were in plain
sight, and the muzzle of the rifle where it lay covered them. Dicksie
thrilled, but the man was busy with his work. Breathing deeply, she
walked out on the porch again. Sinclair, she thought, was looking
straight at her, and in her anxiety to appear unconscious she turned,
walked to the end of the house, and at the corner almost ran into a
man sitting out of doors in the shade mending a saddle. He had removed
his belt to work, and his revolver lay in the holster on the bench,
its grip just within reach of his hand. Dicksie walked in front of
him, but he did not look up. She turned as if changing her mind, and
with a little flirt of her riding-skirt sat down in the porch chair,
feeling a faint moisture upon her forehead.

* * * * *

"I am going to leave this country, Marion," Sinclair was saying.
"There's nothing here for me; I can see that. What's the use of my
eating my heart out over the way I've been treated? I've given the
best years of my life to this railroad, and now they turn me down with
a kick and a curse. It's the old story of the Indian and his dog, only
I don't propose to let them make soup of me. I'm going to the coast,
Marion. I'm going to California, where I wanted to go when we were
married, and I wish to God we had gone there then. All our troubles
might never have been if I had got in with a different crowd from
these cow-boozers on the start. And, Marion, I want to know whether
you'll give me another chance and go with me."

Sinclair, on the bench and leaning against the tree, sat with folded
arms looking at his wife. Marion in a hickory chair faced him.

"No one would like to see you be all you ought to be more than I,
Murray; but you are the only one in the world that can ever give
yourself another chance to be that."

"The fellows in the saddle here now have denied me every chance to
make a man of myself again on the railroad--you know that, Marion. In
fact, they never did give me the show I was entitled to. I ought to
have had Hailey's place. Bucks never treated me right in that; he
never pushed me in the way he pushed other men that were just as bad
as I ever was. It discouraged me; that's the reason I went to
pieces."

"It could be no reason for treating me as you treated me: for bringing
drunken men and drunken women into our house, and driving me out of it
unless I would be what you were and what they were."

"I know I haven't t