The Missing Chord

I stopped overnight at the sheep-ranch of Rush Kinney, on the Sandy Fork of the Nueces.

Mr. Kinney and I had been strangers up to the time when I called "Hallo!" at his hitching-rack; but from that moment until my departure on the next morning we were, according to the Texas code, undeniable friends.

After supper the ranchman and I lugged our chairs outside the two-room house, to its floorless gallery roofed with chaparral and sacuista grass.

With the rear legs of our chairs sinking deep into the hardpacked loam, each of us reposed against an elm pillar of the structure and smoked El Toro tobacco, while we wrangled amicably concerning the affairs of the rest of the world.

As for conveying adequate conception of the engaging charm of that prairie evening, despair waits upon it.

It is a bold chronicler who will undertake the description of a Texas night in the early spring.

An inventory must suffice.

The ranch rested upon the summit of a lenient slope.

The ambient prairie, diversified by arroyos and murky patches of brush and pear, lay around us like a darkened bowl at the bottom of which we reposed as dregs.

Like a turquoise cover the sky pinned us there.

The miraculous air, heady with ozone and made memorably sweet by leagues of wild flowerets, gave tang and savour to the breath.

In the sky was a great, round, mellow searchlight which we knew to be no moon, but the dark lantern of summer, who came to hunt northward the cowering spring.

In the nearest corral a flock of sheep lay silent until a groundless panic would send a squad of them huddling together with a drumming rush.

For other sounds a shrill family of coyotes yapped beyond the shearing-pen, and whippoorwills twittered in the long grass.

But even these dissonances hardly rippled the clear torrent of the mocking-birds' notes that fell from a dozen neighbouring shrubs and trees.

It would not have been preposterous for one to tiptoe and essay to touch the stars, they hung so bright and imminent.

Mr. Kinney's wife, a young and capable woman, we had left in the house.

She remained to busy herself with the domestic round of duties, in which I had observed that she seemed to take a buoyant and contented pride.

In one room we had supped.

Presently, from the other, as Kinney and I sat without, there burst a volume of sudden and brilliant music.