For another moment he smoked in solemn silence. He found that he was wishing for the story not so much because of its strangeness, but because he wanted that voice to run on indefinitely. Yet he weighed the question pro and con.
"Here's the point, Jig," he said at last. "I got a good deal to make up to you. In the first place I pretty near let you get strung up for a killing I done myself. Then I been treating you pretty hard, take it all in all. You got a story, and I don't deny that I'd like to hear it; but it don't seem a story that you're fond of telling, and I ain't got no right to ask for it. All I ask to know is one thing: When you stood there under that cotton wood tree, with a rope around your neck, did you know that all you had to do was to tell us that you was a woman to get off free?"
"Of course."
"And you'd sooner have hung than tell us?"
"Yes."
Sinclair sighed. "Maybe I've said this before, but I got to say it ag'in: Jig, you plumb beat me!" He brushed his hand across his forehead. "S'pose it'd been done! S'pose I had let 'em go ahead and string you up! They'd have been a terrible bad time ahead for them seven men. We'd all have been grabbed and lynched. A woman!"
He put the word off by itself. Then he was surprised to hear her laughing softly. Now that he knew, it was all woman, that voice.
"It wasn't really courage, Riley. After you'd said half a dozen words I knew you were square, and that you knew I was innocent. So I didn't worry very much—except just after you'd sentenced me to hang!"
"Don't go back to that! I sure been a plumb fool. But why would you have gone ahead and let that hanging happen?"
"Because I had rather die than be known, except to you."