almost cloudless sky,
and he took off his hat and threw his grizzled head back with a boyish
laugh.

"It's good--good enough!" he said. "I've seen so much country all on edge
that this is like getting a peep over the wall on the other side--the
other side of Jordan. And yet that was God's country with the sun on it,
as Gladney used to say--poor devil!"

He dropped his eyes from the prospect before him and pushed the sod and
ling with his foot musingly. "If I had been in Gladney's place, would I
have done as he did, and if he had been in my place would he have done as
I did? One thing is certain, there'd have been bad luck for both of us,
this way or that, with a woman in the equation. He was a fool--that's the
way it looked, and I was a liar--to all appearances, and there's no heaven
on earth for either. I've seen that all along the line. One thing is sure,
Gladney has reached, as in his engineering phrase he'd say, the line of
saturation, and I the line of liver, thanks be to London and its joys!
And now for sulphur water and--damnation!"

This last word was not the real end to the sentence. He had, while
lighting his cigar, suddenly remembered something. He puffed the cigar
fiercely and immediately drew out a letter. He stood looking at it for a
minute and presently let go a long breath.

"So much for London and getting out of my old tracks! Now, it can't go for
another three days, and he needing the dollars. * * * I'll read it over
again anyhow." He took it out and read:

"Cheer up, and get out of the hospital as soon as you can and come over
yourself. And remember in the future that you can't fool about the fire
escapes of a thirteen story flat as you can a straight foothill of the
Rockies or a Lake Superior silver mine. Here goes to you $1,000 (per
draft), and please to recall that what's mine is yours, and what's yours
is your own, and there's a good big sum that'll be yours, concerning which
later. But take care of yourself, Gladney. You can't drown a mountain with
the squirt of a rattlesnake's tooth; you can't flood a memory with cognac.
I've tried it. For God's sake don't drink any more. What's the use? Smile
in the seesaw of the knives. You can only be killed once, and, believe me,
there's twice the fun in taking bad luck naked, as it were. Do you
remember the time you and I and Ned Bassett, the H.B. company's man,
struck the camp of bloods on the Gray Goose river? How the squaw lied and
said he was the t