Some of the bandits uttered an exclamation.  Then silently, like a shadow, Jim Cleve entered.

Joan’s heart leaped and seemed to stand still.  Jim could not have locked more terrible if he were really a murderer.  He opened his coat.  Then he flung a black object upon the table and it fell with a soft, heavy, sodden thud.  It was a leather belt packed with gold.

When Kells saw that he looked no more at the pale Cleve.  His clawlike hand swept out for the belt, lifted and weighed it.  Likewise the other bandits, with gold in sight, surged round Kells, forgetting Cleve.

“Twenty pounds!” exclaimed Kells, with a strange rapture in his voice.

“Let me heft it?” asked Pearce, thrillingly.

Joan saw and heard so much, then through a kind of dimness, that she could not wipe away, her eyes beheld Jim.  What was the awful thing that she interpreted from his face, his mien?  Was this a part he was playing to deceive Kells?  The slow-gathering might of her horror came with the meaning of that gold-belt.  Jim had brought back the gold-belt of the miner Creede.  He had, in his passion to remain near her, to save her in the end, kept his word to Kells and done the ghastly deed.

Joan reeled and sank back upon the bed, blindly, with darkening sight and mind.

16

Joan returned to consciousness with a sense of vague and unlocalized pain which she thought was that old, familiar pang of grief.  But once fully awakened, as if by a sharp twinge, she became aware that the pain was some kind of muscular throb in her shoulder.  The instant she was fully sure of this the strange feeling ceased.  Then she lay wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting and wondering.

Suddenly the slight sharp twing was repeated.  It seemed to come from outside her flesh.  She shivered a little, thinking it might be a centipede.  When she reached for her shoulder her hand came in contact with a slender stick that had been thrust through a crack between the boards.  Jim was trying to rouse her.  This had been his method on several occasions when she had fallen asleep after waiting long for him.

Joan got up to the window, dizzy and sick with the resurging memory of Jim’s return to Kells with that gold-belt.

Jim rose out of the shadow and felt for her, clasped her close.  Joan had none of the old thrill; her hands slid loosely round his; and every second the weight inwardly grew heavier.

“Joan!  I had a time waking you,” whispered Jim, and then he kissed her.  “Why, you’re as cold as ice.”

“Jim—­I—­I must have fainted,” she replied.

“What for?” “I was peeping into Kells’s cabin, when you—­you—­”

“Poor kid!” he interrupted, tenderly.  “You’ve had so much to bear! ...  Joan, I fooled Kells.  Oh, I was slick! ...  He ordered me out on a job—­to kill a miner!  Fancy that!  And what do you think?  I know Creede well.  He’s a good fellow.  I traded my big nugget for his gold-belt!”