was dead or alive, or whether he would live or die. Angus Valorous had dashed off for the doctor, there being but one doctor in his rating, in McPacken, and that one his estimable father, who was a bearded, a slow and ponderous man. Angus would have waited for him to come back if he had been a hundred miles away, rather than's ummon a rival, As it was he waited until the doctor got out of bed and made his deliberate toilet, and drank a cup of coffee to clear his head of sleep.

While Angus was gone on this merciful errand,

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 somebody thought of whisky. It was neither a very long wait nor a very long reach to that. Myron, who took a great cheer out of mortuary matters, and enjoyed an intimate connection with all the grim business attendent and antecedent thereto, poured a little liquor into Cal Withers's mouth, and lifted his head so it 'would run down to the spot where life was lingering in him like a covered coal.

There was virtue in the remedy. Cal Withers presently opened his eyes and looked around him with a dull dawning of perception. Myron applied a little more of the liquor, with growing result.

"Can you speak, Cal?" Myron asked with the officious solicitude of one in charge. "Do you want to leave any word?"

"Where am I shot?" Withers asked, his voice weak and low.

"Right in the center of the brain," Myron replied.

"I'm a dead man!" Withers groaned, falling back, closing his eyes.

Myron let his head down to the pillow,—taking his arm away.

"Yes, Cal, I'm afraid you are," he replied.

Those who stood around, looking with the curious impertinence on the wounded man that healthy and unhurt people invariably are guilty of, even in the presence of death, began to be sorry for Withers. Mrs. Cowgill, who had thought mainly of the sofa up to that moment, began to sob and cry, her emotions lying very shallow, indeed.

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 "I want somebody to take it down," said Withers, red-eyed and wildly disturbed.

"Take what down, Cal?"

"My dyin' statement. I want it put in writin', I want to sign it before I go."

Myron, being facile with the pen and the use of words, brought some hotel stationery and the register, and sat near the wounded cowman's head to make a record of his last word.

"Put down," Withers directed, his eyes closed, his breath coming short, "that this is my dyin' statement. Put down I said that note of old Tom Laylander's that I sued and got judgment on was paid when it come due. Put down I said it is my dyin' wish and directions that young Tom Laylander take them cattle and keep them, as they belong to him and are his rightful property. Put down I say this because I want to go clear and clean, and not have this fraud brought up against me on the last day. That's all."

When Myron had finished the writing, and had read it over for verification, they held Withers up until he signed it. Six men witnessed it; four times that many heard the dictation and stood as legal witnesses to the cowman's confession of fraud.

"He'll never live till the doctor comes," said Myron. "It got him span in the middle of the brain."

The doctor came as Myron was putting the cowman's statement in the hotel safe. He cleared the onlookers out of the parlor, but considerately left the door open so some of them, at least, might observe and hear. It

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 would have been equal to shutting up his most profitable channel of income to have closed that door.

The sheriff arrived close on the heels of the doctor. He had heard that Withers was shot, and had come to see if there was anything in the incident of which he should take official cognizance. The city marshal had not appeared in the morning's activities at all.

Myron produced the record he had made of Withers's confession.

"Here, you represent the law, you take care of this," he said, his importance over him in great solemnity.

The sheriff read it quickly, Myron's writing being in a large and carpenterly hand.

"Where's Laylander?" he inquired. "Does he know about this?"

"I don't think he was here; I didn't see him," Myron replied.

"He went back to watch them cows," a railroader said.

In the parlor the doctor was feeling around the black spot in Cal Withers's forehead, an inch below the rim of his hair.

"They got me this time," Withers whispered.

"Um-m-m?" said the doctor. He turned the sufferer's head to get the light on it more directly, a hand on either side of his face; held it so a little while, looking as if he debated whether it was worth while to attempt anything in such an extreme case. Presently he turned Withers's head back to align with his body, as if he composed him for the rigor of death.

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 "Get me a pan of hot water," he directed Mrs. Cowgill.

While waiting for the water the doctor leaned back, hands in his trousers pockets, legs extended, eyes fixed with studious contemplation on the wounded man's face.

"I can't last long now, can I, Doc?" Withers inquired, his voice scarcely carrying to the door.

"Um-m-m-m," said the doctor, in a soothing, noncommittal humming sound.

