He prepared the deer meat with incomprehensible swiftness, at the same time arranging the fire so that it rapidly burned down to a firm, strong, level bed of coals, and by the time the bed of coals were ready, the meat was prepared in thick steaks to broil over it.

In a little time the rich brown of the cooking venison streaked across to Jig.  He had kept at a distance up to this time, realizing that he was in disgrace.  Now he drifted near.  He was rewarded by an amiable grin from Riley Sinclair, whose ugly humor seemed to have vanished at the odor of the broiling meat.

“Watch this meat cook, kid, will you?  There’s something you can do that don’t take no muscle and don’t take no knowledge.  All you got to do is to keep listening with your nose, and if you smell it burning, yank her off.  Understand?  And don’t let the fire blaze.  She’s apt to flare up at the corners, you see?  And these here twigs is apt to burn through—­these ones that keep the meat off’n the coals.  Watch them, too.  And that’s all you got to do.  Can you manage all them things at once?”

Jig nodded gravely, as though he failed to see the contempt.

“I seen a fine patch of grass down the hill a bit.  I’m going to take the hosses down there and hobble ’em out.”  Whistling, Sinclair strode off down the hill, leading the horses after him.

The schoolteacher watched him go, and when the forms had vanished, and only the echo of the whistling blew back, he looked up.  The last life was gone from the sunset.  The last time he glanced up, there had been only a few dim stars; now they had come down in multitudes, great yellow planets and whole rifts of steel-blue stars.

He took from his pocket the old envelope which Sinclair had given him, examined the scribbled confession, chuckling at the crude labor with which the writing had been drawn out, and then deliberately stuffed the paper into a corner of the fire.  It flamed up, singeing the cooking meat, but John Gaspar paid no heed.  He was staring off down the hill to make sure that Sinclair should not return in time to see that little act of destruction.  An act of self-destruction, too, it well might turn out to be.

As for Sinclair, having found his pastureland, where the grass grew thick and tall, he was in no hurry to return to his clumsy companion.  He listened for a time to the sound of the horses, ripping away the grass close to the ground, and to the grating as they chewed.  Then he turned his attention to the mountains.  His spirit was easier in this place.  He breathed more easily.  There was a sense of freedom at once and companionship.  He lingered so long, indeed, that he suddenly became aware that time had slipped away from him, and that the venison must be long since done.  At that he hurried back up the slope.

He was hungry, ravenously hungry, but the first thing that greeted him was the scent of burning meat.  It stopped him short, and his hands gripped involuntarily.  In that first burst of passion he wanted literally to wring the neck of the schoolteacher.  He strode closer.  It was as he thought.  The twigs had burned away from beneath the steak and allowed it to drop into the cinders, and beside the dying fire, barely illuminated by it, sat Jig, sound asleep, with his head resting on his knees.