anger
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.

From stupor I had leaped to pain, and that tossed me into fever. There
were spaces darkened, mercifully shutting me in; there were others of
light, where I burned and burned in my heated blood. Sally, like the
wraith she had become in my mind, passed in and out; Diane watched and
helped in those hours when sight was clear. But always the Ranger was
with me. Sometimes I seemed to feel his spirit grappling with mine,
drawing me back from the verge. Sometimes, in strange dreams, I saw him
there between me and a dark, cold, sinister shape.

The fever passed, and with the first nourishing drink given me I seemed
to find my tongue, to gain something.

"Hello, old man," I whispered to Steele.

"Oh, Lord, Russ, to think you would double-cross me the way you did!"

That was his first speech to me after I had appeared to face round from
the grave. His good-humored reproach told me more than any other thing
how far from his min