Lynette, with all her fast-beating heart, wanted to come to Babe Deveril's aid. The one thing which mattered was that, at her hour of need, he had stood up for her; her soul was tumultuously crying out for the opportunity to demonstrate beyond lip-service the meaning of gratitude. She caught up a stone, and throughout the fight held it gripped so hard that before the end her fingers were bleeding. But never an opportunity did she have to hurl it as long as those two contended. Once it entered her thought that she must have dreamed of Bruce Standing, shot and bleeding and senseless on the floor at the Gallup House. For now, so few hours after, he gave no slightest hint of being a man recently badly wounded. There was more of common sense in a man's dying of such a wound as his than in his striking such great, hammer-hard blows with both arms. He created within her from that moment an odd sensation which grew with her later; the man was not of the common mould. Something beyond and above mere flesh and blood and the routine of human qualifications inspired him. There was something _inevitable_ about Bruce Standing.... Babe Deveril fought like a young, lissome tiger.... He fought with all of the might that lay within him, muscle and mind and controlling spirit. When he struck a blow he put into it, with a little coughing grunt, every last ounce of hostility which was at his command; with every blow he longed to kill. And, as though the two were blood-brothers, Bruce Standing fought as did Babe Deveril. Straight, hard, merciless blow to answer blow as straight and hard and merciless.... Timber-Wolf was a man to laugh at his own mine muckers when they could not thrust a boulder aside, and to stoop and set his hands and arms and back to the labor and pluck the thing up and hurl it above their bewildered heads. He smote as though he carried a war-club in each hand; he received a crashing blow full in the face, and, though the blood came, he did not feel it; he struck back, and his great iron fist beat through Deveril's guarding arms. No man, or at least no man whom Bruce Standing in his wild life had ever met, could have stood up against that blow. Babe Deveril, with the life almost jarred out of his body, went down. And Bruce Standing, growling like an angry bear, caught him up and lifted him high in air and flung him far away from him, as lightly as though he flung but a fifty-pound weight. And where Babe Deveril fell he lay still.... Lynette ran to him and knelt and put her hands at his shoulders, thinking him dead.