CHAPTER IV.
JEAN
The still loneliness of desertion held fast the clutter of sheds andold stables roofed with dirt and rotting hay. The melancholy ofemptiness hung like an invisible curtain before the sprawling housewith warped, weather-blackened shingles, and sagging window-frames.You felt the silence when first you sighted the ranch buildings fromthe broad mouth of the Lazy A coulee,--the broad mouth that yawnedalways at the narrow valley and the undulations of the open range, andthe purple line of mountains beyond. You felt it more strongly when yourode up to the gate of barbed-wire, spliced here and there, and havingan unexpected stubbornness to harry the patience of men who would passthrough it in haste. You grew unaccountably depressed if you rode onpast the stables and corrals to the house, where the door was closedbut never locked, and opened with a squeal of rusty hinges, if youturned the brown earthenware knob and at the same instant pressedsharply with your knee against the paintless panel.
You might notice the brown spot on the kitchen door where a man haddied; you might notice the brown spot, but unless you had been told thegrim story of the Lazy A, you would never guess the spot was abloodstain. Even though you guessed and shuddered, you would forget itpresently in the amazement with which you opened the door beyond andlooked in upon a room where the chill atmosphere of the whole placecould find no lodgment.
This was Jean's room, held sacred to her own needs and uses, indefiance of the dreariness that compassed it close. A square of oldrag carpet covered the center of the floor, and beyond its border thewarped boards were painted a dull, pale green. The walls were uglywith a cheap, flowered paper that had done its best to fade intoinoffensive neutral tints. Jean had helped, where she could, bycovering the intricate rose pattern with old prints cut from magazinesand with cheap, pretty souvenirs gleaned here and there and hoardedjealously. And there were books, which caught the eyes and held themeven to forgetfulness of the paper.
You would laugh at Jean's room. Just at first you would laugh; afterthat you would want to cry, or pat Jean on her hard-muscled, capableshoulder; but if you knew Jean at all, you would not do either. Firstyou would notice an old wooden cradle, painted blue, that stood in acorner. A button-eyed, blank-faced rag doll, the size of a baby at thefist-sucking age, was tucked neatly under the red-and-white patchworkquilt made to fit the cradle. Hanging directly over the cradle by astirrup was Jean's first saddle,--a cheap pigskin affair with harshstraps and buckles, that her father had sent East for. Jean never hadliked that saddle, even when it was new. She used to stand perfectlystill while her father buckled it on the little buckskin pony she rode;and she would laugh when he picked her up and tossed her into the seat.She would throw her dad a kiss and go galloping off down thetrail,--but when she was quite out of sight around the bend of thebench-land, she would stop and take the saddle off, and hide it in acertain clump of wild currant bushes, and continue her journeybareback. A kit-fox found it one day; that is how the edge of thecantle came to have that queer, chewed look.
There was an old, black wooden rocker with an oval picture of a shipunder full sail, just where Jean's brown head rested when she leanedback and stared big-eyed down the coulee to the hills beyond. Therewas an old-fashioned work-basket always full of stockings that neverwere mended, and a crumpled dresser scarf which Jean had begun tohemstitch more than a year ago in a brief spasm of domesticity. Therewere magazines everywhere; and you may be sure that Jean had read themall, even to the soap advertisements and the sanitary kitchens and thevacuum cleaners. There was an old couch with a coarse, Navajo rugthrown over it, and three or four bright cushions that looked muchused. And there were hair macartas and hackamores, and two pairs ofher father's old spurs, and her father's stock saddle and chaps andslicker and hat; and a jelly glass half full of rattlesnake rattles,and her mother's old checked sunbonnet,--the kind with pasteboard"slats." Half the "slats" were broken. There was a guitar and an old,old sewing machine with a reloading shotgun outfit spread out upon it.There was a desk made of boxes, and on the desk lay a shot-loaded quirtthat more than one rebellious cow-horse knew to its sorrow. There wasa rawhide lariat that had parted its strands in a tussle with astubborn cow. Jean meant to fix the broken end of the longest pieceand use it for a tie-rope, some day when she had time, and thought ofit.
Somewhere in the desk were verses which Jean had written,--dozens ofthem, and not nearly as bad as you might think. Jean laughed at themafter they were written; but she never burned them, and she never spokeof them to any one but Lite, who listened with fixed attention and asolemn appreciation when she read them to him.
On the whole, the room was contradictory. But Jean herself wassomewhat contradictory, and the place fitted her. Here was where shespent those hours when her absence from the Bar Nothing was leftunexplained to any one save Lite. Here was where she drew into hershell, when her Uncle Carl made her feel more than usually aninterloper; or when her Aunt Ella's burden of complaints and worry andheadaches grew just a little too much for Jean.
She never opened the door into the kitchen. There was another justbeyond the sewing-machine, that gave an intimate look into the face ofthe bluff which formed that side of the coulee wall. There werehollyhocks along the path that led to this door, and stunted rosebusheswhich were kept alive with much mysterious assistance in the way ofwater and cultivation. There was a little spring just under the footof the bluff, where the trail began to climb; and some young aldersmade a shady nook there which Jean found pleasant on a hot day.
The rest of the house might be rat-ridden and desolate. The couleemight wear always the look of emptiness; but here, under the bluff bythe spring, and in the room Jean called hers, one felt the air ofoccupancy that gave the lie to all around it.
When she rode around the bold, out-thrust shoulder of the hill whichformed the western rim of the coulee, and went loping up the trail towhere the barbed-wire gate stopped her, you would have said that Jeanhad not a trouble to call her own. She wore her old gray Stetsonpretty well over one eye because of the sun-glare, and she was ridingon one stirrup and letting the other foot swing free, and she waswhirling her quirt round and round, cartwheel fashion, and whistling anair that every one knows,--and putting in certain complicatedvariations of her own.
