“Which it goes to show,” explained Cimarron Bill, judgmatically, when a week later he was recovered from the gloom into which Mr. Allison’s escape had plunged him, “which it goes to show that every cloud has a silver linin’. Clay saves himse’f; but that Ground Owl has to go. It’s a stand-off. We lose on Clay; but we shore win on that Ground Owl man.” CHAPTER XI HOW TRUE LOVE RAN IN DODGE In the old golden days, gunshot wounds were never over-soberly regarded by Dodge. Mr. Kelly, being creased by Rattlesnake Sanders and discovering that the bullet had done no more than just bore its sullen way through the muscular portion of his shoulder, came to look upon the incident as trivial, and nothing beyond a technical violation of his rights. He gave his word to that effect; and when Rattlesnake—in seclusion on Bear Creek—was made aware of that word, he returned to the ranges along the White Woman, and re-began a cowboy existence where his flight had broken it off. Mr. Kelly’s forbearance was approved by the public, the more readily since Dodge in the catholicity of its justice believed in punishing folk, not for what they did but for what they were, and Rattlesnake was an estimable youth. This tolerant breadth was wholly of the olden day, and has not come down to modern men. Dodge now lies writhing beneath the wheel of Eastern convention. Starched shirts have crept in, derby hats have done their worst, and that frank fraternalism, so brightly a virtue of the heretofore, has disappeared. To-day the sound of a six-shooter in the timid streets of Dodge would produce a shock, and whatever gentleman was behind that alarming artillery meet the fate which would encounter him under similar explosive conditions in Philadelphia. California is the proprietor of a past, and in moments of sentiment croons of: The days of old, The days of gold, The days of Forty-nine. Dodge also owns a day-that-was. Its memory appeals often and fondly to an hour when no one asked a stranger’s name, but politely reduced curiosity to a cautious “What may I call you?” The stranger might have been “Bill Jones” in the faraway, forgotten East. He could now become “Jack Robinson”; and if his case presented any personal argument favourable to such change, the liberality of Dodge not alone permitted but invited that amendment. The stranger’s life for Dodge commenced with his advent in its friendly midst and went no further back. His past, with all that to him appertained, had fallen from him as fall the fetters from the bond slave when once he sets foot upon the sacred soil of England. Dodge refused to be involved in any question of what that stranger had done, or who he was. It received him, trusted him, watched him, and when popular judgment concerning him had ripened, it either applauded or lynched him as circumstances seemed most to invite.