Chapter IV. Jean - Page 2

galloping off down the trail,--but when she was quite out of sight around the bend of the bench-land, she would stop and take the saddle off, and hide it in a certain clump of wild currant bushes, and continue her journey bareback. A kit-fox found it one day; that is how the edge of the cantle came to have that queer, chewed look.

There was an old, black wooden rocker with an oval picture of a ship under full sail, just where Jean's brown head rested when she leaned back and stared big-eyed down the coulee to the hills beyond. There was an old-fashioned work-basket always full of stockings that never were mended, and a crumpled dresser scarf which Jean had begun to hemstitch more than a year ago in a brief spasm of domesticity. There were magazines everywhere; and you may be sure that Jean had read them all, even to the soap advertisements and the sanitary kitchens and the vacuum cleaners. There was an old couch with a coarse, Navajo rug thrown over it, and three or four bright cushions that looked much used. And there were hair macartas and hackamores, and two pairs of her father's old spurs, and her father's stock saddle and chaps and slicker and hat; and a jelly glass half full of rattlesnake rattles, and her mother's old checked sunbonnet,--the kind with pasteboard "slats." Half the "slats" were broken. There was a guitar and an old, old sewing machine with a reloading shotgun outfit spread out upon it. There was a desk made of boxes, and on the desk lay a shot-loaded quirt that more than one rebellious cow-horse knew to its sorrow. There was a rawhide lariat that had parted its strands in a tussle with a stubborn cow. Jean meant to fix the broken end of the longest piece and use it for a tie-rope, some day when she had time, and thought of it.

Somewhere in the desk were verses which Jean had written,--dozens of them, and not nearly as bad as you might think. Jean laughed at them after they were written; but she never burned them, and she never spoke of them to any one but Lite, who listened with fixed attention and a solemn appreciation when she read them to him.

On the whole, the room was contradictory. But Jean herself was somewhat contradictory, and the place fitted her. Here was where she spent those hours when her absence from the Bar Nothing was left unexplained to any one save Lite. Here was where she drew into her shell, when her Uncle Carl made her feel more than usually an interloper; or when her Aunt Ella's burden of complaints and worry and headaches grew just a little too much for Jean.

She never opened the door into the kitchen. There was another just beyond the sewing-machine, that gave an intimate look into the face of the bluff which formed that side of the coulee wall. There were hollyhocks along the path that led to this door, and stunted rosebushes which were kept alive with much mysterious assistance in the way of water and cultivation. There was a little