Cabin Gulch Read online

  “Jim . . . Jim . . . it’s Joan,” she breathed, with lips almost mute.

  “Joan,” he gasped, and the sound of his voice seemed to be the passing from horrible doubt to certainty.

  Then like a panther he leaped at her—fastened a powerful hand at the neck of her blouse—jerked her to her knees—and began to drag her. Joan fought his iron grasp. The twisting and tightening of her blouse choked her utterance. He did not look down upon her, but she could see him—the regularity of his body set in violence—the awful shade upon his face—the upstanding hair on his head. He dragged her as if she had been an empty sack. Like a beast he was seeking a dark place—a hole to hide her. She was strangling, a distorted sight made objects dim, and now she struggled instinctively. Suddenly the clutch at her neck loosened; gaspingly came the intake of air to her lungs; the dark red veil left her eyes.

  She was still upon her knees. Cleve stood before her, like a gray-faced demon, holding his gun level ready to fire.

  “Pray for you soul . . . and mine!”

  “Jim . . . oh, Jim . . . will you kill yourself, too?”

  “Yes. But pray, girl . . . quick!”

  “Then I pray to God . . . not for my soul . . . but just for one more moment of life. . . . To tell you, Jim.”

  Cleve’s face worked and the gun began to waver. Her reply had been a stroke of lightning into the dark abyss of his jealous agony.

  Joan saw it, and she raised her quivering face, and she held up her arms to him.

  “To tell . . . you . . . Jim,” she entreated.

  “What?” he rasped out.

  “That I’m innocent . . . that I’m as good . . . a girl . . . as ever. Let me tell you. Oh, you’re mistaken . . . terribly mistaken.”

  “Now I know I’m drunk! You, Joan Randle! You in that rag! You the companion of Jack Kells! Not even his wife! The jest of these foul-mouthed bandits! And you say you’re innocent . . . good? When you refused to leave him!”

  “I was afraid to go . . . afraid you’d be killed,” she moaned, beating her breast.

  It must have seemed madness to him—a monstrous nightmare—a delirium of drink that Joan Randle was there on her knees in brazen male attire, lifting her arms to him, beseeching him, not to spare her life, but to believe in her innocence.

  Joan burst into swift broken utterance: “Only listen! I trailed you out . . . thirty miles . . . from Hoadley. I met Roberts. He came with me. He lamed his horse . . . we had to camp. Kells rode down on us. He had two men. They camped there. Next morning he . . . killed Roberts . . . made off with me. Then he killed his men . . . just to have me . . . alone to himself. We crossed a range . . . camped in a cañon. There he attacked me . . . and I . . . I shot him. But I couldn’t leave him . . . to die.”

  Joan hurried on with her narrative, gaining strength and eloquence as she saw the weakening of Cleve.

  “First he said I was his wife to fool that Gulden . . . and the others,” she went on. “He meant it to save me from them. But they guessed or found out. Kells forced me into these bandit clothes. He’s depraved, somehow. And I had to wear something. Kells hasn’t harmed me . . . no one has. I’ve influence over him. He can’t resist it. And he’s tried to give up his evil intentions. But he can’t. There’s good in him. I can make him feel it. Oh, he loves me, and I’m not afraid of him anymore. It has been a terrible time for me, Jim, but I’m still . . . the same girl you knew . . . you used to. . . .”

  Cleve dropped the gun and he waved his hand before his eyes as if to dispel a blindness.

  “But why . . . why?” he asked incredulously. “Why did you leave Hoadley? That’s forbidden. You knew the risk.”

  Joan gazed steadily up at him, to see the whiteness slowly fade out of his face. She had imagined it would be an overcoming of pride to betray her love, but she had been wrong. The moment was so full, so overpowering that she seemed dumb. He had ruined himself for her and out of that ruin had come the glory of her love. Perhaps it was all too late, but at least he would know that for love of him she had in turn sacrificed herself.

