The most perfect of the summer months in this secluded mountain nook, not inaptly named "Eden" by Standing, was a period of time measuring itself in soft, fragrant loveliness. The days were balmy, perfect, halcyon; gentle hours of blue cloudlessness and golden sunshine and little breezes which scarcely ruffled the clear water in the bigger pools; night as clear as crystal, with flaring stars like distant torches above the yellow pine tops; nature in her gentlest mood here among the ruggedness of the wilderness, expressing herself in the most delightful of odors wafted through the woods, in the tenderest tiniest blossoms of wild flowers; a time of infinite hush and infinite solitude and peace.
To have chafed and been unhappy here, to a spirit like either Bruce Standing's or Lynette Brooke's, would have seemed next door to an impossibility. Even the girl, though restrained, a prisoner of a man's will when the bright star of her life had ever been one of splendid independence, found it easier to smile or laugh aloud at the sober-faced antics of Thor ... when she and Thor were alone with none to see!... than to sigh. She knew her periods of restiveness and bitter rebellion; they were due not to her environment, but to the thought that another than herself was dictating to her. But for one reason or another these periods were rarer and briefer than her other hours of a strange sort of peacefulness.
"It's because I've been worn out and only now am resting," she tried to tell herself. "Recuperating from a condition of exhausted mind and body."
Thus four days and nights passed. There had been, during all that time, not the slightest opportunity toescape. The first day Standing had hurled the chain from him, as far as he could send it. But he had not lost sight of her for more than a few minutes at a time, saving such times that she gave him her promise that she would wait for him to come back. He accepted her word as he expected all the world to accept his. On other occasions, when he allowed her briefer freedoms, he had said merely: "No chance to run for it, girl! I'd overtake you, you know, in no time. Even if you hid, here'd be old Thor, nosing you out!" Then he laughed, adding: "For his own sake, the renegade, as well as for his master's! He's fallen in love with you, too." He made her bed in the rock-and-tree grotto; he labored, one-handed, over it for hours. With his heavy clasp knife he cut the tender tips of resinous branches; he heaped them high; he covered all with great handfuls of fragrant grass, thick with the tall red flowers that grew down by the creek, odorous with the tender white blossoms which shyly lifted their little heads to dot the grassy slopes.... He made her a bathing-pool: stiff and sore all up and down his left side, he worked with his right hand, dragging big boulders up out of their ancient beds, piling them in a ring about the pool, plastering them over the top with great handfuls of that carpet-like moss which thrived in these cool places.
"If you'd let me go!"
"No; not yet.... What man can read the mind of a girl? How do I know what you would do? Where you would go? My wounds are healing; until they heal I am only half a man. You might whisk away from me, I tell you; and I'd have to follow and seek you, if you led me through hell on the way to heaven; and I must be whole again. And I've got to get everything straight...."
Always when he left her he returned before the end of the time she had promised to wait for him. And always he sent, as herald of his approach, his golden voice forward to her. At times in an echoing shout. More than once in an outburst of singing which thrilled her strangely. What a voice the man had! And once, when he had elected to bathe in the starlight, he sent down to her that cry which she had heard the first time from the door of Babe Deveril's cabin in Big Pine ... the wild, fierce call of the timber-wolf which, despite her naming herself "fool," sent a shiver into her blood.... Once this happened: He had left her in the forenoon, accepting her word that she would not stir until high noon. Usually he came well in advance; this time she watched the climbing sun and the creeping shade and suddenly her heart began its wild beating; it was almost noon and he was not here; no sound of his coming. When he shouted to her and then came rushing into camp, he found that she had been working frenziedly with a stick and a stone; driving the sliver of wood like a stake into the ground.... She started up, her face crimson.
"Well?" he said, his hands on his hips, staring down at her. "What's that?"
She blurted out the explanation and then was angry with herself for telling him. She had meant to stay until the tip end of the giant pine's shadow fell where it marked midday; she had meant there to drive in her stake; for him it would be a marker, an assurance from her that she had kept her word with him, that she had waited as she had promised to wait ... that then, scorning him, she had snatched at her rights and had fled!
His first impulse was toward laughter. And then, strangely quiet, he stood looking at her and she saw a gathering mist in his eyes!
"Girl!" he muttered. "Oh, girl!... God, I love you!"
"I hate you...."
... How many times had she cried out in those words! And how much of that did she mean? In her heart, in her soul ... in the most hidden recesses of her most hidden being?
Thus she had hours to herself. And, therefore, had Bruce Standing hours to himself. For he wanted them. He wanted to be away from her, where he could not see her, could not hear that low music of her voice, could not catch that soft lure of her eyes, could not be tempted to have it happen that his rude hand brushed her hand.... Her hand, though she had been all these days and nights outdoors, roughing it, seemed to him a maddening realm of crumpled rose-leaves ... pink-and-white rose-leaves. He left her, secure in her pledge that she would wait for him, and threw himself down on his back and stared up through slowly shifting branches and mused on her. He thought how like a flower she was, the queen of flowers ... and he could have wept that he was so big and ungentle. He thought of Babe Deveril, and cursed him for being so slender and debonair; graceful and light of mood; gentle-voiced, with the knack of pretty words to pretty ladies. And Babe Deveril had befriended her; stood champion to her against him! He ground his teeth. He leaped up and paced back and forth, forgetful of all such insignificant nothings as trifling wounds of the flesh. He recalled how, man to man, he had broken Babe Deveril, and he laughed out loud.... Yet it remained that Babe Deveril had stood her friend and protector when he had pursued them both, linking them but the closer, with his wrath. She and Deveril had travelled together, side by side and hand in hand, miles and other miles of the opensolitudes; they had been drawn close together, driven closer together. He, Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf, and Fool, had done that! And what spark had been struck out of the flint of the adversity which he had hurled at them?... Had they loved ... had they kissed ... wasshenow longing with a sick heart for the return of Babe Deveril?
"Oh, Lord!" he cried out, his great iron fingers crooking as his arms were thrown out. "Deliver him into these hands!"
