and a bell for the burro, completed his outfit.

The sheep dog lay with his head on his paws, following every movement with loving eyes.

The sheepherder scraped a smooth place with the side of his foot, set up his tepee and spread the blankets inside. Then he built a tiny sagebrush fire, filled his battered coffee pot at the spring in the “draw,” threw in a small handful of coffee, and, when the sagebrush was burned to coals, set it to boil. He warmed over a few cooked beans in a lard can, sliced bacon and laid it with great exactness in a long-handled frying pan and placed it on the coals. Then unwrapping a half dozen cold baking-powder biscuits from a dish towel he put them on a tin cover on the ground near a tin cup and plate and a knife and fork.

The man moved lightly, with the deftness of experience, stopping every now and then to cast a look at the sheep that were slowly feeding back preparatory to bedding down. And each time he did so, his eyes unconsciously sought the road in the direction from which he had come, and as often his face clouded with a troubled frown.

When the bacon was brown and the coffee bubbled in the pot, he sat down crosslegged with his plate in his lap and the tin cup beside him on the ground. He ate hungrily, yet with an abstracted expression, which showed that his thoughts were not on his food.

After he had finished he broke open the biscuits which remained, soaked them in the bacon grease and tossed them to the dog, which caught them in the air and swallowed them at a gulp. Then he got to his feet and filled his pipe. He looked contemplatively at a few sheep feeding away from the main band and said as he waved his arm in an encircling gesture:

“Way ’round ’em, Shep! Better bring ’em in.”

The dog responded instantly, his handsome tail waving like a plume as he bounded over the sagebrush and gathered in the stragglers.

By the time the herder had washed his dishes and finished his pipe the sun was well below the horizon and the sky in the west a riot of pink and amber and red. The well-trained sheep fed back and dropped down in twos and threes on a spot not far from the tepee where it pleased their fancy to bed. Save for the distant tinkle of the bell on the burro, and the stirring of the sheep, the herder might have been alone in the universe. When he had set his dishes and food back in the paniers and covered them with a piece of “tarp,” in housewifely orderliness, he opened the black case and took out the violin with a care that amounted to tenderness. The first stroke of the bow bespoke the trained hand. He did not sit, but knelt in the sand with his face to the west as he played like some pagan sun-worshiper, his expression rapt, intent. Strains from the world’s best music rose and fell in throbbing sweetness on the desert stillness, music which told beyond peradventure that some cataclysm in the player’s life had shaken him from his rightful niche. It proclaimed this travel-stained sheepherder in his faded overalls and peak-crowned limp-brimmed hat another of the incongruities of the far west. The sagebrush plains and mountains have held the secrets of many Mysteries locked in their silent breasts, for, since the coming of the White Man, they have been a haven for civilization’s Mistakes, Failures and Misfits.

While he poured out his soul with only the sheep and the tired collie sleeping on its paws for audience, the gorgeous sunset died and a chill wind came up, scattering the gray ashes of the camp fire and swaying the tepee tent. Suddenly he stopped and shivered a little in spite of his woolen shirt. “Dog-gone!” he said abruptly, aloud, as he put the violin away, “I can’t get that kid out of my thoughts!” Though he could not have told why he did so, or what he might, even remotely, expect to hear, he stood and listened intently before he stooped and disappeared for the night between the flaps of the tent.

He turned often between the blankets of his hard bed, disturbed by uneasy dreams quite unlike the deep oblivion of his usual sleep.

“Oh, Mister, where are you?”

The sheepherder stirred uneasily.

“Please—please, Mister, won’t you speak?”

The plaintive pleading cry was tremulous and faint like the voice of a disembodied spirit floating somewhere in the air. This time he sat up with a start.

“It’s only me—Katie Prentice, from the Roadhouse. Don’t be scart.”

The wail was closer. There was no mistake. Then the dog barked. The man threw back the blanket and sprang to his feet. It took only a moment to get into his clothes and step out into a night that had turned pitch dark.

“Where are you?” he called.

“Oh, Mister!?” The shrill cry held gladness and relief.

Then she came out of the blackness, the ends of a white nubia and a little shoulder cape snapping in the wind, her breath coming short in a sound that was a mixture of exhaustion and sobs.

“I was afraid I couldn’t find you till daylight. I heard a bell, but I didn’t know where to go, it’s such a dark night. I ran all the way, nearly, till I played out.”

“What’s the row?” he asked gently.

She slipped both arms through one of his and hugged it convulsively, while in a kind of hysteria she begged:

“Don’t send me back, Mister! I won’t go! I’ll kill myself first. Take me with you—please, please let me go with you!”

“Tell me what it’s all about.”

She did not answer, and he urged:

“Go on. Don’t be afraid. You can tell me anything.”

She replied in a strained voice:

“Pete Mullendore, he—”

A gust of wind blew the shoulder cape back and he saw her bare arm with the sleeve of her dress hanging by a shred.

“—he did this?”

“Yes. He—insulted—me—I—can’t—tell—you—what—he—said.”

“And then?”

“I scratched him and bit him. I fought him all over the place. He was chokin’ me. I got to a quirt and struck him on the head—with the handle. It was loaded. He dropped like he was dead. I ran to my room and clum out the window—”

“Your mother—”

“She—laughed.”

“God!” He stooped and picked up the little bundle she had dropped at her feet. “Come along, Partner. You are going into the sheep business with 'Mormon Joe.'”

The experienced ear of Major Stephen Douglas Prouty told him that he was getting a hot axle. The hard dry squeak from the rear wheel of the “democrat” had but one meaning—he had forgotten to grease it. This would seem an inexcusable oversight in a man who expected to make forty miles before sunset, but in this instance there was an extenuating circumstance. Immediately after breakfast there had been a certain look in his hostess’s eye which had warned him that if he lingered he would be asked to assist with the churning. Upon observing it he had started for the barn to harness with a celerity that approached a trot.

Long years of riding the grub-line had developed in the Major a gift for recognizing the exact psychological moment when he had worn out his welcome as company and was about to be treated as one of the family and sicced on the woodpile, that was like a sixth sense. It seldom failed him, but in the rare instances when it had, he had bought his freedom with a couple of boxes of White Badger Salve—unfailing for cuts, burns, scalds and all irritations of the skin—good also, as it proved, for dry axles, since he had neglected to replenish his box of axle grease from that of his host at