ranch, you know; and
Curly wanted to go, but they wouldn't let him."

"Why wouldn't they?"

"Because he was a married man, they said. And yet you say this
criminal is not dangerous?"

"He'd ought to been glad to go, him a married man. I've been married a
good deal myself. But was them two the only ones that went?"

"They two--and Mr. Anderson."

Tom smoked on quietly. "Well, I don't see why they'd take a tenderfoot
like him," he remarked at length, "while there was men like Curly
standin' around."

"I thought you were his friend!" blazed the girl, her cheeks reddening.

Tom Osby grinned at the success of his subterfuge.

"If he wasn't a good man, Ben Stillson wouldn't 'a' took him along,"
admitted he.

"Then it _is_ dangerous?"

"Ma'am," said Tom Osby, tapping his pipe against the side of the wagon
seat, "they're about even, a half dozen good ones against about that
many bad ones. They're game on both sides, and got to be. And we all
know well enough that Dan Anderson's game as the next one. The boys
figured that out the other night. Why, he'll come back all right in a
few days; don't worry none about _that_." He looked straight ahead of
him, pretending not to notice the little gloved hand that stole toward
his sleeve. In her own way, Constance had discovered that she might
depend upon this rough man of the plains.

"Ma'am," he went on after a while, "not apropy of nothing, as they say
in the novels, I wish you and your dad would hurry and get your old
railroad through here. Us folks may some of us want to go back to the
States sometime, and it's a long way to ride from Heart's Desire to any
railroad the way it is, unless you've got mighty good company, like I
have, this trip. I get awful lonesome sometimes, drivin' between here
and Vegas. I had a parrot onct, and a phonygraph, as you may remember,
but the fellers took 'em both away from me, you know. I'm thinkin' of
makin' up to that oldest girl from Kansas and settlin' down. She makes
fine pies. I've knew one of her pies to last two hundred miles--all
the way up to Vegas--they're that permernent. She reminds me a heap of
my third wife. Now, allowin' I did take one more chanct, and make up
to that oldest girl, we'd look fine, wouldn't we, takin' a weddin' trip
in this here wagon, and not on no railroad!"

Constance was smiling now. "I've got her gentled and comin' along
right easy now," thought Tom Osby to himself.

"I knowed a fell