Judith Of The Plains

by Marie Manning

Harper & Brothers Publishers

New York And London

Copyright, 1903. By Harper & Brothers
Printed In The United States Of America


[Illustration: Peter’s Hand Sought Hers, And All Her Woman’s Fear Of
The Vague Terrors Of The Dreadful Night Spoke In Her Answering
Pressure.]

Contents

 CHAPTER I. “Town”
 CHAPTER II. The Encounter
 CHAPTER III. Leander And His Lady
 CHAPTER IV. Judith, The Postmistress
 CHAPTER V. The Trail Of Sentiment
 CHAPTER VI. A Daughter Of The Desert
 CHAPTER VII. Chugg Takes The Ribbons
 CHAPTER VIII. The Rodneys At Home
 CHAPTER IX. Mrs. Yellett And Her “Gov’ment”
 CHAPTER X. On Horse-thief Trail
 CHAPTER XI. The Cabin In The Valley
 CHAPTER XII. The Round-up
 CHAPTER XIII. Mary’s First Day In Camp
 CHAPTER XIV. Judith Adjusts The Situation
 CHAPTER XV. The Wolf-hunt
 CHAPTER XVI. In The Land Of The Red Silence
 CHAPTER XVII. Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst
 CHAPTER XVIII. Foreshadowed
 CHAPTER XIX. “Rocked By A Hempen String”
 CHAPTER XX. The Ball




Judith Of The Plains




I.
“Town”


It was June, and a little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early
summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled
like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the
green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning
and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling
air and discomfort.

The only passenger stirring was a girl whose youth drooped under the
unfavorable influences of foul air, fatigue, and a strained anxiety to
come to the end of this fateful journey. She had been up while it was
yet dark, and her hand—luggage, locked, strapped, and as pitifully new
at the art of travelling as the girl herself, clustered about the hem
of her blue serge skirt like chicks about a hen. The engine shrieked,
but its voice sounded weak and far off in that still ocean of space;
the girl tightened her grasp on the largest of the satchels and looked
at the approaching porter tentatively.

“We’re late twenty-fi’e minutes,” he reassured her, with the hopeless
patience of one who has lost heart in curbing travellers’ enthusiasms.

She turned towards the window a pair of shoulders plainly significant
of the burdensome last straw.

“Four days and nights in this train”—they were slower in those
days—“and now this extra twenty-five minutes!”

Miss Carmichael’s famous dimple hid itself in disgust. The demure lines
of mouth and chin, that could always be relied upon for special
pleading when sentence was about to be passed on the dimple by those
who disapproved of dimples, drooped with disappointment. But the
light-brown hair continued to curl facetiously—it was the sort of hair
whose spontaneous rippling conveys to the seeing eye a sense of humor.

The train plodded across the spacious vacancy that unrolled itself
farther and farther in quest of the fugitive horizon. The scrap of view
that came within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows
like a bit of stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate
a race at breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing
eyes; the whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was
but part of the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of
homesickness was in it all.

“My dear! my dear!”—a head in crimpers was thrust from between the
curtains of the section opposite—“I’ve been awake half the night. I was
so afraid I wouldn’t see you before you got off.”

The head was followed, almost instinctively, by a hand travelling
furtively to the crimpers that gripped the lady’s brow like barnacles
clinging to a keel.

Mary expressed a grieved appreciation at the loss of rest in behalf of
her early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the
direction of the barnacles, that being a first principle as between
woman and woman.

“And, oh, my dear, it gets worse and worse. I’ve looked at it this
morning, and it’s worse in Wyoming than it was in Colorado. What it ’ll
be before I reach California, I shudder to think.”

“It’s bound to improve,” suggested Mary, with the easy optimism of one
who was leaving it. “It couldn’t be any worse than this, could it?”

The neuter pronoun, it might be well to state, signified the prairie;
its melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their
train existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as
in certain nether circles the head of the house receives his
superlative distinction in “He.”

Again the locomotive shrieked, again the girl mechanically clutched the
suit-case, as presenting the most difficult item in the problem of
transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality. The
train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped
curtains stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth
cradle. The porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one
whose hopes of largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called
after her redundant farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael was
standing on the station platform looking helplessly after the train
that toiled and puffed, yet seemed, in that crystalline atmosphere,
still within arm’s-reach. She watched it till its floating pennant of
smoke was nothing but a gray feather blowing farther and farther out of
sight on the flat prairie.

The town—it would be unkind to mention its name—had made merry the
night before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just
disposed of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons,
“What’s the use of temptin’ the bank?” “Town,” therefore, when Mary
Carmichael first made its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of
the unjust. Those among last night’s roisterers who had had to make an
early start for their camps were well into the foot-hills by this time,
and would remember with exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the
dance-hall piano as inspiring music when the lonesomeness of the desert
menaced and the young blood again clamored for its own.

“Town”—it contained in all some two dozen buildings—was very unlovely
in slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced
urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in
all the “health resorts” of the East did air sweep from the clean
hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of
abiding youth. Surely “Town” was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that
hung in the unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and
called good; an omen of the abominations that men would make when they
grew blind to the beauty of God’s world.

Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret,
wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign
of a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening
messenger, suggested to her that a reassuring telegram was only Aunt
Adelaide’s due. Whereupon she began to rap on the door of the office, a
scared pianissimo which naturally had little effect on the operator,
who was at home and asleep some three blocks distant. But the West is
the place for woman if she would be waited upon. No seven-to-one ratio
of the sexes has tempered the chivalry of her sons of the saddle. A
loitering something in a sombrero saw rather than heard the rapping,
and, at the sight, went in quest of the dreaming operator without so
much as embarrassing Miss Carmichael with an offer of his services. And
presently the operator, whose official day did not begin for some two
hours yet, appeared, much dishevelled from running and the cursory
nature of his toilet, prepared to receive a message of life and death.

The wire to Aunt Adelaide ran:

“Practically at end of journey. Take stage to Lost Trail this morning.
Am well. Don’t worry about me.


“MARY.”


And the telegraph operator, dimly remembering that he had heard Lost
Trail was a “pizen mean country,” and that it was tucked some two
hundred miles back in the foot-hills, did not find it very hard to
forgive the girl, who was “practically at end of journey,” particularly
as the dimple had come out of hiding, and he had never been called upon
to telegraph the word “practically” before. He was a progressive man
and liked to extend his experiences.

After sending the telegram, Miss Carmichael, quite herself by reason of
the hill air, felt that she was getting along famously as a traveller,
but that it was an expensive business, and she was glad to be
“practically” at the end of her journey. And, drawing from her pocket a
square envelope of heavy Irish linen, a little worn from much reading,
but primarily an envelope that bespoke elegance of taste on the part of
her correspondent, she read:

“LOST TRAIL, WYOMING.


“My Dear Miss Carmichael,—Pray let me assure you of my gratification
that the preliminaries have been so satisfactorily arranged, and that
we are to have you with us by the end of June. The children are
profiting from the very anticipation of it, and it will be most
refreshing to all us isolated ones to be able to welcome an Eastern
girl as a member of our family.
    “Although the long journey across the continent is trying,
    particularly to one who has not made it before, I hope you may not
    find it utterly fatiguing. Please remember that after leaving the
    train, it will be necessary to take a stage to Lost Trail. If it is
    possible, I shall meet you with the buckboard at one of the stage
    stations; otherwise, keep to the stage route, being careful to
    change at Dax’s Ranch.
    “Unfortunately, the children vary so in their accomplishments that
    I fear I can make no suggestions as to what you may need to bring
    with you in the way of text-books. But I think you will find them
    fairly well grounded.
    “I had a charming letter from Mrs. Kirkland, who said the
    pleasantest things possible of you. I am glad the wife of our
    Senator was able conscientiously to commend us.
    “With our most cordial good wishes for a safe journey, believe me,
    dear Miss Carmichael,


“Sincerely yours,
    “SARAH YELLETT.”


In the mean time, “Town” came yawning to breakfast. It was not so
prankish as it had been the night before, when it accepted the
sheepman’s broad-gauge hospitality and made merry till the sun winked
from behind the mountains. It made its way to the low, shedlike
eating-house with a pre-breakfast solemnity bordering on sulkiness. Not
a petticoat was in sight to offset the spurs and sombreros that filed
into breakfast from every point in the compass, prepared to eat
primitively, joke broadly, and quarrel speedily if that sensitive and
often inconsistent something they called honor should be brushed
however lightly.

But the eternal feminine was within, and, discovering it, the temper of
“Town” was changed; it ate self-consciously, made jokes meet for the
ears of ladies, and was more interested in the girl in the sailor-hat
than it was in remembering old feuds or laying the foundations of new.

In its interior aspect, the eating-house conveyed no subtle invitation
to eat, drink, and be merry. On the contrary, its mission seemed to be
that of confounding appetite at every turn. A long, shedlike room it
was, with walls of unpainted pine, still sweating from the axe.
Festoons of scalloped paper, in conflicting shades, hung from the
ceiling, a menace to the taller of the guests. On the rough walls some
one, either prompted by a latent spirit of æstheticism or with an idea
of abetting the town towards merrymaking—an encouragement it hardly
required—had tacked posters of shows, mainly representing the
tank-and-sawmill school of drama.

Miss Carmichael sat at the extreme end of the long, oilcloth-covered
table, on which a straggling army of salt and pepper shakers, catsup
bottles, and divers commercial condiments seemed to pause in a
discouraged march. A plague of flies was on everything, and the food
was a threat to the hardiest appetite. One man summed up the steak
with, “You got to work your jaw so hard to eat it that it ain’t fair to
the next meal.”

His neighbor heaved a sigh. “This here formation, whatever it be”—and
he turned the meat over for better inspection—“do shore remind me of an
indestructible doll that an old maid aunt of mine giv’ my sister when
we was kids. That doll sort of challenged me, settin’ round oncapable
o’ bein’ destroyed, and one day I ups an’ has a chaw at her. She war
ondestructible, all right; ’fore that I concluded my speriments I had
left a couple o’ teeth in her.”

“Well, I discyards the steak and draw to a pair of aces,” and the first
man helped himself to a couple of biscuits.

Miss Carmichael knew, by the continual scraping of chairs across the
gritty floor, that the places at the table must be nearly all taken;
and while she anticipated, with an utterly unreasonable terror, any
further invasion of her seclusion at the end of the table, still she
could not persuade herself to raise her eyes to detect the progress of
the enemy, even in the interest of the diary she had kept so
conscientiously for the past three days; which was something of a loss
to the diary, as those untamed, manly faces were well worth looking at.
Reckless they were in many instances, and sometimes the lines of
hardship were cruelly writ across young faces that had not yet lost the
down of adolescence, but there were humor and endurance and the courage
that knows how to make a crony of death and get right good sport from
the comradeship. Their faults were the faults of lusty, red-blooded
youth, and their virtues the open-handed generosity, the ready sympathy
of those uncertain tilters at life who ride or fall in the tourney of a
new country.

At present, “the yearling,” drinking her execrable coffee in an agony
of embarrassment, weighed heavily on their minds. They would have liked
to rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for her.
But as a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her
discomfiture tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most
difficult thing and looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael’s.
With a delicacy of perception that the casual observer might not have
given them credit for, they had refrained from taking seats directly
opposite her, or those immediately on her right, which, as she occupied
the last seat at the table, gave her at least a small degree of
seclusion.

As one after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating
a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could
obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a
chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the
floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And
the cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about “Town,” as the
case might be, would take the hint and the chair, leaving the petticoat
separated from the sombreros by a table-land of oilcloth and a range of
four chairs.

But now entered a man who failed to take the hint of the spinning
chair. In fact, he entered the eating-house with the air of one who has
dropped in casually to look for a friend and, incidentally, to eat his
breakfast. He stopped in the doorway, scanned the table with
deliberation, and started to make his way towards Mary Carmichael with
something of a swagger. Some one kicked a chair towards him at the head
of the table. Some one else nearly upset him with one before he reached
the middle, and the Texan remarked, quite audibly, as he passed:

“The damned razor-back!”

But the man made his way to the end of the table and drew out the chair
opposite Miss Carmichael with a degree of assurance that precipitated
the rest of the table into a pretty pother.

Suppose she should countenance his audacity? The fair have been known
to succumb to the headlong force of a charge, when the persistence of a
long siege has failed signally. What figures they would cut if she
did!—and Simpson, of all men! A growing tension had crept into the
atmosphere of the eating-house; knives and forks played but
intermittently, and Mary, sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered
table, felt intuitively that she was the centre of the brewing storm.
Oh, why hadn’t she been contented to stay at home and make over her
clothes and share the dwindling fortunes of her aunts, instead of
coming to this savage place?

“From the look of the yearling’s chin, I think he’ll get all that’s
coming to him,” whispered the man who had nearly upset him with the
second chair.

“You’re right, pard. If I’m any good at reading brands, she is as
self-protective as the McKinley bill.”

The man Simpson was not a pleasant vis-à-vis. He wore the same
picturesque ruffianliness of apparel as his fellows, but the
resemblance stopped there. He lacked their dusky bloom, their clearness
of eye, the suppleness and easy flow of muscle that is the hall-mark of
these frontiersmen. He was fat and squat and had not the rich bronzing
of wind, sun, and rain. His small, black eyes twinkled from his puffy,
white face, like raisins in a dough-pudding.

He was ogling Mary amiably when the woman who kept the eating-house
brought him his breakfast. Mrs. Clark was a potent antidote for the
prevailing spirit of romance, even in this woman-forsaken country. A
good creature, all limp calico, Roman nose, and sharp elbows, she
brought him his breakfast with an ill grace that she had not shown to
the others. The men about the table gave him scant greeting, but the
absence of enthusiasm didn’t embarrass Simpson.

He lounged expansively on the table, regarding Miss Carmichael
attentively meanwhile; then favored her with the result of his
observations, “From the East, I take it.” And the dumpling face screwed
into a smile whose mission was pacific.

Every knife and fork in the room suspended action in anxiety to know
how the “yearling” would take it. Would their chivalry, which strained
at a gnat, be compelled to swallow such a conspicuous camel as the
success of Simpson? With the attitude he had taken towards the girl,
there had crept into the company an imperceptible change; deep-buried
impulses sprang to the surface. If a scoundrel like Simpson was going
to try his luck, why shouldn’t they? They didn’t see a pretty girl once
in a blue moon. With the advent of the green-eyed monster at the board,
each man unconsciously became the rival of his neighbor.

But Miss Carmichael merely continued her breakfast, and if she heard
the amiable deductions of Simpson regarding her, she gave no sign. But
a rebuff to him was in the nature of an appetizer, a fillip to press
the acquaintance. He encroached a bit farther on the narrow limits of
the table and continued, “Nice weather we’re having.”

Miss Carmichael gave her undivided attention to her coffee. The spurs
and sombreros, that had not relaxed a muscle in their strained
observation of the little drama, breathed reflectively. Perhaps it was
just as well that they had not emulated Simpson in his brazen charge;
the “yearling” was not to be surprised into talking, that was certain.

“He shore is showing hisself to be a friendly native,” commented the
man who had sacrificed milk-teeth investigating the indestructible
doll.

“Seems to me that the system he’s playing lacks a heap of science. My
money’s on the yearling.” And the man who had “discarded the steak and
drawn to the biscuits” leaned a little forward that he might better
watch developments.

Simpson by this time fully realized his error, but failure before all
these bantering youngsters was a contingency not to be accepted
lightly. As he phrased it to himself, it was worth “another throw.”
“Seems kind o’ lonesome not having any one to talk to while you’re
eatin’, don’t it?”

Miss Carmichael’s air of perfect composure seemed a trifle out of tune
with her surroundings; the nice elevation of eyebrow, the slightly
questioning curl of the lip as she, for the first time apparently,
became aware of the man opposite, seemed to demand a prim drawing-room
rather than the atmosphere of the slouching eating-house.

“Well, really, I’ve hardly had a chance of finding out.” And her eyes
were again on her coffee-cup. And there was joy among the men at table
that they had not rushed in after the manner of those who have a
greater courage than the angels.

“No offence meant,” deprecated Simpson, with an uneasy glance towards
the other end of the table, where the men sat with necks craned forward
in an attitude uncomfortably suggestive of hounds straining at the
leash. Simpson felt rather than saw that something was afoot among the
sombreros. There was a crowding together in whispered colloquy, and in
a flash some half-dozen of them were on their feet as a man. Descending
upon Simpson, they lifted him, chair and all, to the other end of the
table, as far removed as possible from Miss Carmichael.

The man who thought Simpson’s system lacked science rubbed his hands in
delight. “She took the trick all right; swept his hand clean off the
board!”




II.
The Encounter


Simpson, from the seat to which he had been so rapidly transplanted,
looked about him with blinking anxiety. It was more than probable that
the boys intended “to have fun with him,” though his talking, or rather
trying to talk, to a girl that sat opposite him at an eating-house
table was, according to his ethics, plainly none of their business. He
knew he wasn’t popular since he had done for Jim Rodney’s sheep, though
the crime had never been laid at his door, officially. He had his way
to make, the same as the next one; and, all said and done, the
cattle-men were glad to get Jim Rodney’s sheep off the range, even if
they treated him as a felon for the part he had played in their
extermination.

Thus reasoned Simpson, while he marked with an uneasy eye that the
temper of the company had grown decidedly prankish with the exit of the
girl, who, after having caused all the trouble, had, with an irritating
quality peculiar to her sex, vanished through the kitchen door.

Some three or four of the boys now ran to Simpson’s former seat at the
table and rushed towards him with his half-eaten breakfast, as if the
errand had been one of life and death. They showered him with mock
attentions, waiting on him with an exaggerated deference, and the pale,
fat man, remembering the hideousness of some of their manifestations of
a sense of humor, breathed hard and felt a falling-off of appetite.

Costigan, the cattle-man, a strapping Irish giant, was clearing his
throat with ominous sounds that suggested the tuning-up of a bass
fiddle.

“Sure, Simpson, me lad, if ye happen to have a matther av fifty
dollars, ’tis mesilf that can tell ye av an illegint invistmint.”

Simpson looked up warily, but Costigan’s broad countenance did not
harbor the wraith of a smile. “What kin I git for fifty chips? ’Tain’t
much,” mused the pariah, with the prompt inclination to spend that
stamps the comparative stranger to ready money.

“Ye can git a parrut, man—a grane parrut—to kape ye coompany while
ye’re aiting—”

Simpson interrupted with an oath.

“Don’t be hard on old Simmy; remember he’s studied for the ministry!
How did I savey that Simpson aimed to be a sharp on doctrine?” A
cow-puncher with a squint addressed the table in general. “I scents the
aroma of dogma about Simpson in the way he throwed his conversational
lariat at the yearling. He urbanes at her, and then comes his
‘firstly,’ it being a speculation as to her late grazing-ground, which
he concludes to be the East. His ‘secondly’ ain’t nothing startling,
words familiar to us all from our mother’s knee—‘nice weather’—the
congregation ain’t visibly moved. His ‘thirdly’ is insinuating. In it
he hints that it ain’t good for man to be alone at meals—”

“’Twas the congregation that added the ‘foinelly,’ though, before
hastily leaving be the back door!” and Costigan slapped his thigh.

“The gentleman in question don’t seem to be makin’ much use of his
present conversational opportunities. I’m feelin’ kinder turned down
myself”; and the Texan began to look over his six-shooter.

The man with the squint looked up and down the board.

“Gentlemen, I believe the foregoing expresses the sentiment of this
company, which, while it incloodes many foreign and frequent-warring
elements, is at present held together by the natchral tie of eating.”

Thumping with knife and fork handles, stamping of feet, cries of “Hear!
hear!” with at least three cow-boy yells, argued well for a resumption
of last night’s festivities. Simpson glowered, but said nothing.

“Seems to me you-all goin’ the wrong way ’bout drawin’ Mistu’ Simpson
out. He is shy an’ has to be played fo’ like a trout, an’ heah you-all
come at him like a cattle stampede.” The big Texan leaned towards
Simpson. “Now you-all watch my methods. Mistu’ Simpson, seh, what du
think of the prospects of rain?”

There was a general recommendation from Simpson that the entire company
go to a locality below the rain-belt.

A boy, plainly “from the East,” and looking as if the ink on his
graduating thesis had scarce had time to dry, was on his feet,
swaggering; he would not have swapped his newly acquired _camaraderie_
with these bronzed Westerners for the Presidency.

“Gentlemen, you have all heard Simpson say it is lonesome having no one
to talk to during meals. We sympathized with him and offered him a
choice of subjects. He greets our remarks by a conspicuous silence,
varied by profanity. This, gentlemen, reflects on us, and is a matter
demanding public satisfaction. All who feel that their powers as
conversationalists have been impugned by the silence of Simpson, please
say ‘Ay.’”

