last."

"Then she hasn't written from Laramie," said the hilarious Governor, and
Mr. McLean understood and winced in his spirit deep down. "Gee whiz!"
went on Barker, "I'll never forget you and Lusk that day!"

But the mask fell now. "You're talking of his wife, not mine," said the
cow-puncher very quietly, and smiling no more; "and, Doc, I'm going to
say a word to yu', for I know yu've always been my good friend. I'll
never forget that day myself--but I don't want to be reminded of it."

"I'm a fool, Lin," said the Governor, generous instantly. "I never
supposed--"

"I know yu' didn't, Doc. It ain't you that's the fool. And in a way--in
a way--" Lin's speech ended among his crowding memories, and Barker,
seeing how wistful his face had turned, waited. "But I ain't quite the
same fool I was before that happened to me," the cow-puncher resumed,
"though maybe my actions don't show to be wiser. I know that there was
better luck than a man like me had any call to look for."

The sobered Barker said, simply, "Yes, Lin." He was put to thinking by
these words from the unsuspected inner man.

Out in the Bow Leg country Lin McLean had met a woman with thick,
red cheeks, calling herself by a maiden name; and this was his whole
knowledge of her when he put her one morning astride a Mexican saddle
and took her fifty miles to a magistrate and made her his lawful wife
to the best of his ability and belief. His sage-brush intimates were
confident he would never have done it but for a rival. Racing the rival
and beating him had swept Mr. McLean past his own intentions, and the
marriage was an inadvertence. "He jest bumped into it before he could
pull up," they explained; and this casualty, resulting from Mr. McLean's
sporting blood, had entertained several hundred square miles of alkali.
For the new-made husband the joke soon died. In the immediate weeks that
came upon him he tasted a bitterness worse than in all his life before,
and learned also how deep the woman, when once she begins, can sink
beneath the man in baseness. That was a knowledge of which he had lived
innocent until this time. But he carried his outward self serenely, so
that citizens in Cheyenne who saw the cow-puncher with his bride argued
shrewdly that men of that sort liked women of that sort; and before the
strain had broken his endurance an unexpected first husband, named
Lusk, had appeared one Sunday in the street, prosperous, forgiving,
and exceedingly dru