doing all your own work outside and doing all your
own cooking and everything all the time in your own house. Just living
along twenty years one day after another, all by your own self, and
never--never----"

His voice trailed off faintly, and he left the sentence unfinished.
Wid Gardner completed it for him.

"And never having a woman around?" said he.

"Ain't it the truth?" said Sim Gage suddenly. His eyes ran furtively
around the room in which they sat, taking in, without noting or
feeling, the unutterable squalor of the place.

"Well," said his friend after a time, rising, "it'd be a fine place to
fetch a woman to, wouldn't it? But now I got to be going--I got my
chores to do."

"What's your hurry, Wid?" complained the occupant of the cabin.
"Cow'll wait."

"Yours might," said the other sententiously. As he spoke he was making
his way to the door.

The sun was sinking now behind the range, and as he stood for a moment
looking toward the west, he might himself have been seen to be a man of
some stature, rugged and bronzed, with scores of wrinkles on his
leathery cheeks. His garb was the rude one of the West, or rather of
that remnant of the Old West which has been consigned to the dry
farmers and hay ranchers in these modern polyglot days.

Sim Gage, the man who followed him out and stood for a time in the
unsparing brilliance of the evening sunlight, did not compare too well
with his friend. He was a man of absolutely no presence, utterly
lacking attractiveness. Not so much pudgy as shapeless; he had been
shapeless originally. His squat figure showed, to be sure, a certain
hardiness and vigor gained in his outdoor life, but he had not even the
rude grace of a stalwart manhood about him. He sank apologetically
into a lax posture, even as he stood. His pale blue eyes lacked fire.
His hair, uneven, ragged and hay-colored, seemed dry, as though
hopeless, discouraged, done with life, fringing out as it did in gray
locks under the edge of the battered hat he wore. He had been unshaven
for days, perhaps weeks, and his beard, unreaped, showed divers colors,
as of a field partially ripening here and there. In general he was
undecided, unfinished--yes, surely nature must have been undecided as
he himself was about himself.

His clothing was such as might have been predicted for the owner of the
nondescript bed resting on the cabin floor. His neck, grimed, red and
wrinkled as that of an ancient turtle,