Lynette, running like one blind out into the dark silent forest land, her own soul storm-tossed, stopped with sudden abruptness, staring about her, striving to see what lay before her, about her. Free! As free as the wind, to roam where she listed. And alone! Alone with the wilderness for the first moment since she had fled the menace yelping at her heels in Big Pine. Alone.
And walled about by the wildest and most impenetrably blackly dark solitudes. She had but the one impulse; to flee from this man whose fellows termed him a wolf; but the one clear thought, that she must hasten in search of the very man from whom originally she had fled, Jim Taggart. For, since Bruce Standing had not been killed by that shot fired in her room at the Gallup House, she, like Babe Deveril, was no longer threatened with the most serious charge of murder. Let Taggart place her under arrest; let him take her back into the region of towns and stages and lamp-lit homes; let him accuse her. Suddenly it seemed to her, wearied with endless exertion and privation and nervous tension, that there could be no peace greater than that of being taken back and placed in custody in Big Pine!
Now she had to guide her but a general, a very vague, sense of direction. It was so absolutely dark! There were stars, but they seemed little sparks of cold distant light, blurred and almost lost beyond the tops of the pines. Standing had led her after him, on his way to his lower cabin, down the gentle slope. Yes; she knew the general direction. And the distance? She had little impression of the distance between these two aloof
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 lairs of Timber-Wolf; half a mile or two miles, she did not know. She would go on and on, seeking a way among the trees; on and on and on, stumbling in the dark. Then, after a while, she would call; call and call again, praying that Taggart and the others were lurking somewhere within ear-shot; that they would hear and come to her ... and place her under arrest! And she wondered, as she had done so many a time to-day, where was Babe Deveril? Was he near? Would he, by any chance, hear her? Would he, too, come to her? And, then, what?
She began hastening on; to be farther from him, though that meant to come at every step nearer Jim Taggart and Young Gallup and that other man with the hawk face. She could not be absolutely certain that the direction she set her course by would ever lead her to the lower cabin; but on one point she was assured: at every step she was getting farther from wolf-man and wolf-dog. What a brute, what a beast he was! And yet ... and yet.... There swept across her, like a clean, cold wind out of the north, a sudden appreciation of those finer qualities of manhood which his nature and his fate had allowed to dwell on in that anomaly, Bruce Standing. His absolute honesty, itself like a north wind, was not to be gainsaid even by his bitterest enemy; his courage, in any woman's eyes, was invested with sheer nobility. How he had befriended poor little Mexicali Joe; how, to-night for the second time, though handicapped by his wound, he had gone to Joe's relief; how he, one against three, had had his way, like a lion among curs. Wolf or lion?... And, finally, she abode wonderingly on that queer, distorted chivalry which resided in the heart of him, his brutally chivalrous way with her. For, no matter how harsh and bitter his tongue had been and no matter how hard his eye, he
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 had not harmed her; when his hands had been like steel upon hers, commanding her while he jeered at her, they had not once so much as bruised her soft skin. In no way had he harmed her while it had been at his command, had he desired, to harm her in all ways.... She thought of being alone with any man like Taggart or Gallup or that hawk-faced hanger-on of theirs ... and shuddered. Even Babe Deveril; he had looked at her last night, insinuating.... She remembered how Bruce Standing, rushing down upon them, had thrown his own rifle away to grapple with Deveril, man to man and no odds stolen; she would never forget the picture of him with his axe, attacking the jail and defying the law.... Her mind raced, her thoughts switched into a new groove: how he had set her free just now and tossed her the revolver....
And then came the most vivid picture of all, the latest one, that of Bruce Standing glaring at her just before she ran out of the cabin. A second time she came to a sudden stop. He had looked like a man dying! Too proud, with that vainglorious pride of his, to have her, a girl, watch him, a man, die. Too unyieldingly proud and defiant to have her, a weakling, look on while he, the strongest man she had ever glimpsed, yielded in anything, if even to death itself. What a man he was! A man wrong-minded, maybe; a man who overrode others and bore them down; a man who set up his own standards, such as they were, and battled for them wholeheartedly. Even in the matter of high-handed robbery ... he had robbed Babe Deveril of three thousand dollars, and yet voluntarily, when he was ready to make restitution and not before, he had returned the full amount, estimating in his own way that he had merely borrowed it! There was the man disclosed; one who made his own laws, and yet who abode by them as
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loyally and as unswervingly as a true priest may abide by God's....
