o me that you
should walk."

"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage!
persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."

"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise
that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part
in the duel.

His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to
keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became
stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed.
He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer
its charm on the previous evening.

"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this
afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till the
minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great
kindness you did her."

"Not a kindness--an inevitable interruption by any passer-by,"
Jack put in.

"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew
you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's
self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper
perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had
turned out fortunately."

"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing
in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much
on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men
ought to witness--so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable
impression."

"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at
it all, now!"

"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into
laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.

Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find
that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy
traveller's life as in Mary's.

"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You
may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you
had planned to take the train this morning."

"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few
days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week
Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure
of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should
have missed."

"I am