Cleve was telling this fabrication in a matter-of-fact way, growing a little less frank as he proceeded, and he paused while he lifted sand and let it drift through his fingers, watching it curiously.  All the men were interested and Kells hung on every word.

“When I got back,” went on Cleve, “my girl had married another fellow.  She’d given him all I left with her.  Then I got drunk.  While I was drunk they put up a job on me.  It was her word that disgraced me and run me out of town. ...  So I struck west and drifted to the border.”

“That’s not all,” said Kells, bluntly.

“Jim, I reckon you ain’t tellin’ what you did to thet lyin’ girl an’ the feller.  How’d you leave them?” added Pearce.

But Cleve appeared to become gloomy and reticent.

“Wimmen can hand the double-cross to a man, hey, Kells?” queried Smith, with a broad grin.

“By gosh!  I thought you’d been treated powerful mean!” exclaimed Bate Wood, and he was full of wrath.

“A treacherous woman!” exclaimed Kells, passionately.  He had taken Cleve’s story hard.  The man must have been betrayed by women, and Cleve’s story had irritated old wounds.

Directly Kells left the fire and repaired to his blankets, near where Joan lay.  Probably he believed her asleep, for he neither looked nor spoke.  Cleve sought his bed, and likewise Wood and Smith.  Pearce was the last to leave, and as he stood up the light fell upon his red face, lean and bold like an Indian’s.  Then he passed Joan, looking down upon her and then upon the recumbent figure of Kells; and if his glance was not baleful and malignant, as it swept over the bandit, Joan believed her imagination must be vividly weird, and running away with her judgment.

The next morning began a day of toil.  They had to climb over the mountain divide, a long, flat-topped range of broken rocks.  Joan spared her horse to the limit of her own endurance.  If there were a trail Smith alone knew it, for none was in evidence to the others.  They climbed out of the notched head of the canon, and up a long slope of weathered shale that let the horses slide back a foot for every yard gained, and through a labyrinth of broken cliffs, and over bench and ridge to the height of the divide.  From there Joan had a magnificent view.  Foot-hills rolled round heads below, and miles away, in a curve of the range, glistened Bear Lake.  The rest here at this height was counteracted by the fact that the altitude affected Joan.  She was glad to be on the move again, and now the travel was downhill, so that she could ride.  Still it was difficult, for horses were more easily lamed in a descent.  It took two hours to descend the distance that had consumed all the morning to ascend.  Smith led through valley after valley between foot-hills, and late in the afternoon halted by a spring in a timbered spot.

Joan ached in every muscle and she was too tired to care what happened round the camp-fire.  Jim had been close to her all day and that had kept up her spirit.  It was not yet dark when she lay down for the night.