come back and thank you, alive or dead."

Every word he said she could have anticipated, so plain the situation
seemed to her now. And every word he said she knew was the truth. Yet
her cool common sense struggled against it.

"What's the use of your escaping, ef you're comin' back here to be
ketched again?" she said pertly.

He drew a little nearer to her, but seemed to her the more awkward as
she resumed her self-possession. His voice, too, was broken, as if by
exhaustion, as he said, catching his breath at intervals:--

"I'll tell you. You did more for me than you think. You made another man
o' me. I never had a man, woman, or child do to me what you did. I never
had a friend--only a pal like Red Pete, who picked me up 'on shares.'
I want to quit this yer--what I'm doin'. I want to begin by doin' the
square thing to you"--He stopped, breathed hard, and then said brokenly,
"My hoss is over thar, staked out. I want to give him to you. Judge
Boompointer will give you a thousand dollars for him. I ain't lyin';
it's God's truth! I saw it on the handbill agin a tree. Take him, and
I'll get away afoot. Take him. It's the only thing I can do for you, and
I know it don't half pay for what you did. Take it; your father can get
a reward for you, if you can't."

Such were the ethics of this strange locality that neither the man who
made the offer nor the girl to whom it was made was struck by anything
that seemed illogical or indelicate, or at all inconsistent with
justice or the horse-thief's real conversion. Salomy Jane nevertheless
dissented, from another and weaker reason.

"I don't want your hoss, though I reckon dad might; but you're just
starvin'. I'll get suthin'." She turned towards the house.

"Say you'll take the hoss first," he said, grasping her hand. At the
touch she felt herself coloring and struggled, expecting perhaps another
kiss. But he dropped her hand. She turned again with a saucy gesture,
said, "Hol' on; I'll come right back," and slipped away, the mere shadow
of a coy and flying nymph in the moonlight, until she reached the house.

Here she not only procured food and whiskey, but added a long dust-coat
and hat of her father's to her burden. They would serve as a disguise
for him and hide that heroic figure, which she thought everybody must
now know as she did. Then she rejoined him breathlessly. But he put the
food and whiskey aside.

"Listen," he said; "I've turned the hoss into your corral. You