“Dearest Joan!” he whispered.  “It’s over!  It’s done! ...  Kiss me!”

She lifted her lips and Jim seemed to kiss her more sweetly, with less violence.

“Oh, Joan, that you’d really have me!  I can’t believe it. ...  Your husband.”

That word dispelled the dream and the pain which had held Joan, leaving only the tenderness, magnified now a hundredfold.

And that instant when she was locked in Cleve’s arms, when the silence was so beautiful and full, she heard the heavy pound of a gun-butt upon the table in Kells’s room.

“Where is Cleve?” That was the voice of Kells, stern, demanding.

Joan felt a start, a tremor run over Jim.  Then he stiffened.

“I can’t locate him,” replied Red Pearce.  “It was the same last night an’ the one before.  Cleve jest disappears these nights—­about this time. ...  Some woman’s got him!”

“He goes to bed.  Can’t you find where he sleeps?”

“No.”

“This job’s got to go through and he’s got to do it.”

“Bah!” taunted Pearce.  “Gulden swears you can’t make Cleve do a job.  And so do I!”

“Go out and yell for Cleve! ...  Damn you all!  I’ll show you!”

Then Joan heard the tramp of heavy boots, then a softer tramp on the ground outside the cabin.  Joan waited, holding her breath.  She felt Jim’s heart beating.  He stood like a post.  He, like Joan, was listening, as if for a trumpet of doom.

“Hallo, jim!” rang out Pearce’s stentorian call.  It murdered the silence.  It boomed under the bluff, and clapped in echo, and wound away, mockingly.  It seemed to have shrieked to the whole wild borderland the breaking-point of the bandit’s power.

So momentous was the call that Jim Cleve seemed to forget Joan, and she let him go without a word.  Indeed, he was gone before she realized it, and his dark form dissolved in the shadows.  Joan waited, listening with abated breathing.  On this side of the cabin there was absolute silence.  She believed that Jim would slip around under cover of night and return by the road from camp.  Then what would he do?  The question seemed to puzzle her.

Joan leaned there at her window for moments greatly differing from those vaguely happy ones just passed.  She had sustained a shock that had left her benumbed with a dull pain.  What a rude, raw break the voice of Kells had made in her brief forgetfulness!  She was returning now to reality.  Presently she would peer through the crevice between the boards into the other room, and she shrank from the ordeal.  Kells, and whoever was with him, maintained silence.  Occasionally she heard the shuffle of a boot and a creak of the loose floor boards.  She waited till anxiety and fear compelled her to look.