CHAPTER IV

FLIGHT

There was a girl named Joan who followed Pierre Landis because he laid
his hand upon her wrist, and there was another Joan who fled up the
mountain-side at sight of him, as though the fire that had once
touched her shoulder had burnt its way into her heart. Then there was
a third Joan, a Joan astray. It was this Joan that had come to Lazy-Y
Ranch and had cooked for and bullied "the outfit"--a Joan of set face
and bitter tongue, whose two years' lonely battle with life had
twisted her youth out of its first comely straightness. In Joan's
brief code of moral law there was one sin--the dealings of a married
woman with another man. When Pierre's living and seeking face looked
up toward her where she stood on the mountain-side above Prosper's
cabin, she felt for the first time that she had sinned, and so, for
the first time, she was a sinner, and the inevitable agony of soul
began.

She fled and hid till dark, then prowled about till she knew that Wen
Ho was alone in the house. She came like a spirit from hell and
questioned him.

"What did the men ask? What did you tell them?"

The men had asked for a lady. He had told them, as Prosper had once
instructed him, that no lady was living there, that the man had just
gone. They had been satisfied and had left. But Joan was still in
terror. Pierre must never find her now. She had accepted the lie of a
stranger, had left her husband for dead, had made no effort to
ascertain the truth, and had "dealings with another man." Joan sat in
judgment and condemned herself to loneliness. She turned herself out
from all her old life as though she had been Cain, and, following Wen
Ho's trail over the mountains, had gone into strange lands to work for
her bread. She called herself "Jane" and her ferocity was the armor
for her beauty. Always she worked in fear of Pierre's arrival, and, as
soon as she had saved money enough for further traveling, she moved
on. She worked by preference on lonely ranches as cook or harvester,
and it was after two years of such life that she had drifted into
Yarnall's kitchen. She was then greatly changed, as a woman who works
to the full stretch of her strength, who suffers privation and
hardship, who gives no thought to her own youth and beauty, and who,
moreover, suffers under a scourge of self-scorn and fear, is bound to
change. Of all the people that had seen her after months of such
living, Jasper Morena was the only one to find h