“I’ll not be goin’ back with him,” she said.
Her slow, deep voice, chest notes of a musical vibration, stirred the room. The men were hers and gruffly said so. A sudden warmth enveloped her from heart to foot. She followed Mrs. Upper to the initiation in her service, clothed for the first time in human sympathies.
CHAPTER II
PIERRE LAYS HIS HAND ON A HEART
Maud Upper was the first girl of her own age that Joan had ever seen. Joan went in terror of her and Maud knew this and enjoyed her ascendancy over an untamed creature twice her size. There was the crack of a lion-tamer’s whip in the tone of her instructions. That was after a day or two. At first Maud had been horribly afraid of Joan. “A wild thing like her, livin’ off there in the hills with that man, why, ma, there’s no tellin’ what she might be doin’ to me.”
“She won’t hurt ye,” laughed Mrs. Upper, who had lived in the wilds herself, having been a frontierman’s wife before the days even of this frontier town and having married the hotel-keeper as a second venture. She knew that civilization—this rude place being civilization to Joan—would cow the girl and she knew that Maud’s self-assertive buoyancy would frighten the soul of her. Maud was large-hipped, high-bosomed, with a small, round waist much compressed. She carried her head, with its waved brown hair, very high, and shot blue glances down along a short, broad nose. Her mouth was thin and determined, her color high. She had a curiously shallow, weak voice that sounded breathless. She taught Joan impatiently and laughed loudly but not unkindly at her ways.
“Gee, she’s awkward, ain’t she?” she would say to the men; “trail like a bull moose!”
The men grinned, but their eyes followed Joan’s movements. As a matter of fact, she was not awkward. Through her clumsy clothes, the heaviness of her early youth, in spite of all the fetters of her ignorance, her wonderful long bones and her wonderful strength asserted themselves. And she never hurried. At first this apparent sluggishness infuriated Maud. “Get a gait on ye, Joan Carver!” she would scream above the din of the rough meals, but soon she found that Joan’s slow movements accomplished a tremendous amount of work in an amazingly short time. There was no pause in the girl’s activity. She poured out her strength as a python pours his, noiselessly, evenly, steadily, no haste, no waste. And the men’s eyes brooded upon her.