The woman’s tone became more than ever repellent.

“Never you mind about not knowing your own name.  I got it on the pay roll, and it’ll still be there to-morrow if you’re helping Buck get out the rest of them fence posts like I told you.  If you happen to get stuck for your name when I ain’t round, and the inquiring parties won’t wait, just ask the Chinaman; he never forgets anything he’s learned once.  Or I’ll write it out on a card, so you can show it to anybody who rides up and wants to know it in a hurry!”

“Huh!”

The powers of this brief utterance had not yet been exhausted.  It now conveyed despair.  With bowed head the speaker dully turned and withdrew from our presence.  As he went I distinctly heard him mutter: 

“Huh!  Four-teen!  Four-teen!  And seven!  And twenty-eight!”

“Say, there!” his callous employer called after him.  “Why don’t you get Boogles to embroider that name of yours on the front of your shirt?  He’d adore to do it.  And you can still read, can’t you, in the midst of your agonies?”

There was no response to this taunt.  The suffering one faded slowly down the path to the bunk house and was lost in its blackness.  A light shone out and presently came sombre chords from a guitar, followed by the voice of Sandy in gloomy song:  “There’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway—­”

I was not a little pained to discover this unsuspected vein of cruelty in a woman I had long admired.  And the woman merely became irrelevant with her apothegm about foreigners.  I ignored it.

“What about that sufferer down there in the bunk house?” I demanded.  “Didn’t you ever have toothache?”

“No; neither did Sandy Sawtelle.  He ain’t a sufferer; he’s just a liar.”

“Why?”

“So I’ll let him go to town and play the number of them stitches on the wheel.  Sure!  He’d run a horse to death getting there, make for the back room of the Turf Club Saloon, where they run games whenever the town ain’t lidded too tight, and play roulette till either him or the game had to close down.  Yes, sir; he’d string his bets along on fourteen and seven and twenty-eight and thirty-five, and if he didn’t make a killing he’d believe all his life that the wheel was crooked.  Stitches in a mule’s hide is his bug.  He could stitch up any horse on the place and never have the least hunch; but let it be a mule—­Say!  Down there right now he’s thinking about the thousand dollars or so I’m keeping him out of.  I judge from his song that he’d figured on a trip East to New York City or Denver.  At that, I don’t know as I blame him.  Yes, sir; that’s what reminded me of foreigners and bazaars and vice, and so on—­and poor Egbert Floud.”

My hostess drew about her impressive shoulders a blanket of Indian weave that dulled the splendours of the western sky, and rolled a slender cigarette from the tobacco and papers at her side.  By the ensuing flame of a match I saw that her eyes gleamed with the light of pure narration.