mily away to the west. He was a
good deal given to looking to the west, these days when a leg
new-healed kept him at the ranch, though habit and inclination would
have sent him riding fast and far over prairies untamed. Inaction
comes hard when a man has lived his life mostly in the open, doing
those things which keep brain and muscle keyed alike to alertness and
leave no time for brooding.

If Andy had not broken his leg but had gone with the others on
roundup, he would never have spent the days glooming unavailingly
because a girl with a blond pompadour and teasing eyes had gone away
and taken with her a false impression of his morals, and left behind
her the sting of a harsh judgment against which there seemed no
appeal. As it was, he spent the time going carefully over his past in
self-justification, and in remembering every moment that he had spent
with Mary Johnson in those four weeks when she stayed with her father
and petted the black lamb and the white.

In his prejudiced view, he had never done anything to make a girl hate
him. He had not always told the truth--he would admit that with
candid, gray eyes looking straight into your own--but he had never
lied to harm a man, which, it seemed to him, makes all the difference
in the world.

If he could once have told her how he felt about it, and showed her
how the wide West breeds wider morals--he did not quite know how you
would put these things, but he felt them very keenly. He wanted to
make her feel the difference; to see that little things do not count
in a man's life, after all, except when they affect him as a man when
big things are wanted of him. A little cowardice would count, for
instance, because it would show that the man would fail at the test;
but a little lie? just a harmless sort of lie that was only a "josh"
and was taken as such by one's fellows? Andy was not analytic by
nature, and he would have stumbled vaguely among words to explain his
views, but he felt very strongly the injustice of the girl's
condemnation, and he would scarcely speak to Jack Bates and Irish when
they came around making overtures for peace and goodwill.

"If she hadn't gone home so sudden, I could uh squared it all right,"
he told the Little Doctor, whenever her sympathetic attitude won him
to speech upon the subject.

"Yes, I believe you could," she would agree cheeringly. "If she's the
right sort, and cared, you could."

"She's the right sort--I know that," Andy w