ivining
what was in her mind. "I will try to understand."

"I have known all the bitterness of life," interposed the low, soft
voice of Madame Bulteel.

"All ears are the same here," Fleda added, looking the woman in the
eyes.

"I will tell everything," was the instant reply. Her fingers twined and
untwined in her lap with a nervousness shown by neither face nor body.
Her face was almost apathetic in its despair, but her body had an
upright courage.

She sighed heavily and began.

"My name is Arabella Stone. I was married from my home over against Wind
River by the Jumping Sandhills.

"My father was a lumberman. He was always captain of the gang in the
woods, and captain of the river in the summer. My mother was deaf and
dumb. It was very lonely at times when my father was away. I loved
a boy--a good boy, and he was killed breaking horses. When I was
twenty-one years old my mother died. It was not good for me to be alone,
my father said, so he must either give up the woods and the river, or
he or I must marry. Well, I saw he would not marry, for my mother's face
was one a man could not forget."

The old man stirred in his seat. "I have seen such," he said in his deep
voice.

"So it was I said to myself I would marry," she continued, "though I
had loved the Boy that died under the hoofs of the black stallion. There
weren't many girls at the Jumping Sandhills, and so there were men, now
one, now another, to say things to me which did not touch my heart; but
I did not laugh, because I understood that they were lonely. Yet I liked
one of them more than all the others.

"So, for my father's sake, I came nearer to Dennis, and at last it
seemed I could bear to look at him any time of the day or night he came
to me. He was built like a pine-tree, and had a playful tongue, and also
he was a ranchman like the Boy that was gone. It all came about on the
day he rode in from the range the wild wicked black stallion which all
range-riders had tried for years to capture. It was like a brother of
the horse which had killed my Boy, only bigger. When Dennis mastered him
and rode him to my door I made up my mind, and when he whispered to me
over the dipper of buttermilk I gave him, I said, 'Yes.' I was proud of
him. He did things that a woman likes, and said the things a woman loves
to hear, though they be the same thing said over and over again."

Madame Bulteel nodded her head as though in a dream, and the Ry of Rys
sat wi