woman like unto her had been picked up in Texas and brought on yere,
and that mebbe she was somewhar in Californy. I was that foolish--and
that ontrue to her, all the while knowin', as I once told you, Mr. Key,
that ef she'd been alive she'd bin yere--that I believed it true for a
minit! And that was why, afore this happened, I had a dream, right out
yer, and dreamed she kem to me, all white and troubled, through the
woods. At first I thought it war my Sadie; but when I see she warn't
like her old self, and her voice was strange and her laugh was
strange--then I knowed it wasn't her, and I was dreamin'. You're
right, Mr. Key, in wot you got off just now--wot was it? Better to
know nothin'--and keep the old thoughts unchanged."

"Have you any pain?" asked Key after a pause.

"No; I kinder feel easier now."

Key looked at his changing face. "Tell me," he said gently, "if it
does not tax your strength, all that has happened here, all you know.
It is for HER sake."

Thus adjured, with his eyes fixed on Key, Collinson narrated his story
from the irruption of the outlaws to the final catastrophe. Even then
he palliated their outrage with his characteristic patience, keeping
still his strange fascination for Chivers, and his blind belief in his
miserable wife. The story was at times broken by lapses of faintness,
by a singular return of his old abstraction and forgetfulness in the
midst of a sentence, and at last by a fit of coughing that left a few
crimson bubbles on the corners of his month. Key lifted his eyes
anxiously; there was some grave internal injury, which the dying man's
resolute patience had suppressed. Yet, at the sound of Alice's
returning step, Collinson's eyes brightened, apparently as much at her
coming as from the effect of the powerful stimulant Key had taken from
his medicine case.

"I thank ye, Mr. Key," he said faintly; "for I've got an idea I ain't
got no great time before me, and I've got suthin' to say to you, afore
witnesses"--his eyes sought Alice's in half apology--"afore witnesses,
you understand. Would you mind standin' out thar, afore me, in the
light, so I kin see you both, and you, miss, rememberin', ez a witness,
suthin' I got to tell to him? You might take his hand, miss, to make
it more regular and lawlike."

The two did as he bade them, standing side by side, painfully humoring
what seemed to them to be wanderings of a dying man.

"Thar was a young fellow," said Collinso