The Fighting Shepherdess

The waning day was cloudy, the crossings deep with slush, the pavements damp, and the chill of her wet soles made her shiver, adding the last touch to her forlornness and the depression which Bowers's desertion had induced. She dreaded returning to her cheerless room, but she could not walk the streets indefinitely, so she bought a magazine to read until it was time to dine alone in some one of the neighborhood's cheap restaurants. The night clerk was already on duty and through the fly-specked plate-glass window of the office saw her coming. Dashing from behind the desk, he skated recklessly across the tiles to open the door.

"Say--you're all right!" His tone was emphatic and sincere.

Kate eyed him without enthusiasm.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he demanded.

"Tell you what?"

He held up the afternoon newspaper that he had in his hand.

Kate's own face looked back at her from the front page and her name in the headlines met her astonished eyes. The picture, which had been made from a snapshot, was excellent, and the text was a highly colored recital of her achievements obtained from Bowers.

The clerk's tone conveyed his admiration as he confessed: "Looks like you knew what you was talkin' about when you said I'd know who you was before you left Omaha."

Sitting on the edge of her bed Kate read the article again, but her first feeling of elation did not return. With her hands clasped about one knee, in her characteristic attitude, she stared at a festoon of dusty cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, and there gradually crept over her a feeling of lassitude.

She had established a record price with the best trainload of range sheep that ever had come into the stockyards; she had been accepted as an equal in achievement and intelligence by every one of the worthwhile men with whom she had come in contact; and as a climax to the day's events she was proclaimed a successful woman in the public prints. Yet, in the silence of the cheerless room, she was cognizant of the fact that nothing inside of her was changed thereby. There remained in her heart the same dreary emptiness.

Two tears slipped slowly down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, looked at her watch, and got up. She had no appetite, but ordering food in a restaurant would help the time to pass. After rubbing such mud as she could from her boots, she smoothed her hair before the mirror and put on her hat. The sheep woman was the cynosure of the respectful gaze of many eyes as she came down the stairs.