He held out a wide piece of black felt that evidently he had cut
from a sombrero. This he measured over her forehead and eyes, and
then taking his knife he cut it to a desired shape. Next he cut
eyeholes in it and fastened to it a loop made of a short strip of
buckskin.
"Try that. ... Pull it down--even with your eyes. There!--take a
look at yourself."
Joan faced the mirror and saw merely a masked stranger. She was no
longer Joan Randle. Her identity had been absolutely lost.
"No one--who ever knew me--could recognize me now," she murmured,
and the relieving thought centered round Jim Cleve.
"I hadn't figured on that," replied Kells. "But you're right. ...
Joan, if I don't miss my guess, it won't be long till you'll be the
talk of mining-towns and camp-fires."
This remark of Kells's brought to Joan proof of his singular pride
in the name he bore, and proof of many strange stories about bandits
and wild women of the border. She had never believed any of these
stories. They had seemed merely a part of the life of this unsettled
wild country. A prospector would spend a night at a camp-fire and
tell a weird story and pass on, never to be seen there again. Could
there have been a stranger story than her life seemed destined to
be? Her mind whirled with vague, circling thought--Kells and his
gang, the wild trails, the camps, and towns, gold and stage-coaches,
robbery, fights, murder, mad rides in the dark, and back to Jim
Cleve and his ruin.
Suddenly Kells stepped to her from behind and put his arms around
her. Joan grew stiff. She had been taken off her guard. She was in
his arms and could not face him.
"Joan, kiss me," he whispered, with a softness, a richer, deeper
note in his voice.
"No!" cried Joan, violently.
There was a moment of silence in which she felt his grasp slowly
tighten--the heave of his breast.
"Then I'll make you," he said. So different was the voice now that
another man might have spoken. Then he bent her backward, and,
freeing one hand, brought it under her chin and tried to lift her
face.
But Joan broke into fierce, violent resistance. She believed she was
doomed, but that only made her the fiercer, the stronger. And with
her head down, her arms straining, her body hard and rigidly
unyielding she fought him all over the room, knocking over the table
and seats, wrestling from wall to wall, till at last they fell
across the bed and she broke his hold. Then she sprang up, panting,
disheveled, and backed away from him. It had been a sharp, desperate
struggle on her part and she was stronger than he. He was not a well
man. He raised himself and put one hand to his breast. His face was
haggard, wet, working with passion, gray with pain. In the struggle
she had hurt him, perhaps reopened his wound.