bstitutes of a secondary sort--your children, ambition,
success, and even rest. Then his eyes grew all misty and sad, and he
looked out on the desert, and at that moment we were passing a group of
a few shanties close to the rails. They were tumbled down and deserted,
and nearby lay the skeleton of a horse. "It was in just such a place as
that, only a good bit farther west, I first saw my Hearts-ease," he
said. "The boys called her 'Hearts-ease' because she was the sweetest
English flower, drifted out to the mines with the people who had
adopted her." He paused, and I slipped my hand into his, he looked so
sad, and then he told me all the story, Mamma, and it has touched me
so, I tell it to you.

He had gone to this small rough camp, about thirty miles short of the
Great Eagles, with only ten cents in his pocket, from the ranch where
he had been a cowboy. He had ridden for days, and there his horse had
died. He crept up half dead, carrying his saddle bags, and these
people, "human devils," he called them, who owned Hearts-ease, let him
come in and lie in a shed. They kept a sort of a gambling den, all of
the most primitive, and the worst rogues of the world congregated there
in the evenings.

Hearts-ease was about sixteen, and they looked upon her as a promising
decoy-duck, but she was "just the purest flower of the prairies," he
said, and so they beat and starved her in consequence, for not falling
in with their views.

That night when he lay in the straw, she crept out of some corner where
she slept, and warned him not to remain, if he had gold in the bags, or
they would certainly murder him before morning; and she gave him some
water, and half her wretched supper, because he had been too tired to
eat when he arrived. Then he told her he was only a poor cowboy, hoping
to get on to the Great Eagles Camp and make his fortune; and they
stayed there talking till dawn, and she bathed his poor feet, all
bleeding from his long tramp, and must have been too sweet and
adorable, Mamma. And when the morning came and her adopted parents
found he was still there and had only ten cents to pay with, they tried
to make him leave, and beat Hearts-ease before his eyes, which made him
so mad he got out his gun (that means revolver) and would have shot the
man, only Hearts-ease clung to him, and begged him not to. Then they
called in some more brutes, who had been drinking and gambling all
night in the bar, and overpowered him, and th