had
grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them. I know not why, but
I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths--mental
depths--which held a message that I feared. So I procrastinated, staying
on in the air which had given me red blood. But that was cowardly, and
that day I came over the pass I was making my last ride in the kingdom of
irresponsibility. I was going home!

"When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse. I had just
as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if
he would. Yes, I was strong. I had conquered. And if Leddy hit me, why, I
did not have to go back to battle with the shadows--the obsession of
shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew. When I was
smiling in Leddy's muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling
exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying,
like some boaster, 'Could you do this, millions?' I--I--well, Mary, I--I
have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before."

"Thank you, Jack!" she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that
bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached,
permeating, and transcendent.

"When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight," he went on. "I wanted to
see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in
battle. After Leddy's shot in the _arroyo_ I found that strength had
discovered something else in me--something that had lain dormant in
boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five
years on the desert--something of which all my boyhood training made me
no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very
strength I had won. It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and
peace itself--a lawless, devil-like creature! Yes, I gloried in the fact
that I could kill Leddy. It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on
him. And you saw and felt that in me--yes, I tell you everything as a man
must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels,
his devils, and his dreams!"

He paused trembling, as before a judge. She turned quickly, with a
sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes
and smiling a comradeship which made her old attitude over the wall a
thing of dross and yet far more intimate. Her hand went out to meet his.

"Jack, we have had good times together," she said. "We were never
mawkish; we were just good c