  “Jim,” she whispered, and with the first word of that betrayal a thrill, a tremble, a rush went over her, and all the blood seemed hot at her neck and face. “That night, when you kissed me, I was furious. But the moment you had gone, I repented. I must have . . . cared for you then, but I didn’t know. . . . Remorse seized me. And I set out on your trail to save you from yourself. And with the pain and fear and terror there was sometimes . . . the . . . the sweetness of your kisses. Then I knew I cared. And with the added days of suspense and agony . . . all that told me of your throwing your life away . . . there came love . . . such love as otherwise I’d never have been big enough for. I meant to find you . . . to save you . . . to send you home. . . . I have found you, maybe too late to save your life, but not your soul, thank God. That’s why I’ve been strong enough to hold back Kells. I love you, Jim! I love you! I couldn’t tell you enough. My heart is bursting. Say you believe me! Say you know I’m good . . . true to you . . . your Joan! And kiss me . . . like you did that night . . . when we were such blind fools. A boy and a girl who didn’t know . . . and couldn’t tell . . . oh, the sadness of it. . . . Kiss me, Jim, before I . . . drop . . . at your feet. If only you . . . believe. . . .”

  Joan was blinded by tears and whispering she knew not what when Cleve broke from his trance and caught her to his breast. She was fainting—hovering at the border of unconsciousness when his violence held her back from oblivion. She seemed wrapped to him and held so tightly there was no breath in her body, no motion, no stir of pulse. That vague dreamy moment faded. She heard his husky broken accents—she felt the pound of his heart against her breast. And he began to kiss her as she had begged him to. She quickened to thrilling revivifying life. And she lifted her face, and clung around his neck, and kissed him blindly, sweetly, passionately, with all her heart and soul in her lips, wanting only one thing in the world—to give that which she had denied him.

  “Joan . . . Joan . . . Joan,” he murmured when their lips parted. “Am I dreaming . . . drunk . . . or crazy?”

  “Oh, Jim, I’m real . . . you have me in your arms,” she whispered. “Dear Jim . . . kiss me again . . . and say you believe me.”

  “Believe you! I’m out of my mind with joy. You loved me! You followed me! And that idea of mine . . . only an absurd vile suspicion! I might have known . . . had I been sane!”

  “There! Oh, Jim, enough of madness. . . . We’ve got to plan. Remember where we are. There’s Kells, and this terrible situation to meet.”

  He stared at her, slowly realizing, and then it was his turn to shake.

  “My God, I’d forgotten. I’ll have to kill you now.”

  A reaction set in. If he had any self-control left, he lost it, and like a boy whose fling at manhood had exhausted his courage he sank beside her and buried his face against her. He cried in a low tense heart-broken way. For Joan it was terrible to hear him. She held his head to her breast and implored him not to weaken now. But he was stricken with remorse—he had run off like a coward—he had brought her to this calamity—and he could not rise under it. Joan realized that he had long labored under stress of morbid emotion. Only a supreme effort could lift them out of it to strong and reasoning equilibrium, and that must come from her.

  She pushed him away from her, and held him back where he must see her, and white-hot with passionate purpose she kissed him.

  “Jim Cleve, if you’ve nerve enough to be bad, you’ve nerve enough to save the girl who loves you, who belongs to you.”

  He raised his face and it flashed from red to white. He caught the subtlety of her antithesis. With the very two words that had driven him away under the sting of cowardice she uplifted him, and, with all that was tender and faithful and passionate in her meaning of surrender, she settled at once and forever the doubt of his manhood. He arose, trembling in every limb. Like a dog he shook himself. His breast heaved. The shades of scorn and bitterness and abando
n might never have haunted his face. In that moment he had passed from the reckless and wild, sick rage of a weakling to the stern, realizing courage of a man. His suffering on this wild border had developed a different fiber of character, and at the great moment, the climax, when his moral force hung balanced between elevation and destruction, the woman had called to him, and her unquenchable spirit passed into him.

  “There’s only one thing . . . to get away,” he said.

  “Yes, but that’s a terrible risk,” she replied.

  “We’ve a good chance now. I’ll get horses. We can slip away while they’re all excited.”

  “No . . . no. I daren’t risk so much. Kells would find out at once. He’d be like a hound on our trail. But that’s not all. I’ve a horror of Gulden. I can’t explain. I feel it. He would know . . . he would take the trail. I’d never try to escape with Gulden in camp. Jim, do you know what he’s done?”

  “He’s a cannibal. I hate the sight of him. I tried to kill him. I wish I had killed him.”

  “I’m never safe while he’s near.”

  “Then I will kill him.”

