“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’ I had words about you, Joan. Yes’m, he give me quite a line of preachin’ about you, Joan, as how you hed oughter develop yer own life in yer own way—along the lines laid out by him. I told him as how I knowed best what was right an’ fittin’ fer my own wife; as how, with a mother like your’n you needed watchin’ more’n learnin’; as how you belonged to me an’ not to him. An’, says he, ‘She don’t belong to any man, Pierre Landis,’ he said, ‘neither to you nor to me. She belongs to her own self.’ ‘I’ll see that she belongs to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll fix her so she’ll know it an’ every other feller will.’”
At that he turned from the fire and straightened to his feet.
Joan moved backward slowly to the door. He had made no threatening sign or movement, but her fear had come overwhelmingly upon her and every instinct urged her to flight. But before she touched the handle of the door, he flung himself with deadly, swift force and silence across the room and took her in his arms. With all her wonderful young strength, Joan could not break away from him. He dragged her back to the hearth, tied her elbows behind her with the scarf from his neck, that very scarf he had worn when the dawn had shed a wistful beauty upon him, waiting for her on a morning not so very long ago. Joan went weak.
“Pierre,” she cried pitifully, “what are you a-goin’ to do to me?”
He roped her to the heavy post of a set of shelves built against the wall. Then he stood away, breathing fast.
“Now whose gel are you, Joan Carver?” he asked her.
“You know I’m yours, Pierre,” she sobbed. “You got no need to tie me to make me say that.”
“I got to tie you to make you do more’n say it. I got to make sure you are it. Hell-fire won’t take the sureness out of me after this.”