“Well, you do the countin’.” I accordingly did it, feeling my revolving memory slip cogs all the way round. “Anyhow, there are safely fifteen.” “Fifteen.” He held this fact a moment. “And they don’t worship a whole heap o’ different gods like the ancients did?” “Oh, no!” “It’s just the same one?” “The same one.” The Virginian folded his hands over the horn of his saddle, and leaned forward upon them in contemplation of the wide, beautiful landscape. “One God and fifteen religions,” was his reflection. “That’s a right smart of religions for just one God.” This way of reducing it was, if obvious to him, so novel to me that my laugh evidently struck him as a louder and livelier comment than was required. He turned on me as if I had somehow perverted the spirit of his words. “I ain’t religious. I know that. But I ain’t unreligious. And I know that too.” “So do I know it, my friend.” “Do you think there ought to be fifteen varieties of good people?” His voice, while it now had an edge that could cut anything it came against, was still not raised. “There ain’t fifteen. There ain’t two. There’s one kind. And when I meet it, I respect it. It is not praying nor preaching that has ever caught me and made me ashamed of myself, but one or two people I have knowed that never said a superior word to me. They thought more o’ me than I deserved, and that made me behave better than I naturally wanted to. Made me quit a girl onced in time for her not to lose her good name. And so that’s one thing I have never done. And if ever I was to have a son or somebody I set store by, I would wish their lot to be to know one or two good folks mighty well--men or women--women preferred.” He had looked away again to the hills behind Sunk Creek ranch, to which our walking horses had now almost brought us. “As for parsons “--the gesture of his arm was a disclaiming one--“I reckon some parsons have a right to tell yu’ to be good. The bishop of this hyeh Territory has a right. But I’ll tell yu’ this: a middlin’ doctor is a pore thing, and a middlin’ lawyer is a pore thing; but keep me from a middlin’ man of God.” Once again he had reduced it, but I did not laugh this time. I thought there should in truth be heavy damages for malpractice on human souls. But the hot glow of his words, and the vision of his deepest inner man it revealed, faded away abruptly. “What do yu’ make of the proposition yondeh?” As he pointed to the cause of this question he had become again his daily, engaging, saturnine self. Then I saw over in a fenced meadow, to which we were now close, what he was pleased to call “the proposition.” Proposition in the West does, in fact, mean whatever you at the moment please,--an offer to sell you a mine, a cloud-burst, a glass of whiskey, a steamboat. This time it meant a stranger clad in black, and of a clerical deportment which would in that atmosphere and to a watchful eye be visible for a mile or two.