The Border Legion by Zane Grey (which ebook reader TXT) 📖

in it. She stood with scarlet face and dilating eyes, trembling in every limb. Kells had entered with an expectant smile and that mocking light in his gaze. Both faded. He stared at the blanket—then at her face. Then he seemed to comprehend this ordeal. And he looked sorry for her.

“Why you—you little—fool!” he exclaimed, with emotion. And that emotion seemed to exasperate him. Turning away from her, he gazed out between the logs. Again, as so many times before, he appeared to be remembering something that was hard to recall, and vague.

Joan, agitated as she was, could not help but see the effect of her unexpected and unconscious girlishness. She comprehended that with the mind of the woman which had matured in her. Like Kells, she too, had different personalities.

“I'm trying to be decent to you,” went on Kells, without turning. “I want to give you a chance to make the best of a bad situation. But you're a kid—a girl!... And I'm a bandit. A man lost to all good, who means to have you!”

“But you're NOT lost to all good,” replied Joan, earnestly. “I can't understand what I do feel. But I know—if it had been Gulden instead of you—that I wouldn't have tried to hide my—myself behind this blanket. I'm no longer—AFRAID of you. That's why I acted—so—just like a girl caught.... Oh! can't you see!”

“No, I can't see,” he replied. “I wish I hadn't fetched you here. I wish the thing hadn't happened. Now it's too late.”

“It's never too late.... You—you haven't harmed me yet.”

“But I love you,” he burst out. “Not like I have. Oh! I see this—that I never really loved any woman before. Something's gripped me. It feels like that rope at my throat—when they were going to hang me.”

Then Joan trembled in the realization that a tremendous passion had seized upon this strange, strong man. In the face of it she did not know how to answer him. Yet somehow she gathered courage in the knowledge.

Kells stood silent a long moment, looking out at the green slope. And then, as if speaking to himself, he said: “I stacked the deck and dealt myself a hand—a losing hand—and now I've got to play it!”

With that he turned to Joan. It was the piercing gaze he bent upon her that hastened her decision to resume the part she had to play. And she dropped the blanket. Kells's gloom and that iron hardness vanished. He smiled as she had never seen him smile. In that and his speechless delight she read his estimate of her appearance; and, notwithstanding the unwomanliness of her costume, and the fact of his notorious character, she knew she had never received so great a compliment. Finally he found his voice.

“Joan, if you're not the prettiest thing I ever saw in my life!”

“I can't get used to this outfit,” said Joan. “I can't—I won't go away from this room in it.”

“Sure you will. See here, this'll make a difference, maybe. You're so shy.”

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.

“Did you—knife me—that it hurts so?” he panted, raising a hand that shook.

“I had—nothing.... I just—fought,” cried Joan, breathlessly.

“You hurt me—again—damn you! I'm never free—from pain. But this's worse.... And I'm a coward.... And I'm a dog, too! Not half a man!—You slip of a girl—and I couldn't—hold you!”

His pain and shame were dreadful for Joan to see, because she felt sorry for him, and divined that behind them would rise the darker, grimmer force of the man. And she was right, for suddenly he changed. That which had seemed almost to make him abject gave way to a pale and bitter dignity. He took up Dandy Dale's belt, which Joan had left on the bed, and, drawing the gun from its sheath, he opened the cylinder to see if it was loaded, and then threw the gun at Joan's feet.

“There! Take it—and make a better job this time,” he said.

The power in his voice seemed to force Joan to pick up the gun.

“What do—you mean?” she queried, haltingly.