So that was the way of it! I got to my feet. Save a dull ache in my head and the smarting of my bruised face, I felt equal to anything—and the physical pain was as nothing to the hurt of my pride. To be felled by a woman—the woman I loved—I did love her, and therein lay the hurt of her action. I could hardly understand it, and yet—strange paradox—I did not trouble myself to understand. My brain was in no condition for solving problems of that sort. I was not concerned with the why; the fact was enough. If I had been the unformed boy who cowered before those two hairy-fisted slave-drivers aboard the _New Moon_—but I was not; I never could be again. The Trouble Trail had hardened more than my bone and sinew; and the last seven days of it, the dreary plodding over unbroken wastes, amid forbidding woods, utter silence, and cold bitter beyond Words, had keyed me to a fearful pitch. There was a kink to my mental processes; I saw things awry. In all the world there seemed to be none left but us three; two men and a woman, and each of us desiring the woman so that we were ready to fly at each other’s throats. Standing there by the fire I could see how it would be, I thought. Unless the unseen enemy who hovered about us cut it short with his rifle, we were foredoomed to maddening weeks, perhaps months, of each other’s company. Though she had jeered at him and flaunted her contempt for him at both MacLeod and the post, Jessie had put by that hostile, bitter spirit. To me, it seemed as if she were in deadly fear of Barreau. She shrank from him, both his word and look. And I must stand like a buffer between. Weeks of suspicion, of trifling, jealous actions, of simmering hate that would bubble up in hot words and sudden blows; I did not like the prospect. “I have a mind to settle it all, right here and now!” I did not know until the words were out that I had spoken aloud. As a spark falling in loose powder, so was the effect of that sentence upon a spirit as turbulent and as sorely tried as his. “Settle it then, settle it,” he rose to his feet and shouted at me. “There is your gun behind you.” I blurted an oath and reached for the rifle, and as my fingers closed about it Jessie flung herself on me. “No, no, _no_,” she screamed, “I won’t let you. Oh, oh, for God’s sake be men, not murdering brutes. Think of me if you won’t think of your own lives. Stop it, stop it! Put down those guns!”