them a part of itself."
It seemed to Barrett that this bitter indictment from the lips of youth and beauty who had suffered the cruelties of that land, cast a gloom over the morning. It was as if he had turned from the contemplation of a fair garden to see a black storm-cloud rising in silent portent of destruction, of lashing fury of wind, fierce shrapnel of driven hail. Yet he felt as if he should speak, to persuade her away from that brooding bitterness, so destructive to the soul of youth.
"Maybe all things grow big in men here," he said, "and out of bounds as we set them in our more conventional lives, because their tasks are bigger, their daily contact with immensity"
"You could have killed a man anywhere, you didn't need to come here to do it!"
The words burst from her as a charge laid at his door of a thing already done, bitterly reproving, dramatically severe.
"I didn't come here to kill anybody," Barrett returned, not even indignant over her implication of his intentions, his frank face lighting with his ready smile. "A man isn't under any obligation, it isn't a part of the cowboy curricula, is it?"
"As much a part of it as Latin to your alma mater," she insisted, still too grave even to reflect his smile. "If you ever expect to amount to anything in the judgment of men out here, you'll have to kill a man."
"Then I'll never be a master cowboy," he declared.
He felt that her judgment was prejudiced, due to what she had suffered in the tragedy that had clouded
