s
without understanding why. She had not yet sounded Jesse Smith, but not
a man of all the others was true to Kells. They would be of his Border
Legion, do his bidding, revel in their ill-gotten gains, and then, when
he needed them most, be false to him.

When Joan was awakened her room was shrouded in gray gloom. A bustle
sound from the big cabin, and outside horses stamped and men talked.

She sat alone at breakfast and ate by lantern-light. It was necessary
to take a lantern back to her cabin, and she was so long in her
preparations there that Kells called again. Somehow she did not want to
leave this cabin. It seemed protective and private, and she feared she
might not find such quarters again. Besides, upon the moment of leaving
she discovered that she had grown attached to the place where she had
suffered and thought and grown so much.

Kells had put out the lights. Joan hurried through the cabin and
outside. The gray obscurity had given way to dawn. The air was cold,
sweet, bracing with the touch of mountain purity in it. The men, except
Kells, were all mounted, and the pack-train was in motion. Kells dragged
the rude door into position, and then, mounting, he called to Joan to
follow. She trotted her horse after him, down the slope, across the
brook and through the wet willows, and out upon the wide trail. She
glanced ahead, discerning that the third man from her was Jim Cleve; and
that fact, in the start for Alder Creek, made all the difference in the
world.

When they rode out of the narrow defile into the valley the sun was
rising red and bright in a notch of the mountains. Clouds hung over
distant peaks, and the patches of snow in the high canons shone blue and
pink. Smith in the lead turned westward up the valley. Horses trooped
after the cavalcade and had to be driven back. There were also cattle in
the valley, and all these Kells left behind like an honest rancher
who had no fear for his stock. Deer stood off with long ears pointed
forward, watching the horses go by. There were flocks of quail, and
whirring grouse, and bounding jack-rabbits, and occasionally a brace
of sneaking coyotes. These and the wild flowers, and the waving
meadow-grass, the yellow-stemmed willows, and the patches of alder, all
were pleasurable to Joan's eyes and restful to her mind.

Smith soon led away from this valley up out of the head of a ravine,
across a rough rock-strewn ridge, down again into a hollow that grew to
be a