th slow, cavernous stare, without
curiosity or speculation or admiration. Evidently a woman was a new and
strange creature to him and he was experiencing unfamiliar sensations.
Whenever Joan accidentally met his gaze--for she avoided it as much as
possible--she shuddered with sick memory of a story she had heard--how
a huge and ferocious gorilla had stolen into an African village and run
off with a white woman. She could not shake the memory. And it was this
that made her kinder to Kells than otherwise would have been possible.

All Joan's faculties sharpened in this period. She felt her own
development--the beginning of a bitter and hard education--an
instinctive assimilation of all that nature taught its wild people
and creatures, the first thing in elemental life--self-preservation.
Parallel in her heart and mind ran a hopeless despair and a driving,
unquenchable spirit. The former was fear, the latter love. She believed
beyond a doubt that she had doomed herself along with Jim Cleve; she
felt that she had the courage, the power, the love to save him, if
not herself. And the reason that she did not falter and fail in this
terrible situation was because her despair, great as it was, did not
equal her love.

That morning, before being lifted upon his horse, Kells buckled on his
gun-belt. The sheath and full round of shells and the gun made this belt
a burden for a weak man. And so Red Pearce insisted. But Kells laughed
in his face. The men, always excepting Gulden, were unfailing in
kindness and care. Apparently they would have fought for Kells to the
death. They were simple and direct in their rough feelings. But in
Kells, Joan thought, was a character who was a product of this border
wildness, yet one who could stand aloof from himself and see the
possibilities, the unexpected, the meaning of that life. Kells knew that
a man and yet another might show kindness and faithfulness one moment,
but the very next, out of a manhood retrograded to the savage, out
of the circumstance or chance, might respond to a primitive force far
sundered from thought or reason, and rise to unbridled action. Joan
divined that Kells buckled on his gun to be ready to protect her. But
his men never dreamed his motive. Kells was a strong, bad man set among
men like him, yet he was infinitely different because he had brains.

On the start of the journey Joan was instructed to ride before Kells
and Pearce, who supported the leader in his saddle