Cabin Gulch (14 page)

“Since you force me so . . . then I must,” she said.

Kells left her without another word.

Joan removed her stained and torn dress and her wornout boots, then hurriedly, for fear Kells might return, she put on the dead boy bandit's outfit. Dandy Dale assuredly must have been her counterpart, for his things fit her perfectly. Joan felt so strange that she scarcely had courage enough to look into the mirror. When she did look, she gave a start that was both amaze and shame. But for her face, she never could have recognized herself. What had become of her height . . . her slenderness? She looked like an audacious girl in a dashing boy masquerade. Her shame was singular, was such that it consisted of a burning hateful consciousness that she had not been able to
express a thrill of delight at her appearance, and that this costume strangely magnified every curve and swell of her body, betraying her femininity as nothing had ever done.

And just at that moment Kells knocked on the door and called: “Joan, are you dressed?”

“Yes,” she replied. But the word seemed involuntary.

Then Kells came in.

It was an instinctive and frantic impulse that made Joan snatch up a blanket and half envelope herself 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 damn' 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 that 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 reacted . . . 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 damned 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 silently 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 face Joan. It was the piercing gaze he bent upon her that hastened her decision to resume the part she had to play. 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 on 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 . . . whoever knew me . . . could recognize me now,” she murmured, and the relieving thought centered around 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 campfires.”

This remark of Kells 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 campfire 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 stagecoaches—robbery, fights, murder, and 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, loosing one hand, caught 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,” said Joan breathlessly.

“You hurt me . . . again . . . damn you! I'm never free . . . from pain. But there's worse. 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.

“Shoot me again. Put me out of my pain . . . my misery. I'm sick of it all. I'd be glad to have you kill me.”

“Kells,” said Joan weakly.

“Take your chance . . . now . . . when I've no strength . . . to force you . . . throw the gun on me. Kill me.”

He spoke with a terrible impelling earnestness and the strength of his will almost hypnotized Joan into execution of his demand.

“You are mad,” she said. “I don't want to kill you. I couldn't. I just want you to . . . to be . . . decent to me.”

“I have been . . . for me. I was only in fun this time . . . when I grabbed you. But the
feel
of you! I can't be decent any more. I see things clear now. Joan Randle, it's my life or your soul!”

He rose now, dark, shaken, stripped of all save the truth.

Joan dropped the gun from nerveless grasp.

“Is that your choice?” he asked hoarsely.

“I can't murder you.”

“Are you afraid of the other man . . . of Gulden? Is that why you can't kill me? You're afraid to be left . . . to try to get away?”

“I never thought of him.”

“Then . . . my life or your soul?”

He stalked toward her, loomed over her, so that she put out trembling hands. After the struggle a reaction was coming to her. She was weakening. She had forgotten her plan.

“If you're merciless . . . then it must be . . . my soul,” she whispered. “For I
can't
murder you. Could you take that gun now . . . and press it here . . . and murder
me?
”

“No. For I love you.”

“You don't love me. It's a blacker crime to murder the soul than the body.”

Something in his strange eyes inspired Joan with a flashing reviving divination. Back upon her flooded all that tide of woman's subtle incalculable power to allure, to change, to hold. Swiftly she went close to Kells. She stretched out her hands. She was bleeding from rough contact with the log wall during the struggle. Her wrists were red, swollen, bruised from his fierce grasp.

“Look! See what you've done. You were a beast. You made me fight like a beast. My hands were claws . . . my whole body one hard knot of muscle. You couldn't hold me . . . you couldn't kiss me. Suppose you
are
able to hold me . . . later. I'll only be the husk of a woman. I'll just be a cold shell, doubled up, unrelaxed, a callous thing never to yield. All that's
me
, the girl, the woman you say you love . . . will be inside, shrinking, loathing, hating, sickened to death. You will only kiss . . . embrace a thing you've degraded. The warmth, the sweetness, the quiver, the thrill, the response, the life . . . all that is the soul of a woman and makes her lovable will be murdered.”

Then she drew still closer to Kells, and with all the wondrous subtlety of a woman in a supreme moment
where a life and a soul hung in the balance, she made of herself an absolute contrast to the fierce wild unyieldingly creature who had fought him off.

“Let me show . . . you . . . the difference,” she whispered, leaning to him, glowing, soft, eager, terrible with her woman's charm. “Something tells me . . . gives me strength. What
might
be. Only barely possible . . . if in my awful plight . . . you turned out to be a man, good instead of bad. And . . . if it were possible . . . see the difference . . . in the woman. . . . I show you . . . to save my soul!”

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 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 her, she put warm and tremulous lips to his.

Then she fell away from him, shrinking and terrified. But he stood there as if something beyond belief had happened to him, and the evil of his face, the hard lines, the brute softened and vanished in a light of transformation.

“My God,” he breathed softly. Then he awakened, as if from a trance, and, leaping down the steps, he violently swept aside the curtain, and disappeared.

Joan threw herself upon the bed and spent the last of her strength in the relief of blinding tears. She had won. She believed she need never fear Kells again. In that one moment of abandon she had exalted him. But at what cost?

Next day, when Kells called Joan into the other cabin, she verified her hope and belief, not so much in the almost indefinable aging and sadness of the man, as in the strong intuitive sense that her attraction had magnified for him and had uplifted him.

“You mustn't stay shut up in there any longer,” he said. “You've lost weight and you're pale. Go out in the air and sun. You might as well get used to the gang. Bate Wood came to me this morning and said he thought you were the ghost of Dandy Dale. That name will stick to you. I don't care how you treat my men. But if you're friendly, you'll fare better. Don't go far from the cabin. And if any man says or does a thing you don't like . . . flash your gun. Don't yell for me. You can bluff this gang to a standstill.”

That was a trial for Joan—when she walked out into the light in Dandy Dale's clothes. She did not step very straight and she could feel the cold prick of her face under the mask. It was not shame, but fear that gripped her. She would rather die than have Jim
Cleve recognize her in that bold disguise. A line of dusty saddled horses stood heads and bridles down before the cabin, and a number of lounging men ceased talking when she appeared. It was a crowd that smelled of dust and horses and leather and whiskey and tobacco. Joan did not recognize anyone there, which fact aided her in a quiet recovery of her composure. Then she found amusement in the absolute sensation she made upon these loungers. They stood, open-mouthed and motionless. One old fellow dropped his pipe from bearded lips and did not seem to note the loss. A dark young man, dissipated and wild-looking, with years of lawlessness stamped upon his face was the first to move, and he, with awkward gallantry, doffed his sombrero. Then others greeted her gruffly, but with amiable disposition. Joan wanted to run, yet she forced herself to stand there, apparently unconcerned before this battery of bold and curious eyes. Once done, that made the rest easier. She was grateful for the mask. And with her first low, almost insolent words in reply, Joan entered upon the second phase of her experience with these bandits. Naturalness did not come soon, but it did come, and with it her wit and courage.