Joan shook her head.  She was sorry for him.  When he talked like this he was not Kells, the bandit.  She could not resist a strange agitation at the intensity of his emotion.  One moment he had entered—­a bandit leader, planning blood, murder; the next, as his gaze found her, he seemed weakened, broken in the shaking grip of a hopeless love for her.

“Speak, Joan!” he said, with his hands tightening and his brow clouding.

“No, Kells,” she replied.

“Why?  Because I’m a red-handed bandit?”

“No.  Because I—­I don’t love you.”

“But wouldn’t you rather be my wife—­and have me honest—­than become a slave here, eventually abandoned to—­to Gulden and his cave and his rope?” Kells’s voice rose as that other side of him gained dominance.

“Yes, I would. ...  But I know you’ll never harm me—­or abandon me to—­to that Gulden.”

“How do you know?” he cried, with the blood thick at his temples.

“Because you’re no beast any more. ...  And you—­you do love me.”

Kells thrust her from him so fiercely that she nearly fell.

“I’ll get over it. ...  Then—­look out!” he said, with dark bitterness.

With that he waved her back, apparently ordering her to her cabin, and turned to the door, through which the deep voices of men sounded nearer and nearer.

Joan stumbled in the darkness up the rude steps to her room, and, softly placing the poles in readiness to close her door, she composed herself to watch and wait.  The keen edge of her nerves, almost amounting to pain, told her that this night of such moment for Kells would be one of singular strain and significance for her.  But why she could not fathom.  She felt herself caught by the changing tide of events—­a tide that must sweep her on to flood.  Kells had gone outside.  The strong, deep voices’ grew less distinct.  Evidently the men were walking away.  In her suspense Joan was disappointed.  Presently, however, they returned; they had been walking to and fro.  After a few moments Kells entered alone.  The cabin was now so dark that Joan could barely distinguish the bandit.  Then he lighted the lanterns.  He hung up several on the wall and placed two upon the table.  From somewhere among his effects he produced a small book and a pencil; these, with a heavy, gold-mounted gun, he laid on the table before the seat he manifestly meant to occupy.  That done, he began a slow pacing up and down the room, his hands behind his back, his head bent in deep and absorbing thought.  What a dark, sinister, plotting figure!  Joan had seen many men in different attitudes of thought, but here was a man whose mind seemed to give forth intangible yet terrible manifestations of evil.  The inside of that gloomy cabin took on another aspect; there was a meaning in the saddles and bridles and weapons on the wall; that book and pencil and gun seemed to contain the dark deeds of wild men; and all about the bandit hovered a power sinister in its menace to the unknown and distant toilers for gold.