“Quite likely, barring the small fact that I didn’t know there was a Miss Dawson until I had been a month in Angels.”

“Oh!” she said half spitefully.  And then, with calculated malice, “Howard, if you were only as brave as you are clever!...  Why can’t you be a man and strike back now and then?”

“Strike back at the woman I love?  I’m not quite down to that, I hope, even if I was once too cowardly to strike for her.”

“Always that! Why won’t you let me forget?”

“Because you must not forget.  Listen:  two weeks ago—­only two weeks ago—­one of the Angels—­er—­peacemakers stood up in his place and shot at me.  What I did made me understand that I had gained nothing in a year.”

“Shot at you?” she echoed, and now he might have discovered a note of real concern in her tone if his ear had been attuned to hear it.  “Tell me about it.  Who was it? and why did he shoot at you?”

His answer seemed to be indirection itself.

“How long do you expect to stay in Angels and its vicinity?” he asked.

“I don’t know.  This is partly a pleasure trip for us younger folk.  Father was coming out alone, and I—­that is, mamma decided to come and make a car-party of it.  We may stay two or three weeks, if the others wish it.  But you haven’t answered me.  I want to know who the man was, and why he shot at you.”

“Exactly; and you have answered yourself.  If you stay two weeks, or two days, in Angels you will doubtless hear all you care to about my troubles.  When the town isn’t talking about what it is going to do to me, it is gossiping about the dramatic arrest of my would-be assassin.”

“You are most provoking!” she declared.  “Did you make the arrest?”

“Don’t shame me needlessly; of course I didn’t.  One of our locomotive engineers, a man whom I had discharged for drunkenness, was the hero.  It was a most daring thing.  The desperado is known in the Red Desert as ‘The Killer,’ and he has had the entire region terrorized so completely that the town marshal of Angels, a man who has never before shirked his duty, refused to serve the warrant.  Judson, the engineer, made the capture—­took the ‘terror’ from his place in a gambling-den, disarmed him, and brought him in.  Judson himself was unarmed, and he did the trick with a little steel wrench such as engineers use about a locomotive.”

Miss Brewster, being Colorado-born, was deeply interested.

“Now you are no longer dull, Howard!” she exclaimed.  “Tell me in words just how Mr. Judson did it.”

“It was an old dodge, so old that it seemed new to everybody.  As I told you, Judson was discharged for drunkenness.  All Angels knows him for a fighter to the finish when he is sober, and for the biggest fool and the most harmless one when he is in liquor.  He took advantage of this, reeled into the gambling-place as if he were too drunk to see straight, played the fool till he got behind his man—­after which the matter simplified itself.  Rufford, the desperado, had no means of knowing that the cold piece of metal Judson was pressing against his back was not the muzzle of a loaded revolver, and he had every reason for supposing that it was; hence, he did all the things Judson told him to do.”