Lynette had no mirror. Standing began to grow a lusty young beard, as blond as his hair, shot through with red gleams. She knew the need of fresh clothing. When he was away she did her washing as best she could, pounding garments against the rocks in the creek; she dried them and hid them and donned them without his knowing ... though of course he knew as she knew that he did his own rude washings. There was a spring at the side of the cañon, one of the many sources which fed the stream; a shadowed, tranquil place. Of this she made her pier-glass! She stooped and looked down into its glassily smooth surface. It gave back her own image; it reflected the dark green of the pines, the lighter green of the willows. Even the subdued colors of her worn suit. She washed her hair and groomed it; no comb, no brush, but agile fingers. Most of all, when secure through his promise in return for her own, did she enjoy her plunge in the pool he had made for her. The slender whiteness of her slipped hastily down under the translucent cover of the cool, flowing water; she was as swift in her movements as any slim-bodied trout that darted about her, scurrying into its retreat; the water shot a thrill through her; she emerged, dripping, charged with all the electric currents of well-being.
"If this were only a holiday ... instead of imprisonment!"
She, too, thought of Babe Deveril, as was inevitable. And in many ways: One, always recurrent, was: "Could she have been assureof Babe Deveril as she was of Bruce Standing? As secure in her utter conviction of safety?" And here was a question to which she found no ready answer. Babe Deveril, leaping full-breastedly into the stream which had swept her off her feet, had been a friend to her from the beginning; from the beginning Bruce Standing had been a menace.
... Best of all she loved the waterfall. It was her shower-bath. But, more than that, it was her friend and confidante, and, beyond aught else, a living, glimmering, varicolored thing of gossamer beauty. It talked with her, it was at once handmaiden and musician and troubadour; it plashed and sang and poured its cadences into quiet harmonies which sank into her soul. It had leapt and sparkled and poured itself onward unstintedly, unafraid, for a thousand years; for a thousand years would it keep up its merry dancings, uncaring if only the tall pines watched or if men and maids brought hither their loves and hates and hopes and fears. Unstable it was always, always falling; secure was it in its diaphanous veilings of its own merry immortality. She loved it for its abandon, for its recklessness, for its translucent myriad beauties. It lived; it sang and sparkled; it filled the moment with musical murmurings and recked not of all those vague threats and shadows of a vague future.... She sat here, quiet under the spell of its dashings and splashings and eerie flutings ... musing, her soul drawn forth into all those vague and troublous musings which beset the heart of youth.
Youth? Young, too, was Bruce Standing! He hearkened to the cascading waters; he listened to the harp-tongued whisperings of the pines.... He had done everything wrong; he told himself that a thousand, thousand times. Yet he told himself savagely thatthroughout the insanities, the veritable madnesses of constricted human life there flowed always, onward and sweepingly upward, the great, triumphal, eternal forces of destiny. And, in the end ... in the end ... it all made for good. For eternal and triumphant good.
... After all, but the old, old story of man and maid, converging to the one gleaming, focal point though across distances oceans-wide removed.
He had his point of view; Lynette Brooke had her point of view. Yet it remains that from two widely separated peaks two eager hearts may see the same sun rise.
"Tell me," he said once. "What manner of man is this Babe Deveril? I know him as a man may know a man; you know him otherwise. Tell me; what have you found him to be?"
Never would she have been Lynette, had she not been ever quick of instinct ... instinct leaping, never looking, yet so certain to strike true! She read the thought under a thought; there came a living, joyous gloating; she cried warmly, all the while watching him:
"A true friend and a gentleman! A man unafraid ... one like a loyal knight of the olden time! Like one of the King Arthur's knights...."
"Like one," he growled, deep down in his throat, angrily, "who saw another Lynette across the four fords? That's not true, girl; else he would not have forsaken you so long! Nor would he have given up so easily when, in your view, I beat him down and sent him up over the ridge!"
"He'll come back!"
"You think so?"
"I know!"
Chance remarks of hers ... this one above all others ... rankled. She seemed so confident that Babe Deveril would come again, that he would carry in hisbreast the memory of sweet hours with her, that he would never rest until he, with her pleading eyes tender upon his, could rescue her from the bondage which Bruce Standing had set upon her! So it came about that nightly, and all night long, Bruce Standing dreamed of Babe Deveril and of battling with him and of beating him finally into such definite defeat as had not resulted from that other fierce struggle before her widening eyes.
Another day went by and another, with Bruce Standing obsessed, knowing himself for a man who yearned with all his soul for one thing and one thing only, a mere slip of a gray-eyed girl who made madness in his pulses. He had his moods of fierceness; on their heels came those other moods of tenderness. More than once he came toward her, striding through the woods, his mind made up to set her free, asking only her happiness. And then he saw her; and in his heated fancies he saw Babe Deveril; and he named Deveril a man of slight manhood and swore by his own manhood that never would he show so lax and flabby a hand as to let this priceless girl, drop into the graceful, careless hand of any Babe Deveril who ever lived.
"He'd never know how to love her as I do!" That ancient cry of all true lovers!
But all the while there bit into him doubtings, fears, those manifold darts flung from love's alter ego, jealousy. He stood ready to give this girl full-handedly everything; from her he craved with that direst of all cravings, everything.... And when he could no longer hold back the tumult within him and demanded: "What of this Baby Devil?" putting a sneer into his voice, always she cried out warmly: "A true friend and a gentleman!"
All unexpected by both of them, the less by him than her, Billy Winch, Timber-Wolf's one-legged retainer,rode full tilt into camp. They were lunching; they sat under a tree in the noonday shadow like two at picnic. He had been saying: "We're running short of rations." Then it was that Billy Winch, anxiously spurring a big roan saddle-horse, rode down upon them and, seeing them, began waving his hat high over his head in sweeping, joyous circles and shouting:
"So you're still alive! That's something!"
"You fool! Who told you to come here!"
Standing leaped to his feet; he was hot with anger.
"I knew where to find you, Timber!" cried Billy Winch gleefully. "Unless, a fair bet, the devil had claimed you and taken you down under, I knew I'd find you here!... How's the sick wing? Been usin' my salve? Night and morning, keepin' it clean and...."
Billy Winch, headlong, stopping his horse with a sudden pluck of the reins when the gaunt roan had come near setting his four flickering hoofs in their midday fire, chose to ignore the fact that the Timber-Wolf was not alone.
