The Branding Iron Part 3

It was not till a week or two after this second visit from the clergyman that Pierre's smouldering jealousy broke into flame. After clearing away the supper things with an absent air of eager expectation, Joan would dry her hands on her ap.r.o.n, and, taking down one of her books from their place in a shelf corner, she would draw her chair close to the lamp and begin to read, forgetful of Pierre. These had been the happiest hours for him; he would tell Joan about his day's work, about his plans, about his past life; wonderful it was to him, after his loneliness, that she should be sitting there drinking in every word and loving him with her dumb, wild eyes. Now, there was no talk and no listening. Joan's absorbed face was turned from him and bent over her book, her lips moved, she would stop and stare before her. After a long while, he would get up and go to bed, but she would stay with her books till a restless movement from him would make her aware of the lamplight shining wakefulness upon him through the c.h.i.n.ks in the part.i.tion wall. Then she would get up reluctantly, sighing, and come to bed.

For ten evenings this went on, Pierre's heart slowly heating itself, until, all at once, the flame leaped.

Joan had untied her ap.r.o.n and reached up for her book. Pierre had been waiting, hoping that of her free will she might prefer his company to the "parson feller's"--for in his ignorance those books were jealously personified--but, without a glance in his direction, she had turned as usual to the shelf.

"You goin' to read?" asked Pierre hoa.r.s.ely. It was a painful effort to speak.

She turned with a childish look of astonishment. "Yes, Pierre."

He stood up with one of his lithe, swift movements, all in one rippling piece. "By G.o.d, you're not, though!" said he, strode over to her, s.n.a.t.c.hed the volume from her, threw it back into its place, and pointed her to her chair.

"You set down an' give heed to me fer a change, Joan Carver," he said, his smoke-colored eyes smouldering. "I didn't fetch you up here to read parsons' books an' waste oil. I fetched you up here--to--" He stopped, choked with a sudden, enormous hurt tenderness and sat down and fell to smoking and staring, hot-eyed, into the fire.

And Joan sat silent in her place, puzzled, wistful, wounded, her idle hands folded, looking at him for a while, then absently before her, and he knew that her mind was busy again with the preacher feller's books. If he had known better how to explain his heart, if she had known how to show him the impersonal eagerness of her awakening mind--! But, savage and silent, they sat there, loving each other, hurt, but locked each into his own impenetrable life.

After that, Joan changed the hours of her study and neglected housework and sagebrush-grubbing, but, nonetheless, were Pierre's evenings spoiled. Perfection of intercourse is the most perishable of all life's commodities. Now, when he talked, he could not escape the consciousness of having constrained his audience; she could not escape her knowledge of his jealousy, the remembrance of his mysterious outbreak, the irrepressible tug of the story she was reading. So it went on till snow came and they were shut in, man and wife, with only each other to watch, a tremendous test of good-fellowship. This searching intimacy came at a bad time, just after Holliwell's third visit when he had brought a fresh supply of books.

"There's poetry this time," he said. "Get Pierre to read it aloud to you."

The suggestion was met by a rude laugh from Pierre.

"I wouldn't be wastin' my time," he jeered.

It was the first rift in his courtesy. Holliwell looked up in sharp surprise. He saw a flash of the truth, a little wriggle of the green serpent in Pierre's eyes before they fell. He flushed and glanced at Joan. She stood by the table in the circle of lamplight, looking over the new books, but in her eagerness there was less simplicity. She wore an almost timorous air, accepted his remarks in silence, shot doubtful looks at Pierre before she answered questions, was an entirely different Joan. Now Holliwell was angry and he stiffened toward his host and hostess, dropped all his talk about the books and smoked haughtily. He was young and over-sensitive, no more master of himself in this instance than Pierre and Joan. But before he left after supper, refusing a bed, though Pierre conquered his dislike sufficiently to urge it, Holliwell had a moment with Joan. It was very touching. He would tell about it afterwards, but, for a long time, he could not bear to remember it.

