Carolyn June had noticed the absence of the Ramblin' Kid. She had believed, all evening, he was on the porch and that was the real reason she had come outside. She saw him. "Oh, is--is--that you, Ramblin' Kid?" she exclaimed as if surprised, and went quickly to where, at the sound of her voice, he had paused. He did not answer. The light shone full on his face and he knew that she knew--and had known before she spoke--that he was there. His eyes were filled with a look queerly blending scorn, loathing, pity and pain. "Why--why--don't you come in and dance?" she asked lightly, not certain of his mood. "I don't want to," he replied coldly: "anyhow--" he added with a sneer and a brutal laugh as he slowly moved away in the darkness, "when I decide to _hug_ I'll hug in private!" Carolyn June started almost as though he had struck her. The taunt was an insult! A flood of anger swept over her. "The brute!" she whispered passionately and with utter contempt in her voice. She stood a moment. Suddenly she remembered the reckless abandon with which she had been dancing and flirting with the cowboys inside the house. Her face flamed scarlet. She looked out into the blackness toward the circular corral. Her expression changed and a pitying smile crossed her lips: "Poor Ramblin' Kid--he just--does not understand!" she murmured and stepped back into the house. As the Ramblin' Kid passed through the back-yard gate he muttered savagely under his breath: "Playin' with their hearts like marbles--th' damned fools!" He paused a moment and added, as though tired, "Oh, well, I reckon she thinks she has to do it--it's her breed--she was raised that way I guess!" The snuffling sound of a horse blowing hay-powder or other dust from its nostrils came from the direction of the circular corral. The Ramblin' Kid stopped in his walk and turning went thoughtfully through the darkness toward where Captain Jack and the Gold Dust maverick were quietly feeding. He leaned against the bars of the corral and looked at the shadowy forms of the two horses standing a little distance away. Captain Jack quit eating and came to the fence. "God! Little Horse"--the Ramblin' Kid spoke tensely and without repression--"why can't humans be as decent an' honest as you?" The black dome of night was studded with innumerable stars that gleamed like points of silver sprinkled over a canopy of somber velvet some infinite hand had flung, in a great arch, from rim to rim of a sleeping world. The call of a night bird shrilled softly from the cottonwood trees along the Cimarron. A hint of a breeze swung idly from the west and rustled the leaves in the tops of the poplars in front of the house. Faintly as a distant echo came the wailing strains of a waltz, drifting out from the lighted windows and the open door of the room where Carolyn June and Ophelia, in a spirit of sport and for revenge, juggled the hearts of men afraid of nothing in all the world but the look in a Woman's eyes.