his hitting one of them, all began to quarrel together, the Senator and the girl slipped away, and ran and hid in the scrub.  If you could have heard him telling all this, Mamma, in the dying light, his strong face and quiet voice so impressive!  I shall never forget it.  Well, the girl had brought some bread in a handkerchief, which he had not eaten, and they shared that together, and when it was dark they slept under the stars; and “by then I’d just grown to love her,” he said, and “we were quite content to die together if we couldn’t push on to the big camp; but we meant to make an almighty try.”

They did get there, finally, and the sheriff married them, and here his voice broke a little and was so low I could hardly hear him.  There were no two people ever so happy, he said.  He built a little shack of boards not twelve feet long, “way up on the mountain,” and she kept it like a new pin, and was dainty and sweet and loving, and when he came in from the mines she would run to meet him “as gentle as a fawn,” and he never wanted to go to the saloons or drink like the other men, “though I was always pretty handy with my gun,” he said, “and had been through the whole ugly show.”

And presently he began to make a little money and would contrive to give her small things for the house; it gave her more pleasure than anything in the world to make it pretty, so that the little shed was the admiration of all the other miners’ wives.  And once he was able to buy some flower seeds, and she grew a pansy in a pot because there is no green thing in that barren land, and she tended it and watched it as it came through the earth, and no one was so joyous as she.  “It hurts me to look at pansies even now,” he said; and I was glad, Mamma, it was getting dark, because I felt the tears coming in my eyes.  They were perfectly happy like this for about three years, and then Lola was born and they were happier still; but before that she used to take him up on the mountains, above their shack, to look down at the camps, and watch the stars, and she always used to see things in the future—­how they would be very rich, and he would be a great man.  “And this is where blood tells,” he said.  “She was nothing but the love-child of some young English lord, drifted out to our land with her servant-girl mother.  And she’d spent all her life in gambling hells among rogues, but her soul was the daintiest lady angel that ever walked this earth, though she could hardly read or write, and all the stars were her friends, and even a rattlesnake wouldn’t have wounded her.”  Mustn’t she have been a darling, Mamma?  She had hair like gold, and little ears, pink as sea shells, and big blue eyes and a flower for a mouth.  No wonder he loved her so.  He said her baby was even more pleasure to her than the pansy had been, and they both were “just kind of foolish over it.”  Well, when Lola was about three months old a gang of desperadoes came to the camp, and among them the man