Not like men's lives, surely! What had fate done to Vaughn Steele and to me?
I had a moment of bitterness, an emotion rare with me.
Most Rangers put love behind them when they entered the Service and seldom found it after that.

But love had certainly met me on the way, and I now had confirmation of my fear that Vaughn was hard hit.
Then the wildness, the adventurer in me stirred to the wonder of it all.
It was in me to exult even in the face of fate.

Steele and I, while balancing our lives on the hair-trigger of a gun, had certainly fallen into a tangled web of circumstances not calculated in the role of Rangers.
I went back to the ranch with regret, remorse, sorrow knocking at my heart, but notwithstanding that, tingling alive to the devilish excitement of the game.
I knew not what it was that prompted me to sow the same seed in Diane Sampson's breast that I had sown in Steele's; probably it was just a propensity for sheer mischief, probably a certainty of the truth and a strange foreshadowing of a coming event.
If Diane Sampson loved, through her this event might be less tragic.
Somehow love might save us all.
That was the shadowy portent flitting in the dark maze of my mind.
At the ranch dancing had been resumed.

There might never have been any interruption of the gaiety.

I found Miss Sampson on the lookout for me and she searched my face with eyes that silenced my one last qualm of conscience.
"Let's go out in the patio," I suggested.