job?" asked Mrs. Upper
incredulously.

"No. I come." Joan's grave gaze was unchanging. "I'm tired of it up
there. I ain't a-goin' back. I'm most eighteen now an' I kinder want a
change."

She had not meant to be funny, but a gust of laughter rattled the
room. She shrank back. It was more terrifying to her than any cruelty
she had fancied meeting her in the town. These were the men her father
had forbidden, these loud-laughing, crinkled faces. She had turned to
brave them, a great surge of color in her brows.

"Don't mind the boys, dear," spoke Mrs. Upper. "They will laff, joke
or none. We ain't none of us blamin' you. It's a wonder you ain't run
off long afore now. I can give you a job an' welcome, but you'll be
green an' unhandy. Well, sir, we kin learn ye. You kin turn yer hand
to chamber-work an' mebbe help at the table. Maud will show you. But,
Joan, what will dad do to you? He'll be takin' after you hot-foot, I
reckon, an' be fer gettin' you back home as soon as he can."

Joan did not change her look.

"I'll not be goin' back with him," she said.

Her slow, deep voice, chest notes of a musical vibration, stirred the
room. The men were hers and gruffly said so. A sudden warmth enveloped
her from heart to foot. She followed Mrs. Upper to the initiation in
her service, clothed for the first time in human sympathies.

CHAPTER II

PIERRE LAYS HIS HAND ON A HEART

Maud Upper was the first girl of her own age that Joan had ever seen.
Joan went in terror of her and Maud knew this and enjoyed her
ascendancy over an untamed creature twice her size. There was the
crack of a lion-tamer's whip in the tone of her instructions. That was
after 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 glances
down along a short, broad nose. Her mouth was