The Branding Iron. Katharine Newlin Burt
town; there were celebrations and her house was full; she needed extra hands, but where this wild creature was concerned she was doubtful.
“Joan. I’m John Carver’s daughter,” answered the girl.
At once comprehension dawned; heads were nodded, then craned for a better look. Yes, the town, the whole country even, had heard of John Carver’s imprisoned daughter. Sober and drunk, he had boasted of her and of how there was to be “no man” in her life. It was like dangling ripe fruit above the mouths of hungry boys to make such a boast in such a land. But they were lazy. It was a country of lazy, slow-thinking, slow-moving, and slow-talking adventurers—you will notice this ponderous, inevitable quality of rolling stones—and though men talked with humor not too fine of “travelin’ up Lone River for John’s gel,” not a man had got there. Perhaps the men knew John Carver for a coward, that most dangerous animal to meet in his own lair.
Now here stood the “gel,” the mysterious secret goal of desire, a splendid creature, virginal, savage, as certainly designed for man as Eve. The men’s eyes fastened upon her, moved and dropped.
“Your father sent you down here fer a job?” asked Mrs. Upper incredulously.
“No. I come.” Joan’s grave gaze was unchanging. “I’m tired of it up there. I ain’t a-goin’ back. I’m most eighteen now an’ I kinder want a change.”
She had not meant to be funny, but a gust of laughter rattled the room. She shrank back. It was more terrifying to her than any cruelty she had fancied meeting her in the town. These were the men her father had forbidden, these loud-laughing, crinkled faces. She had turned to brave them, a great surge of color in her brows.
“Don’t mind the boys, dear,” spoke Mrs. Upper. “They will laff, joke or none. We ain’t none of us blamin’ you. It’s a wonder you ain’t run off long afore now. I can give you a job an’ welcome, but you’ll be green an’ unhandy. Well, sir, we kin learn ye. You kin turn yer hand to chamber-work an’ mebbe help at the table. Maud will show you. But, Joan, what will dad do to you? He’ll be takin’ after you hot-foot, I reckon, an’ be fer gettin’ you back home as soon as he can.”
Joan did not change her look.
“I’ll not be goin’ back with him,” she said.
Her slow, deep voice, chest notes of a musical vibration, stirred the room. The men were hers and gruffly said so. A sudden warmth enveloped her from heart to foot. She followed Mrs. Upper to the initiation in her service, clothed for the first time in human sympathies.
CHAPTER II
PIERRE LAYS HIS HAND ON A HEART
Maud Upper was the first girl of her own age that Joan had ever seen. Joan went in terror of her and Maud knew this and enjoyed her ascendancy over an untamed creature twice her size. There was the crack of a lion-tamer’s whip in the tone of her instructions. That was after a day or two. At first Maud had been horribly afraid of Joan. “A wild thing like her, livin’ off there in the hills with that man, why, ma, there’s no tellin’ what she might be doin’ to me.”
“She won’t hurt ye,” laughed Mrs. Upper, who had lived in the wilds herself, having been a frontierman’s wife before the days even of this frontier town and having married the hotel-keeper as a second venture. She knew that civilization—this rude place being civilization to Joan—would cow the girl and she knew that Maud’s self-assertive buoyancy would frighten the soul of her. Maud was large-hipped, high-bosomed, with a small, round waist much compressed. She carried her head, with its waved brown hair, very high, and shot blue glances down along a short, broad nose. Her mouth was thin and determined, her color high. She had a curiously shallow, weak voice that sounded breathless. She taught Joan impatiently and laughed loudly but not unkindly at her ways.
“Gee, she’s awkward, ain’t she?” she would say to the men; “trail like a bull moose!”
The men grinned, but their eyes followed Joan’s movements. As a matter of fact, she was not awkward. Through her clumsy clothes, the heaviness of her early youth, in spite of all the fetters of her ignorance, her wonderful long bones and her wonderful strength asserted themselves. And she never hurried. At first this apparent sluggishness infuriated Maud. “Get a gait on ye, Joan Carver!” she would scream above the din of the rough meals, but soon she found that Joan’s slow movements accomplished a tremendous amount of work in an amazingly short time. There was no pause in the girl’s activity. She poured out her strength as a python pours his, noiselessly, evenly, steadily, no haste, no waste. And the men’s eyes brooded upon her.
If Joan had stayed long at Mrs. Upper’s, she would have begun inevitably to model herself on Maud, who was, in her eyes, a marvelous thing of beauty. But, just a week after her arrival, there came to the inn Pierre Landis and for Joan began the strange and terrible history of love.
In the lives of most women, of the vast majority, the clatter and clash of housewifery prelude and postlude the spring song of their years. And the rattle of dishes, of busy knives and forks, the quick tapping of Maud’s attendant feet, the sound of young and ravenous jaws at work: these sounds were in Joan’s bewildered ears, and the sights which they accompanied in her bewildered eyes, just before she heard Pierre’s voice, just before she saw his face.
It was dinner hour at the hotel, an hour most dreadful to Joan because of the hurry, the strangeness, and the crowd, because of the responsibility of her work, but chiefly because at that hour she expected the appearance of her father. Her eyes were often on the door. It opened to admit the young men, the riders and ranchers who hung up their hats, swaggered with a little jingle of spurs to their chairs; clean-faced, clean-handed, wet-haired, murmuring low-voiced courtesies—“Pass me the gravy, please,” “I wouldn’t be carin’ fer any, thank you,”—and lifting to the faces of waiting girls now and again their strange, young, brooding eyes, bold, laughing, and afraid, hungry, pathetic, arrogant, as the eyes of young men are, tameless and untamable, but full of the pathos of the untamed. Joan’s heart shook a little under their looks, but when Pierre lifted his eyes to her, her heart stood still. She had not seen them following her progress around the room. He had come in late, and finding no place at the long, central table sat apart at a smaller one under a high, uncurtained window. By the time she met his eyes they were charged with light; smoky-blue eyes they were, the iris heavily ringed with black, the pupils dilated a little. For the first time it occurred to Joan, looking down with a still heart into his eyes, that a man might be beautiful. The blood came up from her heart to her face. Her eyes struggled away from his.
“What’s yer name, gel?” murmured Pierre.
“Joan Carver.”
“You run away from home?” He too had heard of her.
“Yes.”
“Will your father be takin’ you back?”
“I won’t be goin’ with him.”
She was about to pass on. Pierre cast a swift look about the table—bent heads and busy hands, eyes cast down, ears, he knew, alert. It was a land of few women and of many men. He must leave in the morning early and for months he would not be back. He put out a long, hard hand, caught Joan’s wrist and gave it a queer, urgent shake, the gesture of an impatient and beseeching child.
“Will you be comin’ home with me, gel?” asked Pierre hurriedly.
She looked at him, her lips apart, and she shook her head.
Maud’s voice screamed at her from the kitchen door. Pierre let her go. She went on, very white.
She did not