"Down, Thor," he commanded; he made the dog lie again across the threshold. "Watch her, Thor!" Thor growled; the red eyes watched her. "Don't you move from that bunk until I get back!" Standing told her sternly. He ran out of the cabin. She heard him breaking through brush, going the shortest, straightest way down toward the spot from which voices had come up to them. Thor growled. She looked at the dog, fascinated with fear of him. The big head was down now, resting between the big fore paws; the unwinking eyes were on her.... She lay back on the bunk, staring up at the smoke-blackened rafters. It was very quiet. No longer could she hear the sound of Timber-Wolf's running.... He, one man, pitting himself in blazing anger against at least three men, ... perhaps four!... What if he were killed? Leaving her here, under the relentless guard of Thor? She was taken with a long fit of shivering. Thor growled. CHAPTER XV Every experience through which Lynette Brooke had gone until now seemed suddenly dwarfed into insignificance by the present. She was so utterly wearied out physically that muscles all over her body, demanding their hour of relaxation and having that relaxation denied them through the nervous stress laid upon her, quivered piteously. Hers was that frame of mind which distorts and magnifies, whipping out of its true semblance all actual conditions or building them up into monstrous, grotesque shapes. She was afraid of that great, staring dog on the threshold; more afraid of him than she had ever been of any man, Thor's master not excepted. For here was a fear which she could not throttle down. She would have sighed in content and have gone to sleep, her turbulent emotions quieted, if only it had been Bruce Standing's hard hand on the chain denying her her liberty instead of a great dog lying across the door-step.... Enough here to make her clinch her teeth to hold back a scream of panic-swept nerves; yet this was not all. For still that cry, heard through the woods, rang in her ears; still she built up in the picture which her quick fancy limned the vision of Mexicali Joe at the mercy of merciless men; Joe, who had lied to them, hoping to deliver them into the hands of one greater than they; Joe, who at the end, with them demanding to see what he had to show them, must be driven to the last extremity to fight for time.... And, blurring everything else at times, there swept over her another picture; that of Timber-Wolf, wounded and white-faced, stalking in that fearless way of his among them, confronting three armed men ... or four?... and then man-killing.... They were all wolves! She shuddered. And Thor, watching her, filled the quiet cabin with the sound of his low suspicious growling. "Thor!" she called him, hardly above a whisper. Her lips were dry. "Good old Thor!" His throaty rumble of a growl, telling her of his distrust as eloquently as it could have done had Thor the words of man at his command, was her answer.