.

"Gulden, did you hear that?" asked Kells.

"Yes," replied the man.

"What do you think about this Jim Cleve--and the job he prevented?"

"Never saw Cleve. I'll look him up when we get back to camp. Then I'll
go after the Brander girl."

How strangely his brutal assurance marked a line between him and his
companions! There was something wrong, something perverse in this
Gulden. Had Kells meant to bring that point out or to get an impression
of Cleve?

Joan could not decide. She divined that there was antagonism between
Gulden and all the others. And there was something else, vague and
intangible, that might have been fear. Apparently Gulden was a
criminal for the sake of crime. Joan regarded him with a growing
terror--augmented the more because he alone kept eyes upon the corner
where she was hidden--and she felt that compared with him the
others, even Kells, of whose cold villainy she was assured, were but
insignificant men of evil. She covered her head with a blanket to shut
out sight of that shaggy, massive head and the great dark caves of eyes.

Thereupon Joan did not see or hear any more of the bandits. Evidently
the conversation died down, or she, in the absorption of new thoughts,
no longer heard. She relaxed, and suddenly seemed to quiver all over
with the name she whispered to herself. "Jim! Jim! Oh, Jim!" And the
last whisper was an inward sob. What he had done was terrible. It
tortured her. She had not believed it in him. Yet, now she thought, how
like him. All for her--in despair and spite--he had ruined himself. He
would be killed out there in some drunken brawl, or, still worse, he
would become a member of this bandit crew and drift into crime. That was
a great blow to Joan--that the curse she had put upon him. How silly,
false, and vain had been her coquetry, her indifference! She loved Jim
Cleve. She had not known that when she started out to trail him, to
fetch him back, but she knew it now. She ought to have known before.

The situation she had foreseen loomed dark and monstrous and terrible in
prospect. Just to think of it made her body creep and shudder with cold
terror. Yet there was that strange, inward, thrilling burn round her
heart. Somewhere and soon she was coming face to face with this changed
Jim Cleve--this boy who had become a reckless devil. What would he
do? What could she do? Might he not despise her, scorn her, curse her,
taking her at Kells's word, the wife of a bandit? But