"If you'll give me her name and address," said he, with the future
entirely in his mind.

"Why, Laramie!" and the Governor feigned surprise.
"Say, Doc," said Lin, uneasily, "none of 'em ain't married me since I saw

yu' last."
"Then she hasn't written from Laramie," said the hilarious Governor, and

Mr. McLean understood and winced in his spirit deep down. "Gee whiz!"
went on Barker, "I'll never forget you and Lusk that day!"

But the mask fell now. "You're talking of his wife, not mine," said the
cow-puncher very quietly, and smiling no more; "and, Doc, I'm going to

say a word to yu', for I know yu've always been my good friend. I'll
never forget that day myself--but I don't want to be reminded of it."

"I'm a fool, Lin," said the Governor, generousinstantly. "I never
supposed--"

"I know yu' didn't, Doc. It ain't you that's the fool. And in a way--in a
way--" Lin's speech ended among his crowding memories, and Barker, seeing

how wistful his face had turned, waited. "But I ain't quite the same fool
I was before that happened to me," the cow-puncher resumed, "though maybe

my actions don't show to be wiser. I know that there was better luck than
a man like me had any call to look for."

The sobered Barker said, simply, "Yes, Lin." He was put to thinking by
these words from the unsuspected inner man.

Out in the Bow Leg country Lin McLean had met a woman with thick, red
cheeks, calling herself by a maiden name; and this was his whole

knowledge of her when he put her one morning astride a Mexican saddle and
took her fifty miles to a magistrate and made her his lawful wife to the

best of his ability and belief. His sage-brush intimates were confident
he would never have done it but for a rival. Racing the rival and beating

him had swept Mr. McLean past his own intentions, and the marriage was an
inadvertence. "He jest bumped into it before he could pull up," they

explained; and this casualty, resulting from Mr. McLean's sporting blood,
had entertained several hundred square miles of alkali. For the new-made

husband the joke soon died. In the immediate weeks that came upon him he
tasted a bitterness worse than in all his life before, and learned also

how deep the woman, when once she begins, can sink beneath the man in
baseness. That was a knowledge of which he had lived innocent until this

time. But he carried his outward self serenely, so that citizens in
Cheyenne who saw the cow-puncher with his bride argued shrewdly that men

of that sort liked women of that sort; and before the strain had broken
his endurance an unexpected first husband, named Lusk, had appeared one

Sunday in the street, prosperous, forgiving, and exceedingly drunk. To
the arms of Lusk she went back in the public street, deserting McLean in

the presence of Cheyenne; and when Cheyenne saw this, and learned how she
had been Mrs. Lusk for eight long, if intermittent, years, Cheyenne

laughed loudly. Lin McLean laughed, too, and went about his business,
ready to swagger at the necessary moment, and with the necessary kind of

joke always ready to shield his hurt spirit. And soon, of course, the
matter grew stale, seldom raked up in the Bow Leg country where Lin had

been at work; so lately he had begun to remember other things beside the
smouldering humiliation.

"Is she with him?" he asked Barker, and musingly listened while Barker
told him. The Governor had thought to make it a racy story, with the

moral that the joke was now on Lusk; but that inner man had spoken and
revealed the cow-puncher to him in a new and complicated light; hence he

quieted the proposed livelycadence and vocabulary of his anecdote about
the house of Lusk, but instead of narrating how Mrs. beat Mr. on Mondays,

Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Mr. took his turn the odd days, thus getting
one ahead of his lady, while the kid Lusk had outlined his opinion of the

family by recently skipping to parts unknown, Barker detailed these
incidents more gravely, adding that Laramie believed Mrs. Lusk addicted

to opium.
"I don't guess I'll leave my card on 'em," said McLean, grimly, "if I

strike Laramie."
"You don't mind my saying I think you're well out of that scrape?" Barker

ventured.
"Shucks, no! That's all right, Doc. Only--yu' see now. A man gets tired

pretending--onced in a while."
Time had gone while they were in talk, and it was now half after one and

