t a grievous twist.

"We bought that ham," she said sadly, "a-purpose."

"No matter. We have decided to go into this packing business with your
husband. When--er--experience goes into partnership with ignorance,
ignorance expects to pay a premium. We have paid our premium."

She rose, and we held out our hands.

"No, gentlemen; I won't take your hands till that debt is cancelled.
The piano and the team will go some ways towards it. Good-bye, and--
thank you."

VIII

AN EXPERIMENT

My brother and I had just ridden off the range, when Uncle Jake told
us that a tramp was hanging about the corrals and wished to speak with
us.

"He looks like hell," concluded Uncle Jake.

We found him, a minute later, curled up on a heap of straw on the
shady side of our big barn. He got up as we approached, and stared at
us with a curious derisive intentness of glance, slightly
disconcerting.

"You are Englishmen," he said quietly.

The man's voice was charming, with that unmistakable quality which
challenges attention even in Mayfair, and enthrals it in the
wilderness. We nodded, and he continued easily: "It is late, and some
twenty-six miles, so I hear, to the nearest town. May I spend the
night in your barn. I don't smoke--in barns."

While he was speaking, we had time to examine him. His appearance was
inexpressibly shocking. Dirty, with a ragged six weeks' growth of dark
hair upon his face, out at heel and elbows, shirtless and shiftless,
he seemed to have reached the nadir of misery and poverty. Obviously
one of the "broken brigade," he had seemingly lost everything except
his manners. His amazing absence of self-consciousness made a clown of
me. I blurted out a gruff "All right," and turned on my heel, unable
to face the derisive smile upon the thin, pale lips. As I walked
towards the house, I heard Ajax following me, but he did not speak
till we had reached our comfortable sitting-room. Then, as gruffly as
I, he said, "Humpty Dumpty--after the fall!"

We lit our pipes in silence, sensible of an extraordinary depression
in the moral atmosphere. Five minutes before we had been much elated.
The spring round-up of cattle was over; we had sold our bunch of
steers at the top price; the money lay in our small safe; we had been
talking of a modest celebration as we rode home over the foothills.
Now, to use the metaphor of a cow county, we had been brought up with
a sharp turn! Our prosperity, measured by the ill-fo