Colonel Dexter got out of his chair and walked to the office window. When he came back it was to say: "Are they sure-enough chasing you, John?--for something that you have done? Is that what you're trying to tell me?" "That is it--and they are nearly here. Now you know at least one of the reasons why I can't go with you to-night." "I'll be shot if I do!" stormed the generous one. "I promised the Missus I'd bring you." "You must make my excuses to her; and to Corona you may say that I am once more carrying a gun. She will understand." "Which means, I take it, that you've been telling Corry more than you've told the rest of us. That brings on more talk, John. I haven't said a word before, have I?" "No." "Well, I'm going to say it now: I've got only just one daughter in the wide, wide world, John." Smith stood up and put his hands behind him, facing the older man squarely. "Colonel, I'd give ten years of my life, this minute, if I might go with you to Hillcrest this evening and tell Corona what I have been wanting to tell her ever since I have come to know what her love might make of me. The fact that I can't do it is the bitterest thing I have ever had to face, or can ever be made to face." Colonel Baldwin fell back into his swing-chair and thrust his hands into his pockets. "It beats the Dutch how things tangle themselves up for us poor mortals every little so-while," he commented, after a frowning pause. And then: "You haven't said anything like that to Corry, have you?" "No." "That was white, anyway. And now I suppose the other woman--this Miss Rich-some-thing-or-other over at the hotel--has come and dug you up and got you on the end of her trail-rope. That's the way it goes when a man mixes and mingles too much. You never can tell--" "Hold on," Smith interposed. "Whatever else I may be, I'm not that kind of a scoundrel. I don't owe Miss Richlander anything that I can't pay without doing injustice to the woman I love. But in another way I am a scoundrel, Colonel. For the past two days I have been contemptible enough to play upon a woman's vanity merely for the sake of keeping her from talking too much." The grizzled old ranchman shook his head sorrowfully. "I didn't think that of you, John; I sure didn't. Why, that's what you might call a low-down, tin-horn sort of a game." "It is just that, and I know it as well as you do. But it's the price I have to pay for my few days of grace. Miss Richlander knows the Stantons; they've made it their business to get acquainted with her. One word from her to Crawford Stanton, and a wire from him to my home town in the Middle West would settle me." The older man straightened himself in his chair, and his steel-gray eyes blazed suddenly.