Joan felt a start, a tremor run over Jim. Then he stiffened.
“I can't locate him,” replied Red Pearce. “It was the same last night an' the one before. Cleve jest disappears these nights—about this time.... Some woman's got him!”
“He goes to bed. Can't you find where he sleeps?”
“No.”
“This job's got to go through and he's got to do it.”
“Bah!” taunted Pearce. “Gulden swears you can't make Cleve do a job. And so do I!”
“Go out and yell for Cleve!... Damn you all! I'll show you!”
Then Joan heard the tramp of heavy boots, then a softer tramp on the ground outside the cabin. Joan waited, holding her breath. She felt Jim's heart beating. He stood like a post. He, like Joan, was listening, as if for a trumpet of doom.
“HALLO, JIM!” rang out Pearce's stentorian call. It murdered the silence. It boomed under the bluff, and clapped in echo, and wound away, mockingly. It seemed to have shrieked to the whole wild borderland the breaking-point of the bandit's power.
So momentous was the call that Jim Cleve seemed to forget Joan, and she let him go without a word. Indeed, he was gone before she realized it, and his dark form dissolved in the shadows. Joan waited, listening with abated breathing. On this side of the cabin there was absolute silence. She believed that Jim would slip around under cover of night and return by the road from camp. Then what would he do? The question seemed to puzzle her.