"Well, I don't know but you could say she did. You see she married a sheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there on the side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while he went off foolin' around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. I tell you when you git sheep on the brain you don't eat at home more than once in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin' tails off of lambs, and all such fool things as that." "Why, do they cut the poor things' tails off?" she asked, getting the notion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense. "They all do it," he informed her, "to keep the sand and burrs out of 'em. If they let 'em grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes 'em poor to pack 'em, they say, I don't know myself; I'm not a sheepman." "But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs' tails?" "No, she didn't," said Smith. "She went out of her head. The feller she shot was a storekeeper's son down in Meander, and he got to ridin' up there to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such a hold on her, thinkin' about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin' in every one of 'em, that she up and run off with that feller when he promised to take her back there. They started to cut across to the U.P. in a wagon--more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her head when he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave." "Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her that way," Agnes said. "A man orto stick to his wife in this country, specially if she's new to it and not broke," said Smith; "and if I had one, ma'am, I'd _stick_ to her." Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deep earnestness in his eyes. "I'm sure you would," she agreed. "And I'd be kind to her," he declared. "There's no need to tell me that," she assured him. "You're kind to everybody." "And if she didn't like the name," Smith went on significantly, "I'd have it changed!" "I'm sure she'd like it--she'd be very ungrateful if she didn't," Agnes replied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. "I'm going to order lumber for my house in a day or two." Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash. "Let me sell you the nails," he requested. "I can give 'em to you as cheap as you can git 'em in Meander." CHAPTER XIV "LIKE A WOLF" Agnes had been on her homestead almost a week. She was making a brave "stagger," as Smith described all amateurish efforts, toward cutting up some dry cottonwood limbs into stove-lengths before her tent on the afternoon that Jerry Boyle rode across the ford. While she had not forgotten him, she had begun to hope that he had gone back to Comanche, and his sudden appearance there gave her an unpleasant shock. He drew up near her with a friendly word, and dismounted with a cowboy swing to his long body and legs.