John Brent. Theodore Winthrop

morning the two strangers were free and accepted members of the party. They travelled on with us without question. Smith the gaunt affected a rough frankness of manner. Robinson was low comedy. His head was packed with scurvy jokes and stories. He had a foul leer on his face whenever he was thinking his own thoughts. But either, if suddenly startled, showed the unmistakable look that announces worse crime than mere knavery.

      They tangled their names so that we perceived each was an alias hastily assumed. Smith compared six-shooters with me. I detected on his the name Murker, half erased. Once, too, Brent heard Murker, alias Smith, call his partner Larrap.

      “Larrap is appropriate,” said I, when Brent told me this; “just the name for him, as that unlucky mule branded ‘ A. & A.’ could testify.”

      “The long ruffian studied my face, when he made that slip, to see if I had heard. He might as well have inspected the air for the mark of his traitorous syllables.”

      “You claim that your phiz is so covered with hieroglyphs, inscriptions of fine feeling, that there is no room to write suspicions of other men’s villany?”

      “A clean heart keeps a clean face. A guilty heart will announce itself at eyes and lips and cheeks, and by a thousand tremors of the nerves. I have no prejudices against the family Larrap. But when Larrap’s mate spoke the name, he looked at me as if he had been committing a murder, and had by an irresistible impulse proclaimed the fact. Look at him now! how he starts and half turns whenever one of our horses makes a clatter. He dares not quite look back. He knows there is something after him.”

      “The dread of a vengeance, you think. That’s a blacker follower than ‘Atra cura post equitem.’ ”

      I tire of these unwholesome characters I am describing. But I did not put them into the story. They took their places themselves. I find that brutality interferes in most dramas and most lives. Brutality the male sin, disloyalty the female sin—these two are always doing their best to baffle and blight heroism and purity. Often they succeed. Oftener they fail. And so the world exists, and is not annulled; its history is the history of the struggle and the victory. This episode of my life is a brief of the world’s complete experience.