Cabin Gulch by Zane Grey Page A

live out here on this border,” he said.
    â€œI’m no different from other girls. You don’t know girls.”
    â€œI know one pretty well. She put a rope around my neck,” he replied grimly.
    â€œA rope?”
    â€œYes, I mean a halter, a hangman’s noose. But I balked her.”
    â€œOh. A good girl?”
    â€œBad! Bad to the core of her damned black heart . . . bad as I am!” he exclaimed with fierce, low passion.
    Joan trembled. The man, in an instant, seemed transformed, somber as death. She could not look at him, but she must keep on talking.
    â€œBad? You don’t seem bad to me . . . only violent, perhaps, or wild. Tell me about yourself.”
    She had stirred him. His neglected pipe fell from his hand. In the gloom of the campfire he must have seen faces as ghosts of his past.
    â€œWhy not?” he queried strangely. “Why not do what’s been impossible for years . . . open my life. It’ll not matter . . . to a girl who can never tell. Have I forgotten? God, I have not! Listen so that you’ll
know
that I’m bad. My name’s not Kells. I was born in the East, and went to school there, till I ran away. I was young, ambitious, wild. I stole. I ran away . . . came West in ’fifty-one . . . to the gold fields in California. There I became prospector, miner, gambler, robber . . . and road agent. I had evil in me, as all men have, and those wild years brought it out. I had no chance. Evil and gold and blood, they were all one and the same thing. I committed every crime till no place, bad as it might be, was safe for me. Driven and hunted and shot and starved . . . almost hanged! And now I’m twenty-nine. Kells of that outcast crew you named the Border Legion . . . every black crime but one . . . the blackest . . . and that, by God, haunting me, itching my hands tonight.”
    â€œOh, you speak so . . . so dreadfully!” cried Joan. “What can I say? I’m sorry for you. I don’t believe it all. What . . . what black crime haunts you? Oh, what could be possible tonight . . . here in this lonely cañon . . . with only me?”
    Dark and terrible, the man arose. “Girl,” he said hoarsely, “tonight . . . tonight . . . I’ll . . . what have you done to me? One more day . . . and I’ll be mad to do right by you . . . instead of wrong! Do you understand that?”
    Joan leaned forward in the campfire light, with outstretched hands and quivering lips, as overcome by his halting confession of one lost remnant of honor as she was by the dark hint of his passion.
    â€œNo . . . no . . . I don’t understand . . . nor believe!” she cried. “But you frighten me . . . so! I am all . . . all alone with you here. You said I’d be safe. Don’t . . . don’t . . .”
    Her voice broke then, and she sank back exhausted in her seat. Probably Kells had heard only the first words of her appeal, for he took to striding back and forth in the circle of campfire light. The scabbard with the big gun swung against his leg. It grew to be a dark and monstrous thing in Joan’s sight. A marvelous intuition born of that hour warned her of Kells’s subjection of the beast in him, even while with all the manhood left to him he still battled against it. Her girlish sweetness and innocence had availed nothing, except to mock him with the ghost of dead memories. He could not be won or foiled. She must get her hands on that gun—kill him—or? The alternative was death for herself. She leaned there, slowly gathering all the unconquerable and unquenchable forces of a woman’s nature, waiting to make one desperate, supreme, and final effort.

F IVE
    Kells strode there, a black silent shadow, plodding with bent head, as if all about and above him were demons and furies.
    Joan’s perceptions of him, of the night, of the inanimate and impondering black walls, and of herself were exquisitely and