8

In three days—­during which time Joan attended Kells as faithfully as if she were indeed his wife—­he thought that he had gained sufficiently to undertake the journey to the main camp, Cabin Gulch.  He was eager to get back there and imperious in his overruling of any opposition.  The men could take turns at propping him in a saddle.  So on the morning of the fourth day they packed for the ride.

During these few days Joan had verified her suspicion that Kells had two sides to his character; or it seemed, rather, that her presence developed a latent or a long-dead side.  When she was with him, thereby distracting his attention, he was entirely different from what he was when his men surrounded him.  Apparently he had no knowledge of this.  He showed surprise and gratitude at Joan’s kindness though never pity or compassion for her.  That he had become infatuated with her Joan could no longer doubt.  His strange eyes followed her; there was a dreamy light in them; he was mostly silent with her.

Before those few days had come to an end he had developed two things—­a reluctance to let Joan leave his sight and an intolerance of the presence of the other men, particularly Gulden.  Always Joan felt the eyes of these men upon her, mostly in unobtrusive glances, except Gulden’s.  The giant studied her with slow, cavernous stare, without curiosity or speculation or admiration.  Evidently a woman was a new and strange creature to him and he was experiencing unfamiliar sensations.  Whenever Joan accidentally met his gaze—­for she avoided it as much as possible—­she shuddered with sick memory of a story she had heard—­how a huge and ferocious gorilla had stolen into an African village and run off with a white woman.  She could not shake the memory.  And it was this that made her kinder to Kells than otherwise would have been possible.

All Joan’s faculties sharpened in this period.  She felt her own development—­the beginning of a bitter and hard education—­an instinctive assimilation of all that nature taught its wild people and creatures, the first thing in elemental life—­self-preservation.  Parallel in her heart and mind ran a hopeless despair and a driving, unquenchable spirit.  The former was fear, the latter love.  She believed beyond a doubt that she had doomed herself along with Jim Cleve; she felt that she had the courage, the power, the love to save him, if not herself.  And the reason that she did not falter and fail in this terrible situation was because her despair, great as it was, did not equal her love.

That morning, before being lifted upon his horse, Kells buckled on his gun-belt.  The sheath and full round of shells and the gun made this belt a burden for a weak man.  And so Red Pearce insisted.  But Kells laughed in his face.  The men, always excepting Gulden, were unfailing in kindness and care.  Apparently they would have fought for Kells to the death.  They were simple and direct in their rough