And he had looked like a man dying. She turned her head. The door of his cabin was still wide open, as she had left it; light, though failing, still gushed out. She told herself that it was only a natural curiosity, surely her sex's most irrefutable prerogative, that made her turn and look. She caught no sight of him; he was not striding up and down. And he had not come outside for his fallen rifle....
Her breast rose and fell to a deep sigh. Of relief, perhaps; perhaps for another emotion. Still she remained where she was, pondering. Which way lay the path to the other cabin, where Taggart and Gallup and the other man were? And what was Bruce Standing doing? He had named her "Liar!" He did not believe when she had cried out passionately: "I did not shoot you!" Darting considerations, flashing through her consciousness. The one question was: "Was Bruce Standing mortally wounded?" Shot in the back a second time; he had as much as told her that.
Babe Deveril was what the world names a ladies' man. Bruce Standing was a man's man. And the strange part of it is that the feminine soul is drawn to the man's man inevitably more urgently than to the ladies' man....
And all the while Lynette was saying to herself: "He is a brute and a beast and yet ... he has not harmed me once and he has set me free and there is some good in him and ... and he may be dying! Alone."
She had turned her head to look back; now, hesitatingly, her whole body turned. Slowly, silently, she retraced her steps. She came closer and closer to the hidden cabin; the light outlining the open door grew fainter, dimmer as the fire died down; she heard no sound; she
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 caught no glimpse of a man within. She drew still closer; she heard the strange whining of his dog. Even Thor she could not see until, lingering at every step, she came close to the door. Then she saw both, the man on his back, his lax hand on the floor; the dog whining, distressed, licking the hand one instant and then looking wistfully into the master's face. A face bloodlessly white, save for one smear of blood, where a hand had sought to wipe his eyes clear of a gathering film.
Hesitating no longer, she stepped across the threshold. Thor looked at her and broke into a new whining, a note of sudden joyousness in it. Standing did not hear and did not know that she had returned; his eyes were shut and there was the pulse as of distant seas in his ears. She hurried to the fireplace and tossed into it the last of the wood he had gathered; then she came swiftly to where he lay. Her heart was beating wildly....
She saw that his jaw was set, hard and stubborn. She stood, uncertain, troubled, half regretful that she had come back, hence half of a mind to go hurriedly. But she did not stir for a long time, and then only to come the last step closer. His eyes flew open; he looked up at her. And, as the fire she had freshly piled blazed higher, she saw a sudden flash of his eyes ... whether the reflection of the fire or the flash of the spirit within him, she could not tell.
"I thought you'd gone," he said. He sat up; it was a struggle for him to do so, yet here was a man who made of all his life a struggle and who thought nothing of a trifling victory over either nature itself or his fellow man.
"You have been cruel...."
He mocked her with his haggard eyes.
"That," she ran on swiftly, "is what you expected me to say to you, Bruce Standing, that you have been
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 cruel! And, what I came back to say is: 'You have been good to me!'"
She had not meant to say anything of the kind. But when she looked into his eyes, when she saw the clear-as-crystal soul of him, a soul as simple as a child's and ... yes!... as clean; and when she remembered how she had ridden all day long while he had walked, and how he had steadfastly refused to so much as harm a hair of her head, the words gushed forth.
He eyed her queerly; suspicion in his look and confusion. She could have laughed out aloud suddenly, since her whole emotional being was aquiver; for he, Timber-Wolf, like his own wolf-dog, Thor, distrusted her and regarded her with fierce eyes and yet ... and yet....
"Your wound has not been dressed since morning," she said quietly. "And now you've got yourself another wound. I am going to help you with them."
His slave.... He had commanded her once to help him with his wound.... But his slave no longer, since he himself had set her free! Yet here she was, saying that she stood ready to help him care for his wounds. More, already she was getting warm water, and his old piece of castile soap ... she was rolling up her sleeves....
He glared at her through a mist. He could be sure of nothing, since it seemed to him that she was half smiling! A tender, wistful sort of smile ... as if she had it in her heart to forget injuries done, to forgive him who had done them, and to succor him now that there was little of man-strength left in his body.... Curse her! What right had she to forgive, to look at a man that way? He had asked nothing from her, save that she leave him....
He stirred uneasily. Had she smiled? In this
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uncertain light one could be certain of nothing; the flickering of the wood fire, casting quick-racing little shadows, breaking into their play with sudden warm, rosy gleamings, made it impossible for him to know if she had smiled, or if that semblance of a smile were but the effect of shifting lights. He held himself rigid, his back to the wall now............