“Let be, Hattie,” grumbled the old man. “He’s our guest, and we in his debt. Stranger, who are you?”
“Nobody,” said Reivers.
“Ah!” cried the girl. “Now he’s come to his senses, sure enough.”
“Hattie!” said the old man ominously. “I beg pardon for her uncivility, stranger.”
“Never mind,” said Reivers lightly. “Apparently she doesn’t know any better. Speaking to you, sir, I am nobody. I’m as much nobody as a child born yesterday. My life—as far as you’re concerned—began up there on the rocks in the Dead Lands.
“I died just a few days before that—died as effectively as if a dozen preachers had read the service over me. You don’t understand that. You’ve got a simple mind. But I tell you I’m beginning a new life as completely as if there was no life behind me, and as you know all that’s happened in this new life, you see there’s nothing for me to tell you about myself.”
“You died,” repeated the old man slowly. “I’ll warrant you had a good reason.”
“A fair one. I wanted to live. I died to save my life.”
“Speak plain!” growled MacGregor. “You were not fleeing from the law?”
“No—as I told you yesterday. The only law I was fleeing from was the good old one that cheap men make when they become a mob.”