above all else on earth.

It was her voice that brought him about. She had risen to her feet,
and she stood before him panting like a hunted animal, and Billy saw
in her face the thing which he had feared more than the sting of
death. No longer were her blue eyes filled with the sweetness and
faith of the angel who had come to him from out of the Barren. They
were hard and terrible and filled with that madness which made him
think she was about to leap upon him. In those eyes, in the quivering
of her bare throat, in the sobbing rise and fall of her breast were
the rage, the grief, and the fear of one whose faith had turned
suddenly into the deadliest of all emotions; and Billy stood before
her without a word on his lips, his face as cold and as bloodless as
the snow under his feet.

"And so you-- you followed-- after-- that!"

It was all she said, and yet the voice, the significance of the
choking words, hurt him more than if she had struck him. In them there
was none of the passion and condemnation he had expected. Quietly,
almost whisperingly uttered, they stung him to the soul. He had meant
to say to her what he had said to Deane-- even more. But the crudeness
of the wilderness had made him slow of tongue, and while his heart
cried out for words Isobel turned and went to her husband. And then
there came the thing he had been expecting. Down the ridge there raced
a flurry of snow and a yelping of dogs. He loosened the revolver in
his holster, and stood in readiness when Bucky Smith ran a few paces
ahead of his men into the camp. At sight of his enemy's face, torn
between rage and disappointment, all of Billy's old coolness returned
to him.