“And then I knew that I was safe, because people here in the West are not suspicious.  They let a stranger go with one look.  By the time I reached Sour Creek I was nearly over being ashamed of my clothes.  And then I found this place and work as a schoolteacher.  I think you know the rest.”  She leaned close to Sinclair.  “Was I wrong to leave him?”

Sinclair rubbed his chin.  “You’d ought to have told him straight off,” he said firmly.  “But seeing you went through with the wedding—­well, take it all in all, your leaving of him was about the rightest thing I ever heard of.”

Quiet fell between them.

“But what am I going to do?  And where is it all going to end?” a small voice inquired of Sinclair at last.

“Roll up in them blankets and go to sleep,” he advised her curtly.  “I’m figuring steady on this here thing, Jig.”

Jig followed that advice.  Sinclair had left the fire and was walking up and down from one end of the little plateau to the other, with a strong, long step.  As for the girl, she felt that an incalculable burden had been shifted from her shoulders by the telling of this tale.  That burden, she knew, must have fallen on another person, and it was not unpleasant to know that Riley Sinclair was the man.

Gradually the sense of strangeness faded.  As she grew drowsy, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for her to be up here at the top of the world with a man she had; known two days.  And, before she slept, the last thing of which she was conscious was the head of Sinclair in the broad sombrero, brushing to and fro across the stars.

18

With a bang the screen door of Sheriff Kern’s office had creaked open and shut four times at intervals, and each man, entering in turn with a “Howdy” to the sheriff, had stamped the dust out of the wrinkles of his riding boots, hitched up his trousers carefully, and slumped into a chair.  Not until the last of his handpicked posse had taken his place did the sheriff begin his speech.

“Gents,” he said, “how long have I been a sheriff?”

“Eighteen to twenty years,” said Bill Wood.  “And it’s been twenty years of bad times for the safecrackers and gunmen of these parts.”

“Thanks,” said the sheriff hastily.  “And how many that I’ve once put my hands on have got loose?”

Again Bill Wood answered, being the senior member.

“None.  Your score is exactly one hundred percent, sheriff.”

Kern sighed.  “Gents,” he said, “the average is plumb spoiled.”

It caused a general lifting of heads and then a respectful silence.  To have offered sympathy would have been insulting; to ask questions was beneath their dignity, but four pairs of eyes burned with curiosity.  The least curious was Arizona.  He was a fat, oily man from the southland, whose past was unknown in the vicinity of Woodville, and Arizona happened to be by no means desirous of rescuing that past from