. There wasn't any especial
virtue, since there is little credit in merely enduring what cannot be
cured.

Of what happened after our return to Colorado only a few things stand
out as being at all worthy of note. For one, Barrett and I, with
Benedict's help, took up the case of one Dorgan, _alias_ Michael
Murphey, _alias_ No. 3126, whom we found still preserving his incognito
in a dam-building camp in Idaho. Appealing to the Governor and Board
of Pardons of my home State, we made it appear that Dorgan was a
reformed man and no longer a menace to society, and in due time had the
satisfaction of seeing him set legally free.

As another act of pure justice, tempered with a good bit of filial and
fraternal affection--Polly was the prime mover in this--my mother and
sister were brought to Colorado, and a home was built for them in
Colorado Springs, where my sister, ignoring a bank account which would
have enabled her to sit with folded hands for the remainder of her
days, promptly gathered a group of little girls about her and began
teaching them the mysteries of the three "R's."

A third outreaching--and this, also, was Polly's idea--was in the
altruistic field. A fund was set apart out of the lavish yieldings of
the Little Clean-Up, the income from which provides in perpetuity that
at the doors of at least one prison of the many in our land the
outcoming convict shall be met and helped to stand upon his own feet,
if so be he has any feet to stand upon.

Gray granite peaks and valleys fallow-dun under the westering autumn
sun; vistas of inspiring horizons leading the eye to vanishing levels
remote and vaguely deliminating earth and sky, or soaring with it to
shimmering heights dark-green or bald; these infinities were spread
before us in celestial array one afternoon in the first year of peace
and joy when we--my good angel and I--clambered together to the summit
of the mountain behind the Little Clean-Up.

After the little interval of reverent adoration which is claimed by all
true lovers of the mountain infinities at the opening of the
illimitable doors, we fell to talking of the past--my past--as we sat
on a projecting shelf of the summit rock.

"No," I said. "I can't admit that there is anything regenerative in
punishment. If I had been the thief that everybody believed I was, I
should have come out of prison still a thief--with an added grudge
against society. While I was treated well, as a whole, nothing