Upon the return trip up the gulch Joan found men in sight leading
horses, chopping wood, stretching arms in cabin doors. Joan avoided
riding near them, yet even at a distance she was aware of their
gaze. One rowdy, half hidden by a window, curved hands round his
mouth and called, softly, "Hullo, sweetheart!"
Joan was ashamed that she could feel insulted. She was amazed at the
temper which seemed roused in her. This border had caused her
feelings she had never dreamed possible to her. Avoiding the trail,
she headed for the other side of the gulch. There were clumps of
willows along the brook through which she threaded a way, looking
for a good place to cross. The horse snorted for water. Apparently
she was not going to find any better crossing, so she turned the
horse into a narrow lane through the willows and, dismounting on a
mossy bank, she slipped the bridle so the horse could drink.
Suddenly she became aware that she was not alone. But she saw no one
in front of her or on the other side of her horse. Then she turned.
Jim Cleve was in the act of rising from his knees. He had a towel in
his hand. His face was wet. He stood no more than ten steps from
her.
Joan could not have repressed a little cry to save her life. The
surprise was tremendous. She could not move a finger. She expected
to hear him call her name.
Cleve stared at her. His face, in the morning light, was as drawn
and white as that of a corpse. Only his eyes seemed alive and they
were flames. A lightning flash of scorn leaped to them. He only
recognized in her a woman, and his scorn was for the creature that
bandit garb proclaimed her to be. A sad and bitter smile crossed his
face; and then it was followed by an expression that was a lash upon
Joan's bleeding spirit. He looked at her shapely person with
something of the brazen and evil glance that had been so revolting
to her in the eyes of those ruffians. That was the unexpected--the
impossible--in connection with Jim Cleve. How could she stand there
under it--and live?
She jerked at the bridle, and, wading blindly across the brook, she
mounted somehow, and rode with blurred sight back to the cabin.
Kells appeared busy with men outside and did not accost her. She
fled to her cabin and barricaded the door.
Then she hid her face on her bed, covered herself to shut out the
light, and lay there, broken-hearted. What had been that other thing
she had imagined was shame--that shrinking and burning she had
suffered through Kells and his men? What was that compared to this
awful thing? A brand of red-hot pitch, blacker and bitterer than
death, had been struck brutally across her soul. By the man she
loved--whom she would have died to save! Jim Cleve had seen in her
only an abandoned creature of the camps. His sad and bitter smile
had been for the thought that he could have loved anything of her
sex. His scorn had been for the betrayed youth and womanhood
suggested by her appearance. And then the thing that struck into
Joan's heart was the fact that her grace and charm of person,
revealed by this costume forced upon her, had aroused Jim Cleve's
first response to the evil surrounding him, the first call to that
baseness he must be assimilating from these border ruffians. That he
could look at her so! The girl he had loved! Joan's agony lay not in
the circumstance of his being as mistaken in her character as he had
been in her identity, but that she, of all women, had to be the one
who made him answer, like Kells and Gulden and all those ruffians,
to the instincts of a beast.