The Branding Iron - Page 84/142

There was a girl named Joan who followed Pierre Landis because he laid

his hand upon her wrist, and there was another Joan who fled up the

mountain-side at sight of him, as though the fire that had once

touched her shoulder had burnt its way into her heart. Then there was

a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y

Ranch and had cooked for and bullied "the outfit"--a Joan of set face

and bitter tongue, whose two years' lonely battle with life had

twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan's

brief code of moral law there was one sin--the dealings of a married

woman with another man. When Pierre's living and seeking face looked

up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper's

cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and so, for

the first time, she was a sinner, and the inevitable agony of soul

began.

She fled and hid till dark, then prowled about till she knew that Wen

Ho was alone in the house. She came like a spirit from hell and

questioned him.

"What did the men ask? What did you tell them?"

The men had asked for a lady. He had told them, as Prosper had once

instructed him, that no lady was living there, that the man had just

gone. They had been satisfied and had left. But Joan was still in

terror. Pierre must never find her now. She had accepted the lie of a

stranger, had left her husband for dead, had made no effort to

ascertain the truth, and had "dealings with another man." Joan sat in

judgment and condemned herself to loneliness. She turned herself out

from all her old life as though she had been Cain, and, following Wen

Ho's trail over the mountains, had gone into strange lands to work for

her bread. She called herself "Jane" and her ferocity was the armor

for her beauty. Always she worked in fear of Pierre's arrival, and, as

soon as she had saved money enough for further traveling, she moved

on. She worked by preference on lonely ranches as cook or harvester,

and it was after two years of such life that she had drifted into

Yarnall's kitchen. She was then greatly changed, as a woman who works

to the full stretch of her strength, who suffers privation and

hardship, who gives no thought to her own youth and beauty, and who,

moreover, suffers under a scourge of self-scorn and fear, is bound to

change. Of all the people that had seen her after months of such

living, Jasper Morena was the only one to find her beautiful. But with

his sensitive observation he had seen through the shell to the

sweetness underneath; for surely Joan was sweet, a Friday's child. It

was good that Jasper had torn the skin from her wound, good that he

had broken up the hardness of her heart. She left him and Yarnall that

afternoon and went away to her cabin in the trees and lay face down on

the bare boards of the floor and was young again. Waves of longing for

love and beauty and adventure flooded her. For a while she had been

very beautiful and had been very passionately loved; for a while she

had been surrounded by beauty and taught its meanings. She had fled

from it all. She hated it, yes, but she longed for it with every fiber

of her being. The last two years were scalded away. She was Joan, who

had loved Pierre; Joan, whom Prosper Gael had loved.