"Me--stay heah with y'u--alone!"
The tone seemed a contradiction to the apparently accepted sense of her words. Jean held his breath. But he could not still the slowly mounting and accelerating faculties within that were involuntarily rising to meet some strange, nameless import. He felt it. He imagined it would be the catastrophe of Ellen Jorth's calm acceptance of Colter's proposition. But down in Jean's miserable heart lived something that would not die. No mere words could kill it. How poignant that moment of her silence! How terribly he realized that if his intelligence and his emotion had believed her betraying words, his soul had not!
But Ellen Jorth did not speak. Her brown head hung thoughtfully. Her supple shoulders sagged a little.
"Ellen, what's happened to y'u?" went on Colter.
"All the misery possible to a woman," she replied, dejectedly.
"Shore I don't mean that way," he continued, persuasively. "I ain't gainsayin' the hard facts of your life. It's been bad. Your dad was no good.... But I mean I can't figger the change in y'u."
"No, I reckon y'u cain't," she said. "Whoever was responsible for your make-up left out a mind--not to say feeling."
Colter drawled a low laugh.
"Wal, have that your own way. But how much longer are yu goin' to be like this heah?"
"Like what?" she rejoined, sharply.
"Wal, this stand-offishness of yours?"
"Colter, I told y'u to let me alone," she said, sullenly.
"Shore. An' y'u did that before. But this time y'u're different.... An' wal, I'm gettin' tired of it."
Here the cool, slow voice of the Texan sounded an inflexibility before absent, a timber that hinted of illimitable power.
Ellen Jorth shrugged her lithe shoulders and, slowly rising, she picked up the little rifle and turned to step into the cabin.
"Colter," she said, "fetch my pack an' my blankets in heah."
"Shore," he returned, with good nature.
Jean saw Ellen Jorth lay the rifle lengthwise in a chink between two logs and then slowly turn, back to the wall. Jean knew her then, yet did not know her. The brown flash of her face seemed that of an older, graver woman. His strained gaze, like his waiting mind, had expected something, he knew not what--a hardened face, a ghost of beauty, a recklessness, a distorted, bitter, lost expression in keeping with her fortunes. But he had reckoned falsely. She did not look like that. There was incalculable change, but the beauty remained, somehow different. Her red lips were parted. Her brooding eyes, looking out straight from under the level, dark brows, seemed sloe black and wonderful with their steady, passionate light.