o make
love to you, even though I think you're a mighty nice girl. But say I
was. What then? Your friends can't shut you up in a glass cage if you're
going to keep on growing. Life was made to be lived."

"Yes.... Yes.... That's what I think," she cried eagerly. "But it isn't
arranged for girls that way--not if they belong to the class I do. We're
shut in--chaperoned from everything that's natural. You don't know how I
hate it."

"Of course you do. You're a live wire. That's why you're going to sit
down and listen to me."

She looked him straight between the eyes. "But I don't think morality is
only a convention, Mr. Kilmeny. 'Thou shalt not steal,' for instance."

"Depends what you steal. If you take from a man what doesn't belong to
him you're doing the community a service. But we won't go into that now,
though I'll just say this. What is right for me wouldn't be for Captain
Kilmeny. As I told you before, our standards are different."

"Yes, you explained that to me just after you--while you were hiding
from the officers after the first robbery," she assented dryly.

He looked at her and laughed. "You're prosecuting attorney and judge and
jury all in one, aren't you?"

She held her little head uncompromisingly erect. Not again was she going
to let her sympathy for him warp her judgment.

"I'm ready to hear what you have to say, Mr. Kilmeny."

"Not guilty, ma'am."

His jaunty insouciance struck a spark from her. "That is what you told
us before, and within half an hour we found out that you knew where the
booty was hidden. Before that discrepancy was cleared up you convinced
us of your innocence by stealing the money a second time."

"What did I do with it?" he asked.

"How should I know?"

From his pocket he drew a note book. Between two of its leaves was a
slip of paper which he handed to Moya. It was a receipt in full from the
treasurer of the Gunnison County Fair association to John Kilmeny for
the sum previously taken from him by parties unknown.

The girl looked at him with shining eyes. "You repented and took the
money back?"

"No. I didn't repent, but I took it back."

"Why?"

"That's a long tale. It's tied up with the story of my life--goes back
thirty-one years, before I was born, in fact. Want to hear it?"

"Yes."

"My father was a young man when he came to this country. The West wasn't
very civilized then. My father was fearless and outspoken. This made him
enemies among the gang of