He wanted to tell her all, but found no words.
She said, "Never mind that now. Tell me what you are here for."
He tried again but in a wild, incoherent way. The sum of it all was that he was "ruined, degraded, and lost. He would go down to the Big Cheyenne and get a job as a cowboy."
"Now listen, Jim," she said. "You have made a bad mistake; but a man may make one big, bad mistake and still be all right. It is the man that goes on making a little mistake every day that is hopeless."
There was a long pause. Then she continued: "What is it you of all people admire most in a man? Is it not courage to see things through, no matter how black they look?"
In his then frame of mind Hartigan had expected drunkenness to be singled out as the worst of all sins; there was a ray of comfort in this other thought; he nodded and grunted an inarticulate assent.
"Jim, I don't doubt your courage. I know you too well, believe in you too much. I want you to drop the idea of the Big Cheyenne. Turn right around and go back to Cedar Mountain at once; and the sooner you get there the easier it will be."
He shook his head, and sat as before, his face buried in his hands. "I—cannot—do—it." He forced out the words.
"Jim Hartigan cannot—isn't brave enough?" she asked, her voice a little tremulous with sudden emotion.
In all his life, he had never been charged with cowardice. It stung. Of all things he most despised cowardice, and here it was, brought squarely home to him. He writhed under the thought. There was a dead silence in the little parlour.