"Oh, Ward, for heaven's sake don't be singing that come-all-ye at the top of your voice, like that. Don't you—"

"Now I was given to understand that you liked that same come-all-ye. Have you been educating your musical taste in the last week, Miss William Louisa?" Ward stopped his horse before her, and with his hands still clasped over the saddle-horn, looked down at her with that hidden smile—and something else.

"No, I haven't. I don't have to educate myself to the point where I know the Chisholm Trail isn't a proper kind of funeral hymn, Ward Warren." Billy Louise glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice instinctively, as we all do when death has come close and stopped. "Jase died last night; that's his grave up there. Isn't it perfectly pitiful? Poor old Marthy was here all solitary alone with him. And—Ward! She dug that grave her own self, and took him up and buried . . . Read More