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Updated: May 14, 2025
June Tolliver and her father lived alone on Piceance Creek. Their nearest neighbor was a trapper on Eighteen-Mile Hill. From one month's end to another she did not see a woman. The still repression in the girl's face was due not wholly to loneliness. She lived on the edge of a secret she intuitively felt was shameful. It colored her thoughts and feelings, set her apart from the rest of the world.
June snatched up the brogan, stooped, and fastened it. Houck, an unwelcome guest, stayed at the cabin on Piceance nearly two weeks. His wooing was surely one of the strangest known. He fleered at June, taunted her, rode over the girl's pride and sense of decorum, beat down the defenses she set up, and filled her bosom with apprehension.
If he let the search party head toward Piceance, there would be no chance for it to save the girl. The man was no coward. To his credit, he told the truth. A half-circle of hostile faces hemmed him in, for the word had spread that this was the man who had carried off June Tolliver. He was the focus of a dozen pairs of eyes.
It had been definitely decided that she was to wait on table at the hotel restaurant and not return with her father to Piceance Creek. The plan had originated with Mollie, but Tolliver had acquiesced in it eagerly.
The girl from Piceance Creek worked hard and was content, even if not quite happy. If she ever thought of the boy she had married, no reference to him ever crossed her lips. She was known simply as June by the town. Strangers called her Miss Tolliver. There was about her a quiet self-possession that discouraged familiarity on the part of ambitious and amorous cowboys.
The Cinderella of Piceance Creek was scrupulously clean even though ragged and unkempt. Every Saturday night she shooed Pete Tolliver out of the house and took a bath in the tub which usually hung suspended from a wooden peg driven into the outer wall of the log cabin. Regularly as Monday came wash day.
The first faint glimmer of gray dawn had begun to lighten the sky when he reached the watershed of Piceance. It had been seventeen hours since he had tasted water and that had been as a chaser after a large drink of whiskey. He was thirsty, and he hastened his pace to reach the creek. Moving down the slope, he pulled up abruptly. He had run into a cavvy grazing on the hill.
She suspected their laughter, their whispers about the wild girl on Piceance Creek. The pride with which she ignored them was stimulated by her sense of inferiority. June had read books. She felt the clothes she made were hideous, the conditions of her existence squalid; and back of these externals was the shame she knew because they must hide themselves from the world on account of the secret.
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