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 cadence, as for something known in happier times, denied through hardship and lonely days.

But he would not ask her to sing, feeling that her heart would not be in it. The others were beginning it all over again when Malcolm Duncan came home. Texas was thankful that greetings made it necessary to suspend the din.

Duncan was a splendid figure of manhood, tall and rugged, with the health of his clean life in his eyes. His broad forehead and short gray beard gave him an appearance more suited to a chair in a university than a seat in the saddle. It was plain where the girls got their comeliness.

The Duncan girls took their strong-lunged admirers out to gabble under the moon while the master of the house had his supper, leaving Texas and Sallie to follow, pairing off as ingeniously as birds. Sallie lingered a little behind the others, answering Duncan's inquiries about her mother, and whether she had brought him the Kansas City paper. Texas waited in the hall-like passage between the two sections of the house, where a bracketlamp shone over the saddles and guns which hung along the wall.

"I thought I knew that belt," said Sallie, stopping where Texas had hung his gun. "I wonder how it came here?"

"It's mine—Uncle Boley gave it to me," he ex-