The Branding Iron. Katharine Newlin Burt
still without word or caress, he strode out and did not come back till dark. Joan suffered heartache and terror. When he came, she ran into his arms. He kissed her, seemed quite himself again, and the strange interview was never mentioned by either of them. They were silent people, given to feelings and to action rather than to thoughts and words.
The other memory was of a certain sunset hour when she came at Pierre’s call out to the shed he had built at one side of their cabin. Its open side faced the west, and, as Joan came, her shadow went before her and fell across Pierre at work. The flame of the west gave a weird pallor to the flames over which he bent. He was whistling, and hammering at a long piece of iron. Joan came and stood beside him.
Suddenly he straightened up and held in the air a bar of metal, the shaped end white hot. Joan blinked.
“That’s our brand, gel,” said Pierre. “Don’t you fergit it. When I’ve made my fortune there’ll be stock all over the country marked with them two bars. That’ll be famous—the Two-Bar Brand. Don’t you fergit it, Joan.”
And he brought the white iron close so that she felt its heat on her face and drew back, flinching. He laughed, let it fall, and kissed her. Joan was very glad and proud.
CHAPTER IV
THE SIN-BUSTER
In the fall, when the whole country had turned to a great cup of gold, purple-rimmed under the sky, Pierre went out into the hills after his winter meat. Joan was left alone. She spent her time cleaning and arranging the two-room cabin, and tidying up outdoors, and in “grubbing sagebrush,” a gigantic task, for the one hundred and fifty acres of Pierre’s homestead were covered for the most part by the sturdy, spicy growth, and every bush had to be dug out and burnt to clear the way for ploughing and planting. Joan worked with the deliberateness and intentness of a man. She enjoyed the wholesome drudgery. She was proud every sundown of the little clearing she had made, and stood, tired and content, to watch the piled brush burn, sending up aromatic smoke and curious, dull flames very high into the still air.
She was so standing, hands folded on her rake, when, on the other side of her conflagration, she perceived a man. He was steadily regarding her, and when her eyes fell upon him, he smiled and stepped forward—a tall, broad, very fair young man in a shooting coat, khaki riding-breeches, and puttees. He had a wide brow, clear, blue eyes and an eager, sensitive, clean-shaven mouth and chin. He held out a big white hand.
“Mrs. Landis,” he said, in a crisp voice of an accent and finish strange to the girl “I wonder if you and your husband can put me up for the night. I’m Frank Holliwell. I’m on a round of parish visits, and, as my parish is about sixty miles square, my poor old pony has gone lame. I know you are not my parishioners, though, no doubt, you should be, but I’m going to lay claim to your hospitality, for all that, if I may?”
Joan had moved her rake into the grasp of her left hand and had taken the proffered palm into her other, all warm and fragrantly stained.
“You’re the new sin-buster, ain’t you?” she asked gravely.
The young man opened his blue and friendly eyes.
“Oh, that’s what I am, eh? That’s a new one to me. Yes. I suppose I am. It’s rather a fine name to go by—sin-buster,” and he laughed very low and very amusedly.
Joan looked him over and slowly smiled. “You look like you could bust anything you’d a mind to,” she said, and led the way toward the house, her rake across her shoulder.
“Pierre,” she told him when they were in the shining, clean log house, “is off in the hills after his elk, but I can make you up a bed in the settin’-room an’ serve you a supper an’ welcome.”
“Oh, thanks,” he rather doubtfully accepted.
Evidently he did not know the ways and proprieties of this new “parish” of his. But Joan seemed to take the situation with an enormous calm impersonality. He modeled his manner upon hers. They sat at the table together, Joan silent, save when he forced her to speak, and entirely untroubled by her silence, Frank Holliwell eating heartily, helping her serve, and talking a great deal. He asked her a great many questions, which she answered with direct simplicity. By the end of dish-washing, he had her history and more of her opinions, probably, than any other creature she had met.
“What do you do when Landis is away?”
She told him.
“But, in the evenings, I mean, after work. Have you books?”
“No,” said Joan; “it’s right hard labor, readin’. Pa learned me my letters an’ I can spell out bits from papers an’ advertisements an’ what not, but I ain’t never read a book straight out. I dunno,” she added presently, “but as I’d like to. Pierre can read,” she told him proudly.
“I’m sure you’d like to.” He considered her through the smoke of his pipe. He was sitting by the hearth now, and she, just through with clearing up, stood by the corner of the mantel shelf, arranging the logs. The firelight danced over her face, so beautiful, so unlighted from within.
“How old are you, Joan Landis?” he asked suddenly, using her name without title for the first time.
“Eighteen.”
“Is that all? You must read books, you know. There’s so much empty space there back of your brows.”
She looked up smiling a little, her wide gray eyes puzzled.
“Yes, Joan. You must read. Will you—if I lend you some books?”
She considered. “Yes,” she said. “I’d read them if you’d be lendin’ me some. In the evenings when Pierre’s away, I’m right lonesome. I never was lonesome before, not to know it. It’ll take me a long time to read one book, though,” she added with an engaging mournfulness.
“What do you like—stories, poetry, magazines?”
“I’d like real books in stiff covers,” said Joan, “an’ I don’t like pictures.”
This surprised the clergyman. “Why not?” said he.
“I like to notion how the folks look myself. I like pictures of real places, that has got to be like they are”—Joan was talking a great deal and having trouble with her few simple words—“but I like folks in stories to look like I want ’em to look.”
“Not the way the writer describes them?”
“Yes, sir. But you can make up a whole lot on what the writer describes. If he says ‘her eyes is blue’; you can see ’em dark blue or light blue or jest blue. An’ you can see ’em shaped round or what not, the way you think about folks that you’ve heard of an’ have never met.”
It was extraordinary how this effort at self-expression excited Joan. She was rarely self-conscious, but she was usually passive or stolid; now there was a brilliant flush in her face and her large eyes deepened and glowed. “I heerd tell of you, Mr. Holliwell. Fellers come up here to see Pierre once in a while an’ one or two of ’em spoke your name. An’ I kinder figured out you was a weedy feller, awful solemn-like, an’ of course you ain’t, but it’s real hard for me to notion that there ain’t two Mr. Holliwells, you an’ the weedy sin-buster I’ve ben picturin’. Like as not I’ll get to thinkin’ of you like two fellers.” Joan sighed. “Seems like when I onct get a notion in my head it jest sticks there some way.”
“Then the more wise notions you get the better. I’ll ride up here in a couple of weeks’ time with some books.