g Boss obediently got
down his fiddle from the smoky corner beside the fireplace and played a
weird old tune or two, and then they sang. First the men, with hoarse,
quavering approach and final roar of wild sweetness; then Margaret and
the Boy in duet, and finally Margaret alone, with a few bashful chords
on the fiddle, feeling their way as accompaniment.

Mom Wallis had long ago stopped her work and was sitting huddled in the
doorway on a nail-keg with weary, folded hands and a strange wistfulness
on her apathetic face. A fine silence had settled over the group as the
girl, recognizing her power, and the pleasure she was giving, sang on.
Now and then the Boy, when he knew the song, would join in with his rich
tenor.

It was a strange night, and when she finally lay down to rest on a hard
cot with a questionable-looking blanket for covering and Mom Wallis as
her room-mate, Margaret Earle could not help wondering what her mother
and father would think now if they could see her. Would they not,
perhaps, almost prefer the water-tank and the lonely desert for her to
her present surroundings?

Nevertheless, she slept soundly after her terrible excitement, and woke
with a start of wonder in the early morning, to hear the men outside
splashing water and humming or whistling bits of the tunes she had sung
to them the night before.

Mom Wallis was standing over her, looking down with a hunger in her eyes
at the bright waves of Margaret's hair and the soft, sleep-flushed
cheeks.

"You got dretful purty hair," said Mom Wallis, wistfully.

Margaret looked up and smiled in acknowledgment of the compliment.

"You wouldn't b'lieve it, but I was young an' purty oncet. Beats all how
much it counts to be young--an' purty! But land! It don't last long.
Make the most of it while you got it."

Browning's immortal words came to Margaret's lips--

Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made--

but she checked them just in time and could only smile mutely. How could
she speak such thoughts amid these intolerable surroundings? Then with
sudden impulse she reached up to the astonished woman and, drawing her
down, kissed her sallow cheek.

"Oh!" said Mom Wallis, starting back and laying her bony hands upon the
place where she had been kissed, as if it hurt her, while a dull red
stole up from her neck over her cheeks and high forehead to the roots of
her hay-colored hair.