n, no longer sincere and forgetful, but the girl with
her deep and cunning game. She leaned close to him in the twilight.

"Did you ever love any one? Did you ever have a sister--a girl like me?"

Kells stalked away into the gloom.

Joan was left alone. She did not know whether to interpret his
abstraction, his temper, and his action as favorable or not. Still she
hoped and prayed they meant that he had some good in him. If she could
only hide her terror, her abhorrence, her knowledge of him and his
motive! She built up a bright camp-fire. There was an abundance of wood.
She dreaded the darkness and the night. Besides, the air was growing
chilly. So, arranging her saddle and blankets near the fire, she
composed herself in a comfortable seat to await Kells's return and
developments. It struck her forcibly that she had lost some of her fear
of Kells and she did not know why. She ought to fear him more every
hour--every minute. Presently she heard his step brushing the grass
and then he emerged out of the gloom. He had a load of fire-wood on his
shoulder.

"Did you get over your grief?" he asked, glancing down upon her.

"Yes," she replied.

Kells stooped for a red ember, with which he lighted his pipe, and then
he seated himself a little back from the fire. The blaze threw a bright
glare over him, and in it he looked neither formidable nor vicious nor
ruthless. He asked her where she was born, and upon receiving an answer
he followed that up with another question. And he kept this up until
Joan divined that he was not so much interested in what he apparently
wished to learn as he was in her presence, her voice, her personality.
She sensed in him loneliness, hunger for the sound of a voice. She had
heard her uncle speak of the loneliness of lonely camp-fires and how all
men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces
in the embers and be haunted by soft voices. After all, Kells was
human. And she talked as never before in her life, brightly, willingly,
eloquently, telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood--the
sorrow and the joy and some of the dreams--up to the time she had come
to Camp Hoadley.

"Did you leave any sweethearts over there at Hoadley?" he asked, after a
silence.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"A whole campful," she replied, with a laugh, "but admirers is a better
name for them."

"Then there's no one fellow?"

"Hardly--yet."

"How would you like being kept here in t