And I swear by the Lord I'll never night-herd again,
Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a, youpy-a,
Coma ti yi youpy, youpy-a!

"Feet in the stirrups and seat in the saddle,
I hung and rattled with them long-horn cattle,
Coma ti yi--"

"Do shut the door, Billy Louise! What you want to stand there like
that for? And the wind freezing everything inside! I can feel a
terrible draught on my feet and ankles, and you know what that leads
to."

So Billy Louise closed the door and laid another alder root on the
coals in the fireplace, the while her mind was given over to dreamy
speculations, and the words of that old trail song ran on in her memory
though she could no longer hear him singing. Her mother talked on
about Peter and the storm and this man who had ridden straight from the
land of daydreams to her door, but the girl was not listening.

"Now ain't you relieved, yourself, that he's going to stay?"

Billy Louise, kneeling on the hearth and staring abstractedly into the
fire, came back with a jerk to reality. The little smile that had been
in her eyes and on her lips fled back with the dreams that had brought
it. She gave her shoulders an impatient twitch and got up.

"Oh--I guess he'll be more agreeable to have around than Peter," she
admitted taciturnly; which was as close to her real opinion of the man
as a mere mother might hope to come.

CHAPTER IV

"OLD DAME FORTUNE'S USED ME FOR A FOOTBALL"

Ward Warren sat before the fireplace with a cigarette long gone cold in
his fingers and stared into the blaze until the blaze died to
bright-glowing coals, and the coals filmed and shrank down into the bed
of ashes. Billy Louise had spoken to him twice, and he had not
answered. She had swept all around him, and he had shifted his feet
out of her way, and later his chair, like a man in his sleep who turns
from an unaccustomed light or draws the covers over shoulders growing
chilled, without any real consciousness of what he does. Billy Louise
put away the broom, hung the dustpan on its nail behind the door, and
stood looking at Ward curiously and with some resentment; this was not
the first time he had gone into fits of abstraction as deep as his
absorption in the books he read so hungrily. He had been at the
Wolverine a month, and they were pretty well acquainted by now and
inclined to friendliness when Ward threw off his moodiness and his air
of holding himself ready for some affront which he see