her lips to search for a more
fitting retort.

"You flatter yourself," she said, smiling thinly, "but you do not
flatter me."

"Yeah, 'vice and crime.' That shows where you good people fall down.
I suppose you think that she was an _awful_ disreputable woman! Well,
she wasn't; she was just another of Stoddard's stool-pigeons that he
uses to work suckers like me. She got me back there and helped him
bleed me and then she kissed me good-bye--so!"

He made the motion of slamming a door and his eyes turned dark with
fury.

"She had a good line of talk herself," he sneered, "and her heart was
as black as that book!"

He pointed to a book that was black indeed but Mary said never a word.
This was news to her, and perhaps it was balm that would in time cure a
wound in her heart, but now it rankled deep.

"I think," she said at last, "the most pitiable spectacle in the world
is you, Mr. Rimrock Jones. You try to buy friends, as if they were
commodities, and you try to buy them wholesale. You set up the drinks
and try to buy the whole town, but what is the result of it all? Why,
you simply attract a lot of leeches and bloodsuckers whose sole purpose
is to get your money. And then, when you finally become disillusioned,
you class them all together. You don't deserve any friends!"

"Well, maybe not!" he answered truculently, "but who's got the most,
right now? You or me? Look at Old Hassayamp Hicks, and Woo Chong--and
L. W.!"

A swift, almost instantaneous, change swept over her sensitive face and
then she closed down her lips; yet Rimrock was quick enough to see it.

"What's the matter?" he challenged. "What's the matter with L. W.?
Ain't he stood by me like a rock? He's in the hospital right now with
a busted arm, and I won't hear a word against him. No, my troubles
have been with women."

A swifter spasm, almost ugly in its rage, came over Mary Fortune's
lips; and then she shut them down again.

"Yes," she said with a sarcastic smile, "I've heard women say the same
about men."

"Oh, you've always got some come-back," he went on blusteringly, "but I
notice you don't say nothing against L. W. Now there was a man who had
done me dirt--he sold me out, on the Gunsight--but when I trusted him
and treated him white L. W. became my best friend. He stood right up
with me against Andy McBain and that bunch of hired gun-fighters he
had; and he'd lay down his life for me, to-morrow. And yet he just
worship