teal WELL; and if
you claim to be quick with your gun, you must be quick, for you're a
public temptation, and some man will not resist trying to prove he is
the quicker. You must break all the Commandments WELL in this Western
country, and Shorty should have stayed in Brooklyn, for he will be a
novice his livelong days. You don't know about him? He has told me his
circumstances. He don't remember his father, and it was like he could
have claimed three or four. And I expect his mother was not much
interested in him before or after he was born. He ran around, and when
he was eighteen he got to be help to a grocery man. But a girl he ran
with kept taking all his pay and teasing him for more, and so one day
the grocery man caught Shorty robbing his till, and fired him. There
wasn't no one to tell good-by to, for the girl had to go to the country
to see her aunt, she said. So Shorty hung around the store and kissed
the grocery cat good-by. He'd been used to feeding the cat, and she'd
sit in his lap and purr, he told me. He sends money back to that girl
now. This hyeh country is no country for Shorty, for he will be a
conspicuous novice all his days."

"Perhaps he'll prefer honesty after his narrow shave," I said.

But the Virginian shook his head. "Trampas has got hold of him."

The day was now all blue above, and all warm and dry beneath. We had
begun to wind in and rise among the first slopes of the foot-hills, and
we had talked ourselves into silence. At the first running water we made
a long nooning, and I slept on the bare ground. My body was lodged so
fast and deep in slumber that when the Virginian shook me awake I could
not come back to life at once; it was the clump of cottonwoods, small
and far out in the plain below us, that recalled me.

"It'll not be watching us much longer," said the Virginian. He made it
a sort of joke; but I knew that both of us were glad when presently we
rode into a steeper country, and among its folds and carvings lost all
sight of the plain. He had not slept, I found. His explanation was that
the packs needed better balancing, and after that he had gone up and
down the stream on the chance of trout. But his haunted eyes gave me the
real reason--they spoke of Steve, no matter what he spoke of; it was to
be no short thing with him.

XXXII. SUPERSTITION TRAIL

We did not make thirty-five miles that day, nor yet twenty-five, for
he had let me sleep. We made an early camp and tri