“Yes,” said Winston dryly.  “I have done it twice.”

“Well,” said Courthorne, “I fancy that night narrowed in my life for me, but I made out across the prairie in the morning, and as we had a good many friends up and down the country, one of them took care of me.”

Winston sat silent a while.  The story had held his attention, and the frankness of the man who lay panting a little in his chair had its effect on him.  There was no sound from the prairie, and the house was very still.

“Why did you kill Shannon?” he asked, at length.

“Is any one quite sure of his motives?” said Courthorne.  “The lad had done something which was difficult to forgive him, but I think I would have let him go if he hadn’t recognized me.  The world is tolerably good to the man who has no scruples, you see, and I took all it offered me, while it did not seem fitting that a clod of a trooper without capacity for enjoyment, or much more sensibility than the beast he rode, should put an end to all my opportunities.  Still, it was only when he tried to warn his comrades he threw his last chance away.”

Winston shivered a little at the dispassionate brutality of the speech, and then checked the anger that came upon him.

“Fate, or my own folly, has put it out of my power to denounce you without abandoning what I have set my heart upon, and after all it is not my business,” he said.  “I will give you five hundred dollars and you can go to Chicago or Montreal, and consult a specialist.  If the money is exhausted before I send for you, I will pay your hotel bills, but every dollar will be deducted when we come to the reckoning.”

Courthorne laughed a little.  “You had better make it seven fifty.  Five hundred dollars will not go very far with me.”

“Then you will have to husband them,” said Winston dryly.  “I am paying you at a rate agreed upon for the use of your land and small bank balance handed me, and want all of it.  The rent is a fair one in face of the fact that a good deal of the farm consisted of virgin prairie, which can be had from the Government for nothing.”

He said nothing further, and soon after he went out Courthorne went to sleep, but Winston sat by an open window with a burned-out cigar in his hand staring at the prairie while the night wore through, until he rose with a shiver in the chill of early morning to commence his task again.

A few days later he saw Courthorne safely into a sleeping car with a ticket for Chicago in his pocket, and felt that a load had been lifted off his shoulders when the train rolled out of the little prairie station.  Another week had passed when, riding home one evening, he stopped at the Grange, and as it happened found Maud Barrington alone.  She received him without any visible restraint, but he realized that all that had passed at their last meeting was to be tacitly ignored.

“Has your visitor recovered yet?” she asked.