Mrs. Cowgill returned like the ewer bearer in a procession, the basin held in both hands. The doctor washed the wound, Cal Withers lying white and still, eyes closed, as good as dead already, everybody said. The doctor put something on the wound with a piece of gauze, and leaned back in that waiting, thoughtful way again, hands in his pockets, legs stretched out as if he might slip from the chair.

Presently the doctor woke to attivity from his apparent trance. He got an instrument out of his case, the favored ones in the door stretching to see; leaned over Withers and introduced the shining metal into the wound that should have led, by all true calculation, into the frontal chambers of the cowman's brain.

The doctor was only a few moments in his exploration, which seemed to satisfy him. He was busy again with the water, with more stuff on gauze. He got out his scissors and cut off some of the cowman's grizzly coarse forelock, and strapped a dressing over the

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 wound, just as if he had hope of a man with a bullet hole in the center of his brain.

"Al-l-l right, Cal," said the doctor, cheerfully, comfortably. "You'd better come in about Monday, I guess, and let me have a look at it."

He put the little instrument in his case, snapped it shut, picked it up, took his hat to go.

The doctor's amazing nonchalance, his more astonishing dismissal of Withers's hurt in that off-hand, careless way, removed the bar from the door that had held the onlookers respectfully back. They poured into the parlor now, packing it in a moment, pressing around the doctor, who stood smiling blandly; around Withers, who lurched up suddenly, with the ungainly quickness of a frightened cow.

"Do you mean I ain't goin' to die?" Withers demanded with something like resentful challenge.

"Not this time, Cal," the doctor replied. He held out his hand, revealing a little piece of mashed and flattened lead. "It'll take something bigger than a twenty-two slammed up against that old cast-iron pot of yours to put you out of business, Cal."

"Wait a minute," said Withers, getting to his feet, the color coming back into his face; "wait a minute, now. Wasn't somebody writin' a paper here a little while ago and gittin' me to sign my name to it?"

"You dictated a dyin' statement to me, Cal, and signed it of your own free will and motion," Myron replied.

"It don't go, it don't go!" Withers declared, glaring

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 around in red-eyed renunciation. "I was out of my head—it don't go. Give that paper back to me! I demand that paper!"

"I'm kind of used to hearin' your demands by now," said the sheriff, pushing forward, his chicken face with its long pale mustache looking like a face being offered on the end of a pole, his neck was stretched to such uncommon length. "I've got that paper, and I'm goin' to keep it."

"I demand that paper!" Withers repeated, unabashed by the peculiar turn of events that had placed him in a situation so ridiculous.

"I'm goin' to hand it in to the court, to be made a part of the record of this case," the sheriff informed him. "If you want it, go to court for it."

"It don't stand," Withers protested. "I'll law you to the limit!"

"Next time you make a dyin' statement, you danged old crook, go on and die," the sheriff advised.

The situation appealed to the railroad sense of humor.

"This is my dyin' statement!' somebody groaned.

"Go on and put it down!" another pleaded, in the exaggeration of mortal agony and remorse.

"I'm goin' down there and take them cows of mine," Withers announced.

He set his dusty, trampled old hat on the back of his head, glared around in defiance, sliding his belt to bring his gun in place for a quick draw. But there was not

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 any gun in his holster; that was lying on the shelf back of the hotel desk, beside the box of plug tobacco.

"You'll pull your freight out of this town," said the sheriff, pushing a little nearer, "or I'll lock you up for assault to commit murder."

"I believe if I was you I'd go, Cal," the doctor advised him kindly.

Withers bluffed around a little while, the hilarity of the railroaders rising and increasing around him. He finally gave it up, seeing that public opinion was against him so unanimously that the recovery of the cattle, either by force or by law, was beyond all hope. The sheriff walked on one side of him, the doctor on the other, as the defeated but not humiliated cowman went to the livery stable to hire a rig to drive him home.

There was a good deal of discussion and speculation among the railroaders before they dispersed to go to breakfast, and from breakfast to work, over that twenty-two calibre bullet the doctor had picked from Cal Withers's head. Nobody would admit owning a pistol of such diminutive and despised bore, although its efficiency was generally admitted in this case, and as generally admired.

