The Virginian quotes

The man might pretend to look at the weather, which was fine; or he might affect earnest conversation with a bystander: it was bootless. The pony saw through it. No feint hoodwinked him.

This animal was thoroughly a man of the world.

His undistracted eye stayed fixed upon the dissembling foe, and the gravity of his horse-expression made the matter one of high comedy. Then the rope would sail out at him, but he was already elsewhere;

“

Why, your Sunday clothes told me, Uncle Hughey. They are speakin’ mighty loud o’ nuptials.

”

“Course I expect to think different when my age is different.

I’m havin’ the thoughts proper to twenty-four, and you’re havin’ the thoughts proper to sixty.

”

At any time he could have escaped into the baggage-room or withdrawn to a dignified distance until his train should come up. But the old man had evidently got a sort of joy from this teasing.

He had reached that inevitable age when we are tickled to be linked with affairs of gallantry, no matter how.

With him now the Eastbound departed slowly into that distance whence I had come. I stared after it as it went its way to the far shores of civilization.

“

Yes, seh, there is a right smart of oddities around. They come in on every train.

”

It smacked of patronizing: on this occasion he had come off the better gentleman of the two. Here in flesh and blood was a truth which I had long believed in words, but never met before.

The creature we call a gentleman lies deep in the hearts of thousands that are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type.

Between the station and the eating-house I did a deal of straight thinking. But my thoughts were destined presently to be drowned in amazement at the rare personage into whose society fate had thrown me.

Each was similar to the next, as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones.

They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away.

Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation’s first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights were immaculate and wonderful.

“Drinks are due now,” said the Virginian. “My treat, Steve. But I reckon your suspense will have to linger a while yet.”

Thus they dropped into direct talk from that speech of the fourth dimension where they had been using me for their telephone.

“Any cyards going tonight?” inquired the Virginian.

“

When you call me that, smile.

” And he looked at Trampas across the table.

Something had been added to my knowledge also. Once again I had heard applied to the Virginian that epithet which Steve so freely used. The same words, identical to the letter. But this time they had produced a pistol. “When you call me that, smile!”

So I perceived a new example of the old truth, that the letter means nothing until the spirit gives it life.

Youth untamed sat here for an idle moment, spending easily its hard-earned wages. City saloons rose into my vision, and I instantly preferred this Rocky Mountain place. More of death it undoubtedly saw, but less of vice, than did its New York equivalents.

And death is a thing much cleaner than vice.

Moreover, it was by no means vice that was written upon these wild and manly faces. Even where baseness was visible, baseness was not uppermost. Daring, laughter, endurance—these were what I saw upon the countenances of the cowboys.

And this very first day of my knowledge of them marks a date with me. For something about them, and the idea of them, smote my American heart, and I have never forgotten it, nor ever shall, as long as I live.

In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous; but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took on heroic stature.

The dealer had styled the Virginian “a black-headed guy.” This did well enough as an unflattered portrait. Judge Henry’s trustworthy man, with whom I was to drive two hundred and sixty-three miles, certainly had a very black head of hair.

I passed cowboys, whom half an hour before I had seen prancing and roaring, now rolled in their blankets beneath the open and shining night.

“What world am I in?” I said aloud. “Does this same planet hold Fifth Avenue?”

And I went to sleep, pondering over my native land.

It was seven o’clock. Medicine Bow stood voiceless and unpeopled. The cowboys had melted away. The inhabitants were indoors, pursuing the business or the idleness of the forenoon. Visible motion there was none.

No shell upon the dry sands could lie more lifeless than Medicine Bow.

Looking in at the store, I saw the proprietor sitting with his pipe extinct. Looking in at the saloon, I saw the dealer dealing dumbly to himself.

“

When it’s outside yu’, seh, no distance looks too far to go to it.

”

In settled places, like back in the States, even a poor man mostly has a home. Don’t care if it’s only a barrel on a lot, the fello’ will keep frequentin’ that lot, and if yu’ want him yu’ can find him.

But out hyeh in the sagebrush, a man’s home is apt to be his saddle blanket. First thing yu’ know, he has moved it to Texas.

”

“So that thing has got around,” murmured the Virginian. “Well, it wasn’t worth such wide repawtin’.” And he gave the simple facts to Taylor, while I sat wondering at the contagious powers of Rumor.

Here, through this voiceless land, this desert, this vacuum, it had spread like a change of weather.

