Part 2

And then it burst and left her weak with compassion, seeing them together in her mind’s eye; seeing them as clearly as the daylight that was climbing over Gray Dome Mountain. That fragile, empty, smart little thing and Long Jim Briggs! Gaunt, weathered, grizzled old Jim--and her! She’d no more be able to shoot than to enter into her dead mother’s womb and be born again.

Feeling as old as the granite hills that ramparted the cañon, and with something too of their plain ineluctable dignity, she arose and dressed herself and built the breakfast fire in the stove.

When Jim came out to her she got slowly to her feet, closed the damper and faced him.

“Jim,” she said, “that girl don’t want you. Take a good look at yourself in the mirror over there, and then think of her. She’ll throw you away like a sucked orange when the money’s gone.”

Long Jim Briggs stood up with his head in the rafters of the tiny room and stared like an idiot.

“I smelled her perfumery on your coat,” said Rosie shortly, and comprehension dawned slowly in his face.

“Holy jumping June bugs!” he said from somewhere down in his boots. “So that’s what you thought! Wait a minute. I was hidin’ it in the wood house. I wanted to surprize you.”

In a moment he returned with a package. With awkward swift movements he ripped off the wrapping paper and shook out the folds of a brilliant electric blue plush dress of a fashion fallen into forgotten desuetude ten years before.

He displayed it pridefully down the front of his long person, head a-cock and a twinkle in his eye.

“That’s all there was between us! Smell it!” The room reeked of orange blossoms. “She made it for me nights, to make some extra money. It’s the kind you kep’ a picture of from a fashion book. I got it off your dresser. Do you--do you like it, Rosie?”

She tried to speak, but could only nod her head. He patted her shoulder awkwardly. The dress swam before her eyes like a pane of blue glass in the rain.

“It’s goin’ to be the swellest weddin’,” he said huskily, “that little old Gray Dome ever seen. An’ then--” he cleared his throat with a rumble like summer thunder--“we’re goin’ to Denver an’ buy a house on Capitol Hill an’ the finest auto in town, an’ a nigger to run it an’ drive around an’ tell ’em all to go to hell!”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 1, 1928 issue of Adventure magazine.]