“No one—­who ever knew me—­could recognize me now,” she murmured, and the relieving thought centered round Jim Cleve.

“I hadn’t figured on that,” replied Kells.  “But you’re right. ...  Joan, if I don’t miss my guess, it won’t be long till you’ll be the talk of mining-towns and camp-fires.”

This remark of Kells’s brought to Joan proof of his singular pride in the name he bore, and proof of many strange stories about bandits and wild women of the border.  She had never believed any of these stories.  They had seemed merely a part of the life of this unsettled wild country.  A prospector would spend a night at a camp-fire and tell a weird story and pass on, never to be seen there again.  Could there have been a stranger story than her life seemed destined to be?  Her mind whirled with vague, circling thought—­Kells and his gang, the wild trails, the camps, and towns, gold and stage-coaches, robbery, fights, murder, mad rides in the dark, and back to Jim Cleve and his ruin.

Suddenly Kells stepped to her from behind and put his arms around her.  Joan grew stiff.  She had been taken off her guard.  She was in his arms and could not face him.

“Joan, kiss me,” he whispered, with a softness, a richer, deeper note in his voice.

“No!” cried Joan, violently.

There was a moment of silence in which she felt his grasp slowly tighten—­the heave of his breast.

“Then I’ll make you,” he said.  So different was the voice now that another man might have spoken.  Then he bent her backward, and, freeing one hand, brought it under her chin and tried to lift her face.

But Joan broke into fierce, violent resistance.  She believed she was doomed, but that only made her the fiercer, the stronger.  And with her head down, her arms straining, her body hard and rigidly unyielding she fought him all over the room, knocking over the table and seats, wrestling from wall to wall, till at last they fell across the bed and she broke his hold.  Then she sprang up, panting, disheveled, and backed away from him.  It had been a sharp, desperate struggle on her part and she was stronger than he.  He was not a well man.  He raised himself and put one hand to his breast.  His face was haggard, wet, working with passion, gray with pain.  In the struggle she had hurt him, perhaps reopened his wound.

“Did you—­knife me—­that it hurts so?” he panted, raising a hand that shook.

“I had—­nothing. ...  I just—­fought,” cried Joan, breathlessly.

“You hurt me—­again—­damn you!  I’m never free—­from pain.  But this’s worse. ...  And I’m a coward. ...  And I’m a dog, too!  Not half a man!—­You slip of a girl—­and I couldn’t—­hold you!”

His pain and shame were dreadful for Joan to see, because she felt sorry for him, and divined that behind them would rise the darker, grimmer force of the man.  And she was right, for suddenly he changed.  That which had seemed almost to make him abject gave way to a pale and bitter dignity.  He took up Dandy Dale’s belt, which Joan had left on the bed, and, drawing the gun from its sheath, he opened the cylinder to see if it was loaded, and then threw the gun at Joan’s feet.