But Standing, springing up, strode out to meet him, his mien anything but friendly.
"Damn you, Billy Winch," he muttered between his teeth, too low for the wondering Lynette to hear. She, too, had sprung up and stood leaning against the valiant pine-tree, wondering swiftly how this latest happening, the coming of Billy Winch into the wild-wood, was to affect her.
Billy Winch, as gay-hearted a rascal as ever stumped on one leg or rode a wild, half-broken horse in carelessly lopsided fashion, laughed gleefully.
"Ho, Timber!" he cried. "If I was a whole man, 'stead of half a one, I'd just jump down and naturally beat you to death! Bein' what I am, all carved to thunder, you're too much all gone to proud flesh tojerk me out of the saddle to stomp on me! So I got the age on you! And I asks you, Johnny Wolf, man-eater, how's tricks?"
"By God, Winch!" Standing in upstarting wrath had the roan horse by the bit, shoving it back with one savage hand so that it fell back on its haunches. "Just because I've stood a lot off you...."
"Slow does it, Timber!" cried Winch. "This is business. I've got a man back there, just out of sight, ready to go clean crazy unless he can have a word with you. To put a name to him ... well, then, Mexicali Joe!"
Now Standing, deep down within him, knew why Billy Winch had come. Never did more faithful heart beat in human breast than that heart thrumming away beneath Billy Winch's faded blue shirt. Winch, having always a shrewd guess where to find his chief, when Standing took it upon himself to disappear from headquarters, had caught at the first excuse to come in person and make sure with his own keen eyes that all went well with a man whom many hated and whom he, above all men, loved.
"Hang Mexicali Joe to the first stout limb you come to!"
Lynette, of impulses ungovernable, could have broken into laughter. For the amazing thing was that what Bruce Standing, impatient almost to fury, said he meant. He had suffered enough inconvenience at Mexicali Joe's hands; he wanted nothing of the man nor of his dross of gold.
Winch did laugh aloud. And then, keen-eyed to see the play of his employer's expression, he grew sober and said earnestly:
"On the level, Mr. Standing, how's the hurt comin' along? Been usin' the salve I told you to?"
Lynette, though he had ignored her presence orbecause of this very attitude of his, could not hold back from exclaiming:
"He has two wounds now! Another shot in the back! And he gives them less attention than a sane man would give a cut finger!"
"The old fool! No more sense than a rabbit! Shot again? Twice in the back? Plugged a second time? The old fool!"
Like a flash in his quick movements he was down from the saddle; he left his horse with dragging reins to wait for him; over the uneven ground he came forward rapidly, queerly, hopping like an oddly oversized bird. He caught at Standing's shoulder, crying out:
"Let me see them hurts! I tell you, I got to see them hurts! Shot twice from behind? You bloody baby. Let me look at 'em. Blood poison most likely settin' in!"
"I could kill you ... you interfering fool...."
But just then Billy Winch's one foot caught at a root and he came near falling, and Standing, instead of carrying out a threat, sprang toward him and steadied him; and Lynette saw a sincere rough affection in the way the big arms closed about Winch's body. Friends, these two.
"Who plugged you, Timber? And for the love of Mike, how come you to let it happen ...twice? But tell me: Who plugged you the second time?"
"Taggart," said Standing; "at least that's my bet. And," he added hastily, "it was Taggart that shot me the first time, through the window at Gallup's!"
Billy Winch looked sharp incredulity; his eyes flickered away to Lynette as he gave sign of seeing her for the first time.
"But, man! I thought...."
"You thought wrong! She did not shoot me. You've got my word for that, Bill.She did not shoot me!"
Winch looked perplexed.
"Sure, Timber?" he demanded. "Dead sure?"
"Yes," said Standing. "Taggart didn't believe I had already changed my papers, ruling his name out. If he could have dropped me and made it seem clear that she had done it.... See it, Bill?"
"Well," said Winch slowly, "I guess you know or you wouldn't say so. And Jim Taggart was a real man once. But I've seen signs of late; he's mildewed inside, clean through. As comes of running with such as Young Gallup."
Suddenly he whipped off his battered hat and turned a pair of bright and smiling, and at last warmly admiring eyes upon Lynette.
"I beg your pardon, Miss," he said genially.
"Now," said Standing. "About this Mexicali Joe. You go back and tell him for me...."
Winch interrupted quickly, saying:
"No use, Timber. You got to see him. I tell you he's clean crazy to see you; he'll stick on your trail until he finds you. He wants only ten minutes; five would do it."
Lynette was mildly surprised to see Standing so easily persuaded; but she had no way of knowing the relationship of this man and his chief henchman nor how Billy Winch never took it upon himself to suggest unless he knew what he was about.
"All right," said Standing, though he frowned as he spoke. "Go get your man."
Winch jerked his head about and shouted; his long, halloing call pierced clear through the woodland silences.
"Hi, Joe! This way, on the run!Pronto, hombre!"
Joe came almost immediately, mounted on a scrawny mulish-looking horse, breaking an impatient way through the brush. His dark face still carried a frightened,furtive expression which had not been absent from it for a matter of days; not since a handful of raw gold had been spilled from his torn pocket.
"Señor!" he cried ringingly from a distance. "Señor Caballero!I tell you, they keel me! I got no chances! For sure, they keel me, robbers!"
Standing answered roughly: "And what do I care? Serve you right for the fool you are!"
"Now, he's here," said Winch. "Look here, Timber: you can take your time talking to him. Let me look you over. I want to see that second bullet hole."
"Winch, you idiot," Standing growled at him; "I got it close to a week ago. I've tended to it myself; it's all right. I don't look like a dying man, do I?"
"Señor!" Joe was crying, down on the ground now, tremendously excited.
"Are you usin' my salve?" demanded Winch. "Plenty of it, night and morning?"
"I have been using it...."
"And you're out of itnow!" With a triumphant flourish Winch dipped into a pocket and extracted a small package. "Here you are, Timber! And this is extra special! I got all the ingredients this time; tried it out day before yesterday on that new pinto pony you bought from Ferguson; got cut in the wire fence down by the pasture. Say, it works like magic...."
Standing groaned. "Winch, some fine day I'll carve you all up with a hand-axe, just to give you a chance to use your own filthy mess...."
