"I want a good long drink of fresh water," said Standing. "And you, after this lunch of ours, will be thirsty. Let's go down to the creek; down there, by the waterfall, after we've drunk, I want to talk with you."
He had turned to her, that flash still in his eyes, before Billy Winch and Mexicali Joe had ridden a dozen yards out of camp. She looked at him in silence, wondering what lay in his thoughts; what had been the sudden, compelling, and triumphant motive to actuate him when with his great shout of laughter he had dismissed the two men. He had Joe's secret now; she shared it herself: The gold was far from here and very near Big Pine; in Light Ladies' Cañon! The strange part of it was that Taggart's first surmise, when he and his companions had trapped Mexicali Joe at the dugout, was that it was in Light Ladies' Cañon that he had made his strike!... How many men and at least one girl had travelled how many wilderness miles from Big Pine, when the gold lay so snugly close to the starting-point! How Joe had tricked his captors, leading them so far afield!
"If I should escape from you now," Lynette could not help crying, "what is there to prevent me from staking the first claim? And bringing my friends ... to stake claims!"
"If you should happen to escape me!" he laughed back at her.
Then he stepped to the tree where his rifle stood and called to Thor as he did always when he left the dog in camp: "Watch, Thor! Watch, sir."
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It was not always that he carried his rifle. He explained, while he looked to her to come with him.
"We'll talk things over; but in any case it's clear that we're getting short of food. Maybe, while we talk, we can bring down something in the way of provisions with a lucky shot."
Willing enough was she to-day for talk; at least to listen to whatever he might say. She followed, stopping only to stoop and pat old Thor's head; already she counted the faithful brute a friend. Thor tried to lick her hand; for already Thor, like Thor's master, had bestowed an abiding love to the first true girl who had ever intimately entered the life of either. Thor wanted to follow; he whined and looked anxious, ears pricked forward, tail wagging.
"Down, Thor," commanded Standing, if only because already he had issued his command. "You watch camp for us; watch, Thor."
Thor dropped down at the entrance of Lynette's grotto; for one instant his great head lay between his forepaws; then he jerked it up again so that he might watch them as they went through the thickets to the creek.
Standing carried a cup with him. When they came to the waterfall leaping down a twenty-foot rocky spillway, glassily clear, making a pigmy thunder in the narrow-walled ravine, he rinsed and filled his cup and gave it to Lynette. She drank. Thereafter, and with no further rinsing, he drank. She sat upon a big rock, leaning back against a leaning tree trunk; he sat down close enough to her to allow of words carrying above the thunder of the falling waters and filled his after-lunch pipe.
"I know as much as you do of the place to find the gold!" she told him again. "And I, though a girl, have as much interest in a fortune to be made as any
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 man can have. That's fair warning to you, Bruce Standing!"
He laughed carelessly. Then he said:
"It's neither your gold nor mine. By right of discovery, it belongs to a little shrimp named Mexicali Joe Alguna-Cosa. Our hands are off, so far as our own pockets are concerned."
"But.... You took quick interest when you learned where it was! You have some plan ... you commanded your friend Billy Winch to keep Joe well guarded!"
His eyes were twinkling; and greed does not light twinkling lights!
"I've got gold of my own, girl! Gold enough to last me my life and you your life and both of us together our lives! And to leave a decent residuum after us.... But let's talk of Mexicali Joe's gold some other time. To-day.... We have ourselves!"
"You have yourself!" cried Lynette with sudden bitterness. "I have not even my own personal liberty!"
"And what if I let you go, girl? As I have a mind to do to-day? What then? Where would you go? Where would I find you again? For find you I must and will though 'it were ten thousand mile.'"
"Am I to suffer your dictation during the days of actual imprisonment at your hands, and then, for all time afterward, render you an accounting of my actions!"
"Why do you try to hate me so, girl?"
"Why should I not hate you?"
"What have I done to you? Have I done anything more than put out a hand to stop time, to snatch time for you and me, for us to know!... Look you, girl, a man, at least a man of my sort, may go a third of his
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 life or a fourth or a full half, and know much less than nothing of what a true girl is! How can he know? Already I have learned that you have instincts which leap; a man gropes like a blind mole and it takes him a long time to teach himself to see the stars ... the star! Now it's a fair bet, and no odds given or taken, that one Bruce Standing happened to be an unruly devil, a blunt man, a man who has as a part and parcel of his religion to shoot square and to hit hard, so long as God lets him. I've done wrong and I've done right, and I'm doing as all the rest of the great mass, in a state of flux, is doing; growing up from the mud into something better. If not in this life or the next, well then, since the mills grind with exceeding patience, in some other life. At least I'm honest; at least, in plain English, I do my damnedest! Take it or leave it, there's the truth. If it happens that I'm a man of few friends.... Almost you can count 'em on Billy Winch's one leg!... if few men love me and many men hate...."
"Yes!" cried Lynette, and her own earnestness was caught and compelled by his own. "Most men, many, many men, hate you!... And yet you have it within you to make them love you!"
"Love and hate! What have I to do with the loves and hates of men as I know them? Shall I step to right or to left for all that? I play out my part in the eternal game. I live my life!"
"But you don't live your life! You miss ... everything! If you would but be kind instead of cruel; open-hearted and generous always ... you have in you the seeds of all that. Then men might come to know the real you; you could make them love instead of hate...."
