and I turned our talk again to suicide. I said it was small, mean,
cowardly, criminal, contemptible! I was savagely in earnest, and
Grayson shivered and said not a word. I thought he was in better mind
after that. We got to taking night rides again, and I stayed as
closely to him as I could, for times got worse and trouble was upon
everybody. Notes fell thicker than snowflakes, and, through the
foolish policy of the company, foreclosures had to be made. Grayson
went to the wall like the rest of us. I asked him what he had done
with the money he had made. He had given away a great deal to poorer
kindred; he had paid his dead father's debts; he had played away a good
deal, and he had lost the rest. His faith was still imperturbable. He
had a dozen rectangles of "dirt," and from these, he said, it would all
come back some day. Still, he felt the sudden poverty keenly, but he
faced it as he did any other physical fact in life--dauntless. He used
to be fond of saying that no one thing could make him miserable. But
he would talk with mocking earnestness about some much-dreaded
combination; and a favorite phrase of his--which got to have peculiar
significance--was "the cohorts of hell," who closed in on him when he
was sick and weak, and who fell back when he got well. He had one
strange habit, too, from which I got comfort. He would deliberately
walk into and defy any temptation that beset him. That was the way he
strengthened himself, he said. I knew what his temptation was now, and
I thought of this habit when I found him asleep with his revolver, and
I got hope from it now, when the dreaded combination (whatever that
was) seemed actually to have come.

I could see now that he got worse daily. He stopped his mockeries, his
occasional fits of reckless gayety. He stopped poker--resolutely--he
couldn't afford to lose now; and, what puzzled me, he stopped drinking.
The man simply looked tired, always hopelessly tired; and I could
believe him sincere in all his foolish talk about his blessed Nirvana:
which was the peace he craved, which was end enough for him.

Winter broke. May drew near; and one afternoon, when Grayson and I
took our walk up through the Gap, he carried along a huge spy-glass of
mine, which had belonged to a famous old desperado, who watched his
enemies with it from the mountain-tops. We both helped capture him,
and I defended him. He was sentenced to hang--the glass was my fee.
We sat