Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/49

 ago and now was only an unspeakable thing under the ugly shaft. She found a couplet in a book one evening, faintly marked in pencil, and as the book was poetry and was wedged between a treatise on anthrax and a report on pedigreed Hereford cattle, she rather suspected a feminine hand in it. The couplet was:

On an impulse she went outside to show it to Henry, but he was asleep in his chair with his mouth open.

Herbert was quietly but politely desperate. He could not go to either of them and blurt out what he knew. "Kay is crazy about this ranch hand, McNair. For God's sake let's get the car and get away from here." He had to get up politely when Katherine came into the room, and see that Henry had a sufficient supply of cigars, and send telegrams and write well-worded letters. "Yours very truly, Henry Dowling. Per H. F."

Henry could go to sleep, having dutifully opened his window, but Herbert only went to bed. And in the early mornings he would rouse from a tormented sleep to hear Kay on her way to the corral or the barn, even to get up in his silk pajamas, monogrammed just under the pocket—branded, Tom said once, seeing them on the washing line—and from his window watch her quick nervous determined movements, the bright flash of her neckerchief, the half-defiant upturn of her head. Then he would groan and go back to his bed, to lie there sleepless until the rising bell forced him to meet another day.

And so things were the early days of September. Already some of the cattle were moving down from their summer pastures in the mountains. By twos, by eights, by twenties, they worked down the cattle trails. The green pastures up above had dried up in the summer heat, the coyote pups were growing large and hungry for young beef, and so they were coming home. Along with the threshing came the preparations for the autumn round-up. The wagons were