Angus Valorous, his rabbit rifle put away behind the counter, kept his own counsel, although he was in such a state of bristling exultation that he did not go to bed for his rightful portion of repose. His black beard was rough as sandpaper on his cheeks and chin; his rough little laugh, in keeping with that manly adorn-

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 ment, seemed to fill him so completely that it spilled over with every move.

Windy Moore had not been a participant in the discussion of the mysterious twenty-two. He did not know, in truth whether it was a twenty-two or a forty-four that had stopped the cowman in his galloping charge. When Windy mounted to the pile of ties to fire the last shot in the battle, the sight of Withers lying in the road a few feet away, that frightful black hole in his forehead, had been too much for him. He never had seen a man struck down in the vigor of life in that summary way before. It shook him to the foundation with a revulsion that made him sick.

The romance was gone out of gun-handling for Windy Moore. His strength was spent with his courage; he was white, weak in the legs, dizzy and upset. He went ahead of the men who were carrying the cowman to the hotel, his brave bulldog forgotten in his cold and nerveless hand; he struck for the stairs with weaving and uncertain legs, like a man staggering across the deck of a ship, blind in the great sickness that makes the world a heaving, horrible, hateful place.

Windy Moore did not wait for the verdict of life or death in Cal Withers's case. A man hiding a mortal wound could not have gone with more uncertain step, with more frozen fixity of glazed eye, or sickness of every atom of his body than Windy Moore as he dragged his heavy feet up the stairs. He got to his room at last, where the sweat of his great terror burst from him in relief. He shut the door behind him, and

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 with that act shut himself out of this story, as a man goes down to the grave from the great serial of life, his consequence upon him, his little part in the drama done.

Mrs. Cowgill went upstairs to take off her nightgown after Cal Withers left. She had put her clothes on over that garment of privacy, not with such happy effect as might have been desired. It was a gown with a flounce, and very long, Mrs. Cowgill being a discreet and modest dame. This flounce came down below the hem of her serge skirt at least four inches. It was not contributive to the dignity of the house.

Louise Gardner was at her door, in such a bloodless, frightened and woeful plight that Mrs. Cowgill hastened to her to offer support and cheer.

"Is he dead?" Louise whispered, her eyes big with fright of the sight she had fled from, her heart heavy with the thought that it was Tom Laylander's sure hand that had brought the cowman down.

Mrs. Cowgill related the amazing recovery, with more contempt for a man who would not die when he was expected by everybody to do so, than appreciation of the betrayal of his own rascality that Withers had made. She never was so much astonished in her life as she was when Louise turned her face to the wall, bowed her head against her arm and cried, sobbing as if she had suffered a bereavement for which there was no consolation in the world.

Mrs. Cowgill did not attempt any consolation; consolation was not in her line. It was beyond her to understand emotion of that kind, and whatever was in-

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 explicable to Mrs. Cowgill was vexing, something to move resentment, rather than sympathy. She looked back sharply at the weeping girl as she stopped before Goosie's door, and looked back again, with increasing disfavor, as she opened it to enter and call that sleeping beauty, whom the noise of conflict and the tumult of victory had not disturbed.

Tom Laylander shipped his cattle that afternoon, contrary to the advice of the sheriff and the banker, the liveryman and the railroaders, who all urged him to put them on the range for two or three months longer, now that the question of ownership was decided for good. The banker offered a loan on the herd if Laylander wanted it to carry the expense of grazing. Tom refused it, with grateful thanks. He had seen too much trouble in Kansas, he said. He preferred to accept the loss on his cattle to running the risk of becoming involved in any further unpleasantness.

The railroaders ordered tons of hay from the livery barn, protesting that it was their treat. The cattle had a good stuffing before they were loaded, and went on their way to market happy, if hay could make them so.

Louise Gardner sat at her window and watched the long train pull out, Tom Laylander and the two cowboys, who had run away at Withers's arrival the night before, on top of the cars, prod-poles ready for the merciless goading up of such weak cattle as might fall, or lie down, on the way. Tom had not come to the hotel; she had not spoken a word to him since the day they parted on the range.

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 McPacken would be a desolate place for her from that hour she knew; a silent and savorless place, indeed. The world had withdrawn from McPacken and her life with that long extra cattle train, leaving nothing but railroaders, walking about in a hateful void. Tom might have come, for just one little minute, she thought, with resentment that tried to be spiteful, only to melt away in tears. He might have come for one little minute, if only to say good-by.

But he said good-by that day when she had tried to set up a law for him that was older, indeed, than any written statutes, but not older than the code that bound him to his straight and inflexible way. Tom had said farewell that day, and farewell for him once was farewell forever. So it seemed, in sad and sombre truth.

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 cannot mistrust. One who is accustomed to these things divine can experience for himself what we have said. The aim of this discourse is to bring together intellectual and traditional science. Indeed, we would even say that no logical conclusion will be found to bo opposed to the Law, which when sifted and Investigated in its different parts will be found in accordance, or almost so, with it.

That is why all Muslims are agreed that all the words of the Law are not to be taken literally, nor all of them given an interpretation. But they vary in verses, which are or are not to be interpreted. For example, the Asharites put an interpretation upon the verse of Equalisation and on the Tradition of


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OOSIE had picked up that song from hearing Maud Kelly sing it. The melody, as well as the words, had suffered somewhat in the transposition, Goosie's version beginning like this:

Goosie was unfamiliar with the word anguish, as she was with the emotion. But language was something of which she had no doubt. Bill Connor was proficient in language; he employed it in moments of jealousy, when he sometimes wrung her ear. If Goosie had to offer back a heart, Bill Connor's heart, or anybody's heart, the surrender certainly would be accompanied by language. So the word, according to Goosie's understanding, was entirely appropriate in its place.

Louise wanted to get beyond range of both Goosie's organ and her organs. She pressed her nose against the screen trying to sight along the wall to see if Pap was holding down the end of a bench according to his after-supper habit when off his run. She could not see from the parlor window, yet dreaded to make an

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 exploration from the office door. Pap would be certain to take her appearance as a hint that she wanted to go for a walk. Which she did, but not with Pap.—Pap was not there; the way was clear. Louise hurried out, bareheaded as she was, according to the informal fashion of McPacken ladies when they took the air. This gave them the appearance of having just stepped out of doors, and being on the point of stepping back in again. It was a custom that had the stamp of domesticity about it, and restrained forward young sprigs from getting too fresh.

A certain amount of freshness a lady of McPacken expected and tolerated; but there was a line of safety which both sides usually were careful to respect. Being bareheaded on the streets of McPacken at evening was a woman's safeguard. It was her proclamation that she was one of them, under the guardianship of some hard-knuckled champion who would make times smoky for any fresh guy that might step up and pinch her arm.

Pap was getting to be very troublesome to Louise. He was taking on a proprietary air, just as if things were settled between them, proceeding on the assumption that a man who would cross over to the right-hand side of the engine cab within two years was irresistible to the female desire.

He often came to the court house when he was off his run, to hang around in his leaning, somnolent way of patience, common to people who are not so very brisk of intellect, until her hour for leaving came. Taxpayers had to push in beside his leaning bulk at the

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 window, where Pap smoked Tulip Roses, turning now and then to spit, with the perfection of loftiness, on the splintery floor.

During these watches at the wicket Pap was not voluble. He seldom spoke at all, just stood there leaning on his arms, his watch-chain hooked high up in his black sateen shirt, his watch in the pocket of that favored garment of railroad men of the period. He was like a slow old cat waiting at a hole for a goper to come out, not much concerned whether it ever would appear, but serenely easy in the waiting. It was a sort of public adulation extremely distasteful to the object. It seemed to admit some sort of arrangement, which McPacken was quick to accept and respect.

This progression in Pap's courtship, for it was nothing less romantic, had been made during the two weeks since Tom Laylander went away from McPacken with his cattle. It might go on, Louise thought, smiling whimsically at the absurdity of it, until Pap would take possession of her in due course, unless she began to develop cruelty, and got herself despised by McPacken for her airs, or made a retreat before the slow pressure of Pap's affections, which were about as quick and warm as a glacier.

Seriously, she would leave McPacken. That was all there remained to be done. Tom Laylander never was coming back; the place grew more desolate every day. Her situation at the court house was pleasant, but uncertain. Election would take place in a few weeks; the county treasurer might not be retained in office, in

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 which case the incoming man's friends and relatives would get the subordinate jobs. The tenure of her foothold at the political feed-box in McPacken was extremely insecure. The longer she held on, the more money she would have to begin the world with again, to be sure. But there would be more of Pap, also.

