y the piano with. By itself it was about as musical as the holes of
a flute without the flute.

"And that was the piano that Uncle Cal had selected; and standing by
it was the good, fine, all-wool girl that never let him know it.

"And what you heard playing a while ago," concluded Mr. Kinney, "was
that same deputy-piano machine; only just at present it's shoved up
against a six-hundred-dollar piano that I bought for Marilla as soon
as we was married."

XIV

A CALL LOAN

In those days the cattlemen were the anointed. They were the grandees
of the grass, kings of the kine, lords of the lea, barons of beef and
bone. They might have ridden in golden chariots had their tastes so
inclined. The cattleman was caught in a stampede of dollars. It seemed
to him that he had more money than was decent. But when he had bought
a watch with precious stones set in the case so large that they hurt
his ribs, and a California saddle with silver nails and Angora skin
/suaderos/, and ordered everybody up to the bar for whisky--what else
was there for him to spend money for?

Not so circumscribed in expedient for the reduction of surplus wealth
were those lairds of the lariat who had womenfolk to their name. In
the breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may
slumber through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does
it become extinct.

So, out of the chaparral came Long Bill Longley from the Bar Circle
Branch on the Frio--a wife-driven man--to taste the urban joys of
success. Something like half a million dollars he had, with an income
steadily increasing.

Long Bill was a graduate of the camp and trail. Luck and thrift, a
cool head, and a telescopic eye for mavericks had raised him from
cowboy to be a cowman. Then came the boom in cattle, and Fortune,
stepping gingerly among the cactus thorns, came and emptied her
cornucopia at the doorstep of the ranch.

In the little frontier city of Chaparosa, Longley built a costly
residence. Here he became a captive, bound to the chariot of social
existence. He was doomed to become a leading citizen. He struggled for
a time like a mustang in his first corral, and then he hung up his
quirt and spurs. Time hung heavily on his hands. He organised the
First National Bank of Chaparosa, and was elected its president.

One day a dyspeptic man, wearing double-magnifying glasses, inserted
an official-looking card between the bars of the cashier's window of
the Fir