Mackenzie lingered beside the clamoring water in a little valley where
the uncropped grass was lush about his feet, considering making camp
there for the night. It was a pleasant place for a land so bleak, even
in summer, as that country of high table-lands and rolling gray hills.
As he started to unsling his pack he caught the dim note of somebody's
voice raised in song, and stood so, hand on the strap, listening.

The voice was faint, broken by the distance, yet cheering because it
was a voice. Mackenzie pressed up the hill, hoping to be able to
thread the voice back to its source from that eminence. As he neared
the top the voice came clearer; as he paused to listen, it seemed
quite close at hand. It was a woman singing, and this was the manner
of her song:

_Na-a-fer a-lo-o-one, na-a-fer a-lone,
He promise na-fer to leafe me,
Na-fer to leafe me a-lone!_

The valley whence came the song was quite dark below him, and darker
for the indefinite blotch of something that appeared to be trees. In
that grove the house that sheltered the melancholy singer must be
hidden, so completely shrouded that not even a gleam of light escaped
to lead him to the door. Mackenzie stood listening. There was no other
sound rising from that sequestered homestead than the woman's song,
and this was as doleful as any sound that ever issued from human
lips.

Over and over again the woman sang the three lines, a silence after
the last long, tremulous note which reached to the traveler's heart,
more eloquent in its expression of poignant loneliness than the
hopeless repetition of the song. He grinned dustily as he found
himself wishing, in all seriousness, that somebody would take a day
off and teach her the rest of the hymn.

Mackenzie's bones were weary of the road, hard as he tried to make
himself believe they were not, and that he was a tough man, ready to
take and give as it might come to him in the life of the sheeplands.
In his heart he longed for a bed that night, and a cup of hot coffee
to gladden his gizzard. Coffee he had not carried with him, much less
a coffeepot; his load would be heavy enough without them, he rightly
anticipated, before he reached Tim Sullivan's. Nothing more cheering
than water out of the holes by the way had passed his lips these five
days.

He could forgive the woman her song if she would supply some of the
comforts of those who luxuriated in houses for