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 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!" ...