y in
the morning and put his case for damages against Drumm into Judge
Thayer's hands.

Through Morgan's days of sickness and waiting for strength, he was
attended tenderly by Mrs. Stilwell, and sometimes of an afternoon, when
Violet came in from the hot, dry range, she would play for him on her
new piano. She played a great deal better than he had any reason to
expect of her, self-taught in her isolation on the banks of the shallow
Arkansas.

Violet was a girl of large frame, large bones in her wrists, large
fingers to her useful, kindly ministering hands. Her face was somewhat
too long and thin to be called handsome, but it was refined by a
wistfulness that told of inner striving for something beyond the horizon
of her days there in her prairie-circled home. And now as the two men
talked outside the door, the new moonlight white on the dust of the
trampled yard, Violet was at her piano, playing a simple melody with a
soft, expressive tenderness as sweet to him as any music Morgan ever had
heard. For he understood that the instrument was the medium of
expression for this prairie girl's soul, reaching out from its shelter
of sod laid upon sod to what aspirations, following what longings,
mounting to what ambitions, none in her daily contact ever knew.

Stilwell was downcast by the blow he had received in the loss of more
than half his herd through the Texas scourge. It had taken years of
hardship and striving, fighting drouth and winter storm, preying wolves
and preying men, to build the herd up to the point where profits were
about ready to be enjoyed.

Nothing but a frost would put an end to the scourge of Texas fever; in
those days no other remedy had been discovered. Before nature could send
this relief Stilwell feared the rest of his cattle would die, although
he had driven them from the contaminated range. If that happened he
would be wiped out, for he was too old, he said, to start at the bottom
and build up another herd.

It was at this point that Morgan suggested Stilwell turn to the soil
instead of range cattle as a future business, a thing that called down
the cattleman's scorn and derision, and citation of the wreckage that
country had made of men's hopes. He dismissed that subject very soon as
one unworthy of even acrimonious debate or further denunciation, to
dwell on his losses and the bleakness of the future as it presented
itself through the bones of his dead cattle.

As they sat talking, the so