  “Hush! You’ll not be desperate unless you have to be. Listen. I’m safe with Kells, for the present. And he’s friendly to you. Let us wait. I’ll keep trying to influence him. I have won the friendship of some of his men. We’ll stay with him . . . travel with him. Surely we’d have a better chance to escape after we reach that gold camp. You must play your part. But do it without drinking and fighting. I couldn’t bear that. We’ll see each other somehow. We’ll plan. Then we’ll take the first sure chance to get away.”

  “We might never have a better chance than we’ve got right now,” he remonstrated.

  “It may seem so to you. But I know. I haven’t watched these ruffians for nothing. I tell you Gulden has split with Kells because of me. I don’t know how I know. And I think I’d die of terror out on the trail, with two hundred miles to go . . . and that gorilla after me.”

  “But Joan, if we once got away, Gulden would never take you alive,” said Jim earnestly. “So you needn’t fear that.”

  “I’ve uncanny horror of him. It’s as if he were a gorilla . . . and would take me off even if I were dead! No, Jim, let me wait. Let me select the time. I can do it. Trust me. Oh, Jim, now that I’ve saved you from being a bandit, I can do anything. I can fool Kells or Pearce or Wood . . . any of them, except Gulden.”

  “If Kells had to choose now between trailing you and rushing for the gold camp, which would he do?”

  “He’d trail me,” she said.

  “But Kells is crazy over gold. He has two passions. To steal gold, and to gamble with it.”

  “That may be. But he’d go after me first. So would Gulden. We can’t ride these hills as they do. We don’t know the trails . . . the water. We’d get lost. We’d be caught. And somehow I know Gulden and his gang would find us first.”

  “You’re probably right, Joan,” replied Cleve. “But you condemn me to a living death. . . . To let you out of my sight with Kells or any of them! It’ll be worse almost than my life was before.”

  “But, Jim, I’ll be safe,” she entreated. “It’s the better choice of two evils. Our lives depend on reason, waiting, planning. And Jim, I want to live for you.”

  “My brave darling, to hear you say that!” he exclaimed with deep emotion. “When I never expected to see you again. . . . But the past is past. I begin over from this hour. I’ll be what you want . . . do what you want.”

  Joan seemed irresistibly drawn to him again, and the supplication—as she lifted her blushing face—and the yielding were perilously sweet.

  “Jim, kiss me and hold me . . . the way . . . you did that night.”

  And it was not Joan who first broke that embrace.

  “Find my mask,” she said.

  Cleve picked up his gun and presently the piece of black felt. He held it as if it was a deadly thing.

  “Put it on me.”

  He slipped the cord over her head and adjusted the mask so the holes were right for her eyes.

  “Joan, it hides the . . . the goodness of you,” he said. “No one can see your eyes now. No one will look at your face. That damned rig shows your . . . shows you off so! It’s not decent. But, oh, Lord! I’m bound to confess how pretty, how devilish, how seductive you are. And I hate it.”

  “Jim, I hate it, too. But we must stand it. Try not to shame me anymore. And now good bye. Keep watch for me . . . as I will for you . . . all the time.”

  Joan broke from him and glided out of the grove, away under the straggling pines, along the slope. She came upon her horse, and she led him back to the corral. Many of the horses had strayed. There was no one at the cabin, but she saw men striding up the slope, Kells in the lead. She had been fortunate. Her absence could hardly have been noted. She had just enough strength left to get to her room, where she fell upon the bed, weak and trembling and dizzy, and unutterably grateful at her deliverance from the hateful unbearable falsity of her situation.

  THIRTEEN

  It was afternoon before Joan could trust herself sufficiently to go out again, and, when she did go, she saw that she attracted very little attention from the bandits. Kells had a springy step, a bright eye, a lifted head, and he seemed to be listening. Perhaps he was—to the music of his sordid dreams. Joan watched him sometimes with wonder. Even a bandit—plotting gold robbing with violence and blood merely means to an end—built castles in the air and lived with joy.

  All that afternoon the bandits left camp in twos and threes, each party with pack burros and horses, packed as Joan had not seen them before on the border. Shovels and picks and old sieves and pans,—these swinging or tied in prominent places were evidence that the bandits meant to assume the characters of miners and prospectors. They whistled and sang. It was a lark. The excitement had subsided and the action begun. Only in Kells, under his radiance, could be felt the dark and sinister plot. He was the heart of the machine.