At the gate she dismounted without ever missing a note, gave the warpedstake a certain twist and jerk which loosened the wire loop so that shecould slip it easily over the post, passed through and dragged the gatewith her, dropping it flat upon the ground beside the trail. There wasno stock anywhere in the coulee, and she would save a little trouble byleaving the gate open until she came out on her way home. She steppedaside to inspect the meadow lark's nest cunningly hidden under a wildrosebush, and then mounted and went on to the stable, still whistlingcarelessly.
She turned Pard into the shed where she invariably left him when shecame to the Lazy A, and went on up the grass-grown path to the house.She had the preoccupied air of one who meditates deeply upon thingsapart; as a matter of fact, she had glanced down the coulee to itswide-open mouth, and had thrilled briefly at the wordless beauty of thegreen spread of the plain and the hazy blue sweep of the mountains, andhad come suddenly into the poetic mood. She had even caught aphrase,--"The lazy line of the watchful hills," it was,--and she wastrying to fit it into a verse, and to find something beside "rills"that would rhyme with "hills."
She followed the path absent-mindedly to where she would have to turnat the corner of the kitchen and go around to the door of her own room;and until she came to the turn she did not realize what was jarringvaguely and yet insistently upon her mood. Then she knew; and shestopped full and stared down at the loose sand just before the warpedkitchen steps. There were footprints in the path,--alien footprints;and they pointed toward that forbidden door into the kitchen ofgruesome memory. Jean looked up frowning, and saw that the door hadbeen opened and closed again carelessly. And upon the top step, strangefeet had pressed a little caked earth carried from the trai
l where shestood. There were the small-heeled, pointed prints of a woman's foot,and there were the larger tracks of a man,--a man of the town.
Jean stood with her quirt dangling loosely from her wrist and glancedback toward the stables and down the coulee. She completely forgotthat she wanted a rhyme for "hills." What were towns people doinghere? And how did they get here? They had not ridden up the coulee;there were no tracks through the gate; and besides, these were not theprints of riding-boots.
She twitched her shoulders and went around to the door leading into herown room. The door stood wide open when it should have been closed.Inside there were evidences of curious inspection. She went hot withan unreasoning anger when she saw the wide-open door into the kitchen;first of all she went over and closed that door, her lips pressedtightly together. To her it was as though some wanton hand had forcedup the lid of a coffin where slept her dead. She stood with her backagainst the door and looked around the room, breathing quickly. Shefelt the woman's foolish amusement at the old cradle with the rag dolltucked under the patchwork quilt, and at her pitiful attempts atadorning the tawdry walls. Without having seen more than the prints ofher shoes in the path, Jean hated the woman who had blundered in hereand had looked and laughed. She hated the man who had come with thewoman.
She went over to her desk and stood staring at the litter. A couple ofsheets of cheap tablet paper, whereon Jean had scribbled some verses ofthe range, lay across the quirt she had forgotten on her last trip.They had prowled among the papers, even! They had respected nothing ofhers, had considered nothing sacred from their inquisitiveness. Jeanpicked up the paper and read the verses through, and her cheeksreddened slowly.
Then she discovered something else that turned them white with freshanger. Jean had an old ledger wherein she kept a sporadic kind of adiary which she had entitled "More or Less the Record of my Sins." Shedid not write anything in it unless she felt like doing so; when shedid, she wrote just exactly what she happened to think and feel at thetime, and she had never gone back and read what was written there. Someone else had read, however; at least the book had been pulled out ofits place and inspected, along with her other personal belongings.Jean had pressed the first wind-flowers of the season between the pageswhere she had done her last scribbling, and these were crumpled and twopetals broken, so she knew that the book had been opened carelessly andperhaps read with that same brainless laughter.
She did not say anything. She straightened the wind-flowers as bestshe could, put the book back where it belonged, and went outside, anddown to a lop-sided shack which might pass anywhere as a junk-shop.She found some nails and a hammer, and after a good deal of rummagingand some sneezing because of the dust she raised whenever she moved apile of rubbish, she found a padlock with a key in it. More dustysearch produced a hasp and some staples, and then she went back andnailed two planks across the door which opened into the kitchen. Afterthat she fastened the windows shut with nails driven into the casingjust above the lower sashes, and cracked the outer door withtwelve-penny nails which she clinched on the inside with vicious blowsof the hammer, so that the hasp could not be taken off without a gooddeal of trouble. She had pulled a great staple off the door of auseless box-stall, and when she had driven it in so deep that she couldscarcely force the padlock into place over the hasp, and had put thekey in her pocket, she felt in a measure protected from futureprowlers. As a final hint, however, she went back to the shop andmixed some paint with lampblack and oil, and lettered a thin boardwhich she afterwards carried up and nailed firmly across the outsidekitchen door. Hammer in hand she backed away and read the wordsjudicially, her head tilted sidewise:
ONLY SNEAKS GO WHERE THEY ARE NOT WANTED. ARE YOU A SNEAK?
The hint was plain enough. She took the hammer back to the shop andled Pard out of the stable and down to the gate, her eyes watchingsuspiciously the trail for tracks of trespassers. She closed the gateso thoroughly with baling wire twisted about a stake that the nextcomer would have troubles of his own in getting it open again. Shemounted and went away down the trail, sitting straight in the saddle,both feet in the stirrups, head up, and hat pulled firmly down to hervery eyebrows, glances going here and there, alert, antagonistic. Nowhistling this time of rag-time tunes with queer little variations ofher own; no twirling of the quirt; instead Pard got the feel of it in atender part of the flank, and went clean over a narrow washout thatcould have been avoided quite easily. No groping for rhythmicphrasings to fit the beauty of the land she lived in; Jean was in themood to combat anything that came in her way.