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 the little children do not live long, no matter if their joyless lives are soon snuffed out by the accursed system.

What does Big Business care for murder—unless some crazed workingman, like the McNamaras, chance to do the murder—then comes a wave of horror.

More than 500,000 human beings crushed every year in preventable accidents and mine explosions!

That is nothing, compared to the profits in the game.

More than 600,000 girls living in prostitution and white slavery, because capitalism pays them wages too small to live honest lives.

The average lives of these girls is five years.

The white slave syndicate figures on needing 200,000 fresh recruits every year to assure an attractive stock, as some quit the business, or become too diseased to keep it up, before the five years roll around with its death sentence.

When you vote for Capitalism you vote for this thing to go on.

And that unknown quantity carried off annually by disease bred of filth and unsanitary conditions and poverty—the biggest toll of all to the god of Mammon.

But what of this, anyway, man? Why, your capitalist courts have declared that a workingman is only worth $350 more than a mule, and it is blamed hard and expensive, too, to collect the $350.

After your lawyers and courts are done with you, I should judge you would be left with about seventy-five cents clear, so virtually you bring in the neighborhood of six bits more than the mule. I suppose a woman would not be worth so much, and a child less.

Here is the court decision that has established the market value of a workingman. The decision was rendered in the federal court, at Cleveland, in December last (1911), and the rendering is reported as follows:


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HERE was a good deal of loose skin on Charley Thomson's neck, dry wrinkled skin, which caused one to wonder how he stretched it to shave. That he managed it someway, day by day, was as evident as the hills around Saunders, for never a hair had grown long enough to interfere with his mouth in all his years in the town.

A great avid mouth, like a cannibal fish, elongated by wrinkles at the corners, which bent it downwards with a sneering cast; a clubbed, fleshy nose, purple, immense; small eyes, squinting from a life-long habit of drawing them to points to increase his look of shrewdness and inscrutability. Not a handsome man in one line of his rascally old face, not a nice man in one habit of his daily life, yet a man with something about him that caught upon the perception like a burr, and argued convincingly for some strength which lay beneath the smoky rind.

As long as he had practiced law in Saunders, and that ran back to the territorial days of Wyoming, and far back into them, at that, Charley Thomson had garbed himself with unvarying sameness, A blue woolen shirt, loose about his lean neck as the folded


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T's a proud thing to go out from under the realm of a school-mistress, and to be enrolled in a company of boys who are under the guidance of a master. It 1s one of the earliest steps of worldly pride, which has before it a long and tedious ladder of ascent. Even the advice ot tne old mistress, and the nine-penny book that she thrusts into your hand as a parting gift, pass for nothing; and her kiss or adieu, if she tenders it in the sight of your fellows, will call up an angry rush of blood to the cheek, that for long years, shall drown all sense of its kindness.

You have looked admiringly many a day upon the tall fellows who play at the door of Dr. Bidlow's school: you have looked with reverence, second only to that felt for the old village church, upon its dark-looking heavy brick walls. It seemed to be redolent of learning; and stopping at times, to


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 skin for which he had no use, nearly always lumpy in the corners of the collar, as a woolen shirt becomes after much washing; a black necktie, pulled almost as tight as the hangman's noose which he had helped so many who deserved it to escape, the ends of it tucked into his bosom; a long black professional coat, glossy on the back from long rubbing against various articles of, furniture, even church pews; an old black hat, weathered and rain-beaten, sweated and greasy, deplorable and disgraceful altogether.

Charley Thomson was the only man in Saunders, or perhaps in Wyoming from one end to the other, who could catch fish like an Indian. That is to say, with a hook bound to a long pole, which the artist introduces into the water and slips under the fish as he dozes in depths of pellucid stream or lake, in that country commonly glass-clear. How craftily a man must go about this to land the fish by raking the hook into its keel, requires no very active imagination to understand. Charley Thomson could do it; he could land the fish down to the very last one in the school worth carrying home.

Similarly, he had some undefined adroitness in his practice of the law by which he reached his hook into the very shadow of the gallows and jerked men back to the safety of liberty and life. He had been doing it a long time in that mountain-bound county seat, but, though his fame had grown, his fortunes seemed to run backwards, Thomson drank a quart of whisky a day. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

On the afternoon of this summer day, Thomson was


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 closeted in his office in consultation with a client. The lawyer's window was open on the street, the acrid smoke of his greasy cob pipe trailed out to assail the nostrils and eyes of those who passed. The client, who sat between the lawyer and the window, turned his head uneasily as the footsteps of passengers in the street sounded in the room. Thomson, hand at the bowl of his pipe, eyes fixed in keen, probing directness on his client's troubled face, nodded toward the open sash he client rose with alacrity and pulled it down.

This client was a young man, tall, lithe, sinewy; with the pliant grace of a horseman in his sinewy back. He was coatless, his shirt was open at the neck, showing his brown bosom; a pistol was belted about him, leather cuffs protected his wrists. His bearing and trappings proclaimed him cowboy, common among his kind in that country in his day, which was the day of the cattle barons, as they were called both East and West.

There was a shadow of trouble in the young cowboy's face, which was an ingenuous face, and mild, with a cast of unawakened humor about the mouth, an eager alertness in the clear blue eyes. He held his hat respectfully in his hand, although Charley Thomson kept his own on his head, after his manner in the presence of all men, great and small. The young man resumed his chair uneasily after closing the window, the shadow of troubled earnestness deepening on his face.

"Huh!" said Thomson, grunting meditatively around the stem of his pipe.

The client lifted his eyes expectantly. The lawyer


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 said no more, but sat with frowning eyes fixed in abstract gaze on whatever hypothetical situation he may have conjured up in his crafty mind. Presently he put his pipe on the cluttered table, where the handle of a notarial seal lifted out of the drift of old papers and tattered books like a smothered word of truth appealing its own sad case.

"I don't like for a man to come to me and tell me he's goin' to kill somebody," Thomson said, severely. "It ain't my business to give advice on how a man can be killed with the minimum of risk and the maximum of justification. My business is to get him off after he's done it."

He looked sharply at the young man, who moved his feet uneasily, colored hotly, dropped his eyes.

"Yes sir, Mr. Thomson," said he.

"So the only thing I've got to say to you, Mr. "

"Dan Gustin is my name." The young man gave it to him straight in the eyes, with head lifted quickly, as a man delivers something of which he is not ashamed.

"Mr. Dan Gustin, of"

"I'm with the Elk Mountain Cattle Company, over on the Big Wind—the Diamond Tail brand."

"Of the Diamond Tail brand, is to go out and kill your man, then come to me. That is—" turning again from the table, as with an afterthought—"if you've got to kill him. I'm not advisin' you to go and do it, but if you've got to work it out of your system, my part in the transaction is after, not before, the fact."

"Yes sir," said Dan Gustin, in the same respectfully perfunctory way as before. He stood a little while


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 turning his hat in his hands. Then: "Thank you, Mr. Thomson, for puttin' me right. I thought if it wouldn't be too much bother to you to git me off—if I wouldn't have to lose too much time"

"It would be a lot of bother to get you off, it's gettin' harder every day to get 'em off," Thomson replied crabbedly.

"Yes sir," Dan Gustin said, respectfully confused.

"They might keep you in jail six months before trial, that's a scheme this new prosecutor's got to break a man and make him so weak he'll convict himself. My advice to you is keep out of it. A cowpuncher's got no business to set up as a killer in these degenerate times, Gustin; that's a luxurious distinction only a man with money can afford. Let that feller go. If he deserves killin', somebody'll come along in time and do it, and save you the trouble and expense."

"He sure deserves it, all right!" Gustin declared, twisting his head in great earnestness.

"Who is he?"

"Feller up in our country," the cowboy replied, evasively.

"All right," said Thomson, after boring him with a gimlet look; "you let him live on. How much money have you got?"

"About sixty dollars."

"That wouldn't patch a bullet—that wouldn't patch a bullet! Killin' isn't as cheap in this country as it was five years ago, young man. What do you reckon it costs to get a man off these times?"

"I don't know, sir, but I thought maybe a hundred


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 dollars or so."

"A hundred dollars or so wouldn't grease one hinge of the jail door! If I can get a man off before the trial jury it lets him out for about a thousand; if we have to appeal, it'll run up to five. It's not a game for cowpunchers, kid. You keep out of it."

The young man stood fingering the leather band of his big hat, his weight thrown first on this foot, then on that. He looked up after a spell of cogitation, a sheepish grin clearing the trouble out of his eyes.

"I guess I'll let him live on," he said.

Thomson bent that frowning, sharp, half resentful gaze on him again.

"Girl back of it?"

"Well sir, we did have words over a lady."

"Who? Who's over there in that God-blasted country you inhabit worth pullin' a gun for?"

"She's a lady they call Cattle Kate."

"What other name?" the lawyer asked, showing a frowning, dark interest.

"Medford's her old man's name."

"Huh! married, is she?"

"I mean her paw."

"Is he the man you want to kill?" Thomson inquired, looking up in sudden severity.

"No sir!" the cowboy denied frigidly. "I wouldn't hurt a hair of his head."

"No, of course you wouldn't, you young gourd!" said Thomson, turning his grim old eyes to shoot his contemptuous ridicule into the cowboy's face. "Well, you let Cattle Kate and her daddy do their own killin'."


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 "Yes sir," Dan Gustin agreed, with a very foolish look about him. "Much obliged, Mr. Thomson."

"Twenty-five dollars," said Thomson, severely, holding out his hand. "I haven't got any advice to give away."

Dan Gustin got out his money, very red in the face, looking more foolish and chastened than ever, and left twenty-five dollars in the lawyer's not over-clean fingers.

"I'll let him live a good while!" said the cowboy, with a wry grin, stuffing his wallet into his inner vest-pocket.

