I saw her changing through all those weeks, holding many of the old traits and graces, acquiring new character of mind and body, to become what I had just fled from—­a woman sweet, fair, loyal, loving, passionate.

Temptation assailed me.  To have her to-morrow—­my wife!  She had said it.  Just twenty-four little hours, and she would be mine—­the only woman I had ever really coveted, the only one who had ever found the good in me.  The thought was alluring.  I followed it out, a long, happy stage-ride back to Austin, and then by train to her home where, as she had said, the oranges grew and the trees waved with streamers of gray moss and the mocking-birds made melody.  I pictured that home.  I wondered that long before I had not associated wealth and luxury with her family.  Always I had owned a weakness for plantations, for the agricultural life with its open air and freedom from towns.

I saw myself riding through the cotton and rice and cane, home to the stately old mansion, where long-eared hounds bayed me welcome and a woman looked for me and met me with happy and beautiful smiles.  There might—­there would be children.  And something new, strange, confounding with its emotion, came to life deep in my heart.  There would be children!  Sally their mother; I their father!  The kind of life a lonely Ranger always yearned for and never had!  I saw it all, felt it keenly, lived its sweetness in an hour of temptation that made me weak physically and my spirit faint and low.

For what had I turned my back on this beautiful, all-satisfying prospect?  Was it to arrest and jail a few rustlers?  Was it to meet that mocking Sampson face to face and show him my shield and reach for my gun?  Was it to kill that hated Wright?  Was it to save the people of Linrock from further greed, raids, murder?  Was it to please and aid my old captain, Neal of the Rangers?  Was it to save the Service to the State?

No—­a thousand times no.  It was for the sake of Steele.  Because he was a wonderful man!  Because I had been his undoing!  Because I had thrown Diane Sampson into his arms!  That had been my great error.  This Ranger had always been the wonder and despair of his fellow officers, so magnificent a machine, so sober, temperate, chaste, so unremittingly loyal to the Service, so strangely stern and faithful to his conception of the law, so perfect in his fidelity to duty.  He was the model, the inspiration, the pride of all of us.  To me, indeed, he represented the Ranger Service.  He was the incarnation of that spirit which fighting Texas had developed to oppose wildness and disorder and crime.  He would carry through this Linrock case; but even so, if he were not killed, his career would be ruined.  He might save the Service, yet at the cost of his happiness.  He was not a machine; he was a man.  He might be a perfect Ranger; still he was a human being.

The loveliness, the passion, the tragedy of a woman, great as they were, had not power to shake him from his duty.  Futile, hopeless, vain her love had been to influence him.  But there had flashed over me with subtle, overwhelming suggestion that not futile, not vain was my love to save him!  Therefore, beyond and above all other claims, and by reason of my wrong to him, his claim came first.