Mr. McLean late for that long-plotted first square meal. So the friends
shook hands, wishing each other Merry Christmas, and the cow-puncher

hastened toward his chosen companions through the stirring cheerfulness
of the season. His play-hour had made a dull beginning among the toys. He

had come upon people engaged in a pleasant game, and waited, shy and well
disposed, for some bidding to join, but they had gone on playing with

each other and left him out. And now he went along in a sort of hurry to
escape from that loneliness where his human promptings had been lodged

with him useless. Here was Cheyenne, full of holiday for sale, and he
with his pockets full of money to buy; and when he thought of Shorty, and

Chalkeye, and Dollar Bill, those dandies to hit a town with, he stepped
out with a brisk, false hope. It was with a mentalhurrah and a foretaste

of a good time coming that he put on his town clothes, after shaving and
admiring himself, and sat down to the square meal. He ate away and drank

with a robustimitation of enjoyment that took in even himself at first.
But the sorrowful process of his spirit went on, for all he could do. As

he groped for the contentment which he saw around him he began to receive
the jokes with counterfeit mirth. Memories took the place of

anticipation, and through their moody shiftings he began to feel a
distaste for the company of his friends and a shrinking from their lively

voices. He blamed them for this at once. He was surprised to think he had
never recognized before how light a weight was Shorty; and here was

Chalkeye, who knew better, talking religion after two glasses. Presently
this attack of noticing his friends' shortcomings mastered him, and his

mind, according to its wont, changed at a stroke. "I'm celebrating no
Christmas with this crowd," said the inner man; and when they had next

remembered Lin McLean in their hilarity he was gone.
Governor Barker, finishing his purchases at half-past three, went to meet

a friend come from Evanston. Mr. McLean was at the railway station,
buying a ticket for Denver.

"Denver!" exclaimed the amazed Governor.
"That's what I said," stated Mr. McLean, doggedly.

"Gee whiz!" went his Excellency. "What are you going to do there?"
"Get good and drunk."

"Can't you find enough whiskey in Cheyenne?"
"I'm drinking champagne this trip."

The cow-puncher went out on the platform and got aboard, and the train
moved off. Barker had walked out too in his surprise, and as he stared

after the last car, Mr. McLean waved his wide hat defiantly and went
inside the door.

"And he says he's got maturity," Barker muttered. "I've known him since
seventy-nine, and he's kept about eight years old right along." The

Governor was cross, and sorry, and presently crosser. His jokes about
Lin's marriage came back to him and put him in a rage with the departed

fool. "Yes, about eight. Or six," said his Excellency, justifying himself
by the past. For he had first known Lin, the boy of nineteen, supreme in

length of limb and recklessness, breaking horses and feeling for an early
mustache. Next, when the mustache was nearly accomplished, he had mended

the boy's badly broken thigh at Drybone. His skill (and Lin's utter
health) had wrought so swift a healing that the surgeon overflowed with

the pride of science, and over the bandages would explain the human body
technically to his wild-eyed and flattered patient. Thus young Lin heard

all about tibia, and comminuted, and other glorious new words, and when
sleepless would rehearse them. Then, with the bone so nearly knit that

the patient might leave the ward on crutches to sit each morning in
Barker's room as a privilege, the disobedient child of twenty-one had

slipped out of the hospital and hobbled hastily to the hog ranch, where
whiskey and variety waited for a languishing convalescent. Here he grew

gay, and was soon carried back with the leg refractured. Yet Barker's
surgical rage was disarmed, the patient was so forlorn over his doctor's

professional chagrin.
"I suppose it ain't no better this morning, Doc?" he had said, humbly,

after a new week of bed and weights.
"Your right leg's going to be shorter. That's all."

"Oh, gosh! I've been and spoiled your comminuted fee-mur! Ain't I a
son-of-a-gun?"

You could not chide such a boy as this; and in time's due course he had