cattle business. Better to keep them at home, marry them to some range cavalier and harden them early in the disappointments which almost certainly would overwhelm them in the end.
So Eudora Ellison thought that bright October morning as she flung bones out of her wagon where it stood by a great heap of bones in the spacious barnyard beside the house. She was dressed in blue overalls and cowboy boots, neither fitting her with any particular grace; a gray woolen shirt not cut for any maidenly form, the extra length of its sleeves taken up in several turns from the wrists, and a broad-brimmed brown hat that had seen service on the range for many a year. She had pinned up the lopping brim of this headgear on one side, which gave both hat and wearer a kind of battered, brave jauntiness. Her hair was short, its unconfined curls brushing her cheek when she stooped.
Gathering a pitiful profit out of the wreckage of their past consequence, as many another was doing on the Kansas range that year, Eudora had driven in from her scavaging of bones too late last night to unload. It always made her sad to handle the bones of her old friends who had perished in the great winter kill of three years past. But sentiment could not be permitted to stand in the way of common sense, especially when much-needed money was involved. The bone market was active; more trainloads of bones had gone out of that range the past summer than live cattle. They were grinding them and using them to fertilize their fields in the east, she had heard, the market price at Drumwell being a little more
