Joan was dragged and crushed in the melee.  Not for rods did her feet touch the ground.  But in the clouds of dust and confusion of struggling forms she knew Jim still held her, and she clasped him with all her strength.  Presently her feet touched the earth; she was not jostled and pressed; then she felt free to walk; and with Jim urging her they climbed a rock-strewn slope till a cabin impeded further progress.  But they had escaped the stream.

Below was a strange sight.  A scaffold shrouded in dust-clouds; a band of bewildered vigilantes with weapons drawn, waiting for they knew not what; three swinging, ghastly forms and a dead man on the platform; and all below, a horde of men trying to escape from one another.  That shot of Kells’s had precipitated a rush.  No miner knew who the vigilantes were nor the members of the Border Legion.  Every man there expected a bloody battle—­distrusted the man next to him—­ and had given way to panic.  The vigilantes had tried to crowd together for defense and all the others had tried to escape.  It was a wild scene, born of wild justice and blood at fever-heat, the climax of a disordered time where gold and violence reigned supreme.  It could only happen once, but it was terrible while it lasted.  It showed the craven in men; it proved the baneful influence of gold; it brought, in its fruition, the destiny of Alder Creek Camp.  For it must have been that the really brave and honest men in vast majority retraced their steps while the vicious kept running.  So it seemed to Joan.

She huddled against Jim there in the shadow of the cabin wall, and not for long did either speak.  They watched and listened.  The streams of miners turned back toward the space around the scaffold where the vigilantes stood grouped, and there rose a subdued roar of excited voices.  Many small groups of men conversed together, until the vigilante leader brought all to attention by addressing the populace in general.  Joan could not hear what he said and had no wish to hear.

“Joan, it all happened so quickly, didn’t it?” whispered Jim, shaking his head as if he was not convinced of reality.

“Wasn’t he—­terrible!” whispered Joan in reply.

“He!  Who?”

“Kells.”  In her mind the bandit leader dominated all that wild scene.

“Terrible, if you like.  But I’d say great! ...  The nerve of him!  In the face of a hundred vigilantes and thousands of miners!  But he knew what that shot would do!”

“Never!  He never thought of that,” declared Joan, earnestly.  “I felt him tremble.  I had a glimpse of his face. ...  Oh! ...  First in his mind was his downfall, and, second, the treachery of Frenchy.  I think that shot showed Kells as utterly desperate, but weak.  He couldn’t have helped it—­if that had been the last bullet in his gun.”

Jim Cleve looked strangely at Joan, as if her eloquence was both persuasive and incomprehensible.

“Well, that was a lucky shot for us—­and him, too.”