She tried to return his books, coming with her arms full of them and lifting up eyes that were almost tragic with renunciation.

"I can't be takin' the time to read them, Mr. Holliwell," she said, that extraordinary, over-expressive voice of hers running an octave of regret; "an' someway Pierre don't like that I should spend my evenin's on them. Seems like he thinks I was settin' myself up to be knowin'

more than him." She laughed ruefully. "Me--knowin' more'n Pierre! It's laughable. But anyways I don't want him to be thinkin' that. So take the books, please. I like them." She paused. "I love them," she said hungrily and, blinking, thrust them into his hands.

He put them down on the table. "You're wrong, Joan," he said quickly.

"You mustn't give in to such a foolish idea. You have rights of your own, a life of your own. Pierre mustn't stand in the way of your learning. You mustn't let him. I'll speak to him."

"Oh, no!" Some intuition warned her of the danger in his doing this.

"Well, then, keep your books and talk to Pierre about them. Try to persuade him to read aloud to you. I shan't be back now till spring, but I want you to read this winter, read all the stuff that's there.

Come, Joan, to please me," and he smiled coaxingly.

"I ain't afeared of Pierre," said Joan slowly. Her pride was stung by the suggestion. "I'll keep the books." She sighed. "Good-bye. When I see you in the spring, I'll be a right learned school-marm."

She held out her hand and he took and held it, pressing it in his own.

He felt troubled about her, unwilling to leave her in the s...o...b..und wilderness with that young savage of the smouldering eyes.

"Good-bye," said Pierre behind him. His soft voice had a click.

Holliwell turned to him. "Good-bye, Landis. I shan't see either of you till the spring. I wish you a good winter and I hope--" He broke off and held out his hand. "Well," said he, "you're pretty far out of every one's way here. Be good to each other."

"d.a.m.n your interference!" said Pierre's eyes, but he took the hand and even escorted Holliwell to his horse.

Snow came early and deep that winter. It fell for long, gray days and nights, and then it came in hurricanes of drift, wrapping the cabin in swirling white till only one window peered out and one gabled corner c.o.c.ked itself above the crust. Pierre had cut and stacked his winter wood; he had sent his cows to a richer man's ranch for winter feeding.

There was very little for him to do. After he had brought in two buckets of water from the well and had cut, for the day's consumption, a piece of meat from his elk hanging outside against the wall, he had only to sit and smoke, to read old magazines and papers, and to watch Joan. Then the poisonous roots of his jealousy struck deep. Always his brain, unaccustomed to physical idleness, was at work, falsely interpreting her wistful silence--she was thinking of the parson, hungry to read his books, longing for the open season and his coming again to the ranch.

In December a man came in on snowshoes bringing "the mail"--one letter for Pierre, a communication which brought heat to his face. The Forest Service threatened him with a loss of land; it pointed to some flaw in his t.i.tle; part of his property, the most valuable part, had not yet been surveyed.... Pierre looked up with set jaws, every fighting instinct sharpened to hold what was his own.

"I hev put in two years' hard work on them acres," he told his visitor, "an' I'm not plannin' to give them over to the first fool favored by the Service. My t.i.tle is as clean as my hand. It'll take more'n thievery an' more'n spite to take it away from me."

"You better go to Robinson," advised the bearer of the letter; "can't get after them fellers too soon. It's a country where you can easy come by what you want, but where it ain't so easy to hold on to it. If it ain't yer land, it's yer hosses; if it ain't yer hosses, it's yer wife." He looked at Joan and laughed.

Pierre went white and dumb; the chance shot had inflamed his wound.

He strapped on his snowshoes and bade a grim good-bye to Joan, after the man had left. "Don't you be wastin' oil while I'm away," he told her sharply, standing in the doorway, his head level with the steep wall of snow behind him, and he gave her a threatening look so that the tenderness in her heart was frozen.

After he had gone, "Pierre, say a real good-bye, say good-bye," she whispered. Her face cramped and tears came.