"It would pay you," Thomson nodded, raising his eyebrows with his eyes to look into the tall young man's face, but not moving his head at all.

"It'd be cheaper for me to throw my stuff into a and hit the breeze out of this country," the cowboy figured, making for the door.

"And wiser," the lawyer shot after him, moved somewhat out of his habitual attitude of contempt for the weaknesses of men by the honest simplicity of the one at present before him. "So you're ridin' the range for old Dale Findlay?"

"I'm makin' a stagger at it."

"Give him my regards," said Thomson, a mocking sarcasm in his tone that won for him another deepfathoming glance from the cowboy's baffled eyes.

"I'll mention you sent 'em," Gustin agreed, one foot outside the door.

"There's a feller down at Grimmitt's inquirin' the way out to your God-forsaken ranch."


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 "I guess he's the man I come down here to meet—I've got a wagon to haul him out there in," Gustin confessed, with no small indignation.

"Expectin' him, huh?"

"The big boss, Hal Nearing, sent me. This feller belongs to some high-up lady back East, a pardner in the ranch, or something. He's her only dear child, brung up back of the kitchen stove. She's sent him out here to grow hair on his shins and learn to be a man."

"Well, he's goin' to a heavenly atmosphere!" Thomson said.

"There's worse outfits than the Diamond Tail, mister," Dan said, turning with a bristling attitude of defense that was as good as a threat.

"Yes," the lawyer granted, thoughtfully, "and you wouldn't have to go far to find them, from what you've been tellin' me. So you came down to meet that boy, huh?"

"That was my aim and object, pardner."

"I thought it was for legal advice. Or is the matter of shootin' a man off just incidental with a fresh young blood like you?"

"I thought I'd kill two skunks at the same shot," Dan returned, quite innocent of either intent or expression of offense.

Thomson accepted it as delivered, knowing the breed too well to raise a question.

"I see," said he, his wide mouth clamped for a moment upon its ugly secrets, his eyebrows lifted as he slewed his eyes to look at what now plainly had become


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 an object of contempt. "And if you hadn't been drivin' down to haul out this greenhorn you'd 'a' gone gunnin' for that feller up there without countin' the cost."

"I sure would, mister!"

"Well, you've paid for my advice; what're you goin' to do with it?"

"I'll let him live on," Dan declared, twisting his head in expression of deep seriousness.

"Stop in and see me when you come to town," Thomson invited, offering his hand with his words.

This unaccountable unbending from what had appeared to Dan a scornful coldness, winded him for a moment, paralyzing all effort of response. He appeared to stand doubting, as if charges were expected to go with this approach to friendliness and well-wishing.

"I sure will, Mr. Thomson," he responded heartily, grasping the lawyer's hand as warmly as if it had dragged him from the gibbet and restored him to the joyous ways of life.

As Dan Gustin went his way down the street, Lawyer Thomson stood in his door looking after him, no line of disdain, amusement, satisfaction, or any emotion that the eye could interpret in his inscrutable face. Presently he turned into his office, where he began to pry dustily into his records contained in a little set of drawers that once had held spool cotton thread. With chair drawn close against this homely little cabinet, which was nailed to the wall and braced by two rough boards on long slant to the floor, Thomson thumbed his untidy papers until he came at last to that which


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 he sought. This he drew from its sheaf of like frayed and yellowed documents, glanced over it to verify its contents, and then put it in his great flat, gaunt wallet along with Dan Gustin's fee, struck match to his outrageous pipe, and sat glooming in a reverie.


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RIMMITT'S hotel stood a hundred yards or thereabout from the lawyer's office which Dan Gustin had just quitted. Between the two places there stretched a plank sidewalk of varying height and width, according to the caprice, liberality or business convenience of the property-holders fronting the street. Here it ran at street level, the débris of crushed tin cans, blowing papers, scattered oats from nose-bags, littered hay, lodged against its plank-ends, even overflowing upon it; along a little way it rose a foot to accord with the foundation of a saloon; again it became a platform in front of the principal store, upon which women could step directly from their wagons when they drove in to trade.

Along this unequal way, where loafers sat on whittled benches, lounged in doorways, leaned against porch props, Dan Gustin went pegging in his high-heeled boots like a mule in a Mexican chain hobble, holding a straight course for the hotel, past the doors of temptation. The marks of his spur straps were polished on his insteps, the chafing of their metal was plain upon his heels, but he had laid those galling instruments aside for this excursion by wagon and, as he walked in review of those of his own calling who idled by the way, he felt like a plucked drake set loose before the flock.


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 Inwardly he cursed the luck that had singled him out for the business of meeting this stranger from far places who was coming into that country to cut his eye-teeth on the bones of the range. It was beneath the dignity of a proper man to run an ambulance for the transportation of undeveloped or deficient human beings who could not ride a horse.

In the window of the bar at Grimmitt's hotel there stood the mounted skin of a great white wolf, bottles of red and yellow liquor around its feet. It had been there a long time, so long, indeed, that it had become a landmark to the thirsty who came riding from the far-away ranges, mines and military post. Dust had gathered on its back, and blackened the once fiery red of the snarling tongue curved inside the barrier of long, threatening teeth.

All the old-timers knew that Grimmitt had slain the wolf back in the days when he rode like one of its kind on the trail of thief or murderer, never dropping the scent for hardship, boundary of his jurisdiction as sheriff, or any of the common obstacles of nature or the cunning of desperate men. Now Grimmitt's hair was whiter than the wolf's, and he was prouder of that trophy of the chase than the most notable deed of his truly notable past as peace officer in that rough-handed land.

But there was one peculiarity about this wolf that probably marked it apart from all other wolves of whatever hue, living or dead; it was blessed and comforted by a pair of such mild, wide-open, wondering, innocent blue eyes as never graced a vulpine counte-


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 mance anywhere among that ravening tribe in this world. Grimmitt contended that this wolf had blue eyes when he shot it, and a blue-eyed wolf he would have it, dead and snarling among the whisky bottles in his window.

On this point of fidelity to nature the community was divided, some holding with Grimmitt that a white wolf had blue eyes, although none could be fastened down to the declaration that he ever had met one; others scorning the contention and ridiculing the effigy as a slander against nature, wolf nature in particular. As for Grimmitt, he was ready to fight for the blue eyes of his wolf, and their fidelity to the original. It had blue eyes when alive, and blue eyes he had ordered for it dead. The taxidermist had done the best he could to meet this extraordinary specification, but had succeeded only in supplying blue eyes, not blue eyes of a wolf. Far from it, indeed. Not even human eyes. Doll's eyes, they appeared to be, large and expressionless of all wolfish ferocity, calm and untroubled and wide-staring; blue as asters by the roadside, placid as water in a porridge bowl.

Dan Gustin never had been a resident of Saunders, therefore never had been aligned in the controversy of the white wolf, although he had his own opinion in the matter, as a free rider might have, indeed. Now he went his way to the hotel to meet his charge, a bit uncomfortable, and ashamed of his mission.

Dan brisked up a bit at the sight of two men before the window displaying the white wolf, evidently engaged in a wrangle over the merits of that historic


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 beast. His hope of seeing a mixup over the question was only secondary, however, to his sudden and keen interest in one of the contestants, which interest and curiosity increased with every step that he took drawing him nearer.

This man was garbed in what appeared to Dan Gustin, cowboy of the inter-mountain plains, the most astonishing garments that ever concealed the nakedness of a fellow-creature. To one of wider range of experience, the stranger would have appeared as nothing more extraordinary than a sailor of the United States navy, dressed as he had stepped from the deck of his ship, wide-flapping trouser legs, tight little blouse with its laced front and open collar, and that little cap which js neither useful nor ornamental, above all.

It was the headgear, especially, that held Dan's amazed attention, striking him with such immeasurable astonishment that his mouth fell open for want of a properly strong word to fill it. To Dan the man seemed some curious freak of overgrown child, for that sort of cap he had seen on the heads of very little boys in the officers' quarters at the post, even that very pattern of a suit, if suit it might properly be called. That any full-grown, man-shouldered male human being could be so poor in dignity as to appear in public and the light of day so trigged up, passed all bounds of credulity. But there he was, his little old fool cap pushed back like a three-year-old boy, his blunderbuss trousers flapping in the wind about his ankles, holding an argument with as much assurance as if he stood equal with any man that ever split the breeze.


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 Dan Gustin did not know that nations attired their defenders of the seas in that manner; to him the sight of this sailor, a thousand miles and more from the nearest salt sea, brought no association of romance or adventure, or of white cruisers lifting to the placid lap of swelling waters in far-off San Francisco bay. The stranger was an amazing freak, parading with an affrontery that Dan resented. Dan remembered having seen a girl in a show down at Cheyenne one time, dressed in that fashion. Maybe this was the explanation. There must be a show in town.

Quickened by this thought and hope, Dan approached the window where the white wolf stood, its grizzly muzzle wrinkled in a fearful snarl which the serene blue eyes turned into nothing more than a bluff and a false pretense.

"I ketch 'em alive with my bare hands," the man who argued with the one Dan took for a walking advertisement declared, putting it rather roughly, in loud and quarrelsome words. "I'm here to tell you, little feller, I know wolf. I'm kin to 'em."

"I'm not sayin' you don't, mister," the other returned, mild and unruffled, but with a firmness that surprised Dan. "You asked me for my opinion on that beast's eyes, and I gave it to you."

"It ain't worth hell room!" the contentious man declared, glaring in bristling ferocity on the sailor.

This man who claimed kinship with the outlawed tribe was a thin-shouldered, narrow-chested person, standing gangling and tall, but with a roughness about him like a cactus, promising unpleasantness in handling.


