Thus with a gesture ... he abandoned wordy outpourings of wrath and hurled himself into flesh-and-blood combat. He did not turn to right or left for the dwindling camp-fire; he came straight through it, his two long arms outstretched, seeking Deveril. And Babe Deveril, the moment he saw how the rifle sped through the air and understood his kinsman's challenge, leaped forward eagerly to the meeting with him. Their four boots began scattering firebrands....
Lynette, with all her fast-beating heart, wanted to come to Babe Deveril's aid. The one thing which mattered was that, at her hour of need, he had stood up for her; her soul was tumultuously crying out for the opportunity to demonstrate beyond lip-service the meaning of gratitude. She caught up a stone, and throughout the fight held it gripped so hard that before the end her fingers were bleeding. But never an opportunity did she have to hurl it as long as those two contended.
Once it entered her thought that she must have dreamed of Bruce Standing, shot and bleeding and senseless on the floor at the Gallup House. For now, so few hours after, he gave no slightest hint of being a man recently badly wounded. There was more of common sense in a man's dying of such a wound as his than in his striking such great, hammer-hard blows with both arms. He created within her from that moment an odd sensation which grew with her later; the man was not of the common mould. Something beyond and above mere flesh and blood and the routine of human qualifications inspired him. There was something inevitable about Bruce Standing....
Babe Deveril fought like a young, lissome tiger.... He fought with all of the might that lay within him, muscle and mind and controlling spirit. When he struck a blow he put into it, with a little coughing grunt, every last ounce of hostility which was at his command; with every blow he longed to kill. And, as though the two were blood-brothers, Bruce Standing fought as did Babe Deveril. Straight, hard, merciless blow to answer blow as straight and hard and merciless....
Timber-Wolf was a man to laugh at his own mine muckers when they could not thrust a boulder aside, and to stoop and set his hands and arms and back to the labor and pluck the thing up and hurl it above their bewildered heads. He smote as though he carried a war-club in each hand; he received a crashing blow full in the face, and, though the blood came, he did not feel it; he struck back, and his great iron fist beat through Deveril's guarding arms. No man, or at least no man whom Bruce Standing in his wild life had ever met, could have stood up against that blow. Babe Deveril, with the life almost jarred out of his body, went down. And Bruce Standing, growling like an angry bear, caught him up and lifted him high in air and flung him far away from him, as lightly as though he flung but a fifty-pound weight. And where Babe Deveril fell he lay still.... Lynette ran to him and knelt and put her hands at his shoulders, thinking him dead.
A short fight it had been, but already had the swift end come. So hard had that blow been, so tremendous had been the crash against rock and earth when the flung body struck, there appeared to be but a pale flame of life, flickering wanly, in Deveril's body. Timber-Wolf came and stood over him and over Lynette, gloating, mumbling; muttering while his great chest heaved: "Little rat that he is! A man to take advantage when he found me down; a man to cheat me of the she-cat that shot me. I could crush him into the dirt with my boot heel...."
"You great big brute!..."
It was then that she sprang to her feet and, almost inarticulate with her own warring emotions, grief and fear and anger and hatred, flung the jagged stone full into his face. He was unprepared; the stone struck him full upon the forehead; he staggered backward, stumbling, almost falling; his hands flew to his face. He was near-stunned; blinded. Deveril was on his elbow....
"Come!" she screamed wildly. "Quick! You and I...."
"Treacherous devil-cat!" There was his thunderous voice shouting so that she, so near him, was almost deafened.