"I wouldn't have been shy a leg, would I, if that fool doctor had had a pint of this?"
"Señor!" Joe was crying. "You got to listen; you got to hear what I goin' tell you! My gold, my gold that I find, me, myself, all alone...."
"What do I care for you or your gold!" criedStanding. "I don't need it, do I? I don't ask you anything about it, do I? I don't want to know anything about it! Go wallow in your gold and leave me alone!"
But Joe explained, growing vehement to the point of wildness; as Winch had put it, "he was clean crazy over the thing." How could Joe wallow in it, much as he would like to, when always there were men like ugly hounds on his trail? What chance had he, poor devil that he styled himself, against such men as Jim Taggart and Young Gallup and Cliff Shipton and Babe Deveril and Barny McCuin.... He named a score. At the name of Babe Deveril Standing's eyes flashed and sped to a meeting with Lynette's; into hers, too, came a quick light. Joe had caught Standing's interest.
"What about these men?" he asked. "What about Deveril?"
"Him? The worst of them all!" wailed Joe. He went on, bursting with all the things he had to tell. That night when, for a second time, like God himself, the grand Señor Caballero had burst into the cabin and set him free, he had run! God, how he had run! But then he had thought of his savior alone against so many hard, merciless men; he had come to a sudden stop, saying to himself: "Joe,mi amigo, you must not desert him!" And then, of a sudden, had that young devil Deveril burst from the bushes upon him ... and Joe had fled again and Deveril had sought after him. There was no shaking off this man; twice since then in the forest Joe had barely escaped him.... Lynette had come close, was listening breathlessly.
"I tell you where my gold is!" cried Joe. "You take what you like, I don't care! You give me what you like ... I know you for one fair man. That way we save it. Any other way, they get me; they burn me with fire; they break my teeth and my fingers; they makeme tell! And they get it all. Taggart and Gallup and Deveril and...."
He broke off, half whimpering, cursing them with all the eloquence of the Latin tongue.
Clearly Standing hesitated. Then, amazing them all, but with his own mind clear, he said bluntly:
"Clear out! It's your game. I don't want to know anything about it."
"It's down in Light Ladies' Gulch!" screamed Joe. "Not two mile from Big Pine! I lied to them ... a big pine, with crooked roots sticking out ... a washout.... Last year I make mistake; I think down under the Red Cliffs. But this time I find ... four miles the other side...."
"Why, you shrivelled-souled...."
Then suddenly Standing caught himself up short; there came a new look into his eyes; he shouted, catching Joe by the shoulder:
"Light Ladies' Cañon!Just across from Big Pine? Only a mile or two!"
"As God hears me, Señor!"
Standing broke into sudden laughter. He clapped Joe upon the shoulder so that the little man staggered and paled under the jovial blow.
"With bells on! With bells, Mexico! By high Heaven.... Here, you, Winch! On the run, back to headquarters. Take Joe with you; mount guard over him night and day with a rifle. No man to have a word with him. And wait for me. And, all the while, Bill Winch,keep your mouth shut!"
Winch, with one arm out as a brace against a pine, stiffened.
"I guess I know how to take orders, Mr. Standing," he said, and his tone sounded angry. "You don't need...."
Him also Standing smote on the shoulder.
"Why, God bless you, Bill Winch, you're the only man on earth I'd trust! Those last words weren't necessary.... You're right and I apologize for them! But now, go! Go, I tell you; I'll do anything you say; I'll use your poison on me three times a day.... I'll eat it, if you say so! Only hit the high spots and keep Mexicali under cover until I come! No matter when or how long; there's your job ... old friend!"
Billy Winch, galvanized, went hopping to his horse; he flipped after his own fashion up into the saddle; he loosened the rifle in its holster strapped conveniently; he called to Joe:
"Quick does it, Mexico! We're on our way!"
Bruce Standing watched them ride away among the trees and stood laughing! He had succeeded in puzzling two men; most of all had he set Lynette wondering....
"I want a good long drink of fresh water," said Standing. "And you, after this lunch of ours, will be thirsty. Let's go down to the creek; down there, by the waterfall, after we've drunk, I want to talk with you."
He had turned to her, that flash still in his eyes, before Billy Winch and Mexicali Joe had ridden a dozen yards out of camp. She looked at him in silence, wondering what lay in his thoughts; what had been the sudden, compelling, and triumphant motive to actuate him when with his great shout of laughter he had dismissed the two men. He had Joe's secret now; she shared it herself: The gold was far from here and very near Big Pine; in Light Ladies' Cañon! The strange part of it was that Taggart's first surmise, when he and his companions had trapped Mexicali Joe at the dugout, was that it was in Light Ladies' Cañon that he had made his strike!... How many men and at least one girl had travelled how many wilderness miles from Big Pine, when the gold lay so snugly close to the starting-point! How Joe had tricked his captors, leading them so far afield!
"If I should escape from you now," Lynette could not help crying, "what is there to prevent me from staking the first claim? And bringing myfriends... to stake claims!"
"If you should happen to escape me!" he laughed back at her.
Then he stepped to the tree where his rifle stood and called to Thor as he did always when he left the dog in camp: "Watch, Thor! Watch, sir."
It was not always that he carried his rifle. He explained, while he looked to her to come with him.
"We'll talk things over; but in any case it's clear that we're getting short of food. Maybe, while we talk, we can bring down something in the way of provisions with a lucky shot."
Willing enough was she to-day for talk; at least to listen to whatever he might say. She followed, stopping only to stoop and pat old Thor's head; already she counted the faithful brute a friend. Thor tried to lick her hand; for already Thor, like Thor's master, had bestowed an abiding love to the first true girl who had ever intimately entered the life of either. Thor wanted to follow; he whined and looked anxious, ears pricked forward, tail wagging.
"Down, Thor," commanded Standing, if only because already he had issued his command. "You watch camp for us; watch, Thor."
Thor dropped down at the entrance of Lynette's grotto; for one instant his great head lay between his forepaws; then he jerked it up again so that he might watch them as they went through the thickets to the creek.
