le
money--not a whole lot. Our property isn't paid for yet. We've got a
quarter section, but you know the range is in back of it. We think we
can make some sort of a start."

"With her? Her that was used to so much?" says I. "Are you married? But,
of course, that was what you was after--her money, not her."

He flushed plumb red then, and sort of swallowed several times.

"You think high of me and her, don't you, Curly?" says he.

I seen that, after all, I was too late; and my gun dropped down into the
bottom of the buckboard, and neither of us noticed it.

"You married her--our girl," says I, "that we'd tried so hard to get a
place for? She could of owned the whole ranch--and you give her forty
acres, part paid for! That's fine--for the girl we loved so much!"

"You don't love her no more than I do," says he. "You never tried harder
for her than I'll try for her. Love--why, what do you know about it? If
she hadn't loved me do you think she'd of done what she done and run
away with me? Do you think she'd of broke her father's heart and forgot
all that had been done for her if it hadn't been for love? If it hadn't
been for thinking of those things we'd be the happiest two young fools
in all the world. We are now! She's some happy anyway. But it breaks my
own heart to think she isn't any happier."

After a while he goes on:

"What could I do, Curly? It's a awful thing to love a woman this way;
it's a terrible thing. There's no sense nor reason about it at all,"
says he. "But now if I only could have had any decent chance----"

"Pick up your gun," says he after a while; "it might fall out."

We rode on for quite a while. He made like he was going to reach into
his pocket for something and I covered him quick, but he only hauled out
a piece of Arrow Head plug. He offered me a chaw, absent-minded.

"No," says I; "I can't take no chaw of tobacco with such as you."

He put it back in his pocket, then, and didn't take none his own self.
His face was right red and troubled now.

"Curly," says he, "what am I going to do? What's right to do? I hadn't
much to give up, but such as it was I give it up gladly for her; I'd
give up everything in the world--if I had everything--for her. That's
what she means to me," says he. "We are so much to one another that I
haven't any time to be scared of you. We haven't got around to that
yet--not that I'm so cheap as to believe you're bluffing; I know you're
not."

"No, I ain't,"