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 His face was long and morose, its mournful cast heightened by the length of his nose, which hung club-ended over a wild red mustache. His upstanding eyebrows were huge and coarse as the bristles of an old boar, the small eyes under them combative and red, like the eyes of a man who had watched at campfires through long and windy nights.

He stood with thumbs hooked in his belt, a chafed and worn scabbard carrying a long pistol dangling against his thigh. His coat was tight across his narrow back, the sleeves of it far up his hairy wrists. He was not a friendly-looking man to meet on the trail, not the kind of a man one would stop in the road and ask for a match. He was that type of frontiersman to whom whisky was as necessary as fire to a stove. Without it he was a dead lump of encumbering material; with it one must touch him carefully. He was such a familiar type to Dan Gustin as to call for no consideration. Dan's eyes were centered on the sailor, whose strange garb and easy carriage began to move in the cowboy a certain admiration.

This sailor, who had wandered like a storm-blown gull so far from his sea, stood a little taller than Dan Gustin, who was no puny specimen himself. He was straight-backed and well-balanced; a compact man about the chest, which was uncommonly broad and deep. His brown face was clear and frank, rather boyish in its glad freshness, inviting confidence by its easy smile. There was a look of high courage in his blue eyes, a promise of good sense in the rather small head that carried so confidently on the short, muscular


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 neck. His brown hair was cut close; his cap was fixed with a little tilt toward his ear.

"No call to get your bristles up, that I can see," he said to the man who scorned his opinion on the eyes of Grimmitt's wolf. "I'm not an authority on wolves, but it strikes me that a white one ought to have blue eyes, even if it hasn't."

"You ain't got as many brains in your head as a fishin' worm!"

"Maybe you're right," the sailor admitted, placid and undisturbed by the other's scorn. "I never argue about that."

"A feller that'd wear a rig like you've got on don't know enough to scratch a hog!"

"That's all right now, pardner," said the sailor, turning to the brother of the wolf, a quick flush mounting to his face; "you go light on what you've got to say about this uniform!"

The kinsman of the wolf made a scoffing noise in his big nose.

"You look like a bottle in a sock," he said.

"It don't make any difference how I look, stranger. If this uniform's good enough for Uncle Sam, it's good enough for you, and you've got to respect it!"

Dan Gustin moved a little nearer. What was that about a uniform and Uncle Sam? Well, if Uncle Sam and that kid were partners, Dan was on their side from the jump.

The wolf's kin was looking the sailor up and down, contempt in his long nose, wrinkled in a snarl that was fiercer than the beast's behind the glass.


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 "Down in the Indian Nation, where I used to run wild," he said, "we slice up little fellers like you and fry 'em in grease. Give me that little purty you've got on your head—I want to take it home for my equaw to set a hen in."

He reached out with a swiping movement of his long arm as he spoke, to knock the offending little cap from its easy, but rather challenging, perch. The sailor ducked. The next moment Dan Gustin saw a blue flash like a kingfisher shooting down at a minnow's glint. The sailor's fist sounded as if somebody had struck a stump with an ax. Dan stepped back to let the stranger from the Indian Nation have all the ground that was coming to him when he fell.

The sailor stood where he had delivered his knockdown, crouching a little, alert, hands up for offense or defense as developments might demand, Dan wondered why he didn't follow up the advantage he had won in that first swift blow, according to the code of the range.

"Pile on to him, kid!" he urged, while the troublehunter lay stretched full length for a moment in the dust.

Before the sailor could act on Dan's charitable urging, if he had any mind for doing so, indeed, the man whom he had knocked down gathered himself and sprang nimbly to his feet. The sailor rushed him, only to run against the long pistol which the fellow jerked from the leather as he came to his feet in a cloud of dust.

"Put it up, pardner!" Dan commanded. "That


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 kid ain't got no gun."

Dan had stepped into the engagement quite easily and naturally, and well within the rights of a gentlemah, according to the custom of the country. He stood holding his own weapon with arm shortened against his side, after the manner of a quick and sure shooting man. There was blood on the quarrelsome stranger's mouth, murder in his sullen eyes. He turned his head to glare on Dan, reading at a glance something in the young man's eyes that would admit no argument. Then he slowly and sulkily returned the pistol to his holster, saying nothing, only opening his mouth to empty it of the blood that was already overflowing down the dusty stubble of his chin.

"If you want to stand up and fight him like a man, I'm willin'," Dan offered cheerfully.

"I'll hang your hide over the fence," the ruffian promised, turning to go.

The sailor, who had stepped back as nimbly as from a redhot iron when he saw the pistol at his breast, offered Dan his hand with a sort of shame-faced grin.

"Thanks, old feller," said he. "He took the wind out of me for a minute—I don't fight that way."

"Sure you don't, kid," said Dan, heartily.

The fight had drawn a good many people from along the street; the noise of their coming and gathering in front of the hotel attracted the customers from Grimmitt's bar. It drew Grimmitt with them; he appeared in the door drying his hands on his apron, just as the wolf hunter turned, his gun reluctantly restored to the scabbard, and went off to mount his horse.


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 "What's all this gun-slingin' goin' on over?" Grimmitt wanted to know, looking darkly and disfavoringly at Dan, who still kept his iron in his hand, not trusting the stranger's shifty eyes. Dan explained in few words, not mentioning the original controversy between the sailor and the stranger over the wolf.

Grimmitt, a short, tight man, with white hair cut as close to his scalp as scissors could clip it, stepped into the street.

"That feller's been loafin' around here all day tryin' to pick a fight out of somebody he thought he could lick," he said, watching the stranger swing into the saddle and ride away. "Anybody know who he is?"

"He goes by the name of Wells over on Horse Crick," said one. "He's ranchin' over there."

"I thought he looked like he come from that neck of the woods," Grimmitt said. "You know what kind of ranchin' them fellers does up there."

It seemed very well understood what manner of industry men were following on Horse Creek in those days, which was, indeed, a long time ago as time is measured by events in that quick-changing land. They grinned, some of them, but more of them followed the retreating stranger with dark and unfriendly eyes. Out of all this the sailor stood aside, an actor whose small part was played, an incidental factor in a momentary disturbance. Grimmitt turned again within his door; the customers who had put down their drinks hastily at his bar followed to repair their haste at leisure. Dan looked in quizzical comicality at the sailor, who seemed considerably embarrassed.


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 "What did you say about a uniform and Uncle Sam, kid?" Dan inquired. "I ain't never seen no soldiers dressed like you over at the post."

The sailor explained, his bright face lighting up with a smile. Again Dan must shake hands with him, making a regular ceremony of it this time.

"Will you come in and have a drink?" he whispered, delicately covering the invitation from the ears of others, in case regulations of which he never had heard might deny the sailor the freedom of other men, as Indians belonging to Uncle Sam were denied. Dan's cautious reserve received a pleasant shock in the hearty and ready acceptance of his invitation. The sailor came up to the situation like a man of experience, Dan thought.

"You're a man clear down to the heels!" said Dan, with ingenuous sincerity, as they started for the door.

Dan was so well pleased with his guest that his generosity, never difficult to move, was at once extended to include all at Grimmitt's bar, in spite of the heavy drain his savings had suffered at the lawyer's hands but a few minutes before. As they lounged at the bar waiting for the bottle to come down the class, the sailor flashed a sidelong glance now and then at his companion's face, and smiled to himself in the way of a man who has heard tidings which bring cheer to his heart.

They put away a few charges of Grimmitt's worst, the sailor getting it down as if he had been drinking that kind of pain-killer a long time. Dan, a little flushed around the gills, spoke across to Grimmitt.


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 "I come down here with a wagon to meet a feller that's goin' out to the ranch," he said, something like an apology in his manner of speaking. "Charley Thomson told me he was here."

"There's your man," said Grimmitt, tilting his head toward the sailor.

Dan gulped his amazement, thanking his lucky day that he hadn't made some kind of a crack. A broad feeling of satisfaction brought a sparkle into his eyes and a grin to his face, Once more he had to shake hands.

"I thought you'd met him," said Grimmitt, not intending the least humor.

"Gustin is the name I go by in this man's country. When they want me to come to dinner they call me Dan."

"Barrett's what they write on the tag when they ship me," said the sailor; "the handle's Ed."

They shook hands on it all once more, the sailor standing another dose of Grimmitt's great household remedy all around again.

Since there was nothing to be ashamed of in the company of such a man, even in a wagon, Dan's spirits rose with sudden rebound. He went to fetch the wagon around to get Barrett's trunk, which was still at the depot, making a display of his craft as teamster, for Dan had served his apprenticeship, as all good cowboys before him, as horse wrangler and driver of the chuck wagon in his boyhood days on the range.

It was about eighty miles to the ranch, Dan said. If it didn't rain before they struck the alkali flats they'd


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 make it in two days.

"If it rains before we git acrost there we may be hung up a day or two. A wagon'll sink to the hubs in them flats right after a rain."

Barrett was fervent in his hope that they would get across the flats before any water fell, although he had no more notion of what an alkali flat was like than he had of a Mussulman's paradise. He said he was eager to get to the ranch and take up the life of cowboy before the romance was gone out of it.

"I don't know much about any romance business, Ed," said Dan, "but I'm here to tell you it's a mighty good game for a man to git out of while he's young and limber. I can't see no deeper into the ground than the next man, but I can see fur enough to know changes are comin' on the range out here that'll push the cattle business off of the map."

"What changes, Dan?"

Barrett looked at his new friend curiously as he asked the question, with the faltering concern of one who begins to see a dream dissolve.

"Grangers," said Dan with gloomy finality.

"I've heard of them," Barrett nodded knowingly, his face clearing.

"Looks to me like a man could see more high life workin' for Uncle Sam on them navy ships," Dan ventured. "I think if I was startin' out to find romantical times and doin's I'd head for the nearest office and put my name down for a job."

