o silent guides who had found him
where a stray bullet left him.

She turned a tired, smiling face into the light.

"I _was_ happy, so happy; yet I wonder if you can understand how vague
it seems now. It was so brief and ended so terribly. I think the shock
of it made me another woman. Dick and I seem like a boy and girl I once
knew who laughed and played childish games and never became real. I find
myself sympathizing with them sometimes, as I would with two dear young
things in a story that ended sadly."

He awkwardly stroked and patted the hand he still held.

"Come and live with me, Nell. There's only a one-room cabin at that
place now, with a carpet of hay on the dirt floor. But I'll have a
mansion there next summer that will put the eye out of this shack at
Bar-7. I believe in getting back to Nature, but I don't want to land
clear the other side of her. You'd be comfy with me. And it's a great
life; not a line of dyspepsia in it. And think of _feeling_ yourself
sliding off to sleep the moment you touch the pillow, as plainly as you
feel yourself going down in an elevator. That reminds me, I'm going to
bed down with the boys in the bunkhouse to-night. I'm afraid to trust
myself in that bed upstairs again--I've lain awake there so many
nights."

For a time she lost the thread of his rambling talk, busied with her own
thoughts. She was faintly aware that for luncheon he had been eating a
biscuit, a thick, soggy, dangerous biscuit, caught up in the hurry of
the morning's packing, wrenched in half and sopped in bacon grease.
There was a word about shooting. He was learning to "hold down" the
Colt's 44, and had almost hit a coyote. Later, words reached her of a
cold night on the divide, when ice formed in the pail by the cooking
fire. What at last brought her back was a yawn and his remark that he
must "hole up" for the night.

"Clarence," she began, looking far into a little white-hot chamber
between two half-burned logs, "listen, please, and advise me. If you
were going to do something that might, just possibly, and not by any
means certainly, rake up rather an ugly mess, in a sort of remote
way--that might make some people uncomfortable, you understand--I mean
if you saw something that ought to be done, because the person deserved
it, and it was by no means that person's fault, not in the least, and
the person didn't even know about it nor suspect anything, would you
stop because it might be painful to some on