id Barbara, "if you have a criminal, so to speak, where you
want him--why let him be free to make more mischief? I ask merely for
information."

"If he were punished for an ordinary crime," said Lichtenstein, "justice
would be cheated. But if we can really get him where we want him, why,
not only crime will be tried and found guilty, but the whole fabric of
the police--yes, and the administration of the law. Therefore," and his
voice was cold as marble, "it would be inadvisable to run him in for
such picayune crimes as twisting lead pipe round young women and
throwing them overboard, or otherwise delicately quieting tongues that
might be made to wag against him. And now if you are going to lend me
a car--"

XLI

Wilmot Allen was surprised and annoyed at being called back to New York
by his employer. He had not "gotten over" Barbara in the least, but the
great West had entered his blood. Thanks to financial arrangements with
Blizzard he had lived a life free from care, and indeed had grown and
developed in many ways, just as a forest tree will, to which air and
sunlight has been admitted by removing its nearest neighbors, together
with all their claims upon the rainfall and the tree-food locked up in
the forest soil,

He had grown in body and mind. Wall Street, that had seemed so broad and
important to him, now seemed narrow and insignificant. It was better for
a man, a good horse between his knees, to find out what lay beyond the
Ridges than whether steel was going up or down. He looked back upon his
past life, not, it is true, with contempt and loathing, but with amused
tolerance, as a man wise and reliable looks back upon the pranks of
his boyhood.

He loved Barbara with all his heart, but no longer with the feeling that
the loss of her would put an end to all the possibilities of life.
Indeed he was coolly resolved in the event of her marrying somebody else
to marry somebody else himself. The thought of children and a home had
grown very dear to him. In short, he had assimilated a characteristic
of the great unsettled West, where the ratio of the male of the species
to the female is often as great as ten to one.

But if the year did not cure him of Barbara he would get her if he
could.

To the main line was a day's journey over a single-track road abounding
in undeveloped way stations, at which an insatiable locomotive was
forever stopping to drink. At one of these stations a young man taller
and br