Joan did not choose to allow these men to see that she feared them
or distrusted them or disliked them. She ate with them beside the
fire. And this was their first opportunity to be close to her. The
fact had an immediate and singular influence. Joan had no vanity,
though she knew she was handsome. She forced herself to be pleasant,
agreeable, even sweet. Their response was instant and growing. At
first they were bold, then familiar and coarse. For years she had
been used to rough men of the camps. These however, were different,
and their jokes and suggestions had no effect because they were
beyond her. And when this became manifest to them that aspect of
their relation to her changed. She grasped the fact intuitively, and
then she verified it by proof. Her heart beat strong and high. If
she could hide her hate, her fear, her abhorrence, she could
influence these wild men. But it all depended upon her charm, her
strangeness, her femininity. Insensibly they had been influenced,
and it proved that in the worst of men there yet survived some good.
Gulden alone presented a contrast and a problem. He appeared aware
of her presence while he sat there eating like a wolf, but it was as
if she were only an object. The man watched as might have an animal.

Her experience at the camp-fire meal inclined her to the belief
that, if there were such a possibility as her being safe at all, it
would be owing to an unconscious and friendly attitude toward the
companions she had been forced to accept. Those men were pleased,
stirred at being in her vicinity. Joan came to a melancholy and
fearful cognizance of her attraction. While at home she seldom had
borne upon her a reality--that she was a woman. Her place, her
person were merely natural. Here it was all different. To these wild
men, developed by loneliness, fierce-blooded, with pulses like
whips, a woman was something that thrilled, charmed, soothed, that