She laid a hand gently upon his shoulder and looked straight into his eyes:  “Don’t, Win,” she said; “don’t always hark back to that.  Let us forget.”

“I wish to God I could forget!” he answered, bitterly.  “I know the act was justified.  I believe it was unavoidable.  But—­it is my New England conscience, I suppose.”

Alice smiled:  “Don’t let your conscience bother you, because it is a New England conscience.  They call you ‘the pilgrim’ out here.  It is the name they called your early Massachusetts forebears—­and if history is to be credited, they never allowed their consciences to stand in the way of taking human life.”

“But, they thought they were right.”

“And you know you were right!”

“I know—­I know!  It isn’t the ethics—­only the fact.”

“Don’t brood over it.  Don’t think of it, dear.  Or, if you must, think of it only as a grim duty performed—­a duty that proved, as nothing else could have proved, that you are every inch a man.”

Endicott drew her close against his pounding heart.  “It proved that the waters of the Erie Canal, if given the chance, can dash as madly unrestrained as can the waters of the Grand Canyon.”

She pressed her fingers to his lips:  “Don’t make fun of me.  I was a fool.”

“I’m not making fun—­I didn’t know it myself, until—­” the sentence was drowned in a series of yells and curses and vile epithets that brought both to the door to stare down at the trussed-up one who writhed on the ground in a very paroxysm of rage.

“Conscience hurting you, or is it your jaw?” asked Endicott, as he grinned into the rage-distorted features.

“Git them hosses outa that alfalfy!  You ——­ ——­ ——­ ——­ ——!  I’ll hev th’ law on ye!  I’ll shoot ye!  I’ll drag yer guts out!” So great was the man’s fury that a thin white foam flecked his hate-distorted lips, and his voice rose to a high-pitched whine.  Endicott glanced toward the two horses that stood, belly-deep, in the lush vegetation.

“They like it,” he said, calmly.  “It’s the first feed they have had in two days.”  The man’s little pig eyes glared red, and his voice choked in an inarticulate snarl.

Alice turned away in disgust.  “Let him alone,” she said, “and we will have dinner.  I’m simply famished.  Nothing ever looked so good to me in the world as that ham and potatoes and corn and peas.”  During the course of the meal, Endicott tried to dissuade the girl from her purpose of accompanying him on his search for Tex and the half-breed.  But she would have it no other way, and finally, perforce, he consented.