Cabin Gulch by Zane Grey

retorted. Her wet eyes, as she raised them, were proof enough.
    â€œStop it.”
    â€œI can’t help . . . but cry . . . a little. I was th-thinking of home . . . of those who’ve been father and mother to me . . . since I was a baby. I wasn’t crying . . . for myself. But they . . . they’ll be so miserable. They loved me so.”
    â€œIt won’t help matters to cry.”
    Joan stood up then, no longer sincere and forgetful, but the girl with her deep and cunning game. She leaned close to him in the twilight.
    â€œDid you ever love anyone? Did you ever have a sister . . . a girl like me?”
    Kells stalked away into the gloom.
    Joan was left alone. She did not know whether to interpret his abstraction, his temper, and his action as favorable to her or not. Still she hoped and prayed they meant that he had some good in him. If she could only hide her terror—her abhorrence—her knowledge of him and his motive! She built up a bright campfire. There was an abundance of wood. She dreaded the darkness and the night. Besides, the air was growing chilly. So, arranging her saddle and blankets near the fire, she composed herself in a comfortable seat to await Kells’s return and developments. It struck her forcibly that she had lost some of her fear of Kells and she did not know why. She ought to fear him more every hour—every minute. Presently she heard his step brushing the grass, and then he emerged out of the gloom. He had a load of firewood on his shoulder.
    â€œDid you get over your grief?” he asked, glancing down upon her.
    â€œYes,” she replied.
    Kells stooped for a red ember, with which he lighted his pipe, and then he seated himself a little back from the fire. The blaze threw a bright glare over him, and in it he looked neither formidable nor vicious or ruthless. He asked her where she was born, and, upon receiving an answer, he followed that up with another question. He kept this up until Joan divined that he was not so much interested in what he apparently wished to learn as he was in her presence, her voice, her personality. She sensed in him loneliness, hunger for the sound of a voice. She had heard her uncle speak of the loneliness of lonely campfires and how all men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers and be haunted by soft voices. After all, Kells was human.And she talked as never before in her life—brightly, willingly, eloquently, telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood—the sorrow and the joy and some of the dreams up to the time she had come to Camp Hoadley.
    â€œDid you leave any sweethearts over there at Hoadley?” he asked after a silence.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow many?”
    â€œA whole camp full,” she replied with a laugh, “but admirers is a better name for them.”
    â€œThen there’s no one fellow?”
    â€œHardly . . . yet.”
    â€œHow would you like being kept here in this lonesome place for . . . well, say forever?”
    â€œI wouldn’t like that,” replied Joan. “I’d like this . . . camping out like this now . . . if my folks only knew I am alive and well and safe. I love lonely dreary places. I’ve dreamed of being in just such a one as this. It seems so far away here . . . so shut in by the walls and the blackness. So silent and sweet. I love the stars. They speak to me. And the wind in the spruces. Hear it? Very low, mournful. That whispers to me. And I dare say, in the daytime . . . tomorrow I’d like it here, if I had no worry. I’ve never grown up yet. I explore and climb trees and hunt for little birds and rabbits . . . young things just born, all fuzzy and sweet . . . frightened . . . piping or squealing for their mothers. But I won’t touch one for worlds. I simply can’t hurt anything. I can’t spur my horse or beat him. Oh, I
hate
pain!”
    â€œYou’re a strange girl to