“Any news up your way?” the Virginian concluded.

“Offspring of Bear Creek,” the Virginian meditatively repeated. “

I don’t remember noticin’ much offspring. There was some white tail deer, and a right smart o’ jack rabbits.

”

“I expect she is not an awful sincere spinster,” surmised the Virginian, still looking at the letter, still holding it as if it were some token.

Has any botanist set down what the seed of love is? Has it anywhere been set down in how many ways this seed may be sown?

In what various vessels of gossamer it can float across wide spaces? Or upon what different soils it can fall, and live unknown, and bide its time for blooming?

” and he smiled over this to himself, shaking his head. “What would she be doing on Bear Creek?” he next said. And finally: “I reckon that witness will detain her in Vermont. And her mother’ll keep livin’ at the old house.”

Thus did the cowpuncher deliver himself, not knowing at all that the seed had floated across wide spaces, and was biding its time in his heart.

On the morrow we reached Sunk Creek. Judge Henry’s welcome and his wife’s would have obliterated any hardships that I had endured, and I had endured none at all.

And this lent to her appearance an air of being décollete, singularly at variance with her otherwise prudish ensemble. Her eye was remarkably bright, but somehow it had an outraged expression.

It was as if she went about the world perpetually scandalized over the doings that fell beneath her notice.

Her legs were blue, long, and remarkably stout.

At length we found another retreat for her, and in these new surroundings, with a new piece of work for her to do, Em’ly sat on the one egg which the Virginian had so carefully provided for her.

Thus, as in all genuine tragedies, was the stroke of Fate wrought by chance and the best intentions.

Em’ly began sitting on Friday afternoon near sundown. Early next morning my sleep was gradually dispersed by a sound unearthly and continuous. Now it dwindled, receding to a distance; again it came near, took a turn, drifted to the other side of the house;

“Quit that,” said the Southerner, “or I’ll break your neck!”

The eye of a man is the prince of deadly weapons.

Trampas looked in the Virginian’s, and slowly rose. “I didn’t mean—” he began, and paused, his face poisonously bloated.

“You’re from Virginia, I understand?” said Molly Wood, regarding him politely, but not rising.

One gains authority immensely by keeping one’s seat. All good teachers know this.

“I’ve heard that Southerners have such good manners.”

Leave him for Uncle Hershey!

Jealousy is a deep and delicate thing, and works its spite in many ways.

The Virginian had been ready to look at Lin McLean with a hostile eye; but finding him now beside the barrel, he felt a brotherhood between himself and Lin, and his hostility had taken a new and whimsical direction.

“

That’s all square enough. You’re goin’ to love me before we get through.

I wish yu’d come a-ridin, ma’am.”

Thus, for this occasion, did the Virginian part from his lady—and nothing said one way or another about the handkerchief that had disappeared during the South Fork incident.

As we fall asleep at night, our thoughts will often ramble back and forth between the two worlds.

“What color were his eyes?” wondered Molly on her pillow. “His mustache is not bristly like so many of them. Sam never gave me such a look at Hoosic Junction. No. … You can’t come with me. … Get off your horse.

But she thought that it came from his confession about “pretty near crying.” The deeper cause she failed to divine—that he, like the dying hero in the novel, felt himself to be a giant whom life had made “broad gauge,” and denied opportunity.

Fecund nature begets and squanders thousands of these rich seeds in the wilderness of life.

He took away with him a volume of Shakespeare. “I’ve saw good plays of his,” he remarked.

All right. Call it his luck. I look around and I see folks movin’ up or movin’ down, winners or losers everywhere. All luck, of course. But since folks can be born that different in their luck, where’s your equality?

No, seh! call your failure luck, or call it laziness, wander around the words, prospect all yu’ mind to, and yu’ll come out the same old trail of inequality.

” He paused a moment and looked at her. “Some holds four aces,” he went on, “and some holds nothin’, and some poor fello’ gets the aces and no show to play ’em;

I’ll not do more than ask you if your mind’s the same. And now I’ll not see you for quite a while. I am going a long way. But I’ll be very busy. And bein’ busy always keeps me from grievin’ too much about you.”

Strange is woman! She would rather have heard some other last remark than this.

“Oh, very well!” she said. “I’ll not miss you either.”

Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, “Let the best man win, whoever he is.”

Let the best man win! That is America’s word. That is true democracy.

