about them."

She looked at him steadily and withdrew her hand.

"That won't do, Bud," she replied firmly, but in a low voice. "What is the
thing for which Caldwell blackmailed you three years ago and again this
year?"

Bud looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then seemed to recede into
thought. She waited patiently, and, after a while, he began to speak.

"Yes, I suppose you are right," he said. "It is a woman's privilege to
know what a man's life holds if she desires it. There are but a few rare
souls who can marry men against whom the world holds something, and say:
'Never tell me what you were or what you have done; what you are and what
you will be are enough for me.'

"Putting myself in your place, I am sure I should do what you are doing,
for I have always told myself that those who marry with points unsettled
between them have taken the first step toward unhappiness. Suspicion and
deceit would undermine the greatest love that ever existed. Acts in the
past that cannot be explained create suspicion, and those in the present
that are better unobserved father deceit."

He paused for a few moments, and appeared to be thinking.

"Do you know who that Ed Skidmore is?" he asked abruptly.

"No; only he was quite nice, and evidently from the East."

"He is my brother Lester, and he is the man who stampeded the punchers'
horses last night with his flashlight."

"He is? I should never have suspected it; you are absolutely different in
looks."

"I know we are, or I shouldn't have risked his life last night. Well, I
bring him into this because I have to. He is part of the story. Lester was
always a wild youth, particularly after the governor stuck him on a
bookkeeper's stool and tried to make a business man out of him. The boy
couldn't add a column of figures a foot long correctly inside of ten
tries. I took to the game a little better than he did, and managed to get
promoted occasionally. But Lester never did.

"Father believed, and announced often enough, that anybody that couldn't
add figures and keep accounts had no business to handle money. To
discipline Lester, who he thought was loafing when he really was
incapable, the governor cut off the boy's allowance almost entirely and
told him he would have to live on his wages until he showed he could earn
more.

"Well, Julie, you know what kind of a cad I was back in the old
days--rich, spoiled, flattered by men, and sought after by women. (I can
say