Another week was as long as she could endure Pap, to say nothing of the barren loneliness of that town. One more week, she resolved, in her firm, final way, and then good-by McPacken and the gray-green prairie swells. She would go back to the places where trees circumscribed the view, making the world seem smaller, less formidable to assault. Here the immensity of it was appalling. The heart quailed before it; the courage faltered and shrank away. It was a bleak land to be alone in; a weary land, with no cheer in its vast monotony; a land to break the heart, if it were a heart alone.

There was unusual life in the square tonight, a sound of music, a pressing of people around the center of attraction, which seemed to be a man standing in the town's one hack, which vehicle had its top down, giving it a bold and impertinent, if not a sporty and immoral, air. No less illustrious person than Banjo Gibson was seated in the hack behind the standing man. Banjo was playing them up, the standing man measuring them as they came.

Louise concluded, from Banjo's connection with the stranger, that he was one of those medicine adventurers who commonly appeared in that theatrical manner. In

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 those days it was considered a mark of affluence and high-handed liberality to hire a hack by the hour. McPacken's one vehicle of this sort was anything but a luxurious or costly coach. It had been working gradually westward from Kansas City for twenty years. From its decreasing activity in McPacken's streets it must go to the weed-plot beside the blacksmith shop, among the wrecks of irreparable wagons, old plows, old buggies.

Tonight, with its top turned back, the old hack looked unfamiliar and frivolous, like an elderly country belle who had thrown her sunbonnet off to take part in some unseemly revel. The man who stood in it, with a black coat coming to the joints of his knees, was tall and meagre. He looked like a member of the southern bar, his black hair long and glossy, combed back from a professorial forehead, held down by pomatum which streamed its scents upon the breeze.

This man had a severe and judicial appearance, with his white vest, his black coat held back by a hand thrust in his trousers pocket. From his close, severe scrutiny of the people before him, it seemed as if he had come to try McPacken on some serious charge. Banjo Gibson, in the background of this dignified presence, did not carry out the impression of austere and solemn purpose. Along with Banjo, it was rather a ludicrous combination, indeed, for the mustached little musician lifted up his voice and sang, in far-carrying, deep-throated baritone, this being the burden of his song:

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and something else, and something else, all down the menu, which was a long one, and exceedingly humorous in the ears of McPacken.

The climax of this long singing was that this fine blade had but fifty cents in his pocket to meet the bill. That was the point McPacken appreciated. It could understand the exquisite humor of a situation such as that. No matter what was coming—pills, plasters, bitter draughts or sweet—McPacken was content to stand and listen, and perhaps buy a little, only to have more music of that diverting kind.

Banjo finished, his last note carried out on appreciative applause. The man in professional attire began to talk. Not of medicine, although it might lead up to medicine in time; but of consequence and power, and the desire in the breasts of people to enjoy and exercise these blessings. It might be something for the breath, thought Louise, or for the hair; it might be something 'for the liver, or something for the teeth. Whatever he was laying his approach to, he was an easy talking man, sure of his words, sure of himself. It was as if he had come into both consequence and power early in life, and was quite accustomed to them now.

The man talked briskly and refreshingly, getting his

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 Descent, while the Hanbalites take them literally. The Law has made two sides of these—exoteric and esoteric—because of the differences of human nature and minds in verifying a thing. The existence, of an opposed esoteric meaning is in order to call the attention of the learned to find out a comprehensive interpretation. To this the following verse of the Quran refers: "It is he who hath sent down unto thee the book, wherein are some verses clear to be understood—they are the foundation of the book—and others are parabolical. But they whose hearts are perverse will follow that which is parabolical therein; out of love of schism, and a desire of the interpretation thereof; yet none knoweth the interpretation thereof except God. But they who are well grounded in


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 words into everybody's ears, putting them just about where he wanted them to go, as it appeared from the silence, the leaning expectancy. Just when he had come to the point where it seemed he was about to uncover his hand, he stopped.

"We'll have some more music," he said.

He continued standing while Banjo sang another song, keeping the thread of expectation in his hands, not relaxing it for a moment. Banjo's song was another one continuing his adventures with his gal, this time in a place that he called "the big cook-quarium," which was devoted to the display of fishes, gentle and monstrous. That done, with greater applause than before, the speaker resumed.

