The still loneliness of desertion held fast the clutter of sheds and old stables roofed with dirt and rotting hay.The melancholy of emptiness hung like an invisible curtain before the sprawling house with warped,weather-blackened shingles,and sagging window-frames.You felt the silence when first you sighted the ranch buildings from the broad mouth of the Lazy A coulee,--the broad mouth that yawned always at the narrow valley and the undulations of the open range,and the purple line of mountains beyond.
You felt it more strongly when you rode up to the gate of barbed-wire,spliced here and there,and having an unexpected stubbornness to harry the patience of men who would pass through it in haste.You grew unaccountably depressed if you rode on past the stables and corrals to the house,where the door was closed but never locked,and opened with a squeal of rusty hinges,if you turned the brown earthenware knob and at the same instant pressed sharply with your knee against the paintless panel.
You might notice the brown spot on the kitchen door where a man had died;you might notice the brown spot,but unless you had been told the grim story of the Lazy A,you would never guess the spot was a bloodstain.Even though you guessed and shuddered,you would forget it presently in the amazement with which you opened the door beyond and looked in upon a room where the chill atmosphere of the whole place could find no lodgment.
This was Jean's room,held sacred to her own needs and uses,in defiance of the dreariness that compassed it close.A square of old rag carpet covered the center of the floor,and beyond its border the warped boards were painted a dull,pale green.The walls were ugly with a cheap,flowered paper that had done its best to fade into inoffensive neutral tints.Jean had helped,where she could,by covering the intricate rose pattern with old prints cut from magazines and with cheap,pretty souvenirs gleaned here and there and hoarded jealously.And there were books,which caught the eyes and held them even to forgetfulness of the paper.
You would laugh at Jean's room.Just at first you would laugh;after that you would want to cry,or pat Jean on her hard-muscled,capable shoulder;but if you knew Jean at all,you would not do either.First you would notice an old wooden cradle,painted blue,that stood in a corner.A button-eyed,blank-faced rag doll,the size of a baby at the fist-sucking age,was tucked neatly under the red-and-white patchwork quilt made to fit the cradle.Hanging directly over the cradle by a stirrup was Jean's first saddle,--a cheap pigskin affair with harsh straps and buckles,that her father had sent East for.Jean never had liked that saddle,even when it was new.She used to stand perfectly still while her father buckled it on the little buckskin pony she rode;and she would laugh when he picked her up and tossed her into the seat.She would throw her dad a kiss and go 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 spring just under the foot of the bluff,where the trail began to climb;and some young alders made a shady nook there which Jean found pleasant on a hot day.