And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.

You should have seen the palace and sat there. In front of you passed rainbows of men—Chinese, Indian chiefs, Africans, General Miles, younger sons, Austrian nobility, wide females in pink.

Our continent drained prismatically through Omaha once.

So I was passing that way also, walking for the sake of ventilation from a sleeping-car toward a bath, when the language of Colonel Cyrus Jones came out to me. The actual colonel I had never seen before.

“

Oh, pshaw! When yu’ can’t have what you choose, yu’ just choose what you have.

” And he took the bill-of-fare. I began to know that he had something on his mind, so I did not trouble him further.

He took out Sir Walter’s Kenilworth once more, and turned the volume over and over slowly, without opening it. You cannot tell if in spirit he wandered on Bear Creek with the girl whose book it was.

The spirit will go one road, and the thought another, and the body its own way sometimes.

“Queen Elizabeth would have played a mighty pow’ful game,” was his next remark.

If a man is built like that Prince boy was built (and it’s away down deep beyond brains), he’ll play winnin’ poker with whatever hand he’s holdin’ when the trouble begins.

Maybe it will be a mean, triflin’ army, or an empty six-shooter, or a lame hawss, or maybe just nothin’ but his natural countenance.

’Most any old thing will do for a fello’ like that Prince boy to play poker with.”

Shorty struck me as “looking around” also. He was quite short, indeed, and the jerky hurt him almost every time. He was light-haired and mild.

Think of a yellow dog that is lost, and fancies each newcomer in sight is going to turn out his master, and you will have Shorty.

It was the Northern Pacific that surprised us into intimacy. We were nearing Medora. We had made a last arrangement of our legs. I lay stretched in silence, placid in the knowledge it was soon to end. So I drowsed.

“So yu’ heard me speakin’ to the express,” said Scipio. “Well, I guess, sometimes I—See here,” he exclaimed, for the Virginian was gravely considering him, “I may have talked some, but I walked a whole lot. You didn’t catch me squandering no speed. Soon as—”

“I noticed,” said the Virginian, “thinkin’ came quicker to yu’ than runnin’.”

I was glad I was not Shorty, to have my measure taken merely by my way of missing a train. And of course I was sorry that I had kicked my valise.

Din now rose wild in the caboose. They rocked together. The enthusiast beat his knee tumultuously. And I joined them. Who could help it? It had been so well conducted from the imperceptible beginning.

Fact and falsehood blended with such perfect art.

And this last, an effect so new made with such world-old material! I cared nothing that I was the victim, and I joined them; but ceased, feeling suddenly somehow estranged or chilled. It was in their laughter. The loudness was too loud.

He allowed himself a broad smile of retrospect. “To hear ’em talk frawgs at Tulare! Same as other folks talks hawsses or steers or whatever they’re raising to sell. Yu’d fall into it yourselves if yu’ started the business.

Anything a man’s bread and butter depends on, he’s going to be earnest about. Don’t care if it is a frawg.

”

And if ever yu’ see a man that hides his feet an’ won’t take off his socks in company, he has worked in them Tulare swamps an’ got the disease. Catch him wadin’, and yu’ll find he’s web-footed.

Frawgs are dead, Trampas, and so are you.

”

Catch him wadin’, and yu’ll find he’s web-footed. Frawgs are dead, Trampas, and so are you.”

“Rise up, liars, and salute your king!” yelled Scipio. “Oh, I’m in love with you!”

And he threw his arms round the Virginian.

Thus I saw the Virginian carefully rewrapping Kenilworth, that he might bring it to its owner unharmed; and I said, “Don’t you think you could have played poker with Queen Elizabeth?”

“No; I expaict she’d have beat me,” he replied. “She was a lady.”

It was at Billings, on this day, that I made those reflections about equality. For the Virginian had been equal to the occasion: that is the only kind of equality which I recognize.

It was at Billings, on this day, that I made those reflections about equality.

For the Virginian had been equal to the occasion: that is the only kind of equality which I recognize.

So I let him alone as to all this, discussing with him most other things good and evil in the world, and being convinced of much further innocence; for Scipio’s twenty odd years were indeed a library of life.

I have never met a better heart, a shrewder wit, and looser morals, with yet a native sense of decency and duty somewhere hard and fast enshrined.

But all the while I was wondering about the Virginian: eating with him, sleeping with him (only not so sound as he did), and riding beside him often for many hours.

