"Even if it should give you another attack of the 'seeing things'?"

"Yes; I'll chance even that."

"Very well, then: once upon a time—it was a good while ago, I'm afraid—you were a very upright young man, and your uprightness made you just a little bit austere—for yourself, if not for others. At that time you were busy whittling out heroic little ideals and making idols of them; and I am quite sure you were spelling duty with a capital 'D' and that you would have been properly horrified if a sister of yours had permitted an unchaperoned acquaintance like—well, like ours."

"Go on," he said, neither affirming nor denying.

"Also, at that time you thought that a man's work in the world was the biggest thing that ever existed, the largest possible order that could be given, and the work and everything about it had to be transparently honest and openly aboveboard. You would cheerfully have died for a principle in those days, and you would have allowed the enemy to cut you up into cunning little inch cubes before you would have admitted that any pigeon was ever made to be plucked."

He was smiling mirthlessly, with the black mustaches taking the sardonic upcurve.

"Then what happened?"

"One of two things, or maybe both of them. You were pushed out into the life race with some sort of a handicap. I don't know what it was—or is. Is that true?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll hazard the other guess. You discovered that there were women in the world and that there was something in you, or about you, that was sufficiently attractive to make them sit up and be nice to you. For some reason—perhaps it was the handicap—you thought you'd be safer in the unwomaned wilderness and so you came out here to the 'wild and woolly.' But even here you're not safe. There is a passable trail over War Arrow Pass and at a pinch an automobile can cross the Buckskin."

When she stopped he nodded gravely. "It is all true enough. You haven't added anything more than a graceful little touch here and there. Who has been telling you all these things about me?"

She clapped her hands in delighted self-applause.

"You don't deny them?"

"I wouldn't be so impolite."

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