people! Anyway, her brother Spencer had no use for me, because
I could tell how slick he was with the cards an' beat him at his own
game. Spencer had a gamblin' pard, a cowboy run out of Texas, one Cap
Fol--But no matter about his name. One night they were fleecin' a
stranger an' I broke into the game, winnin' all they had. The game ended
in a fight, with bloodshed, but nobody killed. That set Spencer an' his
pard Cap against me. The stranger was a planter from Louisiana. He'd
been an officer in the rebel army. A high-strung, handsome Southerner,
fond of wine an' cards an' women. Well, he got to payin' my wife a good
deal of attention when I was away, which happened to be often. She never
told me. I was jealous those days.

"My little girl you call Columbine was born there durin' a long absence
of mine. When I got home Lucy an' the baby were gone. Also the
Southerner!... Spencer an' his pard Cap, an' others they had in the
deal, proved to me, so it seemed, that the little girl was not really
mine!... An' so I set out on a hunt for my wife an' her lover. I found
them. An' I killed him before her eyes. But she was innocent, an' so was
he, as came out too late. He'd been, indeed, her friend. She scorned me.
She told me how her brother Spencer an' his friends had established
guilt of mine that had driven her from me.

"I went back to Dodge to have a little quiet smoke with these men who
had ruined me. They were gone. The trail led to Colorado. Nearly a year
later I rounded them all up in a big wagon-train post north of Denver.
Another brother of my wife's, an' her father, had come West, an' by
accident or fate we all met there. We had a family quarrel. My wife
would not forgive me--would not speak to me, an' her people backed her
up. I made the great mistake to take her father an' other brothers to
belong to the same brand as Spencer. In this I wronged them an' her.

"What I did to them, Belllounds, is one story I'll never tell to any man
who might live to repeat it. But it drove my wife near crazy. An' it
made me Hell-Bent Wade!... She ran off from me there, an' I trailed her
all over Colorado. An' the end of that trail was not a hundred miles
from where we stand now. The last trace I had was of the burnin' of a
prairie-schooner by Arapahoes as they were goin' home from a foray on
the Utes.... The little girl might have toddled off the trail. But I
reckon she was hidden or dropped by her mother, or some one fleein' for
l