Absolute silence ensued after that last swift and startling speech.  It broke to a commingling of yells and shouts.  Blicky wheeled his horse and Kells started on a run.  And there was a stampede and rush after him.

Joan grasped her opportunity.  She had seen all this excitement, but she had not lost sight of Cleve.  He got up from a log and started after the others.  Joan flew to him, grasped him, startled him with the suddenness of her onslaught.  But her tongue seemed cloven to the roof of her mouth, her lips weak and mute.  Twice she strove to speak.

“Meet me—­there!—­among the pines—­right away!” she whispered, with breathless earnestness.  “It’s life—­or death—­for me!”

As she released his arm he snatched at her mask.  But she eluded him.

“Who are you?” he flashed.

Kells and his men were piling into the willows, leaping the brook, hurrying on.  They had no thought but to get to Jesse Smith to hear of the gold strike.  That news to them was as finding gold in the earth was to honest miners.

“Come!” cried Joan.  She hurried away toward the corner of the cabin, then halted to see if he was following.  He was, indeed.  She ran round behind the cabin, out on the slope, halting at the first trees.  Cleve came striding after her.  She ran on, beginning to pant and stumble.  The way he strode, the white grimness of him, frightened her.  What would he, do?  Again she went on, but not running now.  There were straggling pines and spruces that soon hid the cabins.  Beyond, a few rods, was a dense clump of pines, and she made for that.  As she reached it she turned fearfully.  Only Cleve was in sight.  She uttered a sob of mingled relief, joy, and thankfulness.  She and Cleve had not been observed.  They would be out of sight in this little pine grove.  At last!  She could reveal herself, tell him why she was there, that she loved him, that she was as good as ever she had been.  Why was she shaking like a leaf in the wind?  She saw Cleve through a blur.  He was almost running now.  Involuntarily she fled into the grove.  It was dark and cool; it smelled sweetly of pine; there were narrow aisles and little sunlit glades.  She hurried on till a fallen tree blocked her passage.  Here she turned—­she would wait—­the tree was good to lean against.  There came Cleve, a dark, stalking shadow.  She did not remember him like that.  He entered the glade.

“Speak again!” he said, thickly.  “Either I’m drunk or crazy!”

But Joan could not speak.  She held out hands that shook—­swept them to her face—­tore at the mask.  Then with a gasp she stood revealed.

If she had stabbed him straight through the heart he could not have been more ghastly.  Joan saw him, in all the terrible transfiguration that came over him, but she had no conceptions, no thought of what constituted that change.  After that check to her mind came a surge of joy.

“Jim! ...  Jim!  It’s Joan!” she breathed, with lips almost mute.