It was not medicine. The key to power was not something to sweeten the breath and enable a common, catarrhal man to marry a fortune; not something for the hair, to furnish a forlorn and plucked bachelor with a brush equal to any fox in a single night. It was nothing in this world of surprises and disappointments but a book.

The man stooped and came up with one of the inestimable volumes in his hand. It was a chunky, thick little book, with a most familiar appearance in the eyes of Louise Gardner; a tight, fat little book in a red cover with large black letters on the back. In truth, surprising, almost comical truth, it was the familiar Thousand Ways.

This man did not follow printed instructions, he did not recite the argument prepared by somebody in

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 the publishing house, and sent out on yellow-tinted paper for the guidance of agents in the field. He was his own authority, and amazingly sufficient unto his day. He transcended all bounds of book agents; he brought imagination into a business that had not known it before his time.

There was nobody in a publishing office anywhere who could advise, direct or instruct that man in ways for bringing his books before the public ear—the public eye would engage them only after purchasing—or add one word that he had not thought of and employed. Before him other book agents were only as dumb beginners; beyond him there was nothing. In the business of being a book agent, he was supreme.

Louise knew she hadn't any claim on the territory this capably voluble man had invaded. Under the terms of her contract with the general agent she was obliged to report every two weeks, a certain number of lapses in this particular amounting to forfeiture of territory exclusively assigned. She never had made any report. This stranger was welcome to the whole world. If he could prosper in it, as he appeared to have done, Kansas was his by the sovereignty of genius. Louise drew a little nearer, to hear more of his methods, and watch the result.

Nobody in that eager crowd of McPacken's best appeared to remember that Louise Gardner had come to town on a certain hot day two months before, offering that same priceless treasure in her appealing, timid, unconvincing way. There was no appeal in this man's

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 business, no uncertainty. He seemed to believe in that book as thoroughly as man ever accepted written word in this world. He seemed even to believe, as he talked on, that the book was a bit too good for McPacken, and to hesitate over allowing them to have it at all.

That was an amazing method, thought Louise. Here he had led them up to what seemed the very approach of his climax, to the point of desire, when hands were already in pockets, and now he was putting the book away. He had only a few copies left, he said; it would seem unfair to place these invaluable formulae for compounding quick and easy fortune into the hands of a small number of people, when there were so many in this world of hardship and poverty who might need them more.

He seemed to be thinking over the situation, with regret for having brought them up to this pitch of desire, as he put the sample volume away in the large valise that stood on the seat before him. It seemed to sadden him to deny them this great secret of the way to wealth, this philosopher's stone bound in red with black letters on the back.

Presently he brightened, looking over the crowd with a little eloquent gesture illustrating his inability to refuse humanity this blessing. But there were only a few, he reminded them; they must not hold it against him if there were not enough to go around. He stood like a philanthropist handing down loaves to the starving. Jake Smolinsky, of the Racket Store, was the first one to step up and buy.

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 Tom Laylander was a little in advance of her when Louise first saw him. The sight of him gave her a shock, but not an unpleasant one. It was more of an uprising of some hot, flooding emotion between gladness and surprise, with an eagerness to call to him, to crowd through and touch his arm, as one feels when seeing a familiar figure in a strange and lonely place. Tom was wearing the same old white hat, the same old gray shirt. If he had sold his cattle to advantage, he had not yielded to the dominating human vanity to make a show of his prosperity in his dress.

Louise pushed forward, disturbing the calculations of some who were making up sums of money in their palms, to have the price ready if fortune should favor them by allowing them to get up to the hack before the books were gone. She yielded to the impelling, warm feeling of glad friendship, joyful relief, and touched Laylander's shoulder.

"Were you intending to buy a book, Mr. Laylander?" she inquired.

Tom turned as if a bullet had given him a fiery nip in the shoulder. He had a new necktie, of color somewhat too warm; otherwise his appearance was unchanged. He was as fresh and pink as a new potato, and as confused and stammering as if Louise had caught him with his hand in the book agent's pocket.

"Why, Miss Louise!" he said. He seemed amazed, incredulous, but he managed to get his hat off with one hand, and held out the other in greeting.

