His strong, direct talk evidently impressed them, and in silence
they crowded out of the cabin, leaving Pearce and Cleve behind.
"Jim, are you just hell-bent on fighting or do you mean to make
yourself the champion of every poor girl in these wilds?"
Cleve puffed a cloud of smoke that enveloped his head "I don't pick
quarrels," he replied.
"Then you get red-headed at the very mention of a girl."
A savage gesture of Cleve's suggested that Kells was right.
"Here, don't get red-headed at me," called Kells, with piercing
sharpness. "I'll be your friend if you let me. ... But declare
yourself like a man--if you want me for a friend!"
"Kells, I'm much obliged," replied Cleve, with a semblance of
earnestness. "I'm no good or I wouldn't be out here ... But I can't
stand for these--these deals with girls."
"You'll change," rejoined Kells, bitterly. "Wait till you live a few
lonely years out here! You don't understand the border. You're
young. I've seen the gold-fields of California and Nevada. Men go
crazy with the gold fever. It's gold that makes men wild. If you
don't get killed you'll change. If you live you'll see life on this
border. War debases the moral force of a man, but nothing like what
you'll experience here the next few years. Men with their wives and
daughters are pouring into this range. They're all over. They're
finding gold. They've tasted blood. Wait till the great gold strike
comes! Then you'll see men and women go back ten thousand years ...
And then what'll one girl more or less matter?"
"Well, you see, Kells, I was loved so devotedly by one and made such
a hero of--that I just can't bear to see any girl mistreated."
He almost drawled the words, and he was suave and cool, and his face
was inscrutable, but a bitterness in his tone gave the lie to all he
said and looked.
Pearce caught the broader inference and laughed as if at a great
joke. Kells shook his head doubtfully, as if Cleve's transparent
speech only added to the complexity. And Cleve turned away, as if in
an instant he had forgotten his comrades.
Afterward, in the silence and darkness of night, Joan Randle lay
upon her bed sleepless, haunted by Jim's white face, amazed at the
magnificent madness of him, thrilled to her soul by the meaning of
his attack on Gulden, and tortured by a love that had grown
immeasurably full of the strength of these hours of suspense and the
passion of this wild border.