"We might try. But it'd be no use if they mean bad. I can't make up
my mind yet what's comin' off. It's all right for you to pretend
you're bashful. But don't lose your nerve."

Then he returned to the camp-fire. Joan was hungry. She ate and
drank what had been given her, and that helped her to realize
reality. And although dread abided with her, she grew curious.
Almost she imagined she was fascinated by her predicament. She had
always been an emotional girl of strong will and self-restraint. She
had always longed for she knew not what--perhaps freedom. Certain
places had haunted her. She had felt that something should have
happened to her there. Yet nothing ever had happened. Certain books
had obsessed her, even when a child, and often to her mother's
dismay; for these books had been of wild places and life on the sea,
adventure, and bloodshed. It had always been said of her that she
should have been a boy.

Night settled down black. A pale, narrow cloud, marked by a train of
stars, extended across the dense blue sky. The wind moaned in the
cedars and roared in the replenished camp-fire. Sparks flew away
into the shadows. And on the puffs of smoke that blew toward her
came the sweet, pungent odor of burning cedar. Coyotes barked off
under the brush, and from away on the ridge drifted the dismal
defiance of a wolf.

Camp-life was no new thing to Joan. She had crossed the plains in a
wagon-train, that more than once had known the long-drawn yell of
hostile Indians. She had prospected and hunted in the mountains with
her uncle, weeks at a time. But never before this night had the