But any who could have read fully this little drama at the cook house would have known that world to be tenanted by folk embittered by the war and ready to say that their world now was made and done. Of these, Taisie Lockhart, orphan loaded with riches that could not be rendered portable or divisible, made one more unhappy unit. She was, naturally, far the more unhappy because through her education she had found a wider outlook on life and the world than had these others. Somewhere, too, in her stern ancestry had been a sense of personal honor which left her still more sensitive. But the immortal gods take pity on the sorrows of youth and beauty, it may chance. They have their own ways, employ agents of their own selecting. This orphan heiress, keen to pay her debts, became one of the first factors in one of the most Homeric epochs in the history of all the world. Not so long after this woebegone meeting of bankrupt cattle folk at the Del Sol cook house there was to appear a phenomenon that set at naught all customs, that asked no precedent, that defied even the ancient laws of section and of latitude. All of which did not just now develop. “Set down, Miss Taisie,” said the gray old foreman, awkwardly, gently, flushing at asking the owner of Del Sol to be seated in her own cook house. She had arisen, and, hands at her eyes, was about to leave the place. Now she dropped back and looked at him dumbly, suddenly no more than a weak girl at her wits’ end. “Now listen to me, Miss Taisie,” began old Jim Nabours with sudden firmness. “You know I’ve worked for yore folks all my life, ever since I come down from the Brazos forty years ago. I come back here when the war stopped—Kirby Smith’s men on the Lower Red was the last to surrender. This is my place, that’s all. “Now, I got a right to talk plain to you. I’m a-going to. When you say you’re going to turn off a bunch of the best cow hands in Texas, just because you can’t pay their wages no more, why, then you ain’t showing reason ner judgment I’m foreman for the T.L. brand. What I say goes. When you say we’re turned loose you’re talking foolish. We ain’t! What’s wages to us? I’d like for you to tell me. Did we get any in the Army? Does anybody pay wages now, in all Texas? How can they? “Miss Taisie, I went with yore paw to Austin, when he was a member, and in the big Assembly Room was a man at a desk with a hammer, and says he, ever oncet in a while, ‘Motion done overruled!’ Then he soaks the table with the hammer. And now, ma’am, yore motion about firing sixteen good cow hands is done overruled!” Jim Nabours’ great fist fell with the force of a gavel on the breakfast table, till the tin plates rattled under their two-tined forks and the nicked cups brought added antiphony. Frowning, he looked savagely at the young woman. He was no better than her peon for life, for her father had given her to his care. She was the very apple of his eye.