“Papa!” cried Diane, wringing her hands.

“Don’t give way,” he replied.  “Both you girls will need your nerve.  Russ is badly hurt.  There’s little hope for him.”

Sally moaned and dropped her face against me, clasping me convulsively.  I tried to reach a hand out to touch her, but I could not move.  I felt her hair against my face.  Diane uttered a low heart-rending cry, which both Sampson and I understood.

“Listen, let me tell it quick,” he said huskily.  “There’s been a fight.  Russ killed Snecker and Wright.  They resisted arrest.  It—­it was Wright—­it was Wright’s gun that put Russ down.  Russ let me off.  In fact, Diane, he saved me.  I’m to divide my property—­return so far as possible what I’ve stolen—­leave Texas at once and forever.  You’ll find me back in old Louisiana—­if—­if you ever want to come home.”

As she stood there, realizing her deliverance, with the dark and tragic glory of her eyes passing from her father to me, my own sight shadowed, and I thought if I were dying then, it was not in vain.

“Send—­for—­Steele,” I whispered.

Silently, swiftly, breathlessly they worked over me.  I was exquisitely sensitive to touch, to sound, but I could not see anything.  By and by all was quiet, and I slipped into a black void.  Familiar heavy swift footsteps, the thump of heels of a powerful and striding man, jarred into the blackness that held me, seemed to split it to let me out; and I opened my eyes in a sunlit room to see Sally’s face all lined and haggard, to see Miss Sampson fly to the door, and the stalwart Ranger bow his lofty head to enter.  However far life had ebbed from me, then it came rushing back, keen-sighted, memorable, with agonizing pain in every nerve.  I saw him start, I heard him cry, but I could not speak.  He bent over me and I tried to smile.  He stood silent, his hand on me, while Diane Sampson told swiftly, brokenly, what had happened.

How she told it!  I tried to whisper a protest.  To any one on earth except Steele I might have wished to appear a hero.  Still, at that moment I had more dread of him than any other feeling.  She finished the story with her head on his shoulder, with tears that certainly were in part for me.  Once in my life, then, I saw him stunned.  But when he recovered it was not Diane that he thought of first, nor of the end of Sampson’s power.  He turned to me.

“Little hope?” he cried out, with the deep ring in his voice.  “No!  There’s every hope.  No bullet hole like that could ever kill this Ranger.  Russ!”

I could not answer him.  But this time I did achieve a smile.  There was no shadow, no pain in his face such as had haunted me in Sally’s and Diane’s.  He could fight death the same as he could fight evil.  He vitalized the girls.  Diane began to hope; Sally lost her woe.  He changed the atmosphere of that room.  Something filled it, something like himself, big, virile, strong.  The very look of him made me suddenly want to live; and all at once it seemed I felt alive.  And that was like taking the deadened ends of nerves to cut them raw and quicken them with fiery current.