He did not seem to notice this. He had taken his eyes from her at last
and was busy with the fire. She, too, busy and reassured by the
familiar occupation, ceased to watch him. Her pulses were quiet now.
She was even beginning to be glad of his return. Why had she been so
frightened? Of course, after such a terrible journey alone in the
bitter cold, he would look strange. Her father, when he came back
smelling of liquor, had always been more than usually morose and
unlike his every-day self. He would sit over the stove and tell her
the story of his crime. They were horrible home-comings, horrible
evenings, but the next morning they would seem like dreams. To-morrow
this strangeness of Pierre's would be mistlike and unreal.
"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.