In the interval somehow he had grown.  Sweet to remember how he had fought for her and kept it secret!  After all, she had misjudged him.  She had hated him because she liked him.  Maybe she did more!  That gave her a shock.  She recalled his kisses and then flamed all over.  If she did not hate him she ought to.  He had been so useless; he ran after her so; he was the laughing-stock of the village; his actions made her other admirers and friends believe she cared for him, was playing fast-and-loose with him.  Still, there was a difference now.  He had terribly transgressed.  He had frightened her with threats of dire ruin to himself.  And because of that she had trailed him, to fall herself upon a hazardous experience.  Where was Jim Cleve now?  Like a flash then occurred to her the singular possibility.  Jim had ridden for the border with the avowed and desperate intention of finding Kells and Gulden and the bad men of that trackless region.  He would do what he had sworn he would.  And here she was, the cause of it all, a captive of this notorious Kells!  She was being led into that wild border country.  Somewhere out there Kells and Jim Cleve would meet.  Jim would find her in Kells’s hands.  Then there would be hell, Joan thought.  The possibility, the certainty, seemed to strike deep into her, reviving that dread and terror.  Yet she thrilled again; a ripple that was not all cold coursed through her.  Something had a birth in her then, and the part of it she understood was that she welcomed the adventure with a throbbing heart, yet looked with awe and shame and distrust at this new, strange side of her nature.

And while her mind was thus thronged the morning hours passed swiftly, the miles of foot-hills were climbed and descended.  A green gap of canon, wild and yellow-walled, yawned before her, opening into the mountain.

Kells halted on the grassy bank of a shallow brook.  “Get down.  We’ll noon here and rest the horses,” he said to Joan.  “I can’t say that you’re anything but game.  We’ve done perhaps twenty-five miles this morning.”

The mouth of this canon was a wild, green-flowered, beautiful place.  There were willows and alders and aspens along the brook.  The green bench was like a grassy meadow.  Joan caught a glimpse of a brown object, a deer or bear, stealing away through spruce-trees on the slope.  She dismounted, aware now that her legs ached and it was comfortable to stretch them.  Looking backward across the valley toward the last foot-hill, she saw the other men, with horses and packs, coming.  She had a habit of close observation, and she thought that either the men with the packs had now one more horse than she remembered, or else she had not seen the extra one.  Her attention shifted then.  She watched Kells unsaddle the horses.  He was wiry, muscular, quick with his hands.  The big, blue-cylindered gun swung in front of him.  That gun had a queer kind of attraction for her.  The curved black butt made