suspicion to you. In this way we may work all summer
without detection. The Border Legion will become mysterious and famous.
It will appear to be a large number of men, operating all over. The
more secretive we are the more powerful the effect on the diggings. In
gold-camps, when there's a strike, all men are mad. They suspect each
other. They can't organize. We shall have them helpless.... And in
short, if it's as rich a strike as looks due here in these hills, before
winter we can pack out all the gold our horses can carry."

Kells had begun under restraint, but the sound of his voice, the
liberation of his great idea, roused him to a passion. The man radiated
with passion. This, then, was his dream--the empire he aspired to.

He had a powerful effect upon his listeners, except Gulden; and it was
evident to Joan that the keen bandit was conscious of his influence.
Gulden, however, showed nothing that he had not already showed. He
was always a strange, dominating figure. He contested the relations of
things. Kells watched him--the men watched him--and Jim Cleve's piercing
eyes glittered in the shadow, fixed upon that massive face. Manifestly
Gulden meant to speak, but in his slowness there was no laboring, no
pause from emotion. He had an idea and it moved like he moved.

"DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES!" The words boomed deep from his cavernous
chest, a mutter that was a rumble, with something almost solemn in its
note and certainly menacing, breathing murder. As Kells had propounded
his ideas, revealing his power to devise a remarkable scheme and
his passion for gold, so Gulden struck out with the driving inhuman
blood-lust that must have been the twist, the knot, the clot in his
brain. Kells craved notoriety and gold; Gulden craved to kill. In the
silence that followed his speech these wild border ruffians judged him,
measured him, understood him, and though some of them grew farther
aloof from him, more of them sensed the safety that hid in his terrible
implication.

But Kells rose against him.

"Gulden, you mean when we steal gold--to leave only dead men behind?" he
queried, with a hiss in his voice.

The giant nodded grimly.

"But only fools kill--unless in self-defense," declared Kells,
passionately.

"We'd last longer," replied Gulden, imperturbably.

"No--no. We'd never last so long. Killings rouse a mining-camp after a
while--gold fever or no. That means a vigilante band."

"We can belong to the vigilante