"It isn't so bad, but a man wants a change sometimes," Barrett said.


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 gaze upon the gallipots and broken retorts, at the second story window, you have pondered, in your boyish way, upon the inscrutable wonders of Science, and the ineffable dignity of Dr. Bidlow's brick school! Dr. Bidlow seems to you to belong to a race of giants; and yet he is a spare, thin man, with a hooked nose, a large, flat, gold watch-key, a crack in his voice, a wig, and very dirty wristbands. Still you stand in awe at the mere sight of him;—an awe that is very much encouraged by a report made to you by a small boy,—that "Old Bid" keeps a large ebony ruler in his desk. You are amazed at the small boy's audacity: it astonishes you that any one who had ever smelt the strong fumes of sulphur and ether in the Doctor's room, and had seen him turn red vinegar blue, (as they say he does) should call him "Old Bid!"

You, however, come very little under his control: you enter upon the proud life, in the small boy's department,—under the dominion of the English master. He is a different personage from Dr. Bidlow: he is a dapper, little man, who twinkles his eye in a peculiar fashion, and who has a way of marching about the school-room with his hands crossed behind him, giving a playful to his coat-tails. He wears a pen tucked behind his ear: his hair is carefully set up


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 "You want to be a cowpuncher and I'd like to be a sailor. That's the way it goes, I guess, every man thinkin' the other one's got a better job than him. But I always did want to see the ocean, and wade out in her to my arm-pits and whoop."

When they had Barrett's trunk aboard, the sailor enlisted Dan's help in buying a proper outfit for the range.

"When we get out in the country," Barrett said, "I'd like for you to stop somewhere long enough for me to go back of a bush and change clothes. They'd kid the life out of me if I went to the ranch in this uniform, wouldn't they?"

"You might have a purty lively time handin' it out to all of 'em the way you did that feller down in front of Grimmitt's," Dan allowed. "It's funny you'd come to this country wearin' them clothes," he speculated, in a way that was nothing less than a polite inquiry into the reason why.

"I had just thirteen minutes to make the jump from the ship to the train," Barrett explained. "My trunk followed a day behind me, it didn't get here till this afternoon."

"You must 'a' been in a hurry to git here!" Dan whistled, still bidding for more.

"I'll tell you how it was one of these days," Barrett laughed, as if pushing the scent too hotly embarrassed him, or as if there might be something to his discredit in making that swift passage from deck to train.

They let it rest at that, for Dan was a true-born gentleman who had secrets of his own. The town was


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 soon behind them, their way plunging into country at once so bleak, rugged and uninhabited that the wonder rose in the traveler whence Saunders drew the sustenance for its sickly life. Toward sunset Dan took an observation from the top of a hill where he drew up a little while to let the horses catch their wind, announcing thereafter that he didn't think it would rain.

"If it don't, we'll camp on the Diamond Tail tomorrow night," he said.

"I hope there'll be a little romance left lying around for me," Barrett laughed, for the matter of romancehunting had grown to be a joke between them already.

"No man can tell what's waitin' by the trail," Dan returned, and seriously, much to the surprise of his companion, who began to have little glimpses such as this of more beneath the rind of this young man thanhis simple bearing might betray.


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HE Elk Mountain Cattle Company's brand was the diamond tail, a device like this:

By the name of its brand, rather than its legal title, according to the custom of the range everywhere, the ranch was known throughout the inter-mountain country of the west. The Diamond Tail, and the hardriding men who made up its muster roll, are only a memory and a tradition now among the alfalfa fields and farms, for this tale is of a time that was, and is no more.

In those days there were many enterprises like the Elk Mountain Cattle Company scattered over the range country of the west and northwest, for cattle-raising was a business with its romantic phases and profitable lures which drew many people into it who had no reasonable foundation for having a hand in any such hazardous game. To make it worse, many of them played it from a distance, frequently with seas intervening. The Elk Mountain Company had its stockholders in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, London, and the farther away from the scene of activities they chanced to be, the higher they were valued by Hal Nearing, organizer and president of the concern.


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 For the Elk Mountain Cattle Company was not returning the promised dividends to those who had put their money into it. Hal Nearing, once lieutenant governor and United States senator from his state, was resourceful in promises, ready in explanations. Evil days had come upon the cattle business of the inter-mountain range, he said. Summer droughts for two years running, the encroachments of homesteaders, of sheepmen; the incursions of rustlers, the toll of wolves, bears and mountain lions—all these reasons Nearing advanced with good foundation of argument, to account for the lack of profits.

There was much to his explanation of conditions, so much, in fact, that a deputation of stockholders had returned from an investigation a year before the time you first heard of Hal Nearing and his enterprise through this tale, with a report bearing him out in every particular. While this investigation sufficed to stay the threatened receivership and ousting of President Nearing, it had not quieted doubts and suspicions in all quarters, nor revived the falling hopes of many who had their little fortunes bound up in the company's failure or success.

Among these latter was Edgar Barrett, late seaman in the United States navy, now on his way with Dan Gustin to the headquarters of the Diamond Tail ranch. Barrett's father had been an under secretary of the navy at the period of Nearing's senatorial splurge. In the belief that he was being peculiarly favored, Barrett had put his lifetime winnings into Nearing's cattle company, along with many other friends of the sena-


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 tor, each of whom was made feel himself to be the last one squeezed in through the narrow door of a rare opportunity by the senator's personal regard.

At that time, some five years before the opening of this story, young Edgar Barrett, glowing with the romance that this new venture seemed to bring to the family's door, was for quitting college, taking train for Wyoming, and setting up in the wildly adventurous life of cowboy, such as it was in those days, and generally is yet, from a distance believed to be.

No, said Barrett senior. Take four years in the navy to make a man of him, then go his way as he might choose. Into the navy the young man went, dutiful as always, cheerful according to his way. In the first year of his enlistment his father died, leaving shares in the Elk Mountain Cattle Company instead of insurance. Sixty shares of the company's stock he left his family, representing an investment of sixty thousand dollars. What percentage of the whole capitalization this was, young Barrett did not know. Whether a thousand or ten thousand shares had been sold, he never had been able to learn. Events of the past two or three years had confirmed him in his growing suspicion that the shares were not worth sixty cents.

Whether the stockholders in Nearing's company had been led deliberately into a shearing, or whether vindictive nature and outlawed man and beast had combined to work the failure of the enterprise, Barrett had journeyed into that land to learn. He was determined to get to the bottom of it, and find out whether there


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 was any use in looking to the business for future returns, or whether he must wipe the slate clean and set his face about other undertakings. For there were other Barretts besides his mother, young female Barretts numbering three.

Long before the days of his enlistment were done, Ed Barrett had figured out his programme. His mother had secured him the opening he desired, a favor which Nearing could not well refuse, considering the past social relations of the families, especially as the candidate for cowboy honors proposed to serve for the experience to be gained, without pay. His eagerness to take up the trail of the family's vanishing fortunes had been so great that Ed virtually had leaped from deck to train, as has been seen, not considering the sensation he might create by his unusual garb in that mountain-locked land.

To learn exactly how many head of cattle carried the Diamond Tail brand; how many men were employed in herding them, and the extent of the payroll; what'the sales in numbers of hoofs and dollars had been during the past three years, where the sales had been made and where the money had gone; the present resources and liabilities, and future prospects—all this young Barrett had set himself the task of learning, expeditiously as might be. Job enough, he realized, to be accomplished under the guise of a greenhorn.

It was difficult to believe Nearing a dishonest man who had lured his friends intentionally into a game to shear them. Barrett's recollections of the senator rose up to refute what, in his heart and conscience, he had


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 felt growing upon him day by day. The senator, a placid, urbane gray gentleman, slender, quick, hearty; his face tinged by a brown tint of sun and wind from his early years in the saddle, the healthy rose of careful living and much open air glowing under it, A man of studied, deliberate speech, exact, mild, generous. Such Barrett remembered Senator Nearing. Incredible that he could turn out in the end to be a dishonest, a heartlessly dishonest, a ruinously dishonest man.

The nucleus of the great Diamond Tail ranch was the Nearing homestead on the shore of the river, where the commodious ranch-house with its village of outbuildings now stood. This original homestead was owned in fee simple by Nearing, as was the practice of all the cattle barons to own a bit of land in the midst of vast, usurped territory belonging to the public domain. Nearing had reserved this homestead out of the pool into which all the rest had been thrown when he organized the cattle company.

The method among the cattle barons of that time was to first locate on some attractive bit of land, such as this homestead by the river, take title to it, and spread from there over as many miles on every side as cupidity might direct or force could control. Boundaries were fixed by mutual agreement among themselves, by hills, mountains, rivers. As in the instance of the Diamond Tail, the southern boundary of which was the little river upon which the home place stood, the eastern a range of distant mountains, and other natural barriers and monuments serving in like capacity elsewhere.


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 This ranch contained millions of acres, hundreds of square miles; it was greater in extent than half some of the New England states. And every inch of it, save alone the homestead where the houses stood, belonged to the public domain. No rent was paid for it, no taxes were levied against it. Hal Nearing and his forces reigned over it like a tsar with Cossacks at his back.

It was a common saying among the cattle barons, great and small, that God made that country for cattle. No price was too great to pay, except in taxes after the manner of honest men, to hold it inviolate to their sacred purpose. Many a man paid with his blood for striking a furrow in its sward.

Time had not altered Hal Nearing's appearance greatly. He was sitting on the long porch, smoking his after-supper cigar, when Barrett and Dan drove up. Still slender and graceful, the only evidence left by the passing years against his youth was his blanched mustache and hair. These now were as white as the ashes of time could ever leach them, lending him a distinction which seemed singularly original and peculiar, taken with the healthy brown of his smooth skin, the friendly brightness of his strong eyes.

