she had learned to know them better.  Gathering each a bit of stick, she and Aunt Lucy drove away the two grinning daylight thieves, as they had done dozens of times before their kin, all eager for a taste of this new feathered game that had come in upon the range.  With plenteous words of admonition, the two corralled the excited but terror-stricken speckled hen, which had been the occasion of the trouble, driving her back within the gates of the inclosure they had found a necessity for the preservation of the fowls of their “hen ranch.”  Once inside the protecting walls, the erring one raised her feathers in great anger and stalked away in high dudgeon, clucking out anathemas against a country where a law-abiding hen could not venture a quarter of a mile from home, even at the season when bugs were juiciest.

“It’s that same Domineck, isn’t it, Lucy?” said Mary Ellen, leaning over the fence and gazing at the fowls.

“Yess’m, that same ole hen, blame her fool soul!  She’s mo’ bother’n she’s wuf.  I ‘clare, ever’ time I takes them er’ chickens out fer a walk that ole Sar’ Ann hen, she boun’ fer to go off by herse’f somewheres, she’s that briggotty; an’ first thing I knows, dar she is in trouble again—­low down, no ’count thing, I say!”

“Poor old Sarah!” said Mary Ellen.  “Why, Aunt Lucy, she’s raised more chickens than any hen we’ve got.”

“Thass all right, Miss Ma’y Ellen, thass all right, so she have, but she made twict as much trouble as any hen we got, too.  We kin git two dollahs fer her cooked, an’ seems like long’s she’s erlive she boun’ fer ter keep me chasin’ ‘roun’ after her.  I ’clare, she jest keep the whole lot o’ ouah chickens wore down to a frazzle, she traipsin ‘roun’ all the time, an’ them a-follerin’ her.  Jess like some womenfolks.  They gad ‘roun’ so much they kain’t git no flesh ontoe ’em.  An’, of co’se,” she added argumentatively, “we all got to keep up the reppytation o’ ouah cookin’.  I kain’t ask these yer men a dollah a meal—­not fer no lean ole hen wif no meat ontoe her bones—­no, ma’am.”

Aunt Lucy spoke with professional pride and with a certain right to authority.  The reputation of the Halfway House ran from the Double Forks of the Brazos north to Abilene, and much of the virtue of the table was dependent upon the resources of this “hen ranch,” whose fame was spread abroad throughout the land.  Saved by the surpassing grace of pie and “chicken fixings,” the halting place chosen for so slight reason by Buford and his family had become a permanent abode, known gratefully to many travellers and productive of more than a living for those who had established it.  It was, after all, the financial genius of Aunt Lucy, accustomed all her life to culinary problems, that had foreseen profit in eggs and chickens when she noted the exalted joy with which the hungry cow-punchers fell upon a meal of this sort after a season of salt pork, tough beef, and Dutch-oven bread.