He sat staring into the fire. Thor began sniffing at the limp hand. Standing got to his feet; the fire was dying down and a sudden shiver of cold prompted him to pile on fresh fuel. He kicked Taggart's revolver viciously out of his way. He was going to the fireplace, but in doing so passed the bunk. He sat down a moment, wiping the sweat from his forehead ... cold and sweating at the same time. He lay back, flat on his back, and shut his eyes. He wondered vaguely how much blood he had lost coming up through the woods from the lower cabin where he had been shot; how much blood he had lost while he ran like a madman after that girl.... His eyes were shut doggedly tight and yet it seemed to his dizzied senses as though he could feel the look of her eyes, bending over him.... Now, that was a strange thing.... Never once had she given him a look from those eyes of hers to show a single spasm of fear.... Fearless? She, a girl? Did fearlessness and cowardice blend, then, that the incomprehensible result might be known as woman? For it was the supreme stroke of cowardice to shoot a man in the back. And yet ... she had said: "I did not shoot you!" While she spoke, he had believed!... He lay jeering at himself.... And all the while, as in a vision, he saw a pair of big gray eyes, soft and tender and alluring, bending over him.... "There's just one thing in the world," muttered Bruce Standing aloud, as a man may do when hard driven by perplexity and safe in solitary isolation from other ears than his own, "that I'd give everything to know! To know for sure!... Just one thing...." CHAPTER XVII Lynette, running like one blind out into the dark silent forest land, her own soul storm-tossed, stopped with sudden abruptness, staring about her, striving to see what lay before her, about her. Free! As free as the wind, to roam where she listed. And alone! Alone with the wilderness for the first moment since she had fled the menace yelping at her heels in Big Pine. _Alone._ And walled about by the wildest and most impenetrably blackly dark solitudes. She had but the one impulse; to flee from this man whose fellows termed him a wolf; but the one clear thought, that she _must_ hasten in search of the very man from whom originally she had fled, Jim Taggart. For, since Bruce Standing had not been killed by that shot fired in her room at the Gallup House, she, like Babe Deveril, was no longer threatened with the most serious charge of murder. Let Taggart place her under arrest; let him take her back into the region of towns and stages and lamp-lit homes; let him accuse her. Suddenly it seemed to her, wearied with endless exertion and privation and nervous tension, that there could be no peace greater than that of being taken back and placed in custody in Big Pine!