olly laughed triumphantly. "Then who told Mrs. Taylor?"

Being caught, he grinned at her. "I reckon husbands are a special kind
of man," was all that he found to say. "Well, since you do know about
that, it was the next move in the game. Trampas thought I had no call
to stop him sayin' what he pleased about a woman who was nothin' to
me--then. But all women ought to be somethin' to a man. So I had to give
Trampas another explanation in the presence of folks lookin' on, and it
was just like the cyards. No ideas occurred to him again. And down goes
his opinion of me some more!

"Well, I have not been able to raise it. There has been this and that
and the other,--yu' know most of the later doings yourself,--and to-day
is the first time I've happened to see the man since the doings last
autumn. Yu' seem to know about them, too. He knows I can't prove he
was with that gang of horse thieves. And I can't prove he killed poor
Shorty. But he knows I missed him awful close, and spoiled his thieving
for a while. So d' yu' wonder he don't think much of me? But if I had
lived to be twenty-nine years old like I am, and with all my chances
made no enemy, I'd feel myself a failure."

His story was finished. He had made her his confidant in matters he had
never spoken of before, and she was happy to be thus much nearer to him.
It diminished a certain fear that was mingled with her love of him.

During the next several miles he was silent, and his silence was enough
for her. Vermont sank away from her thoughts, and Wyoming held less of
loneliness. They descended altogether into the map which had stretched
below them, so that it was a map no longer, but earth with growing
things, and prairie-dogs sitting upon it, and now and then a bird flying
over it. And after a while she said to him, "What are you thinking
about?"

"I have been doing sums. Figured in hours it sounds right short. Figured
in minutes it boils up into quite a mess. Twenty by sixty is twelve
hundred. Put that into seconds, and yu' get seventy-two thousand
seconds. Seventy-two thousand. Seventy-two thousand seconds yet before
we get married."

"Seconds! To think of its having come to seconds!"

"I am thinkin' about it. I'm choppin' sixty of 'em off every minute."

With such chopping time wears away. More miles of the road lay behind
them, and in the virgin wilderness the scars of new-scraped water
ditches began to appear, and the first wire fences. Next, they were
p