She twitched her shoulders and went around to the door leading into her own room.The door stood wide open when it should have been closed.Inside there were evidences of curious inspection.She went hot with an unreasoning anger when she saw the wide-open door into the kitchen;first of all she went over and closed that door,her lips pressed tightly together.To her it was as though some wanton hand had forced up the lid of a coffin where slept her dead.She stood with her back against the door and looked around the room,breathing quickly.She felt the woman's foolish amusement at the old cradle with the rag doll tucked under the patchwork quilt,and at her pitiful attempts at adorning the tawdry walls.Without having seen more than the prints of her shoes in the path,Jean hated the woman who had blundered in here and had looked and laughed.She hated the man who had come with the woman.
She went over to her desk and stood staring at the litter.A couple 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 nailed firmly across the outside kitchen door.Hammer in hand she backed away and read the words judicially,her head tilted sidewise:
ONLY SNEAKS GO WHERE THEY ARE NOT WANTED.
ARE YOU A SNEAK?
The hint was plain enough.She took the hammer back to the shop and led Pard out of the stable and down to the gate,her eyes watching suspiciously the trail for tracks of trespassers.She closed the gate so thoroughly with baling wire twisted about a stake that the next comer would have troubles of his own in getting it open again.She mounted and went away down the trail,sitting straight in the saddle,both feet in the stirrups,head up,and hat pulled firmly down to her very eyebrows,glances going here and there,alert,antagonistic.No whistling this time of rag-time tunes with queer little variations of her own;no twirling of the quirt;instead Pard got the feel of it in a tender part of the flank,and went clean over a narrow washout that could have been avoided quite easily.No groping for rhythmic phrasings to fit the beauty of the land she lived in;Jean was in the mood to combat anything that came in her way.
