“I can't get used to this outfit,” said Joan. “I can't—I won't go away from this room in it.”
“Sure you will. See here, this'll make a difference, maybe. You're so shy.”
He held out a wide piece of black felt that evidently he had cut from a sombrero. This he measured over her forehead and eyes, and then taking his knife he cut it to a desired shape. Next he cut eyeholes in it and fastened to it a loop made of a short strip of buckskin.
“Try that.... Pull it down—even with your eyes. There!—take a look at yourself.”
Joan faced the mirror and saw merely a masked stranger. She was no longer Joan Randle. Her identity had been absolutely lost.
“No one—who ever knew me—could recognize me now,” she murmured, and the relieving thought centered round Jim Cleve.
“I hadn't figured on that,” replied Kells. “But you're right.... Joan, if I don't miss my guess, it won't be long till you'll be the talk of mining-towns and camp-fires.”
This remark of Kells's brought to Joan proof of his singular pride in the name he bore, and proof of many strange stories about bandits and wild women of the border. She had never believed any of these stories. They had seemed merely a part of the life of this unsettled wild country. A prospector would spend a night at a camp-fire and tell a weird story and pass on, never to be seen there again. Could there have been a stranger story than her life seemed destined to be? Her mind whirled with vague, circling thought—Kells and his gang, the wild trails, the camps, and towns, gold and stage-coaches, robbery, fights, murder, mad rides in the dark, and back to Jim Cleve and his ruin.
Suddenly Kells stepped to her from behind and put his arms around her. Joan grew stiff. She had been taken off her guard. She was in his arms and could not face him.
“Joan, kiss me,” he whispered, with a softness, a richer, deeper note in his voice.