"Hours and hours! You're talking foolishness! What have they got to do
with it? And she will listen to me. I can tell she will. I know I can
be so she'll listen, and it will go all right, for I'll ask so hard.
And everything'll come out straight. Yu' see, I've not been spending
to speak of since Billy's on my hands, and now I'll fix up my cabin and
finish my fencing and my ditch--and she's going to like Box Elder Creek
better than Shawhan. She's the first I've ever loved."

"Then I'd like to ask--" I cried out.

"Ask away!" he exclaimed, inattentively, in his enthusiasm.

"When you--" but I stopped, perceiving it impossible. It was, of
course, not the many transient passions on which he had squandered his
substance, but the one where faith also had seemed to unite. Had he
not married once, innocent of the woman's being already a wife? But I
stopped, for to trench here was not for me or any one.

And my pause strangely flashed on him something of that I had in my
mind.

"No," he said, his eyes steady and serious upon me, "don't you ask about
the things you're meaning." Then his face grew radiant and rather
stern. "Do you suppose I don't know she's too good for me? And that some
bygones can't ever be bygones? But if you," he said, "never come to look
away up to a woman from away down, and mean to win her just the same as
if you did deserve her, why, you'll make a turruble mess of the whole
business!"

When we walked in silence for a long while, he lighted again with the
blossoming dawn of his sentiment. I thought of the coarse yet taking
vagabond of twenty I had once chanced upon, and hunted and camped with
since through the years. Decidedly he was not that boy to-day! It is
not true that all of us rise through adversity, any more than that all
plants need shadow. Some starve out of the sunshine; and I have seen
misery deaden once kind people to everything but self--almost the
saddest sight in the world! But Lin's character had not stood well the
ordeal of happiness, and for him certainly harsh days and responsibility
had been needed to ripen the spirit. Yes, Jessamine Buckner would have
been much too good for him before that humiliation of his marriage, and
this care of young Billy with which he had loaded himself. "Lin," said
I, "I will drink your health and luck."

"I'm healthy enough," said he; and we came back to the main street and
into the main saloon.

"How d'ye, boys?" said some one, and there was Na