Her love and Pierre's--her life before Pierre came--to put herself in
Isabella's place, she felt back to the days before her love, when she
had lived in a desolation of bleak poverty, up and away along Lone
River in her father's shack. This log house of Pierre's was a castle
by contrast. John Carver and his daughter had shared one room between
them; Joan's bed curtained off with gunny-sacking in a corner. She
slept on hides and rolled herself up in old dingy patchwork quilts and
worn blankets. On winter mornings she would wake covered with the snow
that had sifted in between the ill-matched logs. There had been a
stove, one leg gone and substituted for by a huge cobblestone; there
had been two chairs, a long box, a table, shelves--all rudely made by
John; there had been guns and traps and snowshoes, hides, skins, the
wings of birds, a couple of fishing-rods--John made his living by
legal and illegal trapping and killing. He had looked like a trapped
or hunted creature himself, small, furtive, very dark, with long
fingers always working over his mouth, a great crooked nose--a hideous
man, surely a hideous father. He hardly ever spoke, but sometimes,
coming home from the town which he visited several times a year, but
to which he had never taken Joan, he would sit down over the stove and
go over heavily, for Joan's benefit, the story of his crime and his
escape.
Joan always told herself that she would not listen, whatever he said
she would stop her ears, but always the story fascinated her, held
her, eyes widened on the figure by the stove. He had sat huddled in
his chair, gnomelike, his face contorting with the emotions of the
story, his own brilliant eyes fixed on the round, red mouth of the
stove. The reflection of this scarlet circle was hideously noticeable
in his pupils.
"A man's a right to kill his woman if she ain't honest with him," so
the story began; "if he finds out she's ben trickin' of him, playin'
him off fer another man. That was yer mother, gel; she was a bad
woman." There followed a coarse and vivid description of her badness
and the manner of it. "That kinder thing no man can let pass by in his
wife. I found her"--again the rude details of his discovery--"an' I
found him, an' I let him go fer the white-livered coward he was, but
her I killed. I shot her dead after she'd said her prayers an' asked
God's mercy on her soul. Then I walked off, but they kotched me an' I
was tried. They didn't swing me. Out in them parts they knowed I was
in my rights; so the boys held, but 'twas a life sentence. They tuk me
by rail down to Dawson an' I give 'em the slip, handcuffs an' all.
Perhaps 'twas only a half-hearted chase they made fer me. Some of them
fellers mebbe had wives of their own." He always stopped to laugh at
this point. "An' I cut off up country till I come to a smithy at the
edge of a town. I hung round fer a spell till the smith hed gone off
an' I got into his place an' rid me of the handcuffs. 'Twas a job, but
I wasn't kotched at it an' I made myself free." Followed the story of
his wanderings and his hardships and his coming to Lone River and
setting out his traps. "In them days there weren't no law ag'in'
trappin' beaver. A man could make a honest livin'. Now they've tuk an'
made laws ag'in' a man's bread an' butter. I ask ye, if 't ain't wrong
on a Tuesday to trap yer beaver, why, 't ain't wrong the follerin'
Tuesday. I don't see it, jes becos some fellers back there has made a
law ag'in' it to suit theirselves. Anyway, the market fer beaver hides
is still prime. Mebbe I'll leave you a fortin, gel. I've saved you
from badness, anyhow. I risked a lot to go back an' git you, but I
done it. You was playin' out in front of yer aunt's house an' I come
fer you. You was a three-year-old an' a big youngster. Says I, 'What's
yer name?' Says you, 'Joan Carver'; an' I knowed you by yer likeness
to her. By God! I swore I'd save ye. I tuk you off with me, though
you put up a fight an' I hed to use you rough to silence you. 'There
ain't a-goin' to be no man in yer life, Joan Carver,' says I; 'you an'
yer big eyes is a-goin' to be fer me, to do my work an' to look after
my comforts. No pretty boys fer you an' no husbands either to go
a-shootin' of you down fer yer sins.'" He shivered and shook his head.
"No, here you stays with yer father an' grows up a good gel. There
ain't a-goin' to be no man in yer life, Joan."