Had he fainted from sheer fright when the gun blazed at him? Or was Blister's explanation a genuine one? He had read of men being thrown down and knocked senseless by the atmospheric shock of shells exploding near them in battle. But this would not come in that class. He had been actually struck. The belt buckle had been driven against his flesh. Had this hit him with force enough actually to drive the breath out of him? Or had he thought himself wounded and collapsed because of the thought?
It made a great deal of difference to him which of these was true, more than it did to the little world in which he moved. Some of the boys might guy him good-naturedly, but nobody was likely to take the matter seriously except himself. Bob had begun to learn that a man ought to be his own most severe critic. He had set out to cure himself of cowardice. He would not be easy in mind so long as he still suspected himself of showing the white feather.
He leaned on a fence and looked across the silvery sage to a grove of quaking asp beyond. How long he stood there, letting thoughts drift through his mind, he did not know. A sound startled him, the faint swish of something stirring. He turned.
Out of the night shadows a nymph seemed to be floating toward him. For a moment he had a sense of unreality, that the flow and rhythm of her movement were born of the imagination. But almost at once he knew that this was June in the flesh.
The moonlight haloed the girl, lent her the touch of magic that transformed her from a creature not too good for human nature's daily food into an ethereal daughter of romance. Her eyes were dark pools of loveliness in a white face.
"June!" he cried, excitement drumming in his blood.
Why had she come to find him? What impulse or purpose had brought her out into the night in his wake? Desire of her, tender, poignant, absorbing, pricked through him like an ache. He wanted her. Soul and body reached out to her, though both found expression only in that first cry.
Her mouth quivered. "Oh, Bob, you silly boy! As if--as if it matters why you were stunned. You were. That's enough. I'm so glad--so glad you're not hurt. It's 'most a miracle. He might have killed you."
She did not tell him that he would have done it if she had not flung her weight on his arm and dragged the weapon down, nor how in that dreadful moment her wits had worked to save him from the homicidal mania of the killer.