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“What!” Tish exclaimed. “This is your cave?”

“Not at all; it is yours. The fact that I had been stopping in it gave me no right that I was not happy to waive.”

“There was nothing of yours in it,” Tish said suspiciously.

“As I have told you, I have lost everything but my good name and my sprained ankle. I had them both out with me when you—-“

“We will leave immediately,” said Tish. “Aggie, bring Modestine.”

“Ladies, ladies!” cried the young man. “Would you make me more wretched than I already am? I assure you, if you leave I shall not come back. I should be too unhappy.”

Well, nothing could have been fairer than his attitude. He wished us to stay on. But as he limped a step or two into the night Aggie turned on us both in a fury.

“That’s it,” she said. “Let him go, of course. So long as you are dry and comfortable it doesn’t matter about him.”

“Well, you are dry and comfortable too,” snapped Tish. “What do you expect us to do?”

“Call him back. Let him sleep here by the fire. Give him something to eat; he looks starved. If you’re afraid it isn’t proper we can hang our kimonos up for curtains and make him a separate room.”

But we did not need to call him. He had limped back and stood in the firelight again.

“You–you haven’t seen anything of the bandits, have you?” he asked.

“Bandits!”

“Train robbers. I thought you had probably run across them.”

All at once we remembered the green automobile and the four men with guns. We told him about it and he nodded.

“That would be they,” he said. As Tish remarked later, we knew from that instant that he was a gentleman. Even Charlie Sands would probably have said “them.” “They got away very rapidly, and I dare say an automobile would be—- Did one of them have a red beard?”

“Yes,” we told him. “The one who called to us.”

Well, he said that on Monday night an express car on the C. & L. Railroad had been held up. The pursuit had gone in another direction, but he was convinced from what we said that they were there in Thunder Cloud Glen!

As Tish said, the situation was changed if there were outlaws about. We were three defenseless women, and here was a man brought providentially to us! She asked him at once to join our party and look after us until we got to civilization again, or at least until the roads were dry enough to travel on.

“To look after you!” he said with a smile. “I, with a bad leg and no weapon!”

At that Aggie brought out her new revolver and gave it to him. He whistled when he looked at it. “Great Scott!” he said. “What a weapon for a woman! Why, you don’t need any help. You could kill all the outlaws in the county at one loading!”

But finally he consented to take the revolver and even to accept the shelter of the cave for that night anyhow, although we had to beg him to do that. “How do you know I’ll not get up in the night and take all your valuables and gallop away on your trusty steed before morning?” he asked.

“We’ll take a chance,” Tish said dryly. “In the first place, we have nothing more valuable than the portable stove; and in the second place, if you can make Modestine gallop you may have him.”

It is curious, when I look back, to think how completely he won us all. He was young–not more than twenty-six, I think–and dressed for a walking tour, in knickerbockers, with a blue flannel shirt, heavy low shoes and a soft hat. His hands were quite white. He kept running them over his chin, which was bluish, as if a day or two’s beard was bothering him.

We asked him if he was hungry, and he admitted that he could hardly remember when he had eaten. So we made him some tea and buttered toast, and opened and heated a can of baked beans. He ate them all.