“I tell you we are brothers, he being several years my senior,” said the outlaw. “My first love was a young and beautiful girl, and, though she loved me, he stole her from me.”
“I do not believe you.”
“Well, he married her, that is certain——”
“My mother?”
“Oh, no; your mother was his second wife.
“He won my sweetheart from me, married her, and then went to Texas to live. I heard afterward that his wife died after two years of wedded life, but I did not know, did not care, and I was not aware of where he was, or what doing until during the Civil War. I was taken prisoner by the Confederates, when in my captor, the colonel of a regiment, I recognized my brother. He knew me at a glance, and he came to me and we had a long talk together.
“He told me that he had not known of my love for the woman he married, that he had never been told by her or her parents about an engagement between her and myself, that I was away and he therefore could not hear it from my own lips, and hence he had asked her to be his wife. He was going to Texas to live, and the marriage was hastened and she went with him, and only when on her dying bed had she confessed to him that she had been engaged to me.
“Then he had written me the truth; but his letter I never received, and I did not believe what he told me.”
“Yet it was the truth.”
“How do you know?”