his protruding lower lip thrust
out, his hands in his pocket.

"I suppose she'll quit now," he muttered. "Suppose she'll leave the
ranch--if she hates me like that. Well, she can go--that's all--she can
go. Fool feemale girl," he muttered between his teeth, "petticoat mess."
He was about to sit down to his supper when his eye fell upon the
Irish setter, on his haunches in the doorway. There was an expectant,
ingratiating look on the dog's face. No doubt, he suspected it was time
for eating.

"Get out--YOU!" roared Annixter in a tempest of wrath.

The dog slunk back, his tail shut down close, his ears drooping, but
instead of running away, he lay down and rolled supinely upon his back,
the very image of submission, tame, abject, disgusting. It was the one
thing to drive Annixter to a fury. He kicked the dog off the porch in
a rolling explosion of oaths, and flung himself down to his seat before
the table, fuming and panting.

"Damn the dog and the girl and the whole rotten business--and now," he
exclaimed, as a sudden fancied qualm arose in his stomach, "now, it's
all made me sick. Might have known it. Oh, it only lacked that to wind
up the whole day. Let her go, I don't care, and the sooner the better."

He countermanded the supper and went to bed before it was dark, lighting
his lamp, on the chair near the head of the bed, and opening his
"Copperfield" at the place marked by the strip of paper torn from the
bag of prunes. For upward of an hour he read the novel, methodically
swallowing one prune every time he reached the bottom of a page. About
nine o'clock he blew out the lamp and, punching up his pillow, settled
himself for the night.

Then, as his mind relaxed in that strange, hypnotic condition that
comes just before sleep, a series of pictures of the day's doings passed
before his imagination like the roll of a kinetoscope.

First, it was Hilma Tree, as he had seen her in the
dairy-house--charming, delicious, radiant of youth, her thick, white
neck with its pale amber shadows under the chin; her wide, open eyes
rimmed with fine, black lashes; the deep swell of her breast and hips,
the delicate, lustrous floss on her cheek, impalpable as the pollen of
a flower. He saw her standing there in the scintillating light of the
morning, her smooth arms wet with milk, redolent and fragrant of milk,
her whole, desirable figure moving in the golden glory of the sun,
steeped in a lambent flame, saturated with it, glow