“In ha’f-an-hour,” cried James, with a swift return to his harsh command. “Tell the boys to vittle for three days an’ roll a blanket. We’ll need ’em fer sleep. An’, say,” he cried, with sudden threat, “don’t you git around here again till I call you. Get me?”
There was no mistaking his anger at the interruption. There was no mistaking his meaning. The man slunk away. But as James turned back to the woman his previous lightness had gone, and his ill-humor found savage expression.
“There’s someone else needing a lesson besides Conroy,” he snarled.
Jessie shivered.
“He didn’t mean harm,” she protested weakly.
“Harm? Harm? He was staring at you. You ain’t fer sech scum as him to stare at. I’ll have to teach him.”
The man was lashing himself to that merciless fury Jessie had once before witnessed, and now she foolishly strove to appease him. She laughed. It was a forced laugh, but it served her purpose, for the man’s brow cleared instantly, and his thoughts diverted to a full realization of her presence, and all she meant to him.
“You can laugh,” he said, his eyes darkening with sudden lustful passion. “But I can’t have folks––starin’ at you. Say, Jess, you don’t know, you can’t think, how I feel about you. You’re jest mine––mine.” His teeth clipped together with the force of his emotion. The brute in him urged him as madly in his desire as it did in his harsher tempers. “I just don’t care for nothing else but you. An’––I got you now. Here, you haven’t kissed me since I came back. I’d forgot, thinking of that sixty thousand of gold-dust. I’m off again in ha’f-an-hour––an’ I won’t be back for three days. Here––”
His arms were held out and he drew nearer. But now the woman drew back in unmistakable horror.
“Say,” he cried in a voice still passionate, yet half angry, “you don’t need to get away. Ther’s a wall back of you.” Then, as she still shrank back, and he saw the obvious terror in her eyes, his swift-changing mood lost its warmth of passion and left it only angry. “Ther’s three other walls an’ a door to this room, an’ I can easy shut the door.”