I asked him what the greatest was, and he said perfect happiness was to be close to the woman you loved. If that was impossible there were several substitutes of a secondary sort--your children, ambition, success, and even rest. Then his eyes grew all misty and sad, and he looked out on the desert, and at that moment we were passing a group of a few shanties close to the rails. They were tumbled down and deserted, and nearby lay the skeleton of a horse. "It was in just such a place as that, only a good bit farther west, I first saw my Hearts-ease," he said. "The boys called her 'Hearts-ease' because she was the sweetest English flower, drifted out to the mines with the people who had adopted her." He paused, and I slipped my hand into his, he looked so sad, and then he told me all the story, Mamma, and it has touched me so, I tell it to you. He had gone to this small rough camp, about thirty miles short of the Great Eagles, with only ten cents in his pocket, from the ranch where he had been a cowboy. He had ridden for days, and there his horse had died. He crept up half dead, carrying his saddle bags, and these people, "human devils," he called them, who owned Hearts-ease, let him come in and lie in a shed. They kept a sort of a gambling den, all of the most primitive, and the worst rogues of the world congregated there in the evenings. Hearts-ease was about sixteen, and they looked upon her as a promising decoy-duck, but she was "just the purest flower of the prairies," he said, and so they beat and starved her in consequence, for not falling in with their views.