Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/329

 "Remember the night you threw the Swede off?"

"Sure do!"

The train moved on, and Tom was left on the platform, staring after it. Then he drew himself up. There had been pity in that last look of Bill's.

It was soon afterwards that Kay's letter arrived. He took it quietly, put it in his pocket and left town. Only when he was well out on the frozen road did he dare to open it and read it. It was like a blow between the eyes. She still believed he had been unfaithful to her, after all he had told her! "Maybe all men are unfaithful to their wives, or at least disloyal And I did love you so dreadfully, Tom." Did. Did! Well, that was clear enough anyhow. She had cared for him, but now she was through.

He took to brooding over that phrase, in the saddle, in his untidy house. More than once he got out paper and ink and set himself to answer it. He would sit there, his elbows squared, the pen held in his cold and roughened hands, trying to think how to put all his seething thoughts into words. But he could not do it. What could he say that would bring her back? Why should she come back to this, anyhow? Or to him?

Once he roused in the icy dawn, to find that he had slept all night by the table, his head on the paper. He wakened stiff with the cold.

He worked on doggedly, but the heart had gone out of him. Fortunately he had little leisure in which to think; the struggle for existence for himself and his herd absorbed him utterly. He was never rested, he was always cold. Out on the range in the piercing wind it was nothing unusual to find his rope, his saddle blanket and his latigo frozen stiff. Luckily the snows were not heavy until the first of the year. His dry stock, wintering outside in "breaks" or broken places, followed the ridges blown bare of snow, and somehow managed to subsist. His "poor" cows and his calves he fed, going short on provisions for himself to buy oil-cake.

When, on the range, he met other cowboys muffled to the ears, he heard similar tales of woe, but with this difference: