“Have you earned an honest dollar lately, Billy?” she inquired as we were eating. She was about my age and had snapping black eyes.

“Ain’t earned a dollar, honest or otherwise,” Billy admitted with a grin.

“Now, Bill, I want you to give up the desperado life,” Sister Blandina insisted. “You can be decent if you try.”

“At least I ain’t shot that dentist yet,” Billy said.

“No, and you mustn’t, you’ve given me your word that you’d let him be.”

I had heard Billy grumble more than once about the Santa Fe dentist, who had evidently done a poor job of extracting one of Billy’s teeth and had only been spared a bullet because of Sister Blandina’s intervention.

Billy even seemed to shine a little under her scolding—he had the manner of a nephew being called to order by his favorite aunt.

“And what is your profession, Mr. Sippy?” the little nun asked politely. Up to then I had been rather left out of the conversation.

“Ma’am, I write booklets,” I said—I was never quite ready to call my dimers books.

“Goodness me, are you that Sippy?” she said, clapping a hand to her mouth. “But you’re my favorite author.”

She was up and off, returning a minute later with a copy of Wedded but Not Won—the first copy I had seen.

“A news agent in St. Louis sends them,” she admitted—and then she blushed.

I may have blushed myself. I suppose I thought that nuns read only prayer books and catechisms; that this welcoming little nun, serving her order in that far, lonely place, should have passed her scanty leisure reading a thinly veiled account of my failure with Dora set me back on my heels for a moment.

“Except for A Tryst at Twilight, I believe I like this the best of your works,” the Sister said. “The cowboy yarns don’t sway me—I suppose having real ones in and out all the time makes yours seem rather tame.”

That very point had begun to trouble me, but before I could stammer my agreement Sister Blandina delivered some rather sharp criticisms of Wedded but Not Won.

“I’ll speak plainly, I always do,” Sister Blandina said. “I don’t believe you were at all fair to the wife. Why, all she sought was a little kind attention, and perhaps a loving word now and then. If she’d got her due, she soon would have been won.”

Kind attention. Loving words. Got her due?

“Why, the woman had her due!” I exclaimed, amazed that any reader would think she hadn’t.

“Why, I’d like to see the man who could deny that woman her due, or anything else she might want!” I added. Memories of Dora’s icy efficiency in such matters—indeed, in all matters—swirled like dust devils in my brain.