Another day of wilderness wandering. A cabin sighted, but so far away that it was merely a vague dot upon a distant ridge; miner's shack or sheepman's or wood-cutter's? Housing an occupant or deserted for years? No smoke from the rock chimney; no sign of any human being near it. And all view of it so soon lost!... And, afterward, no other human habitation of any kind; no road man-made; only trees and rocks, gorges and ridges and brush, and a winding way to be chosen between them. With, always, Bruce Standing driving on and on, relentlessly on, ever deeper into the wilderness.
A day of life like a leaf torn out of the book of hell for Lynette. He did not speak to her as they went on from dawn to noon and from noon until afternoon shadows gathered; he did not so much as turn his eyes full upon her own; for the most part he seemed altogether forgetful of the fact that, besides himself, there was another of his species in all the wide sweep of this land of mighty solitudes. For his dog, Thor, he had a kindly though rough-spoken word now and then; for his horse a word or a rude pat upon the shoulder or hip; for her nothing but his utter, unruffled silence.... At times she hummed little snatches of gay tunes, hoping to irritate him; at times she strove for an aloofness to match his own. Countless times she looked over her shoulder, looking for Babe Deveril. And so the day, a long day, went by until at last it was late afternoon.
"Here we stop," said Standing abruptly. "Get down."
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He would seem to have all advantage over her; yet she understood that in one way, and in one way only, could she rob him of his advantage, and that was by giving him swift and cheerful obedience. So she slipped out of the saddle on the instant, giving him for answer only the light gay words:
"Oh, it is beautiful here!" ...
It was beautiful.... He glared at her and led his horse away to unsaddle; his big dog, Thor, had trotted along at Daylight's heels all day and now slumped down, ears erect and suspicious, while he watched his master and made certain of never losing sight for a second of his master's new companion, whom he tolerated but did not trust. Lynette, stiff from so many hours in the saddle, looked about her. They were in the upper, brief space of a valley; above reared the mountains steeply, rugged slopes with pines here and there, with more open spaces and tumbled boulders. The valley itself was a pretty, pleasant place, soft in short green grass, flower-dotted, smoothly curving down into the more open level lands below. Yet here was no proper place to pitch camp, especially at so early an hour when it was allowed to seek further; it was too open, it would be unsheltered and cold; there was no water....
"Come on!"
She started and turned again toward Standing. He had slung his small pack across his shoulders and was going on. She looked forward toward the ridge, which he faced; it rose sheer and forbidding. And she saw that his face was white and drawn; she wondered quickly how sorely his wound hurt him.
"Brute?" He could have been far more brutal to her.... He was dead-tired, white-faced; he had fought hard last night, scorning the advantage of an armed man against an unarmed; he had not harmed a
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 hair of her head! Almost ... almost it lay within her to whisper "Poor fellow!" And if only Bruce Standing could have known that!...
He led the way. She followed, since there was nothing else to think of doing.
They climbed steadily upward out of this narrow green valley, finding a steep but open way among the trees. Now and then they paused briefly to breathe, and Lynette, looking back, saw more and more of the long, winding valley, as it revealed itself to her from new vantage points. Far away she caught the glint of the sunlight upon a little wandering creek. They went on, and came to the crest of the ridge, in full sunshine now; Standing led an unhesitating way through a natural pass, and down on the other side, into shadows of a thick grove; through thickets; they splashed across a creek, a thin line of clear, cool water slipping through mountain willows, a tributary of the larger stream in the valley below. Down here it was almost dark. But twenty minutes later, climbing another slope where the larger timber stood widely spaced, they came again into the full sunshine.... Lynette began to wonder why he had left his horse so far back; how far did the silent, tireless man mean to walk? Also, she began to welcome the coming night with an eagerness which she was at all pains to conceal from him; he was always ten steps ahead of her; if he walked on another half-hour, she began to hope that they would come into a place of shadows and clumps of trees among which she might dare make the attempt for escape which had been denied her all day....
They came into a little upland flat, well watered, emerald-carpeted with tender grass, shot through with lingering flowers and studded with magnificent trees; it seemed the very heart of the great wilderness; here was
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 such glorious forest land as Lynette had never seen and did not know existed in all the broad scope of the great Southwest mountain country. She looked upward. Dark branches towered into the sky, the tips still shot through with soft summer light. She heard the gush of water—the tumble and splash and fall of water. Somewhere above, at the upper end of the flat, where a dark ravine was an ebon-shadow-filled gash through the hills, was a waterfall. She could not see it, but its musical waters proclaimed it through the still air. She looked swiftly down the other way; there it was growing dark. She glanced hurriedly at Standing. And he, as though he had read her thought, stopped and turned and, before she could stir, was at her side.
After that, with never a word, they went on, deeper into this shadowy realm of big trees. He watched her at every step. Fury filled her heart, but with compressed lips she maintained a silence like his own. Thor trotted along with them, now in front of his master, as though this were a way he had travelled before and knew well, now questing far afield, now in the rear, eying his master's captive and setting his dog's brains to the riddle.
