He laughed. "Now don't talk any more. You're white and fagged-out.
You need to rest--to sleep."
"Sleep? How impossible!" she murmured.
"Why, your eyes are half shut now. ... Anyway, I'll not talk to you.
I want to think."
"Jim! ... kiss me--good night," she whispered.
He bent over rather violently, she imagined. His head blotted out
the light of the stars. He held her tightly for a moment. She felt
him shake. Then he kissed her on the cheek and abruptly drew away.
How strange he seemed!
For that matter, everything was strange. She had never seen the
stars so bright, so full of power, so close. All about her the
shadows gathered protectingly, to hide her and Jim. The silence
spoke. She saw Jim's face in the starlight and it seemed so keen, so
listening, so thoughtful, so beautiful. He would sit there all
night, wide-eyed and alert, guarding her, waiting for the gray of
dawn. How he had changed! And she was his wife! But that seemed only
a dream. It needed daylight and sight of her ring to make that real.
A warmth and languor stole over her; she relaxed comfortably; after
all, she would sleep. But why did that intangible dread hang on to
her soul? The night was so still and clear and perfect--a radiant
white night of stars--and Jim was there, holding her--and to-morrow
they would ride away. That might be, but dark, dangling shapes
haunted her, back in her mind, and there, too, loomed Kells. Where
was he now? Gone--gone on his bloody trail with his broken fortunes
and his desperate bitterness! He had lost her. The lunge of that
wild mob had parted them. A throb of pain and shame went through
her, for she was sorry. She could not understand why, unless it was
because she had possessed some strange power to instil or bring up
good in him. No woman could have been proof against that. It was
monstrous to know that she had power to turn him from an evil life,
yet she could not do it. It was more than monstrous to realize that
he had gone on spilling blood and would continue to go on when she
could have prevented it--could have saved many poor miners who
perhaps had wives or sweethearts somewhere. Yet there was no help
for it. She loved Jim Cleve. She might have sacrificed herself, but
she would not sacrifice him for all the bandits and miners on the
border.
Joan felt that she would always be haunted and would always suffer
that pang for Kells. She would never lie down in the peace and quiet
of her home, wherever that might be, without picturing Kells, dark
and forbidding and burdened, pacing some lonely cabin or riding a
lonely trail or lying with his brooding face upturned to the lonely
stars. Sooner or later he would meet his doom. It was inevitable.
She pictured over that sinister scene of the dangling forms; but no--
Kells would never end that way. Terrible as he was, he had not been
born to be hanged. He might be murdered in his sleep, by one of that
band of traitors who were traitors because in the nature of evil
they had to be. But more likely some gambling-hell, with gold and
life at stake, would see his last fight. These bandits stole gold
and gambled among themselves and fought. And that fight which
finished Kells must necessarily be a terrible one. She seemed to see
into a lonely cabin where a log fire burned low and lamps flickered
and blue smoke floated in veils and men lay prone on the floor--
Kells, stark and bloody, and the giant Gulden, dead at last and more
terrible in death, and on the rude table bags of gold and dull,
shining heaps of gold, and scattered on the floor, like streams of
sand and useless as sand, dust of gold--the Destroyer.