oned, straight-riding, swift-roping Texas cowman. The gang was
an ugly one: it was sullen, black-browed, sinister. But it, one and all,
could throw a rope and cut out stock, which was not only the main
thing--it was the whole thing.

Still, the game was not pleasant. Either Alfred or Tom usually rode
night-herd on the ponies--merely as a matter of precaution--and they
felt just a trifle more shut off by themselves and alone than if they
had ridden solitary over the limitless alkali of the Arizona plains.
This feeling struck in the deeper because Tom had just entered one of
his brooding spells. Tom and Alfred had been chums now for close on two
years, so Alfred knew enough to leave him entirely alone until he should
recover.

The primary cause of Tom's abstraction was an open-air preacher, and the
secondary cause was, of course, a love affair. These two things did not
connect themselves consciously in Tom's mind, but they blended subtly to
produce a ruminative dissatisfaction.

When Tom was quite young he had fallen in love with a girl back in the
Dakota country. Shortly after a military-post had been established near
by, and Anne Bingham had ceased to be spoken of by mayors' daughters and
officers' wives. Tom, being young, had never quite gotten over it. It
was still part of his nature, and went with a certain sort of sunset, or
that kind of star-lit evening in which an imperceptible haze dims the
brightness of the heavens.

The open-air preacher had chosen as his text the words, "passing the
love of woman," and Tom, wandering idly by, had caught the text. Somehow
ever since the words had run in his mind. They did not mean anything to
him, but merely repeated themselves over and over, just as so many
delicious syllables which tickled the ear and rolled succulently under
the tongue. For, you see, Tom was only an ordinary battered Arizona
cow-puncher, and so, of course, according to the fireside moralists,
quite incapable of the higher feelings. But the words reacted to arouse
memories of black-eyed Anne, and the memories in turn brought one of his
moods.

Tom, and Alfred, and the ponies, and the cook-wagon, and the cook, and
the Mexican vaqueros had done the alkali for three days. Underfoot had
been an exceedingly irregular plain; overhead an exceedingly bright and
trying polished sky; around about an exceedingly monotonous horizon-line
and dense clouds of white dust. At the end of the third day everybody
was feeli