"Why of course."
He looked anxiously at her. "In that case," he said, "mebbe the reader would want to know what the heroine thought about it. Would she want to go back East to live—takin' her cowpuncher with her to show off to her Eastern friends?"
She laughed. "I thought you were not very good at pretending," she said, "and here you are trying to worm a declaration of my intentions out of me. You did not need to go about that so slyly," she told him, with an earnestness that left absolutely no doubt of her determination, "for I am going to stay right here. Why," she added, taking a deep breath, and a lingering glance at the rift in the mountains where the rose veil descended, "I love the West."
He looked at her, his eyes narrowing with sympathy. "I reckon it's a pretty good little old country," he said. He smiled broadly. "An' now I'm to tell you how to end your story," he said, "by givin' you the hero's plans for the future. I'm tellin' you that they ain't what you might call elaborate. But if your inquisitive reader must know about them, you might say that Stafford is givin' his hero—I'm meanin', of course, his range boss—a hundred dollars a month—bein' some tickled over what his range boss has done for him.
"An' that there range boss knows when he's got a good thing. He's goin' to send to Cimarron for a lot of stuff—fixin's an' things for the heroine,—an' he's goin' to make a proposition to Ben Radford to make his cabin a whole lot bigger. Then him an' the heroine is goin' to live right there—right where the hero meets the heroine the first time—when he come there after bein' bit by a rattler. An' then if any little heroes or heroines come they'd have——"
Her hand was suddenly over his mouth. "Why—why——" she protested, trying her best to look scornful—"do you imagine that I would think of putting such a thing as that into my book?"
He grinned guiltily. "I don't know anything about writin'," he said, properly humbled, "but I reckon it wouldn't be any of the reader's business."
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Two-Gun Man, by Charles Alden Seltzer