--just lived every minute, and that's a blamed sight more
than a lot of these higher-cultured, top-lofty, half-dead couples that
marry and separate, and separate and marry again now-a-days can say.

"No, sir, 'tain't what a man gets that makes him rich; it's what he
keeps. And these folks that are swoppin' the old-fashioned sort of love
that builds homes and raises families and lets man and wife work
together, an' meet trouble together, an' be happy together, an' grow old
bein' happy together--if they're swoppin' all that for these here new,
down-to-date ideas of such things, they're makin' a damned poor bargain,
accordin' to my way of thinkin'. There is such a thing, sir, as
educatin' a man or woman plumb out of reach of happiness.

"Look at our Phil," the Dean continued, for the man beside him was a
wonderful listener. "There just naturally couldn't be a better all round
man than Phil Acton. He's healthy; don't know what it is to have an
hour's sickness; strong as a young bull; clean, honest, square, no bad
habits, a fine worker, an' a fine thinker, too--even if he ain't had
much schoolin', he's read a lot. Take him any way you like--just as a
man, I mean--an' that's the way you got to take 'em--there ain't a
better man that Phil livin'. Yet a lot of these folks would say he's
nothin' but a cow-puncher. As for that, Jim Reid ain't much more than a
cow-puncher himself. I tell you, I've seen cow-punchers that was mighty
good men, an' I've seen graduates from them there universities that was
plumb good for nothin'--with no more real man about 'em than there is
about one of these here wax dummies that they hang clothes on in the
store windows. What any self-respectin' woman can see in one of them
that would make her want to marry him is more than I've ever been able
to figger out."

If the Dean had not been so engrossed in his own thoughts, he would have
wondered at the strange effect of his words upon his companion. The
young man's face flushed scarlet, then paled as though with sudden
illness, and he looked sidewise at the older man with an expression of
shame and humiliation, while his eyes, wistful and pleading, were filled
with pain. Honorable Patches who had won the admiration of those men in
the Cross-Triangle corrals was again the troubled, shamefaced,
half-frightened creature whom Phil met on the Divide.

But the good Dean did not see, and so, encouraged by the other's
silence, he continued his dissertation. "