Now she had to guide her but a general, a very vague, sense of direction. It was so absolutely dark! There were stars, but they seemed little sparks of cold distant light, blurred and almost lost beyond the tops of the pines. Standing had led her after him, on his way to his lower cabin, down the gentle slope. Yes; she knew the general direction. And the distance? She had little impression of the distance between these two aloof lairs of Timber-Wolf; half a mile or two miles, she did not know. She would go on and on, seeking a way among the trees; on and on and on, stumbling in the dark. Then, after a while, she would call; call and call again, praying that Taggart and the others were lurking somewhere within ear-shot; that they would hear and come to her ... and place her under arrest! And she wondered, as she had done so many a time to-day, where was Babe Deveril? Was he near? Would he, by any chance, hear her? Would he, too, come to her? And, then, what? She began hastening on; to be farther from him, though that meant to come at every step nearer Jim Taggart and Young Gallup and that other man with the hawk face. She could not be absolutely certain that the direction she set her course by would ever lead her to the lower cabin; but on one point she was assured: at every step she was getting farther from wolf-man and wolf-dog. What a brute, what a beast he was! _And yet_ ... _and yet_.... There swept across her, like a clean, cold wind out of the north, a sudden appreciation of those finer qualities of manhood which his nature and his fate had allowed to dwell on in that anomaly, Bruce Standing. His absolute honesty, itself like a north wind, was not to be gainsaid even by his bitterest enemy; his courage, in any woman's eyes, was invested with sheer nobility. How he had befriended poor little Mexicali Joe; how, to-night for the second time, though handicapped by his wound, he had gone to Joe's relief; how he, one against three, had had his way, like a lion among curs. Wolf or lion?... And, finally, she abode wonderingly on that queer, distorted chivalry which resided in the heart of him, his brutally chivalrous way with her. For, no matter how harsh and bitter his tongue had been and no matter how hard his eye, he had not harmed her; when his hands had been like steel upon hers, commanding her while he jeered at her, they had not once so much as bruised her soft skin. In no way had he harmed her while it had been at his command, had he desired, to harm her in all ways.... She thought of being alone with any man like Taggart or Gallup or that hawk-faced hanger-on of theirs ... and shuddered. Even Babe Deveril; he had looked at her last night, insinuating.... She remembered how Bruce Standing, rushing down upon them, had thrown his own rifle away to grapple with Deveril, man to man and no odds stolen; she would never forget the picture of him with his axe, attacking the jail and defying the law.... Her mind raced, her thoughts switched