Lynette, in a mood to expect anything of fate, wondered vaguely where the steep trail of adventure now led. She would not have been surprised had Standing set his plans for some spot a hundred miles distant. But she was surprised to arrive so soon, after only two or three hours, at their destination. He looked at her, exulting.
"Here is Eden!" he cried out joyously. "Remember the name, girl; bestowed upon this spot no longer ago than this very minute! Eden! And as far from the world as that other distant Eden. Here we stop and here no man finds us!"
He had led the way, upward along a rocky slope. He had brought her into a spot which she would have named "The Land of Waterfalls!" A tiny valley with a sparkling mountain creek cleaving like flowing crystal through a grassy meadow; tall trees, noble patriarchs bounding it. Steep cañon walls shutting in the timber growth; a narrow ravine above with the water leaping, plunging, tumbling translucent green over jagged rocks, splashing into a series of pools, turned into rainbow spray here and there in its wild cascadings. The world all about was murmurous with living waters, with bees, with the eternal whisperings of the pines.
And here began an idyl; a strange idyl. A man asserting his power as captor; a maid made captive; two souls wide awake, questing, swung from certainty to uncertainty, gathered up in doubt. Life grown a thing of tremendous import.
All morning had Standing been wracked with pain. Yet none the less did he hold unswervingly to his
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purpose. Now he sat down, his back to a tree. Thor came and lay at his feet. Lynette stood looking down upon the two.
"Rest," he said. "Here is your home for a time. A day? Ten days? Who knows? Not I, girl! All that I know I have told you; here we rest and here we take life into our hands and mould it ... as we have always moulded it! We are at the gates; we enter or we turn to one side! We go on or we go back. Which? When we know that, we know everything."
He had brought with him, slung across his back, a great roll from the hidden cabin. His rifle lay across his knees. He looked up into her face with eyes which, though haggard, shone wonderfully. She sat down, ten steps from him; her clasped hands were in her lap; her eyes were veiled mysteries.
"Taggart won't look for us here," he said. "He hasn't the brains of a little gray seed-tick! He'll be sure we've made a big jump, forward or back, ten times this distance. Besides, he has to go somewhere to get himself a new set of guns! Imagine him tackling anything with an ounce of risk in it unless he was heeled like an army corps! I begin to lose respect for that man."
Lynette was thinking but one thing: "She was not afraid of this man; not afraid to be alone with him in pathless solitudes. She might choose to be elsewhere ... yet she was safe with him. For, above all, he was a man; and never need a true girl fear a true man." And, when she stole a swift glance at his face, it lay in her heart to be a bit sorry for him. Sympathy? It lies close to another eternal human emotion! He looked like one whom fate had crushed and yet whose spirit refused to be crushed. He looked a sick man who, scorning all the commands laid upon the flesh, carried on.
After a while he turned to look upon her, and for the
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 first time she saw a new and strange look in his eyes, a look of pleading.
"Don't misjudge me, girl," he said heavily. "Rather than see your little finger bruised I'd have a man drive a knife in me! I'm just blundering along now ... blundering ... trying to see daylight. I won't hurt you. There's nothing on earth or in Heaven so sure as that. But don't ask me to let you go!"
She made him no answer. She began thinking of his wounds; he gave them such scant attention! He should be caring for them; what he should do was to hasten to a surgeon. She wondered if still he clung to his conviction, the natural one after all, that she had shot him? And she wondered, as she had done so many a time before: "Who had shot him?" Whose hand that which she had seen reach through her window and snatch up her revolver and fire the cowardly shot? Taggart, only a few hours ago, had said: "I saw! I was right there!" ...
"Was it Jim Taggart who shot you in the back last night?" she demanded suddenly.
"Yes," he said. "At least, I think so."
"Is he that kind of man?"
Now his eyes were keen and hard upon hers.
"I begin to think that he is, girl," he said shortly. "Why?"
She shrugged and again turned away.
He lumbered to his feet. Thor, knowing where he was going, barked and leaped ahead.
"Come, I'll show you where we pitch camp."
She looked about her. Mere madness to attempt flight now; he would bear down upon her before she had run twenty steps. And did she want to run just now? She had her own measure of curiosity.... Was it only that?... and she had, locked away securely in
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 her breast, her absolute positive knowledge that she had nothing to fear at his hands. She rose and followed him.
Suddenly he swerved about, confronting her, his eyes stern, his voice hard with the emotion riding him.
"Madman I may be," he said. "Fool, I am not, praise God! Last night I heard; you could have chucked that rifle into Taggart's hands and could have gone free yourself ... and by now I'd be a dead man! But, glory be, there isn't a streak of yellow in your whole glorious being!"
The blood ran up into her face; it made her hot throughout her whole body. Praise, from him, to stir her like that! Her eyes flashed back angrily, for she was angry with herself.
"Come," he muttered. "Talk's cheap at any time. And I'm to show you where we make our first home."
With her teeth sharply catching up her underlip, she held her silence. He went on some two-score paces and stopped; with a sudden gesture he said:
"Here I've spent, God knows how many nights, when I had to be off by myself! No roof for us, girl, but who wants a roof with that sky above us?"
Here was a natural grotto which at another time would have made her exclaim in delight: a nook, set apart, thresholded in tender grass shot through with those tiny delicate blooms of mountain flowers. On one side a cliff, outjutting, thrusting forward a great overhanging shelf of rock which looked as though it must fall and yet which, obviously, had held securely through the centuries. Three big pine-trees, two of them leaning strangely toward the cliff, as though yearning to lean against the sturdy rock and rest there upon its iron breast. The whole ringed about by a dense copse of brush, thick as a wall and rearing high above her head. Almost a cave
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 made of cliff and growing things, cosy and warm, with its opening fronting the stream which was never silent. Thor ran ahead into the dusky seclusion and barked his invitation to them to follow. A thick, dry mat, under Thor's feet, of fallen pine-needles.
Standing tossed his roll inside; he began, with one hand, to work with the knotted rope. Lynette came forward swiftly, saying:
"At least I have two hands...."
Their hands brushed over the labor. Again the hot blood raced through her, and again sudden anger, anger at herself, flashed through her being.
And a tingling, like that which shot through her, was in Bruce Standing's veins. He caught her hand.
"Girl!" he said huskily.
"Don't!" she cried in alarm.
He dropped her hand and rose swiftly to his feet.
"You are right," he muttered. "Not yet...."
How could this man at a touch make her heart beat like mad? She was afraid ... she knew that she was not afraid of him ... yet she was afraid.
"I'm sorry," he said roughly. Actually, marvelling, she saw that the big man looked embarrassed. "Look here, girl: I've come to know you a bit and, thinking what I think, I hold that I know you well! I'll take my chance that you are no petty crook, that you are no coward, that you are no liar! So...."
"Then," she cried, jumping to her feet, all eagerness, "do you believe me when I say that I did not shoot you?"
His eyes met hers steadily; he answered promptly:
"You have told me ... and I believe. I know!"
A rush of gladness, an intoxication of gladness, ............