way
across the herd, singing. As he drew nearer Thurston caught the words,
at first disjointed and indistinct, then plainer as they met. It was a
song he had never heard before, because its first popularity had swept
far below his social plane.

"She's o-only a bird in a gil-ded cage,
A beautiful sight to see-e-e;
You may think she seems ha-a-aappy and free from ca-a-re.."

The singer passed on and away, and only the high notes floated across to
Thurston, who whistled softly under his breath while he listened. Then,
as they neared again on the second round, the words came pensively:

"Her beauty was so-o-old
For an old man's go-o-old, She's a bird in a gilded ca-a-age."

Thurston rode slowly like one in a dream, and the lure of the range-land
was strong upon him. The deep breathing of three thousand sleeping
cattle; the strong, animal odor; the black night which grew each moment
blacker, and the rhythmic ebb and flow of the clear, untrained voice
of a cowboy singing to his charge. If he could put it into words; if
he could but picture the broody stillness, with frogs cr-ekk, er-ekking
along the reedy creek-bank and a coyote yapping weirdly upon a distant
hilltop! From the southwest came mutterings half-defiant and ominous.
A breeze whispered something to the grasses as it crept away down the
valley.

"I stood in a church-yard just at ee-eve,
While the sunset adorned the west."

It was Bob, drawing close out of the night. "You're doing fine, Kid;
keep her a-going," he commended, in an undertone as he passed, and
Thurston moistened his unaccustomed lips and began industriously
whistling "The Heart Bowed Down," and from that jumped to Faust. Fifteen
minutes exhausted his memory of the whistleable parts, and he was not
given to tiresome repetitions. He stopped for a moment, and Bob's voice
chanted admonishingly from somewhere, "Keep her a-go-o-ing, Bud, old
boy!" So Thurston took breath and began on "The Holy City," and came
near laughing at the incongruity of the song; only he remembered that he
must not frighten the cattle, and checked the impulse.

"Say," Bob began when he came near enough, "do yuh know the words uh
that piece? It's a peach; I wisht you'd sing it." He rode on, still
humming the woes of the lady who married for gold.

Thurston obeyed while the high-piled thunder-heads rumbled deep
accompaniment, like the resonant lower tones of a bass viol.

"Last night