way and the horse came down on him, and it was only the horse that got up again.
He was very weary, very cold. His head ached, the blood drummed in his ears.
"All right," he said. "Have it your own way. Now let's get out of here."
It was only later on in the little car, sliding along the greasy roads; that his conscience began to bother him. He took one hand from the wheel and put his arm around her, and she moved closer to him, relaxed and happy.
"I'm crazy about you, Tom."
And when she held up her face to be kissed, he stopped the car and took her into his arms with a gesture of pure passion.
Back at the siding the loading had ceased for the night. The new empties had not come up, and the men had laid their beds in the warm cook tent and were snoring heavily. From the loaded cars came occasional wails and the heavy ammoniacal odor of great bodies closely confined; and in the caboose the train crew slept on their leather couches, in the glow from a red-hot stove.
It was afternoon the next day before the last of the weary cattle had filed wearily into the cinder-bedded cars, lifting heavy heads now and then to cry out against this new and dreadful procedure, and against their masters, the sweating weary men who drove, cursed and cajoled.
But although two deputy sheriffs watched the train and the pens, and made a final careful inspection of it before it pulled out, Tom McNair had not appeared.
The locomotive took up the slack carefully, the cattle braced themselves against the strange and disquieting motion, and in the caboose Bill and Gus, the Swede who was traveling on Tom's contract ticket, settled their gear and proceeded to catch up on long arrears of sleep.
It was about midnight that night that the cattle train, having puffed and snorted up the long divide, stopped by a water tank to shift off the extra locomotive, and Bill, wakening, looked up into a face which was faintly familiar under
