That day the rude cabin was completed.  It contained one long room; and at the back a small compartment partitioned off from the rest, and built against and around a shallow cavern in the huge rock.  This compartment was for Joan.  There were a rude board door with padlock and key, a bench upon which blankets had been flung, a small square hole cut in the wall to serve as a window.  What with her own few belongings and the articles of furniture that Kells bought for her, Joan soon had a comfortable room, even a luxury compared to what she had been used to for weeks.  Certain it was that Kells meant to keep her a prisoner, or virtually so.  Joan had no sooner spied the little window than she thought that it would be possible for Jim Cleve to talk to her there from the outside.

Kells verified Joan’s suspicion by telling her that she was not to leave the cabin of her own accord, as she had been permitted to do back in Cabin Gulch; and Joan retorted that there she had made him a promise not to run away, which promise she now took back.  That promise had worried her.  She was glad to be honest with Kells.  He gazed at her somberly.

“You’ll be worse off it you do—­and I’ll be better off,” he said.  And then as an afterthought he added:  “Gulden might not think you—­a white elephant on his hands! ...  Remember his way, the cave and the rope!”

So, instinctively or cruelly he chose the right name to bring shuddering terror into Joan’s soul.

14

Joan’s opportunity for watching Kells and his men and overhearing their colloquies was as good as it had been back in Cabin Gulch.  But it developed that where Kells had been open and frank he now became secret and cautious.  She was aware that men, singly and in couples, visited him during the early hours of the night, and they had conferences in low, earnest tones.  She could peer out of her little window and see dark, silent forms come up from the ravine at the back of the cabin, and leave the same way.  None of them went round to the front door, where Bate Wood smoked and kept guard.  Joan was able to hear only scraps of these earnest talks; and from part of one she gathered that for some reason or other Kells desired to bring himself into notice.  Alder Creek must be made to know that a man of importance had arrived.  It seemed to Joan that this was the very last thing which Kells ought to do.  What magnificent daring the bandit had!  Famous years before in California—­with a price set upon his life in Nevada—­and now the noted, if unknown, leader of border robbers in Idaho, he sought to make himself prominent, respected, and powerful.  Joan found that in spite of her horror at the sinister and deadly nature of the bandit’s enterprise she could not avoid an absorbing interest in his fortunes.