end a squad of them huddling together with
a drumming rush. For other sounds a shrill family of coyotes yapped
beyond the shearing-pen, and whippoorwills twittered in the long
grass. But even these dissonances hardly rippled the clear torrent of
the mocking-birds' notes that fell from a dozen neighbouring shrubs
and trees. It would not have been preposterous for one to tiptoe and
essay to touch the stars, they hung so bright and imminent.

Mr. Kinney's wife, a young and capable woman, we had left in the
house. She remained to busy herself with the domestic round of
duties, in which I had observed that she seemed to take a buoyant and
contented pride. In one room we had supped. Presently, from the other,
as Kinney and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and
brilliant music. If I could justly estimate the art of piano-playing,
the construer of that rollicking fantasia had creditably mastered
the secrets of the keyboard. A piano, and one so well played, seemed
to me to be an unusual thing to find in that small and unpromising
ranch-house. I must have looked my surprise at Rush Kinney, for he
laughed in his soft, Southern way, and nodded at me through the moonlit
haze of our cigarettes.

"You don't often hear as agreeable a noise as that on a sheep-ranch,"
he remarked; "but I never see any reason for not playing up to the
arts and graces just because we happen to live out in the brush. It's
a lonesome life for a woman; and if a little music can make it any
better, why not have it? That's the way I look at it."

"A wise and generous theory," I assented. "And Mrs. Kinney plays well.
I am not learned in the science of music, but I should call her an
uncommonly good performer. She has technic and more than ordinary
power."

The moon was very bright, you will understand, and I saw upon Kinney's
face a sort of amused and pregnant expression, as though there were
things behind it that might be expounded.

"You came up the trail from the Double-Elm Fork," he said promisingly.
"As you crossed it you must have seen an old deserted _jacal_ to your
left under a comma mott."

"I did," said I. "There was a drove of _javalis_ rooting around it. I
could see by the broken corrals that no one lived there."

"That's where this music proposition started," said Kinney. "I don't
mind telling you about it while we smoke. That's where old Cal Adams
lived. He had about eight hundred graded merinos and a daughter that
was solid si