“What do you mean?” He frowned sternly and shook off my hand.

“I brought her through,” I said, “and if it would do any good, I would lie down here and die for her.  If what I say is not true, draw up your men for a firing squad and let us end it.  I don’t care to go back to Laramie.”

“What good would that do?” said he.  “It’s the girl’s name that’s compromised, man!  Why, the news of this is all over the country—­the wires have carried it both sides of the mountains; the papers are full of it in the East.  You have been gone nearly three months together, and all the world knows it.  Don’t you suppose all the world will talk?  Did I not see—­” he motioned his hand toward our encampment.

He babbled of such things, small, unimportant, to me, late from large things in life.  I interrupted long enough to tell him briefly of our journey, of our hardships, of what we had gone through, of how my sickness had rendered it impossible for us to return at once, of how we had wandered, with what little judgment remained to us, how we had lived in the meantime.

He shook his head.  “I know men,” said he.

“Yes,” said I, “I would have been no man worth the name had I not loved your daughter.  And I admit to you that I shall never love another woman, not in all my life.”

In answer he flung down on the ground in front of me something that he carried—­the scroll of our covenant, signed by my name and in part by hers.

“What does this mean?” he asked.

“It means,” said I, “what it says; that here or anywhere, in sickness or in health, in adversity or prosperity, until I lie down to die and she beside me in her time, we two are in the eye of God married; and in the eye of man would have been, here or wherever else we might be.”

I saw his face pale; but a somber flame came into his eyes.  “And you say this—­you, after all I know regarding you!”

Again I felt that old chill of terror and self-reproach strike to my heart.  I saw my guilt once more, horrible as though an actual presence.  I remembered what Ellen Meriwether had said to me regarding any other or earlier covenant.  I recalled my troth, plighted earlier, before I had ever seen her,—­my faith, pledged in another world.  So, seeing myself utterly ruined in my own sight and his and hers, I turned to him at length, with no pride in my bearing.

“So I presume Gordon Orme has told you,” I said to him.  “You know of Grace Sheraton, back there?”

His lips but closed the tighter.  “Have you told her—­have you told this to my girl?” he asked, finally.

“Draw up your file!” I cried, springing to my feet.  “Execute me!  I deserve it.  No, I have not told her.  I planned to do so—­I should never have allowed her to sign her name there before I had told her everything—­been fair to her as I could.  But her accident left her weak—­I could not tell her—­a thousand things delayed it.  Yes, it was my fault.”