When at length she spoke it was the same voice, and yet how new! The
quality in it made Sinclair sit a little straighter.

"You have a right to know everything that I can tell you. Do you wish
to hear?"

For another moment he smoked in solemn silence. He found that he was
wishing for the story not so much because of its strangeness, but
because he wanted that voice to run on indefinitely. Yet he weighed the
question pro and con.

"Here's the point, Jig," he said at last. "I got a good deal to make up
to you. In the first place I pretty near let you get strung up for a
killing I done myself. Then I been treating you pretty hard, take it
all in all. You got a story, and I don't deny that I'd like to hear it;
but it don't seem a story that you're fond of telling, and I ain't got
no right to ask for it. All I ask to know is one thing: When you stood
there under that cotton wood tree, with a rope around your neck, did
you know that all you had to do was to tell us that you was a woman to
get off free?"

"Of course."

"And you'd sooner have hung than tell us?"

"Yes."

Sinclair sighed. "Maybe I've said this before, but I got to say it
ag'in: Jig, you plumb beat me!" He brushed his hand across his
forehead. "S'pose it'd been done! S'pose I had let 'em go ahead and