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Updated: May 9, 2025
They talked while they worked, as any other group of campers might have talked, and jested and laughed. Kells made a fire, and carried water, then broke cedar boughs for later camp-fire use; one of the strangers whom they called Bill hobbled the horses; the other unrolled the pack, spread a tarpaulin, and emptied the greasy sacks; Roberts made biscuit dough for the oven.
In the grayness Joan saw the dark shape of a cabin and it resembled the one Kells had built. It disappeared. Presently when Jim led her into a road she felt sure that this cabin had been the one where she had been a prisoner for so long. They hurried down the road and entered the camp. There were no lights. The tents and cabins looked strange and gloomy. The road was empty.
During the weeks of his enforced stay in the canon there had been a cessation of operations the nature of which Joan merely guessed and a gradual accumulation of idle wailing men in the main camp. Also she gathered, but vaguely, that though Kells had supreme power, the organization he desired was yet far from being consummated.
"To tell you Jim!" she entreated. "What?" he rasped out. "That I'm innocent that I'm as good a girl as ever.. ever.... Let me tell you.... Oh, you're mistaken terribly mistaken." "Now, I know I'm drunk.... You, Joan Randle! You in that rig! You the companion of Jack Kells! Not even his wife! The jest of these foul-mouthed bandits!
She gave the fascinated Kells her hands, slipped into his arms, to press against his breast, and leaned against him an instant, all one quivering, surrendered body; and then lifting a white face, true in its radiance to her honest and supreme purpose to give him one fleeting glimpse of the beauty and tenderness and soul of love, she put warm and tremulous lips to his.
As she went away to the seat under the balsam she heard a sharp cry and then cheers. Evidently the grim Gulden had been both swift and successful. Presently the men came out of the cabin and began to attend to their horses and the pack-train. Pearce looked for Joan, and upon seeing her called out, "Kells wants you."
If all of these prospectors were finding gold, then gold was everywhere. And presently Joan did not need to have Kells tell her that all of these diggers were finding dust. How silent they were how tense! They were not mechanical. It was a soul that drove them.
That dark, sodden thickness of comprehension and feeling, indicative of the hold of drink, passed away swiftly. The shock had sobered him. Instantly Joan saw it saw in him the return of the other and better Kells, how stricken with remorse. She slipped to her knees and clasped her arms around him. He tried to break her hold, but she held on. "Get up!" he ordered, violently.
But, once round that obstruction, Kells halted his men with short, tense exclamation. Joan saw that she stood high up on the slope, looking down upon the gold-camp. It was an interesting scene, but not beautiful. To Kells it must have been so, but to Joan it was even more hideous than the slash in the forest.
Kells rapidly overhauled her, and she had to get out of the trail to let the pack-animals pass. He threw her bridle to her. "Get up," he said. She complied. And then she bravely faced him. "Where are the other men?" "We parted company," he replied, curtly. "Why?" she persisted. "Well, if you're anxious to know, it was because you were winning their regard too much to suit me."
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