The Border Legion

After dark Kells had his men build a fire before the open side of

the cabin. He lay propped up on blankets and his saddle, while the

others lounged or sat in a half-circle in the light, facing him.

Joan drew her blankets into a corner where the shadows were thick

and she could see without being seen. She wondered how she would

ever sleep near all these wild men--if she could ever sleep again.

Yet she seemed more curious and wakeful than frightened. She had no

way to explain it, but she felt the fact that her presence in the

camp had a subtle influence, at once restraining and exciting. So

she looked out upon the scene with wide-open eyes.

And she received more strongly than ever an impression of wildness.

Even the camp-fire seemed to burn wildly; it did not glow and

sputter and pale and brighten and sing like an honest camp-fire. It

blazed in red, fierce, hurried flames, wild to consume the logs. It

cast a baleful and sinister color upon the hard faces there. Then

the blackness of the enveloping night was pitchy, without any bold

outline of canon wall or companionship of stars. The coyotes were

out in force and from all around came their wild sharp barks. The

wind rose and mourned weirdly through the balsams.

But it was in the men that Joan felt mostly that element of

wildness. Kells lay with his ghastly face clear in the play of the

moving flare of light. It was an intelligent, keen, strong face, but

evil. Evil power stood out in the lines, in the strange eyes,

stranger then ever, now in shadow; and it seemed once more the face

of an alert, listening, implacable man, with wild projects in mind,

driving him to the doom he meant for others. Pearce's red face shone

redder in that ruddy light. It was hard, lean, almost fleshless, a

red mask stretched over a grinning skull. The one they called

Frenchy was little, dark, small-featured, with piercing gimlet-like

eyes, and a mouth ready to gush forth hate and violence. The next

two were not particularly individualized by any striking aspect,

merely looking border ruffians after the type of Bill and Halloway.

But Gulden, who sat at the end of the half-circle, was an object

that Joan could scarcely bring her gaze to study. Somehow her first

glance at him put into her mind a strange idea--that she was a woman

and therefore of all creatures or things in the world the farthest

removed from him. She looked away, and found her gaze returning,

fascinated, as if she were a bird and he a snake. The man was of

huge frame, a giant whose every move suggested the acme of physical

power. He was an animal--a gorilla with a shock of light instead of

black hair, of pale instead of black skin. His features might have

been hewn and hammered out with coarse, dull, broken chisels. And

upon his face, in the lines and cords, in the huge caverns where his

eyes hid, and in the huge gash that held strong, white fangs, had

been stamped by nature and by life a terrible ferocity. Here was a

man or a monster in whose presence Joan felt that she would rather

be dead. He did not smoke; he did not indulge in the coarse, good-

natured raillery, he sat there like a huge engine of destruction

that needed no rest, but was forced to rest because of weaker

attachments. On the other hand, he was not sullen or brooding. It

was that he did not seem to think.