She was very deeply moved. Clearly here was no concern of hers; these men, all of them including Deveril, were strangers to her and their loves and hates had nothing to do with Lynette Brooke. But none the less that current of men's lives ran so strong and swift that she felt as though she were being actually and physically drawn into it. Nor, though her eyes did not once leave the rigid figure of Deveril, did her thoughts concern themselves exclusively with him. She felt a sudden strange and burning interest in that other man whom she had never seen but of whose wild nature she had heard. She resented the work of Bruce Standing, done for him by his emissaries; she felt that she, no less than Babe Deveril, could hate a man like that. And yet already there had sprung up within her a strong desire to see him for herself. "How can it be," she wondered, "that if he is the lawbreaker you call him, thief and worse, men allow him to go on his way?" He looked at her curiously. Then he laughed his short angry laugh. "He's a man for you to look into, girl with the daring eyes! A cruel, merciless devil if half the tales are true and, to top off his madness, a man who has not hate but an abiding contempt for all your gentle sex. But you wonder why men let him roam free? In the first place, haven't I told you that he rolls in wealth? That's one thing. Another is his cursed craft. You wonder why I say in one breath that he stole three thousand dollars from me and then merely growl that he remains outside jail?" "I don't understand it, of course." "Here you go, then: Half a dozen years ago I held that Bruce Standing and I were friends. He sent me word to come up here into his wilderness; I was to bring whatever money I could raise and there was the chance to double it. I came. When I met him, twenty miles off over yonder in a cabin where he lived like a solitary old bear, we talked things out. With all of his big ventures he was on the edge of bankruptcy. He was grabbing money in both hands from any source and every source. He wanted my three thousand to throw in with the rest, the damned selfish hog that he was and is. I laughed at him and you could have heard him growl a mile. We slept that night in his cabin. In the middle of the night in the pitch black dark, I felt a man on top of me in my bunk, his hands at my throat. I got a tap over the head with something; when I woke up my money belt was gone and it was morning and there was Bruce Standing, singing and grinning and getting breakfast and asking me if I had had bad dreams." "But...." "The law? When he wouldn't either admit or deny? When he just laughed and said, 'Where in this country, _my country_, will you get a jury to convict me?' And where, by the same token, was any money left in my pockets to do legal battle with a man intrenched as he is in his old mountains?" "And he goes on prospering?"