The Virginian folded his hands over the horn of his saddle, and leaned forward upon them in contemplation of the wide, beautiful landscape.

“One God and fifteen religions,” was his reflection. “That’s a right smart of religions for just one God.”

This way of reducing it was, if obvious to him, so novel to me that my laugh evidently struck him as a louder and livelier comment than was required. He turned on me as if I had somehow perverted the spirit of his words.

“As for parsons”—the gesture of his arm was a disclaiming one—“I reckon some parsons have a right to tell yu’ to be good. The bishop of this hyeh Territory has a right.

But I’ll tell yu’ this: a middlin’ doctor is a pore thing, and a middlin’ lawyer is a pore thing; but keep me from a middlin’ man of God.

”

He seemed more the sort of gardener to keep old walks and vines pruned in their antique rigidity. I admired him for coming all this way with his clean, short, gray whiskers and his black, well-brushed suit.

And he made me think of a powerful locomotive stuck puffing on a grade.

Meanwhile, the Virginian rode beside me, so silent in his volcanic wrath that I did not perceive it. The missionary coming on top of Trampas had been more than he could stand. But I did not know, and I spoke with innocent cheeriness.

But I know one more thing I would tell Him to His face: if I can’t do nothing long enough and good enough to earn eternal happiness, I can’t do nothing long enough and bad enough to be damned.

I reckon He plays a square game with us if He plays at all, and I ain’t bothering my haid about other worlds.

”

The New Yorker also meant to be properly democratic. “You’re the man I’ve been hearing such a lot about.”

But familiarity is not equality.

“Then I expect yu’ have the advantage of me, seh,” said the Virginian, very politely. “Shall I repawt tomorro’?” His grave eyes were on the Judge again. Of me he had taken no notice; he had come as an employee to see his employer.

The Virginian looked down at his hat, then up again at the Judge, mildly.

“I had to part with my cook.”

There was no use; Ogden and myself exploded. Even upon the embarrassed Virginian a large grin slowly forced itself. “I guess yu’ know about it,” he murmured. And he looked at me with a sort of reproach.

like him, they were to feel as nothing, to be swept up in the potent heat of his faith. So he thrust out to them none of the sweet but all the bitter of his creed, naked and stern as iron.

Dogma was his all in all, and poor humanity was nothing but flesh for its canons.

Thus to kill what chance he had for being of use seemed to me more deplorable than it did evidently to them. Their attention merely wandered. Three hundred years ago they would have been frightened; but not in this electric day.

Having told them this, he invited them to glorify the Creator of the scheme. Even if damned, they must praise the person who had made them expressly for damnation. That is what I heard him prove by logic to these cowboys.

Stone upon stone he built the black cellar of his theology, leaving out its beautiful park and the sunshine of its garden.

He did not tell them the splendor of its past, the noble fortress for good that it had been, how its tonic had strengthened generations of their fathers. No; wrath he spoke of, and never once of love.

“Otherwise,” Ogden suggested, “it might be reported that you were enemies of religion.”

“That’s about it,” said the Judge. “I can get on with most people. But elephants depress me.”

So we named the Doctor “Jumbo,” and I departed to my quarters.

Better get it in the neck after a good time than a poor one.” And so forth. Their wit was not extreme, yet I should like Dr. MacBride to have heard it. One fellow put his natural soul pretty well into words,

“If I happened to learn what they had predestinated me to do, I’d do the other thing, just to show ’em!”

And Trampas? And the Virginian? They were out of it. The Virginian had gone straight to his new abode. Trampas lay in his bed, not asleep, and sullen as ever.

and there he was, going out with his bag in his hand. As I still continued to lie, weak and sore, and with a mind that had ceased all operation, the Virginian’s door opened.

He was clean and dressed and decent, but the devil still sported in his eye. I have never seen a creature more irresistibly handsome.

Then my mind worked again. “You’ve gone and done it,” said I. “He’s packed his valise. He’ll not sleep here.”

He looked pleased.

“I reckon,” he said, “I couldn’t be so good if I wasn’t bad onced in a while.”

“Why, there’s a skunk,” said I, noticing the pretty little animal trotting in front of us at the edge of the thickets.

“Yes; I have.” She spoke in accents light and well intrenched.

“I wish to say that I have never liked any man better than you. But I expect to!”

