Blicky darted through the door and his footsteps thudded out of hearing.

“You can’t force me to marry you,” said Joan.  “I—­I won’t open my lips.”

“That’s your affair.  I’ve no mind to coax you,” he replied, bitterly.  “But if you don’t I’ll try Gulden’s way with a woman. ...  You remember.  Gulden’s way!  A cave and a rope!”

Joan’s legs gave out under her and she sank upon a pile of blankets.  Then beyond Kells she saw Jim Cleve.  With all that was left of her spirit she flashed him a warning—­a meaning—­a prayer not to do the deed she divined was his deadly intent.  He caught it and obeyed.  And he flashed back a glance which meant that, desperate as her case was, it could never be what Kells threatened.

“Men, see me through this,” said Kells to the silent group.  “Then any deal you want—­I’m on.  Stay here or—­sack the camp!  Hold up the stage express with gold for Bannack!  Anything for a big stake!  Then the trail and the border.”

He began pacing the floor.  Budd and Smith strolled outside.  Bate Wood fumbled in his pockets for pipe and tobacco.  Cleve sat down at the table and leaned on his hands.  No one took notice of the dead Pearce.  Here was somber and terrible sign of the wildness of the border clan—­that Kells could send out for a parson to marry him to a woman he hopelessly loved, there in the presence of murder and death, with Pearce’s distorted face upturned in stark and ghastly significance.

It might have been a quarter of an hour, though to Joan it seemed an endless time, until footsteps and voices outside announced the return of Blicky.

He held by the arm a slight man whom he was urging along with no gentle force.  This stranger’s face presented as great a contrast to Blicky’s as could have been imagined.  His apparel proclaimed his calling.  There were consternation and bewilderment in his expression, but very little fear.

“He was preachin’ down there in a tent,” said Blicky, “an I jest waltzed him up without explainin’.”

“Sir, I want to be married at once,” declared Kells, peremptorily.

“Certainly.  I’m at your service,” replied the preacher.  “But I deplore the—­the manner in which I’ve been approached.”

“You’ll excuse haste,” rejoined the bandit.  “I’ll pay you well.”  Kells threw a small buckskin sack of gold-dust upon the table, and then he turned to Joan.  “Come, Joan,” he said, in the tone that brooked neither resistance nor delay.

It was at that moment that the preacher first noticed Joan.  Was her costume accountable for his start?  Joan had remembered his voice and she wondered if he would remember hers.  Certainly Jim had called her Joan more than once on the night of the marriage.  The preacher’s eyes grew keener.  He glanced from Joan to Kells, and then at the other men, who had come in.  Jim Cleve stood behind Jesse Smith’s broad person, and evidently the preacher did not see him.  That curious gaze, however, next discovered the dead man on the floor.  Then to the curiosity and anxiety upon the preacher’s face was added horror.