第91章 CHAPTER XIV(2)

That angered the man. With one long stride he stepped over the doorsill, down into the cabin, and flung the blankets at her feet and then the pack after it. Whereupon he deliberately sat down in the door, facing her.

With one hand he slid off his sombrero, which fell outside, and with the other he reached in his upper vest pocket for the little bag of tobacco that showed there. All the time he looked at her. By the light now unobstructed Jean descried Colter's face; and sight of it then sounded the roll and drum of his passions.

"Wal, Ellen, I reckon we'll have it out right now an' heah," he said, and with tobacco in one hand, paper in the other he began the operations of making a cigarette. However, he scarcely removed his glance from her.

"Yes?" queried Ellen Jorth.

"I'm goin' to have things the way they were before--an' more," he declared. The cigarette paper shook in his fingers.

"What do y'u mean?" she demanded.

"Y'u know what I mean," he retorted. Voice and action were subtly unhinging this man's control over himself.

"Maybe I don't. I reckon y'u'd better talk plain."

The rustler had clear gray-yellow eyes, flawless, like, crystal, and suddenly they danced with little fiery flecks.

"The last time I laid my hand on y'u I got hit for my pains.

An' shore that's been ranklin'."

"Colter, y'u'll get hit again if y'u. put your hands on me," she said, dark, straight glance on him. A frown wrinkled the level brows.

"Y'u mean that?" he asked, thickly.

"I shore, do."

Manifestly he accepted her assertion. Something of incredulity and bewilderment, that had vied with his resentment, utterly disappeared from his face.

"Heah I've been waitin' for y'u to love me," he declared, with a gesture not without dignified emotion. "Your givin' in without that wasn't so much to me."

And at these words of the rustler's Jean Isbel felt an icy, sickening shudder creep into his soul. He shut his eyes. The end of his dream had been long in coming, but at last it had arrived. A mocking voice, like a hollow wind, echoed through that region--that lonely and ghost-like hall of his heart which had harbored faith.

She burst into speech, louder and sharper, the first words of which Jean's strangely throbbing ears did not distinguish.

"-- -- you! . . . I never gave in to y'u an' I never will."

"But, girl--I kissed y'u--hugged y'u--handled y'u--" he expostulated, and the making of the cigarette ceased.

"Yes, y'u did--y'u brute--when I was so downhearted and weak I couldn't lift my hand," she flashed.

"Ahuh! Y'u mean I couldn't do that now?"

"I should smile I do, Jim Colter!" she replied.

"Wal, mebbe--I'll see--presently," he went on, straining with words.

"But I'm shore curious. . . . Daggs, then--he was nothin' to y'u?"

"No more than y'u," she said, morbidly. "He used to run after me--long ago, it seems. . . . . I was only a girl then--innocent--an' I'd not known any but rough men. I couldn't all the time--every day, every hour--keep him at arm's length. Sometimes before I knew--I didn't care.

I was a child. A kiss meant nothing to me. But after I knew--"

Ellen dropped her head in brooding silence.

"Say, do y'u expect me to believe that?" he queried, with a derisive leer.

"Bah! What do I care what y'u believe?" she cried, with lifting head.

"How aboot Simm Brace?"

"That coyote! . . . He lied aboot me, Jim Colter. And any man half a man would have known he lied."

"Wal, Simm. always bragged aboot y'u bein' his girl," asserted Colter.

"An' he wasn't over--particular aboot details of your love-makin'."

Ellen gazed out of the door, over Colter's head, as if the forest out there was a refuge. She evidently sensed more about the man than appeared in his slow talk, in his slouching position. Her lips shut in a firm line, as if to hide their trembling and to still her passionate tongue. Jean, in his absorption, magnified his perceptions.

Not yet was Ellen Jorth afraid of this man, but she feared the situation.

Jean's heart was at bursting pitch. All within him seemed chaos--a wreck of beliefs and convictions. Nothing was true. He would wake presently out of a nightmare. Yet, as surely as he quivered there, he felt the imminence of a great moment--a lightning flash--a thunderbolt--a balance struck.

Colter attended to the forgotten cigarette. He rolled it, lighted it, all the time with lowered, pondering head, and when he had puffed a cloud of smoke he suddenly looked up with face as hard as flint, eyes as fiery as molten steel.

"Wal, Ellen--how aboot Jean Isbel--our half-breed Nez Perce friend--who was shore seen handlin' y'u familiar?" he drawled.

Ellen Jorth quivered as under a lash, and her brown face turned a dusty scarlet, that slowly receding left her pale.

"Damn y'u, Jim Colter!" she burst out, furiously. "I wish Jean Isbel would jump in that door--or down out of that loft! . . . He killed Greaves for defiling my name! . . . He'd kill Y'U for your dirty insult.

. . . And I'd like to watch him do it. . . . Y'u cold-blooded Texan!

Y'u thieving rustler! Y'u liar! . . . Y'u lied aboot my father's death.

And I know why. Y'u stole my father's gold. . . . An' now y'u want me--y'u expect me to fall into your arms. . . . My Heaven! cain't y'u tell a decent woman? Was your mother decent? Was your sister decent?

. . . Bah! I'm appealing to deafness. But y'u'll HEAH this, Jim Colter!

. . . I'm not what yu think I am! I'm not the--the damned hussy y'u liars have made me out. . . . I'm a Jorth, alas! I've no home, no relatives, no friends! I've been forced to live my life with rustlers --vile men like y'u an' Daggs an' the rest of your like. . . . But I've been good! Do y'u heah that? . . . I AM good--so help me God, y'u an' all your rottenness cain't make me bad!"

Colter lounged to his tall height and the laxity of the man vanished.

Vanished also was Jean Isbel's suspended icy dread, the cold clogging of his fevered mind--vanished in a white, living, leaping flame.