THE LONG SHADOW

BY B.M. BOWER

(B.M. SINCLAIR)

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARENCE ROWE

COPYRIGHT, 1908

TO THOSE

WHO HAVE WATCHED THE SHADOW FALL

UPON THE RANGE.

I Charming Billy Has a Visitor

II Prune Pie and Coon-can

III Charming Billy Has a Fight

IV Canned

V The Man From Michigan

VI "That's My Dill Pickle!"

VII "Till Hell's a Skating-rink"

VIII Just a Day-dream

IX The "Double-Crank"

X The Day We Celebrate

XI "When I Lift My Eyebrows This Way"

XII Dilly Hires a Cook

XIII Billy Meets the Pilgrim

XIV A Winter at the Double-Crank

XV The Shadow Falls Lightly

XVI Self-Defense

XVII The Shadow Darkens

XVIII When the North Wind Blows

XIX "I'm Not Your Wife Yet!"

XX The Shadow Lies Long

XXI The End of the Double-Crank

XXII Settled In Full

XXIII "Oh, Where Have You Been, Charming Billy?"

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"I'll leave you this, you'll feel safer if you have a gun"

"Hands off that long person! That there's my dillpickle"

"We—we're 'up against it,' as fellows say"

For every sentence a stinging blow with the flat of his hand

CHAPTER I.

Charming Billy Has a Visitor.

The wind, rising again as the sun went down, mourned lonesomelyat the northwest corner of the cabin, as if it felt thedesolateness of the barren, icy hills and the black hollowsbetween, and of the angry red sky with its purple shadows loweringover the unhappy land—and would make fickle friendship withsome human thing. Charming Billy, hearing the crooning wail of it,knew well the portent and sighed. Perhaps he, too, felt somethingof the desolateness without and perhaps he, too, longed for somehuman companionship.

He sent a glance of half-conscious disapproval around the untidycabin. He had been dreaming aimlessly of a place he had seen not solong ago; a place where the stove was black and shining, with afire crackling cheeringly inside and a teakettle with straight,unmarred spout and dependable handle singing placidly to itself andpuffing steam with an air of lazy comfort, as if it were smoking acigarette. The stove had stood in the southwest corner of the room,and the room was warm with the heat of it; and the floor was whiteand had a strip of rag carpet reaching from the table to a cornerof the stove. There was a red cloth with knotted fringe on thetable, and a bed in another corner had a red-and-white patchworkspread and puffy white pillows. There had been a woman—butCharming Billy shut his eyes, mentally, to the woman, because hewas not accustomed to them and he was not at all sure that hewanted to be accustomed; they did not fit in with the life helived. He felt dimly that, in a way, they were like the heaven hismother had taught him—altogether perfect and altogetherunattainable and not to be thought of with any degree offamiliarity. So his memory of the woman was indistinct, as ofsomething which did not properly belong to the picture. He clunginstead to the memory of the warm stove, and the strip of carpet,and the table with the red cloth, and to the puffy, white pillowson the bed.

The wind mourned again insistently at the corner. Billy liftedhis head and looked once more around the cabin. The reality wasdepressing—doubly depressing in contrast to the memory

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