Standing carried a cup with him. When they came to the waterfall leaping down a twenty-foot rocky spillway, glassily clear, making a pigmy thunder in the narrow-walled ravine, he rinsed and filled his cup and gave it to Lynette. She drank. Thereafter, and with no further rinsing, he drank. She sat upon a big rock, leaning back against a leaning tree trunk; he sat down close enough to her to allow of words carrying above the thunder of the falling waters and filled his after-lunch pipe.
"I know as much as you do of the place to find the gold!" she told him again. "And I, though a girl, have as much interest in a fortune to be made as anyman can have. That's fair warning to you, Bruce Standing!"
He laughed carelessly. Then he said:
"It's neither your gold nor mine. By right of discovery, it belongs to a little shrimp named Mexicali JoeAlguna-Cosa. Our hands are off, so far as our own pockets are concerned."
"But.... You took quick interest when you learned where it was! You have some plan ... you commanded your friend Billy Winch to keep Joe well guarded!"
His eyes were twinkling; and greed does not light twinkling lights!
"I've got gold of my own, girl! Gold enough to last me my life and you your life and both of us together our lives! And to leave a decent residuum after us.... But let's talk of Mexicali Joe's gold some other time. To-day.... We have ourselves!"
"You have yourself!" cried Lynette with sudden bitterness. "I have not even my own personal liberty!"
"And what if I let you go, girl? As I have a mind to do to-day? What then? Where would you go? Where would I find you again? For find you I must and will though 'it were ten thousand mile.'"
"Am I to suffer your dictation during the days of actual imprisonment at your hands, and then, for all time afterward, render you an accounting of my actions!"
"Why do you try to hate me so, girl?"
"Why should I not hate you?"
"What have I done to you? Have I done anything more than put out a hand to stop time, to snatch time for you and me, for us toknow!... Look you, girl, a man, at least a man of my sort, may go a third of hislife or a fourth or a full half, and know much less than nothing of what a true girl is!How can he know?Already I have learned that you have instincts which leap; a man gropes like a blind mole and it takes him a long time to teach himself to see the stars ...the star!Now it's a fair bet, and no odds given or taken, that one Bruce Standing happened to be an unruly devil, a blunt man, a man who has as a part and parcel of his religion to shoot square and to hit hard, so long as God lets him. I've done wrong and I've done right, and I'm doing as all the rest of the great mass, in a state of flux, is doing; growing up from the mud into something better. If not in this life or the next, well then, since the mills grind with exceeding patience, in some other life. At least I'm honest; at least, in plain English, I do my damnedest! Take it or leave it, there's the truth. If it happens that I'm a man of few friends.... Almost you can count 'em on Billy Winch's one leg!... if few men love me and many men hate...."
"Yes!" cried Lynette, and her own earnestness was caught and compelled by his own. "Most men, many, many men, hate you!... And yet you have it within you to make them love you!"
"Love and hate! What have I to do with the loves and hates of men as I know them? Shall I step to right or to left for all that? I play out my part in the eternal game. I live my life!"
"But you don't live your life! You miss ... everything! If you would but be kind instead of cruel; open-hearted and generous always ... you have in you the seeds of all that. Then men might come to know the realyou; you could make them love instead of hate...."
But his eyes stabbed at her like quickened blue flames.
"So!" he said, and his tone was one of bitter mockery. "If I choose to pay them for the pretty, emptycompliment, they will call me a good fellow and ... love me! If I kick them they will call me villain and hate me. And there you have the epitome of that so-called love and hate of mankind which sickens me. I'll be eternally damned before I prostitute my immortal soul to pitch pennies out for a peck of treacherous hearts. For, I tell you, girl ... Only Girl ... the love that is to be bought is to be spat upon. I'll have none of it. Even your love, that I'd give my soul to have freely, I'd have none of if it were to be bought."
Lynette looked at him strangely, half pityingly. And she answered him softly:
"You twist things out of all reason to make, to yourself, your own acts appear something other than they are."
"A girl trying to turn logician?" he laughed at her, teasing.
Little effort on his part was required to set fire to her quick inflammable temper.
"It's magnanimous of you to jeer at me," she retorted hotly. "Because you have the physical strength of a beast and the beast's lack of understanding...."
Now his golden outburst of laughter stopped her. He shouted:
"See! There you go! As if to preach me the final word of love and hate! You'd hate me now, just because I tease you! If I said, with poets' roses twining through the saying, that you were most beautiful and no-end intellectual and beyond that of the heart of an angel, could you not better tolerate me? And thus we come to the open pathway to most human loves and hates; two little doors standing side by side. For, I ask you, going back to your challenge to make men love rather than despise me, what in the devil's name is that sort oflovebut transplanted self-love? A damned-foolsort of selfishness masking like a hypocrite as something quite different.... If you loved a man who beat you there would be something worth while in that sort of loving; something divorced from plain selfishness and the eternal I-want-to-get-all-I-can-out-of-everything! Now, I love you! I love you so that my love for you comes near killing me! It gets me by the throat at night. That's love; and there's less of self in it, I swear to you, than there is of ...you!"
"You! You talk of love. To me!"
She broke into her light, taunting laughter. And yet he had set her heart beating and the ancient fear ... not fear of him ... was upon her. "You, talking of love, are like a blind man lecturing on the colors of the rainbow! You...."
But he had started to his feet; his eyes went suddenly toward the camp, all sight of which they had lost on coming down into the creek bed.
"Listen!" he cried. "What was that?"
She had heard nothing; nothing above the splash and fall of water ... and the beating of her own heart.
"Listen!" he said the second time.
"What is it?"
He caught up his rifle and leaped across the creek. He began running, back toward their camp.
"It's old Thor ... there's some one...."
And now, Lynette realized clearly, had come her first opportunity to be free again! While Bruce Standing, because of something he had heard above the merry-mad music of the waterfall, or had thought he had heard, was running back to their encampment, she could run in the opposite direction. She stood balancing, of this mind and that. What had he heard in camp? What was happening there? As always, because of that volatile nature of hers which wasen rapportwith life'spulsings, she wanted to know! And then there was a certain assurance in her heart that after all these days the budding intention in Bruce Standing's heart was bursting into full flower to set her free again! She hesitated; she saw him running up the steep bank, charging back toward camp, vanishing among the trees higher up on the slope.
