Joan saw or imagined she saw that the glances in the eyes of these men were yellow, like gold fire.  She had seen miners and prospectors whose eyes shone with a strange glory of light that gold inspired, but never as those of Kells’s bandit Legion.  Presently Joan discovered that, despite the excitement, her effect upon them was more marked then ever, and by a difference that she was quick to feel.  But she could not tell what this difference was—­how their attitude had changed.  Then she set herself the task of being useful.  First she helped Bate Wood.  He was roughly kind.  She had not realized that there was sadness about her until he whispered:  “Don’t be downcast, miss.  Mebbe it’ll come out right yet!” That amazed Joan.  Then his mysterious winks and glances, the sympathy she felt in him, all attested to some kind of a change.  She grew keen to learn, but she did not know how.  She felt the change in all the men.  Then she went to Pearce and with all a woman’s craft she exaggerated the silent sadness that had brought quick response from Wood.  Red Pearce was even quicker.  He did not seem to regard her proximity as that of a feminine thing which roused the devil in him.  Pearce could not be other than coarse and vulgar, but there was pity in him.  Joan sensed pity and some other quality still beyond her.  This lieutenant of the bandit Kells was just as mysterious as Wood.  Joan mended a great jagged rent in his buckskin shirt.  Pearce appeared proud of her work; he tried to joke; he said amiable things.  Then as she finished he glanced furtively round; he pressed her hand:  “I had a sister once!” he whispered.  And then with a dark and baleful hate:  “Kells!—­he’ll get his over in the gold-camp!”

Joan turned away from Pearce still more amazed.  Some strange, deep undercurrent was working here.  There had been unmistakable hate for Kells in his dark look and a fierce implication in his portent of fatality.  What had caused this sudden impersonal interest in her situation?  What was the meaning of the subtle animosity toward the bandit leader?  Was there no honor among evil men banded together for evil deeds?  Were jealousy, ferocity, hate and faithlessness fostered by this wild and evil border life, ready at an instant’s notice to break out?  Joan divined the vain and futile and tragical nature of Kell’s great enterprise.  It could not succeed.  It might bring a few days or weeks of fame, of blood-stained gold, of riotous gambling, but by its very nature it was doomed.  It embraced failure and death.

Joan went from man to man, keener now on the track of this inexplicable change, sweetly and sadly friendly to each; and it was not till she encountered the little Frenchman that the secret was revealed.  Frenchy was of a different race.  Deep in the fiber of his being inculcated a sentiment, a feeling, long submerged in the darkness of a wicked life, and now that something came fleeting out of the depths—­and it was respect for a woman.  To Joan it was a