Before they had walked another ten minutes, Standing threw down his pack and said abruptly:
"This is as far as we go."
She sat down, her back to a tree, her face averted from him. She was very tired and now she could have put her face into her hands and cried from very weariness. But instead she caught her lip up between her teeth and hid her face from him and ignored him. But in her heart she was wondering; had he travelled all day long and then this far from the spot where he had released his horse, just to pitch camp in a clump of trees? Was this the spot toward which he had striven on so
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 stubbornly since daylight? Where was he going? Why? Old queries and doubts rushed back upon her.... She was vaguely grateful that they were questions which he and not she had to answer; that responsibilities were his instead of hers. She was tired enough to lie down where she was and cease to care what happened.... It was not as yet pitch-dark; the sun was not down on the heights. But here, among the tall pines, in this hollow, the shadows were thick; nothing stood out in detail to her slowly closing eyes; here was a place of black blots, distorted glooms, the weird formless outriders of the night.... She had not the remotest suspicion that, where she had slumped down, she was almost at the door of a cabin.
Rather, it would have been surprising had she known. For surely there was never cabin like this hermit camp of Bruce Standing's! Two sky-scraping pines stood close together; between them was the door, framed by their own straight trunks. Smaller trees grew about the ancient parents; these hid the walls which to escape notice required little enough hiding at any time; a man might have passed here within a few yards at noonday and not noticed all this which Lynette failed to see in the dusk. For the walls of the tiny cabin were of rough logs from which the bark had never been stripped, walls which blended so perfectly with the greater note struck by the woodland that they failed to draw the eye; the chimney, of loose-piled rocks, was viewless at this time of day behind the tree trunks and inconspicuous at any time. And low, over the flat roof drooped the concealing branches of the trees. Of all this Lynette glimpsed nothing until Timber-Wolf said, looking down at her:
"When all the tavern is prepared within,
Why nods the drowsy worshipper outside?"
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She had striven in one way and another since she had had her first view of him, axe in hand, for a clew to the real Bruce Standing. Now, again, he set her jaded faculties to work: Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf, and man of violence, quoting poetry to her! And at such a moment and under such circumstances!... It is not merely the feminine soul which is indeterminable, mystifying, intriguing into the ultimate bournes of speculation; rather the human soul....
"I don't fancy guessing riddles this evening," she told him. "All that I can think of by way of repartee is: 'What meanest thou, Sir Tent-maker?'"
She thought that she heard him stifle a chuckle!
But, in this thickening gloom and through those heavy shadows which lay across her soul in an hour of doubtings and uncertainties, she could be certain of nothing.... He was saying merely:
"If you're not clean done in, I'd suggest you walk three steps into my cabin. On the other hand, if you can't make it, I'll pick you up and carry you in!"
At that she sprang to her feet; through the gathering dark he could feel the burning look in her eyes.
Then, groping mentally and physically, it was given to her to understand. For already he stood upon the rude threshold. She followed after him.
She gasped, astonished, when she realized that already, in so few steps, she had passed into the embrasure of four walls! Sturdy walls; walls rude and unbeautiful, but rising stalwart bulwarks against the cold of night mountain air. He, a blurred, gigantic form in the dusk, was before her; his wolfish dog was at her heels. She heard the scratch, she saw the blue and yellow spurt of a sulphur match. His form suddenly loomed larger, leaped into grotesque giganticness; the tiny room sprang waveringly out of darkness into the
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 unreality of half-light; he found a candle; a steady golden flame sent the shadows racing into limbo; she looked about her wonderingly....
A room, bound in rough logs; a hastily, roughly hewn log set on other logs, offering its surly service as table; a stump which obviously made pretense at being a stool; a bunk against a wall, thick-padded with the tips from pines; a tin cup, a tin plate, an imitation of a box against a wall. And, hanging over a pole ... her first certainty that Bruce Standing, though animal as she named him in her heart, was a clean animal ... two or three blankets which, on last leaving this hut of his, he had stretched to air.... A primitive room, and yet clean. And, across from the narrow bunk, a deep, wide-mouthed fireplace made of big rocks.... He himself must have made that fireplace, for what other man could have lifted those rocks into place?
"I'm hungry," said Standing. "As hungry as a bear."
Already she was sitting on the edge of the bunk. She expected to hear for his next words: "Get me my dinner." But, instead, he said, his voice harsher than she had ever heard it before:
"And that's why I'm cooking for myself instead of making you do it! I don't want you to get it into your head it's because I'm getting sorry for you...."
She lay back, unanswering, and watched him. And presently, though not for him to see, a little smile touched her lips and for a short instant lighted her big gray eyes.... And in her heart she said: "He is so obvious, with all his thinking that he is a man whom a girl cannot see through! All day he has made me ride, while he walked! He said that that was to make better time! And, with every opportunity to harm me, he has no............