The Branding Iron

a day or two. At first Maud had been horribly afraid of Joan. "A wild thing like her, livin' off there in the hills with that man, why, ma, there's no tellin' what she might be doin' to me." "She won't hurt ye," laughed Mrs. Upper, who had lived in the wilds herself, having been a frontierman's wife before the days even of this frontier town and having married the hotel- keeper as a second venture. She knew that civilization ? this rude place being civilization to Joan ? would cow the girl and she knew that Maud's self-assertive buoyancy would frighten the soul of her. Maud was large-hipped, high- bosomed, with a small, round waist much compressed. She carried her head, with its waved brown hair, very high, and shot blue glancesdown along a short, broad nose. Her mouth was thin and determined, her color high. She had a curiously shallow, weak voice that sounded breathless. She taught Joan impatiently and laughed loudly but not unkindly at her ways. "Gee, she's awkward, ain't she?" she would say to the men; "trail like a bull moose!" The men grinned, but their eyes followed Joan's movements. As a matter of fact, she was not awkward. Through her clumsy clothes, the heaviness of her early youth, in spite of all the fetters of her ignorance, her wonderful long bones and her wonderful strength asserted themselves. And she never hurried. At first this apparent sluggishness infuriated Maud. "Get a gait on ye, Joan Carver!" she would scream above the din of the rough ...