“I don’t want or expect thanks. I was thinking of the effort it cost me.” “As a man who was once a gentleman, I do thank you--which is a courtesy due my past. But now that you have put me in debt for a service I didn’t want, why do you linger here?” “I wish to help your wife.” “Ah! that’s frank of you. That frankness is something for which I really thank you. But you’ll pardon me if I’m inclined to doubt the idealistic nature of your motive to help her.” Adam pondered over this speech without reply. Words always came fluently when he was ready to speak. And he seemed more concerned over Virey’s caustic bitterness than over his meaning. Then, as he met the magnificent flash in Magdalene Virey’s eyes, he was inspired into revelation of Virey’s veiled hint and into a serenity he divined would be kindest to her pride. “Go ahead and help her,” Virey went on. “You have my sincere felicitations. My charming wife is helpless enough. I never knew how helpless till we were thrown upon our own resources. She cannot even cook a potato. And as for baking bread in one of those miserable black ovens, stranger, if you eat some of it I will not be long annoyed by your attentions to her.” “Well, I’ll teach her,” said Adam. His practical response irritated Virey excessively. It was as if he wished to insult and inflame, and had not considered a literal application to his words. “Who are you? What’s your name?” he queried, yielding to a roused curiosity. “Wansfell,” replied Adam. “Wansfell?” echoed Virey. The name struck a chord of memory--a discordant one. He bent forward a little, at a point between curiosity and excitement. “Wansfell?... I know that name. Are you the man who in this desert country is called Wansfell the Wanderer?” “Yes, I’m that Wansfell.” “I heard a prospector tell about you,” went on Virey, his haggard face now quickened by thought. “It was at a camp near a gold mine over here somewhere--I forget where. But the prospector said he had seen you kill a man named Mc something--McKin--no, McKue. That’s the name.... Did he tell the truth?” “Yes, I’m sorry to say. I killed Baldy McKue--or rather, to speak as I feel, I was the means by which the desert dealt McKue the death justly due him.” Virey now glowed with excitement, changing the man. “Somehow that story haunted me,” he said. “I never heard one like it.... This prospector told how you confronted McKue in the street of a mining camp. In front of a gambling hell, or maybe it was a hotel. You yelled like a demon at McKue. He turned white as a sheet. He jerked his gun, began to shoot. But you bore a charmed life. His bullets did not hit you, or, if they did, to no purpose. You leaped upon him. His gun flew one way, his hat another.... Then--then you killed him with your hands!... Is that true?” Adam nodded gloomily. The tale, told vividly by this seemingly galvanized Virey, was not pleasant. And the woman stood there, transfixed, with white face and tragic eyes.