"Here you go, then: Half a dozen years ago I held that Bruce Standing and I were friends. He sent me word to come up here into his wilderness; I was to bring whatever money I could raise and there was the chance to double it. I came. When I met him, twenty miles off over yonder in a cabin where he lived like a solitary old bear, we talked things out. With all of his big ventures he was on the edge of bankruptcy. He was grabbing money in both hands from any source and every source. He wanted my three thousand to throw in with the rest, the damned selfish hog that he was and is. I laughed at him and you could have heard him growl a mile. We slept that night in his cabin. In the middle of the night in the pitch black dark, I felt a man on top of me in my bunk, his hands at my throat. I got a tap over the head with something; when I woke up my money belt was gone and it was morning and there was Bruce Standing, singing and grinning and getting breakfast and asking me if I had had bad dreams."
"The law? When he wouldn't either admit or deny? When he just laughed and said, 'Where in this country, _my country_, will you get a jury to convict me?' And where, by the same token, was any money left in my pockets to do legal battle with a man intrenched as he is in his old mountains?"
"I tell you he was hanging on the rim of nowhere, broke. And he used my three thousand and God knows what other stolen funds, and now again he is the one power across a hundred miles up here!"
There was one other thing she meant to ask. Billy Winch had said just now that Standing was on his way; that all they had to do was _listen_ for him. She supposed that he had meant the clatter of a running horse's hoofs; and yet something in Winch's tone implied something else. No doubt Deveril understood; she was parting her lips to ask when, across the fields of the silent night, Bruce Standing himself answered her. A sudden thrill shot through her blood.
As she was to learn later, there were many wonderful things about Bruce Standing. Among them were his reckless impudence and his glorious voice. Now, before ever she saw the man, she heard him singing, somewhere far out, under the stars, alone with his wilderness, sending far ahead of him into Big Pine the word of his coming. A coming which was in defiance of the order which had gone forth and which, with his superb assurance, he was ignoring. It was a voice as sweet and clear and true, for the high notes and the low notes alike, as a silver trumpet. She stopped breathing to listen. She felt her heart leap and quicken; a tingling quivered along her nerves. Never had she heard singing like that, wild, free, a voice to haunt and linger echoing in the memory.