They were hideous thoughts and really not hers at all. It seemed that some devil sent them to torture her. The unfairness of it gagged in her throat. She had fought her way out of filth and blackness to cleanness and the sun, and now, without volition, the old horror came on her again from within--clicked through her brain like yards and yards of cinema film. The current of her life had swept past its one clean tranquil place and was swirling along muddied and normal. The familiar ache was in her heart, and Rosie was herself again--Captain Mac, of Al’s Dance Hall. You didn’t get away from things like that. Well, there were things that Captain Mac knew how to do that Rosie Briggs had forgotten. She had whipped a can along the street once with revolver bullets as a child whips a hoop to the admiration of every idle man in town, and ended the demonstration by shooting a stranger’s plug hat off his head without disturbing his hair. Her whirling thoughts showed her Jim’s old .44 in the left-hand end of the bottom drawer of the dresser. She must wait, she told herself--and her heart gave a great bound--she must wait until she had them together! She laughed out with sudden raucous cruelty in the still cool night. Jim stirred in his sleep but didn’t waken. She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him, while her thoughts raced and danced, piling themselves into the bubble. And then it burst and left her weak with compassion, seeing them together in her mind’s eye; seeing them as clearly as the daylight that was climbing over Gray Dome Mountain. That fragile, empty, smart little thing and Long Jim Briggs! Gaunt, weathered, grizzled old Jim--and her! She’d no more be able to shoot than to enter into her dead mother’s womb and be born again. Feeling as old as the granite hills that ramparted the cañon, and with something too of their plain ineluctable dignity, she arose and dressed herself and built the breakfast fire in the stove. When Jim came out to her she got slowly to her feet, closed the damper and faced him. “Jim,” she said, “that girl don’t want you. Take a good look at yourself in the mirror over there, and then think of her. She’ll throw you away like a sucked orange when the money’s gone.” Long Jim Briggs stood up with his head in the rafters of the tiny room and stared like an idiot. “I smelled her perfumery on your coat,” said Rosie shortly, and comprehension dawned slowly in his face. “Holy jumping June bugs!” he said from somewhere down in his boots. “So that’s what you thought! Wait a minute. I was hidin’ it in the wood house. I wanted to surprize you.” In a moment he returned with a package. With awkward swift movements he ripped off the wrapping paper and shook out the folds of a brilliant electric blue plush dress of a fashion fallen into forgotten desuetude ten years before. He displayed it pridefully down the front of his long person, head a-cock and a twinkle in his eye.