girls who go wrong
because they have no chance to know better. The kind bred in slums,
ignorant, ill-fed--the kind who never had a fair show. So I resolved that
you should have one. Bender wanted you out of town with the surety that
you would never come back.

"I felt sorry for you. I offered to take you off his hands and bring you
out here among the hills, where the best woman in the world would teach
you to _want_ to be honest. Do you suppose I'd have done it if I'd known
the kind you are--a bright, smart brat who is bad because she wants to be,
and boasts of it? There is no hope for your kind."

It was the longest speech the acting sheriff had ever made. He had been
scarcely conscious that he was talking, but was simply voicing what had
been in his thoughts for the last half hour.

"How old is this 'best woman in the world'?" asked the girl, seemingly
unconcerned in his summing up of her case. "Is she your sweetheart or your
wife? If she is either one, you'd better take me back to Bender, or spill
me out on the plains here. She won't be real glad to try to reform a
young, good-looking girl like me. I _am_ good-looking, honest, if I was
slicked up a little."

He looked away, an angry frown on his lean, strong face. She gazed at him
curiously for a moment and then laid a slim, brown hand on his arm.

"Listen here, Kurt," she said. "You were right in what you thought about
me never having had a fair show. Everything, everyone, including myself,
seems to have been against me. I was born with 'taking ways.' I couldn't
seem to live them down. Lately things have been going wrong awfully fast.
I've been sick and no one acted as if I were human up to a short time ago.
I didn't know that was why you took me from Bender's jail. Honest, I'm not
so bad as I talk."

He looked at her sceptically. Her eyes, now turned from him, were soft,
feminine and without guile. He wouldn't let himself be hoodwinked.

"No; there's no excuse for you," he declared emphatically. "You are
educated. You could have earned an honest living. You didn't have to
steal."

"No;" she said slowly and thoughtfully. "I didn't have to."

"Then why do you? Bender told me you had a lifelong record of pilfering."

"Lifelong! Kind Kurt, I am young--only twenty."

"He said you'd been given a chance over and over again, but that you were
hopeless. I--think you are."

"I think so, too," she acknowledged, with a little giggle that brought
back his scowl.