Tom held her hand with such an ardent clasp, looked

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 at her with so much leaping, sparkling joy in his blue eyes, that Louise felt ashamed to take advantage of his forgiving innocence. She had wronged him doubly, but there was not a shadow of such memories on his ingenuous soul. She drew on his hand to pull him out of the crowd.

"You don't need to buy one of those books," she said.

"Why, Miss Louise!" Tom repeated, in that same amazed, glad way.

There was a bench under the maple trees in the square, close by a cement fountain that never had thrown a jet of water in its day. Not a very secluded place, for seclusion in affairs between people was not encouraged by McPacken, which liked above everything to know what was going on.

A big electric light hung over them, just a little way to one side, around which a cloud of hard-backed, fascinated June-bugs blundered to their doom, to fall in a constant showering, attended by little sounds of sizzling, to the grass. Others had sat on the same bench under like conditions, with similar business before them; others would come after them in their order and sit there, where all McPacken that crossed the square might see.

"Did you do well with your cattle, Tom?" she asked. She was sitting on his lee side, his shadow falling over her like a protecting cloak.

"Yes, Miss Louise, I did right well with them."

"When did you come back?"

"Just this evening, Miss Louise."

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 "I didn't see you at the hotel."

"No, ma'am. I didn't feel like goin' to the ho-tel, somehow, Miss Louise."

"Oh, please don't 'Miss Louise' and 'ma'am' me, Tom. You know me too well for that."

"Yes, lambie," said Tom.

He got hold of her hand, and held it in the light, openly and boldly, as something that belonged to him.

"Tom, you kept away from the hotel because you didn't want to see me."

She didn't believe it, but it is a woman's way to lay charges, especially a guilty woman when she contrives to make a case against the one in whose censure she soon is to stand. It is a poor subterfuge of filing a cross-bill, of which the best of women are guilty in their shifty little lives.

"I had doubts and fears," said Tom, in his simple, honest way. "But I know they were foolish. I know it as well as anything, now."

"But you don't know what a great wrong I did you, Tom."

She looked up at him with that pleading, large-eyed appeal, as she used to look at hard-hearted citizens who would not buy the Thousand Ways; as she had leaned that first day in McPacken to look at Banjo Gibson, and quicken his sophisticated heart.

"You never wronged a butterfly in your life, you poor little dove," he said.

"But I did—I did something that was simply aw-

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 ful!" She leaned a little, her voice lowered to a whisper. "I turned Cal Withers loose that time!"

"Why," said Tom, in surprise to hear her make such a tragedy of her confession, "I knew that all the time. I was glad you let him go; I was beginnin' to feel kind of sorry for the old feller, tied up there without a drink of water to moisten his tongue."

Louise forgot McPacken; she forgot the bright electric light, fantastic lure of destruction in the June-bug world. She leaned her forehead against Tom Laylander's shoulder, as she had leaned it against the wall on the day of Withers's downfall, and cried. He spoke to her endearingly, stroking her hair with gentle consolation. McPacken had set this stage for such events; let it come and see if it would.

"Well, I declare!" said Tom, after a while, cheerfully, briskly, simulating a great surprise. "That man's closed out his gripful of books—my last chance is gone!"

Louise was feeling much better. She laughed.

"Seriously, Tom, did you want one of them?"

"I wouldn't take one of 'em as a gift," he replied. "That many ways to make money would confuse me so I wouldn't know where to start. I didn't come back to McPacken lookin' for any receipt to make money by; I come back longin' for a receipt that would make me happy."

Angus Valorous was returning to the hotel with the baggage wheelbarrow at something after nine o'clock

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 that night. He met Pap Cowgill in his overalls and cap, on his way to take an extra run for which he had been called.

"Who's leavin'?" Pap asked.

"Louise," said Angus, letting down the shafts.

"Louise?" Pap repeated, his heart hitting the bottom of the pit. "Where's she goin' to?"

"Goin' east on Eight," said Angus, enjoying the situation keenly on account of his dislike for Pap, who was too free with his orders, and his full understanding of that young man's intentions with regard to Louise.

"What's she leavin' for?" Pap wondered, dazed by the news.

"It'd pay you to keep posted," said Angus Valorous, with great contempt. "The cow jerry come back to town this evening; him and her was married a little while ago."

