“Please don’t try any more,” he said.
She looked at him, still smiling. She gazed off through the forest, where the men were going home, shovels shouldered, the blades of axe and spade blood-red in the sunset light.
How long they stood there she scarcely reckoned, until a clear primrose light crept in among the trees, and the evening mist rose from an unseen pond, floating through the dimmed avenues of pines.
“Good-night,” she said, gathered bridle, hesitated, then held out her ungloved hand.
Galloping homeward, the quick pressure of his hand still burning her palm, she swept along in a maze of disordered thought. And being by circumstances, though not by inclination, an orderly young woman, she attempted a mental reorganization. This she completed as she wheeled her mare into the main forest road; and, her happy, disordered thoughts rearranged with a layer of cold logic to quiet them, reaction came swiftly; her cheeks burned when she remembered her own attitude of half-accepted intimacy with this stranger. How did he regard her? How cheaply did he already hold her—this young man idling here in the forest for his own pleasure?
But she had something more important on hand than the pleasures of remorseful cogitation as she rode up to the store and drew bridle, where in their shirt-sleeves the prominent citizens were gathered. She began to speak immediately. She did not mince matters; she enumerated them by name, dwelt coldly upon the law governing arson, and told them exactly where they stood.
She was, by courtesy of long residence, one of them. She taught their children, she gave them pills and powders, she had stood by them even when they had the law against them—stood by them loyally and in the very presence of Grier, fencing with him at every move, combating his brutality with deadly intelligence.
They collapsed under her superior knowledge; they trusted her, fawned on her, whined when she rebuked them, carried themselves more decently for a day or two when she dropped a rare word of commendation. They respected her in spite of the latent ruffianly instinct which sneers at women; they feared her as a parish fears its priest; they loved her as they loved one another—which was rather toleration than affection; the toleration of half-starved bob-cats.
And now the school-marm had turned on them—turned on them with undisguised contempt. Never before had she betrayed contempt for them. She spoke of cowardice, too. That bewildered them. Nobody had ever suggested that.
She spoke of the shame of jail; they had heretofore been rather proud of it—all this seated there in the saddle, the light from the store lamp shining full in her face; and they huddled there on the veranda, gaping at her, stupefied.