She heard but gave no sign of hearing; she kept her face averted from him so that he could not see whether her eyes were open or shut. Open they were, and the man appeared to know it.
"Am I wise man or fool?" he cried. "He only is wise who knows what he knows and steers his craft by the one steady star in his sky!"
She would not answer him when he spoke; she could not just now. She lay still, as if asleep. He relapsed into a long silence, his eyes now on her, now on his fire.
"This neck o' the woods is getting all cluttered up with folks!" he muttered abruptly, with such suddenness that he startled her. "I've a notion to run the whole crowd in for trespassing!... Or better, girl, you and I move on. Where there's elbow room; room to talk in. We've got to quarry out our own blocks of stone and build up our own lives, and we want a bit of the world to ourselves. What's more, we're going to have it!"
She knew, as every girl knows when that mighty moment comes ... and her girl-heart beat hard and fast ... that after his own fashion Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf, was making love to her.
"Dawn!" he said, and she understood that he spoke with himself as much as with her. "That's all we're waiting for, the first streak of dawn. Then we move on. Where? I know where, and no other man knows!"
He began impatiently stalking up and down; he seemed to have forgotten his wounds, and yet, stealing her swift glances at him, she could see that his face had lost little of its whiteness and that his whole left side was stiff. Again, bestowing mentally a strange epithet upon him, she regarded the man as "inevitable." Could anything stop him or divert his career into any channel but that of his own choosing? She was afraid of him.
"You told me that I might go! Where I pleased, when I pleased!"
He swung about and turned on her a face of whose expression in that dim, flickering light she could make nothing.
"You had your choice! You came back! Now I know something which I did not know before."