She flung the weapon down to the floor, scorning any gift of his. Without another word, with never another glance toward him, she passed to the door, jerked it open and went out.
He sat staring into the fire. Thor began sniffing at the limp hand. Standing got to his feet; the fire was dying down and a sudden shiver of cold prompted him to pile on fresh fuel. He kicked Taggart's revolver viciously out of his way. He was going to the fireplace, but in doing so passed the bunk. He sat down a moment, wiping the sweat from his forehead ... cold and sweating at the same time. He lay back, flat on his back, and shut his eyes. He wondered vaguely how much blood he had lost coming up through the woods from the lower cabin where he had been shot; how much blood he had lost while he ran like a madman after that girl.... His eyes were shut doggedly tight and yet it seemed to his dizzied senses as though he could feel the look of her eyes, bending over him.... Now, that was a strange thing.... Never once had she given him a look from those eyes of hers to show a single spasm of fear.... Fearless? She, a girl? Did fearlessness and cowardice blend, then, that the incomprehensible result might be known as woman? For it was the supreme stroke of cowardice to shoot a man in the back. And yet ... she had said: "I did not shoot you!" While she spoke, he had believed!... He lay jeering at himself.... And all the while, as in a vision, he saw a pair of big gray eyes, soft and tender and alluring, bending over him....
"There's just one thing in the world," muttered Bruce Standing aloud, as a man may do when hard driven by perplexity and safe in solitary isolation from other ears than his own, "that I'd give everything to know! To know for sure!... Just one thing...."
CHAPTER XVII
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 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 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....