  By sundown, Kells, Pearce, Wood, Jim Cleve, and a robust grizzled bandit, Jesse Smith, were left in camp. Smith was lame from his ride, and Joan gathered that Kells would have left camp but for the fact that Smith needed rest. He and Kells were together all the time, talking endlessly. Joan heard them argue a disputed point—would the men abide by Kells’s plan and go by twos and threes into the gold camp, and hide their relation as a larger band? Kells contended they would and Smith had his doubts.

  “Jack, wait till you see Alder Creek!” ejaculated Smith, wagging his grizzled head. “Three thousand men, old an’ young, of all kinds . . . gone gold crazy! Alder Creek of ’sixty-three has got California’s ’forty-nine an ’fifty-one cinched to the last hole!”

  And the bandit leader rubbed his palms in great glee.

  That evening they all had supper together in Kells’s cabin. Bate Wood grumbled because he had packed most of his outfit. It so chanced that Joan sat directly opposite Jim Cleve, and, while he ate, he pressed her foot with his under the table. The touch thrilled Joan. Jim did not glance at her. But there was such a change in him that she feared it might rouse Kells’s curiosity. This night, however, the bandit could not have seen anything except a gleam of yellow. He talked, he sat at table, but he did not eat. After supper, he sent Joan to her cabin, saying they would be on the trail at daylight. Joan watched them a while from her covert. They had evidently talked themselves out, and Kells grew thoughtful. Smith and Pearce went outside, apparently to roll their beds on the ground under the porch roof. Wood, who said he was never a good sleeper, smoked his pipe. And Jim Cleve spread blankets along the wall in the shadow and lay down. Joan could just see his eyes shining toward her door. Of course, he was thinking of her. But could he see her eyes? Watching her chance, she slipped a hand from behind the curtain, and she knew Cleve saw it. What a comfort that was! Joan’s heart swelled. All might yet be well. Jim Cleve would be near her while she slept. She could sleep now without the dark dreams—without dreading to awaken to the light. Again
she saw Kells pacing the room, silent, bent, absorbed, hands behind his back, weighted with his burden. It was impossible not to feel sorry for him. With all his intelligence and cunning and power his cause was hopeless. Joan knew that as she knew so many other things without understanding why. She had not yet sounded Jesse Smith, but not a man of all the others was true to Kells. They would be of his Border Legion, do his bidding, revel with their ill-gotten gains, and then, when he needed them most, be false to him.

  When Joan was awakened, her room was shrouded in gray gloom. A bustle sounded from the big cabin, and outside horses stamped and men talked.

  She sat alone at breakfast and ate by lantern light. It was necessary to take a lantern back to the cabin, and she was so long in her preparations there that Kells called again. Somehow she did not want to leave this cabin. It seemed protective and private, and she feared she might not find such quarters again. Besides upon the moment of leaving she discovered that she had grown attached to the place where she had suffered and thought and grown so much.

  Kells had put out the lights. Joan hurried through the cabin and outside. The gray obscurity had given way to dawn. The air was cold, sweet, bracing with the touch of mountain purity in it. The men, except Kells, were all mounted, and the pack train was in motion. Kells dragged the rude door into position, and then, mounting, he called to Joan to follow. She trotted her horse after him, down the slope, across the brook and through the wet willows, and out upon the wide trail. She glanced ahead, discerning that the third man from her was Jim Cleve, and that fact, in the start for Alder Creek, made all the difference in the world.

  When they rode out of the narrow defile into the valley, the sun was rising, red and bright, in a notch of the mountains. Clouds hung over distant peaks and the patches of snow in the high cañons shone blue and pink. Smith in the lead turned westward up the valley. Horses trooped after the cavalcade and had to be driven back. There were also cattle in the valley, and all these Kells left behind like an honest rancher who had no fear for his stock. Deer stood with long ears pointed forward, watching the horses go by. There were flocks of quail, and whirring grouse, and bounding jack rabbits, and occasionally a brace of sneaking coyotes. These, and the wild flowers, and the waving meadow grass, the yellow-stemmed willows and the patches of alder, all were pleasurable to Joan’s eyes and restful to her mind.