N ANDY GREEN LIES TO A LADY

In the soft-creeping dusk came Andy Green, slouched in the saddle with
the weariness of riding since dawn; slouched to one side and singing,
with his hat far back on his head and the last of a red sunset tinting
darkly the hills above him. Tip-toe on a pinnacle a great, yellow star
poised and winked at him knowingly. Andy's eyes twinkled answer as he
glanced up that way. "We've got her going, old-timer," he announced
lazily to the star.

Six miles back toward the edge of the "breaks" which are really the
beginning of the Badlands that border the Missouri River all through
that part of Montana, an even five hundred head of the Flying U's best
grade cows and their calves were settling down for the night upon a
knoll that had been the bed-ground of many a herd. At the Flying U
ranch, in the care of the Old Man, were the mortgages that would make
the Happy Family nominal owners of those five hundred cows and their
calves. In the morning Andy would ride back and help bring the herd upon
its spring grazing ground, which was the claims; in the meantime he was
leisurely obeying an impulse to ride into One Man coulee and spend
the night under his own roof. And, say what you will, there is a
satisfaction not to be denied in sleeping sometimes under one's own
roof; and it doesn't matter in the least that the roof is made of
prairie dirt thrown upon cottonwood poles. So he sang while he rode, and
his voice boomed loud in the coulee and scared long stilled echoes into
repeating the song:

"We're here because we're here, because we're here,
because we're here,

"We're here because we're here, because we're here,
because we're here--"

That, if you please, is a song; there are a lot more verses exactly
like this one, which may be sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne with much
effectiveness when one is in a certain mood. So Andy sang, while his
tired horse picked its way circumspectly among the scattered rocks of
the trail up the coulee.

"It's time you're here, it's time you're here,
It's time that you were here--"

mocked an echo not of the hills.

Andy swore in his astonishment and gave his horse a kick as a mild hint
for haste. He thought he knew every woman-voice in the neighborhood--or
had until the colony came--but this voice, high and sweet and with a
compelling note that stirred him vaguely, was absolutely strange. While
he loped forward, sil