His strong, direct talk evidently impressed them, and in silence they crowded out of the cabin, leaving Pearce and Cleve behind.

“Jim, are you just hell-bent on fighting or do you mean to make yourself the champion of every poor girl in these wilds?”

Cleve puffed a cloud of smoke that enveloped his head “I don’t pick quarrels,” he replied.

“Then you get red-headed at the very mention of a girl.”

A savage gesture of Cleve’s suggested that Kells was right.

“Here, don’t get red-headed at me,” called Kells, with piercing sharpness.  “I’ll be your friend if you let me. ...  But declare yourself like a man—­if you want me for a friend!”

“Kells, I’m much obliged,” replied Cleve, with a semblance of earnestness.  “I’m no good or I wouldn’t be out here ...  But I can’t stand for these—­these deals with girls.”

“You’ll change,” rejoined Kells, bitterly.  “Wait till you live a few lonely years out here!  You don’t understand the border.  You’re young.  I’ve seen the gold-fields of California and Nevada.  Men go crazy with the gold fever.  It’s gold that makes men wild.  If you don’t get killed you’ll change.  If you live you’ll see life on this border.  War debases the moral force of a man, but nothing like what you’ll experience here the next few years.  Men with their wives and daughters are pouring into this range.  They’re all over.  They’re finding gold.  They’ve tasted blood.  Wait till the great gold strike comes!  Then you’ll see men and women go back ten thousand years ...  And then what’ll one girl more or less matter?”

“Well, you see, Kells, I was loved so devotedly by one and made such a hero of—­that I just can’t bear to see any girl mistreated.”

He almost drawled the words, and he was suave and cool, and his face was inscrutable, but a bitterness in his tone gave the lie to all he said and looked.

Pearce caught the broader inference and laughed as if at a great joke.  Kells shook his head doubtfully, as if Cleve’s transparent speech only added to the complexity.  And Cleve turned away, as if in an instant he had forgotten his comrades.

Afterward, in the silence and darkness of night, Joan Randle lay upon her bed sleepless, haunted by Jim’s white face, amazed at the magnificent madness of him, thrilled to her soul by the meaning of his attack on Gulden, and tortured by a love that had grown immeasurably full of the strength of these hours of suspense and the passion of this wild border.

Even in her dreams Joan seemed to be bending all her will toward that inevitable and fateful moment when she must stand before Jim Cleve.  It had to be.  Therefore she would absolutely compel herself to meet it, regardless of the tumult that must rise within her.  When all had been said, her experience so far among the bandits, in spite of the shocks and suspense that had made her a different girl, had been infinitely more fortunate than might have been expected.  She prayed for this luck to continue and forced herself into a belief that it would.