"Wal, I'll be damned!" went on the rancher. "Wade, I've heerd of you fer years. Some bad, but most good, an' I reckon I'm jest as glad to meet you as if you'd been somebody else."
"You'll give me the job?"
"I should smile."
"I'm thankin' you. Reckon I was some worried. Jobs are hard for me to get an' harder to keep."
"Thet's not onnatural, considerin' the hell which's said to camp on your trail," replied Belllounds, dryly. "Wade, I can't say I take a hell of a lot of stock in such talk. Fifty years I've been west of the Missouri. I know the West an' I know men. Talk flies from camp to ranch, from diggin's to town, an' always some one adds a little more. Now I trust my judgment an' I trust men. No one ever betrayed me yet."
"I'm that way, too," replied Wade. "But it doesn't pay, an' yet I still kept on bein' that way.... Belllounds, my name's as bad as good all over western Colorado. But as man to man I tell you--I never did a low-down trick in my life.... Never but once."
"An' what was thet?" queried the rancher, gruffly.
"I killed a man who was innocent," replied Wade, with quivering lips, "an'--an' drove the woman I loved to her death."
"Aw! we all make mistakes some time in our lives," said Belllounds, hurriedly. "I made 'most as big a one as yours--so help me God!..."
"I'll tell you--" interrupted Wade.