Joan could not decide.  She divined that there was antagonism between Gulden and all the others.  And there was something else, vague and intangible, that might have been fear.  Apparently Gulden was a criminal for the sake of crime.  Joan regarded him with a growing terror—­augmented the more because he alone kept eyes upon the corner where she was hidden—­and she felt that compared with him the others, even Kells, of whose cold villainy she was assured, were but insignificant men of evil.  She covered her head with a blanket to shut out sight of that shaggy, massive head and the great dark caves of eyes.

Thereupon Joan did not see or hear any more of the bandits.  Evidently the conversation died down, or she, in the absorption of new thoughts, no longer heard.  She relaxed, and suddenly seemed to quiver all over with the name she whispered to herself.  “Jim!  Jim!  Oh, Jim!” And the last whisper was an inward sob.  What he had done was terrible.  It tortured her.  She had not believed it in him.  Yet, now she thought, how like him.  All for her—­in despair and spite—­he had ruined himself.  He would be killed out there in some drunken brawl, or, still worse, he would become a member of this bandit crew and drift into crime.  That was a great blow to Joan—­that the curse she had put upon him.  How silly, false, and vain had been her coquetry, her indifference!  She loved Jim Cleve.  She had not known that when she started out to trail him, to fetch him back, but she knew it now.  She ought to have known before.

The situation she had foreseen loomed dark and monstrous and terrible in prospect.  Just to think of it made her body creep and shudder with cold terror.  Yet there was that strange, inward, thrilling burn round her heart.  Somewhere and soon she was coming face to face with this changed Jim Cleve—­this boy who had become a reckless devil.  What would he do?  What could she do?  Might he not despise her, scorn her, curse her, taking her at Kells’s word, the wife of a bandit?  But no! he would divine the truth in the flash of an eye.  And then!  She could not think what might happen, but it must mean blood-death.  If he escaped Kells, how could he ever escape this Gulden—­this huge vulture of prey?

Still, with the horror thick upon her, Joan could not wholly give up.  The moment Jim Cleve’s name and his ruin burst upon her ears, in the gossip of these bandits, she had become another girl—­a girl wholly become a woman, and one with a driving passion to save if it cost her life.  She lost her fear of Kells, of the others, of all except Gulden.  He was not human, and instinctively she knew she could do nothing with him.  She might influence the others, but never Gulden.

The torment in her brain eased then, and gradually she quieted down, with only a pang and a weight in her breast.  The past seemed far away.  The present was nothing.  Only the future, that contained Jim Cleve, mattered to her.  She would not have left the clutches of Kells, if at that moment she could have walked forth free and safe.  She was going on to Cabin Gulch.  And that thought was the last one in her weary mind as she dropped to sleep.