“Ay” was howled, sung, and roared in every note of the gamut.

“If me yoong frind here an me roight”—and Costigan jerked a shoulder
towards the boy—“will be afther closin’ that silf-feeding automatic
dictionary av his for a moment, I shud be glad to call the attintion av
the coomp’ny to somethin’ in the nature av an ixtinuatin’
circoomsthance in the case av Simpson.”

“Hear! hear!” they shouted. The broad countenance of Costigan beamed
with joy at what he was about to say. “Gintlemin, the silence av Mr.
Simpson is jew in all probabilitee to a certain ivint recalled by many
here prisint, an’ more that’s absent, an’ amicablee settled out av
coort—”

Up to this time the unhappy Simpson had shown an almost superhuman
endurance. Now he bristled—and after looking up and down the board for
a sympathetic face, and not finding one, he declared, loudly and
generally, “’Tain’t so!”

“Ye may have noticed that frind Simpson do be t’reatened wid lockjaw in
the societee av min, but in the prisince av a female ye can’t count on
him. Now, talk wid a female is an agreeable, if not a profitable, way
av passin’ the toime, but sure ye niver know where it will ind—as
witness Simpson. This lady I’m recallin’—’tis a matther av two years
ago—followed the ancient and honorable profission av biscuit shootin’
not far from Caspar. Siz Simpson to the lady some such passin’
civilitee as, ‘Good-marnin’; plisent weather we’re havin’.’ Whereupon
the lady filt a damage to her affictions an’ sued him for breach av
promise.”

“’Twan’t that way, at all!” screamed Simpson. “’Sall a lie!”

“Yu ought er said ‘Good-evenin’’ to the lady, Mistu Simpson; hit make a
diffunce,” drawled the man from Texas, pleasantly.

“But ’twas ‘Good-marnin’’ Simpson made chyce av,” resumed Costigan.
“An’ the lady replied, ‘You’ve broke my heart.’ Whereupon Simpson,
havin’ a matther av t’ree thousand dollars to pay for his passin’
civilitee, learned thot silince was goolden.”

They all remembered the incident in question, and thundered applause at
the reappearance of an old favorite. Without warning, a shadow fell
across the sunlight-flooded room, and, as one after another of the men
glanced up from the table, they saw standing in the doorway a man of
such malignant aspect that his look fell across the company like a
menace. The swing of their banter slowed suddenly; it was as if the
cold of a new-turned grave had struck across the June sunshine checking
their roughshod fun. None of them had the hardihood to joke with a man
that stood in the shadow of death; and hate and murder looked from the
eyes of the man in the doorway and looked towards Simpson. One by one
they perceived the man of the shadow, all but Simpson, eating steak
drowned in Worcestershire.

The man in the doorway was tall and lean, and the prison blench upon
his face was in unpleasant contrast to the ruddy tan of the faces about
the table. His sombrero was tipped back and the hair hung dank about
the pale, sweating forehead, suggestive of sickness. But weak health
did not imply weak purpose; every feature in that hawk-like face was
sharp with hatred, and in the narrowing eye was vengeance that is
sweet.

He stood still; there was in his hatred a something hypnotic that grew
imperceptibly and imperceptibly communicated itself to the men at
table. He gloated over the eating fat man as if he had dwelt much in
imagination on the sight and was in no hurry to curtail his joy at the
reality. The men began to get restless, shuffle their feet, moisten
their lips; only the college boy spoke, and then from a wealth of
ignorance, knowing nothing of the rugged, give-and-take justice of the
plains—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and the law and the
courts go hang while a man’s got a right arm to pull a trigger. Not one
in all that company, even the cattle-men whose interests were opposed
to Rodney’s, but felt the justice of his errand.

“When did they let him out?” whispered the college boy; and then,
“Oughtn’t we to do something?”

“Yis, me son,” whispered Costigan. “We ought to sit still and learn a
thing or two.”

The fat man cleaned his plate with a crust of bread stuck on the point
of a knife. There was nothing more to eat in the way of substantials,
and he debated pouring a little more of the sauce on his plate and
mopping it with a bit of bread still uneaten. Considering the pro and
con of this extra tid-bit, he glanced up and saw the gaunt man standing
in the doorway.

Simpson dropped the knife from his shaking hand and started up with a
cry that died away in a gurgle, an inhuman, nightmare croak. He looked
about wildly, like a rat in a trap, then backed towards the wall. The
men about the table got up, then cleared away in a circle, leaving the
fat man. It was all like a dream to the college boy, who had never seen
a thing of the kind before and could not realize now that it was
happening. Rodney advanced, never once relaxing the look in which he
seemed to hold his enemy as in a vise. Simpson was like a man
bewitched. Once, twice, he made a grab for his revolver, but his right
hand seemed to have lost power to heed the bidding of his will. Rodney,
now well towards the centre of the room, waited, with a suggestion of
ceremony, for Simpson to get his six-shooter.

It was one of those moments in which time seems to have become
petrified. The limp-clad proprietress of the eating-house, made curious
by the sudden silence, looked in from the kitchen. Simpson, his eyes
wandering like a trapped rat, saw, and called, through teeth that
chattered in an ague of fear, “Ree—memm—her thth—there’s la—dies
p—present! For Gawd’s sake, remember t—there’s ladies p—present!”

The pale man looked towards the kitchen, and, seeing the woman, he gave
Simpson a look in which there was only contempt. “You’ve hid behind the
law once, and this time it’s petticoats. The open don’t seem to have no
charm for you. But—” He didn’t finish, there was no need to. Every one
knew and understood. He put up his revolver and walked into the street.

The men broke into shouts of laughter, loud and ringing, then doubled
up and had it out all over again. And their noisy merriment was as
clear an indication of the suddenly lifted strain, at the averted
shooting, as it was of their enjoyment of the farce. Simpson, relieved
of the fear of sudden death, now sought to put a better face on his
cowardice. Now that his enemy was well out of sight, Simpson handled
his revolver with easy assurance.

“Put ut up,” shouted Costigan, above the general uproar. “’Tis toime to
fear a revolver in the hands av Simpson whin he’s no intinsions av
shootin’.”

Simpson still attempted to harangue the crowd, but his voice was lost
in the general thigh-slapping and the shouts and roars that showed no
signs of abating. But when he caught a man by the coat lapel in his
efforts to secure a hearing, that was another matter, and the man shook
him off as if his touch were contagion. Simpson, craving mercy on
account of petticoats, evading a meeting that was “up to him,” they
were willing to stand as a laughing-stock, but Simpson as an equal,
grasping the lapels of their coats, they would have none of.

He slunk away from them to a corner of the eating-house, feeling the
stigma of their contempt, yet afraid to go out into the street where
his enemy might be waiting for him. Much of death and blood and
recklessness “Town” had seen and condoned, but cowardice was the
unforgivable sin. It balked the rude justice of these frontiersmen and
tampered with their code, and Simpson knew that the game had gone
against him.

“What was it all about? Were they in earnest, or was it only their way
of amusing themselves?” inquired Mary Carmichael, who had slipped into
Mrs. Clark’s kitchen after the men at the table had taken things in
hand.

“Jim Rodney was in earnest, an’ he had reason to be. That man Simpson
was paid by a cattle outfit—now, mind, I ain’t sayin’ which—to get Jim
Rodney’s sheep off the range. They had threatened him and cut the
throats of two hundred of his herd as a warning, but Jim went right on
grazin’ ’em, same as he had always been in the habit of doing. Well,
I’m told they up and makes Simpson an offer to get rid of the sheep.
Jim has over five thousand, an’ it’s just before lambing, and them pore
ewes, all heavy, is being druv’ down to Watson’s shearing-pens, that
Jim always shears at. Jim an’ two herders and a couple of dawgs—least,
this is the way I heard it—is drivin’ ’em easy, ’cause, as I said
before, it’s just before lambing. It does now seem awful cruel to me to
shear just before lambing, but that’s their way out here.

“Well, nothing happens, and Jim ain’t more’n two hours from the pens
an’ he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top
of a cañon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an’
dashes into the herd and drives the wether that’s leading right over
the cliff. The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right
over the cliff like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried
to drive ’em back, they tell me, an’ he an’ the dawg were shot at from
the clump of willows by some one else who was there. Three hundred
sheep had gone over the cliff before Jim knew what was happening. He
rode like mad right through the herd to try and head ’em off; but you
know what sheep is like—they’re like lost souls headin’ for damnation.
Nothing can stop ’em when they’re once started. And Jim lost every
head—started for the shearing-pens a rich man—rich for Jim—an’ seen
everything he had swept away before his eyes, his wife an’ children
made paupers. My son he come by and found him. He said that Jim was
sittin’ huddled up in a heap, his knees drawed up under his chin,
starin’ straight up into the noonday sky, same as if he was askin’ God
how He could be so cruel. His dead dawg, that they had shot, was by the
side of him. The herder that was with Jim had taken the one that was
shot into Watson’s, so when my son found Jim he was alone, sittin’ on
the edge of the cliff with his dead dawg, an’ the sky about was black
with buzzards; an’ Jim he just sat an’ stared up at ’em, and when my
son spoke to him he never answered any more than a dead man. He shuck
him by the arm, but Jim just sat there, watchin’ the sun, the buzzards,
and the dead sheep.”

“Was nothing done to this man Simpson?”

“The cattle outfit that he done the dirty work for swore an alibi for
him. Jim has been in hard luck ever since. He’s been rustlin’ cattle
right along; but Lord, who can blame him? He got into some trouble down
to Rawlins—shot a man he thought was with Simpson, but who wasn’t—and
he’s been in jail ever since. Course now that he’s out Simpson’s bound
to get peppered. Glad it didn’t happen here, though. ’Twould be a kind
of unpleasant thing to have connected with a eating-house, don’t you
think so?” she inquired, with the grim philosophy of the country.

The eating-house patrons had gone their several ways, and the quiet of
the dining-room was oppressive by contrast with its late
boisterousness. Mrs. Clark, her hands imprisoned in bread-dough, begged
Mary to look over the screen door and see if anything was happening.
“I’m always suspicious when it’s quiet. I know they’re in deviltry of
some sort.”

Mary tiptoed to the door and peeped over, but the room was deserted,
save for Simpson, huddled in a corner, biting his finger-nails. “The
nasty thing!” exploded Mrs. Clark, when she had received the bulletin.
“I’d turn him out if it wasn’t for the notoriety he might bring my
place in gettin’ killed in front of it.”

“I dare say I’d better go and see after my trunk; it’s still on the
station platform.” Mary wondered what her prim aunts would think of her
for sitting in Mrs. Clark’s kitchen, but it had seemed so much more of
a refuge than the sordid streets of the hideous little town, with its
droves of men and never a glimpse of a woman that she had been only too
glad to avail herself of the invitation of the proprietress to “make
herself at home till the stage left.”

“Well, good luck to you,” said Mrs. Clark, wiping her hand only
partially free from dough and presenting it to Miss Carmichael. She had
not inquired where the girl was going, nor even hinted to discover
where she came from, but she gave her the godspeed that the West knows
how to give, and the girl felt better for it.

At the station, where Mary shortly presented herself, in the interest
of that old man of the sea of all travellers, luggage, she learned that
the stage did not leave town for some three-quarters of an hour yet. A
young man, manipulating many sheets of flimsy, yellow paper covered
with large, flourishing handwriting, looked up in answer to her
inquiries about Lost Trail. This young man, whose accent, clothes, and
manner proclaimed him “from the East,” whither, in all probability, he
would shortly return if he did not mend his ways, disclaimed all
knowledge of the place as if it were an undesirable acquaintance. But
before he could deny it thrice, a man who had heard the cabalistic name
was making his way towards the desk, the pride of the traveller
radiating from every feature.

The cosmopolite who knew Lost Trail was the type of man who is born to
be a Kentucky colonel, and perhaps may have achieved his destiny before
coming to this “No Man’s Land,” for reasons into which no one inquired,
and which were obviously no one’s business. They knew him here by the
name of “Lone Tooth Hank,” and he wore what had been, in the days of
his colonelcy—or its equivalent—a frock-coat, restrained by the lower
button, and thus establishing a waist-line long after nature had had
the last word to say on the subject. With this he wore the sombrero of
the country, and the combination carried a rakish effect that was
positively sinister.

The scornful clerk introduced Mary as a young lady inquiring about some
place in the bad-lands. Off came the sombrero with a sweep, and Lone
Tooth smiled in a way that accented the dental solitaire to which he
owed his name. Miss Carmichael, concealing her terror of this casual
cavalier, inquired if he could tell her the distance to Lost Trail.

“I sho’ly can, and with, consid’able pleasure.” The sombrero completed
a semicircular sweep and arrived in the neighborhood of Mr. Hank’s
heart in significance of his vassalage to the fair sex. He proceeded:

“Lost Trail sutney is right lonesome. A friend of mine gets a little
too playful fo’ the evah-increasin’ meetropolitan spirit of this yere
camp, and tries a little tahget practice on the main bullyvard, an’
finds the atmospheah onhealthful in consequence. Hearin’ that the quiet
solitude of Lost Trail is what he needs, he lit out with the following
circumstance thereof happenin’. One day something in his harness giv’
way—and he recollects seein’ a boot sunnin’ itself back in the road
’bout a quartah of a mile. An’ he figgahs he’ll borry a strip of
leather off the boot to mend his harness. Back he goes and finds it has
a kind of loaded feelin’. So my friend investigates—and I be blanked if
there wasn’t a foot and leg inside of it.”

Miss Carmichael had always exercised a super-feminine self-restraint in
the case of casual mice, and it served her in the present instance.
Instead of screaming, she said, after the suppression of a gasp or two:

“Thank you so much, but I won’t detain you any longer. Your information
makes Lost Trail even more interesting than I had expected.”

Besides, Miss Carmichael had a faint suspicion that this might be a
preconcerted plan to terrify the “lady tenderfoot,” and she prided
herself on being equal to the situation. The time at her disposal
before the stage would embark on that unknown sea of prairies she spent
in the delectable pastime of shopping. The financial and social
interests of the town seemed to converge in Hugous & Co.’s “trading
store,” where Miss Carmichael invested in an extra package of needles
for the mere excitement of being one of the shoppers, though her aunt
Adelaide had stocked the little plaid-silk work-bag to repletion with
every variety of needle known to woman. She pricked up her ears,
meanwhile, at some of the purchases made by the cow-boys for their
camp-larders—devilled ham, sardines, canned tomatoes heading the list
as prime favorites. Did these strapping border lads live by the fruit
of the tin alone? Apparently yes, with the sophisticated accompaniment
of soda biscuit, to judge by the quantity of baking-powder they
invested in—literally pounds of it. Men in any other condition of life
would have died of slow poisoning as the result of it.

There were other customers at Hugous’ that morning besides the spurred
and booted cow-puncher and his despised compeer, the sheep-herder. That
restless emigrant class, whose origin, as a class, lay in the community
of its own uncertain schemes of fortune; the West, with her splendid,
lavish promises, called them from their thriftless farms in the South
and their gray cabins in New England. They began their journeying
towards the land of promise long before the Indians had ever seen the
shrieking “fire-wagon.” All day they would toil over the infinitude of
prairie, the sun that hid nightly behind that maddeningly elusive
vanishing-point, the horizon, their only guide. But the makeshifts of
the wagon life were not without charm. They began to wander in quest of
they knew not precisely what, and from these vague beginnings there had
sprung into existence that nomadic population that was once such a
feature of the far West, but is now going the way of the Indians and
the cow-boys.

This breathing-space in the long journey had for them the stimulus of a
holiday-making. They bought their sides of bacon and their pounds of
coffee as merrily as if they were playing a game of forfeits, the women
fingering the calico they did not want for the joy of pricing and
making shoppers’ talk.

The scene had a scriptural flavor that not even the blue overalls of
the men nor the calico gowns of the women could altogether eliminate.
Their wagons, bulging with household goods and trailing with kitchen
utensils secured by bits of rope, were drawn up in front of the
trading-store. From a pump, at some little distance, the pilgrims
filled their stone water-bottles, for the wise traveller does not trust
to the chance springs of the desert. Baskets of chickens were strapped
to many of the wagons, but whether the unhappy fowls were designed to
supply fresh eggs and an occasional fricassée, or were taken for the
pleasure of their company, there was no means of determining short of
impertinent cross-questioning. Sometimes a cow, and invariably a dog,
formed one of the family party, and an edifying _esprit de corps_
seemed to dwell among them all.

Lone Tooth Hank, in his capacity of man about town, stood on the steps
of Hugous’ watching the preparations; and, seeing Miss Carmichael,
approached with the air of an old and tried family friend.

“Do I obsehve yu regyarding oweh ‘settleahs,’ called settleahs ’cause
they nevah settle?” Hank laughed gently, as one who has made a joke
meet for ladies. “I’ve known whole famblies to bohn an’ raise right in
one of them wagons; and tuhn out a mighty fine, endurin’ lot, too, this
hyeh prospectin’ round afteh somethin’ they wouldn’t reco’nize if they
met. Gits to be a habit same as drink. They couldn’t live in a house
same as humans, not if yu filled their gyarden with nuggets an’ their
well with apple-jack.”

Miss Carmichael looked attentive but said nothing. In truth, she was
more afraid of Hank, his obvious gallantry, and his grewsome tales of
boots with legs in them than she was of the unknown terrors of Lost
Trail.

“I believe that is my stage,” she said, as a red conveyance not unlike
a circus wagon halted at some little distance from the trading-store.
And as she spoke she saw four of her companions of the breakfast-table
heading towards the stage, each with a piece of her precious luggage.
Mary Carmichael was precipitated in a sudden panic; she had heard tales
of the pranks of these playful Western squires—a little gun-play to
induce the terrified tenderfoot to put a little more spirit into his
Highland fling, “by request.” She remembered their merrymaking with
Simpson at breakfast. What did they intend to do with her belongings?
And as she remembered the little plaid sewing-bag that Aunt Adelaide
had made for her—surreptitiously drying her tears in the mean time—when
she remembered that bag and the possibility of its being submitted to
ignominy, she could have cried or done murder, she wasn’t sure which.

“Well, ’pon my wohd, heah ah the boys with yo’ baggage. How time du
fly!”

“Oh!” she gasped, “what are they going to do with it?”

“Place it on the stage, awaitin’ yo’ ohdahs.” And to her expression of
infinite relief—“Yo’ didn’t think any disrepec’ would be shown the
baggage of a lady honorin’ this hyeh metropolis with her presence?”

She thanked the knights of the lariat the more warmly for her unjust
suspicions. They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men
who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She
climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and
the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a
simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver
cracked his whip and turned the horses’ heads towards the billowing sea
of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to
civilization was cut.




III.
Leander And His Lady


The only stage passenger besides Miss Carmichael was a fat lady, whose
entire luggage seemed to consist of luncheon—pasteboard boxes of
sandwiches, baskets of fruit, napkins of cake. These she began to
dispose of, before the stage had fairly started, with an industry
almost automatic, continuing faithful to her post as long as the
supplies lasted. Then she dozed, sleeping the sleep of the just and
those who keep their mouths open. From time to time the stage-driver
invoked his team in cabalistic words, and each time the horses toiled
forward with fresh energy; but progress became a mockery in that ocean
of space, their driving seemed as futile as the sport of children who
crack a whip and play at stage-coach with a couple of chairs; the
mountains still mocked in the distance.

A flat, unbroken sweep of country, a tangle of straggling sage-brush, a
glimpse of foot-hills in the distance, was the outlook mile after mile.
The day grew pitilessly hot. Clouds of alkaline dust swept aimlessly
over the desert or whirled into spirals till lost in space. From
horizon to horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as
it dipped earthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the
prospect was always the same—the red stage crawling over the
wilderness, making no evident progress, and always the sun, the
sage-brush, and the silence.

It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of
things at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red
roads, wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more
haughtily aloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals. This
wilderness was so gaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of
a bit of landscape at home. A young forest of silver beeches growing
straight and fine as the threads on a loom; and through the gray
perspective of their satin-smooth trunks you caught the white gleam of
a fairy cascade as it tumbled over the moss-grown stones to the brook
below. It was like a bit from a Japanese garden in its delicate
artificiality.

And harder to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been the
old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose
of senility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of
mortgages that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces
of Aunt Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it
not sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?—it had faith in the name.
But Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the
mortgage had not invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing
the sangaree of its delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer
afternoons, invading the very dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the
old mahogany table, prompting Aunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at
the worn silver—would it go to pay that blood-sucking mortgage next?

