"I know as much as you do of the place to find the gold!" she told him again. "And I, though a girl, have as much interest in a fortune to be made as any man can have. That's fair warning to you, Bruce Standing!" He laughed carelessly. Then he said: "It's neither your gold nor mine. By right of discovery, it belongs to a little shrimp named Mexicali Joe _Alguna-Cosa_. Our hands are off, so far as our own pockets are concerned." "But.... You took quick interest when you learned where it was! You have some plan ... you commanded your friend Billy Winch to keep Joe well guarded!" His eyes were twinkling; and greed does not light twinkling lights! "I've got gold of my own, girl! Gold enough to last me my life and you your life and both of us together our lives! And to leave a decent residuum after us.... But let's talk of Mexicali Joe's gold some other time. To-day.... We have ourselves!" "You have yourself!" cried Lynette with sudden bitterness. "I have not even my own personal liberty!" "And what if I let you go, girl? As I have a mind to do to-day? What then? Where would you go? Where would I find you again? For find you I must and will though 'it were ten thousand mile.'" "Am I to suffer your dictation during the days of actual imprisonment at your hands, and then, for all time afterward, render you an accounting of my actions!" "Why do you try to hate me so, girl?" "Why should I not hate you?" "What have I done to you? Have I done anything more than put out a hand to stop time, to snatch time for you and me, for us to _know_!... Look you, girl, a man, at least a man of my sort, may go a third of his life or a fourth or a full half, and know much less than nothing of what a true girl is! _How can he know?_ Already I have learned that you have instincts which leap; a man gropes like a blind mole and it takes him a long time to teach himself to see the stars ... _the star!_ Now it's a fair bet, and no odds given or taken, that one Bruce Standing happened to be an unruly devil, a blunt man, a man who has as a part and parcel of his religion to shoot square and to hit hard, so long as God lets him. I've done wrong and I've done right, and I'm doing as all the rest of the great mass, in a state of flux, is doing; growing up from the mud into something better. If not in this life or the next, well then, since the mills grind with exceeding patience, in some other life. At least I'm honest; at least, in plain English, I do my damnedest! Take it or leave it, there's the truth. If it happens that I'm a man of few friends.... Almost you can count 'em on Billy Winch's one leg!... if few men love me and many men hate...." "Yes!" cried Lynette, and her own earnestness was caught and compelled by his own. "Most men, many, many men, hate you!... And yet you have it within you to make them love you!"