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 title; 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 title 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 appetite of a starved creature that she fell upon her books.