savagely. It was
moments before I could accept this old life again offered me.

"She is a splendid girl, a noble being," I said to him, slowly, at last.
"She saved me when I was sick and unable to travel. There is nothing I
could do that would pay the debt I owe to her. She is a noble woman, a
princess among women, body and soul."

"She is like her mother," said he, quietly. "She was too good for this.
Sir, you have done my family a grievous wrong. You have ruined my
daughter's life."

Now at last I could talk. I struck my hand hard on his shoulder and
looked him full in the eye. "Colonel Meriwether," I said to him, "I am
ashamed of you."

"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. "