ere Captain Jack and the Gold Dust maverick were
quietly feeding. He leaned against the bars of the corral and looked at
the shadowy forms of the two horses standing a little distance away.
Captain Jack quit eating and came to the fence.

"God! Little Horse"--the Ramblin' Kid spoke tensely and without
repression--"why can't humans be as decent an' honest as you?"

The black dome of night was studded with innumerable stars that gleamed
like points of silver sprinkled over a canopy of somber velvet some
infinite hand had flung, in a great arch, from rim to rim of a sleeping
world. The call of a night bird shrilled softly from the cottonwood
trees along the Cimarron. A hint of a breeze swung idly from the west
and rustled the leaves in the tops of the poplars in front of the house.
Faintly as a distant echo came the wailing strains of a waltz, drifting
out from the lighted windows and the open door of the room where Carolyn
June and Ophelia, in a spirit of sport and for revenge, juggled the
hearts of men afraid of nothing in all the world but the look in a
Woman's eyes.

The music tortured the soul of the Ramblin' Kid. It breathed the
unfathomable strife of life--of love, longing, hope, despair--almost,
yet subtly, elusively, would not tell the eternal "Why?" of all things.

Not heeding time, he stood and listened. The crunching sound made by the
Gold Dust maverick, munching at the pile of hay on the ground in the
corral, blended with and seemed a queer accompaniment to the melody that
came from the scene of revelry up at the house.

The orange disk of a late-rising moon showed above the rim of the
sand-hills at the lower end of the valley. The Ramblin' Kid watched
it--until it grew into a rounded plate of burnished, glistening silver.
The Gold Dust maverick was suddenly flooded with a glare of light as the
moonbeams poured over the top of the shed and streamed through the bars
of the circular corral. The filly lifted her head.

An impulse to ride--ride--ride, to get away from it all--far out on the
wide unpeopled plains where there was nothing above but God, and the
unmeasured depths of His heavens, and nothing beneath but the earth and
the rhythmic beat of his horse's feet, came over the Ramblin' Kid. Men,
and the works of men--their passions, their strifes, their
foolishness--and women--women who played with love--he wanted to forget,
to leave miles and miles behind.

He started to open the gate, thinking to sadd