"I call myself the best man that ever came into this wilderness country," he told her impudently. "If you are in doubt, bring on any other man of your choice and ask him, with your pretty smiles, if he cares to stand up against me! Yes, a man who goes rough-shod over everything and anything and anybody who stands in his way...." "Boaster!" she named him scornfully. He laughed loudly at that. "I am no boaster and in your heart you know it!... There's another damn-fool convention for you, that business of great modesty! A man who is sure of himself doesn't have to walk easy and talk easy, but can tell other men what he is, and then, by glory, show 'em!" Still she was scornful of him ... though she could not keep out of her thought that picture which he had made when, axe in hand, he had laid an armed jailer in the dust, and single-handed had made a jail delivery which hundreds of other men wanted to make and held back from ... through lack of that unrestricted confidence which was Bruce Standing's. He was staring at her. "You, too ... for a woman ... have courage," he muttered. And then, with a sudden arm flung out: "I'm hungry, I tell you." "I'd rather die...." "It's easy to die ... for any one who is not a coward. And I just told you that you had courage." He came suddenly close to her. "But there are other things that are not so easy! What if I put my two arms about you? If I hold you tight ... and set my lips to yours ... and...." "You beast...." "But my dinner?" he jeered at her. She went hot and cold; she cast a quick glance toward the forest land where the night was thickening; she cast another glance at his rifle where it lay, a few feet from the fire. Then, her lower lip caught between her teeth, she went to the tin can in which she and Babe Deveril had made coffee. "A funny thing," said Bruce Standing, watching her; "you skipped out, hot-foot, from Big Pine, thinking you had killed me! And your little friend, meaning Baby Devil, skipped along, thinking he had done Jim Taggart in! And, after all, nobody much hurt!... Glad to hear that Taggart did not die?" "I knew it already," she said, just to cheat him of any satisfaction in telling her. "Mexicali Joe skipped this way, too," he went on swiftly, so swiftly that he succeeded in tricking her into saying: "I knew that, too!" Then he laughed at her, informing her: "Now there remains little for you to tell me. You knew Taggart was still on his feet and you knew Joe was travelling this way, and you've come up from the general direction of Joe's dugout! Which tells me one thing: where you and Baby Devil got the coffee and this tinned stuff. Now let's hear details!" "Oh ... I hate you!" "You've told me that before. And...." He burst into booming laughter. And then, still laughter-choked, he cried: "Like a good old-time two-handled sword is the man Bruce Standing! And yet his wit, like a Spanish dagger, is good match for a girl's!"