--I've took the better, an' I'd
be a poor sport if I couldn't take the worse. Even if I didn't love you,
Joe, I'd stick. But I do love you--no matter what you've got into. Tell
me all about it, an' we'll work it out--you an' me. You ain't be'n
rustlin' horses, have you? An' the bank stakin' us 'cause they trusted
us to make good! Oh, Joe--you ain't! Have you Joe?"

The fingers tightened reassuringly upon the woman's shoulder and
reassuring were the words with which he answered the appeal of the eyes
that looked imploringly into his own:

"No, no, girl--not that. Not nothin' I've done sence--sence I growed up.
I've played the game square sence then." The man seated himself beside
her upon the sill: "It's a long story an' starts back, let's see, I was
seventeen then, an' now I'm twenty-six--nine years ago, it was, I was
workin' over near Goldfield in a mine. Everything was wide open them
days an' I was jest a fool kid, spendin' my wages fast as I got 'em,
same as all the rest of the miners.

"Out of the riff-raff that worked there in the mines was four men I
throw'd in with. They'd drifted in from God knows where, an' they'd all
be'n cowpunchers, an' their talk run mostly to the open range. They was
counted hard in a camp that was made up of hard men, an' they kep'
pretty much to theirselves. Somehow or other they kind of took a shine
to me, an' it wasn't long till the five of us was thick as thieves. When
we'd be lickered up, makin' the rounds of the saloons, men would edge
along an' give us room at the bar. They didn't want none of our meat;
although we never made no gun-play, they always figgered we would.

"Bein' a kid, that way, it made me feel mighty big an' important to be
jammin' around with 'em. Lookin' back at it now, from my experience on
the other side of the bar, I know that if that bunch had drifted into a
place I was runnin' I'd spot how my guns laid under the bar so's I could
reach 'em without lookin', you bet!

"There was Old Pete Bradley, one-eyed, he was, an' he didn't have no
teeth but false ones that clicked when he talked an' rattled when he et.
An' Mike Hinch, with a foretop of thick black hair that hung down over
his eyes so it looked like he had to squinch down to see in under it.
An' Scar Lamento, which he was a Dago or Spanish, an' had met up with an
accident that tore his mouth down one corner so's he always looked like
he was grinnin'. An' Wild Hoss Duffy. An' me. They wasn't none of 'em