ilip 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 said he would
do, and lays you out--though it wasn't your fault after all. Then you
take possession of another man's shack when he isn't at home, eat his
grub, nurse a broken head, and wonder why the devil you ever joined the
glorious Royal Mounted when you've got money to burn. You're a wise one,
you are, Phil Steele--but you've learned something new. You've learned
there's never a man so good but there's