Then she hid her face on her bed, covered herself to shut out the light, and lay there, broken-hearted.  What had been that other thing she had imagined was shame—­that shrinking and burning she had suffered through Kells and his men?  What was that compared to this awful thing?  A brand of red-hot pitch, blacker and bitterer than death, had been struck brutally across her soul.  By the man she loved—­whom she would have died to save!  Jim Cleve had seen in her only an abandoned creature of the camps.  His sad and bitter smile had been for the thought that he could have loved anything of her sex.  His scorn had been for the betrayed youth and womanhood suggested by her appearance.  And then the thing that struck into Joan’s heart was the fact that her grace and charm of person, revealed by this costume forced upon her, had aroused Jim Cleve’s first response to the evil surrounding him, the first call to that baseness he must be assimilating from these border ruffians.  That he could look at her so!  The girl he had loved!  Joan’s agony lay not in the circumstance of his being as mistaken in her character as he had been in her identity, but that she, of all women, had to be the one who made him answer, like Kells and Gulden and all those ruffians, to the instincts of a beast.

“Oh, he’d been drunk—­he was drunk!” whispered Joan.  “He isn’t to be blamed.  He’s not my old Jim.  He’s suffering—­he’s changed—­he doesn’t care.  What could I expect—­standing there like a hussy before him—­in this—­this indecent rig? ...  I must see him.  I must tell him.  If he recognized me now—­and I had no chance to tell him why I’m here—­why I look like this—­that I love him—­am still good—­ and true to him—­if I couldn’t tell him I’d—­I’d shoot myself!”

Joan sobbed out the final words and then broke down.  And when the spell had exercised its sway, leaving her limp and shaken and weak, she was the better for it.  Slowly calmness returned so that she could look at her wild and furious rush from the spot where she had faced Jim Cleve, at the storm of shame ending in her collapse.  She realized that if she had met Jim Cleve here in the dress in which she had left home there would have been the same shock of surprise and fear and love.  She owed part of that breakdown to the suspense she had been under and then the suddenness of the meeting.  Looking back at her agitation, she felt that it had been natural—­that if she could only tell the truth to Jim Cleve the situation was not impossible.  But the meeting, and all following it, bore tremendous revelation of how through all this wild experience she had learned to love Jim Cleve.  But for his reckless flight and her blind pursuit, and then the anxiety, fear, pain, toil, and despair, she would never have known her woman’s heart and its capacity for love.

11

Following that meeting, with all its power to change and strengthen Joan, there were uneventful days in which she rode the gulch trails and grew able to stand the jests and glances of the bandit’s gang.  She thought she saw and heard everything, yet insulated her true self in a callous and unreceptive aloofness from all that affronted her.