Otherwise not an excrescence marred the face of nature.  The single horse Rowland owned, useless now while his crop matured, was breaking sod far to the west on the bank of the Jim River.  Not a live thing other than human moved about the place.  With them into this land of silence had come a mongrel collie.  For a solitary month he had stood guard; then one night, somewhere in the distance, in the east where flowed the Big Sioux, had sounded the long-drawn-out cry of a timber wolf, alternately nearer and more remote, again and again.  With the coming of morning the collie was gone.  Whether dead or answering the call of the wild they never knew, nor ever filled his place.

Lonely, isolated as the place itself, was Sam Rowland that afternoon of late August.  Silent as a mute was he as to what he had seen; elaborately careful likewise to carry out the family programme as usual.

“Sleepy, kid?” he queried when dinner was over.

Baby Bess, taciturn, sun-browned autocrat, nodded silent corroboration.

“Come, then,” and, willing horse, the big man got clumsily to all fours and, prancing ponderously, drew up at her side.

“Hang tight,” he admonished and, his wife smiling from the doorway as only a mother can smile, ambled away through the sun and the dust; climbed slowly, the tiny brown arms clasped tightly about his neck, down the ladder to the retreat, adjusted the pillow and the patchwork quilt with a deftness born of experience.

“Go to sleepy, kid,” he directed.

“Sing me to sleep, daddy,” commanded the autocrat.

“Sing!  I can’t sing, kid.”

“Yes, you can.  Sing ‘Nellie Gray.’”

“Too hot, girlie.  My breath’s all gone.  Go to sleep.”

“Please, papa; pretty please!”

The man succumbed, as he knew from the first he would do, braced himself in the aperture, and sang the one verse that he knew of the song again and again—­his voice rough and unmusical as that of a crow, echoing and re-echoing in the narrow space—­bent over at last, touched his bearded lips softly to the winsome, motionless brown face, climbed, an irresistible catch in his breath, silently to the surface, sent one swift glance sweeping the bare earth around him, and returned to the cabin.

Very carefully that sultry afternoon he cleaned his old hammer shotgun, and, loading both barrels with buckshot, set it handy beside the door.

“Antelope,” he explained laconically; but when likewise he overhauled the revolver hanging at his hip, Margaret was not deceived.  This done, notwithstanding the fact that the sun still beat scorchingly hot thereon, he returned to the doorstep, lit his pipe, drew his weather-stained sombrero low over his face, through half-closed eyes inspected the lower lands all about, impassively silent awaited the coming of the inevitable.  Of a sudden there was a touch on his shoulder, and, involuntarily starting, he looked up, into the face of Margaret Rowland.