“Russ, did she—­show sympathy?”

“She was all broken up about it.  Thought you were going to die.”

“Did she send you?”

“Sure.  And she said hurry,” I replied.

I was not a little gleeful over the apparent possibility of Steele being in the same boat with me.

“Do you think she would have cared if—­if I had been shot up bad?”

The great giant of a Ranger asked this like a boy, hesitatingly, with color in his face.

“Care!  Vaughn, you’re as thickheaded as you say I’m locoed.  Diane Sampson has fallen in love with you!  That’s all.  Love at first sight!  She doesn’t realize it.  But I know.”

There he stood as if another bullet had struck him, this time straight through the heart.  Perhaps one had—­and I repented a little of my overconfident declaration.

Still, I would not go back on it.  I believed it.

“Russ, for God’s sake!  What a terrible thing to say!” he ejaculated hoarsely.

“No.  It’s not terrible to say it—­only the fact is terrible,” I went on.  I may be wrong.  But I swear I’m right.  When you opened your coat, showed that bloody breast—­well, I’ll never forget her eyes.

“She had been furious.  She showed passion—­hate.  Then all in a second something wonderful, beautiful broke through.  Pity, fear, agonized thought of your death!  If that’s not love, if—­if she did not betray love, then I never saw it.  She thinks she hates you.  But she loves you.”

“Get out of here,” he ordered thickly.

I went, not forgetting to peep out at the door and to listen a moment, then I hurried into the open, up toward the ranch.

The stars were very big and bright, so calm, so cold, that it somehow hurt me to look at them.  Not like men’s lives, surely!

What had fate done to Vaughn Steele and to me?  I had a moment of bitterness, an emotion rare with me.

Most Rangers put love behind them when they entered the Service and seldom found it after that.  But love had certainly met me on the way, and I now had confirmation of my fear that Vaughn was hard hit.

Then the wildness, the adventurer in me stirred to the wonder of it all.  It was in me to exult even in the face of fate.  Steele and I, while balancing our lives on the hair-trigger of a gun, had certainly fallen into a tangled web of circumstances not calculated in the role of Rangers.

I went back to the ranch with regret, remorse, sorrow knocking at my heart, but notwithstanding that, tingling alive to the devilish excitement of the game.

I knew not what it was that prompted me to sow the same seed in Diane Sampson’s breast that I had sown in Steele’s; probably it was just a propensity for sheer mischief, probably a certainty of the truth and a strange foreshadowing of a coming event.

If Diane Sampson loved, through her this event might be less tragic.  Somehow love might save us all.