rew him out, and the girl,
too, and said he might take her to hell with him, they would shelter
her no more. And one of the brutes said he would fight him for her, and
they made a ring and the brute tried to get his pistol off first; but
it hit another man, and before he could shoot again, the Senator fired
and wounded him in the side; and as he fell, and the others, angry at
his hitting one of them, all began to quarrel together, the Senator and
the girl slipped away, and ran and hid in the scrub. If you could have
heard him telling all this, Mamma, in the dying light, his strong face
and quiet voice so impressive! I shall never forget it. Well, the girl
had brought some bread in a handkerchief, which he had not eaten, and
they shared that together, and when it was dark they slept under the
stars; and "by then I'd just grown to love her," he said, and "we were
quite content to die together if we couldn't push on to the big camp;
but we meant to make an almighty try."

They did get there, finally, and the sheriff married them, and here his
voice broke a little and was so low I could hardly hear him. There were
no two people ever so happy, he said. He built a little shack of boards
not twelve feet long, "way up on the mountain," and she kept it like a
new pin, and was dainty and sweet and loving, and when he came in from
the mines she would run to meet him "as gentle as a fawn," and he never
wanted to go to the saloons or drink like the other men, "though I was
always pretty handy with my gun," he said, "and had been through the
whole ugly show."

And presently he began to make a little money and would contrive to
give her small things for the house; it gave her more pleasure than
anything in the world to make it pretty, so that the little shed was
the admiration of all the other miners' wives. And once he was able to
buy some flower seeds, and she grew a pansy in a pot because there is
no green thing in that barren land, and she tended it and watched it as
it came through the earth, and no one was so joyous as she. "It hurts
me to look at pansies even now," he said; and I was glad, Mamma, it was
getting dark, because I felt the tears coming in my eyes. They were
perfectly happy like this for about three years, and then Lola was born
and they were happier still; but before that she used to take him up on
the mountains, above their shack, to look down at the camps, and watch
the stars, and she always used to see things i