fell from a dozen neighbouring shrubs
and trees. It would not have been preposterous for one to tiptoe and
essay to touch the stars, they hung so bright and imminent.

Mr. Kinney's wife, a young and capable woman, we had left in the
house. She remained to busy herself with the domestic round of duties,
in which I had observed that she seemed to take a buoyant and
contented pride. In one room we had supped. Presently, from the other,
as Kinney and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and
brilliant music. If I could justly estimate the art of piano-playing,
the construer of that rollicking fantasia had creditably mastered the
secrets of the keyboard. A piano, and one so well played, seemed to me
to be an unusual thing to find in that small and unpromising ranch-
house. I must have looked my surprise at Rush Kinney, for he laughed
in his soft, Southern way, and nodded at me through the moonlit haze
of our cigarettes.

"You don't often hear as agreeable a noise as that on a sheep-ranch,"
he remarked; "but I never see any reason for not playing up to the
arts and graces just because we happen to live out in the brush. It's
a lonesome life for a woman; and if a little music can make it any
better, why not have it? That's the way I look at it."

"A wise and generous theory," I assented. "And Mrs. Kinney plays well.
I am not learned in the science of music, but I should call her an
uncommonly good performer. She has technic and more than ordinary
power."

The moon was very bright, you will understand, and I saw upon Kinney's
face a sort of amused and pregnant expression, as though there were
things behind it that might be expounded.

"You came up the trail from the Double-Elm Fork," he said promisingly.
"As you crossed it you must have seen an old deserted /jacal/ to your
left under a comma mott."

"I did," said I. "There was a drove of /javalis/ rooting around it. I
could see by the broken corrals that no one lived there."

"That's where this music proposition started," said Kinney. "I don't
mind telling you about it while we smoke. That's where old Cal Adams
lived. He had about eight hundred graded merinos and a daughter that
was solid silk and as handsome as a new stake-rope on a thirty-dollar
pony. And I don't mind telling you that I was guilty in the second
degree of hanging around old Cal's ranch all the time I could spare
away from lambing and shearing. Miss Marilla was her name; and I had
figured it o