The Two-Bar Brand - Chapter 1 Joan Reads by Firelight

The story for some reason interested her. She felt that she could
understand the love of young Lorenzo and of Isabella, the hatred of
those two brothers and Isabella's horrible tenderness for that young
murdered head. There were even things in her own life that she
compared with these; in fact, at every phrase, she stopped, and,
staring ahead, crudely and ignorantly visualized, after her own
experience, what she had just read; and, in doing so, she pictured her
own life.

Her love and Pierre's--her life before Pierre came--to put herself in
Isabella's place, she felt back to the days before her love, when she
had lived in a desolation of bleak poverty, up and away along Lone
River in her father's shack. This log house of Pierre's was a castle
by contrast. John Carver and his daughter had shared one room between
them; Joan's bed curtained off with gunny-sacking in a corner. She
slept on hides and rolled herself up in old dingy patchwork quilts and
worn blankets. On winter mornings she would wake covered with the snow
that had sifted in between the ill-matched logs. There had been a
stove, one leg gone and substituted for by a huge cobblestone; there
had been two chairs, a long box, a table, shelves--all rudely made by
John; there had been guns and traps and snowshoes, hides, skins, the
wings of birds, a couple of fishing-rods--John made his living by
legal and illegal trapping and killing. He had looked like a trapped
or hunted creature himself, small, furtive, very dark, with long
fingers always working over his mouth, a great crooked nose--a hideous
man, surely a hideous father. He hardly ever spoke, but sometimes,
coming home from the town which he visited several times a year, but
to which he had never taken Joan, he would sit down over the stove and
go over heavily, for Joan's benefit, the story of his crime and his
escape.