ny's relieved. Why,
what with me suffering so horrible, I just wouldn't hardly know my own
name sometimes if you was to come up and ask me!"

The woman's tone became more than ever repellent.

"Never you mind about not knowing your own name. I got it on the pay
roll, and it'll still be there to-morrow if you're helping Buck get out
the rest of them fence posts like I told you. If you happen to get stuck
for your name when I ain't round, and the inquiring parties won't wait,
just ask the Chinaman; he never forgets anything he's learned once. Or
I'll write it out on a card, so you can show it to anybody who rides up
and wants to know it in a hurry!"

"Huh!"

The powers of this brief utterance had not yet been exhausted. It now
conveyed despair. With bowed head the speaker dully turned and withdrew
from our presence. As he went I distinctly heard him mutter:

"Huh! Four-teen! Four-teen! And seven! And twenty-eight!"

"Say, there!" his callous employer called after him. "Why don't you get
Boogles to embroider that name of yours on the front of your shirt? He'd
adore to do it. And you can still read, can't you, in the midst of your
agonies?"

There was no response to this taunt. The suffering one faded slowly down
the path to the bunk house and was lost in its blackness. A light shone
out and presently came sombre chords from a guitar, followed by the
voice of Sandy in gloomy song: "There's a broken heart for every light
on Broadway--"

I was not a little pained to discover this unsuspected vein of cruelty
in a woman I had long admired. And the woman merely became irrelevant
with her apothegm about foreigners. I ignored it.

"What about that sufferer down there in the bunk house?" I demanded.
"Didn't you ever have toothache?"

"No; neither did Sandy Sawtelle. He ain't a sufferer; he's just a liar."

"Why?"

"So I'll let him go to town and play the number of them stitches on the
wheel. Sure! He'd run a horse to death getting there, make for the back
room of the Turf Club Saloon, where they run games whenever the town
ain't lidded too tight, and play roulette till either him or the game
had to close down. Yes, sir; he'd string his bets along on fourteen and
seven and twenty-eight and thirty-five, and if he didn't make a killing
he'd believe all his life that the wheel was crooked. Stitches in a
mule's hide is his bug. He could stitch up any horse on the place and
never have the least hunch; but let it be a mule-