“Men,” she began yet again, at last desperately facing them with undried eyes, and stepping fully into the long room, “I’ve come to say good-by to you. I’ve—we’ve—you’ve got to go!” The men stood, shocked. What could she mean? Go? Where? What? Quit the brand? Leave Laguna del Sol? Leave her, the boss? What did that mean? Not even Jim Nabours could break the horrified silence, and he had been foreman these five and twenty years. “Boys,” said Taisie Lockhart at last, suddenly spreading out her hands, “I’m done! I’m broke! I—I can’t pay you any more!” And then Taisie Lockhart, owner of perhaps fifty thousand acres of land and what had once been fifty thousand cows, broke down absolutely. She cast herself on the board bench at one side of the clothless table, sunk her glorious head on her flung arms and wept; wept like a child in need of comfort. And there was none in all the world to comfort her, unless sixteen lean and gawky cow hands could do so; which, now patently, they could not. “Miss Taisie, what you mean?” began Jim Nabours, after a very long time. “Broke!” whispered Anastasie Lockhart collegiately. “Broke at last! Boys, I’m clean busted and for fair!” “That ain’t no ways what I mean, Miss Taisie!” went on the anguished foreman. “Broke ain’t nothing. Yore paw was broke; everybody in all Texas is and always has been. Pay? He didn’t; nobody does. But what I—now, what I mean is, what do you mean when you say we got to go? What have we done? What you got against us?” “Nothing, Jim.” “Why, good Lord! There ain’t a man here that wouldn’t—that wouldn’t—indeed, ma’am, there ain’t, not one of us that wouldn’t—So now then, you say we got to go? Why? You’d ought to tell us why, anyways, ma’am. That’s only fair.” The girl’s somber eyes looked full into his as she raised her head, one clenched hand still on the table top, the quirt loop still around the wrist. She faced business disaster with the courage many a business man has lacked. “That’s what makes me cry,” said she simply. “It’s because you won’t go easy when I tell you. It’s because you’ll be wanting to keep on working for me for nothing. I can’t stand that. If I can hire you I’ve got to pay you. When I can’t, I’m done. Well, I can’t any more. I’d sell my piano for this month’s pay. I’ve tried to, but I can’t.” “What? You’d sell the Del Sol pianny? Why, Miss Taisie, what you mean? I helped freight her up here from Galveston. That’s the onliest pianny in Middle Texas, far’s I know. That’s branded T.L., that pianny! And you’d sell her to pay a lot of measly cow hands wages they didn’t no ways ever half earn? Why, ma’am!” Again sundry evolutions of the Adam’s apple of Mr. Nabours.