He must have drawn small comfort from such an answer as that. But he laughed out indomitably:—

“So it was!” And here she gave him a last scratch. “But you’ll be busier than ever,” she said; “no spare time to grieve about me!”

She could wound him, and she knew it. Nobody else could. That is why she did it.

But he gave her something to remember, too.

And after the girl had gone back to Bennington, the great-aunt had this thought:

“She is like us all. She wants a man that is a man.”

Nor did the old lady breathe her knowledge to any member of the family. For she was a loyal spirit, and her girl’s confidence was sacred to her.

Scipio sat silent. He had never put these thoughts about men and animals to himself, and when they were put to him, he saw that they were true.

“Nothing’s queer,” stated the Virginian, “except marriage and lightning. Them two occurrences can still give me a sensation of surprise.”

“All the same it is queer,” Scipio insisted.

“Trampas has told him different.”

“When a man ain’t got no ideas of his own,” said Scipio, “he’d ought to be kind o’ careful who he borrows ’em from.”

“That’s mighty correct,” said the Virginian. “Poor Shorty! He has told me about his life. It is sorrowful. And he will never get wise. It was too late for him to get wise when he was born. D’ yu’ know why he’s after higher wages?

When she saw that, she smiled too, and unexpectedly took his hand. “Listen, friend,” said she. “

Nobody shall get you, and nobody shall get me.

Now take some more brandy.”

“No,” said she, holding firmly his rein and quickening her step. “

A gentleman does not invite a lady to go out riding and leave her.

”

“And that won’t be anything, deary,” said Mrs. Taylor, harshly. “

A year of nursing don’t equal a day of sweetheart.

”

“You are speakin’ low like me,” he answered. “

But we have no dream we can wake from.

”

She sat lost among her false starts. Had she heard him swear, she would not have minded. She rather liked it when he swore. He possessed that quality in his profanity of not offending by it.

It is quite wonderful how much worse the same word will sound in one man’s lips than in another’s.

But she did not hear him. Her mind was among a litter of broken sentences. Each thought which she began ran out into the empty air, or came against some stone wall.

But some sentences at the end made her pause and sit still for a long while. The severity upon her face changed to tenderness, gradually. “Ah, me,” she sighed. “

If marriage were as simple as love!

” Then she went slowly downstairs, and out into her garden, where she walked long between the box borders. “But if she has found a great love,” said the old lady at length.

“

Nothing is any stronger than its weakest point.

” It was the Virginian who said this, and it was the first word he had spoken.

He thought this over. “You don’t mean all of that. You’d not have spoke just that way about crowding and staring if you thought well of them that stare.

Staring ain’t courage; it’s trashy curiosity.

Now you did not have this thing—”

I have kept my ways the same. He is the one that took to new ones. The man I used to travel with is not the man back there. Same name, to be sure. And same body. But different in—and yet he had the memory!

You can’t never change your memory!

”

You’ve got to deal cyards well; you’ve got to steal well; and if you claim to be quick with your gun, you must be quick, for you’re a public temptation, and some man will not resist trying to prove he is the quicker.

You must break all the Commandments well in this Western country, and Shorty should have stayed in Brooklyn, for he will be a novice his livelong days.

You don’t know about him? He has told me his circumstances. He don’t remember his father, and it was like he could have claimed three or four. And I expect his mother was not much interested in him before or after he was born.

“I’ll be pretty near glad when we get out of these mountains,” said the Virginian. “They’re most too big.”

The pines had altogether ceased; but their silence was as tremendous as their roar had been.

“I don’t know, though,” he resumed. “There’s times when the plains can be awful big, too.”

“You may think I’m discreditable,” he said, “but I know I am. It ought to take more than—well, men have lost their friendships before.

Feuds and wars have cloven a right smart of bonds in twain.

And if my haid is going to get shook by a little old piece of newspaper—I’m ashamed I burned that. I’m ashamed to have been that weak.”

“No, I’m satisfied. Heaven didn’t never interest me much. But if there was a world of dreams after you went—” He stopped himself and turned his searching eyes away from mine. “

There’s a heap o’ darkness wherever you try to step,

” he said, “and I thought I’d left off wasting thoughts on the subject.

to call any act evil, instantly begs the question. Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning.

Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday!

Do you fail to follow my meaning? Then here is an illustration. On Monday I walk over my neighbor’s field; there is no wrong in such walking. By Tuesday he has put up a sign that trespassers will be prosecuted according to law.