But hardest of all to leave had been Archie, best and most promising of
young brothers—Archie, who had come out ahead of his class in the
high-school, all ready to go to The University—the University of
Virginia is always “The University”; but who, it had seemed at a
certain dark season, must give up this long-cherished hope for lack of
the wherewithal. Mary, being four years older than her brother and
quite twenty, had long felt a maternal obligation to administer his
affairs. If he did not go to the university, like his father and
grandfather before him, it would be because she had failed in her duty.
At this particular phase of the domestic problem there had appeared, in
a certain churchly periodical, a carefully worded advertisement for a
governess, and the subsequent business of references, salary, and
information to be imparted and received proving eminently satisfactory,
Mary had finally received a tearful permission from her aunts to depart
for some place in Wyoming, the name of which was not even to be found
on the map. She was to consider herself quite one of the family, and
the compensation was to be fifty dollars a month. Archie would now be
able to go to “The University.”

As the day wore on the sage-brush became scarcer and grayer, there were
fewer flowering cacti, and the great white patches of alkali grew more
and more frequent. In the distance there was a riot of rainbow
tints—violet, pink, and pale orange. It seemed inconceivable that such
barrenness could produce such wealth of color; nothing could have been
more beautiful—not even the changing colors on a pigeon’s neck—than the
coppery iridescence, shading to cobalt and blue on some of the buttes.

Night had fallen before they made the first break in their journey. The
low, beetle-browed cabin that faced them in the wilderness carried in
its rude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur’s art—a world of
desolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney
and curtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but this
shortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs,
a device at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect
was that of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actual
rumbling of the stage, felt its confused motion the more strongly in
imagination, and hardly knew whether she was eating canned tomatoes,
served uncooked directly from the tin, fried steak, black coffee, and
soda biscuit, in company with the fat lady, the stage-driver, and the
woman who kept the road ranch, or if it was all some Alice in
Wonderland delusion.

The fat lady had brought her own bedding—an apoplectic roll of
bedquilts—and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the
protests of the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation
against her accommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited
by the controversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith
of a traveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she
was young or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and
indicating an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss
Carmichael to find a more comfortable bed “in the East.”

In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and
groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering
inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch
left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North
Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their
journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the
Red Desert, when he was sober enough to handle the ribbons.

Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate
condition of Mr. Chugg—would he be wholly or partially incapacitated
for his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of
Miss Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason
for her solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the
situation.

But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Falling
into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name,
place of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a
son on Sweetwater. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every
death in her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael
felt an especial interest in an Uncle Henry who “died of a Friday along
of eating clams.” He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a
background of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic,
and other more familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But
loquacity, apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady
scarce vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss
Carmichael remained the object of her persistent attentions.

But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg’s
condition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, “Before I’d trust my precious
neck to him, I’d get Mr. Dax to shoot me.”

Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became
aware for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic
economy. But so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to
scrutinize very closely, indeed, to detect the evanescent personality
of Mrs. Dax’s husband. Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that
he swam no Hellesponts for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise
he was slender, willowy, bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get
the habitually apologetic crooks out of his knees, he would be tall;
but so in the habit was he of repressing himself in the marital
presence that Leander passed for middle height. He waited on the table
at breakfast with the dumb submissiveness of a trained dog that has
been taught to give pathetic imitations of human servility. But no
sooner had his lady left the room than Leander began quite brazenly to
call attention to himself as a man and an individual, coughing,
rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat. Mary and the fat lady,
out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overtures
equally frank, and Leander ventured finally to inquire if they aimed to
spend the night at his brother’s ranch, it being the next mess-box
between here and nowhere. They admitted that his brother’s ranch was
their next stopping-place, and Leander went through perfect contortions
of apology and self-effacement before he could bring himself to ask
them to do him a favor. It would have taken a very stern order of
womankind to refuse anything so abject, and they blindly committed
themselves to the pledge.

“Tell him I send my compliments,” he whispered, and, looking about him
furtively, he repeated the blood-curdling request.

“Is that all?” sniffed the fat lady, at no pains to conceal her
disappointment.

“It’s enough, if it was known, to raise a war-whoop and stampede this
yere family.” His glance at the door through which his wife had
disappeared was pregnant with meaning.

“Family troubles?” asked the fat lady, as a gourmet might say
“Truffles.”

“Looks like it,” said Leander, dismally. “Me and Johnnie don’t ask for
nothin’ better than to bask in each other’s company; but our wives
insists on keepin’ up the manœuvres of a war-dance the whole endoorin’
time.”

“So,” said the fat lady, as a gourmet might tell of a favorite way of
preparing truffles, “it’s a case of wives?”

“Yes, marm, an’ teeth an’ nails an’ husbands thrown in, when they get a
sight of each other’s petticoats.”

“I’ve known sisters-in-law not to agree,” helped on the fat lady, by
way of an encouraging parallel.

“While I deplores usin’ such a comparison to the refinin’ and softenin’
inflooance of wimmen, the meetin’ of the Dax ladies by chanst anywheres
has all the elements of danger and excitement that accompanies an Injun
uprisin’.”

The travellers looked all manner of encouragement.

“You see, my wife’s a great housekeeper; her talent lies”—and here
Leander winked knowingly—“in managin’ the help.”

“Land’s sake!” interrupted the fat lady. “Why don’t you kick?”

Leander sighed softly. “I tried to once. As an experiment it partook of
the trustfulness of a mule kickin’ against the stony walls of Badger
Cañon. But to resoom about the difficulties that split the Dax family.
Before Johnnie got mislaid in that matrimonial landslide o’ his, he
herds with us. Me an’ him does the work of this yere shack, and my wife
just roominates and gives her accomplishments as manager full play. She
never put her hand in dirty water any more than Mrs. Cleveland sittin’
up in the White House parlor. Johnnie done the fancy cookin’; he could
make a pie like any one’s maw, and while you was lost to the world in
the delights of masticatin’ it, he’d have all his greasy dishes washed
up and put away—”

“No wonder she hated to lose a man like that,” interrupted the fat
lady, feelingly.

“But he took to pinin’ and proclaimin’ that he shore was a lone
maverick, and he just stampeded round lookin’ for trouble and bleatin’
a song that went:

“‘No one to love,
None to caress.’


“Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don’t bear none of
the brands of this yere range. She lives back East, and him and her
took up their claims in each other’s affections through a matrimonial
paper known as _The Heart and Hand_. So they takes their pens in hand
and gets through a hard spell of courtin’ on paper. Love plumb locoes
Johnnie. His spellin’ don’t suit him, his handwritin’ don’t suit him,
his natchral letters don’t suit him. So off he sends to Denver for all
the letter-writin’ books he can buy—_Handbook of Correspondence_, _The
Epistolary Guide_, _The Ready Letter-Writer_, and a stack more. There’s
no denyin’ it, Johnnie certainly did sweat hisself over them letters.”

“Land’s sakes!” said the fat lady.

“Yes, marm; he used to read ’em to me, beginnin’ how he had just seized
five minutes to write to her, when he’d worked the whole day like a
mule over it. She seemed to like the brand, an’ when he sent her the
money to come out here an’ get married, she come as straight as if she
had been mailed with a postage-stamp.”

“The brazen thing!” said the fat lady.

“They stopped here, goin’ home to their place. My Lord! warn’t she a
high-flyer! She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail—my wife called
it a Sikey knot—and it stood out a foot from her head. Some of the
boys, kinder playful, wanted to throw a hat at it and see if it
wouldn’t hang, but they refrained, out of respect to the feelin’s of
the groom.

“From the start,” continued Leander, “the two Mrs. Daxes just hankered
to get at each other; an’ while I, as a slave to the fair sex”—here he
bowed to the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael—“hesitates to use such
langwidge in their presence, the attitood of them two female wimmin
shorely reminds me of a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin’ to
chaw each other.

“At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an’ foot, and she just read
novels and played stylish all the time and danced. She was the hardest
dancer that ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to
any old war-dancin’ chief up to the reservation. No dance she ever
heard of was too far for her to go to. She just went and danced till
broad daylight. Many a man would have took to dissipation, in his
circumstances, but Johnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly. Why,
he’d leave his dishes go from one day till the next—”

“There’s more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next if
they wasn’t looked after.” And the wife of his bosom stood in the door
like a vengeful household goddess. Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearest
plates.




IV.
Judith, The Postmistress


The arrival of Chugg’s stage with the mail should have been coincident
with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from
“Town,” but Chugg was late—a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local
lethe waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to
forget that woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence
of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving
Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent
Chugg, and incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.

Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which
the travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of
dictator, with absolute sway. Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and
staff, executed marvellous feats of domestic engineering. The late
breakfast-table, swept and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United
States post-office, prepared to transact postal business, and for the
time being to become the social centre of the surrounding country.

Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped and climbed and dipped
again over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world
without end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom,
so small that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn
into a horseman.

There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was
ridden. No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting,
Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground
imperceptibly and is a delight to the eye. It needed but the solitary
figure to signify the infinitude of space in the background. In all
that great, wide world the only hint of life was the galloping
horseman, the only sound the rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs. The
rider, now close enough for Miss Carmichael to distinguish the
features, was a thorough dandy of the saddle. No slouching garb of
exigence and comfort this, but a pretty display of doeskin gaiter,
varnished boot, and smart riding-breeches. The lad—he could not have
been, Miss Carmichael thought, more than twenty—was tanned a splendid
color not unlike the bloomy shading on a nasturtium. And when the
doughty horseman made out the girl standing in the doorway, he smiled
with a lack of formality not suggested by the town-cut of his
trappings. Throwing the reins over the neck of the horse with the real
Western fling, he slid from the saddle in a trice, and—Mary Carmichael
experienced something of the gasping horror of a shocked old lady as
she made out two splendid braids of thick, black hair. Her doughty
cavalier was no cavalier at all, but a surprisingly handsome young
woman.

Miss Carmichael gasped a little even as she extended her hand, for the
masquerader had pulled off her gauntlet and held out hers as if she was
conferring the freedom of the wilderness. It was impossible for a
homesick girl not to respond to such heartiness, though it was with
difficulty at first that Mary kept her eyes on the girl’s face.
Curiosity, agreeably piqued, urged her to take another glimpse of the
riding clothes that this young woman wore with such supreme unconcern.

Now, “in the East” Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting
black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the
pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day
at dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by
not betraying this, the attempt was rather a failure.

“Are you surprised that I did not wait for an introduction?” the girl
in the riding clothes asked, noticing Mary’s evident uneasiness; “but
you don’t know how good it is to see a girl. I’m so tired of spurs and
sombreros and cattle and dust and distance, and there’s nothing else
here.”

“Where I come from it’s just the other way—too many petticoats and
hat-pins.”

The horseman who was no horseman dropped Miss Carmichael’s hand and
went into the house. Mary wondered if she ought to have been more
cordial.

From the back door came Leander, with dishcloths, which he began to
hang on the line in a dumb, driven sort of way.

“Who is she?” asked Mary.

“Her?” he interrogated, jerking his head in the direction of the house.
“The postmistress, Judith Rodney; yes, that’s her name.” He dropped his
voice in the manner of one imparting momentous things. “She never wears
a skirt ridin’, any more than a man.”

Mary felt that she was tempting Leander into the paths of gossip,
undoubtedly his besetting sin, but she could not resist the temptation
to linger. He had disposed of his last dish-cloth, and he withdrew the
remaining clothes-pin from his mouth in a way that was pathetically
feminine.

“She keeps the post-office here, since Mrs. Dax lost the job, and
boards with us; p’r’aps it’s because she is my wife’s successor in
office, or p’a’ps it’s jest the natural grudge that wimmin seem to
harbor agin each other, I dunno, but they don’t sandwich none.”

Leander having disposed of his last dish-towel, squinted at it through
his half-closed eyes, like an artist “sighting” a landscape, saw
apparently that it was in drawing, and next brought his vision to bear
on the back premises of his own dwelling, where he saw there was no
wifely figure in evidence.

“Sh-sh-h!” he said, creeping towards Mary, his dull face transfigured
with the consciousness that he had news to tell. “Sh-sh—her brother’s a
rustler. If ’twan’t for her”—Leander went through the grewsome
pantomime of tying an imaginary rope round his neck and throwing it
over the limb of an imaginary tree. “They’re goin’ to get him for shore
this time, soon as he comes out of jail; but would you guess it from
her bluff?”

There was no mistaking the fate of a rustler after Mr. Dax’s grisly
demonstration, but of the quality of his calling Mary was as ignorant
as before.

“And why should they do that?” she inquired, with tenderfoot
simplicity.

“Stealin’ cattle ain’t good for the health hereabouts,” said Leander,
as one who spoke with authority. “It’s apt to bring on throat trouble.”

But Mary did not find Leander’s joke amusing. She had suddenly
remembered the pale, gaunt man who had walked into the eating-house the
previous morning and walked out again, his errand turned into
farce-comedy by the cowardice of an unworthy antagonist. The pale man’s
grievance had had to do with sheep and cattle. His name had been
Rodney, too. She understood now. He was Judith Rodney’s brother, and he
was in danger of being hanged. Mary Carmichael felt first the
admiration of a girl, then the pity of a woman, for the brave young
creature who so stoutly carried so unspeakable a burden. But she could
not speak of her new knowledge to Leander.

She glanced towards this childlike person and saw from his stealthy
manner that he had more to impart. He walked towards the kitchen door,
saw no one, and came back to Mary.

“There ain’t a man in this Gawd-forsaken country wouldn’t lope at the
chance to die for her—but the women!” Leander’s pantomimic indication
of absolute feminine antagonism was conclusive.

“The wimmin treats her scabby—just scabby. Don’t you go to thinkin’ she
ain’t a good girl on that account”; and something like an attitude of
chivalrous protection straightened the apologetic crook in his craven
outline.

“She’s good, just good, and when a woman’s that there’s no use in
sayin’ it any more fanciful. As I says to my wife, every time she give
me a chance, ‘If Judy wasn’t a good girl these boys about here would
just natchrally become extinct shootin’ each other upon account of
her.’ But she don’t favor none enough to cause trouble.”

“Are the women jealous of her?”

“It’s her independence that riles ’em. They take on awful about her
ridin’ in pants, an’ it certainly is a heap more modest than ridin’
straddle in a hitched up caliker skirt, same as some of them do.”

“And do all the women out here ride astride?” Mary gasped.

“A good many does, when you ain’t watchin’; horses in these parts ain’t
broke for no such lopsided foolishness as side-saddles. But you see she
does it becomin’, and that’s where the grudge comes in. You can’t stir
about these foot-hills without coming across a woman, like as not,
holdin’ on to a posse of kids, and ridin’ clothes-pin fashion in a
looped-up skirt; when she sees you comin’ she’ll p’r’aps upset a kid or
two assoomin’ a decorous attitood. That’s feemi_nine_, and as such is
approved by the ladies, but”—and here Leander put his head on one side
and gave a grotesque impression of outraged decorum—“pants is
considered unwomanly.”

“Leander! Leander!” came in accusing accents from the kitchen.

“Run!” gasped Mrs. Dax’s handmaiden; “don’t let her catch us chinnin’.”

Mary Carmichael ran round one side of the house as she was bidden, but,
like Lot’s wife, could not resist the temptation of looking back.
Leander, with incredible rapidity, grabbed two clothes-pins off the
line, clutched a dish-towel, shook it. “Comin’! comin’!” he called, as
he went through the farce of rehanging it.

The lonesomeness of plain and foot-hill, the utter lack of the human
element that gives to this country its character of penetrating
desolation, had been changed while Mary Carmichael forgathered with
Leander by the clothes-line. From the four quarters of the compass, men
in sombreros, flannel shirts, and all manner of strange habiliments
came galloping over the roads as if their horses were as keen on
reaching Dax’s as their riders. They came towards the house at full
tilt, their horses stretching flat with ears laid back viciously, and
Mary, who was unused to the tricks of cow-ponies, expected to see them
ride through the front door, merely by way of demonstrating their sense
of humor. Not so; the little pintos, buckskins, bays, and chestnuts
dashed to the door and stopped short in a full gallop; as a bit of
staccato equestrianism it was superb.

And then the wherefore of all this dashing horsemanship, this
curveting, prancing, galloping revival of knightly tourney effects was
apparent—Judith Rodney had opened post-office. She had changed her
riding clothes; or, rather, that portion of them to which the ladies
took exception was now concealed by a long, black skirt. Her wonderful
braids of black hair had been twisted high on her head. She was well
worth a trip across the alkali wastes to see. The room was packed with
men. One unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some
crowd-collecting casualty had happened. Above the continual clinking of
spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these
United States are capable. There is no Western dialect, properly
speaking. Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or
Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give
an essential picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely
local—the cattle and sheep industries, prospecting, the Indians, poker,
faro, the dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable
embellishment.

Judith managed them all—cow-punchers, sheep-herders, prospectors,
freighters—with an impersonal skill that suggested a little solitary
exercise in the bowling-alley. The ten-pins took their tumbles in good
part—no one could congratulate himself on escaping the levelling
ball—and where there’s a universal lack of luck, doubtless also there
will be found a sort of grim fellowship.

That they were all more or less in love with her there could be no
doubt. As a matter of fact, Judith Rodney did not depend on the
scarcity of women in the desert for her pre-eminence in the interests
of this hot-headed group. Her personality—and through no conscious
effort of hers—would have been pre-eminent anywhere. As it was, in this
woman-forsaken wilderness she might have stirred up a modern edition of
the Trojan war at any moment. That she did not, despite the lurking
suggestion of temptation written all over her, brought back the words
of Leander: “If Judy wasn’t a good girl, these boys would just
nacherally become extinct shooting each other upon account of her.”

And yet what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched
Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her
interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there
might lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint
and devil. One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or
provoking a bar-room brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the
vividness of color, the suggestion of endurance and radiating health in
every line, were comparable to the great primeval forces about her. She
was cast to be the mother of men of brawn and muscle, who would make
this vast, unclaimed wilderness subject to them.

At present neither pole of her character, as it had been hastily
estimated, was even remotely suggested. The atmosphere in the
post-office was, considering the potential violence of its visitors,
singularly calm. And Judith, feeding these wild border lads on scraps
of chaff and banter, and retaining their absolute loyalty, was a sight
worth seeing. She had the alertness of a lion-tamer locked in a cage
with the lords of the jungle; the rashly confident she humbled, the
meek she exalted, and all with such genuine good-fellowship, such an
absence of coquetry in the genial game of give and take, that one
ceased to wonder at even the devotion of Leander. And since they were
to her, on her own confession, but “spurs and sombreros,” one wondered
at the elaboration of the comedy, the endless wire-pulling in the
manipulation of these most picturesque marionettes—until one remembered
the outlaw brother and felt that what she did she did for him.

“You right shore there ain’t a letter for me, Miss Judith. My creditors
are pretty faithful ’bout bearing me in mind.” It was the third time
that the big, shambling Texan who had been one of the company at Mrs.
Clark’s eating-house had inquired for mail, and seemed so embarrassed
by his own bulk that he moved cautiously, as if he might step on a
fellow-creature and maim him. Each time he had asked for a letter he
took his place at the end of the waiting-line and patiently bided his
time for the chance of an extra word with the postmistress.

“They’ve begun to lose hope, Texas.”

She shuffled the letters impartially, as a goddess dispensing fate, and
barely glanced at the man who had ridden a hundred and fifty miles
across sand and cactus to see her.

“That’s the difference between them and me.” There was a grim finality
in his tone.

“What, you’re going to take your place at the end of that line again!
I’ll try and find you a circular.”

He tried to look at her angrily, but she smiled at him with such
good-fellowship that he went off singing significantly that universal
anthem of the cow-puncher the West over:

“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,
    In a narrow grave just six by three,
    Where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me.
Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.”


“Ain’t there a love letter for me?” The young man who inquired seemed
to belong to a different race from these bronzed squires of the saddle.
He suggested over-crowded excursion boats on Sunday afternoons in
swarming Eastern cities. He buttonholed every one and explained his
presence in the West on the score of his health, as though leaving his
native asphalt were a thing that demanded apology.

“Yes,” answered the postmistress, with a real motherly note, “here is
one from Hugous & Co.”

A roar went up at this, and the blushing tenderfoot pocketed his third
bill for the most theatrical style of Mexican sombrero; it had a brass
snake coiled round the crown for a hat-band, and a cow-puncher in good
and regular standing would have preferred going bareheaded to wearing
it.

“She seems to be pressing her suit, son; you better name the day,” one
of the loungers suggested.

“The blamed thing ain’t worth twenty-five dollars,” the young man from
the East declared. A conspicuous silence followed. It seemed to
irritate the owner of the hat that no one would defend it. “It ain’t
worth it,” he repeated.

“I think you allowed you was out here for your health?” the big Texan,
who had returned from the corral, inquired.

“Betcher life,” swaggered the man with the hat, “N’York’s good enough
for me.”

“But”—and the Texan smiled sweetly—“the man who sold you the hat ain’t
out here for his.”

