It was long after midnight when we came into the place, over the very road and at the same hour and at much the same speed as Mr. Pinkerton must have ridden in pursuit of us, not a month prior to this ride of ours. This road from Baker City to Camp Kettle was the base of a triangle over which we had travelled, as it were, at the apex of which triangle was the Lost Cabin Mine; and when we passed the place on the hillside, where we had gone so short a while before, something of a pang leapt in my heart. I bade farewell there to that terrible chapter in my life forever,—bade farewell there to the Lost Cabin Mine. "I will have to borrow from you again," said Apache Kid (the first speech he had spoken since leaving the Half-Way House), as we came loping into Kettle at three of the morning. "Give me fifty dollars, and we’ll settle later." I told him the money was as much his as mine, and gave him what he asked before we reined up at the hotel door, where a wild-faced lad took our horses. An effeminate-looking youth, with that peculiar stamp that comes to effeminate youths in the West,—as though they counterbalanced their effeminacy, in so rugged a place, by keeping quiet, and so held their own among the strenuous majority,—led us to a double-bedded room (for we were very sleepy and desired to rest), we carrying up our blankets and belongings with us. He set a lamp in the room, wished us good-night with a smile,—for it was nigh morning, really a new day,—and we sat in silence, while on the low ceiling the smoke of the lamp wavered. The room was close, stuffy, and Apache Kid flung open the window and moths straightway came fluttering in, moths as large as a dollar piece, and other strange insects, one like a dragon-fly that rattled on the roof and shot from side to side of the apartment so fiercely that it seemed rebounding from wall to wall by the force of its own impact. Apache threw off his coat and blew out a deep breath. "Warm," he said. "It’s beastly to sleep indoors. No! This just adds proof. I could n’t ever do with civilised ways, now. That girl," and he nodded towards the west, "she is mine, or she was mine—when she found that she had been right after all in her opinion of me. And she swung back to me more than ever strong because she had been lured away. But I—" he threw up his head and cried the words out in a whisper, so to speak: "I must never be weighed in the balance before being accepted. I must just be accepted. That is why I like you. You just accept me. But I made it all right with her. She will never regret having believed George’s stories of me for when I went back to her and put the roll down and said: ’For your father’s sake, Miss Pinkerton—you will accept this,’ you could see that she wanted to ask forgiveness for having put me in her black books. But I put that all right." "How?" I asked, for he had paused.