"Some fine day," he said with low-toned quiet anger, "I'll get you or I'll get him. And it will be a great day!"
"It sure will, Kid," laughed Winch. "Adios, and all best wishes."
The three riders, all seated by now, sped away, their horses kicking up the fine dust fragrant with fallen pine-needles. Deveril remained, rigid and angry, looking after them.
"You don't know," he said heavily, as the pounding hoof beats dwindled and the scurrying blurs of figures faded, "you don't know and can't guess...."
And when he remained where he was, stiff, hands clinched at his sides and face lifted to the stars, she thought that for an instant it was given her to glimpse for the first time in her life something of the realities working in a man's very soul. Almost she could see the hot tears in his angry eyes.
She was very deeply moved. Clearly here was no concern of hers; these men, all of them including Deveril, were strangers to her and their loves and hates had nothing to do with Lynette Brooke. But none the less that current of men's lives ran so strong and swift that she felt as though she were being actually and physically drawn into it. Nor, though her eyes did not once leave the rigid figure of Deveril, did her thoughts concern themselves exclusively with him. She felt a sudden strange and burning interest in that other man whom she had never seen but of whose wild nature she had heard. She resented the work of Bruce Standing, done for him by his emissaries; she felt that she, no less than Babe Deveril, could hate a man like that. And yet already there had sprung up within her a strong desire to see him for herself.
"How can it be," she wondered, "that if he is the lawbreaker you call him, thief and worse, men allow him to go on his way?"
He looked at her curiously. Then he laughed his short angry laugh.
"He's a man for you to look into, girl with the daring eyes! A cruel, merciless devil if half the tales are true and, to top off his madness, a man who has not hate but an abiding contempt for all your gentle sex. But you wonder why men let him roam free? In the first place, haven't I told you that he rolls in wealth? That's one thing. Another is his cursed craft. You wonder why I say in one breath that he stole three thousand dollars from me and then merely growl that he remains outside jail?"
"I don't understand it, of course."