Judith hid her head and stamped letters. The boys were suspiciously
quiet, then some one began to chant:

“The devil examined the desert well,
And made up his mind ’twas too dry for hell;
He put up the prices his pockets to swell,
And called it a—heal-th resort.”


The postmistress waited for the last note of the chorus to die away,
and read from a package she held in her hand—“‘Mrs. Henry Lee, Deer
Lodge, Wyoming.’ Well, Henry, here’s a wedding-present, I guess. And my
congratulations, though you’ve hardly treated us well in never saying a
word.”

The unfortunate Henry, who hadn’t even a sweetheart, and who was noted
as the shyest man in the “Goose Creek Outfit,” had to submit to the
mock congratulations of every man in the room and promise to set up the
drinks later.

“I never felt we’d keep you long, son; them golden curls seldom gets a
chance to ripen singly.”

“Shoshone squaw, did you say she was, Henry? They ain’t much for looks,
but there’s a heep of wear to ’em.”

“Oh, go on, now; you fellows know I ain’t married.” And the boy handled
the package with a sort of dumb wonder, as if the superscription were
indisputable evidence of a wife’s existence.

“Open it, Henry; you shore don’t harbor sentiments of curiosity
regarding the post-office dealings of your lady.”

“Now, old man, this here may be grounds for divorce.”

“See what the other fellow’s sending your wife.”

Henry, badgered, jostled, the target of many a homely witticism,
finally opened the package, which proved to be a sample bottle of baby
food. At sight of it they howled like Apaches, and Henry was again
forced to receive their congratulations. Judith, who had been an
interested on-looker without joining in the merriment, now detected in
the tenor of their humor a tendency towards breadth. In an instant her
manner was official; rapping the table with her mailing-stamp, she
announced:

“Boys, this post-office closes in ten minutes, if you want to buy any
stamps.”

The silence following this statement on the part of the postmistress
was instantaneous. Henry took his mirth-provoking package and went his
way; some of the more hilariously inclined followed him. The remainder
confined themselves absolutely to business, scrawling postal-cards or
reading their mail. The pounce of the official stamp on the letters, as
the postmistress checked them off for the mail-bag, was the only sound
in the hot stillness.

A heavily built man, older than those who had been keeping the
post-office lively, now took advantage of the lull to approach Judith.
He had a twinkling face, all circles and pouches, but it grew graver as
he spoke to the postmistress. He was Major Atkins, formerly a famous
cavalry officer, but since his retirement a cattle-man whose herds
grazed to the pan-handle of Texas. As he took his mail, talking
meantime of politics, of the heat, of the lack of water, in the loud
voice for which he was famous, he managed, with clumsy diplomacy, to
interject a word or two for her own ear alone.

“Jim’s out,” he conveyed to her, in a successfully muffled tone. “He’s
out, and they’re after him, hot. Get him out of the State, Judy—get him
out, quick. He tried to kill Simpson at Mrs. Clark’s, in town,
yesterday. The little Eastern girl that’s here will tell you.” Then the
major was gone before Judith could perfectly realize the significance
of what he had told her.

She threw back her head and the pulse in her throat beat. Like a wild
forest thing, at the first warning sound, she considered: Was it time
for flight?—or was the warning but the crackling of a twig? Major
Atkins was a cattle-man: her brother hated all cattle-men. How
disinterested had been the major’s warning! He had always been her
friend. Mrs. Atkins had been one of the ladies at the post who had
helped to send her to school to the nuns at Santa Fé. She despised
herself for doubting; yet these were troublous times, and all was fair
between sheep and cattle-men. Major Atkins had spoken of the Eastern
girl; then that pretty, little, curly-haired creature, whom Judith had
found standing in the sunshine, had seen Jim—had heard him threaten to
kill. Should she ask her about it—consult her? Judith’s training was
not one to impel her to give her confidence to strangers, still she had
liked the little Eastern girl.

These were the perplexities that beset her, sweeping her thoughts
hither and thither, as sea-weed is swept by the wash of the waves. She
strove to collect her faculties. How should she rid the house of her
cavaliers? She had regularly to refuse some half-dozen of them each day
that she kept post-office.

In a few minutes more the group in the post-office began to disperse
under the skilful manipulation of the postmistress. To some she sold
stamps with an air of “God speed you,” and they were soon but dwindling
specks on the horizon. To others she implied such friendly farewells
that there was nothing to do but betake themselves to their saddles.
Others had compromised with the saloon opposite, and their roaring
mirth came in snatches of song and shouts of laughter. She fastened up
the little pile of letters that had remained uncalled for with what
seemed a deliberate slowness. Each time any one entered the room she
looked up—then the hope died hard in her face. Leander came in with
catlike tread and removed the pigeon-holes from the table. The
post-office was closed. Family life had been resumed at the Daxes’.

Judith left the room and stood in the blinding sunlight, basking in it
as if she were cold. The mercury must have stood close to a hundred,
and she was hatless. There was no trace of her ebullient spirits of the
morning. Her head was sunk on her breast and she held her hands with
locked fingers behind her. It was hot, hot as the breaths of a thousand
belching furnaces. A white, burning glare had spread itself from
horizon to horizon, and the earth wrinkled and cracked beneath it. From
every corner of this parched wilderness came an ominous whirring, like
the last wheezing gasp of an alarm-clock before striking the hour. This
menacing orchestration was nothing more or less than millions of
grasshoppers rasping legs and wings together in hoarse appreciation of
the heat and glare; but it had a sound that boded evil. Again and again
she turned towards the yellow road as it dipped over the hills; but
there was never a glimpse of a horseman from that direction.




V.
The Trail Of Sentiment


Within the house the travellers had disposed themselves in a repressed
and melancholy circle that suggested the suspended animation of a
funeral gathering. The fat lady had turned back her skirt to save her
travelling dress. The stage was late, and there was no good and
sufficient reason for wearing it out. A similar consideration of
economy led her to flirt off flies with her second best
pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Dax presided over the gathering with awful
severity. Every one truckled to her shamefully, receiving her lightest
remarks as if they were to be inscribed on tablets of bronze. Leander,
his eyes bright with excitement at being received in the family circle
on an equal footing, balanced perilously on the edge of his chair,
anticipating dismissal.

“Chugg’s never ben so late as this,” said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself
furiously. She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the
nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending
forth flame. Leander, the fat lady, and Miss Carmichael meekly murmured
assent and condemnation.

“And there ain’t a sign of him,” said Mrs. Dax, returning to the house
after straining the landscape through her all-observant eye, and not
detecting him in any of the remote pin-pricks on the horizon, in which
these plainsfolk invariably decipher a herd of antelope, an elk or two,
or a horseman.

“Bet he had a woman in the stage and upset it with her,” said Leander,
in the animated manner of a poor relation currying favor with a bit of
news.

Mrs. Dax regarded him severely for a moment, then conspicuously
addressed her next remark to the ladies. “Bet he had a woman in the
stage, the old scoundrel!”

“Wonder who she was?” said Leander, with the sparkling triumph of a
poor relation whose surmise had been accepted. But Mrs. Dax had
evidently decided that Leander had gone far enough.

“Was you expectin’ any of your lady friends by Chugg’s stage that you
are so frettin’ anxious?” she inquired, and the poor relation collapsed
miserably.

“You’ve heard about Chugg’s goin’ on since ‘Mountain Pink’ jilted him?”
inquired Mrs. Dax of the fat lady, as the only one of the party who
might have kept abreast with the social chronicles of the neighborhood.

“My land, yes,” responded the fat lady, proud to be regarded as
socially cognizant. “M’ son says he’s plumb locoed about it—didn’t want
me to travel by his stage. But I said he dassent upset a woman of my
age—he just nacherally dassent!”

Miss Carmichael, by dint of patient inquiry, finally got the story
which was popularly supposed to account for the misdemeanors of the
stage-driver, including his present delinquency that was delaying them
on their journey.

It appeared that Lemuel Chugg, then writhing in the coils of perverse
romance, was among the last of those famous old stage-drivers whose
talents combined skill at handling the ribbons with the diplomacy
necessary to treat with a masked envoy on the road. His luck in these
encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due
to Chugg’s ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, “while he
had been shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of
fight in the old man yet.”

Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the
manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his
heart, and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking,
stuffed so full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the
bulbous appearance of the “before treatment” view of a chiropodist’s
sign. This darling of his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg’s
earliest manhood. It had been his only love—till he met Mountain Pink.

Mountain Pink’s husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg’s
stage-route. She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had
not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali
water. Furthermore, she could “bring about a dried-apple pie” to make a
man forget the cooking of his mother. Great was the havoc wrought by
Mountain Pink’s pies and complexion, but she followed the decorous
precedent of Cæsar’s wife, and, like her pastry, remained above
suspicion.

Her husband, whose name was Jim Bosky, seemed, to the self-impanelled
jury that spent its time sitting on the case, singularly insensible to
his own advantages. Not only did he fail to take a proper pride in her
beauty, but there were dark hints abroad that he had never tasted one
of her pies. When delicately questioned on this point, at that stage of
liquid refreshment that makes these little personalities not
impossible, Bosky had grimly quoted the dearth of shoes among
shoe-makers’ children.

Whatever were the facts of the case, Mountain Pink got the sympathy
that might have been expected in a section of the country where the
ratio of the sexes is fifty to one. Chugg, eating her pies regularly
once a week on his stage-route, said nothing, but he presented her with
a red plush photograph album with oxidized silver clasps, and by this
first reckless expenditure of money in the life of Chugg, Natrona,
Johnson, Converse, and Sweetwater counties knew that Cupid had at last
found a vulnerable spot in the tough and weather-tanned hide of the old
stage-driver.

Nor did Cupid stop here with his pranks. Having inoculated the
stage-driver with the virus of romance, madness began to work in the
veins of Chugg. He presented Mountain Pink with the gray woollen
stocking—not extracting a single coin—and urged her to get a divorce
from the clodlike man who had never appreciated her and marry him.

Mountain Pink coyly took the stocking so generously given for the
divorce and subsequent trousseau, and Chugg continued to drive his
stage with an Apollo-like abandon, whistling love-songs the while.

Coincident with Mountain Pink’s disappearance Dakotaward, in the
interests of freedom, went also one Bob Catlin, a mule-wrangler. Bosky,
with conspicuous pessimism, hoped for the worst from the beginning, and
as time went on and nothing was heard of either of the wanderers, some
of Mountain Pink’s most loyal adherents confessed it looked “romancy.”
But crusty old Chugg remained true to his ideal. “She’ll write when she
gets good and ready,” and then concluded, loyally, “Maybe she can’t
write, nohow,” and nothing could shake his faith.

When Mountain Pink and the mule-wrangler returned as bride and groom
and set up housekeeping on the remainder of Chugg’s stocking, and on
his stage-route, too, so that he had to drive right past the honeymoon
cottage every time he completed the circuit, they lost caste in Carbon
County. Chugg never spoke of the faithlessness of Mountain Pink. His
bitterness found vent in tipping over the stage when his passengers
were confined to members of the former Mrs. Bosky’s sex, and, as
Leander said, “the flask in his innerds held more.” And these were the
only traces of tragedy in the life of Lemuel Chugg, stage-driver.

Judith had continued her unquiet pacing in the blinding glare while the
group within doors, somnolent from the heat and the incessant shrilling
of the locusts, droningly discussed the faithlessness of Mountain Pink,
dozed, and took up the thread of the romance. Each time she turned
Judith would stop and scan the yellow road, shading her eyes with her
hand, and each time she had turned away and resumed her walk. Mary, who
gave the postmistress no unstinted share of admiration for the courage
with which she faced her difficulties, and who had been seeking an
opportunity to signify her friendship, and now that she saw the last of
the gallants depart, inquired of Judith if she might join her.

They walked without speaking for several minutes, enjoying a sense of
comradeship hardly in keeping with the brevity of their acquaintance; a
freedom from restraint spared them the necessity of exchanging
small-talk, that frequently irritating toll exacted as tribute to
possible friendship.

The desert lay white and palpitating beneath the noonday glare, and
from the outermost rim of desolation came dancing “dust-devils”
whirling and gliding through the mazes of their eerie dance. “I think
sometimes,” said Judith, “that they are the ghosts of those who have
died of thirst in the desert.”

Mary shuddered imperceptibly. “How do you stand it with never a glimpse
of the sea?”

“You’ll love it, or hate it; the desert is too jealous for half
measures. As for the sea”—Judith shrugged her fine shoulders—“from all
I’ve heard of it, it must be very wet.”

Each felt a reticence about broaching the subject uppermost in her
thoughts—Judith from the instinctive tendency towards secretiveness
that was part of the heritage of her Indian blood; Mary because the
subject so closely concerned this girl for whom she felt such genuine
admiration.

Judith finally brought up the matter with an abruptness that scarce
concealed her anxiety.

“You saw my brother yesterday at Mrs. Clark’s eating-house; will you be
good enough to tell me just what happened?”

Mary related the incident in detail, Judith cross-examining her
minutely as to the temper of the men at table towards Jim. Did she know
if any cattle-men were present? Did she hear where her brother had
gone?

Mary had heard nothing further after he had left the eating-house; the
only one she had talked to had been Mrs. Clark, whose sympathy had been
entirely with Jim. Judith thanked her, but in reality she knew no more
now than she had heard from Major Atkins.

Judith now stopped in their walk and stood facing the road as it rolled
over the foot-hills—a skein of yellow silk glimmering in the sun. Then
Mary saw that the object spinning across it in the distance, hardly
bigger than a doll’s carriage, was the long-delayed stage. She spoke to
the postmistress, but apparently she did not hear—Judith was watching
the nearing stage as if it might bring some message of life and death.
She stood still, and the drooping lines of her figure straightened,
every fibre of her beauty kindled. She was like a flame, paling the
sunlight.

And presently was heard the uncouth music of sixteen iron-shod hoofs
beating hard from the earth rhythmic notes which presently grew hollow
and sonorous as they came rattling over the wooden bridge that spanned
the creek.

“Chugg!” exclaimed Leander, rushing to the door in a tumult. There was
something crucial in the arrival of the delayed stage-driver. His
delinquencies had deflected the course of the travellers, left them
stranded in a remote corner of the wilderness; but now they should
again resume the thread of things; Chugg’s coming was an event.

“’Tain’t Chugg, by God!” said Leander, impelled to violent language by
the unexpected.

“It’s Peter Hamilton!” exclaimed Mrs. Dax.

“Land’s sakes, the New-Yorker!” said the fat lady. Only Judith said
nothing.

Mr. Hamilton held the ribbons of that battered prairie-stage as if he
had been driving past the judges’ bench at the Horse Show. Furthermore,
he wore blue overalls, a flannel shirt, and a sombrero, which sartorial
inventory, while it highly became the slim young giant, added an extra
comedy touch to his rôle of whip. He was as dusty as a miller;
close-cropped, curly head, features, and clothes were covered with a
fine alkali powdering; but he carried his youth as a banner streaming
in the blue. And he swung from the stage with the easy flow of muscle
that is the reward of those who live in the saddle and make a fine art
of throwing the lariat.

They greeted him heartily, all but Judith, who did not trust herself to
speak to him before the prying eyes of Mrs. Dax, and escaped to the
house. Chugg’s latest excursion into oblivion had resulted in a fall
from the box. He was not badly hurt, and recuperation was largely a
matter of “sleeping it off,” concluded Peter Hamilton’s bulletin of the
condition of the stage-driver. So the travellers were still marooned at
Dax’s, and the prospect of continuing their journey was as vague as
ever.

“Last I heard of you,” said Mrs. Dax to Hamilton, with a sort of
stone-age playfulness, “you was punching cows over to the Bitter Root.”

“That’s true, Mrs. Dax”—he gave her his most winning smile—“but I could
not stay away from you long.”

Leander grimaced and rubbed his hands in an ecstasy of delight at
finding a man who had the temerity to bandy words with Mrs. Dax.

“Hum-m-m-ph!” she whinnied, with equine coquetry. “Guess it was
rustlers brought you back as much as me.”

Judith, who had entered the room in time to hear Mrs. Dax’s last
remark, greeted him casually, but her eyes, as they met his, were full
of questioning fear. Had he come from the Bitter Root range to hunt
down her brother? The thought was intolerable. Yet, when he had bade
her good-bye some three weeks ago, he had told her that he did not
expect to return much before the fall “round-up.” She had heard, a day
or two before, that he was again in the Wind River country, and her
morning vigil beneath the glare of the desert sun had been for him.

Mrs. Dax regarded them with the mercilessness of a death-watch; she
remembered the time when Hamilton’s excuses for his frequent presence
at the post-office had been more voluble than logical. But now he no
longer came, and Judith, for all her deliberate flow of spirits, did
not quite convince the watchful eyes of Leander’s lady—the postmistress
was a trifle too cheerful.

“Mrs. Dax,” pleaded Peter, boyishly, “I’m perishing for a cup of
coffee, and I’ve got to get back to my outfit before dark.”

“Oh, go on with you,” whinnied the gorgon; but she left the room to
make the coffee.

Judith’s eyes sought his. “Why don’t you and Leander form a coalition
for the overthrow of the enemy?” His voice had dropped a tone lower
than in his parley with Mrs. Dax; it might have implied special
devotion, or it might have implied but the passing tribute to a
beautiful woman in a country where women were few—the generic
admiration of all men for all women, ephemerally specialized by place
and circumstance.

But Judith, harassed at every turn, heart-sick with anxiety, had
anticipated in Peter’s coming, if not a solution of her troubles, at
least some evidence of sustaining sympathy, and was in no mood for
resuscitating the perennial pleasantries anent Leander and his
masterful lady.

The shrilling of the locusts emphasized their silence. She spoke to him
casually of his change of plan, but he turned the subject, and Judith
let the matter drop. She was too simple a woman to stoop to oblique
measures for the gaining of her own ends. If he was here to hunt down
her brother, if he was here to see the Eastern woman at the Wetmore
ranch—well, “life was life,” to be taken or left. Thus spoke the
fatalism that was the heritage of her Indian blood.

The thought of Miss Colebrooke at Wetmore’s reminded her of a letter
for Peter that had been brought that morning by one of the Wetmore
cow-boys.

“I forgot—there’s a letter for you.” She went to the pigeon-holes on
the wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and
brought him a square, blue linen envelope—distinctly a lady’s letter.

Peter took it with rather a forced air of magnanimity, as if in
neglecting to present it to him sooner she drew heavily on his reserve
of patience. Tearing open the envelope, he read it voraciously, read it
to the exclusion of his surroundings, the world at large, and—Judith.
He strode up and down the floor two or three times, and called to
Leander, who was passing:

“Dax, I must have that gray mare of yours right away.” He went in the
direction of the stable, without a second glance at the postmistress,
and presently they saw him galloping off in the opposite direction from
which he had come. Mrs. Dax came in with a tray on which were a pot of
coffee and sundry substantial delicacies.

“Where’s he gone?” she demanded, putting the tray down so hard that the
coffee slopped.

“I dunno,” said Leander. “He said he’d got to have the gray mare,
saddled her hisself, and rode off like hell.”

Mrs. Dax looked at them all savagely for the explanation that they
could not give. In sending her out to make coffee she felt that Peter,
whom she regarded in the light of a weakness, had taken advantage of
her affections to dupe her in regard to his plans.

“Take them things back to the kitchen,” she commanded Leander.

Mary Carmichael involuntarily glanced at Judith; the fall of the leaf
was in her cheek.

Peter Hamilton, bowed in his saddle and flogging forward inhumanely,
bred rife speculation as to his destination among the group that
watched him from the Daxes’ front door. Mrs. Dax, who entertained so
profound a respect for her own omniscience that she disdained to arrive
at a conclusion by a logical process of deduction, was “plumb certain
that he had gone after ‘rustlers!’” Leander, who had held no opinions
since his marriage except that first and all-comprehensive tenet of his
creed—that his wife was a person to be loved, honored, and obeyed
instantly—agreed with his lady by a process of reflex action. The fat
lady, who had a commonplace for every occasion, didn’t “know what we
were all coming to.” Miss Carmichael, who was beginning to find her
capacity for amazement overstrained, alone accepted this last incident
with apathy. Mr. Hamilton might have gone in swift pursuit of cattle
thieves or he might be riding the mare to death for pure whimsy. Only
Judith Rodney, who said nothing, felt that he was spurring across the
wilderness at breakneck speed to see a girl at Wetmore’s. But her lack
of comment caused no ripple of surprise in the flow of loose-lipped
speculation that served, for the time being, to inject a casual
interest into the talk of these folk, bored to the verge of
demoralization by long waiting for Chugg.

