"You came--for her?" repeated Wayland slowly. The night on the Ridge came back to him! Calamity's fear when the old frontiersman arrived; Bat's threat to expose something; Eleanor's perturbed letter; the father's half furtive defiant existence. He was too proud to ask more than the other cared to tell, too loyal to pry into any part of her life that she could not willingly share with him. He sat gazing into the mystic afterglow of the Desert, a flame of fire over a lake of light. It was as the old man had said, he had asked her to strengthen his resolution; and he drank in the love light of her eyes as he asked. He had vowed himself to a life apart and then his humanity, his weakness, his need had sealed the vow of renunciation in the fires that forged eternally their beings into one. But this, this was the Hand from Outside on which we never reckon and which always comes; the Destiny Thing which Man's Will denies, wrenching the forging asunder. Was it right for him to risk their lives farther in the Desert now; it affected her life now; and that was exactly what his common sense had foreseen: the fighter must fight alone. Love might send forth; but love must not be suffered to draw back. "Why do you tell me all this?" The old man moistened his lips before speaking. "If A don't go out, Wayland, A want y' t' see that her father's told, that she's taken back. When A saw the love light in her face come out like stars and her breath break when A spoke of you as a Ranger fellow, when A saw that, A thought, no matter what A thought. If y' married her, d' y' think y' could go off on the firing line; d' y' think y' would if y' knew y'd left her in danger? They'd strike at you through her, Wayland . . . it would be the end of free fightin'. A ask no promise. 'Tis enough A've told y'. Drive on!" They moved slowly up the sand ridge, the Ranger a little ahead, oblivious of the livid blue of the old man's lips and the drag on the bridle rope till a quick jerk ripped the line from his loose hold; and he glanced back to see the other's horse stagger, flounder up again, waver and sink with a sucking groan. Wayland sprang just in time to catch the old frontiersman. He tore the saddle from the fallen broncho and cinched it on his own horse. Then he lifted Matthews, protesting, to the fresh mount, "till we reach the next rest place," he said, tying the halter rope of the pack mule to the saddle pommel. "Go on, I'll come." Wayland waited till the horse and mule passed over the crest of the sand bank; then, he took out his revolver. A shudder ran through the fallen horse. The Ranger's hand trembled. He stroked its neck. "Poor devil; it's none of your affair either. I wonder how the God of the game will square it with the dumb brutes?"