impression of wildness. Even
the camp-fire seemed to burn wildly; it did not glow and sputter and
pale and brighten and sing like an honest camp-fire. It blazed in red,
fierce, hurried flames, wild to consume the logs. It cast a baleful
and sinister color upon the hard faces there. Then the blackness of the
enveloping night was pitchy, without any bold outline of canon wall
or companionship of stars. The coyotes were out in force and from all
around came their wild sharp barks. The wind rose and mourned weirdly
through the balsams.

But it was in the men that Joan felt mostly that element of wildness.
Kells lay with his ghastly face clear in the play of the moving flare
of light. It was an intelligent, keen, strong face, but evil. Evil power
stood out in the lines, in the strange eyes, stranger then ever, now
in shadow; and it seemed once more the face of an alert, listening,
implacable man, with wild projects in mind, driving him to the doom he
meant for others. Pearce's red face shone redder in that ruddy light. It
was hard, lean, almost fleshless, a red mask stretched over a grinning
skull. The one they called Frenchy was little, dark, small-featured,
with piercing gimlet-like eyes, and a mouth ready to gush forth hate
and violence. The next two were not particularly individualized by any
striking aspect, merely looking border ruffians after the type of Bill
and Halloway. But Gulden, who sat at the end of the half-circle, was
an object that Joan could scarcely bring her gaze to study. Somehow her
first glance at him put into her mind a strange idea--that she was a
woman and therefore of all creatures or things in the world the farthest
removed from him. She looked away, and found her gaze returning,
fascinated, as if she were a bird and he a snake. The man was of huge
frame, a giant whose every move suggested the acme of physical power. He
was an animal--a gorilla with a shock of light instead of black hair,
of pale instead of black skin. His features might have been hewn and
hammered out with coarse, dull, broken chisels. And upon his face, in
the lines and cords, in the huge caverns where his eyes hid, and in the
huge gash that held strong, white fangs, had been stamped by nature
and by life a terrible ferocity. Here was a man or a monster in whose
presence Joan felt that she would rather be dead. He did not smoke; he
did not indulge in the coarse, good-natured raillery, he sat there like
a huge engine of destruct