Cleve picked up his gun and presently the piece of black felt.  He held it as if it were a deadly thing.

“Put it on me.”

He slipped the cord over her head and adjusted the mask so the holes came right for her eyes.

“Joan, it hides the—­the goodness of you,” he cried.  “No one can see your eyes now.  No one will look at your face.  That rig shows your—­ shows you off so!  It’s not decent. ...  But, O Lord!  I’m bound to confess how pretty, how devilish, how seductive you are!  And I hate it.”

“Jim, I hate it, too.  But we must stand it.  Try not to shame me any more. ...  And now good-by.  Keep watch for me—­as I will for you—­all the time.”

Joan broke from him and glided out of the grove, away under the straggling pines, along the slope.  She came upon her horse and she led him back to the corral.  Many of the horses had strayed.  There was no one at the cabin, but she saw men striding up the slope, Kells in the lead.  She had been fortunate.  Her absence could hardly have been noted.  She had just strength left to get to her room, where she fell upon the bed, weak and trembling and dizzy and unutterably grateful at her deliverance from the hateful, unbearable falsity of her situation.

13

It was afternoon before Joan could trust herself sufficiently to go out again, and when she did she saw that she attracted very little attention from the bandits.

Kells had a springy step, a bright eye, a lifted head, and he seemed to be listening.  Perhaps he was—­to the music of his sordid dreams.  Joan watched him sometimes with wonder.  Even a bandit—­plotting gold robberies, with violence and blood merely means to an end—­built castles in the air and lived with joy!

All that afternoon the bandits left camp in twos and threes, each party with pack burros and horses, packed as Joan had not seen them before on the border.  Shovels and picks and old sieves and pans, these swinging or tied in prominent places, were evidence that the bandits meant to assume the characters of miners and prospectors.  They whistled and sang.  It was a lark.  The excitement had subsided and the action begun.  Only in Kells, under his radiance, could be felt the dark and sinister plot.  He was the heart of the machine.

By sundown Kells, Pearce, Wood, Jim Cleve, and a robust, grizzled bandit, Jesse Smith, were left in camp.  Smith was lame from his ride, and Joan gathered that Kells would have left camp but for the fact that Smith needed rest.  He and Kells were together all the time, talking endlessly.  Joan heard them argue a disputed point—­ would the men abide by Kells’s plan and go by twos and threes into the gold-camp, and hide their relations as a larger band?  Kells contended they would and Smith had his doubts.

“Jack, wait till you see Alder Creek!” ejaculated Smith, wagging his grizzled head.  “Three thousand men, old an’ young, of all kinds—­ gone gold—­crazy!  Alder Creek has got California’s ‘49 and’ ’51 cinched to the last hole!” And the bandit leader rubbed his palms in great glee.