good way off—two days, three days—three centuries!” he suggested.
She nodded, intensely curious at this working of his mind.
“You’d gain one thing,” he said. “If you’d give me your word not to try to leave and get to a town through the mountains, I’d parole you. Savvy?”
“You would accept my word?” she queried.
“As free as you’d accept mine,” he answered at once.
She bit her lips to keep back the smile.
“I know,” he said. “But when you come to think it over, you would take my word on anything. Go all through the mountains. That’s what I’m known as —a gent that never busted a promise. Lot of other things charged up again’ me, but never a real promise that I’ve broke.”
“For instance,” she said, “last night you promised that Ronicky Doone would be received as a friend, and yet your men opened fire on him!”
“Sure,” he replied, absolutely unabashed. “I just stated that he’d be received that way. I didn’t promise. I didn’t take no oath. I didn’t give anybody my hand on it.”
She observed the distinction with a thoughtful mind. There was a distinction. Even the low took heed of the difference between an oath and a mere given word.
“It’s hard for me to sympathize with that viewpoint,” she said coldly. “In my world we could not call it fair play.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy,” he replied readily. “Not a bit. I ain’t asking you to step inside my world. But I want to find out if my world is so plumb far away from yours that you can’t even see it through a telescope, so to speak. Is it?”
“No,” she said, “I think I can understand a good many things. And I’ll give you my word that I won’t attempt to escape until—”
He did not wait for her to finish the difficult sentence.
“Mind shaking on that?” he said.
“No.”
They shook hands. His palm was as soft as a woman’s, well nigh. No labor had ever hardened it. For some reason the touch of that hand convinced her more than a thousand words, a thousand deeds, of the essential evil of the man.
“This is fine!” he said. “We’ll have a couple of good days out of this. Why not? Every minute you save out of being sad is a minute that’s gained.”
“But what if sorrow comes afterward?”
“Well, what happens tomorrow doesn’t change what happens today.”
It was the root, she felt, of his philosophy.
“I suppose not,” she said cautiously. Then she became frank again. After all, he was distinctly worth frankness. Good or bad, he was a man. “Everything is very new to me here, as you understand. I’m trying to make it out.”
“I wish you’d postpone judging me for a while,” he begged. “Will you do that? I know it’s hard for you to make me out. You can’t know how a gent gets hungry to be free.”
“I think I do know,” she insisted. “I’ve met Ronicky Doone, and if ever there was a man who lives to be free, it is he!”
Her head went up with her enthusiasm; his head went down in thought, and he examined her with a keen glance.
“You figure he’s a lot better than the ordinary, eh?”
“Don’t you? But then, you don’t know him.”
“Lady,” said the other, “I know him like a book.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Never laid eyes on his face.”
“You admit it!”
“I don’t have to. I’ve heard about him. He’s too important for me not to have heard. Gents like him and me can’t live within a thousand miles of each other without knowing what the other fellow is.”
“But he doesn’t know you.”
“Sure he don’t. That’s where he’s weaker.”
“Ah! Weaker?”
“That’s what I said. He’s got his parts. But he’s too much of a fighter to be at the top of any game.”
It was so absurd that she laughed. “You object to fighting?” she said.
“I wish you’d try to understand,” he said, irritated. “You can if you want to. But you can’t get all I mean with the first jump of your mind, every time. Sure I object to fighting. That’s a last resource. Gents that do nothing but fight their way into trouble and out of it are like wolves. No better. They’re beasts. Maybe fine beasts, but beasts just the same. What makes men different? Brains, lady, brains! It ain’t how hard a gent can hit or how quick and straight he can shoot. It’s what he’s got above the eyes. Understand me?”
“Of course I understand you; and of course I agree.” She was piqued by his bluntness. And yet at the same time it made her wish more than ever to have his respect. The respect of Jack Moon! Afterward, she would marvel at herself and her mood during that talk! “But you have to admit that it sounds queer coming from Jack Moon.”
“Sure—Jack Moon the way you know him now. Not the Jack Moon I hope you’ll get to know.”
“Do you really want me to know you? Wouldn’t you be less strong, less invincible, if any one really understood you?”
“You won’t,” said he calmly. “But I’m going to show you my insides if I can. The more you show of yourself the more people miss you.”
“Where are your weaknesses?” she said.
“That’s asking. But I’ll tell you. I’m vain. I like to be flattered.”
“But you intend to be forearmed, I see!”
“Don’t do any good to be prepared for a thing. That’s my weakness. You’d laugh if you knew the way it works. Ain’t a man in my crowd that I don’t want to have respect me. If I can’t get ‘em to love me, I want ‘em to fear me; and you can lay to it that they all do!”
“And that flatters you?”
“Of course. Take you, for instance. If I can’t make you like me— like to talk to me; of course I don’t mean anything more’n that—then the next best is to have you shake every time I come near you.”
She looked at him out of narrowed eyes. And she knew that the fellow was actually telling the truth! And yet the door he had opened let in only enough light upon his involute nature to give her a deceptive feeling of knowledge. The main theme—the key to the mystery—was still farther beyond.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m