Time is partial in this manner with some men; it does not record upon their faces the secrets of their living.

The boss of the ranch came down the steps with a quizzical, good-humored smile of recognition for the young man who piled out of the wagon with all his sea nimbleness in his legs.


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 "In harness already!" Nearing laughed, when the first greetings were over, still holding his young guest warmly by the hand, clasped over in both of his in his fatherly way.

"I'm afraid I'll scare the cows all off the ranch if I look anything like I feel," Barrett said, quite serious in his self-criticism.

"I'll bet the old rig sits easier, but you'll fall into this—why," looking him over approvingly, admiration and approval in tone and expression, "you begin to look like a bronco-buster already."

"I'll be bronco-busted about the first shot out of the box. Ask Dan."

Dan grinned from his perch on the wagon, from which he had not moved to lay a hand to any of the supplies which he had freighted out along with Barrett's trunk. That labor was for wranglers and Mexicans, not a full-blooded cowboy of the aristocracy of his kind, like Dan.

"He'll take to it like a pig to swill, or I miss my guess," said Dan.

"And that's a compliment you may well cross the continent to win!" Nearing declared. "Why," still holding Barrett off at arm's length, shaking hands in his warmest political style, "it's been—how long has it been since I saw you, Ed?"

"I don't just recall the last time, sir, but it must have been shortly before I went to sea."

"No it wasn't—it was on the President's yacht, you were on some kind of special detail—don't you remember?"


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 "I served there during a cruise, by special favor of the President, but I didn't know anybody saw me. I'm afraid I wasn't as proud of that detail then as I am now."

Dan, still lounging on the wagon, leaned over to hear this talk involving the President as incidentally as cowboys on the ranch would discuss the big boss. His eyes enlarged a little, his mouth fixed itself as if to whistle, and his thoughts were about as plainly expressed in his astonished visage as he could have put them into words.

"Back up to the kitchen porch, Dan, and tell Manuel to get that stuff out," Nearing directed, speaking as kindly to his retainer as Barrett would have expected, still with his paternal air. "There's no hurry about beginning your apprenticeship, Ed; I want you to be my guest a little while before you become my employe. Come in and get acquainted with such of the family as you don't already know."

Mrs. Nearing appeared on the porch that moment, and hailed Barrett. She was a small, vivacious lady, who had been a famous entertainer in her Washington days. Now she had laid down all contest and contention against time, resigning herself in her graceful way to the white hair that became her so well, and the pink of skin that needed no cosmetic to enliven nor pencil to improve.

Barrett leaped up the steps to grasp her hands, outstretched to him in a pretty entreaty, to be drawn close and kissed, and held off and admired, and exclaimed and wondered over softly as a son returned to


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 his place at home. Then she turned to the door and called:

"Alma! He's come!"

She laughed when the one summoned appeared almost instantly in the door, and came forth with sprightly eagerness which she made no dishonest attempt to hide.

Barrett, puzzled to account for this unexpected member of the household—for he knew there never had been a daughter in that family—felt himself suddenly uncouth in his strange garb. He backed off a little on his high-heeled boots as awkwardly as the rawest cowpuncher from the back range.

"My niece, Miss Nearing," Barrett heard Nearing say.

Barrett bowed, blushing to the ears in the foolish weakness he never could control, overlooking for a moment her frankly-offered hand.

"We've been talking about you for days and days," Alma Nearing said.

"I never hoped to be half that important," he told 'her, repairing at once the oversight of her friendly hand.

"I expected to see a sailor from the deep, not a cowboy," she laughed.

Barrett was still a boy in his way with women, in spite of his five-and-twenty years. He regarded them with deferential awe; to him they still were the holiest handiwork of the Creator, however they might suffer abasement and become defiled. He looked at her now out of his hot confusion, the touch of her hand still


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 cool as a passing breath upon his own.

"I'm only a masquerader," he said, his courage increasing with his ease, bold enough now to look at her fully, and find her fair.

It seemed to Barrett, in the swift appraisement he made of Alma Nearing, that she was laughing at him with her eyes. Not in derision; more like in the friendly, patronizing, quizzical, knowing fashion of an older and wiser person laughing down at a boy. For laugh eut of her eyes she unquestionably did, with a provoking, engaging little gathering of wrinkles about them, a light and brightness in their soft clearness as if her soul had come to the window with its candle to make merry over the mystification of men.

Her hair was dark red, as if touched with a deep oriental dye, the red of sumach berries after frost. Her forehead was low and calm, her features blending with that entrancing softness from girlhood to maturity which is a woman's greatest charm. Across her nose a little track of freckles ran, as if she had gazed up at a flight of wild geese and their shadow had fastened upon her milk-white skin.

Barrett was not a sentimental young man, rather practical and worldly-bent, in truth; but he knew that this girl must have touched depths of life strange to him, felt its poetry as he never had responded to it, gathered beauties out of it which had escaped him, except for a yearning touch here and there, in his cruise up to this point. To know her well would be to walk among the high places, familiar with the best. So he felt, rather than thought in the sequence of


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 ordered words, as one grasps the great essentials of life in its quick moments without illustration or printed page.

"She's the boss of the ranch, you'll have to take orders from her, all of us do," Nearing was saying.

"That doesn't discourage me a bit," Barrett replied, and sincerely, but afraid the moment the words were out of his mouth that he might appear flippant, or, more to be dreaded, ridiculous or contemptuous in her eyes.

Mrs. Nearing and Alma sat at table with Barrett when the soft-footed Mexican woman had spread his late supper, to bear him company in their hospitable way.

"It isn't good for youth to sit alone and commune with its own soul at meal-time," Mrs. Nearing said. "I've cured more than one case of incipient dyspepsia in diplomats and young secretaries of legation by sitting them down with young ladies and flowers."

And there were flowers here, also, a bowl of roses, for that place was fruitful of the comforts and beauties of life, although eighty miles from the nearest railroad. While Barrett restored himself they talked of many things—his adventures at sea, his unaccountable freak in coming there to rough it as a cowboy after the romance of that larger, happier hfe. That, at least, was Alma's view of it.

Barrett told her of his early longing to come to the range, an ambition deferred until, as she declared the case, the romance all had been lived and nothing was left to him but the hardships and rough work.


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 "There never was any romance in this life on the range—it's been highly misrepresented to you. Mr. Barrett," she said.

"What a sour old materialist!" Mrs. Nearing laughed.

"Aunt Hope, I was born here, I ought to know if anybody does. There isn't a bit of romance in cowpunching, Mr. Barrett. You'll find that out the first time it rains your boots full this fall."

"Oh, you weren't born so very long ago, Alma," Mrs. Nearing said, in gentle disputation; "maybe you chanced to arrive after the age of romance, granting there isn't any left for poor Edgar, You haven't seen it all, child, very little of it, in fact, since you were old enough to give romance a thought. She's been away at school the past six years, most of that time, anyway, Ed. Don't shatter his dream before he's had a chance to see for himself, prophet of sorrow."

"Not for half the world," Alma declared, laughing lightly, looking so charming in the soft lamplight that Barrett felt himself to be on the very borderland of romance that hour.

"If I could people the range with wild cowboys, shooting, rollicking; riding incredible distances on errands of gallantry and mercy, I'd put them there for him, every one that ever had 'loped through the pages of romance. But Mr. Barrett will find cowboys to be of quite a different stripe—you know it, Aunt Hope, as well as anybody."

"You've eaten rue out of my garden, young lady," Aunt Hope charged, lifting a solemn finger.


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 "And what sort are the cowboys?" Barrett inquired, curiously, glad that it wasn't romance, but something very substantial and prosaic, indeed, that had brought him to the range.

"Swearing, unwashed, wicked drunkards, taking them as they come," Alma replied, not halting for a word.

"There are chivalrous men, nature's gentlemen, among them, Alma," Mrs. Nearing corrected, "I've known them, you must have, too."

"I've never been under the necessity of proving their chivalry," Alma returned, without heat, deeply as Barrett could see she felt on the subject of the romance of the range. "I've known them to pick up my hat when it blew off—when I was a little girl riding straddle-legged out to camp to get flapjacks from the cook, I'll grant them a certain rough chivalry, under restraint. Let them go, and they're wolves, ignorant, blasphemous, foul of body and soul."

"I'm afraid I'm at least a generation too late," said Barrett, making out that he did not take her seriously. "Cowboys must have changed scandalously."

"They're all alike," said Alma, "yesterday and today the same. Cowboys live by tradition, their tricks are all handed down, their cuss words, their stories and songs. They all come from Texas and Montana, the real ones. I can tell one of them a mile off. They came up here from Texas with the old drives and established the breed in Montana, No genuine ones are natives of this part of the country at all."

"I wonder if the boy that brought me out is from


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 Texas?" Barrett speculated.

"Dan Gustin?" said Mrs. Nearing. "Yes, Dan's from San Antone. You'll have to except Dan in your general arraignment, Alma."

"He might rise on occasion," Alma granted, but with no great warmth of faith.

"He struck me as a pretty fair-minded and honest boy," Barrett said, thinking of the way Dan had drawn his iron in that little controversy over the blue-eyed wolf.

"Well, I will except Dan," Alma granted, her native generosity coming to his aid.

"And many another one when you come to think," Aunt Hope added. "Some of them are bad characters, all of them are rough, but there's a lot of good in them when friends are needed."

"I've seen them roll in the dirt like dogs and bite each other's noses off!" said Alma, not greatly horrified in the recounting of it.

"Good-bye, romance!" said Barrett, waving his hand as to an evanishing dream.

They had their laugh at that, and felt better acquainted, at least the two young ones rs, Nearing only smiled, her eyes on the bowl of roses, as if she knew deep in her heart that romance was indeed gone out of the world, but it was better for men to practice on them the deceit that they might live it yet.

