"Jeems," she said softly. "I'm not sorry--now--that I came up to Cardigan's place that day--when you thought you were dying. I wasn't wrong. You are different. And I made fun of you then, and laughed at you, because I knew that you were not going to die. Will you forgive me?"
He laughed happily. "It's funny how little things work out, sometimes," he said. "Wasn't a kingdom lost once upon a time because some fellow didn't have a horseshoe? Anyway, I knew of a man whose life was saved because of a broken pipe-stem. And you came to me, and I'm here with you now, because--"
"Of what?" she whispered.
"Because of something that happened a long time ago," he said. "Something you wouldn't dream could have anything to do with you or with me. Shall I tell you about it, Marette?"
Her fingers pressed slightly upon his arm. "Yes."
"Of course, it's a story of the Police," he began. "And I won't mention this fellow's name. You may think of him as that red-headed O'Connor, if you want to. But I don't say that it was he. He was a constable in the Service and had been away North looking up some Indians who were brewing an intoxicating liquor from roots. That was six years ago. And he caught something. Le Mort Rouge, we sometimes call it--the Red Death--or smallpox. And he was alone when the fever knocked him down, three hundred miles from anywhere. His Indian ran away at the first sign of it, and he had just time to get up his tent before he was flat on his back. I won't try to tell you of the days he went through. It was a living death. And he would have died, there is no doubt of it, if it hadn't been for a stranger who came along. He was a white man. Marette, it doesn't take a great deal of nerve to go up against a man with a gun, when you've got a gun of your own; and it doesn't take such a lot of nerve to go into battle when a thousand others are going with you. But it does take nerve to face what that stranger faced. And the sick man was nothing to him. He went into that tent and nursed the other back to life. Then the sickness got him, and for ten weeks those two were together, each fighting to save the other's life, and they won out. But the glory of it was with the stranger. He was going west. The constable was going south. They shook hands and parted."