They negotiated the trough successfully to its uptilted end. She had a bad moment when he leaped for the rock rim above from the narrow ledge on which they stood. But he caught it, drew himself up without the least trouble and turned to assist her. He sat down on the rock edge facing the abyss beneath them, and told her to lock her hands together above his left foot. Then slowly, inch by inch, he drew her up till with one of his hands he could catch her wrist. A moment later she was standing on his rigid toes, from which position she warily edged to safety above. “Well done, little pardner. You’re the first woman ever climbed the Crags.” He offered a hand to celebrate the achievement. “If I am it is all due to you, big pardner. I could never have made that last bit alone.” They ate lunch merrily in the pleasant sunlight, and both of them seemed as free from care as a schoolboy on a holiday. “It’s good to be alive, isn’t it?” he asked her after they had eaten, as he lay on the warm ground at her feet. “And what a life it is here! To be riding free, with your knees pressing a saddle, in the wind and the sun. There’s something in a man to which the wide spaces call. I’d rather lie here in the sunbeat with you beside me than be a king. You remember the ‘Last Ride’ that fellow Browning tells about? I reckon he’s dead right. If a man could only capture his best moments and hold them forever it would be heaven to the _n_th degree.” She studied her sublimated villain with that fascination his vagaries always excited in her. Was ever a more impossible combination put together than this sentimental scamp with the long record of evil? “Say it,” he laughed.” Whang it out I ask, anything you like, pardner.” Pluckily daring, she took him at his word. “I was only wondering at the different men I find in you. Before I have known you a dozen hours I discover in you the poet and the man of action, the schoolboy and the philosopher, the sentimentalist and the cynic, and—may I say it?—the gentleman and the blackguard. One feels a sense of loss. You should have specialized. You would have made such a good soldier, for instance. Pity you didn’t go to West Point.” “Think so?” He was immensely flattered at her interest in him. “Yes. You surely missed your calling. You were born for a soldier; cavalry, I should say. What an ornament to society you would have been if your energies had found the right vent! But they didn’t find it—and you craved excitement, I suppose. Perhaps you had to go the way you did.” “Therefore I am what I am? Please particularize.”