"Before I usurped the functions of the law I appealed to the law. Blackstone says that before a man takes human life--even in defence of his own--he must 'retreat to the ditch or wall'! I obeyed that mandate, and the law refused me. Saul Fulton came back ten thousand miles to have me murdered, and by accident an innocent man died in my stead. Then, and then only, I assumed a man's prerogative to do for himself and his people what courts of injustice decline to do for him." He paused then, and the ferocity of his thoughts brought an ironical smile to his tight lips. "You _have_ come a long way. One can only appreciate what rampant difficulties stood in your path by considering how sacred and unbending are the artificial little laws of your world. It was a bold thing and a kindly thing for you to do, but the text that you preach is--you must pardon the candour of saying it--a sermon of platitudes. They have lost their virtue with me--because, tonight, I'm looking straight into facts and thinking naked thoughts." "Just what are you going to do?" "Do?" He echoed the word tempestuously. "I'm going to call on Tom Carr to deliver Saul Fulton over to me and my mob. I suppose you'd call them that. Saul is going to die, and Tom is going into exile. I reckon first, though, there'll be a sort of a battle. The Carrs are a headstrong crew." He turned on his heel with the air of a man who has surrendered to the demands of politeness moments that can be ill spared from a more pressing urgency, and walked around the cot to lift from the floor behind it a heavy box of rifle cartridges. But when he had straightened up and his eyes again met hers, the sight of her and the sound of her voice brought overpoweringly upon him a surge of that feeling which he had been trying to repress. They had met thus far as two duellists may meet, each testing the blade of his will and studying the eye of the adversary where may be read the coming thrust in advance of its attempted delivery. Consciously Anne had admitted that wariness and determination. Boone had chosen to regard her merely as the woman he had once worshipped, who, after failing of loyalty, was making a theatric effort in his behalf, inspired by a sentimental memory of a dead love. Now he recognized with a disturbing certainty that to try to think of her in any past tense of love was worse than hypocritical. He knew that to him she had never seemed more incredibly beautiful than at this moment when she stood there in the rough corduroy riding clothes in which she had crossed the hills. Those eyes, with the amazing inner lights, were to him dazzling and unsteadying. "What you have just told me is what you meant to do," she declared, with the sort of calm assurance that can speak without faltering or misgiving against the howl of the furies, "but you aren't going to do it. You _couldn't_ do it, except in a moment of delirium--"