He closed his eyes wearily, without explaining, and soon slumbered.  Joan did not choose to allow these men to see that she feared them or distrusted them or disliked them.  She ate with them beside the fire.  And this was their first opportunity to be close to her.  The fact had an immediate and singular influence.  Joan had no vanity, though she knew she was handsome.  She forced herself to be pleasant, agreeable, even sweet.  Their response was instant and growing.  At first they were bold, then familiar and coarse.  For years she had been used to rough men of the camps.  These however, were different, and their jokes and suggestions had no effect because they were beyond her.  And when this became manifest to them that aspect of their relation to her changed.  She grasped the fact intuitively, and then she verified it by proof.  Her heart beat strong and high.  If she could hide her hate, her fear, her abhorrence, she could influence these wild men.  But it all depended upon her charm, her strangeness, her femininity.  Insensibly they had been influenced, and it proved that in the worst of men there yet survived some good.  Gulden alone presented a contrast and a problem.  He appeared aware of her presence while he sat there eating like a wolf, but it was as if she were only an object.  The man watched as might have an animal.

Her experience at the camp-fire meal inclined her to the belief that, if there were such a possibility as her being safe at all, it would be owing to an unconscious and friendly attitude toward the companions she had been forced to accept.  Those men were pleased, stirred at being in her vicinity.  Joan came to a melancholy and fearful cognizance of her attraction.  While at home she seldom had borne upon her a reality—­that she was a woman.  Her place, her person were merely natural.  Here it was all different.  To these wild men, developed by loneliness, fierce-blooded, with pulses like whips, a woman was something that thrilled, charmed, soothed, that incited a strange, insatiable, inexplicable hunger for the very sight of her.  They did not realize it, but Joan did.

Presently Joan finished her supper and said:  “I’ll go hobble my horse.  He strays sometimes.”

“Shore I’ll go, miss,” said Bate Wood.  He had never called her Mrs. Kells, but Joan believed he had not thought of the significance.  Hardened old ruffian that he was.  Joan regarded him as the best of a bad lot.  He had lived long, and some of his life had not been bad.

“Let me go,” added Pearce.

“No, thanks.  I’ll go myself,” she replied.

She took the rope hobble off her saddle and boldly swung down the trail.  Suddenly she heard two or more of the men speak at once, and then, low and clear:  “Gulden, where’n hell are you goin’?” This was Red Pearce’s voice.

Joan glanced back.  Gulden had started down the trail after her.  Her heart quaked, her knees shook, and she was ready to run back.  Gulden halted, then turned away, growling.  He acted as if caught in something surprising to himself.