"There are no buts about it! You did not do it; then Jim Taggart did. He shot me last night, a second time and the second time in the back! He was once a man; now he's a Gallup dog, a man gone to seed, a cur and one for such as you and me to forget about. I hope to high heaven I never see the man again; for the sake of what has been between Jim Taggart and me, when both of us were younger, I'd rather let the past bury its dead. For if he ever comes trailing his filth across my trail again, I'll smash him into the earth." He made a wide angry gesture, as though he would wipe an episode and a man out of his life. "But you interrupt me; I was going to say something. Just this: I'll leave you alone. For an hour, for a dozen hours! You want rest, you want solitude and a chance to think. So do I. I can chain you to a tree and be sure of you! Or I can ask you to give me your word that you'll wait here until I come back to you ... and I already know you well enough to know _that_ will hold you tighter than any chain that was ever forged!" Lynette, without hesitating, answered: "I do want rest and I do want to be alone. Is that to be wondered at? Until noon I'll wait for you to come back." "Until high noon," he said. "And, girl, you pledge me your word on that?" "Yes!" "Come, Thor!" He turned and left her, his great dog at his heels, going up the narrowing cañon. "I'll not spy on you!" he called back, when he had gone a hundred yards. "You'll hear me shouting to you well before I come within eye-shot." And then she lost him, gone among the lesser, denser trees thick about the creek's margins. She turned her back on the grotto of his choosing, and went out into the full sunlight. She found a spot in the open, ringed about by the majestic pines, a grassy sward with the cleaving silver line of the creek cutting across it. For the first time in hours ... how many endless hours? how many days?... she was alone! No man at her side, either protecting or dominating. Her lungs filled with a deep sigh. Alone and secure in her aloneness for a matter of several hours. There was a certain singing happiness, electric within her, and it sprang, bright-winged, from her own characteristic pride. Bruce Standing had left her to an absolute physical freedom, knowing her bound by that intangible and unbreakable bond of her promise. He, a man who did not break his own word knew her for a girl who did not break hers! And he knew, at last, that it had not been her hand that had fired that cowardly shot. "It was cruel ... to have laughed at him. I did not mean to laugh. Would to God...." But if she had not laughed? Then what? Then how much of her adventure would have followed? How much of it did she, after all, regret?... She fell to wondering dreamily on Babe Deveril. Where was he? And would she see him again? And, if she should see him....