"The leading ambition of every cowboy's life is to kill a man, or several men," said Alma, returning to her indictment of the craft. 'Every one of them is a potential Billy. The Kid. I hope you haven't come


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 here with any such sanguinary designs, Mr. Barrett?"

"Alma!" Aunt Hope chided, in shocked protest.

"No," said Barrett, "my present intentions are pastoral and peaceful."

He looked at her with puzzled eyes, unable to determine whether her drawing of the cowboy character was founded on her long experience, or grew out of revulsion with certain exceptional cases.

"It will come on you if you stick to the range long enough," Alma predicted. "It seems to be in the breed of men to want to kill."

She did not say this lightly, nor with derision or accusation for the inherited curse of mankind; rather, with a sadness that gloomed over her fair face as a cloud.

"Your Uncle Hal never killed a man, and he's been on the range more than thirty years," Aunt Hope said, in prideful refutation of this all-including charge.

"He hasn't been a cowboy since I've known him, either," the girl whimsically returned.

"He was in his young days, he rode on the long drive from Texas to Montana more than once, and made his start right here on this range in the saddle at forty dollars a month."

"I know, Aunt Hope; I've heard about it. Yl let Uncle Hal out of my generalization, I'll give him a clean bill. But he's a man with a different vision, not just a common cowboy's little squint."

"You're not very complimentary to Mr. Barrett, intimating that he'll turn out a short-sighted cowboy with a passion for killing off his kind!"


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 "I didn't mean to be complimentary. What six-foot man with the world before him wants or needs the unction of compliments, Aunt Hope, Mr. Barrett?"

"Not this pilgrim," said Barrett, trying to be at ease, but feeling a strange smallness and inadequacy, for all his six feet, in this strange, out-spoken girl's eyes.

"And there's Uncle Hal, striding up and down the porch like a tiger in a cage," said Alma, nodding toward the door through which the sound of footfalls came as Nearing walked back and forth. "He's waiting to have a talk with you; I know the symptoms."


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T'S entirely natural that you should come out here to investigate things for yourself, Edgar; it's a sensible business move. You're not the only one that's uneasy over the failure of this company to live up to expectations, and mine is the most uneasy head of all."

Nearing spared all fencing, feeling about and circuitous approach. He drove straight into the matter with those words inside of five minutes after Edgar Barrett joined him on the porch, Barrett, winded for a moment by this straight-out reading of his purpose, which he foolishly believed had been sufficiently masked under his pretense, could not make any immediate reply. He felt a certain smallness in being thus suddenly uncovered, a guilt as if he had been faced with proof of a meanness beneath the consideration of an honest man.

"That was only incidental," he said at last, speaking slowly, thoughtfully, as if he had no desire to evade or conceal, which was in fact the truth, now that his intentions had been guessed. "As you say, I thought it was prudent to investigate for myself. You must know that about all the family has is tied up in the Elk Mountain Cattle Company."

"I didn't know just what resources there were in the family, Edgar."


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 "A few thousand and the house, enough that mother could live with what I could send her out of my pay."

"You can't afford to work without wages here, then," rather gruffly, as if the discovery carried offense.

Barrett was disturbed by Nearing's tone. He felt that this puerile attempt at investigating the secret affairs of the company had put him in such disfavor that nothing would come of his long planning and ardent hopes, Nearing had seen through him so easily as to make his scheme appear foolish. He found himself wondering how he ever could have taken hold of it with such sincerity.

"I'll put you on the payroll at sixty dollars a month, but keep it under your hat," Nearing said. "That's a little above the wages of a beginner."

"I wouldn't want to do anything to get me in bad with the boys," Barrett protested, glad for the darkness which covered his outer confusion.

"That will rest with you, Ed," Nearing reminded him, back in a word to his paternal form.

"It's mighty fine and generous of you, Senator Nearing, but I'd rather you'd make it about forty, or whatever it is that greenhorns pull down. I don't want to be a load on the company just because my family owns stock in it."

"All right, Ed, we'll say forty-five and found, all except clothes, of course. And in the morning I want you to go through the books and satisfy yourself that everything is being done, and always has been done, open and above board."

Thank you for the offer, Senator Nearing." Bar-


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 rett felt the wind dying out of his sails with every word, leaving the craft of his brave intentions, which had begun to sail with graceful headway, as he believed, entirely becalmed. "I'm certain you could tell me more in ten minutes than I could grub out of the books in ten hours. I'm not much of a hand at accounts."

"It's possible that I could, but I want my word verified. You'd be helping yourself and me at the one operation. But we'll come to that later. What you're anxious to have explained to you is the failure of the company, and its organizer and president, to live up to their obligations to the stockholders."

Nearing was not humble, in the manner of a man who had failed through a weakness of his own, nor whining, as one defeated who seeks to mitigate his downfall. He had made mistakes, he had erred in judgment; this he frankly admitted. Circumstances which he should have taken into account for more than the threat of their development years ago seemed to warrant, had combined against the enterprise and held it back, he said. But he said it like a man who had nothing to cover up or fear, stripping Barrett of his offensive armament before he had more than opened the door.

"You understand, Ed, that profits in the cattle business are slow in coming, for one thing. Take a herd of twenty-seven thousand head, such as we started with, and it'll not pay interest on the investment, except in a cumulative way, for nearly three years. The increase of the first year isn't ready for market before then. We started out with a hard winter that took a heavy toll of calves and weaklings, only to run into


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 a drouth next summer that parched up the range and dried up the water holes. Why, the river along here was nothing but a trickle for miles.

"Our loss was woeful that summer, the bones of nine thousand cattle are spread around this range right now from that visitation—you'll see them when you get to riding around. That was a discouraging beginning, but a thing to be expected, although not foreseen in the order of its coming."

"That would be too much to expect of anybody but a prophet," said Barrett, beginning to see hazards in this mighty game that he never had dreamed of being so great.

"A cattleman on the range must gamble against the universe," said Nearing.

"It takes a prince, instead of a baron, to play the game, I think," Barrett said, speaking more to himself than to his host.

Nearing smoked on a little while, saying nothing to this. He sat with his feet on the low railing of the porch, his strong face lifted to the stars, strewn thicker than his cattle ever stood upon his grassy hills.

Presently Nearing went on to tell of minor troubles with sheepmen and homesteaders, or nesters, as they were called in the cattle country, treating these as small pests, more annoying than menacing.

"The boys have kept the sheepmen pretty well on the jump, and we've smoked the nesters out along the river on the Diamond Tail, although others have allowed them to lodge above and below us."

"Smoked them out?" said Barrett.


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 "Burned their damned shacks over their heads!" said Nearing, dispassionately, nodding in confirmation.

To him the destruction and terror carried by his men to these humble lodgments of the poor involved no deeper question of right and justice than smoking wolves from their dens among the rocks.

"Wasn't it a little rough on the poor devils?" Barrett ventured.

"They can hitch up and go on," Nearing explained. "We always leave them their teams. They're a bad outfit; most of them ought to be shot."

"Where do they go?" Barrett inquired, unable to put aside out of his mind the picture of poignant desolation which the cattleman's few unfeeling words had conjured up.

"We don't bother with them as long as they don't light again on the Diamond Tail."

Nearing took his feet from the railing, turned to face his young guest with slow, impressive movement, portentous of some important disclosure.

"We'd have been on our feet, paying dividends as expected, and rightly expected of us, Ed, in spite of the calamity of drouth and hard winters, if it hadn't been for the infernal damned thieves—rustlers, we call them out here."

"I've heard of them," Barrett said.

"It's become a business up here in the Northwest, as systematically organized, I tell you, Barrett, as any business in the country. The increase of our herd, that ought to go to pay dividends, melts away like snow on the mountains. We couldn't pay more than sixty cents


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 on the dollar if every beef on the ranch was sold today. That infernal damned gang of rustlers keeps us robbed to the bone!"

"That is one phase of it that I can't understand," Barrett frankly admitted.

"Understand!" bitterly, "I tell you it's an organized industry, with ramifications in every big market in the middle-west."

"How they can keep it up, in such volume as to cut the revenues of a big enterprise like this, I mean. I can see well enough how they might pick up a few dozen head a year, even a hundred or two, but"

Nearing laid his hand on the young man's knee, leaned forward a little to impress his words.

"Take one little sheriff, and him not an overly honest one, always, to a county that's as big as New Hampshire, with thousands of cattle spread on its plains and mountains, and figure to yourself where he's going to begin to patrol it."

"Yes, and at the same time take the hundreds of cowboys and ranchers—what are they doing to let this thing grow and sap their herds?"

"No man knows who's a thief in this country," said Nearing, with the desperation of a man honestly and entirely baffled. "I've got as trustworthy a bunch on the Diamond Tail as ever rode leather, I think, but the leak goes on in spite of our vigilance."

"The loss must run into hundreds in the course of a year, to cut"

"Between three and four thousand head the last two years!"


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 "What?" said Barrett, springing to his feet in the shock of this revelation. "And you cattlemen let it go on! What kind of stuff"

"Better reserve your judgment till you understand conditions, boy," Nearing interrupted, frigidly censorious.

"I beg your pardon, Senator Nearing," Barrett said, contritely, his flash of angry indignation gone as quickly as it had gleamed. "You are right; I'm not the one to come here and judge hot-foot. Only I'm mystified; the figures stagger me."

"If any man had told me five years ago that such wholesale thievery and safe, undetected marketing of the stolen product could ever be done, I'd have called him a fool," Nearing said. "The only way I can account for it is by inside leaks, thieves among the cattlemen themselves, I mean."

