s voice.

The cow-puncher stopped dead short, and his hand slid off his brother's
shoulder. "You've made it plain," he said, evenly, slanting his steady
eyes down into Frank's. "You've explained yourself fairly well. Run
along with your crowd, and I'll not bother yu' more with comin' round
and causin' yu' to feel ashamed. It's a heap better to understand these
things at once, and save making a fool of yourself any longer 'n yu'
need to. I guess there ain't no more to be said, only one thing. If yu'
see me around on the street, don't yu' try any talk, for I'd be liable
to close your jaw up, and maybe yu'd have more of a job explainin' that
to your crowd than you've had makin' me see what kind of a man I've got
for a brother."

Frank found himself standing alone before any reply to these sentences
had occurred to him. He walked slowly to his club, where a friend joked
him on his glumness.

Lin made a sore failure of amusing himself that night; and in the
bright, hot morning he got into the train for Swampscott. At the
graveyard he saw a woman lay a bunch of flowers on a mound and kneel,
weeping.

"There ain't nobody to do that for this one," thought the cow-puncher,
and looked down at the grave he had come to see, then absently gazed at
the woman.

She had stolen away from her daily life to come here where her grief
was shrined, and now her heart found it hard to bid the lonely place
goodbye. So she lingered long, her thoughts sunk deep in the motionless
past. When she at last looked up, she saw the tall, strange man re-enter
from the street among the tombs, and deposit on one of them an ungainly
lump of flowers. They were what Lin had been able hastily to buy in
Swampscott. He spread them gently as he had noticed the woman do, but
her act of kneeling he did not imitate. He went away quickly. For some
hours he hung about the little town, aimlessly loitering, watching the
salt water where he used to swim.

"Yu' don't belong any more, Lin," he miserably said at length, and took
his way to Boston.

The next morning, determined to see the sights, he was in New York, and
drifted about to all places night and day, till his money was mostly
gone, and nothing to show for it but a somewhat pleasure-beaten face and
a deep hatred of the crowded, scrambling East. So he suddenly bought a
ticket for Green River, Wyoming, and escaped from the city that seemed
to numb his good humor.

When, after three days, the Missouri lay b