The Lost Cabin Mine

by Frederick Niven

The room was close, stuffy, and Apache Kid flung open the window and moths straightway came fluttering in, moths as large as a dollar piece, and other strange insects, one like a dragon-fly that rattled on the roof and shot from side to side of the apartment so fiercely that it seemed rebounding from wall to wall by the force of its own impact.

Apache threw off his coat and blew out a deep breath.

"Warm," he said. "It's beastly to sleep indoors. No! This just adds proof. I could n't ever do with civilised ways, now. That girl," and he nodded towards the west, "she is mine, or she was mine—when she found that she had been right after all in her opinion of me. And she swung back to me more than ever strong because she had been lured away. But I—" he threw up his head and cried the words out in a whisper, so to speak: "I must never be weighed in the balance before being accepted. I must just be accepted. That is why I like you. You just accept me. But I made it all right with her. She will never regret having believed George's stories of me for when I went back to her and put the roll down and said: 'For your father's sake, Miss Pinkerton—you will accept this,' you could see that she wanted to ask forgiveness for having put me in her black books. But I put that all right."

"How?" I asked, for he had paused.

"Oh, I told her I was a villain, told her I fully expected to be arrested there and had only stopped to settle my promise to her father. It was a different thing for me to tell her I was a villain from another telling her that. When a villain tells his villainy to the ear of a woman he becomes almost a hero to her. She begged me to change my ways, and I promised that for her sake I would. Quite romantic, eh? A touch of Sydney Carton—eh?" and he laughed. "And now she will remember me, if she does not indeed forget me, as a good fellow gone wrong, and thank God she has so good a husband as George. And George is not so bad a fellow. He can appreciate his master when he meets him. That is one good point about George. George is like the lion in the cage, the lion that roars in rage after the tamer has gone and determines to slay him on his next visit. But on the next visit he goes through his tricks as usual. It's a pleasure at least to know that George at last was forced to hold out his hand to me and call himself my friend. He does n't know why he did. He 'll remember and wonder and he'll never understand. That day that he came in and held me up,—you remember?—I said to myself: 'You come to kill me to-day, but the day will come, not when I will crush you, but when you will come to me just like my little poodle dog.'"

He broke off and smote the buzzing insect to the floor as it blundered past his face (he was sitting on a chair with his arms folded on the back) and drew his foot across it.

"And he came, didn't he?" he added. "My poodle dog!

"But after all," he said, after a pause, "a woman that could be moved by my little poodle dog could never be the woman for me. When I look for a woman it must be one who does not doubt me—and who does not fear me. She did not fear me and that was why I thought— Ah well, you see, she doubted me. But let's to bed."

So we put out the light and turned in.

But I lay some time considering that Apache Kid was not the domineering man his words might have caused one to think. He covered up a deal of what was in his heart with a froth of words.