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“He was silent after that, lookin’ at me thoughtfully the while, but in a way that told me I might trust him, evil though he called himself. At length he said: ‘I know a good priest, Father Corraine, who has a cabin sixty miles or more from here, and I’ll guide you to him, if so be you can trust a half-breed and a gambler, and one men call an outlaw. If not, I’m feared it’ll go hard with you; for the Cypress Hills are not easy travel, as I’ve known this many a year. And should you want a name to call me, Pretty Pierre will do, though my godfathers and godmothers did different for me before they went to Heaven.’ And nothing said he irreverently, father.”

Here the priest looked up and answered: “Yes, yes, I know him well–an evil man, and yet he has suffered too… Well, well, my daughter?”

“At that he took his pistol from his pocket and handed it. ‘Take that,’ he said. ‘It will make you safer with me, and I’ll ride ahead of you, and we shall reach there by sundown, I hope.’

“And I would not take his pistol, but, shamed a little, showed him the one Sir Duke Lawless gave me. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘and, maybe, it’s better that I should carry mine, for, as I said, there are anxious gentlemen lookin’ for me, who wish to give me a quiet but dreary home. And see,’ he added, ‘if they should come you will be safe, for they sit in the judgment seat, and the statutes hang at their saddles, and I’ll say this for them, that a woman to them is as a saint of God out here where women and saints are few.’

“I do not speak as he spoke, for his words had a turn of French; but I knew that, whatever he was, I should travel peaceably with him. Yet I saw that he would be runnin’ the risk of his own safety for me, and I told him that I could not have him do it; but he talked me lightly down, and we started. We had gone but a little distance, when there galloped over a ridge upon us, two men of the party I had left, and one, I saw, was the man I hated; and I cried out and told Pretty Pierre. He wheeled his horse, and held his pistol by him. They said that I should come with them, and they told a dreadful lie–that I was a runaway wife; but Pierre answered them they lied. At this, one rode forward suddenly, and clutched me at my waist to drag me from my horse. At this, Pierre’s pistol was thrust in his face, and Pierre bade him cease, which he did; but the other came down with a pistol showin’, and Pierre, seein’ they were determined, fired; and the man that clutched at me fell from his horse. Then the other drew off; and Pierre got down, and stooped, and felt the man’s heart, and said to the other: ‘Take your friend away, for he is dead; but drop that pistol of yours on the ground first.’ And the man did so; and Pierre, as he looked at the dead man, added: ‘Why did he make me kill him?’

“Then the two tied the body to the horse, and the man rode away with it. We travelled on without speakin’ for a long time, and then I heard him say absently: ‘I am sick of that. When once you have played shuttlecock with human life, you have to play it to the end–that is the penalty. But a woman is a woman, and she must be protected.’ Then afterward he turned and asked me if I had friends in Pipi Valley; and because what he had done for me had worked upon me, I told him of the man I was goin’ to find. And he started in his saddle, and I could see by the way he twisted the mouth of his horse that I had stirred him.”