They were tumbled down and deserted,
and nearby lay the skeleton of a horse. "It was in just such a place as
that, only a good bit farther west, I first saw my Hearts-ease," he
said. "The boys called her 'Hearts-ease' because she was the sweetest
English flower, drifted out to the mines with the people who had
adopted her." He paused, and I slipped my hand into his, he looked so
sad, and then he told me all the story, Mamma, and it has touched me
so, I tell it to you.
He had gone to this small rough camp, about thirty miles short of the
Great Eagles, with only ten cents in his pocket, from the ranch where
he had been a cowboy. He had ridden for days, and there his horse had
died. He crept up half dead, carrying his saddle bags, and these
people, "human devils," he called them, who owned Hearts-ease, let him
come in and lie in a shed. They kept a sort of a gambling den, all of
the most primitive, and the worst rogues of the world congregated there
in the evenings.
Hearts-ease was about sixteen, and they looked upon her as a promising
decoy-duck, but she was "just the purest flower of the prairies," he
said, and so they beat and starved her in consequence, for not falling
in with their views.
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