e known a
man can't be trusted to care for the same woman long. You ran after me
and acted the fool, and kept on till you made me believe you really
meant all you said--"

"And you married Spikes," Weary reiterated--ungenerously, perhaps; but
it was the only card he felt sure of. There was no gainsaying that
fact, it seemed. She had married Spikes in a fit of pique at Irish.
Still, it was not well to remind her of it too often. In the next five
minutes of tumultuous recrimination, Weary had cause to remember what
Shakespeare has to say about a woman scorned, and he wondered, more
than ever, if Irish had really cared. The girl--even now he did not
know what name to call her--was showing a strain of coarse temper; the
temper that must descend to personalities and the calling of
unflattering names. Weary, not being that type of male human who can
retort in kind, sat helpless and speechless the while she berated him.
When at last he found opportunity for closing the interview and riding
on, her anger-sharpened voice followed him shrewishly afar. Weary
breathed deep relief when the distance swallowed it, and lifted his
gray hat to wipe his beaded forehead.

"Mamma mine!" he said fervently to Glory. "Irish was sure playing big
luck when she _did_ marry Spikes; and I don't wonder at the poor devil
taking to drink. I would, too, if my little schoolma'am--"

At the ranch, he hastened to make it quite plain that he was not Ira
Mallory, but merely his cousin, Will Davidson. He was quite determined
to put a stop to all this annoying mixing up of identities. And as for
Spikes Weber, since meeting the woman Spikes claimed from him something
very like sympathy; only Weary had no mind to stand calmly and hear
Irish maligned by anybody.

The next day he rode again to Sleepy Trail to meet the stage, hoping
fervently that he would get some word--and that favorable--from Chip.
He was thinking, just then, a great deal about his own affairs and not
at all about the affairs of Irish. So that he was inside the saloon
before he remembered that the bartender knew him for Irish.

The bartender nodded to him in friendly fashion, and jerked his head
warningly toward a far corner where two men sat playing seven-up
half-heartedly. Weary looked, saw that both were strangers, and
puzzled a minute over the mysterious gesture of the bartender. It did
not occur to him, just then, that one of the men might be Spikes Weber.

The man who