"But the brand—how do they manage"

"There's nothing easier changed than a brand. There's a Diamond Tail Cross north of us, a Diamond T in Texas, and various diamond devices all over the western and southwestern range. A bar here, a burn there, and three months for the scar to heal and look old, and the animal's ready for market. A seller doesn't have to show a bill of sale for every head of cattle carrying a different brand from his own in any of the markets, Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago. It'll be different one of these days, but right now the cattle a man offers on the market are supposed to be his own."

"I see," said Barrett, thoughtfully.

"It's hell!" said Nearing. "If I could stop this


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 infernal drain on my herd for three years I could clean up and pay off every stockholder dollar for dollar—I never hope to be able to do anything more now. Yes, I'll do damned well if I come out with clean hands!"

"And the sheriffs are not always straight? That makes it harder."

"Oh, they round a few of them up sometimes, and once in a while we do get a fairly honest man in office in some of the counties around here. But even at that, the combination they have to fight is too big. It's international, it laps over the Canadian line north, and Mexico on the south. A sheriff is a mighty little man to buck a thing like that."

"Are your neighbors standing losses in proportion to yours?" Barrett inquired, hardly willing yet to credit his ears in the report of this amazing robbery.

"No, I've suffered heavier than any of them, five or ten to one. That's due to the peculiar isolation of this range, cut off on two sides by hills, peculiarly favorable to rustlers. There's another trap up the river a few miles below the military post, a settlement of those outcast parasites that always hang on the flanks of military reservations. My men fall into the lure of those joints too often, led away by the decoys that are a part of the system. A gang of them will stay away on a bender up there for days at a time, frequently before we know their cattle are roaming unprotected. I've fired them so often I've had a procession of cowpunchers trailin' across this ranch like a Frontier Day parade, but it don't do any good. There's a lot to contend with here that an outsider never would dream of,


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 Barrett."

"I see there is," Barrett agreed, fully convinced that it was true. "It looks to me that the wise thing to do would be to close out the property and quit before they ruin you."

"I'm not ready to quit," Nearing returned grimly; "I never quit yet in my life."

They were silent while a man could have ridden a mile, Nearing looking at the stars again in that way of his that seemed to tell of far-ranging thoughts, projected over mighty spaces to bright-glittering promises which drew on at his approach.

"It's hell!" said he.

"I was wondering," Barrett began, tentatively, as one tries doubtful ice with cautious foot.

"Yes?"

"Whether I couldn't be of more service to the company and myself, coming in here a stranger"

"A stranger?"

"By turning detective, I mean, trying to get a lead on this big thieving gang."

Nearing jumped to his feet as if springing to answer a shout for help. He stood half leaning over Barrett, hand on his shoulder, fingers so tense they pressed into the flesh.

"Keep out of it! Keep out of it!" he said, his utterance thick, his whole manner that of a man suddenly and completely out of self-control.

"Why, Senator Nearing!"

Barrett stood facing him, cold in the surprise of such unaccountable excitement.


text: Index:The China Review, Or, Notes and Queries on the Far East, Volume 22 1RZBAQAAMAAJ.pdf


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 "I owe your mother too much already to permit you to run your head into a danger like that," Nearing said, regaining hold of himself by a great effort, his voice shaken, the sound of it unnatural and dry.

"It just occurred to me to make the suggestion, I wouldn't want to put my foot into something I might make worse," Barrett said, his thoughts leaping and scurrying like a dog that has dropped the scent.

"That's it, that's the very point," Nearing was regaining his poise with every word, "it's strangers they suspect. I can do more, I am doing more. I'm on track of something right now, big developments are due to break any hour. A slip, a new suspicion—don't you see how it would be?"

"Naturally, being on the ground, you"

"Certainly. Then I owe it to your mother to keep you out of a thing that could have only one ending for you. Sit down; don't let this detective folly run away with you. You don't know these wolves of the range, Ed. You could no more track down evidence that would nail one of them than you could scale the heavens!"

"I don't suppose I could," said Barrett resuming his chair.

He was disturbed by a strange, shaken feeling, as if he had escaped some great peril which had developed in a moment where no danger was dreamed to lurk, It was as if a gun had burst on the deck of his ship, scattering woe and desolation.

"No, it would be like settin' a puppy dog to run down a mountain lion," Nearing said, but with such seriousness that the comparison carried no offense.


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 Contrarily, it only emphasized the feeling of foolish rashness and inadequacy that oppressed Barrett in hot, overwhelming conviction.

"A man must know the range like a book," said Nearing, "not for a matter of a few square miles, but hundreds of square miles; every arroyo, every wooded canyon, every cave in the hills. It would take a hundred sheriffs, every one of them up on the country like a range man, to cover this county alone. You can begin to guess, then, what kind of a job is cut out for me with forty-five cowboys that have to divide their attention between cattle and rustlers."

"I'm beginning to see," Barrett humbly confessed.

"You'd have to ride the range a year, maybe two years, all depending on how you took to it, before you'd be safe alone five miles away from camp. You'd think it an easy matter to track a bunch of cattle run off by rustlers, I expect that's running through your head right now. But they don't drive them off in bunches, they split them up in threes, fives, seldom more than tens, assemble them miles away in the mountains where a coyote couldn't pick up a week-old trail. They drive them over to the Black Hills and split 'em up again. The ingenuity of the devil's in them! If they applied as much thought and craft to business out in the open, they'd skin the world."

Nearing had regained his usual calm, the whirlwind of his perturbation seemed stilled, outwardly at least. What turmoil surged within his breast no man might read in the steady, low-modulated voice, the easy bearing, the carefree laugh with which he now and then


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 The China Review.

The Höng Shán or Macao Dialect.

Though Macao has had early continuous and almost constant intercourse with Europeans for the long period of nearly three centuries and a half,—the Portuguese first took up their residence there in A.D. 1557, —yet the dialect of the Höng Shán district, in which it is situated, has not received, as far as the writer is aware, any special study. Led away by the will o' the wisp of having a uniform pronunciation,—a uniform pronunciation which prevails nowhere—our standard dictionaries of Cantonese have classed some words under sounds which are Höng Shán pronunciations, such for instance as the sound sü, part of the words which should come under súí or söü being placed under it. Dr. Williams in the Introduction to his Tonic Dictionary, pp. XVII, XX, and XXI, gives in a general way a few instances where the Höng Shán differs from the standard Cantonese, and in the Introduction to 'the Chinese Chrestomathy' in the Canton dialect, p. X, there are eleven lines calling attention to some of the variations of the language as heard in Macao; but with this slight exception, noting a few differences in pronunciation, nothing seems ever to have been written specially dealing with the speech of the Höng Shán people.

As far as can be ascertained, only one book has ever been written in the dialect of the Höng Shán district; and that was a small pamphlet of seven pages thus described in 'Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese giving a list of their publications':— This was prepared by Rev. J.I. [sic] J. Roberts of the Southern Baptist Convention, the signature of the author in Chinese being Háú. It would be most interesting to have a look at this little book, the only one that has ever been written in this dialect.

It is almost needless to say that the Chinese never appear to have thought of writing anything on it.


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 illuminated his conversation, even though his theme still was that of thievery and loss.

Barrett had no such outward calm, for inwardly he was boiling with resentment of the heavy toll such uncurbed outlawry drew from him and his. Nearing might be able to hold his feeling under the lid; Barrett, young and impetuous, resentful of oppression, burned to say what was on his tongue to speak.

And that would have been nothing reassuring or sedative to the senator's jangled nerves. Barrett held himself in, answering disjointedly, speaking fragmentarily, a poor listener now and a poor talk-maker. His thoughts were sweeping the range like a free wind, searching for a lead on many perplexing things, and first and greatest among them, this: Why was the Diamond Tail ranch, its disadvantages of location and all considered, the peculiar prey of this outlawed gentry? Why should the losses of that company run so much heavier than the losses of neighboring cattlemen?

There seemed to be a seacock open somewhere in the craft; a careless hand must be remiss in some vital duty. Could a greenhorn do anything to shut off this perilous opening? In his heart Barrett was convinced that a greenhorn could do it, and do it better than an old hand. But he would have to begin by tracking back, back to the heart of things on that ranch itself, and not go roaming strange wilds after elusive men who skulked like gaunt gray wolves among the solemn sage.

There sounded the tinkle of a harp in the dark house, its trilling notes had swelled and fallen away from time


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 to time during the hour or more he had been talking with Nearing on the porch. A fitting instrument, Barrett thought, for expressing the capricious wilfulness which must lie in that young lady's heart. Something wild there was in it, such as this barbarian instrument might relieve, and comfort with its mellow cadence, its treasured secrets and heroic memories of its thousand years.

His thought trailed off on this new and more pleasant speculation. There was one, with her Grecian hair, who would rise to heroic heights if there was any more romance in this dun world to live, indeed. It might never come to her to sacrifice for love and honor and the dear and precious things such as the women of old days gave their all for before their gods. Should romance ever dawn again, and involve her in its tragedies and loves and recompenses, there was one to rise to its heights like a young eagle in the glad morning sun.

"So, a few days around the ranch," said Nearing—Barrett noted that all of them spoke of the home place invariably as the ranch, the rest of it usually as the Diamond Tail—"to get your bearings and harden a little to the saddle, then you can go out and take up your duties at Eagle Rock camp."

"There is so much to learn," said Barrett, "that I'd like to begin as soon as I can, Don't think I'm ungrateful for the hospitality of this house, sir, when I say I'd like to go on the job tomorrow."

"I suppose it's just as well, Ed. The quicker you begin the sooner you'll get enough of it," Nearing laughed.


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 "You think I'll not be able to stick, senator?"

"You can, you can, but—will you? There aren't many compensations, and darn little poetry, in the rough life of a cow camp."

Mrs. Nearing came to the porch, cutting off by her appearance whatever protest or declaration of intentions Barrett might have made. Alma came after her shortly, to say good night. Senator Nearing told them of their guest's desire to take up life in the sadde next day, at which both ladies protested, and argued volubly against it. Barrett remained firm, in spite of the comically dismal picture Alma drew of such adventuring.

