or had been until one overconfident day, when the Flying Heart
Ranch had risked it as a wager in a foot-race with the
neighboring Centipede, and their own man had been too slow. As it
had been their pride, it remained their disgrace. Dearly had they
loved, and dearly lost it. It meant something that looked like
honor, and though there were ten thousand thousand phonographs,
in all the world there was not one that could take its place.

The sound ceased, there was an approving distant murmur of men's
voices, and then the song began:

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Lift up your voice and sing--"

Higher and higher the voice mounted until it reached again its
first thin, ear-splitting pitch.

"Still Bill" Stover stirred uneasily in the darkness. "Why 'n
'ell don't they keep her wound up?" he complained. "Gallagher's
got the soul of a wart-hog. It's criminal the way he massacres
that hymn."

From a rod farther down the wire fence Willie answered him, in a
boy's falsetto:

"I wonder if he does it to spite me?"

"He don't know you're here," said Stover.

The other came out of the gloom, a little stoop-shouldered man