Cabin Gulch Read Online Free PDF

and help Halloway pack. Then take my trail.”
    Bill nodded, and was walking away when Kells called after him: “And say, Bill, don’t say anything to Roberts! He’s easily riled.”
    â€œHaw! Haw! Haw!” laughed Bill.
    His harsh laughter somehow rang jarringly in Joan’s ears. But she was used to violent men who expressed mirth over mirthless jokes.
    â€œGet up, Miss Randle,” said Kells as he mounted. “We’ve a long ride. You’ll need all your strength. So I advise you to come quietly with me and not try to get away. It won’t be any use trying.”
    Joan climbed into her saddle and rode after him. Once she looked back in the hope of seeing Roberts, of waving a hand to him. She saw his horse, standing saddled, and she saw Bill struggling under a pack, but there was no sign of Roberts. Then more cedars intervened and the campsite was lost to view. When she glanced ahead, her first thought was to take in the points of Kells’s horse. She had been used to horses all her life. Kells rode a big rangy bay—a horse that appeared to snort speed and endurance. Her pony could never run away from that big brute. Still Joan had the temper to make an attempt to escape, if a favorable one was presented.
    The morning was rosy, clear, cool; there was a sweet dry tang in the air; white-tailed deer bounded away out of the open spaces, and the gray-domed, glistening mountains, with their bold black-fringed slopes, overshadowed the close foothills. Joan was a victim to swift vagaries of thought and conflicting emotions. She was riding away with a freebooter, a road agent, to be held for ransom. The fact was scarcely credible. She could not shake the dread of nameless peril. She tried not to recall Roberts’s words, yet they haunted her.
If she had not been so handsome
, he had said. Joan knew she possessed goodlooks, but they had never caused her any particular concern. That Kells had let that influence him—as Roberts had imagined—was more than absurd. Kells had scarcely looked at her. It was gold such men wanted. She wondered what her ransom would be—where her uncle would get it—and if there really was a likelihood of that rich strike. Then she remembered her mother, who had died when she was a little girl, and a strange sweet sadness abided with her. It passed. She saw her uncle—that great, robust, hearty, splendid old man, with his laugh and his kindness, and his love for her, and his everlasting unquenchable belief that soon he would make a rich gold strike. What a roar and a stampede he would raise at her loss! The village camp might be divided on that score, she thought, because the few young women in that little settlement hated her, and the young men would have more peace without her. Suddenly her thought shifted to Jim Cleve, the cause of her present misfortune. She had forgotten Jim. In the interval somehow he had grown. Sweet to remember how he had fought for her and kept it secret. After all, she had misjudged him. She had hated him because she liked him. Maybe she did more. That gave her a shock. She recalled his kisses, and then flamed all over. If she did not hate him, she ought to. He had been so useless; he ran after her so; he was the laughingstock of the village; his actions made her other admirers and friends believe she cared for him, was playing fast-and-loose with him. Still there was a difference now. He had terribly transgressed. He had frightened her with threats of dire ruin to himself, and because of that she had trailed him, to fall herself upon a hazardous experience. Where was Jim Cleve now? Like a flash then occurred to her the singular possibility. Jim had ridden for the border with the avowed and desperateintention of finding Kells, and Gulden, and the badmen of that trackless region. He would do what he had sworn he would. And here she was—the cause of it all—a captive of this notorious Kells. She was being led