se could drink and graze more comfortably, threw himself at full
length upon the short grass. The well-trained broncho would not stray
far, and both needed rest. The coyote was still in his thoughts, but his
mood had changed. "After all," he meditated, "she got that rabbit
unexpectedly when she sure needed it worst--and she won out by staying
with the game. Maybe my turn will come, too, if I don't get buffaloed
and stampede. Was it Seneca or Lucretius--no, Havard--who said that
perseverance is a virtue

'that plucks success
Even from the spear-proof crest of rugged danger.'

Well, in this case I'll be virtuous from force of necessity. But how
long, oh, Lord, how long?"

From which it might be inferred that this particular cowboy had some
time or other drank from springs Pierian as well as alkaline. Just now
it was hard to say which was most bitter in his mouth.

He shifted restlessly to his elbow and built a cigarette; through its
thin blue mist he waded retrospectively in the stream of memory. Rapidly
in review passed his boyhood days in the far East, his college career
with its vast ambitions and roseate dreams, his migration to the
cloud-kissed Rockies where he had suffered the undoing of all his
mawkish illusions. An idealist of the most refined type, he writhed even
now at the merciless rape of all his virginal conceptions by that
unsympathetic iconoclast Practicality, that ironical cynic who laughs
our adolescent theories to scorn and desecrates the holiest of our
dream-woven holies. All his finespun hopes had been ruthlessly rent by
the hand of reality. Contact with humanity in its primeval phase had
worn his unusually refined sensibilities to the quick and the reaction
was as unhealthy as it was inevitable. From enthusiastic optimism to
hopeless pessimism is only a short step for exaggerated natures like
his, and there were few things that this man now held sacred--and none
that he held holy. Even life itself, and particularly that of other men,
he held in contempt, and with the usual disastrous consequences. There
were few, even in this land of reckless men, who cared to arouse the
slumbering devil under the quiet demeanor of this gray-eyed range rider
who killed first and argued afterward.

From the pinnacle of a great faith in his kind he had been hurled
headlong to the depths of unbelief and suspicion. He had seen Loyalty
mocked and betrayed; starving Intelligence bought with a price