Judith preferred to confirm her apprehensions regarding Hamilton’s
ride, alone. She knew—had not all her woman’s intuitions risen in
clamorous warning—and yet she hoped, hoped despairingly, even though
the dread alternative to the girl at the Wetmore ranch threatened lynch
law for her brother. Her very gait changed as she withdrew from the
group about the door, covertly gaining her vantage-ground inch by inch.
The heels of her riding-boots made no sound as she stole across the
kitchen floor, toeing in like an Indian tracking an enemy through the
forest. The small window at the back of the kitchen commanded a view of
the road in all its sprawling circumlocution. Seen from this prospect,
it had no more design than the idle scrawlings of a child on a bit of
paper; but the choice of roads to Good and Evil was not fraught with
more momentous consequences than was each prong of that fork towards
which Hamilton was galloping.

The right arm swung towards the Wetmore ranch, where at certain times
during the course of the year a hundred cow-punchers reported on the
stock that grazed in four States. At certain seasons, likewise, despite
the fact that the ranch was well into the foot-hill country, there
might be found a New York family playing at life primeval with the
co-operation of porcelain bath-tubs, a French _chef_, and electric
light.

The left fork of the road had a meaner destiny. It dipped straight into
desolation, penetrating a naked wilderness where bad men skulked till
the evil they had done was forgotten in deeds that called afresh to
Heaven for vengeance. It was well away on this west fork of the road
that they lynched Kate Watson—“Cattle Kate”—for the crime of loyalty.
It was she, intrepid and reckless, who threatened the horde of masked
scoundrels when they came to lynch her man for the iniquity of raising
a few vegetables on a strip of ground that cut into their grazing
country. And when she, recognizing them, masked though they were,
threatened them with the vengeance of the law, they hanged her with her
man high as Haman.

Judith watched Hamilton with narrowing eyes. And now she was all
Indian, the white woman in her dead. Only the Sioux watched, and, in
the patient, Indian style, bided its time. “Cattle thieves,” “the girl
at Wetmore’s”—the words sang themselves in her head like an
incantation. “Cattle thieves” meant her brother, their recognized
leader—her brother, who was dearer to her than the heart in her breast,
the eye in her head, the right hand that held together the shambling,
uncertain destiny of her people. Would he turn to the left, Justice, on
a pale horse, hunting her brother gallowsward? Would he turn towards
the right, the impetuous lover spurring his steed that he might come
swiftly to the woman. A pulse in her bosom rose slowly until her breath
was suspended, then fell again; she was still watching, without an
outward quiver, long after he had turned to the right—and the woman.




VI.
A Daughter Of The Desert


Judith knew that the name of the girl whose letter sent Peter Hamilton
vaulting to the saddle was Katherine Colebrooke. There had been a deal
of letter-writing between her and the young cow-puncher of late, of
which perforce, by a singular irony of fate, the postmistress had been
the involuntary instrument. The correspondence had followed a recent
hasty journey to New York, undertaken somewhat unwillingly by Hamilton
in the interest of certain affairs connected with the settlement of an
estate.

The precipitancy of this latest turn of events bewildered Judith; but
yet a little while—a matter of weeks and days—and her friendship with
Hamilton had been of that pleasantly indefinite estate situated
somewhere on the borderland of romance, a kingdom where there is no law
but the mutual interest of the wayfarers. Judith and Peter had been
pitifully new at the game of life when the gods vouchsafed them the
equivocal blessing of propinquity. Judith was but lately come from the
convent at Santa Fé, and Hamilton from the university whose honors
availed him little in the trailing of cattle over the range or in the
sweat and tumult of the branding-pen. It was a strange election of
opportunity for a man who had been class poet and had rather
conspicuously avoided athletics during his entire college course. In
pursuing fortune westward Hamilton did not lack for chroniclers who
would not have missed a good story for the want of an authentic
dramatic interpretation of his plans. His uncle, said they, who had put
him through college, was disposed to let him sink or swim by his own
efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle
and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp
of his own hand. Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more
to heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives. Peter
made no confidences. He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit;
he was a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother’s side
of the family.

In those days Peter wore his rue—whether for lady fair or for towering
prospects stricken down—with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming
to a gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of
adolescence. His instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would
have availed him little with his new associates had he been a whit less
manly. But as he shirked no part of the universal hardship, they left
him his reticence. He even came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as
one who was conversant with the best—a nonchalant social
connoisseur—yet who realized the stern primitive beauties of the range
life.

Judith’s convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage
of a gentlewoman’s tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an
alien in her father’s house. When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for
her education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw
moreover that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt
her; but Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands
little of what it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold
together a family, uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.

In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to
the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the
beginning there had been between them the barrier of circumstance.
Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose
thriftlessness had become a proverb. He came of a family that numbered
a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice,
and the dean of a great university; Judith was uncertain of her right
to the very name she bore. And yet they were young, he a man, she a
woman—eternal fountain of interest. A precocious sense of the fitness
of things was the compass that enabled Peter to steer through the deep
waters in the years that followed. But the girl paid the penalty of her
great heart; in that troublous sea of friendship, she was soon adrift
without rudder, sail, or compass.

Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a
hundred statues in her. Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health
radiated from her as sparks fly upward. In sunlight, her black hair had
the bluish iridescence of a ripe plum. The eyes were deep and
questioning—the eyes of a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed
the far distant heights of paradise. Again, in her pagan gladness of
living, she might have been a Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a
shooting-star. And yet, in this wilderness that was famishing for
woman’s love and tears and laughter, by a very perversity of fate she
walked alone.

She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely
circumstance. No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly
benediction had ushered her into being. Her maternal grandfather had
been the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white
woman, who knew no word of her people’s tongue, nor yet her name or
race. The Indians found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother
after the massacre of an emigrant train. They took her with them and
she grew up, in the Black Hill country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying
a chief of the people that had slain her people. She accepted her
squaw’s portion uncomplainingly; slaved cheerfully at squaw’s work
while her brave made war on the whites, hunted, and smoked. She reared
her half-breed children in the legends of their father’s people, and
died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who had robbed the Sioux
of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.

Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who
could do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live
with Warren Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek. That was
before the gold fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the
cabin that he might fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left
it. There were reasons why he wanted to forget his identity as a white
man in his play at being an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the
joy of having come into her woman’s kingdom, the half-breed squaw was
pretty; she was proud, too, of her white man, the house he had built
her, and the girl pappoose with blue eyes. Furthermore, she had been
taught to serve man meekly, for he was the lord of creation.

Rodney talked Sioux to her. He had all but forgotten he was a white
man. The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and bare, but for the
bead jacket Singing Stream had made for her in the pride of her
maternity. Rodney called the little girl “Judith.” Her Indian mother
never guessed the significance of the strange name that she could not
say, but made at least ten soft singing syllables of, in the Indian
way. The little Judith greeted her father in strange lispings; Warren
Rodney was far from unhappy in playing at primitive man. This
recessional into conditions primeval endured for “seven snows,” as the
Indian tongue hath it. Then the squaw began to break, after the manner
of the women of her father’s people. She had begun her race with time a
decade after Warren Rodney, and she had outdistanced him by a decade.

And then the Tumlins came from Tennessee to the Black Hills. They came
in an ox-cart, and the days of their journey were more than two years.
They had stopped in Ohio, and again in Illinois; and, behold! neither
was the promised land, the land that their excited imaginations had
painted from the large talk of returning travellers, and that was
further glorified through their own thriftless discontent with
conditions at home. They had travelled on and on across half a
continent in the wake of a vanishing sky-line. The vague westward
impulse was luring them to California, but they waited in Dakota that
their starved stock might fatten, and while they rested themselves from
the long journey, Warren Rodney made the acquaintance of Sally Tumlin,
who rallied him on being a “squaw man.”

Warren Rodney had almost forgotten the sorceries of the women of his
people; he had lived so long with a brown woman, who spread no silken
snares. Sally’s blushes stirred a multitude of dead things—the wiles of
pale women, all strength in weakness, fragile flowers for tender
handling—the squaw had grown as withered as a raisin.

Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed
her “a home of her own.” Her mother had forged the bolt of this
particular maxim at an early date. And Sally saw from precocious
observation that the business of women was home-getting, to which end
they must be neat and sweet and sparing of speech. After the home was
forthcoming, then, indeed, might a woman take ease in slippers and
wrapper, and it is surely a wife’s privilege to speak her mind. Sally
knew that she hated travelling westward after the crawling oxen; each
day the sun pursued them, caught up with them, outdistanced them, and
at night left them stranded in the wilderness, and rose again and
mocked them on the morrow. Her father and oafish brother loved the
makeshifts of the wagon life, with its chance shots at fleeing
antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails; a chance
parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance. But
Sally hated it all. The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren
Rodney had money in the bank. He had had uncommon luck at trapping. His
talk to Sally was largely of his prospects.

Sally knew that the world owed her “a home of her own”; and why should
she let a squaw keep her from it? Sally’s mother giggled when
consulted. She plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter.
The ethics of the case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely
a question of white skin against brown, and which should carry the day.
Singing Stream knew not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in
her very presence, that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but
she knew that Sally was taking her man from her. The white-skinned
woman wore white ruffles about her neck and calico dresses that were
the color of the wild roses that grew among the willows at the creek.
Sally Tumlin’s pink calico gowns sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of
the squaw. It was the rainbow things, she felt, that were robbing her
of her man. All her barbaric craving for glowing colors asserted itself
as a means towards the one great end of keeping him. Singing Stream
began to scheme schemes. One day Rodney was splitting wood at the
Tumlin camp—though why he should split wood where there were two women
puzzled the squaw. But the ways of the pale-faces were beyond her ken.
She only knew that she must make herself beautiful in the eyes of
Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then perhaps the pappoose
that she expected with the first snowfall would be a man-child; and she
hoped great things of this happening.

With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the
light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood,
a matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to
make her like a white woman. It never occurred to the half-breed woman
to make known her plans to Warren Rodney. In circumventing Sally Tumlin
the man became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell
plans on the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of
the enemy, without a word.

Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the
squaw in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties
attending their romance. They admitted it was square of her to “hit the
trail,” and they decided to lose no time in going to the army post,
where a chaplain, an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the
time, and have a real wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson. The
wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about
the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination
of the most decorous courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal
party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the
prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride. The
chaplain at the post was disposed to ask few questions. Parsons made
queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and it was regarded as a
patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in the man of the
gospel at all. To the question whether or not he had been married
before, Rodney answered:

“Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life
sentence.” And the ceremony proceeded.

Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding,
dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim
party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a
bride. They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty
things, as presents to Sally. And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren
Rodney, with “a home of her own” to go to.

Singing Stream did not hasten in her quest for bright fabrics with
which to stay the hand of fate. To the half-breed woman the journey to
town was not without a certain revivifying pleasure. The Indian in her
stirred to the call of the open country. The tight roof to the cabin on
Elder Creek had not the attractions for her that it had for Sally
Tumlin. She had chafed sometimes at a house with four walls. But now
the dead and gone braves rose in her as she followed the old trail
where they had so often crept to battle against their old enemies, the
Crows, before the white man’s army had scattered them. And as she drove
through the foot-hill country, she told the solemn-eyed little Judith
the story of the Sioux, and what a great fighting people they had been
before Rodney’s people drove them from their land. Judith was holding a
doll dressed exactly like herself, in soft buckskin shirt, little
trousers, and moccasins, all beautifully beaded. In her turn she told
the story to the doll.

Singing Stream told her daughter of the making of the world, as the
Sioux believe the story of creation; of the “Four who Never
Die”—Sharper, or Bladder, Rabbit, Turtle, and Monster; likewise of the
coming of a mighty flood on which swam the Turtle and a water-fowl in
whose bill was the earth atom, from which presently the world began to
grow, Turtle supporting the bird on his great back, which was hard like
rock. The rest of the myth, that deals with the rising and setting of
the sun, Singing Stream could not tell her daughter, as the old Sioux
chiefs did not think it wise to let their women folk know too much
about matters of theology. Nor did they relate to squaws the sun myth,
with its account of much cutting-off of heads—thinking, perhaps, with
wisdom, that these good ladies saw enough of carnage in their every-day
life without introducing it into their catechism.

But Singing Stream knew the story of “Sharper,” or “Bladder,” as he is
called by some of the people, because he is round and his grotesquely
fat figure resembles a bladder blown to bursting. Bladder’s province it
is to make a fool of himself, diving into water after plums he sees
reflected there from the branches of the trees. He dives again and
again in his pursuit of folly, even tying stones to his wrists and
ankles to keep himself down while he gathers the reflected fruit. After
his rescue, which he fights against valiantly, as he lies gasping on
the bank of the stream, he sees the fruit on the branches above his
head. It is this same Bladder who is one of the _dramatis personæ_ in
the moon myth, and that is told to women as safely without the limits
of that little learning that is a dangerous thing. Bladder met Rabbit
hunting; and Bladder kept throwing his eye up into the tree-tops to
look for game. The Rabbit watched him enviously, thinking what a saving
of effort it would be if he could do the same thing. Wherefore Bladder
promised to instruct him, telling him to change eyes after using one
four times, but Rabbit did not think that the first time counted, as
that was but a trial. So he lost his eye after throwing it up the fifth
time. And the eye of the rabbit is the moon, and the face seen in the
full moon is the reflection of the rabbit seen in his own eye as we see
ourselves reflected in the eye of a friend if we look closely. The
little girl was wonderfully impressed. She put her hand to her own
eyes, but they were in tight, too tight to throw up to the tree-tops.

Singing Stream also told little Judith that the Great Mystery had shown
truths, hid to man, to the trees, the streams, the hills; and the
clouds that shaped themselves, drifting hither and yon, were the Great
Mystery’s passing thoughts. But he had deprived all these things of
speech, as he did not trust them fully, and they could only speak to
man in dreams, or in some passing mood, when they could communicate to
him the feeling of one of the Great Spirits, and warn man of what was
about to befall him. Judith was not quite four when she took this
memorable drive with her mother, but the impression of these things
abided through all her years. It was to the measureless spaces of
desert loneliness that she learned to bring her sorrows in the days of
her arid youth, and to feel a kinship with all its moods and to hear in
the voice of its silence a never-failing consolation.

And when they had come within a mile of Warren Rodney’s cabin on Elder
Creek, Singing Stream halted and prepared for the great event of
reinstatement. First she made a splendid toilet of purple calico torn
into strips and tied about the waist to simulate the skirts of the
devil woman. Over these she wore a shirt of buckskin, broidered with
beads of many colors, and a necklace of elk teeth, wound twice about
the throat. On her feet she wore new moccasins of tanned elk-hide, and
these, too, were beaded in many colors. Her hair, now braided with
strips of scarlet flannel, hung below the waist. And she walked to
Rodney’s cabin, not as an outgrown mistress, but as the daughter of a
chief. The little Judith held up her head and clung tight to the doll.
She knew that something of moment was about to happen.

The gala trio, Singing Stream, Judith, and Judith’s doll, presented
themselves at Rodney’s house, before which the bride was washing
clothes, the day being fine. Sally, as usual, wore one of the
rose-colored calicoes with the collar turned well in and the sleeves
rolled above the elbows. She washed vigorously, with a steady splashing
of suds. Sally enjoyed this home of her own and all the household
duties appertaining to it. She was singing, and a strand of pale-brown
hair, crinkly as sea-weed, had blown across the rose of her cheek, when
she felt rather than saw a shadow fall across her path, and, glancing
up, she saw facing her the woman whom she had supplanted, and the
solemn-eyed little girl holding tight to her doll. Now, neither woman
knew a word of the other’s speech, but Sally was proficient in the
language of femininity, and she was not at a loss to grasp the
significance of the purple calico, the beaded buckskin shirt, and the
necklace of elk teeth. The half-breed walked as a chief’s daughter to
the woman at the tub, and Sally grew sick and chill despite her white
skin and the gold ring that made Warren Rodney her man in the face of
the law. The dark woman held Judith proudly by the hand, as a sovereign
might carry a sceptre. Judith was her staff of office, her emblem of
authority in the house of Warren Rodney.

Singing Stream held out her hands to Sally in a gesture of appeal—and
blundered. Of the chief’s daughter, walking proudly, Sally was afraid;
but a supplicating half-breed in strips of purple calico, not even
hemmed, was a matter for merriment. Sally put her hands on her hips,
arms akimbo, and laughed a dry cackle. The light in the brown woman’s
eyes, as she looked at the white, was like prairie-fires rolling
forward through darkness. There was no need of a common speech between
them. The whole destiny of woman was in the laugh and the look that
answered it.

And the man they could have murdered for came from the house, an
unheroic figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his
mouth, sullen, angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man
inevitably is when he sniffs a woman’s battle in the air. The bride, at
sight of her husband, took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and
down tumbled her hair. She felt the situation demanded a scene. Rodney,
with a marital brevity hardly to be expected so soon, commanded Sally
to go into the house and to “shut up.”

Then he faced Singing Stream and said to her in her own language: “You
must go away from here. The pale-faced woman is my wife by the white
man’s law—ring and Bible. No Indian marriage about this.”

But the brown woman only pointed to Judith. She asked Rodney had she
not been a good squaw to him.

And Rodney, who at best was but a poltroon, could only repeat: “You got
to keep away from here. It’s the white man’s law—one squaw for one
man.”

From within came the sound of Sally’s lamentation as she called for her
father and brother to take her from the squaw and contamination. Warren
Rodney was a man of few words. It had become his unpleasant duty to
act, and to act quickly. He snatched Judith from her mother and took
her into the house, and he returned with his Winchester, which was not
loaded, to Singing Stream.

“You got to go,” he said, and levelling the Winchester, he repeated the
command. Singing Stream looked at him with the dumb wonder of a forest
thing. “I was a good squaw to you,” she said; and did not even curse
him. And turning, she ran towards the foot-hills, with all the length
of purple calico trailing.

Now Mrs. Rodney, _née_ Tumlin, was but human, and her cup of happiness
as the wife of a “squaw man” was not the brimming beaker she had
anticipated. The expulsion of her predecessor, at such a time, to make
room for her own home-coming, was, it seemed, open to criticism. “The
neighborhood”—it included perhaps five families living in a radius of
as many hundred miles—felt that the Tumlins had established a bad
precedent. A “squaw man” driving out a brown wife to make room for a
white is not a heroic figure. It had been done before, but it would not
hand down well in the traditions of the settling of this great country.
Trespass of law and order, with their swift, red-handed reckoning, were
but moves of the great game of colonization. But to shove out a brown
woman for a white was a mean move. Few stopped at the Rodneys’ ranch,
though it marked the first break in the journey from town to the
gold-mining country. Rodney had fallen from his estate as a pioneer;
his political opinions were unsought in the conclaves that sat and spat
at the stove, when business brought them to the joint saloon and
post-office. The women dealt with the question more openly, scorning
feminine subtlety at this pass as inadequate ammunition. When they met
Mrs. Rodney they pulled aside their skirts and glared. This outrage
against woman it was woman’s work to settle.

Mrs. Rodney, who had no more moral sense than a rabbit, felt that she
was the victim of persecution. She knew she was a good woman. Hadn’t
she a husband? Had there ever been a word against her character? What
was the use of making all that fuss over a squaw? It was not as if she
was a white woman. The injustice of it preyed on the former Miss
Tumlin. She took to the consolations of snuff-dipping and fell from her
pink-and-white estate.

The Tumlin family did not remain long enough in the Black Hill country
to witness Sally’s failure as the wife of a pioneer. The restlessness
of the “settler,” if the paradox be permissible, was in the marrow of
their bones. The makeshifts of the wagon, the adventures of the road,
were the only home they craved. The spring after Sally’s marriage they
set forth for California, the year following for New Mexico, and still
sighed for new worlds to visit. They were happier now that Sally, the
one element of discontent, had been removed from their perennial
journeying by the merciful dispensation of marriage. Old Tumlin, his
wife, and the son gave themselves up more than ever to the day-dreams
of the road, the freedom of the open country, and the spirit of
adventure.

Rodney’s squaw wife was taken in by some neighbors, good folk who were
conversant with all phases of the romance. They stood by her in her
hour of trial, and afterwards continued to keep her as a servant. Her
son Jim grew up with their own children. When he was four years of age
his mother, Singing Stream, died, and Sally persuaded her husband to
take young Jim into their own home, partly as a sop to neighborly
criticism, partly as a salve to her own conscience. Sally had children
of her own, and looked at things differently now from the time when she
fought the squaw for Rodney’s favor.

Jim’s foster-parents were, in truth, glad to part with him. From his
earliest babyhood he had been known as a “limb of Satan.” He was an
Ishmael by every instinct of his being. And Mrs. Warren Rodney, née
Tumlin, felt that in dealing with him, in her capacity of step-mother,
she daily expiated any offence that she might have done to his mother.

Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in
a rocking-chair, dipping snuff—a consolation imported from her former
home—and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his
ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism. He farmed a little, he
raised a little stock, and he drank a great deal of whiskey. Sally
hated the Black Hill country. She felt that it knew too much about her.
The neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family
fortunes. A vague migratory impulse was on her. She wanted to go
somewhere and begin all over again. By dint of persistent nagging she
persuaded her husband to move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the
cattle industry. Those were days when steers, to speak in the cow
language, had “jumped to seventy-five.” The wilderness grew
light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful are the tales still told about
those fat years in cattle-land. It was in those halcyon days of the
Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the range, white with the dust
of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than those procurable at their
clubs in New York.

Nor was it all feasting and merrymaking. A heroic band it was that
battled with the wilderness, riding the range with heat and cold,
starvation and death, and making small pin-pricks in that empty blotch
of the United States map that is marked “Great Alkali Desert” blossom
into settlements. When the last word has been said about the pioneers
of these United States, let the cow-boy be remembered in the universal
toast, that bronzed son of the saddle who lived his little day bravely
and merrily, and whose real heroism is too often forgotten in the
glamour of his own picturesqueness.

Judith was ten years old when her father, his wife, and their children
moved from Dakota—they were not so particular about North and South
Dakota, in those days—to take up a claim on Sweetwater, Wyoming. Judith
gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her
dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring
wretchedness as happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old
friend, Mrs. Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had
been present at the marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who
had always felt a wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the
ceremony and contributing a lace handkerchief to the bride. Her
husband, now Major Atkins, was stationed at Fort Washakie, Wyoming.
Mrs. Atkins happening again on the Rodney family, and her husband
having increased and multiplied his army pay many times over by a
successful venture in cattle, the scheme of Judith’s convent education
was put through by the major’s wife, who had kept her New England
conscience, the discomforts of frontier posts notwithstanding.

So Judith went to the nuns to school, and stayed with them till she was
eighteen. Mrs. Atkins would have adopted her then; but Judith by this
time knew her family history in all its sordid ramifications, and felt
that duty called her to her brother, who had not improved his
unfortunate start in life, though his step-mother did not spoil him for
the staying of the rod.




VII.
Chugg Takes The Ribbons


Chugg, comforted with liquids and stayed with a head-plaster, presented
himself at the Dax ranch just twenty-four hours after he was due. His
mien combined vagueness with hostility, and he harnessed up the stage
that Peter Hamilton had driven over the day before, when his
prospective passengers were looking, with a graphic pantomimic
representation of “take it or leave it.” Under the circumstances, Miss
Carmichael and the fat lady consented to be passengers with much the
same feeling of finality that one might have on embarking for the
planet Mars in an air-ship.

There was, furthermore, a suggestion of last rites in the farewells of
the Daxes, each according to their respective personalities, that was
far from reassuring.

“Here’s some bread and meat and a bottle of cold coffee, if you live to
need it,” was Mrs. Dax’s grim prognostication of accident. Leander,
being of an emotional nature, could scarce restrain his tears—the
advent of the travellers had created a welcome variation in the
monotony of his dutiful routine—he felt all the agitation of parting
with life-long friends. Mary Carmichael and Judith promised to
write—they had found a great deal to say to each other the preceding
evening.

Chugg cracked his whip ominously, the travellers got inside, not daring
to trust themselves to the box.

The journey with the misanthrope was but a repetition of that first
day’s staging—the sage-brush was scarcer, the mountains seemed as far
off as ever, and the outlook was, if possible, more desolate. The entry
in Miss Carmichael’s diary, inscribed in malformed characters as the
stage jolted over ruts and gullies, reads: “I do not mind telling you,
in strictest confidence, ‘Dere Diary’—as the little boy called you—that
when I so lightly severed my connection with civilization, I had no
idea to what an extent I was going in for the prairie primeval. How on
earth does a woman who can write a letter like Mrs. Yellett stand it?
And where on the map of North America is Lost Trail?”

“Land sakes!” regretted the fat lady, “but I do wish I had a piece of
that ‘boy’s favorite’ cake that I had for my lunch the day we left
town. I just ate and ate it ’cause I hadn’t another thing to do. If I
hadn’t been so greedy I could offer him a piece, just to show him that
some women folk have kind hearts, and that the whole sect ain’t like
that Pink.”

“Boy’s favorite,” as adequate compensation for shattered ideals, a
broken heart, and the savings of a lifetime, seemed to Mary Carmichael
inadequate compensation, but she forbore to express her sentiments.

The fat lady had never relaxed her gaze from Chugg’s back since the
stage had started. She peered at that broad expanse of flannel shirt
through the tiny round window, like a careful sailing-master sweeping
the horizon for possible storm-clouds. At every portion of the road
presenting a steep decline she would prod Chugg in the back with the
handle of her ample umbrella, and demand that he let her out, as she
preferred walking. The stage-driver at first complied with these
requests, but when he saw they threatened to become chronic, he would
send his team galloping down grade at a rate to justify her liveliest
fears.

“Do you think you are a-picnicking, that you crave roominating round
these yere solitoodes?” And the misanthrope cracked his whip and
adjured his team with cabalistic imprecations.

“Did you notice if Mrs. Dax giv’ him any cold coffee, same as she did
us?” anxiously inquired the fat lady from her lookout.

Mary hadn’t noticed.

“He’s drinking something out of a brown bottle—seems to relish it a
heep more’n he would cold coffee,” reported the watch. “Hi there! Hi!
Mr. Chugg!” The stage-driver, thinking it was merely a request to be
allowed to walk, continued to drive with one hand and hold the brown
bottle with the other. But even his too solid flesh was not proof
against the continued bombardment of the umbrella handle.

“Um-m-m,” he grunted savagely, applying a watery eye to the round
window.

“Nothing,” answered the fat lady, quite satisfied at having her worst
fears confirmed.

Chugg returned to his driving, as one not above the weakness of seeing
and hearing things.

“’Tain’t coffee.”

“Could you smell it?” questioned Mary, anxiously.

“You never can tell that way, when they are plumb pickled in it, like
him.”

“Then how did you know it wasn’t coffee?”

“His eyes had fresh watered.”

Mary collapsed under this expert testimony. “What are we going to do
about it?”

“Appeal to him as a gentleman,” said the fat lady, not without dramatic
intonation.

“You appeal,” counselled Mary; “I saw him look at you admiringly when
you were walking down that steep grade.”

“Is that so?” said the fat lady, with a conspicuous lack of
incredulity; and she put her hand involuntarily to her frizzes.

This time she did not trust to the umbrella-handle as a medium of
communication between the stage-driver and herself. Putting her hand
through the port-hole she grasped Chugg’s arm—the bottle arm—with no
uncertain grip.

“Why, Mr. Chugg, this yere place is getting to be a regular summer
resort; think of two ladies trusting themselves to your protection and
travelling out over this great lonesome desert.”

Chugg’s mind, still submerged in local Lethe waters, grappled in
silence with the problem of the feminine invasion, and then he muttered
to himself rather than to the fat lady, “Nowhere’s safe from ’em; women
and house-flies is universally prevailing.”

The fat lady dropped his arm as if it had been a brand. “He’s no
gentleman. As for Mountain Pink, she was drove to it.”

All that day they toiled over sand and sage-brush; the sun hung like a
molten disk, paling the blue of the sky; the grasshoppers kept up their
shrill chirping—and the loneliness of that sun-scorched waste became a
tangible thing.

Chugg sipped and sipped, and sometimes swore and sometimes muttered,
and as the day wore on his driving not only became a challenge to the
endurance of the horses, but to the laws of gravitation. He lashed them
up and down grade, he drove perilously close to shelving declivities,
and sometimes he sang, with maudlin mournfulness:

“‘Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.’
The words came low and mournfully
From the cold, pale lips of a youth who lay
On his dying couch at the close of day.”


The fat lady reminded him that he was a gentleman and that he was
driving ladies; she threatened him with her son on Sweetwater, who
began, in the maternal chronicles, by being six feet in his stockings,
and who steadily grew, as the scale of threats increased, till he
reached the altitude of six feet four, growing hourly in height and
fierceness.

But Chugg gave no heed, and once he sang the “Ballad of the
Mule-Skinner,” with what seemed to both terrified passengers an awful
warning of their overthrow:

“As I was going down the road,
With a tired team and a heavy load,
I cracked my whip and the leaders sprung—
The fifth chain broke, and the wheelers hung,
The off-horse stepped on the wagon tongue—”


This harrowing ballad was repeated with accompanying Delsarte at
intervals during the afternoon, but as Mary and the fat lady managed to
escape without accident, they began to feel that they bore charmed
lives.

At sundown they came to the road-ranch of Johnnie Dax, bearing
Leander’s compliments as a secret despatch. The outward aspect of the
place was certainly an awful warning to trustful bachelors who make
acquaintances through the columns of _The Heart_ and Hand. The house
stood solitary in that scourge of desolation. The windows and doors
gaped wide like the unclosed eyes of a dead man on a battle-field.
Chugg halloed, and an old white horse put his head out of the door,
shook it upward as if in assent, then trotted off.

“That’s Jerry, and he’s the intelligentest animal I ever see,” remarked
the stage-driver, sobering up to Jerry’s good qualities, and presently
Johnnie Dax and the white horse appeared together from around the
corner of the house.

This Mr. Dax was almost an exact replica of the other, even to the
apologetic crook in the knees and a certain furtive way of glancing
over the shoulder as if anticipating missiles.

“Pshaw now, ladies! why didn’t you let me know that you was coming? and
I’d have tidied up the place and organized a few dried-apple pies.”

“Good house-keepers don’t wait for company to come before they get to
their work,” rebukefully commented the fat lady.

Mr. Dax, recognizing the voice of authority, seized a towel and began
to beat out flies, chickens, and dogs, who left the premises with the
ill grace of old residents. Two hogs, dormant, guarded either side of
the door-step and refused so absolutely to be disturbed by the flicking
of the towel that one was tempted to look twice to assure himself that
they were not the fruits of the sculptor’s chisel.

“Where’s your wife?” sternly demanded the fat lady.

“Oh, my Lord! I presume she’s dancin’ a whole lot over to Ervay. She
packed her ball-gown in a gripsack and lit out of here two days ago,
p’inting that way. A locomotive couldn’t stop her none if she got a
chance to go cycloning round a dance.”

In the mean time, the two hogs having failed to grasp the fact that
they were _de trop_, continued to doze.

“Come, girls, get up,” coaxed Johnnie, persuasively. “Maude, I don’t
know when I see you so lazy. Run on, honey—run on with Ethel.” For
Ethel, the piebald hog, finally did as she was bid.

Mary Carmichael could not resist the temptation of asking how the hogs
happened to have such unusual names.

“To tell the truth, I done it to aggravate my wife. When I finds myself
a discard in the matrimonial shuffle, I figgers on a new deal that’s
going to inclood one or two anxieties for my lady partner—to which
end—viz., namely, I calls one hawg Ethel and the other hawg Maude,
allowing to my wife that they’re named after lady friends in the East.
Them lady friends might be the daughters of Ananias and Sapphira, for
all they ever happened, but they answers the purpose of riling her same
as if they were eating their three squares daily. I have hopes,
everything else failing, that she may yet quit dancing and settle down
to the sanctity of the home out of pure jealousy of them two proxy
hawgs.”

“I can just tell you this,” interrupted the fat lady: “I don’t enjoy
occupying premises after hawgs, no matter how fashionable you name ’em.
A hawg’s a hawg, with manners according, if it’s named after the
President of the United States or the King of England.”

“That’s just what I used to think, marm, of all critters before I
enjoyed that degree of friendliness that I’m now proud to own. Take
Jerry now, that old white horse—why, me and him is just like brothers.
When I have to leave the kid to his lonesome infant reflections and go
off to chop wood, I just call Jerry in, and he assoomes the
responsibility of nurse like he was going to draw wages for it.”

“I reckon there’s faults on both sides,” said the fat lady,
impartially. “No natural woman would leave her baby to a horse to mind
while she went off dancing. And no natural man would fill his house
full of critters, and them with highfalutin names. Take my advice, turn
’em out.”

Mary did not wait to hear the continuation of the fat lady’s advice.
She went out on the desert to have one last look at the west. The sun
had taken his plunge for the night, leaving his royal raiment of
crimson and gold strewn above the mountain-tops.

Her sunset reflections were presently interrupted by the fat lady, who
proposed that they should walk till Mr. Dax had tidied up his house,
observing, with logic, that it did not devolve on them to clean the
place, since they were paying for supper and lodging. They had gone but
a little way when sudden apprehension caused the fat lady to grasp
Mary’s arm. Miss Carmichael turned, expecting mountain-lions,
rattlesnakes, or stage-robbers, but none of these casualties had come
to pass.

“Land sakes! Here we be parading round the prairie, and I never found
out how that man cooked his coffee.”

“What difference does it make, if we can drink it?”

“The ways of men cooks is a sealed book to you, I reckon, or you
wouldn’t be so unconcerned—’specially in the matter of coffee. All men
has got the notion that coffee must be b’iled in a bag, and if they
’ain’t got a regular bag real handy, they take what they can get. Oh,
I’ve caught ’em,” went on the fat lady, darkly, “b’iling coffee in
improvisations that’d turn your stomach.”

“Yes, yes,” Mary hastily agreed, hoping against hope that she wasn’t
going to be more explicit.

“And they are so cute about it, too; it’s next to impossible to catch
’em. You ask a man if he b’iles his coffee loose or tight, and he’ll
declare he b’iles it loose, knowing well how suspicious and prone to
investigate is the female mind. But you watch your chance and take a
look in the coffee-pot, and maybe you’ll find—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard—”

“I’ve seen—”

“Let’s hurry,” implored Mary.

“Have you made your coffee yet?” inquired the fat lady.

“Yes, marm,” promptly responded Johnnie.

“I hope you b’iled it in a bag—it clears it beautiful, a bag does.”

Johnnie shifted uneasily. “No, marm, I b’iles it loose. You see, bags
ain’t always handy.”

The fat lady plied her eye as a weapon. No Dax could stand up before an
accusing feminine eye. He quailed, made a grab for the coffee-pot, and
rushed with it out into the night.

“What did I tell you?” she asked, with an air of triumph.

Johnnie returned with the empty coffee-pot. “To tell the truth, marm, I
made a mistake. I ’ain’t made the coffee. I plumb forgot it. P’raps you
could be prevailed on to assist this yere outfit to coffee while I
organizes a few sody-biscuits.”

After supper, when the fat lady was so busy talking “goo-goo” language
to the baby as to be oblivious of everything else, Mary Carmichael took
the opportunity to ask Johnnie if he knew anything about Lost Trail.
The name of her destination had come to sound unpleasantly ominous in
the ears of the tired young traveller, and she feared that her inquiry
did not sound as casual as she tried to have it. Nor was Johnnie’s
candid reply reassuring.

“It’s a pizen-mean country, from all I ever heard tell. The citizens
tharof consists mainly of coyotes and mountain-lions, with a few
rattlers thrown in just to make things neighborly. This yere
place”—waving his hand towards the arid wastes which night was making
more desolate—“is a summer resort, with modern improvements, compared
to it.”

Mary screwed her courage to a still more desperate point, and inquired
if Mr. Dax knew a family named Yellett living in Lost Trail.

“Never heard of no family living there, excepting the bluff at family
life maintained by the wild beasts before referred to. See here, miss,
I ain’t makin’ no play to inquire into your affairs, but you ain’t
thinkin’ o’ visitin’ Lost Trail, be you?”

“Perhaps,” said Mary, faintly; and then she, too, talked “goo-goo” to
the baby.




VIII.
The Rodneys At Home


All that long and never-to-be-forgotten night the stage lurched through
the darkness with Mary Carmichael the solitary passenger. The fat lady
had warned Johnnie Dax that he was on no account to replenish Chugg’s
flask, if he had the wherewithal for replenishment on the premises.
Moreover, she threatened Dax with the fury of her son should he fail in
this particular; and Johnnie, hurt to the quick by the unjust suspicion
that he could fail so signally in his duty to a lady, not only refused
to replenish the flask, but threatened Chugg with a conditional
vengeance in the event of accident befalling the stage. It was with a
partially sobered and much-threatened stage-driver, therefore, that
Mary continued her journey after the supper at Johnnie Dax’s, but the
knowledge of it brought scant reassurance, and it is doubtful if the
red stage ever harbored any one more wakeful than the pale, tired girl
who watched all the changes from dark to dawn at the stage window.

Once or twice she caught a glimpse of distant camp-fires burning and
knew that some cattle outfit was camped there for the night; and once
they drove so close that she could hear the cow-boys’ voices, enriched
and mellowed by distance, borne to them on the cool, evening wind. It
gave a sense of security to know that these big-hearted, manly lads
were within call, and she watched the dwindling spark of their
camp-fires and strained her ears to catch the last note of their
singing, with something of the feeling of severed comradeship. Range
cattle, startled from sleep by the stage, scrambled to their feet and
bolted headlong in the blind impulse of panic, their horns and the
confused massing of their bodies showing in sharp silhouette against
the horizon for a moment, then all would settle into quiet again. There
was no moon that night, but the stars were sown broadcast—softly yellow
stars, lighting the darkness with a shaded luster, like lamps veiled in
pale-yellow gauze. The chill electric glitter of the stars, as we know
it from between the roofs of high houses, this world of far-flung
distance knows not. There the stars are big and still, like the eyes of
a contented woman.

The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking
of a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote
would yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way
that made Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale
streak of dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like
jagged rocks heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the
whole dread picture brought before her one of Vedder’s pictures that
hung in the shabby old library at home.

They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage.
She knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had
left the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now
toiled over the sand and desolation were apparently brown. She could
not be certain that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the
sand and desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of
anything. Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries
in the stage, eliminated any certainty as to anything. She could only
sit huddled into a heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.

Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner. He drove rigidly as an
automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the “lightning” when
it was bottled. Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that
separated him from his passenger, and asked questions relative to her
comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than
monosyllables. As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage
creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in
endless journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one
of those maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate
things are given in seasons of nervous tension. This time it was: “All
the world’s—a stage—creak—screech—all—the world’s a
stage—creak—screech!” over and over till Mary found herself fast
succumbing to the hypnotic effect of the constant repetition, listening
for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness of overwrought nerves, when
the stage-driver broke the spell with, “This here stage gets to naggin’
me along about here. She’s hungry for her axle-grease—that’s what ails
her.”

“I suppose,” Mary roused herself to say, “you have quite a feeling of
comradeship for the stage.”

“Me and Clara”—the stage had this name painted on the side—“have been
travelling together nigh onto four year. And while there’s times that I
would prefer a greater degree of reciprocity, these yere silent
companions has their advantages. Why, compare Clara to them female
blizzards—the two Mrs. Daxes—and you see Clara’s good p’ints immejit.
Yes, miss, the thirst-quenchers are on me if either one of the Dax boys
wouldn’t be glad to swap, but I’d have to be a heap more locoed than I
am now to consent to the transaction.”

At sunset the interminable monotony of the wilderness was broken by a
house of curious architecture, the like of which the tired young
traveller had never seen before, and whose singular candor of design
made her doubt the evidence of her own thoroughly exhausted faculties.
The house seemed to consist of a series of rooms thrown, or rather
blown, together by some force of nature rather than by formal design of
builder or carpenter. The original log-cabin of this composite dwelling
looked better built, more finished, neater of aspect than those they
had previously stopped at in crossing the Desert. Springing from the
main building, like claws from a crustacean, were a series of rooms
minus either side walls or flooring. Indeed, they might easily have
passed for porches of more than usually commodious size had it not been
for the beds, bureaus, chairs, stove with attendant pots, kettles, and
supper in the course of preparation. Seen from any vantage-point in the
surrounding country, the effect was that of an interior on the
stage—the background of some homely drama where pioneer life was being
realistically depicted. The _dramatis persona_ who occupied the centre
of the stage when Mary Carmichael drove up was an elderly woman in a
rocking-chair. She was dressed in a faded pink calico gown, limp and
bedraggled, whose color brought out the parchment-like hue and texture
of her skin in merciless contrast. Perhaps because she still harbored
illusions about the perishable quality of her complexion, which gave
every evidence of having borne the brunt of merciless desert suns,
snows, blizzards, and the ubiquitous alkali dust of all seasons, she
wore a pink sun-bonnet, though the hour was one past sundown, and
though she sat beneath her own roof-tree, even if lacking the
protection of four walls. From the corner of her mouth protruded a
snuff-brush, so constantly in this accustomed place that it had come to
be regarded by members of her family as part and parcel of her
attire—the first thing assumed in the morning, the last thing laid
aside at night. Mary Carmichael had little difficulty in recognizing
Judith Rodney’s step-mother, _née_ Tumlin—she who had been the heroine
of the romance lately recorded.

Mrs. Rodney’s interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced
in the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and
forth in place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear
the hours away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active
commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few
inches of her. Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more
favorable to enunciation, she said: “Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett’s
gov’ment, ain’t ye?” There was something threatening in her aspect, as
if the office of governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging
quality.

