riend."

"In all your life?"

"Sure! I was lucky and had one friend."

Cold Feet leaned forward, eagerness in his eyes. "Tell me about him!"

"I don't know you well enough, son."

That jarring speech thrust Jig back into his chair, as if with a
physical hand. There, as though in covert, he continued to study
Sinclair. Presently he began to nod.

"I knew it from the first, in spite of appearances."

"Knew what?"

"Knew that we'd get along."

"And are we getting along, Jig?"

"I think so."

"Glad of that," muttered the cowpuncher dryly.

"Ah," cried John Gaspar, "you're not as hard as you seem. One of these
days I'll prove it. Besides, you won't forget me."

"What makes you so sure of that?"

Jig rose from his chair and stood leaning against it, his hands dropped
lightly into the pockets of his dressing gown. He looked
extraordinarily boyish at that moment, and he seemed to have the
fearlessness of a child which knows that the world has no real account
against it. Riley Sinclair set his teeth to keep back a flood of pity
that rose in him.

"You wait and see," said Jig. He raised a finger at Sinclair. "I'll
keep coming back into your mind a long time after you leave me; and
you'll keep coming back into my mind. Oh, I know it!"

"How in thunder do you?"

"I don't know. Just because--well, how did I understand at the trial
that you knew I was innocent, and that you would let no harm come to
me?"

"Did you know that?" asked Sinclair.

Instead of answering, Jig broke into his soft, pleasant laughter.

11

"Laugh and be hanged," declared Sinclair. "I'm going outside. And don't
try no funny breaks while I'm gone," he said. "I'll be watching and
waiting when you ain't expecting." With that he was gone.

At the door of the house a gust of hot wind struck him, for the day was
verging on noon, and there seemed more heat than light in the sun. Even
to that hot gust Sinclair jerked his bandanna knot aside and opened his
throat gratefully. He felt as if he had been under a hard nervous
strain for some time past. Cold Feet, the craven, the weak of hand and
the frail of spirit, had tested him in a new way. He had been
confronting a novel and unaccountable thing. He felt very oddly as if
someone had been prodding into corners of his nature yet unknown even
to himself. He tingled from the rapier touches of that last laughter.

Now his eyes roamed with relief across the valley. Heat waves blurred
the