And, then, she followed him.
... Before Lynette came, through the trees, within sight of the grotto which Standing had given over to her, she heard a sound which brought her, wondering, from swift haste to lingering; she stood, her breathing stilled, listening, groping a moment blindly for an interpretation of that sound for its explanation. Harsh it was ... terrible ... never had she heard anything like it. At first she did not recognize it as a sound man-made. She paused; she came a step nearer, peering through the trees....
It was an inarticulate, stifled sound coming from the lips of Bruce Standing! He was kneeling on the ground, bending forward. He had dropped his rifle. There was something in his arms, upgathered into his embrace, something held as a baby is held in its mother's arms....
Thor....
And those sounds from Bruce Standing's lips! There were tears in them; his voice was shaken. He held Thor to him in a fierce agony of sorrow....
Lynette came closer, tiptoeing. She heard the sounds as they seemed to choke him, clutching like hands at his throat. And then suddenly, before she caught her first clear view, she knew when, into that first emotion there swept the second; when with the shock of deep grief there mingled white-hot rage. He began to mutter again ... he was lisping ... lisping as she had heard him do only once before ... lisping because hisone weakness had leaped out and caught him unaware. Lisping curses....
She ran closer. She saw old Thor, Thor who had learned to love her and whom she had learned to love, lying limp in Standing's arms. Thor dead? Some one had killed him, then, and Standing, above the booming of the waterfall, had heard? A sight, perhaps, to stir that wild, uncontrollable laughter of Lynette! The sight of a big, strong man half weeping over a dead dog in his arms.... Yet, when she came running to him and dropped down on her knees and put out her quick hand and Standing turned his face toward her ... he saw that this time there was no laughter in her. Instead, her eyes were wet with a sudden dash of tears.
"He's not dead ... we won't have it that he's dead! Thor!" she cried softly.
She did not realize that she had put her warm, sympathetic hand on Standing's arm before her other hand found the old dog's head.
"Thor!... Thor!"
Thor looked up at her; at Standing. The dog tried to stir; the faithful tongue strove to overmaster the terrible inertia laid upon it; to grant in last adulation the last farewell. For a stricken dog, like a stricken man, knows after the way of all creatures which have the spark of eternity within them, when the day's end is in doubt....
Standing tried to speak ... and grew silent. How she hated herself then for that other time when he had slipped, through sorrowing rage, into his one unmanly failing ... and she had laughed! Her tears began running down. He saw; he jerked his head about, focussing his eyes upon the eyes of a dog that he loved; a dog that had been faithful to him.
"Where is he hurt? He can't be shot," cried Lynette. "We would have heard a shot! If he is poisoned...."
Standing had mastered himself. He said coldly.
"Look!"
"Who did ...that?"
"If I only knew! My God, if I only knew!"
Thor was not dead; his body jerked and quivered now and again, in spasms. Yet he seemed to be dying. And it grew clear to Lynette, as, at a glance, it had been clear to Standing, what had happened. Thor had been left in charge of camp; but the one word had rung in the faithful head: "Watch!" And then some one had come; Thor had been true to his trust; some man had struck him down with club or a rifle barrel; had struck and struck again. Thor's fore leg was broken; he had been battered over the head ... bones were broken, the skull seemed crushed ... the dog stiffened; fell back....
"Dying," said Standing, still on his knees. He placed old Thor very gently on the ground, striving after his own rough fashion to make a dog's last few minutes of breathing no more tormenting than was inevitable.
"Thor," said Standing gently. "Good old Thor!"
The dog tried to rouse. The old faithful head on Standing's knee stirred ever so little. The old steadfast eyes, red-rimmed but clear-sighted, were on Standing's. If ever a dog could have spoken....
Standing, with sudden thought, jumped to his feet.
"There's a chance for him yet! There is Billy Winch, the one man on earth to save a dying dog or horse.... Yes, or man!"
He cupped his hands at his mouth and sent forth, piercing through the leafy silences, that wild wolf-call which must bring Winch about in short order ... if he was not already too far to hear it.
"He may be too far," cried Lynette. Already she was down upon her knees, taking his place andgathering Thor's head into her lap. "Hurry. If you can find your horse and ride after him, surely you can overtake him."
"God bless you!" He began running. But before a dozen swift steps were taken he stopped and came back to her, muttering: "But the man who did this for Thor? He'll not be far away; I can't leave you...."
"I am not afraid of a man like him," said Lynette. "A coward, or he would not have done this.... Leave me your rifle and hurry!"
"You'll wait for me, no matter what happens?"
"Of course I'll wait. Now,hurry!"
He placed his rifle at her side and with never a backward look was away again on a run, breaking through breast-high brush; splashing once again across the creek, calling to Winch as he ran.... He would be back with her almost immediately....
So he plowed through the thickets; plunged down a slope, sped up a slope, raced over a ridge. And, now with what breath was left in his lungs, he began to send out his whistled call. That summons, which his horse, if still lingering in these upland meadows, would welcome with quick response.
Lynette stooped and laid her cheek against the grizzled old face of Thor. And then, with a sudden access of emotion, she burst into fresh tears.... Thor tried to wag his tail.... Lynette, like Standing before her, felt that the dog was dying.
"Thor!" she whispered. "Can't you hold on? Can't you carry on? He will bring Billy Winch and Billy Winch will help us...."
Then there burst upon her a surprise which moved her immeasurably. There, almost at her side, stood Babe Deveril! A moment ago she was alone in thewilderness with a dying dog; now Babe Deveril stood close to her. With Thor's head still held in her lap she looked up into his face. She saw that it was tense, the muscles drawn, the eyes hard and bright.
"Lynette!" he cried softly. "Lynette! I've followed you half around the world! And now.... Come quick! We go free and the world is ours!"
She sat, staring up at him, still bewildered.
"You!" she whispered. "And ... then it was you ... who did this?"
He caught her meaning; he glanced down at the thick green club in his hands.
"I came to do what I could for you. That ugly brute stood up against me. I had no gun; I knew Standing was armed. I thought that maybe he had left his rifle in camp."
"What did Thor do to you that you should have done this to him?"
"Thor? That dog? He showed teeth and ... Look here, Lynette Brooke; now's your one chance. I've gone through hell to come to you...."
