tive rôle in this western drama in which he seemed to be cast for the tortured hero.
According to tradition this was all wrong. It was, he easily recalled, the heroine who should be tortured in stories of the West. It was the heroine for whose virtue the heavy villain with the black mustachios hankered. It was the heroine who was attacked on lonely roads and locked in isolated ranch-houses. The hero's job was to save her at odd moments, for which nobility of action he was suitably rewarded with her heart and hand. In this, his story, he was indubitably playing the part ordinarily allotted to the heroine. If, indeed, his story contained a heroine at all, he was quite unable to identify her. The women in his story seemed jointly cast for the rôle traditionally performed so lustily by the villain with the black mustachios. There seemed to be no one trying to save the hero. Assuredly, he was unequal to the task of saving himself . . . unless, when he got out of jail—if he ever did get out of jail; it was difficult to foresee what would happen to him in this particular since he couldn't imagine what he had done to send him there at all—he might go back to New York. Even this eventuality did not seem plausible in prospect. The West, represented by its females, seemed to send out tentacles to grasp
