blackest--and that haunting me, itching my hands to-night."

"Oh, you speak so--so dreadfully!" cried Joan. "What can I say? I'm
sorry for you. I don't believe it all. What--what black crime haunts
you? Oh! what could be possible tonight--here in this lonely canon--with
only me?"

Dark and terrible the man arose.

"Girl," he said, hoarsely. "To-night--to-night--I'll.... What have you
done to me? One more day--and I'll be mad to do right by you--instead of
WRONG.... Do you understand that?"

Joan leaned forward in the camp-fire light with outstretched hands
and quivering lips, as overcome by his halting confession of one last
remnant of honor as she was by the dark hint of his passion.

"No--no--I don't understand--nor believe!" she cried. "But you frighten
me--so! I am all--all alone with you here. You said I'd be safe.
Don't--don't--"

Her voice broke then and she sank back exhausted in her seat. Probably
Kells had heard only the first words of her appeal, for he took to
striding back and forth in the circle of the camp-fire light. The
scabbard with the big gun swung against his leg. It grew to be a dark
and monstrous thing in Joan's sight. A marvelous intuition born of that
hour warned her of Kells's subjection to the beast in him, even while,
with all the manhood left to him, he still battled against it. Her
girlish sweetness and innocence had availed nothing, except mock him
with the ghost of dead memories. He could not be won or foiled. She must
get her hands on that gun--kill him--or--! The alternative was death for
herself. And she leaned there, slowly gathering all the unconquerable
and unquenchable forces of a woman's nature, waiting, to make one
desperate, supreme, and final effort.

5

Kells strode there, a black, silent shadow, plodding with bent head, as
if all about and above him were demons and furies.

Joan's perceptions of him, of the night, of the inanimate and
imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and
abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and
wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward.
Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their lives did not breed
cowardice or baseness. Joan knew the burning in her breast--that thing
which inflamed and swept through her like a wind of fire--was hate. Yet
her heart held a grain of pity for him. She measured his forbearance,
his struggle, against the monstrous cruelt