rit. He looked at her shapely person with something of the brazen
and evil glance that had been so revolting to her in the eyes of those
ruffians. That was the unexpected--the impossible--in connection with
Jim Cleve. How could she stand there under it--and live?

She jerked at the bridle, and, wading blindly across the brook, she
mounted somehow, and rode with blurred sight back to the cabin. Kells
appeared busy with men outside and did not accost her. She fled to her
cabin and barricaded the door.

Then she hid her face on her bed, covered herself to shut out the light,
and lay there, broken-hearted. What had been that other thing she had
imagined was shame--that shrinking and burning she had suffered through
Kells and his men? What was that compared to this awful thing? A brand
of red-hot pitch, blacker and bitterer than death, had been struck
brutally across her soul. By the man she loved--whom she would have died
to save! Jim Cleve had seen in her only an abandoned creature of the
camps. His sad and bitter smile had been for the thought that he could
have loved anything of her sex. His scorn had been for the betrayed
youth and womanhood suggested by her appearance. And then the thing
that struck into Joan's heart was the fact that her grace and charm
of person, revealed by this costume forced upon her, had aroused Jim
Cleve's first response to the evil surrounding him, the first call to
that baseness he must be assimilating from these border ruffians. That
he could look at her so! The girl he had loved! Joan's agony lay not
in the circumstance of his being as mistaken in her character as he had
been in her identity, but that she, of all women, had to be the one who
made him answer, like Kells and Gulden and all those ruffians, to the
instincts of a beast.

"Oh, he'd been drunk--he was drunk!" whispered Joan. "He isn't to be
blamed. He's not my old Jim. He's suffering--he's changed--he doesn't
care. What could I expect--standing there like a hussy before him--in
this--this indecent rig?... I must see him. I must tell him. If he
recognized me now--and I had no chance to tell him why I'm here--why I
look like this--that I love him--am still good--and true to him--if I
couldn't tell him I'd--I'd shoot myself!"

Joan sobbed out the final words and then broke down. And when the spell
had exercised its sway, leaving her limp and shaken and weak, she was
the better for it. Slowly calmness returned so that she could look