He did it, and he did it under difficulty. He was denied the moral support of Kent Burnett, for Kent was sulking over his slight, and would have nothing to say to him. He was jeered unmercifully by Fred De Garmo and his crowd. He was “baptized” by some drunken reveler, so that the stench of spilled whisky filled his nostrils and tortured him the night through. He was urged, he was bullied, he was ridiculed. His head throbbed, his eyeballs burned. But through it all he stayed among them because he feared that if he left them and went to Val, some drunken fool might follow him and shock her with his inebriety. He stayed, and he stayed sober. Val was his wife. She trusted him, and she was ignorant of his sins. If he went to her staggering and babbling incoherent foolishness, he knew it would break her heart. When the sky was at last showing faint dawn tints and the clamor had worn itself out perforce--because even the leaders were, after all, but men, and there was a limit to their endurance--Manley entered the parlor, haggard enough, it is true, and bearing with him the stale odor of cigars long since smoked, and of the baptism of bad whisky, but also with the air of conscious rectitude which sits so comically upon a man unused to the feeling of virtue. As is so often the case when one fights alone the good fight and manages to win, he was chagrined to find himself immediately put upon the defensive. Val, as she speedily demonstrated, declined to look upon him as a hero, or as being particularly virtuous. She considered herself rather neglected and abused. She believed that he had stayed away because he was angry with her on account of her refusal to leave town, and she thought that was rather brutal of him. Also, her head ached from tears and lack of sleep, and she hated the town, the hotel--almost she hated Manley himself. Manley felt the rebuff of her chilling silence when he came in, and when she twitched herself loose from his embrace he came near regretting his extreme virtue. He spent ten minutes trying to explain, without telling all of the truth, and he felt his good opinion of himself slipping from him before her inexorable disfavor. “Well, I don't blame you for not liking the town, Val,” he said at last, rather desperately. “But you mustn't judge the whole country by it. You'll like the ranch, dear. You'll feel as if you were in another world--” “I hope so,” Val interrupted quellingly. “We'll drive out there just as soon as we have breakfast.” He laid his hand diffidently upon her tumbled hair. “I _had_ to stay out there with those fellows. I didn't want to--”