She heard him coming. More than that, and before, it seemed to her that her instinct told her that he would come, bearing down upon her like a hurricane, in such violence as would stamp her into the earth. She had not meant to laugh at him; she did not want to laugh. And yet now all that she could do was clap her hands over her mouth and run before him as a blown leaf races before the storm. She sped down the hall, plunged into her room, slammed the door after her. ... And in the hallway she heard the pounding of his heavy boots. Already he was at her door. Before she could shoot the bolt, he had gripped the knob. When he flung his weight against the panel, it flew back, and under the impact she was thrown backward, and would have fallen had it not been that she brought up against her bed. Here she half fell, but was erect before he had stormed across the threshold. "You...." Why had she run from him? She was not afraid of him and she was not afraid of anything on earth. Or, at least, making a sort of religion out of it, that was the thing which she had always told herself. Just at hand, on the little table by the open window, was her revolver. And she could shoot and shoot true to the mark. She had told Babe Deveril that she could take care of herself. She stood, rigid and defiant, and in her heart unafraid. On a bracketed shelf over her bed was a kerosene lamp which she had left burning when she had gone out. She could see the working of his lips. And he saw her. Now those who knew Timber-Wolf best knew this about him--that he had no use for womankind; that he held all of the female of the human race to be weaklings and worse, leeches upon the strength of man, mere outwardly glossed tricks of a scheming nature; things contemptible. And at this moment, surely, Timber-Wolf was in no mood to revise for the better his sweeping and deep-based opinion. But now, despite all trumped-up reasonings, no matter how sincere, his first clear view of this girl gave him pause. She was superb. Physically, if not otherwise. For the first thing, her hair snared him. Strong men are always caught by films; a big brute of a man who may break his triumphant way through iron bands grows powerless under a frail wisp of a frail woman's hair. In the hall she had held her hat in her hands; her hair, loosely upgathered and insecurely and hastily confined, had tumbled all about her face as she bolted into her room. He saw that first of all. And then he saw her eyes. At the moment, already in her room with the door slammed shut behind him and his back against it, he looked, glowering, into her eyes. And he found them at once soft and still amazingly unafraid; those daring eyes of Lynette Brooke, daughter of a dancing-girl and of the dare-all miner, Brooke. Unafraid, though he who might have choked the life out of her between finger and thumb, turned his furious face upon her.