He remembered Cartwright, tall, handsome, and narrow of eye, and the fear of the girl.  Suddenly he wished with all his soul that he had fought with guns that day, and not with fists.

17

At length the continued silence of the girl made him turn.  Perhaps she had slipped away.  His heart was chilled at the thought; turning, he sighed with relief to find her still there.

Without a word he went back and rekindled the fire, placed new venison steaks over it, and broiled them with silent care.  Not a sound from Jig, not a sound from the cowpuncher, while the meat hissed, blackened, and at length was done to a turn.  He laid portions of it on broad, white, clean chips which he had already prepared, and served her.  Still in silence she ate.  Shame held Sinclair.  He dared not look at her, and he was glad when the fire lost some of its brightness.

Now and then he looked with wonder across the mountains.  All his life they had been faces to him, and the wind had been a voice.  Now all this was nothing but dead stuff.  There was no purpose in the march of the mountains except that they led to the place where Jig sat.

He twisted together a cup of bark and brought her water from the spring.  She thanked him with words that he did not hear, he was so intent in watching her face, as the firelight played on it.  Now that he held the clue, everything was as plain as day.  New light played on the past.

Turning away, he put new fuel on the fire, and when he looked to her again, she had unbelted the revolver and was putting it away, as if she realized that this would not help her if she were in danger.

When at length she spoke it was the same voice, and yet how new!  The quality in it made Sinclair sit a little straighter.

“You have a right to know everything that I can tell you.  Do you wish to hear?”

For another moment he smoked in solemn silence.  He found that he was wishing for the story not so much because of its strangeness, but because he wanted that voice to run on indefinitely.  Yet he weighed the question pro and con.

“Here’s the point, Jig,” he said at last.  “I got a good deal to make up to you.  In the first place I pretty near let you get strung up for a killing I done myself.  Then I been treating you pretty hard, take it all in all.  You got a story, and I don’t deny that I’d like to hear it; but it don’t seem a story that you’re fond of telling, and I ain’t got no right to ask for it.  All I ask to know is one thing:  When you stood there under that cotton wood tree, with a rope around your neck, did you know that all you had to do was to tell us that you was a woman to get off free?”

“Of course.”

“And you’d sooner have hung than tell us?”

“Yes.”

Sinclair sighed.  “Maybe I’ve said this before, but I got to say it ag’in:  Jig, you plumb beat me!” He brushed his hand across his forehead.  “S’pose it’d been done!  S’pose I had let ’em go ahead and string you up!  They’d have been a terrible bad time ahead for them seven men.  We’d all have been grabbed and lynched.  A woman!”