She heard his steps lightly crunching across the hard, bright surface of the snow, they entered into the terrible frozen silence. Then she turned from the door, dried her eyes with her sleeve like a little village girl, and ran across the room to a certain shelf. Pierre would be gone a week. She would not waste oil, but she would read. It was with the appet.i.te of a starved creature that she fell upon her books.

CHAPTER VI

PIERRE TAKES STEPS TO PRESERVE HIS PROPERTY

A log fell forward and Joan lifted her head. She had not come to an end of Isabella's tragedy nor of her own memories, but something other than the falling log had startled her; a light, crunching step upon the snow.

She looked toward the window. For an instant the room was almost dark and the white night peered in at her, its gigantic snow-peaks pressing against the long, horizontal window panes, and in that instant she saw a face. The fire started up again, the white night dropped away, the face shone close a moment longer, then it too disappeared. Joan came to her feet with pounding pulses. It had been Pierre's face, but at the same time, the face of a stranger. He had come back five days too soon and something terrible had happened. Surely his chancing to see her with her book would not make him look like that. Besides, she was not wasting oil. She had stood up, but at first she was incapable of moving forward. For the first time in her life she knew the paralysis of unreasoning fear. Then the door opened and Pierre came in out of the crystal night.

"What brought you back so soon?" asked Joan.

"Too soon fer you, eh?" He strode over to the hearth where she had lain, took up the book, struck it with his hand as though it had been a hated face, and flung it into the fire. "I seen you through the window," he said. "So you been happy readin' while I been away?"

"I'll get you supper. I'll light the lamp," Joan stammered.

Pierre's face was pale, his black hair lay in wet streaks on his temples. He must have traveled at furious speed through the bitter cold to be in such a sweat. There was a mysterious, controlled disorder in his look and there arose from him the odor of strong drink. But he was steady and sure in all his movements and his eyes were deadly cool and reasonable--only it was the reasonableness of insanity, reasonableness based on the wildest premises of unreason.

"I don't want no supper, nor no light," he said. "Firelight's enough fer you to read parsons' books by, it's enough fer me to do what I oughter done long afore to-night."

She stood in the middle of the small, log-walled room, arrested in the act of lighting a match, and stared at him with troubled eyes. She was no longer afraid. After all, strange as he looked, more strangely as he talked, he was her Pierre, her man. The confidence of her heart had not been seriously shaken by his coldness and his moods during this winter. There had been times of fierce, possessive tenderness. She was his own woman, his property; at this low counting did she rate herself. A sane man does no injury to his own possessions. And Pierre, of course, was sane. He was tired, angry, he had been drinking--her ignorance, her inexperience led her to put little emphasis on the effects of the poison sold at the town saloon. When he was warm and fed and rested, he would be quite himself again. She went about preparing a meal in spite of his words.

He did not seem to notice this. He had taken his eyes from her at last and was busy with the fire. She, too, busy and rea.s.sured by the familiar occupation, ceased to watch him. Her pulses were quiet now.

She was even beginning to be glad of his return. Why had she been so frightened? Of course, after such a terrible journey alone in the bitter cold, he would look strange. Her father, when he came back smelling of liquor, had always been more than usually morose and unlike his every-day self. He would sit over the stove and tell her the story of his crime. They were horrible home-comings, horrible evenings, but the next morning they would seem like dreams. To-morrow this strangeness of Pierre's would be mistlike and unreal.

"I seen your sin-buster in town," said Pierre. He was squatting on his heels over the fire which he had built up to a great blaze and glow and he spoke in a queer sing-song tone through his teeth. "He asked after you real kind. He wanted to know how you was gettin' on with the edication he's ben handin' out to you. I tell him that you was right satisfied with me an' my ways an' hed quit his books. I didn't know as you was hevin' such a good time durin' my absence."

Joan was cruelly hurt. His words seemed to fall heavily upon her heart. "I wasn't hevin' a good time. I was missin' you, Pierre," said she in a low tremolo of grieving music. "Them books, they seemed like they was all the company I hed."

"You looked like you was missin' me," he sneered. "The sin-buster an'