"Tell me," she cried. "When did you come?..."
Deveril was as tense as a finely drawn steel wire. Again she marked that hard glint in his dark eyes.
"It is up to you to do the telling!" he shot back at her. "I stood back there in the trees; I saw that damned henchman of his and Mexicali Joe come up to you! Joe, I've been following for days! I had no rifle; no weapon of any kind and both Standing and Winch were armed. But I could watch! Joe was terribly excited; I saw his waving arms. I heard him yelling...."
"Yes," said Lynette. "And then?"
"And then?" exclaimed Deveril. "What then? You know what we came for, don't you? You as well as I?"
"Yes! I know...."
He caught at her hand.
"Come! On the run. Before that madman gets back. We'll clean up on the whole crowd of them!"
But she jerked her hand away.
"There are certain things I don't understand.... Did you see the other night when he took Mexicali Joe out of their hands?"
"I saw; yes. It happened that I had just overhauled them at that minute! I could have cried for rage! He had a rifle, damn him, and was aching to use it! They laid down before him like pups...."
"And you?"
"What could I do, with a rotten stick in my hands!"
She looked up at him curiously.
"And, to-day?"
"To-day?" His hands hardened in his grip upon his club. "To-day, I tell you, I followed them into your camp and I saw. Mexicali Joe...."
"You are after Mexicali Joe's gold, Babe Deveril?"
"As you are! That brought us both into Big Pine in the beginning and then into the rest of it."
"And you were ... afraid to come into camp while Bruce Standing was still here?"
He laughed at her, the old light laughter of debonair Babe Deveril.
"Afraid? Call it that if you like." He shrugged carelessly. "Yet, with an oak club against a man with a modern rifle...."
"Do you remember the last time? How he threw his rifle away?"
Deveril flushed hotly.
"Some day," he muttered, "when it's an even break...."
"What do you want with me, Babe Deveril?"
He stared at her.
"Want with you? I want you to come, to be free from this Timber-Wolf. Is he coming back soon?"
"I think so."
"Then hurry. Lynette...."
"Well?"
"Are you coming?"
She stooped over Thor.
"No," she said quietly.
"What!After all this.... You're not coming?"
"No!"
"But.... Then why?" he demanded with a sudden flare of anger.
"For one thing," she told him without looking up, "because I told him that I would wait for him. For another...."
"And that is?..."
She only shook her head, brown hair tumbling about her hidden face.
"I'll stay with old Thor," she said.
She had him cast away among the lost isles of bewilderment.
"But you'll tell me.... You and I have been friends; we've stood side by side...." He broke off to demand: "You'll tell me about Mexicali Joe's gold?"
"Gold?" she said. "Is gold the greatest thing in life?"
"But you know?"
"Yes! I know."
"Then listen: Taggart and Gallup and Shipton and a thousand other men are going crazy to find out! You and I can turn the whole trick if luck is good.... Why, we'll quit millionaires, Lynette!"
A shudder shot through the tortured body of old Thor. Lynette's long lashes lifted, wet with her tears.
"There are things ... beyond millions...."
"I don't get you to-day!"
"Why did you kill this dog? What good did it do you? What harm had he ever done you?"
"He was in my way. I thought, I told you, that a rifle might have been left behind. And ... it's Standing's dog, anyway! And, beyond that, no matter how you look at it, only a dog...."
"I think," said Lynette, and there was no music in her voice now and no warmth in the eyes which she lifted briefly to his, "that you had better go! Had you come, without rifle, upon Bruce Standing, at least he would have thrown his rifle away to fight with you! You know that. And ... and I am not going to go with you, having given my promise. And I'll warn you of this: If he comes back and finds you here and knows you for the man who killed Thor.... He will kill you!"
Never in all his daredevil life had Babe Deveril made pretense at striking the angelic attitude. Now, in a rush of feeling, he grew black with anger and there came a look into his eyes which put the hottest flush of all her life into Lynette's cheeks, as he cried out:
"Tamed you, has he? So Timber-Wolf has taken a mate after the fashion of wolves! And I, fool that I was, let you slip through my fingers!"
She did not answer him. Had she answered she could have said: "You could have returned to fight with him; man to man and him wounded! Later, when he snatched Mexicali Joe from them, you could have fought with him. You could have followed him here, seeking me; and you followed Joe, seeking gold. You could have fought with him to-day; and instead you held back and spied and killed his dog and waited for him to go!..." So Lynette, stooping low over Thor's battered head, made no answer.
... She knew that Babe Deveril was no coward. She would always remember how he had hurled that gun into Taggart's face and himself into her adventures, reckless and unafraid. Yet Babe Deveril was no such man as Bruce Standing; rather was he like a Jim Taggart, and Taggart was no coward. But it remained that both these men, Deveril and Taggart, were afraid to come to grips with that other man, whose fellows named him Timber-Wolf. And he, the Timber-Wolf, was not afraid of life and all that it bore; and was not afraid of sombre death, in which he did not believe; was not afraid of God, in whom he trusted.
"You've thrown in with him!" Deveril cried it out angrily; his hands were hard upon his club. "Here, I've given days and days trying to see you through, and you've kicked in with him against me! He's had his will with you and he's made you his woman and...."
"You'd better go!"
She was trembling. A spasm shook her, not unlike that which convulsed Thor.
"You won't come with me then? You'll stick with him? After he put a chain on you!"
"At least he did not stand back and see another man put a chain on me!"
"Is that my answer?"
"Yes!" she cried in sudden fury. "And now ...go!"
"I'll go, all right," said Deveril. And began to laugh. All that old light laughter of his, gay and untroubled, which so many a time had made dancing echoes in the souls of those who heard, bubbled up again. He looked, as he had done when first she saw him, a slender, darkly handsome and utterly care-free incarnation of debonair insolence. Still striking the right note, he shrugged his shoulders and tossed his club away as he said insolently:
"What need of all this heavy artillery ... since the Queen of my Heart says Nay? I'll travel light after this!"