But his eyes stabbed at her like quickened blue flames.
"So!" he said, and his tone was one of bitter mockery. "If I choose to pay them for the pretty, empty
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compliment, they will call me a good fellow and ... love me! If I kick them they will call me villain and hate me. And there you have the epitome of that so-called love and hate of mankind which sickens me. I'll be eternally damned before I prostitute my immortal soul to pitch pennies out for a peck of treacherous hearts. For, I tell you, girl ... Only Girl ... the love that is to be bought is to be spat upon. I'll have none of it. Even your love, that I'd give my soul to have freely, I'd have none of if it were to be bought."
Lynette looked at him strangely, half pityingly. And she answered him softly:
"You twist things out of all reason to make, to yourself, your own acts appear something other than they are."
"A girl trying to turn logician?" he laughed at her, teasing.
Little effort on his part was required to set fire to her quick inflammable temper.
"It's magnanimous of you to jeer at me," she retorted hotly. "Because you have the physical strength of a beast and the beast's lack of understanding...."
Now his golden outburst of laughter stopped her. He shouted:
"See! There you go! As if to preach me the final word of love and hate! You'd hate me now, just because I tease you! If I said, with poets' roses twining through the saying, that you were most beautiful and no-end intellectual and beyond that of the heart of an angel, could you not better tolerate me? And thus we come to the open pathway to most human loves and hates; two little doors standing side by side. For, I ask you, going back to your challenge to make men love rather than despise me, what in the devil's name is that sort of love but transplanted self-love? A damned-fool
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 sort of selfishness masking like a hypocrite as something quite different.... If you loved a man who beat you there would be something worth while in that sort of loving; something divorced from plain selfishness and the eternal I-want-to-get-all-I-can-out-of-everything! Now, I love you! I love you so that my love for you comes near killing me! It gets me by the throat at night. That's love; and there's less of self in it, I swear to you, than there is of ... you!"
"You! You talk of love. To me!"
She broke into her light, taunting laughter. And yet he had set her heart beating and the ancient fear ... not fear of him ... was upon her. "You, talking of love, are like a blind man lecturing on the colors of the rainbow! You...."
But he had started to his feet; his eyes went suddenly toward the camp, all sight of which they had lost on coming down into the creek bed.
"Listen!" he cried. "What was that?"
She had heard nothing; nothing above the splash and fall of water ... and the beating of her own heart.
"Listen!" he said the second time.
"What is it?"
He caught up his rifle and leaped across the creek. He began running, back toward their camp.
"It's old Thor ... there's some one...."
And now, Lynette realized clearly, had come her first opportunity to be free again! While Bruce Standing, because of something he had heard above the merry-mad music of the waterfall, or had thought he had heard, was running back to their encampment, she could run in the opposite direction. She stood balancing, of this mind and that. What had he heard in camp? What was happening there? As always, because of that volatile nature of hers which was en rapport with life's
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pulsings, she wanted to know! And then there was a certain assurance in her heart that after all these days the budding intention in Bruce Standing's heart was bursting into full flower to set her free again! She hesitated; she saw him running up the steep bank, charging back toward camp, vanishing among the trees higher up on the slope.
And, then, she followed him.
... Before Lynette came, through the trees, within sight of the grotto which Standing had given over to her, she heard a sound which brought her, wondering, from swift haste to lingering; she stood, her breathing stilled, listening, groping a moment blindly for an interpretation of that sound for its explanation. Harsh it was ... terrible ... never had she heard anything like it. At first she did not recognize it as a sound man-made. She paused; she came a step nearer, peering through the trees....
It was an inarticulate, stifled sound coming from the lips of Bruce Standing! He was kneeling on the ground, bending forward. He had dropped his rifle. There was something in his arms, upgathered into his embrace, something held as a baby is held in its mother's arms....
Thor....
And those sounds from Bruce Standing's lips! There were tears in them; his voice was shaken. He held Thor to him in a fierce agony of sorrow....
Lynette came closer, tiptoeing. She heard the sounds as they seemed to choke him, clutching like hands at his throat. And then suddenly, before she caught her first clear view, she knew when, into that first emotion there swept the second; when with the shock of deep grief there mingled white-hot rage. He began to mutter again ... he was lisping ... lisping as she had heard him do only once before ... lisping because his
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one weakness had leaped out and caught him unaware. Lisping curses....
She ran closer. She saw old Thor, Thor who had learned to love her and whom she had learned to love, lying limp in Standing's arms. Thor dead? Some one had killed him, then, and Standing, above the booming of the waterfall, had heard? A sight, perhaps, to stir that wild, uncontrollable laughter of Lynette! The sight of a big, strong man half weeping over a dead dog in his arms.... Yet, when she came running to him and dropped down on her knees and put out her quick hand and Standing turned his face toward her ... he saw that this time there was no laughter in her. Instead, her eyes were wet with a sudden dash of tears.
"He's not dead ... we won't have it that he's dead! Thor!" she cried softly.
She did not realize that she had put her warm, sympathetic hand on Standing's arm before her other hand found the old dog's head.
"Thor!... Thor!"
Thor looked up at her; at Standing. The dog tried to stir; the faithful tongue strove to overmaster the terrible inertia laid upon it; to grant in last adulation the last farewell. For a stricken dog, like a stricken man, knows after the way of all creatures which have the spark of eternity within them, when the day's end is in doub............