Carolyn June started almost as though he had struck her.  The taunt was an insult!  A flood of anger swept over her.  “The brute!” she whispered passionately and with utter contempt in her voice.  She stood a moment.  Suddenly she remembered the reckless abandon with which she had been dancing and flirting with the cowboys inside the house.  Her face flamed scarlet.  She looked out into the blackness toward the circular corral.  Her expression changed and a pitying smile crossed her lips:  “Poor Ramblin’ Kid—­he just—­does not understand!” she murmured and stepped back into the house.

As the Ramblin’ Kid passed through the back-yard gate he muttered savagely under his breath:  “Playin’ with their hearts like marbles—­th’ damned fools!” He paused a moment and added, as though tired, “Oh, well, I reckon she thinks she has to do it—­it’s her breed—­she was raised that way I guess!”

The snuffling sound of a horse blowing hay-powder or other dust from its nostrils came from the direction of the circular corral.  The Ramblin’ Kid stopped in his walk and turning went thoughtfully through the darkness toward where Captain Jack and the Gold Dust maverick were quietly feeding.  He leaned against the bars of the corral and looked at the shadowy forms of the two horses standing a little distance away.  Captain Jack quit eating and came to the fence.

“God!  Little Horse”—­the Ramblin’ Kid spoke tensely and without repression—­“why can’t humans be as decent an’ honest as you?”

The black dome of night was studded with innumerable stars that gleamed like points of silver sprinkled over a canopy of somber velvet some infinite hand had flung, in a great arch, from rim to rim of a sleeping world.  The call of a night bird shrilled softly from the cottonwood trees along the Cimarron.  A hint of a breeze swung idly from the west and rustled the leaves in the tops of the poplars in front of the house.  Faintly as a distant echo came the wailing strains of a waltz, drifting out from the lighted windows and the open door of the room where Carolyn June and Ophelia, in a spirit of sport and for revenge, juggled the hearts of men afraid of nothing in all the world but the look in a Woman’s eyes.

The music tortured the soul of the Ramblin’ Kid.  It breathed the unfathomable strife of life—­of love, longing, hope, despair—­almost, yet subtly, elusively, would not tell the eternal “Why?” of all things.

Not heeding time, he stood and listened.  The crunching sound made by the Gold Dust maverick, munching at the pile of hay on the ground in the corral, blended with and seemed a queer accompaniment to the melody that came from the scene of revelry up at the house.

The orange disk of a late-rising moon showed above the rim of the sand-hills at the lower end of the valley.  The Ramblin’ Kid watched it—­until it grew into a rounded plate of burnished, glistening silver.  The Gold Dust maverick was suddenly flooded with a glare of light as the moonbeams poured over the top of the shed and streamed through the bars of the circular corral.  The filly lifted her head.