Oh, Toban, catch him--please! I--" Toban laughed.

"I ain't been blind, girl," he said; "the talks I've had with you in old Marston's office have wised me up to how things stand between you an' him.

I'll ketch him, don't worry about that.
That black horse of his is some horse, but he ain't got nothin' on my old dust-thrower, an' I reckon that in fifteen miles--" He was climbing into the saddle while talking, and at his last word he gave the spurs to his horse, a strong, clean-limbed bay, and was away in a cloud of dust.
Betty watched him, her hands clasped over her breast, her body rigid and tense, her eyes straining, until she saw him vanish around the bend in the trail; and then for a long time she stood on the porch, scanning the distant horizon, in the hope that she might again see Toban and be assured that nothing had happened to him.

And when at last she saw a speck moving swiftly along a distant rise, she murmured a prayer and went into the house.
When she closed the kitchen door and stood against it, looking around the room, she was afflicted with a depressing sense of loss, and she realized fully how Calumet had grown into her life, and what it would mean to her if she lost him.

He had been mean, cruel, and vicious, but he had awakened at last to a sense of his shortcomings; he was like a boy who had had no training, who had grown wild and ungovernable, but who, before it had become too late, had awakened to the futility, the absurdity, the falseness of it all, and was determined to begin anew.
And she felt--as she had felt all along--even when she had seen him at his worst--that she must mother him, must help him to build up a new structure of self, must lift him, must give him what the world had so far denied him--his chance.