Again the iron fingers burned at his throat.  But this time he made no resistance, and after a moment the outlaw rose to his feet and stared down into the white, still face half buried in the snow.  Then he gently lifted Philip’s head in his arms.  There was a crimson blotch in the snow and close to it the black edge of a hidden rock.

As quickly as possible DeBar carried Philip into the cabin and placed him on one of the cots.  Then he gathered certain articles of food from Pierre’s stock and put them in his pack.  He had carried the pack half way to the door when he stopped, dropped his load gently to the floor, and thrust a hand inside his coat pocket.  From it he drew forth a letter.  It was a woman’s letter—­and he read it now with bowed lead, a letter of infinite faith, and hope, and love, and when once more he turned toward Philip his face was filled with the flush of a great happiness.

“Mebby you don’t just understand, Phil,” he whispered, as if the other were listening to him.  “I’m going to leave this.”

With the stub of a pencil he scribbled a few words at the bottom of the crumpled letter.

He wrote in a crude, awkward hand: 

You’d won if it hadn’t been for the rock.  But I guess mebby that it was God who put the rock there, Phil.  While you was asleep I took the bullets out of your cartridges and put in damp-paper, for I didn’t want to see any harm done with the guns.  I didn’t shoot to hit you, and after all, I’m glad it was the rock that hurt you instead of me.

He leaned over the cot to assure himself that Philip’s breath was coming steadier and stronger, and then laid the letter on the young man’s breast.

Five minutes later he was plodding steadily ahead of his big Mackenzie hound into the peopleless barrens to the south and west.

And still later Philip opened his eyes and saw what DeBar had left for him.  He struggled into a sitting posture and read the few lines which the outlaw had written.

“Here’s to you, Mr. Felix MacGregor,” he chuckled feebly, balancing himself on the edge of the bunk.  “You’re right.  It’ll take two men to lay out Mr. William DeBar—­if you ever get him at all!”

Three days later, still in the cabin, he raised a hand to his bandaged head with an odd grimace, half of pain, half of laughter.

“You’re a good one, you are!” he said to himself, limping back and forth across the narrow space of the cabin.  “You’ve got them all beaten to a rag when it comes to playing the chump, Phil Steele.  Here you go up to Big Chief MacGregor, throw out your chest, and say to him, ’I can get that man,’ and when the big chief says you can’t, you call him a four-ply ignoramus in your mind, and get permission to go after him anyway—­just because you’re in love.  You follow your man up here—­four hundred miles or so—­and what’s the consequence?  You lose all hope of finding her, and your ‘man’ does just what the big chief