“Government?” repeated Mary, vaguely, her head still rumbling with the
noise and motion of the stage; “I’m afraid I hardly understand.”

“Ain’t you-uns goin’ to teach the Yellett outfit ther spellin’,
writin’, and about George Washington, an’ how the Yankees kem along
arter he was in his grave an’ fit us and broke up the kentry so we had
ter leave our home in Tennessee an’ kem to this yere outdacious place,
where nobody knows the diffunce between aig-bread an’ corn-dodger? I
war a Miss Tumlin from Tennessee.”

The rocking-chair now began to recover its accustomed momentum. This
much-heralded educational expert was far from terrifying. Indeed, to
Mrs. Rodney’s hawklike gaze, that devoured every visible item of Mary’s
extremely modest travelling-dress, there was nothing so very wonderful
about “the gov’ment from the East.” With a deftness compatible only
with long practice, Mrs. Rodney now put a foot on the round of an
adjoining chair and shoved it towards Mary Carmichael in hospitable
pantomime, never once relaxing her continual rocking the meantime. Mary
took the chair, and Mrs. Rodney, after freshening up the snuff-brush
from a small, tin box in her lap, put spurs to her rocking-chair, so to
speak, and started off at a brisk canter.

“I ’low it’s mighty queer you-uns don’t recognize the job you-uns kem
out yere to take, when I call it by name.” From the sheltering flap of
the pink sun-bonnet she turned a pair of black eyes full of
ill-concealed suspicion. “Miz Yellett givin’ herself as many airs ’bout
hirin’ a gov’ment ’s if she wuz goin’ to Congress. Queer you don’t know
whether you be one or not!” She withdrew into the sun-bonnet, muttering
to herself. She could not be more than fifty, Mary thought, but her
habit of muttering and exhibiting her depopulated gums while she was in
the act of revivifying the snuff-brush gave her a cronish aspect.

A babel of voices came from the open-faced room on the opposite side of
the house corresponding to the one in which Mary and Mrs. Rodney were
sitting. Apparently supper was being prepared by some half-dozen young
people, each of whom thought he or she was being imposed upon by the
others. “Hand me that knife.” “Git it yourself.” “I’ll tell maw how you
air wolfing down the potatoes as fast as I can fry ’em.” “Go on,
tattle-tale.” This was the repartee, mingled with the hiss of frying
meat, the grinding of coffee, the thumping sound made by bread being
hastily mixed in a wooden bowl standing on a wooden table. The babel
grew in volume. Dogs added to it by yelping emotionally when the smell
of the newly fried meat tempted them too near the platter and some one
with a disengaged foot at his disposal would kick them out of doors.
Personalities were exchanged more freely by members of the family, and
the meat hissed harder as it was newly turned. “Laws-a-massy!” muttered
Mrs. Rodney; and then, shoving back the sun-bonnet, she lifted her
voice in a shrill, feminine shriek:

“Eudory! Eu-dory! You-do-ry!”

A Hebe-like creature, blond and pink-cheeked, in a blue-checked apron
besmeared with grease and flour, came sulkily into her mother’s
presence. Seeing Mary Carmichael, she grasped the skirt of the greasy
apron with the sleight of hand of a prestidigitateur and pleated it
into a single handful. Her manner, too, was no slower of
transformation. The family sulks were instantly replaced by a company
bridle, aided and abetted by a company simper. “I didn’t know the stage
was in yet, maw. I been talking to Iry.”

“This here be Miz Yellett’s gov’ment. Maybe she’d like to pearten up
some before she eats.” She started the rocking-chair at a gallop, to
signify to her daughter that she washed her hands of further
responsibility. Being proficient in the sign language of Mrs. Rodney’s
second self, as indeed was every member of the family, Eudora led Mary
to a bench placed in one of the rooms enjoying the distinction of a
side wall, and indicated a family toilet service, which displayed every
indication of having lately seen active service. A roll-towel, more
frankly significant of the multitude of the Rodneys than had been the
babel of voices, a discouraged fragment of comb, a tin basin, a
slippery atom of soap, these Eudora proffered with an unction worthy of
better things. “I declare Mist’ Chugg have scarce left any soap, an’ I
don’t believe thar’s ’nother bit in the house.” Eudora’s accent was but
faintly reminiscent of her mother’s strong Smoky Mountain dialect, as a
crude feature is sometimes softened in the second generation. It was
not unpleasing on her full, rosy mouth. The girl had the seductiveness
of her half-sister, Judith, without a hint of Judith’s spiritual
quality.

Mary told her not to mind about the soap, and went to fetch her
hand-bag, which, consistent with the democratic spirit of its
surroundings, was resting against a clump of sage-brush, whither it had
been lifted by Chugg. Miss Carmichael’s individual toilet service,
which was neither handsome nor elaborate, impressed Eudora far more
potently in ranking Mary as a personage than did her dignity of office
as “gov’ment.”

“I reckon you-uns must have seen Sist’ Judy up to Miz Dax’s. I hope she
war lookin’ right well.” There was in the inquiry an unmistakable note
of pride. The connection was plainly one to be flaunted. Judith, with
her gentle bearing and her simple, convent accomplishments, was plainly
the _grande dame_ of the family. Eudora had now divested herself of the
greasy, flour-smeared apron, flinging it under the wash-bench with a
single all-sufficient movement, while Mary’s look was directed towards
her dressing-bag. In glancing up to make some remark about Judith, Mary
was confronted by a radiant apparition whose lilac calico skirts looked
fresh from the iron.

At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden,
running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with
the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the
direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again
in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention
was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood
erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter
of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose
keen glance and slightly grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual
labor. The head, and face were finely modelled. Unless nature had
fashioned them in some vagrant, prankish mood, such elegance of line
betokened prior generations in which gentlemen and scholars had played
some part—the vagabond scion of a good family, perhaps. A multitude of
such had grafted on the pioneer stock of the West, under names that
carried no significance in the places whence they came.

Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep,
on the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of
deeper significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a
curiously ambiguous effect of a fine head modelled by a ’prentice hand;
a lady’s copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first
lessons, might approximate it.

A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost institutional
proportions. There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin
union, strapping lads and lasses all of them, with more than a common
dower of lusty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the
perishable iridescence of youth. There was Frémont, named for the
explorer-soldier; there was Orlando, named from his mother’s vague,
idle musings over paper-backed literature at certain “unchancy”
seasons; there was Richards, named from pure policy, for a local great
man of whom Warren Rodney had anticipated a helping hand at the time;
there was Eudora, whose nominal origin was uncertain, unless it bore
affiliation to that of Orlando; there was Sadie, thus termed to avoid
the painful distinctions of “old Sally” and “young Sally”; and, lastly,
like a postscript, came Dan—with him, fancy, in the matter of names,
seemed to have failed. Dan was now six, a plump little caricature of a
man in blue overalls, which, as they had descended to him from Richards
in the nature of an heirloom, reached high under his armpits and
shortened the function of his suspenders to the vanishing point.

Eudora was now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted
her with a surprising precocity. Eudora knew her value and meant to
make the most of it. Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she
expected more than a “home of her own.” To-night four suitors sat at
table with Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it. Any
one of the four would have cheerfully murdered the remaining three had
opportunity presented itself. Supper was a mockery to them, a Barmecide
feast. Each watched his rivals—and Eudora. This was a matter of life
and death. There was no time for food. The girl revelled in the
situation to the full of her untaught, unthinking, primitive nature.
She gave the incident a tighter twist by languishing at them in turns.
She smiled, she sighed, she drove them mad by taking crescent bites out
of a slice of bread and exhibiting the havoc of her little, white teeth
with a delectably dainty gluttony.

Her mother, mumbling her supper with toothless impotency, renewed her
youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the
rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw
to the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort
Eudora was to her and how handy she was about the house.

Warren Rodney supported the air of an exile at his own table. Beyond a
preliminary greeting to his daughter’s guests, he said nothing. His
family, in their dealings with him, seemed to accord him the exemptions
of extreme age. He ate with the enthusiasm of a man to whom meals have
become the main business in life.

“How’s your mine up to Bad Water comin’ along, Iry?” Orlando inquired,
not from any hospitable interest in Ira’s claim, but because he had
sundry romantic interests in that neighborhood and hoped to make use of
the young prospector’s interest in his sister by securing an invitation
to return with him. Ira regarded the inquiry in the light of a special
providence. Here was his chance to impress Eudora with the splendor of
his prospects and at the same time smite the claims of his rivals, and
behold! a brother of his lady had led the way.

Ira cleared his throat. “They tell me she air like to yield a million
any day.” At this Eudora gave him the wealth of her eyes, and her
mother reached across two of the glowering suitors and dropped a hot
flapjack on his plate.

“Who sez that she air likely to yield a million any day?” inquired Ben
Swift, openly flouting such prophecy. “Yes, who sez it?” inquired Hawks
and Taylor, joining forces for the overthrow of the common enemy.

“‘They sez’ is easy talkin’, shore ’nuff,” mumbled Mrs. Rodney, as she
helped herself to butter with her own knife.

“A sharp from the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, he said it, and
he has taken back speciments with him.”

“Ye can’t keep lackings from freightin’ round speciments—naw, sir, ye
can’t, not till the fool-killer has finished his job.” Ben Swift
charged the table with the statement as the prosecution subtly appeals
to the high grade of intelligence on the part of the jury. The point
told. Eudora, wavering in her donation of hot flapjacks, gave them to
Ben Swift.

Hawks now leaned across the table with a sinuous, beguiling motion,
and, extending his long neck towards the prospector, with the air of a
turkey-gobbler about to peck, he crooned, softly: “Ira, it’s a heap
risky puttin’ your faith in maverick sharps that trail around the
country, God-a’mightying it, renaming little, old rocks into precious
stones, seein’ gold mines in every gopher-hole they come to. They names
your backyard and the rocks appertainin’ thereunto a heap fashionable,
and like as not some sucker gives him good money to float the trash
back East.”

Mrs. Rodney, whose partisanship in any discussion was analogous to the
position of a hen perching on a fence unable to decide on which side to
flutter, was visibly impressed by Hawks’s presentation of the case.
Looking towards her daughter from under the eaves of her sun-bonnet,
she “’lowed she had hearn that Bad Water was hard on the skin, an’ that
it warn’t much of a place arter all. Folks over thar war mostly
half-livers.”

Ira, now losing all semblance of policy at being thus grievously put
down by his possible mother-in-law, “reckoned that herdin’ sheep over
to the Basin was a heap easier on the skin than livin’ in a comf’table
house over to Bad Water”—this as a fling at Hawks, who herded a small
bunch of sheep “over in the Basin.”

“Ai-yi,” openly scoffed the former Miss Tumlin; “talk’s cheap before—”
She would have considered it indelicate to supply the word “marriage,”
but by breaking off her sentence before she came to the pith of it she
continued to maintain the proprieties, and at the same time conveyed to
her audience that she was too old and experienced to permit any
fledgling from her nest to be caught, for want of a warning, by such
obvious ante-matrimonial chaff as fair promises.

“Laws a massy!” she continued, reminiscently, working her toothless jaw
to free it from an escaped splinter from the snuff-brush. “When me an’
paw war keepin’ comp’ny, satin warn’t good enough for me. He lowed I
wuz to have half creation. Sence we wuz married he ’ain’t never found
time, endurin’ all these years, to build me a bird-house.”

The unbuilt bird-house was the Banquo’s ghost at the Rodney board, Mrs.
Rodney hearkening back to it in and out of season. If the family made
merry over a chance windfall of game or fresh vegetables, a prospect of
possible employment for one of the boys, a donation of money from
Judith, Mrs. Rodney remembered the unbuilt bird-house and indulged
herself to the full of melancholy. It is not improbable that, if she
had been asked to name the chiefest disappointment of her wretched
married life, she would have mentioned the bird-house that was never
built.

At mention of it Warren Rodney murmured broken, deprecatory excuses.
His dull eyes nervously travelled about the table for some one to make
excuses for him. The family broke into hearty peals of laughter; the
tragedy of the first generation had grown to be the unfailing source of
merriment for the second.

“Maw,” began Orlando, “the reason you don’t get no bird-house built out
hyear is that they ain’t no birds. We have offered time and time again
to build you a house fo’ buzzuds, they bein’ the only birds
hyearabouts, but you ’low that you ain’t fav’ble to tamin’ ’em.”

“I wuz raised in Tennessee, an’ we-uns had a house for martins made
out’n gourds, an’ it was pearty.” The pride with which she repeated
this particular claim to honor in an alien land never diminished with
repetition. As she advanced further through the dim perspective of
years, the little mountain town in Tennessee became more and more the
centre of cultivation and civic importance. The desolate cabin that she
had left for the interminable journey westward was recalled
flatteringly through the hallowing mists of time. The children, by
reason of these chronicles, had grown to regard their mother as a sort
of princess in exile.

“Mrs. Rodney”—Swift leaned towards her and whispered something in her
ear. She regarded him tentatively, then grinned. At her time of life,
why should she put faith in the promises of men? “You fix it up, an’
you get your bird-house,” was the conclusion of his sentence.

While this discussion had been in progress the viands had not been
neglected except by such members of the company as had been bereft of
appetite by loftier emotions—in consequence of which the table appeared
to have sustained a visitation of seventeen-year locusts. Eudora, ever
economic in the value she placed not only upon herself but her
environment, proposed to her guests that they should wash the dishes,
an art in which they were by no means deficient, being no exception to
the majority of range bachelors in their skill in homely pursuits. And
thus it came to pass that Eudora’s suitors, swathed in aprons, meekly
washed dishes shoulder to shoulder, while their souls craved the
performance of valorous deeds.

As this was the last stage station on the way to Lost Trail, Mary
Carmichael was perforce obliged to content herself till Mrs. Yellett
should call or send for her. After supper, Chugg, with fresh horses to
the stage, left Rodney’s, apparently for some port in that seemingly
pathless sea of foot-hills. That there should be trails and defined
routes over this vast, unvaried stretch of space seemed more wonderful
to Mary than the charted high-roads of the Atlantic. The foot-hills
seemed to have grown during the long journey till they were foot-hills
no longer; they had come to be the smaller peaks of the towering range
that had formed the spine of the desert. The air, that seemed to have
lost some of its crystalline quality on the flat stretches of the
plains, was again sparkling and heady in the clean hill country. It
stirred the pulses like some rare vintage, some subtle distillation of
sun-warmed fruit that had been mellowing for centuries.

Very lonely seemed the Rodney home among the great company of
mountains. A brooding desolation had settled on it at close of day, and
all the laughter and light footsteps and gayly ringing voices of the
young folk could not dispel the feeling of being adrift in a tiny shell
on the black waters of some unknown sea; or thus it seemed to the
stranger within their gate.

Mrs. Rodney retired within the flap of her sun-bonnet after the evening
meal, settling herself in the rocking-chair as if it were some sort of
conveyance. Her family, who might have told the hour of day or her
passing mood by the action of the chair, knew by her pacific gait that
she would lament the unbuilt bird-house no more that night. The
snuff-brush, newly replenished from the tin box, kept perfect time to
the motion of the chair. With the lady of the house it was one of the
brief seasons of passing content vouchsafed by an ample meal and a good
digestion.

Warren Rodney took down a gun from the wall and began to clean it. His
hands had the fumbling, indefinite movements, the obscure action,
directed by a brain already begun to crumble. His industry with the gun
was of a part with the impotent dawdling in the garden. His eyes would
seek for the rag or the bottle of oil in a dull, glazed way, and,
having found them, he would forget the reason of his quest. Not once
that evening had they rested on his wife or any member of his family.
He had shown no interest in any of the small happenings of home, the
frank rivalry of Eudora’s suitors, the bickerings of the girls and boys
over the division of household labor. The one thing that had
momentarily aroused his somnolent intelligence was a revival of his
wife’s plaint anent the unbuilt bird-house. That, and a certain furtive
anxiety during supper lest his daughter Eudora should forget to keep
his plate piled high, were the only signs of a participation in the
life about him.

From one of the rooms that opened to the world like a stage to the
audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil. The last faint
amethystine haze on the mountains was deepening. They towered about the
valley where the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the
pitiful grasp of these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the
taller of the peaks still held the high lights. But all the valleys and
the spaces between the mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the
crazy house invading the great company of mountains, penetrating
brazenly to the very threshold of their silent councils, seemed but a
pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some possible giant tread. The
ill-adjusted family, disputing every inch of ground with the
wilderness, became invested with a dignity quite out of keeping with
its achievements. Their very weaknesses and vanities, old Sally still
clinging to her sun-bonnet and her limp rose-colored skirts, an eternal
requiem for the dead and gone complexion, lost the picturesqueness of
the pioneer and ranked as universal qualities, admissible in the
austerest setting. Perhaps in some far distant council of the Daughters
of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of Rodney would
unctuously announce: “My great-great-grandmother was a Miss Tumlin of
Tennessee; great-great-grandfather’s first wife had been a Sioux squaw.
Isn’t it interesting and romantic?”

Eudora now came to her mother with great news. Hawks had taken the
first opportunity of being alone with her to tell her of Jim’s release
from jail and of his abortive encounter with Simpson in the
eating-house. He had not deferred the telling from any feeling of
reticence regarding the disclosure of family affairs before strangers.
News travels in the desert by some unknown agency. Twenty-four hours
after a thing happened it would be safe to assume that every cow and
sheep outfit in a radius of three hundred miles would be discussing it
over their camp-fires; and this long before there was an inch of
telegraph wire or a railroad tire in the country. Hawks had merely
reserved the news for Eudora’s private ear because he hoped thus to
gain an advantage over his three rivals.

“Ai-yi!” said old Sally, sharply, and the chair came to an abrupt
stand-still. “In the name o’ Heaven, how kem they to let him out?” Mrs.
Rodney’s knowledge of the law was of the vaguest; and if incarceration
would keep a prisoner out of more grievous trouble, she could not
understand giving him his freedom. To her the case was analogous to
releasing a child from the duress of a corner and turning him loose to
play with matches. “How kem they to let him out?” she repeated, the
still rocking-chair conveying the impersonal dignity of the pulpit or
the justice-seat. “I ’ain’t hearn tell of so pearty a couple as the
jail an’ Jim in years.”

The meaning that she put into her words belied their harsh face-value.
With Jim in jail, her mind was comparatively at rest about him. She
knew he had been branding other men’s cattle since the destruction of
his sheep, and she knew the fate of cattle-thieves, and that Jim would
be no exception to the rule. With her purely instinctive maternity, she
had been fond of Jim. He had been one more boy to mother. She harbored
no ill-feeling towards him that he was not her own. Moreover, she
wanted no gallows-tree intermingled with the annals of her family. It
suited her convenience at this particular time that Jim should stay in
jail. That he had been given his freedom loosed the phials of her
condemnation on the incompetents that released him.

“I ’low they wuz grudgin’ him the mouthful they fed to him, that they
ack so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu’n a man out to get hisself
hanged. An’ Jim never wuz a hearty eater. He never seemed to relish his
food, even when he wuz a growin’ kid.”

A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast
solitudes above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling
constellation before the girl and her mother. “It’s a warning!”
shivered the old woman. “Some’um’s bound to happen.” She began to rock
herself slowly. The thing she dreaded had already come to pass in her
imagination. Jim a free man was Jim a dead man. He was so dead that
already his step-mother was going on with a full acceptance of the
idea. She reviewed her relationship to him. No, she had nothing to
blame herself for. He had been more troublesome than any of her own
children and for that reason she had been more liberal with the rod.
And yet—the face of the squaw rose before her, wraithlike, accusing!
“Ai-yi!” she said; but this time her favorite expletive was hardly more
than a sigh.

“I mind Jim when he first kem to us,” she said, more to herself than to
Eudora, who sat at her feet. The impending tragedy in the family had
robbed her of all the joy in her suitors. They sat on a bench on the
opposite side of the house, divided by the very nature of their
interests yet companions in misery.

“He wuz scarce four, an’ yet he had never been broke of the habit of
sucking his thumb. Ef he’d ben my child, I’d a lammed it out’n him
before he’d a seen two, but seem’ he was aged for an infant havin’ such
practices, I tried to shame him out’n it. But, Lord a massy, men folks
is hard to shame even at four. I hissed at him like a gyander every
time I seen him do it. Now I’d a knowed better—I’d a sewed it up in a
pepper rag.”

“What’s suckin’ his thumb as an infant got to do with his gettin’
lynched now?” demanded Eudora, with the scepticism of the second
generation.

“Wait till you-uns has children of your own,” sniffed her mother, from
the assured position of maternal experience, “an’ see the infant that’s
allowed to suck its thumb has the makin’s in him of a felon or a
unfortunit.” She rocked a slow accompaniment to her dismal, prophecy.