He turned away. But at the second step he stopped and swung about and told her:
"I have a guess where Billy Winch will be taking Mexicali Joe! And I'll be in on the final settlement. If you, with a rush of blood to the head, throw in with Standing, I'll play the game out! And what will you have left to trade to me for the pile I'm going to make out of this?... For I heard, too, when Mexicali yelled out! And I'm throwing in with Taggart and Gallup, headed straight for Light Ladies' Gulch!"
Lynette, unable to see anything in all the wide world clearly, could only stoop her head over the stricken dog. Her arms tightened about Thor.... If only Billy Winch would come in time, if only Billy Winch would save that flickering little fire of life ... then, though she hated all the rest of the world she'd love Billy Winch....
Bruce Standing running, breaking a straight path through the brush, came swiftly into the little upper valley. When in answer to his whistling his horse came trotting up to him, he did not tarry to saddle; he had picked up his bridle on his way and now mounted and struck off bareback through the woods with no second's delay.
"Get into it, Daylight!" he muttered. "We're riding for old Thor to-day!"
From a distance Billy Winch, hurrying homeward, heard that long call he knew so well. He pulled his horse down from a steady canter and turned, calling to Mexicali Joe to come back with him. Once within sight Standing waved and shouted again; Winch and Joe sensed urgency and dipped their spurs, riding back to a meeting with him. Winch stared and frowned while his employer made his curt explanation; Mexicali Joe gasped. But neither man had a word to say; Standing laid his brief command upon them and the three turned back, riding hard, into the mountains.
Again Standing called, when near enough to camp to hope that his voice would carry above the noise of the tumbling waterfalls; this time to Lynette, to tell her of their coming. He rode ahead; again and again he shouted to her; he leaned out to right and left from his horse's back, seeking a glimpse of her through the trees. And yet, when they were almost in the camp, there still came no answer to his shoutings and he caught no glimpse of her.... Suddenly, to his fancies, the woods seemed strangely hushed—and empty.
"She's gone," said Winch carelessly.
"No!" said Standing with such brusque emphasis that Winch looked at him wonderingly. "She said she'd wait for us, Bill."
But when they drew closer, so close that the various familiar camp objects were revealed, and still there was no response and no sight of her, Winch muttered:
"Just the same, gone or not gone, she ain't here, Timber."
"I tell you, man," snapped Standing, "she said she would wait. And what she says she will do, she will do!"
Now the three dismounted in the heart of the camp and still there was no sign of Lynette.
"Anyhow," said Winch, "it's a dog and not a girl we come looking for. Thor'll be here ... if he's alive yet."
"He will be right where I left him." Standing led the way among the big trees, an arm about Billy Winch, hopping at his side the last few steps; they saw him looking in all directions and understood that while he led them toward Thor he was seeking the girl. But they found only the dog lying where he had been struck down; Thor barely able to lift his bloody head, his sight dim, but his dog's intelligence telling him that his master had come back to him; Thor whining weakly. Winch squatted down at the dog's side, become upon the instant an impressive diagnostician.
Standing stood a moment over the two, looking down upon them. Then he turned away, leaving Thor in the skilful hands of Winch and hurrying down to the creek, seeking Lynette. It was possible, he told himself, that she had gone down for a drink; that so near the waterfall she had not heard him calling. So he called again as he went on and looked everywhere for her.
But she was not down by the creek and she did notanswer him from the woods. He came back, up into camp, perplexed. Winch was still bending over Thor; he was snapping out brusque orders to Joe for hot water and soap; Standing heard Mexicali Joe's mutterings:
"Por Dios, I no understan'. Somebody hurt one dog an' we wait, an' we look for one girl ... an' all the time I got one meelion dollar gol'-mine down yonder...."
"Shut up," Winch grunted at him. And, seeing Standing coming back: "Say, Timber, we better take this dog home with us right away. We can make a sling of that canvas of yours, tying either end to our saddle horns, making a sort of stretcher; some blankets in it and old Thor on top of 'em. And I'll tell you this: if we get him home alive, and I think we will, I'll keep the life in him."
Thor was whining piteously; Winch shook his head; if only he had his instruments, his antiseptics, and a bottle of chloroform! For here he foresaw such an operation as did not come his way every day.
"Diagnosin' off-hand," Winch was telling the uninterested Joe, "I'd say here's the two important facts: first, old Thor has been beat unmerciful; his head's been whanged bad, but I don't believe the skull's fractured; his left fore leg is busted and he may have a cracked rib. Second and most important, after all that the old devil is alive."
Bruce Standing, still seeking Lynette, more than satisfied to have Thor in Billy Winch's capable hands, turned toward the grotto which he had set apart for Lynette. And thus upon his first discovery. There was a piece of paper tied with a bit of string so that it fluttered gently from a low limb where it was inevitable that it must be seen. He caught it down eagerly. On the scrap of paper were a few pencilled words, written in a girlish-looking hand. At one sweeping glance he read:
"I have gone back to Babe Deveril.Lynette."
"I have gone back to Babe Deveril.Lynette."
He stood staring incredulously at the thing in his hand. Here was a shock which for a moment confused him; here was something beyond credence. Lynette gone ... to Deveril? For that first second his brain groped blindly rather than functioned normally. Lynette gone to Babe Deveril ... that cursed Baby Devil! A handsome, graceful, and altogether irresistible young devil of a fellow to fill any girl's eye, to stir vague romantic longings in her heart. So she had gone to him? He had the proof of it in his hand; a word from her, signed with her name. A cruel, chill, heartless message of seven meagre words.... And she had broken her word; she had promised to wait for his return and she had not waited. She had left a dying dog to die alone and had gone to her lover ... and she carried with her the key to Mexicali Joe's golden secret ... to turn it over to Deveril!
"What's eating you, Timber?" shouted Winch. "Gone to sleep or what?"
Standing tossed the scrap of paper away. And then suddenly he laughed and both Winch and Joe were startled. Bill Winch had heard that laugh once before and knew vaguely the sort of emotion which prompted it: Standing's soul was suddenly steeped in rage ... and anguish....
"We'll be on our way pretty quick, Timber," said Winch. "We'll ride slow and you can pick us up in no time. And ... if you've got anything on your chest, any of your own private rat-killing to do, why, me and Mexicali will make out fine as far as headquarters, and once there I'll see old Thor through."
Standing only nodded at him curtly and went hurriedly to his horse.