ouple of
sheets of cheap tablet paper, whereon Jean had scribbled some verses of
the range, lay across the quirt she had forgotten on her last trip.
They had prowled among the papers, even! They had respected nothing of
hers, had considered nothing sacred from their inquisitiveness. Jean
picked up the paper and read the verses through, and her cheeks
reddened slowly.

Then she discovered something else that turned them white with fresh
anger. Jean had an old ledger wherein she kept a sporadic kind of a
diary which she had entitled "More or Less the Record of my Sins." She
did not write anything in it unless she felt like doing so; when she
did, she wrote just exactly what she happened to think and feel at the
time, and she had never gone back and read what was written there. Some
one else had read, however; at least the book had been pulled out of
its place and inspected, along with her other personal belongings.
Jean had pressed the first wind-flowers of the season between the pages
where she had done her last scribbling, and these were crumpled and two
petals broken, so she knew that the book had been opened carelessly and
perhaps read with that same brainless laughter.

She did not say anything. She straightened the wind-flowers as best
she could, put the book back where it belonged, and went outside, and
down to a lop-sided shack which might pass anywhere as a junk-shop.
She found some nails and a hammer, and after a good deal of rummaging
and some sneezing because of the dust she raised whenever she moved a
pile of rubbish, she found a padlock with a key in it. More dusty
search produced a hasp and some staples, and then she went back and
nailed two planks across the door which opened into the kitchen. After
that she fastened the windows shut with nails driven into the casing
just above the lower sashes, and cracked the outer door with
twelve-penny nails which she clinched on the inside with vicious blows
of the hammer, so that the hasp could not be taken off without a good
deal of trouble. She had pulled a great staple off the door of a
useless box-stall, and when she had driven it in so deep that she could
scarcely force the padlock into place over the hasp, and had put the
key in her pocket, she felt in a measure protected from future
prowlers. As a final hint, however, she went back to the shop and
mixed some paint with lampblack and oil, and lettered a thin board
which she afterwards carried up and n