But in his bleak broodings there remained one gleam of gloating satisfaction: he had tricked Standing out of the girl! That Lynette already loved his kinsman or at the least stood upon the very brink of giving her heart unreservedly into his keeping, Deveril's keen eyes, the eyes of jealous love, had been quick to read. It did not once suggest itself to him that Standing could by any possibility have failed to love Lynette. The two had been for days together, alone in the mountains; why should Standing have kept her and have been gentle with her, as he must have been, save for the one reason that he loved her? Further, what man could have lived so long with Lynette of the daring eyes and not love her? And he, Babe Deveril, had stolen her away from Bruce Standing, had tricked him with a pencil scrawl, had lost Lynette to him for all time. The stage carrying her away now was as inevitable an instrument in the hand of fate as death itself. He turned back for the other horses which he had tethered by the roadside and led them on toward Big Pine. "What the devil is love, anyway?" he muttered once. It was not for a man such as Babe Deveril to know clearly; for love is winged with unselfishness and self-sacrifice. And yet, after his own fashion, he loved her and would love her always, though other pretty faces came and went and he laughed into other eyes. She was lost to him; there was the one great certainty like a rock wall across his path. And she had said at the parting ... her last words to him were to ring in his memory for many a long day ... that there was both good and bad in him; and she chose to remember the good! He tried to laugh at that; what did he care for good and bad? He, a man who went his way and made reckoning to none? And she had said that she knew him for _a man_; one who, whatever else he might have done, had never stooped to a mean, contemptible act; she thought of him and would always think of him as a man who, though he struck unrighteous blows, dealt them in the open, man-style.... And yet ... the one deed of a significance so profound that it had directed the currents of three lives, that writing of seven words, that signing of her name under them.... "I am glad that I did that!" he triumphed. And gladdest of all, in his heart, was he that Lynette did not know ... would never know. Thus Babe Deveril, riding with drooping head, found certain living fires among the ashes of dead hopes: A row to come with Taggart? He could look forward to it with fierce eagerness. Standing and Lynette separated; vindictive satisfaction there. He'd got his knife in Standing's heart at last! He'd like to wait a year or a dozen until some time Lynette forgot and another man came despite her sweeping avowal and she married; he would like then to come back to Bruce Standing and tell him the fool he had been and how it had been none other than Baby Devil who had knifed him.