s certainly going about his
love-making most moderately, I concluded.

I like to remember that I was loyal to him at this time in spite of the
puzzlement. It is perhaps needless to say that these cottage visits
had done their worst for me and I was hopelessly in love with the
sweet-faced, honest-hearted young woman who had grown out of the
brown-eyed little girl of the Glendale school-days. Nevertheless, I
was still able to recognize the barrier which my conviction,
imprisonment and escape, together with the ever-present peril of
recapture, interposed; also I was able to recognize Barrett's prior
claim, and the fact that he could leave wife and children the priceless
heritage of a good name and a clean record--as I could not.

Touching this matter of peril, the period of our beginnings as a
corporation was not without its alarms. Twice I had seen Kellow at a
distance, and once I had stood beside him at the hotel counter where he
had been examining the registered list of names at a moment when I, all
unconscious of his presence until I was elbowing him, had stopped in
passing to ask a question of the clerk. That near-encounter showed me
that I was neither better nor worse than the man who had stood, loaded
weapon in hand, on the sidewalk in the heart of a June night, coldly
deliberating upon the advisability of committing a murder. I was
conscious of a decent hope that Kellow wouldn't look up and recognize
me--as he did not--but coincident with the hope the homicidal devil was
whispering me to be ready with the pistol, without which I never went
abroad any more, even to cross the street from my rooms to the office.
And I was ready.

This mania, which seemed fated to seize me at any moment when my
liberty was threatened, added another stone to the barrier of good
resolutions which I had builded in behalf of my loyalty to Barrett and
a more or less chivalrous consideration for Mary Everton and her future
peace of mind. If the ex-convict might not venture, the potential
man-slayer was at a still greater disadvantage.

I recall, as vividly as if it were yesterday, how the first small
breach was made in this barrier of good resolutions. Barrett and I
were in Denver together, joining forces in our regular monthly fight
with the smelter pirates. We had been to the theater and were smoking
bedtime cigars in the mezzanine lounge of the Brown Palace. I have
forgotten the name of the play we had seen, and even the plot