roared echoes for
three full minutes. "I've always wanted to hear the _Chisholm Trail_.
I know how it was sung from Mexico north on the old cattle-trails, and
how every ambitious puncher who had enough imagination and could make a
rhyme, added a verse or so, till it's really a--a classic of the
cow-camps."

"Ye-es--it sure is all that." Ward eyed her furtively.

"And with that memory of yours, I simply know that you can sing every
single word of it," Billy Louise went on pitilessly--and innocently.
"You're a cowpuncher yourself, and you must have heard it all, at one
time and another; and I don't believe you ever forgot a thing in your
life." She caught her breath there, conscience-stricken, and added
hastily and imperiously, "So go on--begin at the beginning and sing it
all. I'll keep tab and see if you sing forty verses." And she
prompted coaxingly:

"Come along, boys, and listen to my tale,
I'll tell you of my troubles on the old Chisholm trail,
Coma ti yi--"

and nodded her head approvingly when Ward took up the ditty where she
left off and sang it with the rollicking enthusiasm which only a man
who has soothed restless cattle on a stormy night can put into the
doggerel.

He did not sing the whole forty verses, for good and sufficient reasons
best known to punchers themselves. But, with swift, shamed skipping of
certain lines and some hasty revisions, he actually did sing thirty,
and Billy Louise was so engrossed that she forgot to count them and
never suspected the omissions; for some of the verses were quite
"sweary" enough to account for his hesitation.

The singing of those thirty verses brought a reminiscent mood upon the
singer. For the rest of the way, which they rode at a walk, Ward sat
very much upon one side of the saddle, with his body facing Billy
Louise and his foot dangling free of the stirrup, and told her tales of
trail-herds, and the cow-camps, and of funny things that had happened
on the range. His "I remember one time" opened the door to a more
fascinating world than Billy Louise's dream-world, because this other
world was real.

So, from pure accident, she hit upon the most effective of all weapons
with which to fight the memory-devils. She led Ward to remembering the
pleasanter parts of his past life and to telling her of them.

When spring came at last, and he rode regretfully back to his claim on
Mill Greek, he was not at all the morose Ward Warren who had ridden
dow