He caught up the reins of the horse she had left behind. His face grew grim; he still had Jim Taggart to deal with and, therefore, it was as well to take this horse and the others back to Big Pine and leave them there for Taggart. For the first thing which would suggest itself to the enraged sheriff would be to press a charge against him of horse stealing, and in this country horse thieves were treated with no gentle consideration.
"I'll leave the horses there ... and go."
Where? It did not matter. There was nothing left for him in these mountains; Bruce Standing had the gold and the girl was on the stage.
But in his bleak broodings there remained one gleam of gloating satisfaction: he had tricked Standing out of the girl! That Lynette already loved his kinsman or at the least stood upon the very brink of giving her heart unreservedly into his keeping, Deveril's keen eyes, the eyes of jealous love, had been quick to read. It did not once suggest itself to him that Standing could by any possibility have failed to love Lynette. The two had been for days together, alone in the mountains; why should Standing have kept her and have been gentle with her, as he must have been, save for the one reason that he loved her? Further, what man could have lived so long with Lynette of the daring eyes and not love her? And he, Babe Deveril, had stolen her away from Bruce Standing, had tricked him with a pencil scrawl, had lost Lynette to him for all time. The stage carrying her away now was as inevitable an instrument in the hand of fate as death itself.
He turned back for the other horses which he had tethered by the roadside and led them on toward Big Pine.
"What the devil is love, anyway?" he muttered once.
It was not for a man such as Babe Deveril to know clearly; for love is winged with unselfishness and self-sacrifice. And yet, after his own fashion, he loved her and would love her always, though other pretty faces came and went and he laughed into other eyes. She was lost to him; there was the one great certainty like a rock wall across his path. And she had said at the parting ... her last words to him were to ring in his memory for many a long day ... that there was both good and bad in him; and she chose to remember the good! He tried to laugh at that; what did he care for good and bad? He, a man who went his way and made reckoning to none?
And she had said that she knew him for a man; one who, whatever else he might have done, had never stooped to a mean, contemptible act; she thought of him and would always think of him as a man who, though he struck unrighteous blows, dealt them in the open, man-style.... And yet ... the one deed of a significance so profound that it had directed the currents of three lives, that writing of seven words, that signing of her name under them....