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"Dad Jorth is comin'," said Jean, huskily. How he hated to be forced to tell his father that! The boyish love of old had flashed up. "Whar?" demanded the old man, his eagle gaze sweeping the horizon. "Down the road from Grass Valley. You can't see from here." "Wal, come in an' let's get ready." Isbel's house had not been constructed with the idea of repelling an attack from a band of Apaches.
He said he was sittin' there in the dark, shootin' occasionally at Isbel's cabin, when he heerd a rustle behind him in the grass. He knowed some one was crawlin' on him. But before he could get his gun around he was jumped by what he thought was a grizzly bear. But it was a man. He shut off Greaves's wind an' dragged him back in the ditch. An' he said: 'Greaves, it's the half-breed.
"Shore thet's natural," replied the rider. His speech was slow, and the motions of his long, brown hands, as he took a cigarette from his vest, kept time with his words. "But seein' you're one of the Isbels, I'll hev my say whether you want it or not. My name's Colter an' I'm one of the sheepmen Gass Isbel's riled with." "Colter. Glad to meet you," replied Jean.
Then, as the silent, tense, grim men mounted their horses, Bill Isbel's eldest child, the boy, appeared in the door. His little form seemed instinct with a force vastly different from grief. His face was the face of an Isbel. "Daddy kill 'em all!" he shouted, with a passion all the fiercer for its incongruity to the treble voice. So the poison had spread from father to son.
Then hard and violent on her mouth and cheek and neck burned those other kisses of Isbel's, and with the flashing, stinging memory came the truth that now she would have bartered her soul for them. Utterly she surrendered to the resistlessness of this love.
Something young and sweet and hopeful that had been in her did not greet the sun this morning. In their place was a woman's passion to learn for herself, to watch events, to meet what must come, to survive. After breakfast, at which she sat alone, she decided to put Isbel's package out of the way, so that it would not be subjecting her to continual annoyance.
This peculiarity of Isbel's began to be related in my mind to his wastefulness as a cook. He cooked and threw away as much as we ate. I asked him to be careful and to go easy with our supplies, but I could not see that my request made any difference. After supper this evening R.C. heard a turkey call up on the hill east of camp. Then I heard it, and Romer also.
And her face, her body, her hands, locked with the supreme fortitude of pride and sustained by hate, gave no betrayal of the crashing, thundering ruin within her mind and soul. Motionless she leaned there, meeting the piercing fire of Isbel's eyes, seeing in them a righteous and terrible scorn. In one flash the naked truth seemed blazed at her. The faith she had fostered died a sudden death.
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