"The hu-hu-hu—," said Pap.

If Pap ever was able to complete it, Angus Valorous did not hear the end. He left Pap standing in the road as cruelly winded as if the hardest hitter in McPacken had given him a jolt in that seat of his soul where his pie went home.

Angus Valorous went on toward the hotel with the wheelbarrow, in little starts, little haltings. He was a freight engine, pulling out of the McPacken yards on a wet night, his drivers spinning on the slippery rails. He puffed now in deep, laboring exhaust, going with slow step in measure with it; now in quick, explosive racing, as the drivers spun on the wet rails, his feet

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 chuffing the dust to a cloud as he stood in his tracks, the rails fairly burning under the friction of his wheels.

Over in the Cottonwood Hotel, in the corner of the room where Louise Gardner had made her hasty preparations to depart not half an hour before, there lay a little pile of fat red books with black lettering on their backs, which anybody could have had for the carrying away.

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 knowledge say: We believe therein, the whole is from our Lord, and none will consider except the prudent."

Here it may be objected that in the Law there are things which all Muslims have agreed to take esoterically, while there are others on which they have agreed to put an interpretation, while there are some about which they disagree. Is it justifiable to use logic in the interpretation of those which have been taken literally, or otherwise? We would say that if the agreement is positive there is no need to apply logic; but if it be conjectural there is. For this very reason Abu Hamid (Al Ghazzali) and Abu Ma'ali and other learned doctors have ordained that a man does not become an unbeliever by forsaking the common agreement and applying the principle of interpretation in such things. It will certainly be agreed that complete consensus of opinion is not possible in metaphysical questions, in the manner in


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 which it is possible to establish it in practical things. For it is not possible to establish unanimity of opinion at any time, unless we confine ourselves to a small period and know perfectly all the learned doctors living in it, that is, their personalities, their number and their views about any question to be quoted to us directly from them without a break in the chain. With all this we should know for certain that the doctors living at that time are agreed that there is no distinction of exoteric and esoteric meanings in the Law, that the knowledge of no proposition should be concealed from anybody, and that the method of teaching the Law should be the same with all men. But we know that a large number of people in the early days of Islam believed in exoteric and esoteric meanings of the Law, and thought that the esoteric meanings should not be disclosed to an ignorant person who cannot understand them, For example, Bukhari has related on the authority of Ali that


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 he said "Talk to men what they can understand. Do you intend to give the lie to God and His Apostle?" There are many Traditions to the same effect related from other people. So, how is it possible to conceive of any consensus of opinion coining down to us in metaphysical questions when we definitely know that in every age there Have been doctors who take the Law to contain things the real significance of which should not be disclosed to all men? But in practical affairs it is quite different. For all persons are of opinion that they should be revealed to all men alike. In these things unanimity of opinion can be easily obtained if the proposition is published, and no disagreement is reported. That may be sufficient to obtain unanimity of opinion in practical things as distinct from the sciences.

If it be maintained that one docs not become an unbeliever by ignoring consensus of opinion in interpretation, as no unanimity is possible in it, what shall


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title: The Cow Jerry


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title: The Cow Jerry/Chapter 3


text: The Cow Jerry/Chapter 4

title: The Cow Jerry/Chapter 4


text: The Cow Jerry/Chapter 5

title: The Cow Jerry/Chapter 5


text:
Page:The philosophy and theology of Averroes.djvu/35

 we say of such Muslim philosophers as Abu Nasr (Al Farabi) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna)? For Abu Hamid (Al Ghazzali) has charged them with positive infidelity in his book: The Refutation of the Philosophers, in regard to three things: The eternity of the world; God's ignorance of particulars; and the interpretation concerning the resurrection of bodies and the state of the Day of Judgment. To this we should reply that from what he has said it is not clear that he has charged them positively with infidelity. For in his book Al Tafriqah bain'al Islami w'al Zindiqah he has explained that the infidelity of a man who ignores the consensus of opinion is doubtful. Moreover we have definitely pointed out that it is not possible to establish a consensus of opinion in such matters, especially when there are many people of the early times who have held that there are interpretations which should not be disclosed to all but only to those who are fit for a


text: The Cow Jerry/Chapter 6

title: The Cow Jerry/Chapter 6