"There is good and bad in you, Babe Deveril, as I suppose there is in all of us. But you have been good to me! I will never forget how you have stood my friend twice; I will always remember that you were _a man_; a man who never did little, mean things. And I shall always thank God for that memory. And now, good-by, Babe Deveril and good luck go with you!" "And Standing?" he demanded at the end. "You are done with him, too?" Suddenly she looked wearier than he had ever seen her even during their days and nights together in the mountains. She looked a poor little broken-hearted girl; there was a quick gathering of tears in her eyes, which she strove to smile away. But despite the smile, the tears ran down. She waved her hand; the stage driver cracked his long whip.... Deveril stood in the dusty road, his hat in his hand, staring down a winding roadway. A clatter of hoofs, a rattle of wheels, a mist of dust ... and Lynette was gone. CHAPTER XXVI Deveril went back to his horse, mounting listlessly like a very tired man. The spring had gone out of his step and something of the elasticity out of that ever-young spirit which had always been his no matter from what quarter blew the variable winds of chance. Lynette was gone and he could not hold back his thoughts from winging back along the trail he and she had trod together; there had been the time, and now he knew it, when all things were possible; the time before Bruce Standing came into her life, when Babe Deveril, had he then understood both himself and her, might have won a thing more golden than any man's mere gold. In his blindness he had judged her the light adventuress which she seemed; now that it was given him to understand that in Lynette Brooke he had found a pure-hearted girl whose inherited adventuresome blood had led her into tangled paths, he understood that in her there had come that one girl who comes once to all men ... and that she had passed on and out of his life. He caught up the reins of the horse she had left behind. His face grew grim; he still had Jim Taggart to deal with and, therefore, it was as well to take this horse and the others back to Big Pine and leave them there for Taggart. For the first thing which would suggest itself to the enraged sheriff would be to press a charge against him of horse stealing, and in this country horse thieves were treated with no gentle consideration. "I'll leave the horses there ... and go." Where? It did not matter. There was nothing left for him in these mountains; Bruce Standing had the gold and the girl was on the stage.