ss?" she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase.

"It's a disease," Smith proceeded, "and I suppose you git it anywhere;
but you git it harder here. I've seen men take it, and turn gray and
lose their minds, runnin' sheep. After you once git over it you're
broke. You wouldn't leave this country for a purty on a chain."

"I hope I'll not get it," she laughed. "How do people act when they take
the lonesomeness?"

"Well, some acts one way and some acts another," said Smith. "Some mopes
and run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about 'God's
country' till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn't as much God's
country as any place you can name! It's all His'n when you come down to
the p'int, I reckon. But how a woman acts when she takes it I can't so
much say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed a
man."

"Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?"

"Well, I don't know but you could say she did. You see she married a
sheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there on
the side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while he
went off foolin' around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. I
tell you when you git sheep on the brain you don't eat at home more than
once in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin' tails
off of lambs, and all such fool things as that."

"Why, do they cut the poor things' tails off?" she asked, getting the
notion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense.

"They all do it," he informed her, "to keep the sand and burrs out of
'em. If they let 'em grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes 'em
poor to pack 'em, they say, I don't know myself; I'm not a sheepman."

"But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs' tails?"

"No, she didn't," said Smith. "She went out of her head. The feller she
shot was a storekeeper's son down in Meander, and he got to ridin' up
there to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such a
hold on her, thinkin' about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin' in
every one of 'em, that she up and run off with that feller when he
promised to take her back there. They started to cut across to the U.P.
in a wagon--more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her head
when he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave."

"Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her that
way," Agnes said.

"A man orto stic