It had been Christmas before Jeff was completely out of the hands of the surgeon they had had to obtain from Calthorpe. For three months of that time he had hovered between life and death. Nor had his trouble been confined solely to his physical hurts. No, these had been sore: they had been grievous in the extreme. Three times wounded, and his face, and hands, and arms badly burned. But half of his trouble had been the mental sufferings he had endured as a result of his marriage, and the final tragedy of Evie's death. Now, as Bud looked back on that time, two things stood out beyond all the rest. It was the desperate courage--even madness he called it--of Jeff, and the superlative devotion of Nan. He had by no means understood all that Jeff had achieved at the moment of his rescue. It was not till long after, by a process of close questioning, that the magnitude of it became plain. Then the marvel of it dawned on him. The courage, the madness of it. Jeff had rid the district of the whole gang of rustlers single-handed. He had shot five of them to death, and the last two had fallen victims to his own, Bud's, gun after they had been wounded by Jeff. Then had followed that period when Nan had stepped into the picture. With pride, and a great satisfaction, he remembered her weeks and months of devotion to the injured man. Her sleepless, tireless watch. Her skill and patient tenderness. These things had been colossal. To him it had been a vision of a mother's tender care for an ailing child. And the thought of it now stirred him to a touch of bitterness in his feelings toward his partner and friend. To Bud there could only be one possible end to such a wealth of devotion as his little Nan had displayed, but it seemed that all his ideas on the subject must be wrong. To his uncomprehending mind they seemed no nearer to each other than in the days before a mad passion had seized upon Jeff for the woman he had married. Bud was very human. His patience had its limits, and just now they seemed to have been reached. He admitted this to himself frankly. He told himself he had "no durned patience with the bunch." And the bunch included both Nan and Jeff. He felt that Nan, too, must be to blame in some way. He had "no durned patience with the bunch." Therein lay the key-note of his mixed feelings. Here everything was prospering but the one thing above all others upon which he had set his heart. He felt as though he must "butt in" and put matters right himself. How, he did not attempt to suggest. But he felt that if he did not do so, or something or other did not occur to precipitate matters, the "whole durned shootin' match was li'ble to peter." This was how he saw things. This was how he felt, as he awaited Nan's return from the pastures.