God aids the righteous! This from the lips of Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf!... Lynette, her nerves like wires smitten in an electric storm, could have burst into wild laughter.... She wrenched at her wrist; Standing's big hand neither tightened nor relaxed, giving her the feeling of despair which a thick steel chain would have given had she been locked and deserted in a dungeon.
Deveril was looking over his shoulder. In his glance ... the sun was near setting among the pines, and they saw his face as his head jerked about ... any one might read his thought: down there, somewhere among the bushes, lay a rifle!
Standing laughed at him. And Standing, dragging Lynette along with him as easily as he might have drawn a child of six, went down the slope first. And first he came to the fallen rifle and caught it up and brought it back to the trampled camp-fire.
"You're sneak enough for that, Baby Devil!" he taunted. "For that or any other coward act. And so is this woman of yours. So I spike the artillery. God! If the earth were only populated by men!... Now I've got this word for your crafty ear: listen well." Instantly his voice became as hard as flint and carried assurance that every word he was going to say would be a word meant with all his heart and soul. And all the while he gripped Lynette by the wrist and seemed unconscious of that fact or that she struggled to be free. "I've given you a fair fight, you who don't fight fair. And I've knocked the daylights out of you. And now I'm sick of you. You can go. You can sneak off through the timber and be out of sight inside of two minutes. Yet I'll give you five. And at the end of that time, if you're in sight, I am going to shoot you dead!"
Deveril glared at him, his glance laid upon Standing's as one rapier may clash across another.
"Do your dirty killing and be damned to you!" said Deveril briefly.
Timber-Wolf looked at him in surprise; he began to cast about him for a fresh and clearer comprehension of a man whom he despised. He strove with all his power of clean vision to see to the bottom of Deveril's most hidden thought.
"Now," said Standing slowly, "I am almost sorry for what I said. It strikes into me, Kid, that you are not afraid!"
Deveril, breathless, panting, holding himself erect only through a great call upon his will, made no spoken answer, but again laid the blade of his glance shiningly across that of Timber-Wolf.
"You die just the same," said Standing coldly. "It's only because I gave my word; that you can take in man-to-man style from me, Kid; for once I am not ashamed to be related to you. Either you travel or, in five minutes, you are a dead man."