Her voice broke then and she sank back exhausted in her seat.  Probably Kells had heard only the first words of her appeal, for he took to striding back and forth in the circle of the camp-fire light.  The scabbard with the big gun swung against his leg.  It grew to be a dark and monstrous thing in Joan’s sight.  A marvelous intuition born of that hour warned her of Kells’s subjection to the beast in him, even while, with all the manhood left to him, he still battled against it.  Her girlish sweetness and innocence had availed nothing, except mock him with the ghost of dead memories.  He could not be won or foiled.  She must get her hands on that gun—­kill him—­ or—!  The alternative was death for herself.  And she leaned there, slowly gathering all the unconquerable and unquenchable forces of a woman’s nature, waiting, to make one desperate, supreme, and final effort.

5

Kells strode there, a black, silent shadow, plodding with bent head, as if all about and above him were demons and furies.

Joan’s perceptions of him, of the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen.  She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward.  Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards.  Their lives did not breed cowardice or baseness.  Joan knew the burning in her breast—­that thing which inflamed and swept through her like a wind of fire—­was hate.  Yet her heart held a grain of pity for him.  She measured his forbearance, his struggle, against the monstrous cruelty and passion engendered by a wild life among wild men at a wild time.  And, considering his opportunities of the long hours and lonely miles, she was grateful, and did not in the least underestimate what it cost him, how different from Bill or Halloway he had been.  But all this was nothing, and her thinking of it useless, unless he conquered himself.  She only waited, holding on to that steel-like control of her nerves, motionless and silent.

She leaned back against her saddle, a blanket covering her, with wide-open eyes, and despite the presence of that stalking figure and the fact of her mind being locked round one terrible and inevitable thought, she saw the changing beautiful glow of the fire-logs and the cold, pitiless stars and the mustering shadows under the walls.  She heard, too, the low rising sigh of the wind in the balsam and the silvery tinkle of the brook, and sounds only imagined or nameless.  Yet a stern and insupportable silence weighed her down.  This dark canon seemed at the ends of the earth.  She felt encompassed by illimitable and stupendous upflung mountains, insulated in a vast, dark, silent tomb.