My friend, the Native Genius, was a cowboy before he became a painter. He became a great man and was regarded in our Eastern art circles, but in his feelings and his language he remained a cowboy. He also was an historian of the folk-lore of the Old West that has ridden over the ultimate hill of the last free grazing and vanished forever and ever, alas! With none of the conscious effort which so often marks such an undertaking, he could twine a fragrant fictional boscage upon the solid trellis of remembered fact and make you like it. To my way of thinking, this was not the least of his gifts. Indeed not. He joined us the evening before, bringing the tools of his trade and various finished or unfinished canvases. During the night my slumber was at intervals distracted by the far-off wails of a wind-instrument in travail. It was as though someone, enraged by its stubborn defiance, had put the thing to the torture. Distance muffled those moaning outcries but in them, piercing through the curtains of my sleepiness, were torment and anguish. In the morning early, when I walked past the row of log houses at the farther side of the grounds, I came upon the author of this outrage. A male of the refugees sat at an open window and contended with a haunted saxophone for the lost soul of a ghostly tune. He was young enough to have optimism. On the other hand, he was old enough to know better. He had the look about him--a wearied and red-eyed and a wannish look it was--of one who never knows when he is licked. Except among amateur musicians I would regard this as an admirable trait. My friend was squatted on the top step of his cabin, two numbers on beyond. He greeted me and the new-born day with a wide yawn. "Would you maybe like to buy a horn?" he asked, and flirted with his thumb toward the place next-door-but-one. "I don't think so," I answered. "I'm making a special inducement," he said. "There's a man's hide goes with it." His mien changed then from the murderous to the resigned. "Lead me away from here," he pleaded. "I don't know which distresses me the most--the sight of so much suffering or the sound of it." We went by the scene of the unfinished crime and sat in the lee of the hotel veranda with the lake below us, blinking like a live turquoise in its rough matrix of gray mountains. The wind was in our favor there; to our ears reached only faint broken strains of that groaning and that bleating. But from other sources other interruptions ensued, all calculated to disturb the pious reflections of the elderly.