"She laughed at me ... damn her," he muttered. And, as an afterthought: "She shot me in the back, after the fashion of her treacherous sex!"
He had driven himself harder all day long than any sane man, wounded, should have thought of doing. Now the thought, working its way uppermost through the fomenting confusion of teeming thoughts, was: "I'll let her go. I'll be rid of her." For already, deep down in the depths of his heart, he knew that already a girl, a girl whom he despised and had meant to pay in full for her wickedness, had intrigued him; she had flung her defiant fearlessness into his face; she had kept a lifted head and straightforward eyes; and ... those eyes of Lynette Brooke! Deep, fathomless, gray, tender, alluring, the eyes of the one woman for each man! Almost he could have forgotten, not merely forgiven, her greater fault of laughing at his infirmity; if only she had not been of the species, like Jim Taggart's, to shoot a man in the back.
He meant to let her go free and he had his own reasons for his change of front. Though she had laughed and galled him, though she had sunk to a cowardly act and shot him when he was not looking, at least she was not the coward which he had counted upon finding her; he gave credit where credit was due. He had humiliated her sufficiently, dragging her after him, humbling a spirit as proud as his own, making her his handmaiden, calling her his slave. That was one thing. And another, befogged as it was, was even clearer: In letting her go, in being rid for all time of her and the lure of her eyes, he was protecting himself, Bruce Standing, and none other! ... Fearless, he honored her for that. And yet a treacherous she-animal; so he wanted no more of her, no more of the look of her, the fragrance of her, the pressure of her upon his own spirit. He held himself a man; a man he meant to remain. And, for the first time in all his life he was a little afraid....
And then, just at the moment when it would have been better for them both if he had not come ... or when it was best that he should come ... these are questions and the answers of all questions fate holds in her lap, hidden by the films of the future ... he came staggering up to the door of the hidden cabin. And, at the sight of her, he pulled himself up, stiffening, as taut as a bowstring the instant that the arrow thrills to the command to speed.
There, in the doorway framed by the two big-boled pines she stood, vividly outlined by the firelight from within the cabin, superbly, gloriously feminine, her own slender soft loveliness thrown into tremendous contrast by the figure at her side, the figure of old Thor on whose head her hand rested as light as a fallen leaf! Her hand on Thor's head! She and Thor standing side by side, her hand on his head....
Sudden rage flared up in Timber-Wolf's heart; he gripped his rifle in both hands, contemptuously ignoring the pains which shot through his left shoulder; at that moment he could have thanked God for excuse enough to shoot her dead. She had seduced the loyalty and trustworthiness of Thor; she had done that! If a man like Standing could not trust his dog, when that dog was old Thor, then where on this green earth could he plant his trust?
"Back!" he stormed at her. "Back!"
She was poised for flight. He came at the instant of her victory over the brute intelligence of a dog, at the moment of her high hopes, when her heart hot in rebellion throbbed with triumph. She, too, at that moment, could she have commanded the lightnings, would have stricken him dead. Her hatred of him reached in a flash such heights as it had never aspired to before.
Back? He commanded her to turn back? Shouted his dictates at her in that first moment when she sensed escape and freedom and victory over him who had been victor long enough? Back? Not now; not though he flourished his rifle, threatening her with that while he shouted angrily at her. Briefly the sight of him had unnerved her, had created within her an utter powerlessness to move hand or foot. But before he could shout "Back!" the second time defiance, like a flood of fire, broke along her veins, warming her from head to foot; she sprang out from the area of light at the cabin door and, running more swiftly than Bruce Standing had deemed any girl could ever run, she sped away among the trees....