“Yes—if that will persuade you that South Dakota is infinitely better. Are you open to conviction?” “Never! I should die if I had to stay here.” “You will be going back—soon?” “Some day, sure! Soon? Maybe. Oh, I wish I could. That part of me which is like Uncle Hammond says, ‘Stay.’ But that other part of me which is like the rest of us, says, ‘What’s the use? Go back to your kind. You’re happier there. Why should you want to be different? What does it all amount to?’ I am afraid I shall be weak enough and foolish enough to go back and—stay.” There was a stir in the forward part of the car. A man, hitherto sitting quietly by the side of an alert wiry little fellow who sat next the aisle, had attempted to bolt the car by springing over the empty seat in front of him and making a dash for the door. It was daring, but in vain. His companion, as agile as he, had seized him and forced him again into his place before the rest of the passengers fully understood that the attempt had really been made. “Is he crazy? Are they taking him to Yankton?” asked Louise, the pretty color all gone from her face. “Did he think to jump off the train?” “That’s John Yellow Wolf, a young half-breed. He’s wanted up in the Hills for cattle-rustling—United States Court case. That’s Johnson with him, Deputy United States Marshal.” “Poor fellow,” said Louise, pityingly. “Don’t waste your sympathy on such as he. They are degenerates—many of these half-breeds. They will swear to anything. They inherit all the evils of the two races. Good never mixes. Yellow Wolf would swear himself into everlasting torment for a pint of whiskey. You see my cause of complaint? But never think, Miss Dale, that these poor chaps of half-breeds, who are hardly responsible, are the only ones who are willing to swear to damnable lies.” There was a tang of bitterness in his voice. “Perjury, Miss Dale, perjury through fear or bribery or self-interest, God knows what, it is there I must break, I suppose, until the day of judgment, unless—I run away.” Louise, through all the working of his smart and sting, felt the quiet reserve strength of this man beside her, and, with a quick rush of longing to do her part, her woman’s part of comforting and healing, she put her hand, small, ungloved, on his rough coat sleeve. “Is that what you meant a while ago? But you don’t mean it, do you? It is bitter and you do not mean it. Tell me that you do not mean it, Mr. Gordon, please,” she said, impulsively. Smothering a wild impulse to keep the hand where it had lain such a brief, palpitating while, Gordon remained silent. God only knows what human longing he crushed down, what intense discouragement, what sick desire to lay down his thankless task and flee to the uttermost parts of the world to be away from the crying need he yet could not still. Then he answered simply, “I did not mean it, Miss Dale.”