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"How can it be," she wondered, "that if he is the lawbreaker you call him, thief and worse, men allow him to go on his way?"

He looked at her curiously. Then he laughed his short angry laugh.

"He's a man for you to look into, girl with the daring eyes! A cruel, merciless devil if half the tales are true and, to top off his madness, a man who has not hate but an abiding contempt for all your gentle sex. But you wonder why men let him roam free? In the first place, haven't I told you that he rolls in wealth? That's one thing. Another is his cursed craft. You wonder why I say in one breath that he stole three thousand dollars from me and then merely growl that he remains outside jail?"

"I don't understand it, of course."

"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."