“You will come back to it,” he said. “If there was a headstone for every man that once pleasured in his freedom here, yu’d see one most every time yu’ turned your head.

It’s a heap sadder than a graveyard⁠—but yu’ love it all the same.

”

Their confluence was above the town a good two miles; it looked but a few paces from up here, while each side the river straggled the margin cottonwoods, like thin borders along a garden walk.

Over all this map hung silence like a harmony, tremendous yet serene.

“How beautiful! how I love it!” whispered the girl. “But, oh, how big it is!” And she leaned against her lover for an instant. It was her spirit seeking shelter.

“Well, since you do know about that, it was the next move in the game. Trampas thought I had no call to stop him sayin’ what he pleased about a woman who was nothin’ to me—then.

But all women ought to be somethin’ to a man.

So I had to give Trampas another explanation in the presence of folks lookin’ on, and it was just like the cyards. No ideas occurred to him again. And down goes his opinion of me some more!

And I can’t prove he killed poor Shorty. But he knows I missed him awful close, and spoiled his thieving for a while. So d’ yu’ wonder he don’t think much of me?

But if I had lived to be twenty-nine years old like I am, and with all my chances made no enemy, I’d feel myself a failure.

”

They strolled into the saloon of a friend, where, unfortunately, sat some foolish people.

But one cannot always tell how much of a fool a man is, at sight.

It was a temperate health-drinking that they made. “Here’s how,” they muttered softly to the Virginian; and “How,” he returned softly, looking away from them. But they had a brief meeting of eyes, standing and lounging near each other, shyly;

The proprietor shook his to the same amount. They understood each other. It had come to that point where there was no way out, save only the ancient, eternal way between man and man.

It is only the great mediocrity that goes to law in these personal matters.

“So he has talked about me some?” said the Virginian.

Some of the fools present had drawn closer to hear this interesting conversation.

In gatherings of more than six there will generally be at least one fool; and this company must have numbered twenty men.

“This country knows well enough,” said one fool, who hungered to be important, “that you don’t brand no calves that ain’t your own.”

Yet the Virginian stood quiet by the bar, and many an eye of astonishment was turned upon him. “I’d not stand half that language,” some muttered to each other. Still the Virginian waited quietly, while the fools reasoned with Trampas.

But no earthly foot can step between a man and his destiny.

Trampas broke suddenly free.

Gossip ran in advance of him; but as he came by, the talk fell away until he had passed. Then they looked after him, and their words again rose audibly.

Thus everywhere a little eddy of silence accompanied his steps.

“It don’t trouble him much,” one said, having read nothing in the Virginian’s face.

“Well,” said the Virginian, “if that is so, then

Providence makes use of instruments I’d not touch with a ten-foot pole.

Now if you was me, seh, and not a bishop, would you run away from Trampas?”

The Virginian took his turn at smiling. “

Mighty plain to me, seh. Make it plain to Trampas, and there’ll be no killin’.

We can’t get at it that way.”

The good bishop was at a standstill.

Of all kicking against the pricks none is so hard as this kick of a professing Christian against the whole instinct of human man.

“But you have helped me some,” said the Virginian. “I will go and tell her. At least, if I think it will be good for her, I will tell her.”

If any man happened to say I was a thief and I heard about it, would I let him go on spreadin’ such a thing of me? Don’t I owe my own honesty something better than that?

Would I sit down in a corner rubbin’ my honesty and whisperin’ to it, ‘There! there! I know you ain’t a thief?’

No, seh; not a little bit! What men say about my nature is not just merely an outside thing.

But how had he come to choose such a way of getting even as this, face to face? He knew many better ways; and now his own rash proclamation had trapped him.

His words were like doors shutting him in to perform his threat to the letter, with witnesses at hand to see that he did so.

Trampas looked at the sun and the shadow again. He had till sundown. The heart inside him was turning it round in this opposite way: it was to himself that in his rage he had given this lessening margin of grace.

He could not trace the path which had led him to this. He remembered their first meeting—five years back, in Medicine Bow, and the words which at once began his hate. No, it was before any words; it was the encounter of their eyes.

For out of the eyes of every stranger looks either a friend or an enemy, waiting to be known.

But how had five years of hate come to play him such a trick, suddenly, today? Since last autumn he had meant sometime to get even with this man who seemed to stand at every turn of his crookedness, and rob him of his spoils.