bold, black-fringed slopes,
overshadowed the close foot-hills.

Joan was a victim to swift vagaries of thought and conflicting emotions.
She was riding away with a freebooter, a road-agent, to be held for
ransom. The fact was scarcely credible. She could not shake the dread
of nameless peril. She tried not to recall Roberts's words, yet they
haunted her. If she had not been so handsome, he had said! Joan knew
she possessed good looks, but they had never caused her any particular
concern. That Kells had let that influence him--as Roberts had
imagined--was more than absurd. Kells had scarcely looked at her. It was
gold such men wanted. She wondered what her ransom would be, where her
uncle would get it, and if there really was a likelihood of that rich
strike. Then she remembered her mother, who had died when she was a
little girl, and a strange, sweet sadness abided with her. It passed.
She saw her uncle--that great, robust, hearty, splendid old man, with
his laugh and his kindness, and his love for her, and his everlasting
unquenchable belief that soon he would make a rich gold-strike. What a
roar and a stampede he would raise at her loss! The village camp might
be divided on that score, she thought, because the few young women in
that little settlement hated her, and the young men would have more
peace without her. Suddenly her thought shifted to Jim Cleve, the
cause of her present misfortune. She had forgotten Jim. In the interval
somehow he had grown. Sweet to remember how he had fought for her and
kept it secret! After all, she had misjudged him. She had hated him
because she liked him. Maybe she did more! That gave her a shock. She
recalled his kisses and then flamed all over. If she did not hate him
she ought to. He had been so useless; he ran after her so; he was the
laughing-stock of the village; his actions made her other admirers and
friends believe she cared for him, was playing fast-and-loose with him.
Still, there was a difference now. He had terribly transgressed. He had
frightened her with threats of dire ruin to himself. And because of that
she had trailed him, to fall herself upon a hazardous experience.
Where was Jim Cleve now? Like a flash then occurred to her the singular
possibility. Jim had ridden for the border with the avowed and desperate
intention of finding Kells and Gulden and the bad men of that trackless
region. He would do what he had sworn he would. And here she was, the
cause of it all,