“I built the fire with it. But when I took it from him it was a six-shooter I had hold of, and pointing at my breast. And then Steve spoke. ‘Do you think you’re fit to live?’ Steve said; and I got hot at him, and I reckon I must have told him what I thought of him. You heard me, I expect?” “Glad I didn’t. Your language sometimes is--” He laughed out. “Oh, I account for all this that’s happening just like you do. If we gave our explanations, they’d be pretty near twins.” “The horses saw a bear, then?” “Maybe a bear. Maybe “--but here the tide caught him again--“What’s your idea about dreams?” My ropes were all out. “Liver--nerves,” was the best I could do. But now he swam strongly by himself. “You may think I’m discreditable,” he said, “but I know I am. It ought to take more than--well, men have lost their friendships before. Feuds and wars have cloven a right smart of bonds in twain. And if my haid is going to get shook by a little old piece of newspaper--I’m ashamed I burned that. I’m ashamed to have been that weak.” “Any man gets unstrung,” I told him. My ropes had become straws; and I strove to frame some policy for the next hours. We now finished breakfast and set forth to catch the horses. As we drove them in I found that the Virginian was telling me a ghost story. “At half-past three in the morning she saw her runaway daughter standing with a babe in her arms; but when she moved it was all gone. Later they found it was the very same hour the young mother died in Nogales. And she sent for the child and raised it herself. I knowed them both back home. Do you believe that?” I said nothing. “No more do I believe it,” he asserted. “And see here! Nogales time is three hours different from Richmond. I didn’t know about that point then.” Once out of these mountains, I knew he could right himself; but even I, who had no Steve to dream about, felt this silence of the peaks was preying on me. “Her daughter and her might have been thinkin’ mighty hard about each other just then,” he pursued. “But Steve is dead. Finished. You cert’nly don’t believe there’s anything more?” “I wish I could,” I told him. “No, I’m satisfied. Heaven didn’t never interest me much. But if there was a world of dreams after you went--” He stopped himself and turned his searching eyes away from mine. “There’s a heap o’ darkness wherever you try to step,” he said, “and I thought I’d left off wasting thoughts on the subject. You see”--he dexterously roped a horse, and once more his splendid sanity was turned to gold by his imagination--“I expect in many growed-up men you’d call sensible there’s a little boy sleepin’--the little kid they onced was--that still keeps his fear of the dark. You mentioned the dark yourself yesterday. Well, this experience has woke up that kid in me, and blamed if I can coax the little cuss to go to sleep again! I keep a-telling him daylight will sure come, but he keeps a-crying and holding on to me.”