crazy. Maybe she wasn't sure of her own mind, I don't know. But I
do know that she didn't give in as easy as I did to Billy.
Finally, he couldn't stand it any more. Ha rode up that night on
horseback, wild as could be. 'Sadie,' he said, 'if you don't
promise to marry me to-morrow, I'll shoot myself to-night right
back of the corral.' And he'd have done it, too, and Sadie knew
it, and said she would. Didn't they make love fast in those
days?"

"Oh, I don't know," Mary sniffed. "A week after you first laid
eyes on Billy you was engaged. Did Billy say he was going to
shoot himself back of the laundry if you turned him down?"

"I didn't give him a chance," Saxon confessed. "Anyway Del
Hancock and Aunt Sadie got married next day. And they were very
happy afterward, only she died. And after that he was killed,
with General Custer and all the rest, by the Indians. He was an
old man by then, but I guess he got his share of Indians before
they got him. Men like him always died fighting, and they took
their dead with them. I used to know Al Stanley when I was a
little girl. He was a gambler, but he was game. A railroad man
shot him in the back when he was sitting at a table. That shot
killed him, too. He died in about two seconds. But before he died
he'd pulled his gun and put three bullets into the man that
killed him."

"I don't like fightin'," Mary protested. "It makes me nervous.
Bert gives me the willies the way he's always lookin' for
trouble. There ain't no sense in it."