“You mean the jail jitney. Do you know, they never yet put me in one. Always conveyed me other ways. Weren’t so bad to me either. I guess maybe your heart is in the right place or you wouldn’t have let me rest and given me the drink, even if you did wait till the eleventh hour. Can’t you look pleasant like you were going to sit for a picture to give to your best girl instead of posing for ‘Just before the battle, Mother’? You look so sorry you came.”
“I am,” he said angrily. “I guess ‘Kind Kurt’ is a blankety blank fool, as some people say. I’ve been a lot kinder to you than you know. When I heard of your case and Bender pointed you out to me and said he’d got you locked up, I thought you were one of the many young city girls who go wrong because they have no chance to know better. The kind bred in slums, ignorant, ill-fed—the kind who never had a fair show. So I resolved that you should have one. Bender wanted you out of town with the surety that you would never come back.
“I felt sorry for you. I offered to take you off his hands and bring you out here among the hills, where the best woman in the world would teach you to want to be honest. Do you suppose I’d have done it if I’d known the kind you are—a bright, smart brat who is bad because she wants to be, and boasts of it? There is no hope for your kind.”
It was the longest speech the acting sheriff had ever made. He had been scarcely conscious that he was talking, but was simply voicing what had been in his thoughts for the last half hour.
“How old is this ‘best woman in the world’?” asked the girl, seemingly unconcerned in his summing up of her case. “Is she your sweetheart or your wife? If she is either one, you’d better take me back to Bender, or spill me out on the plains here. She won’t be real glad to try to reform a young, good-looking girl like me. I am good-looking, honest, if I was slicked up a little.”
He looked away, an angry frown on his lean, strong face. She gazed at him curiously for a moment and then laid a slim, brown hand on his arm.
“Listen here, Kurt,” she said. “You were right in what you thought about me never having had a fair show. Everything, everyone, including myself, seems to have been against me. I was born with ‘taking ways.’ I couldn’t seem to live them down. Lately things have been going wrong awfully fast. I’ve been sick and no one acted as if I were human up to a short time ago. I didn’t know that was why you took me from Bender’s jail. Honest, I’m not so bad as I talk.”
He looked at her sceptically. Her eyes, now turned from him, were soft, feminine and without guile. He wouldn’t let himself be hoodwinked.
“No; there’s no excuse for you,” he declared emphatically. “You are educated. You could have earned an honest living. You didn’t have to steal.”
“No;” she said slowly and thoughtfully. “I didn’t have to.”