t you're right.... Joan,
if I don't miss my guess, it won't be long till you'll be the talk of
mining-towns and camp-fires."

This remark of Kells's brought to Joan proof of his singular pride in
the name he bore, and proof of many strange stories about bandits and
wild women of the border. She had never believed any of these stories.
They had seemed merely a part of the life of this unsettled wild
country. A prospector would spend a night at a camp-fire and tell a
weird story and pass on, never to be seen there again. Could there have
been a stranger story than her life seemed destined to be? Her mind
whirled with vague, circling thought--Kells and his gang, the wild
trails, the camps, and towns, gold and stage-coaches, robbery, fights,
murder, mad rides in the dark, and back to Jim Cleve and his ruin.

Suddenly Kells stepped to her from behind and put his arms around her.
Joan grew stiff. She had been taken off her guard. She was in his arms
and could not face him.

"Joan, kiss me," he whispered, with a softness, a richer, deeper note in
his voice.

"No!" cried Joan, violently.

There was a moment of silence in which she felt his grasp slowly
tighten--the heave of his breast.

"Then I'll make you," he said. So different was the voice now that
another man might have spoken. Then he bent her backward, and, freeing
one hand, brought it under her chin and tried to lift her face.

But Joan broke into fierce, violent resistance. She believed she was
doomed, but that only made her the fiercer, the stronger. And with her
head down, her arms straining, her body hard and rigidly unyielding
she fought him all over the room, knocking over the table and seats,
wrestling from wall to wall, till at last they fell across the bed and
she broke his hold. Then she sprang up, panting, disheveled, and backed
away from him. It had been a sharp, desperate struggle on her part and
she was stronger than he. He was not a well man. He raised himself and
put one hand to his breast. His face was haggard, wet, working with
passion, gray with pain. In the struggle she had hurt him, perhaps
reopened his wound.

"Did you--knife me--that it hurts so?" he panted, raising a hand that
shook.

"I had--nothing.... I just--fought," cried Joan, breathlessly.

"You hurt me--again--damn you! I'm never free--from pain. But this's
worse.... And I'm a coward.... And I'm a dog, too! Not half a man!--You
slip of a girl--and I couldn't--hold you!"

Hi