"Well, sleep late in the morning, then," she advised, as she gave him her hand in good night, "It will be a blanket among the ants for you after this, and up at the streak o' day."

"Raven!" laughed Nearing, waving her away. "Off to roost with you!"

quoted Alma from the door.

Barrett, in his room a good while later, sat by the window watching the moonlight whiten in the patio where the roses bloomed, and aspen trees whispered like prophets of things that have been and are to be again. Disarmed by Nearing's frank statement of conditions, his offer to throw the books open and uncover all transactions to the root, Barrett was doubtful, nevertheless.

There was something that books would not show nor receipts account for, in the very heart and secret core


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 of this enterprise. That Nearing's alarm over his suggestion that he attempt to uncover the working of the rustlers' organization was founded solely on a consideration of his guest's safety, Barrett was not at all convinced. Was Nearing afraid that investigation might reveal something to his own incrimination and disgrace?

Nearing did not seem sincere. There was a superficiality, a certain straining to make a case, that was not convincing to Barrett. What secrets did this suave man carry in his heart, what fear under his bravely assuring exterior?

Guilty or not guilty must be determined in the course of the adventure that was to begin tomorrow, Barrett resolved. But, fortified as Nearing was, it was going to be a difficult task to undermine the man; a hard task, and distasteful in some ways, especially one. There seemed to be an echo of the harp in the tinkle of the little fountain in the patio, with roses growing close to its rim.


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198 saw, to their surprise, Starveling sitting on a beautiful white horse, surrounded by forty equally beautiful ponies.

"Good morning, father!" cried Starveling, laughing. "I have brought a horse for each of my brothers. Look! are they not beauties?"

After each pony had been properly admired and fed, Starveling mounted his own horse again, exclaiming,—

"Come, brothers, mount your horses, and let us ride into the wide world in search of brides! It will be no easy task, certainly, for we want forty-one maidens, sisters, if possible!"

The brothers laughed; but anything for amusement! So, after receiving their parents' blessing, they set out on their journey, and a nice long journey it was, too!

They rode and rode, through various towns and kingdoms; but, no, forty-one brides was rather more than was generally asked for, especially as these forty-one youngsters insisted upon the brides all being sisters! for then there would not be any jealousy among the brothers. They rode on and on, until at last they came to the World's End; here they thought they would be sure to get what they wanted. So they went on merrily, until they beheld, on the top of a very steep hill, a white palace, round which was a very high wall, and in the middle a large iron gate, in front of which stood forty-one iron posts.

The forty-one brothers dismounted, and tying their horses to the posts, pushed open the iron gates, and


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HERE chanced to be nobody working out of headquarters at the time of Barrett's arrival on the range. The long, shed-like bunkhouse stood untenanted, the big corrals were empty of horses. Only old Manuel, the Mexican man of all work, and his fat wife Teresa, were to be seen of all the retainers of that great enterprise when Barrett walked abroad before sunrise that morning. Even Dan Gustin had disappeared. The dusty wagon that had carried them from Saunders to the ranch Barrett saw standing lonely and deserted before the barn. Dan had taken horse and gone off silently the night before to join his detail.

Barrett grinned as he thought he saw a reason behind this silent departure. Dan did not want to be nurse to this beginner. Let somebody else take the greenhorn by the hand and lead him into the rough and rugged trails of adventure which he sought.

The greenhorn did not blame Dan for this. He knew very well what a task it was to break another into the routine that has become second nature to one's self. He was rather relieved than disappointed over Dan's going, knowing that a certain humiliation attaches to the one encumbered by a rookie in any of these hard-handling jobs, such as soldiering and sailing the seas, and riding the range in a Mexican saddle.

Viewed by the light of a new day, and from another


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 at the sides, and upon the top, to conceal (as you think later in life) his diminutive height; and he steps very springily around behind the benches, glancing now and then at the books,—cautioning one scholar about his dogs-ears, and startling another from a: doze, by a very loud and odious snap of his forefinger upon the boy's head.

At other times, he sticks a hand in the armlet of his waistcoat: he brandishes in the other a thickish bit of smooth cherrywood,—sometimes dressing his hair withal; and again, giving his head a slight scratch behind the ear, while he takes occasion at the same time, for an oblique glance at a fat boy in the corner, who is reaching down from his seat after a little paper pellet, that has just been discharged at him from some unknown quarter. The master steals very cautiously and quickly to the rear of the stooping boy,—dreadfully exposed by his unfortunate position,—and inflicts a stinging blow. A weak-eyed little scholar on the next bench ventures a modest titter; at which the assistant makes a significant motion with his ruler—on the seat, as it were, of an imaginary pair of pantaloons,—which renders the weak-eyed boy on a sudden, very insensible to the recent joke. You, meantime, profess to be very much engrossed with your grammar—turned up:


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 angle than his first sight of it, this oasis in the gray plain beside the narrow river revealed wonders and surprises. The ranch-house itself was a commodious, long, low building of pine logs artfully joined at corners, a very buttress against the storms of that unsheltered land. It was built in the Spanish fashion, such as spread eastward from the old civilization of Santa Fe over the range country in those days, two wings running out from the main structure.

In this middle space between the wings of the building was the patio, or court, where the fountain played among the flowers, and trees brought from the distant mountains grew in grateful security. Water was supplied from a huge tank in the barnyard, where a battery of three windmills was already astir in the waking breeze, which blew as unfailingly as the northwest trades.

A row of tall, thick-boughed cedars stood just outside the wire fence in front of the house, a screen against the summer glare of the plain, a barrier between the dwelling and the northern blasts of winter. Within this line of protecting cedars a long, deep lawn spread bedewed and cool.' The great veranda, with broad, white-painted steps, was embowered in honeysuckle and wistaria. The wonder that this place could hold youth against the lure of the world dissolved out of Barrett's mind. It was a place to call one back from wandering, weary seeking, far following after futile dreams. It was home.

Probably not so isolated as it might appear when one looked from the porch into the limitless gray-green


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 world that swept in gentle undulations northward, rising horizonward as the sea seems to lift, denying at last by a sharp-drawn line the further projection of human vision. Dan had spoken of a military post not far away, probably twenty or thirty miles. No doubt the broad hall, with its great fireplace at the end, had heard the jingle of military spurs many a time; had echoed laughter and the swing of dancing feet.

Barrett could picture slim-waisted, brown-skinned cavalry officers dismounting at the gate. He knew the type, eager for life's next moment, let it bring dance or death. He sighed. Even the interest on sixty thousand dollars.

"I told you to sleep late," said Alma, appearing in the door, fresh-washed by the morning, serene in her youthful comeliness as the placid repose of her natal plain.

"I'm used to getting up early," Barrett returned.

"I don't see why you didn't stay in the navy," she said, a bit fretfully he thought, as if she had considered his foolish adventure into that country all night and had risen confirmed in her opinion that it was no place for him. Barrett did not attempt an immediate reply. He watched her as she fastened a white rosebud in her hair just over her ear.

"Maybe," said he at last, detached, his mind a long distance from the navy.

"Just think of the disadvantage a red-head's under!" she laughed. "No flower that grows but a white one will do for such hair, while a blonde or a brunette has the whole garden to choose from."


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 "What a calamity! But I wouldn't call it red."

"You're the one exception in a long experience, and I doubt if you're sincere. What, then?"

"Come out in the light," he invited, beckoning her away from the door.

She stood turning, arms outstretched as if she balanced on a pivot, in model-like pose of mock seriousness, for him to judge her hair.

"Red," she nodded, with unshaken conviction.

"Not just red," he protested, baffled for another description.

"Not the red that's in the flag, of course, nor the red of a cow," she said; "but the red of a wicked, sullen, revengeful soul. Was that what you wanted to say?"

"You must have been eating some more of your aunt's what-do-you-call-it? bittersweet, or wild parsnip, or something."

"Wait till you know me better," she challenged, a little too serious, he thought, for a matter so banteringly light.

"Why do you dislike cowboys so much, and you born on the range?" he asked her, as if he, too, had been turning something in his mind overnight.

They went down the steps as by common consent, although no such thing had been proposed, and walked toward the wide, double front gate which swung on two immense tree trunks set deeply in the earth.

"I thought I made it plain last night," she replied after a little seeming deliberation, lifting surprised brows as she turned to meet his inquisitorial eyes.

"Not here in this house—you weren't born here?"


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 "Right here. Why? doesn't it look old enough for that?"

"You'll not joke about your age when it's great enough to concern you, my lady," he corrected her, with a grave way he had over trifles at times.

"Well, it was longer ago than yesterday," said she.

They stood at the gate, as children of the dawn who had reached the barrier of their fair land and must not venture beyond it. The top bar was shoulder-high to her; she crossed her arms, bare to the elbows in her loose-fitting blouse, and looked away over the range. The blue of its distances was dissolving into gray before the sun, like a veil in a flame. Soon it would lie harsh and unbeautified under the blaze of day.

"I don't suppose you ever want to leave it," he said, in a conviction founded on his reflections of a little while hefore.

"Leave it!" she echoed, her chin on her folded arms, her eyes fixed on the treeless sweep of sparse grass and low, melancholy, sapless gray sage. "There are times when I could run in my bare feet over rocks and thorns for a thousand miles, and put it behind me forever!"

"I was wrong," said he, confessing to himself, his voice soft, low; "I missed my guess."

"We used to go away, we were more away than here, but we're too poor now to take a trip, the post is the boundary of my world. My father used to be superintendent of this ranch," she explained, lifting her head, arms dropped to her sides. "The rustlers killed him five years ago, out there on that—that—damned, damned range!"