the dark lantern of summer, who came to hunt northward the cowering
spring. In the nearest corral a flock of sheep lay silent until a
groundless panic would send a squad of them huddling together with a
drumming rush. For other sounds a shrill family of coyotes yapped
beyond the shearing-pen, and whippoorwills twittered in the long
grass. But even these dissonances hardly rippled the clear torrent of
the mocking-birds' notes that fell from a dozen neighbouring shrubs
and trees. It would not have been preposterous for one to tiptoe and
essay to touch the stars, they hung so bright and imminent.

Mr. Kinney's wife, a young and capable woman, we had left in the
house. She remained to busy herself with the domestic round of duties,
in which I had observed that she seemed to take a buoyant and
contented pride. In one room we had supped. Presently, from the other,
as Kinney and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and
brilliant music. If I could justly estimate the art of piano-playing,
the construer of that rollicking fantasia had creditably mastered the
secrets of the keyboard. A piano, and one so well played, seemed to me
to be an unusual thing to find in that small and unpromising ranch-
house. I must have looked my surprise at Rush Kinney, for he laughed
in his soft, Southern way, and nodded at me through the moonlit haze
of our cigarettes.

"You don't often hear as agreeable a noise as that on a sheep-ranch,"
he remarked; "but I never see any reason for not playing up to the
arts and graces just because we happen to live out in the brush. It's
a lonesome life for a woman; and if a little music can make it any
better, why not have it? That's the way I look at it."

"A wise and generous theory," I assented. "And Mrs. Kinney plays well.