I wish my heart was stone!" Pond was silent, for he saw the Texan's eyes fill with tears, and he seemed to know that nothing which he could say could soften a grief so deeply felt.
The Texan was the first to speak.
"Addie Neidic is a strange, but a noble girl," he said.

"Her father was a rough sporting man, but her mother was a lady born and bred.

The mother lived long enough to educate Addie in her own ways, but she died just as Addie was budding into beauty.

Addie met her lover when he was a soldier at Fort Russell, near Cheyenne.

After he was driven to desertion by cruelty and injustice, she met him from time to time, and when her father died, leaving her all his fortune, she moved up to Laramie.