"Honest confession is good for the soul: I did," he boasted. "Now beat that for frankness, if you can." "I can't," she admitted, laughing back at him. "But now you've accomplished your purpose, I hope you are not going to give up. That would be a little hard on Colonel-daddy." "Oh, no; I'm not going to give up--until I have to." "Does that mean more than it says?" "Yes, I'm afraid it does." She was silent for the length of time that it took the flaming crimson in the western sky to fade to salmon. "I know I haven't earned the right to ask you any of the whys," she said at the end of the little pause. "Women like you--only there are not any more of them, I think--don't have to earn things. The last time you were in the office you said enough to let me know that you and your father and Williams--all of you, in fact--suspect that I am out here under a cloud of some sort. It is true." "And that is why you say you won't give up until you have to?" "That is the reason; yes." There was another little interval of silence and then she said: "I suppose you couldn't tell me--or anybody--could you?" "I can tell you enough so that you will understand why I may not be permitted to go on and finish what I have begun in Timanyoni High Line. When I left home I thought I was a murderer." He would not look at her to see how she was taking it, but he could not help hearing her little gasp. "_Oh!_" she breathed; and then: "You say you 'thought.' Wasn't it so?" "It happened not to be. The man didn't die. I suppose I might say that I didn't try to kill him; but that would hardly be true. At the moment, I didn't care. Have you ever felt that way?--you know what I mean, just utterly blind and reckless as to consequences?" "I have a horrible temper, if that covers it." "It's something like that," he conceded; "only, up to the moment when it happened I hadn't known that I had any temper. Perhaps I might say that the provocation was big enough, though the law won't say so." The pink flush had faded out of the high western horizon and the stars were coming out one at a time. The colonel had come up from the ranch bunk-house where the men slept, and was smoking his long-stemmed corn-cob pipe on the lawn under the spreading cottonwoods. Peace was the key-note of the perfect summer night, and even for the man under the shadow of the law there was a quiet breathing space. "I don't believe you could ever kill a man in cold blood," said the young woman in the hammock. "I'm sure you know that, yourself, and it ought to be a comfort to you." "It might have been once, but it isn't any more." "Why not?" "I suppose it is because I left a good many things behind me when I ran away--besides the man I thought was dead. In that other life I never knew what it meant to fight for the things I wanted; perhaps it was because I never wanted anything very badly, or possibly it was because the things I did want came too easily." "They are not coming so easily now?"