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"'Minds me o' goin' to meetin' when I was a six-year-old," mused Mancos Mitch; "when Circuit's pencil got to smokin' over th' paper an' we-uns got so dedburned still, 'peared to me like I was back in th' little ol' meetin'-house in th' mosquito clearin', on th' banks o' th' Lee in ol' Uvalde County.
Come the Fall of the eighth year of his exile from Netty, Circuit had accumulated two thousand dollars, and it was unanimously voted by the Cross Cañon outfit, gathered in solemn conclave at Circuit's request, that he might venture to return to claim her.
As soon as Circuit's dressing was finished and he had received assurance from the angular fragment of mirror nailed above the wash-basin that his hair was smoothly combed and a new neckerchief neatly knotted, he produced paper and an envelope from his war sack, seated himself at the end of the long dinner-table, farthest from the fireplace, lighted a fresh candle, spread out his five treasures, carefully sharpened a stub pencil, and duly set its lead end a-soak in his mouth, preparatory to the composition of a letter.
Then he drew from beneath his shirt something none of them had seen before, a buckskin bag, out of which he pulled a fat blank memorandum book, into which he proceeded to copy, in as small a hand as he could write, every line of his sweetheart's letters. Later they learned that this bag and its contents never left Circuit's body, nestled always over his heart, suspended by a buckskin thong!
Swaying for a moment with the shock of the wound, down to the ground he settled like an empty sack, falling across the legs of the ticket-seller. Startled and shocked, it seemed, by the consequences of her deed, the woman approached and for a moment gazed down, horror-stricken, into Circuit's face.
Before many months had passed, Circuit's regular weekly letter to Netty regular when on the ranch and the ceremonial purification and personal decking that preceded it, had become for the Cross Cañon outfit a public ceremony all studiously observed.
In the twilight of an Autumn day that happened to be the twenty-second anniversary of Circuit's death, two grizzled old ranchmen, ambling slowly out of Mancos along the Dolores trail, rode softly up to a corner of the burying ground and stopped. There within, hard by, a woman, bent and gnarled and gray as the sage-brush about her, was tenderly decking a grave with piñon wreaths.
Ripping his shirt open at the neck to find his wound, she uncovered Circuit's buckskin bag and memorandum book, showing through its centre the track of a bullet that had finally spent itself in fracturing a rib over Circuit's heart, the ticket-seller's shot, that would have killed him instantly but for the shielding bulk Netty's treasured letters interposed.
Stalwart canvasmen rushed to their chief's call till Circuit's bunch were outnumbered three to one by tough trained battlers on many a tented field, armed with hand weapons of all sorts.
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