I asked him what the greatest was, and he said perfect happiness was to be close to the woman you loved.  If that was impossible there were several substitutes of a secondary sort—­your children, ambition, success, and even rest.  Then his eyes grew all misty and sad, and he looked out on the desert, and at that moment we were passing a group of a few shanties close to the rails.  They were tumbled down and deserted, and nearby lay the skeleton of a horse.  “It was in just such a place as that, only a good bit farther west, I first saw my Hearts-ease,” he said.  “The boys called her ‘Hearts-ease’ because she was the sweetest English flower, drifted out to the mines with the people who had adopted her.”  He paused, and I slipped my hand into his, he looked so sad, and then he told me all the story, Mamma, and it has touched me so, I tell it to you.

He had gone to this small rough camp, about thirty miles short of the Great Eagles, with only ten cents in his pocket, from the ranch where he had been a cowboy.  He had ridden for days, and there his horse had died.  He crept up half dead, carrying his saddle bags, and these people, “human devils,” he called them, who owned Hearts-ease, let him come in and lie in a shed.  They kept a sort of a gambling den, all of the most primitive, and the worst rogues of the world congregated there in the evenings.

Hearts-ease was about sixteen, and they looked upon her as a promising decoy-duck, but she was “just the purest flower of the prairies,” he said, and so they beat and starved her in consequence, for not falling in with their views.

That night when he lay in the straw, she crept out of some corner where she slept, and warned him not to remain, if he had gold in the bags, or they would certainly murder him before morning; and she gave him some water, and half her wretched supper, because he had been too tired to eat when he arrived.  Then he told her he was only a poor cowboy, hoping to get on to the Great Eagles Camp and make his fortune; and they stayed there talking till dawn, and she bathed his poor feet, all bleeding from his long tramp, and must have been too sweet and adorable, Mamma.  And when the morning came and her adopted parents found he was still there and had only ten cents to pay with, they tried to make him leave, and beat Hearts-ease before his eyes, which made him so mad he got out his gun (that means revolver) and would have shot the man, only Hearts-ease clung to him, and begged him not to.  Then they called in some more brutes, who had been drinking and gambling all night in the bar, and overpowered him, and threw him out, and the girl, too, and said he might take her to hell with him, they would shelter her no more.  And one of the brutes said he would fight him for her, and they made a ring and the brute tried to get his pistol off first; but it hit another man, and before he could shoot again, the Senator fired and wounded him in the side; and as he fell, and the others, angry at