Eudora’s eyes, big with wonder, were fixed on the crouching flank of a
distant mountain. Her mother broke the silence. Not often did they
speak thus intimately. Old Sally belonged to that class of mothers who
feel a pride in their reticent dealings with their daughters, and who
consider the management of all affairs of the heart peculiarly the
province of youth and inexperience.

But to-night she was prompted by a force beyond her ken to speak to the
girl. “Eudory, in pickin’ out one of them men,” she jerked her thumb
towards the opposite side of the house, “git one tha’s clar o’ the
trick o’ stampedin’ round other wimming. It’s bound to kem back to ye,
same as counterfeit money.”

Eudora giggled. She was of an age when the fascinations of curiosity as
to the unknown male animal prompt lavish conjecture. “I ’lowed they all
stampeded.”

“Yes,” leered the old woman—and she grinned the whole horrid length of
her empty gums—“the most of ’em does. But you must shet your eyes to
it. The moment they know you swallow it, they’s wuthless, like horses
that has run away once.”

“Hark!” said Eudora. “Ain’t that wheels?”

“It be,” answered her mother. “It be that old Ma’am Yellett after her
gov’ment.”




IX.
Mrs. Yellett And Her “Gov’ment”


The buckboard drew up to the back or open-faced entrance of the Rodney
house with a splendid sweep, terminating in a brilliantly staccato
halt, as if to convey to the residents the flattering implication that
their house was reached via a gravelled driveway, rather than across
lumpish inequalities of prairie overgrown with cactus stumps and clumps
of sage-brush. From the buckboard stepped a figure whose agility was
compatible with her driving.

No sketchy outline can do justice to Mrs. Yellett or her costume. Like
the bee, the ant, and other wonders of the economy of nature, she was
not to be disposed of with a glance. And yet there was no attempt at
subtlety on her part; on the contrary, no one could have an appearance
of greater candor than the lady whose children Mary Carmichael had come
West to teach. Her costume was a thing apart, suggesting neither sex,
epoch, nor personal vanity, but what it lacked of these more usual
sartorial characteristics, it more than made up in a passionate
individualism; an excessively short skirt, so innocent of “fit” or
“hang” in its wavering, indeterminate outline as to suggest the
possible workmanship of teeth rather than of scissors; and riding-boots
coming well to the knee, displaying a well-shaped, ample foot, perched
aloft on the usual high heel that cow-punchers affect as the expression
of their chiefest vanity. But Mrs. Yellett was not wholly mannish in
her tastes, and to offset the boots she wore a bodice of the type that
a generation ago used to be known as a “basque.” It fitted her ample
form as a cover fits a pin-cushion, the row of jet buttons down the
front looking as if a deep breath might cause them to shoot into space
at any moment with the force of Mauser bullets.

Such a garb was not, after all, incongruous with this original lady’s
weather-beaten face. Her skin was tanned to a fine russet, showing
tiny, radiating lines about the eyes when they twinkled with laughter,
which was often. No individual feature was especially striking, but the
general impression of her countenance was of animation and activity,
mingled with geniality and with native shrewdness.

“Howdy, Miz Yellett,” called out old Sally, hitching her rocker
forward, in an excitement she could ill conceal. “You-uns’ gov’ment
come, an’ she ain’t much bigger’n a lettle green gourd. Don’t seem to
have drawed all the growth comin’ to her yit.”

“In roundin’ up the p’ints of my gov’ment, Mis’ Rodney, you don’t want
to forget that green gourds and green grapes is mighty apt to belong to
the sour fambly, when they hangs beyant your reach.”

“Ai-yi!” grimaced old Sally. “It’s tol’able far to send East for green
fruit. We can take our own pep’mint.”

The prospective advent of a governess in the Yellett family, moreover,
one from that mysterious centre of culture, the East, had not only rent
the neighborhood with bitter factions, but had submitted the Yelletts
to the reproach of ostentation. In those days there were no schools in
that portion of the Wind River country where the Yelletts grazed their
flocks and herds. Parents anxious to obtain “educational
advantages”—that was the term, irrespective of the age of the student
or the school he attended—sent them, often, with parental blindness as
to the equivocal nature of the blessing thus conferred, to visit
friends in the neighboring towns while they “got their education.” Or
they went uneducated, or they picked up such crumbs of knowledge as
fell from the scant parental board. But never, up to the present
moment, had any one flown into the face of neighborly precedent except
sturdy Sarah Yellett.

Old Sally, in her eagerness to convey that she was in no degree
impressed with the pedagogical importation, like many another
belligerent lost the first round of the battle through an excess of
personal feeling. But though down, Sally was by no means out, and after
a brief session with the snuff-brush she returned to the field prepared
to maintain that the Yellett children, for all their pampering in the
matter of having a governess imported for their benefit, were no better
off than her own brood, who had taken the learning the gods provided.

“Too bad, Miz Yellett, that you-uns had to hire that gov’ment without
lookin’ over her p’ints. I’ve ben takin’ her in durin’ supper, and
she’ll never be able to thrash ’em past Clem. She mought be able to
thrash Clem if she got plumb mad, these yere slim wimmin is tarrible
wiry ’n’ active at such times, but she’ll never be able to thrash
beyant her.” And having injected the vitriolic drop in her neighbor’s
cup of happiness, Old Sally struck a gait on her chair which was the
equivalent of a gallop.

But Mrs. Yellett was not the sort of antagonist to be left gaping on
the road, awed to silence by the action of a rocking-chair, no matter
how brilliant.

“I reckon I can thrash my own children when it’s needed, without
gettin’ in help from the East, or hereabouts either, for that matter.
If other folks would only take out their public-spirited reformin’
tendencies on their own famblies, there’d be a heap less lynchin’
likely to happen round the country in the course of the next ten
years.”

Old Sally let the home-thrust pass. “Who ever hearn tell of a good
teacher that wasn’t a fine thrasher in the bargain?” She swung the
chair about with a pivotal motion, as if she were addressing an
assemblage instead of a single listener, and then, bethinking herself
of a clinching illustration, she called aloud to her daughter to bear
witness. “Eudory! Eu-do-ry! You-do-ry!”

“Ye-’s ma’am,” drawled the daughter, coming most unwillingly from the
open-faced room opposite, where she had been inciting all four of the
suitors to battle.

“What was it they called that teacher down to Caspar that larruped the
hide off’n the boys?”

“A fine dis-a-ply-narian, maw.”

“Yes, that’s it—a dis-a-_ply_-narian. What kin a lettle green gourd
like her know ’bout dis-apply-in?”

“Your remarks shore remind me of a sayin’ that ‘the discomfort of
havin’ to swallow other folks’ dust causes a heap of anxiety over their
reckless driving.’”

Mrs. Yellett flicked her riding-boot with her whip. Her voice dropped a
couple of tones, her accent became one of honeyed sweetness.

“Your consumin’ anxiety regardin’ my gov’ment and my children shore
reminds me of a narrative appertainin’ to two dawgs. Them dawgs was
neighbors, livin’ in adj’inin’ yards separated by a fence, and one day
one of them got a good meaty bone and settled hisself down to the
enj’yment thereof. And his intimate friend and neighbor on the other
side of the fence, who had no bone to engage his faculties, he began to
fret hisself ’bout the business of his friend. S’pose he was to choke
hisself over that bone. S’pose the meat disagreed with him. And he
begins to bark warnin’s, but the dawg with the bone he keeps right on.
But the other dawg he dashes hisself again the fence and he scratches
with his claws. He whines pitiful, he’s that anxious about his friend.
But the dawg with the bone he went right on till he gnawed it down to
the last morsel, and, goin’ to the hole in the fence whar his friend
had kep’ that anxious vigil, he says: ‘Friend, the only thing that
consoled me while having to endure the anguish of eatin’ that bone was
the thought of your watchful sympathy!’ Which bein’ the case, I’d thank
you to tell me whar I can find my gov’ment.”

“Ai-yi!” said old Sally. “I ain’t seein’ no bone this deal. Just a
lettle green gourd ’s all I see with my strongest specs.”

Mary Carmichael, in one of the inner rooms, was writing a home letter,
which was chiefly remarkable for what it failed to relate. It gave long
accounts of the scenery, it waxed didactic over the future of the
country; but the adventures of the trip, with her incidental
acquaintance with the Daxes and Chugg, were not recorded. Eudora
announced the arrival of Mrs. Yellett, and Mary, at the news, dropped
the contents of her portfolio and started up with much the feeling a
marooned sailor might have on hearing a sail has been sighted. At this
particular stage of her career Miss Carmichael had not developed the
philosophy that later in life was destined to become her most valuable
asset. Her sense of humor no longer responded to the vagaries of
pioneer life. The comedy element was coming a little too thick and
fast. She was getting a bit heart-sick for a glimpse of her own kind, a
word with some one who spoke her language. And here, at last, was the
woman who had written such a charming letter, who had so graciously
intimated that there was room for her at the hearth-stone. Mary was,
indeed, eager to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Yellett.

To the end of her life she never forgot that first meeting—the perfect
confidence with which she followed Eudora to the open room, the ensuing
blank amazement, the utter inability to reconcile the Mrs. Yellett of
the letter with the Mrs. Yellett of fact. The lamp on the table,
burning feebly, seemed to burst into a thousand shooting-stars as the
girl struggled with her tears. Home was so far, and Mrs. Yellett was so
different from what she had expected! And yet, as she felt her fingers
crush in the grip of that hard but not unkindly hand, there was in the
woman’s rugged personality a sustaining quality; and, thinking again of
Archie’s prospects, Mary was not altogether sorry that she had come.

“You be a right smart young maverick not to get lost none on this long
trail, and no one to p’int you right if you strayed,” commented Mary’s
patroness, affably. “But we won’t roominate here no longer than we can
help. It’s too hard on old Ma’am Rodney. She’s just ’bout the color of
withered cabbage now, ’long of me havin’ you.”

While she talked, Mrs. Yellett picked up Mary’s trunk and bags and
stowed them in the back of the buckboard with the ease with which
another woman might handle pasteboard boxes. One or two of the male
Rodneys offered to help, but she waved them aside and lashed the
luggage to the buckboard, handling the ropes with the skill of an old
sailor. The entire Rodney family and the suitors of Eudora assembled to
witness the departure. “It’s a heap friendly of you to fret so,” was
the parting stab of Sarah Yellett to Sally Rodney; and she swung the
backboard about, cleared the cactus stumps in the Rodney door-yard, and
gained the mountain-road.

“Ai-yi!” said old Sally. “What’s this country comin’ to?”

“A few more women, thank God!” remarked Ira. Eudora had just snubbed
him, and he put a wealth of meaning into his look after the vanishing
buckboard.

The night was magnificent. From horizon to horizon the sky was sown
with quivering points of light. Each straggling clump of sage-brush,
rocky ledge, and bowlder borrowed a beauty not its own from the yellow
radiance of the stars.

They had gone a good two miles before Mary’s patroness broke the
silence with, “Nothing plumb stampedes my temper like that Rodney
outfit—old Sally buckin’ an’ pitchin’ in her rockin’-chair same as if
she was breakin’ a bronco, an’ that Eudory always corallin’, deceivin’,
and jiltin’ one outfit of men after another. If she was a daughter of
mine, I’d medjure her length across my knee, full growed and courted
though she is. The only one of the outfit that’s wuth while is Judith,
an’ she ain’t old woman Rodney’s girl, neither. You hyeard that
already, did you? Well, this yere country may be lackin’ in population,
but it’s handy as a sewin’-circle in distributin’ news.”

Mary mentioned Leander. “Yes,” answered Mrs. Yellett, reflectively,
“Leander’s mouth do run about eight and a half octaves. Sometimes I
don’t blame his wife for bangin’ down the lid.”

They talked of Jim Rodney’s troubles, and the growing hatred between
sheep and cattle men, because of range rights.

“Now that pore Jim had a heap of good citizen in him, before that
pestiferous cattle outfit druv’ his sheep over the cliff. Relations
’twixt sheep and cattle men in this yere country is strained beyant the
goin’-back place, I can tell you. My pistol-eye ’ain’t had a wink of
sleep for nigh on eighteen months, an’ is broke to wakefulness same as
a teethin’ babe.

“Jim was wild as a coyote ’fore he marries that girl. She come all the
way from Topeka, Kansas, thinking she was goin’ to find a respectable
home, and when she come out hyear and found the place was a dance-hall,
she cried all the time. She didn’t add none to the hilarity of the
place. An’ one day Jim he strolled in, an’ seem’ the girl a-cryin’ like
a freshet and wishin’ she was dead, he inquired the cause. She told him
how that old harpy wrote her, an’, bein’ an orphant, she come out
thinkin’ she was goin’ to a respectable place as waitress, an’ Jim he
’lowed it was a case for the law. He was a little shy of twenty at the
time, just a young cockerel ’bout br’ilin’ size. Some of the old
hangers-on ’bout the place they see a heap of fun in Jim’s takin’ on
’bout the girl, he bein’ that young that he had scarce growed a pair of
spurs yet. An’ one of ’em says to him,’ Sonny, if you’re afeerd that
this yere corral is onjurious to the young lady’s morals, we’ll call in
the gospel sharp, if you’ll stand for the brand.’ Now Jim hadn’t a
cent, nor no callin’, nor a prospect to his back, but he struts up to
the man that was doin’ the talkin’, game as a bantam, an’ he says, ‘The
lady ain’t rakin’ in anythin’ but a lettle white chip, in takin’ me,
but if she’s willin’, here’s my hand.’

“At which that pore young thing cried harder than ever. Well, Jim he up
an’ marries the girl an’ it turns out fine. He gets a job herdin’ sheep
on shares, an’ she stays with the Rodney outfit till he saves enough to
build a cabin. Things is goin’ with Jim like a prairie afire. In a few
years he acquires a herd of his own, a fine herd, not a scabby sheep in
the bunch. Alida she makes him the best kind of a wife, them kids is
the pride of his life, and then, them cursed cattle-men do for him. Of
course, he takes to rustlin’; I’d do more’n rustle if they’d touch
mine.”

The pair of broncos that Mrs. Yellett was driving humped their backs
like cats as they climbed the steep mountain-road. With her, driving
was an exact science. It was a treat to see her handle the ribbons.
Mary asked some trifling question about the children and it elicited
the information that one of the girls was named Cacta. “Yes,” she said,
“I like new names for children, not old ones that is all frazzled out
and folks has suffered an’ died to. It seems to start ’em fair, like
playin’ cards with a new deck. Cacta’s my oldest daughter, and I named
her after the flowers that blooms all over the desert spite of
everything, heat, cold, an’ rain an’ alkali dust—the cactus blooms
right through it all. Even its own thorns don’t seem to fret it none. I
called her plain Cactus till she was three, and along came a sharp
studyin’ the flowers an’ weeds out here, and he ’lowed that Cactus was
a boy’s name an’ Cacta was for girls—called it a _fee_minin tarnation,
or somethin’ like that, so we changed it. My second daughter ’ain’t got
quite so much of a name. She’s called Clematis. That holds its own out
here pretty well, ’long by the willows on the creek. Paw ’lowed he was
terrible afraid that I’d name the youngest girl Sage-brush, so he spoke
to call her Lessie Viola, an’ I giv’ in. The boys is all plain named,
Ben, Jack, and Ned. Paw wouldn’t hear of a fancy brand bein’ run onto
’em.”

The temperature fell perceptibly as they climbed the heights, and the
air had the heady quality of wine. It was awesome, this entering into
the great company of the mountains. Presently Mary caught the glimmer
of something white against the dark background of the hills. It gleamed
like a snow-bank, though they were far below the snow-line on the
mountain-side they were climbing.

“Well, here be camp,” announced Mrs. Yellett. What Mary had taken for a
bank of snow was a huge, canvas-covered wagon. Several dogs ran down to
greet the buckboard, barking a welcome. In the background was a shadowy
group, huge of stature, making its way down the mountain-path. “And
here’s all the children come to meet teacher.” Mrs. Yellett’s tone was
tenderly maternal, as if it was something of a feat for the children to
walk down the mountain-path to meet their teacher. But Mary, straining
her eyes to catch a glimpse of her little pupils, could discover
nothing but a group of persons that seemed to be the sole survivors of
some titanic race. Not one among them but seemed to have reached the
high-water mark of six feet. Was it an optical illusion, a
hallucination born of the wonderful starlight? Or were they as huge as
they seemed? The young men looked giants, the girls as if they had
wandered out of the first chapters of Genesis. Their mother introduced
them. They all had huge, warm, perspiring hands, with grips like bears.
Mary looked about for a house into which she could escape to gather her
scattered faculties, but the starlight, yellow and luminous, revealed
none. There was the huge covered wagon that she had taken for a
snow-bank, there was a small tent, there were two light wagons, there
were dogs innumerable, but there was no sign of a house.

“What do you think of it?” inquired Mrs. Yellett, smilingly,
anticipating a favorable answer.

“It’s almost too beautiful to leave.” Mary innocently supposed that
Mrs. Yellett referred to the starlit landscape. “But I’m so tired, Mrs.
Yellett, and so glad to get to a real home at last, that I’m going to
ask if you will not show me the way to the house so that I may go to
bed right away.”

This apparently reasonable request was greeted by a fine chorus of
titanic laughter from Mary’s pupils. Mrs. Yellett waved her hand over
the surrounding landscape in comprehensive gesture.

“Ain’t all this large enough for you?” she asked, gayly.

“You mean the mountains? They’re wonderful. But—I really think I’d like
to go in the house.”

“I shore hope you ain’t figgerin’ on goin’ into no house, ’cause there
ain’t no house to go into.” She laughed merrily, as if the idea of such
an effete luxury as a house were amusing. “This yere family ’ain’t ever
had a house—it camps.”

Mary gasped. The real meaning of words no longer had the power of
making an impression on her. If Mrs. Yellett had announced that they
were in the habit of sleeping in the moon, it would not have surprised
her.

“If you are tired, an’ want to go to bed, you can shuck off and lie
down any time. Ben, Jack, Ned, go an’ set with paw in the tent while
the gov’ment gets ready for bed. Cacta and Clem, you help me with them
quilts.”

Mary stood helpless in the wilderness while quilts and pillows were
fetched somewhere from the adjacent scenery, and Mrs. Yellett asked
her, with the gravity of a Pullman porter interrogating a passenger as
to the location of head and foot, if she liked to sleep “light or
dark.” She chose “dark” at random, hating to display her ignorance of
the alternatives, with the happy result that her bed was made up to
leeward of the great sheep-wagon, in a nice little corner of the State
of Wyoming. Mary was grateful that she had chosen dark.

As she dozed off, she was reminded of a certain magazine illustration
that Archie had pinned over his bed after the aunts had given a
grudging consent to this westward journey. There was a line beneath the
pictorial decoy which read: “Ranch Life in the New West.” And there
were piazzas with fringed Mexican hammocks, wild-grass cushions, a
tea-table with a samovar, and, last, a lady in white muslin pouring
tea. The stern reality apparently consisted in scorching alkali plains,
with houses of the packing-box school of architecture at a distance of
seventy or eighty miles apart. No ladies in white muslin poured tea;
they garbed themselves in simple gunny-sacking, and their repartee had
an acrid, personal note. But Mary was glad to know that Archie had that
picture, and that he thought of her in such ideal surroundings.




X.
On Horse-thief Trail


Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-day
meal to go in quest of her brother. He had left his comfortable cabin
on the Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the “bad
man’s country,” one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in
Wyoming and furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice.
Judith took the left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen
the right, the day she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke
with never a glance backward. Judith strove now to put him and the
memory of that day from her mind by turning towards the open country
without a glance in the direction he had taken. But her thoughts were
weary of journeying over that trail that she would not look towards; in
imagination she had travelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each
dip and turn of the yellow road, each feature of the landscape as he
rode exultant to Kitty, to be turned, tried, taken or left as her mood
should prompt. But Judith was more woman than saint, and in her heart
there was a blending of joy and pain. For she knew—such skill has love
in inference from detail—that the mysterious far-away girl, who was so
powerful that she could have whatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved
her own ambitions better than she did Peter or Peter’s happiness, and
that she would not marry him except as a makeshift. For Miss Colebrooke
wrote verses; Peter had a white-and-gold volume of them that Judith
fancied he said his prayers to.

As for Peter himself, he had never been able to explain the magic Kitty
had brewed for him. There was a heady quality in the very ring of her
name. His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hat
that to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf of
poppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen of
corn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings. He
had no difficulty in securing an introduction. She was a connection of
the Wetmores, as was he, though through opposite sides of the house. In
the few minutes’ talk that followed, he had the disconcerting sensation
of being “talked down to.” There was the indulgent tolerance of the
woman of the world to the “nice boy” about this amazing young woman,
who might have been eighteen. Hamilton had repudiated the very
suggestion of being a “nice boy.” But he felt himself blushing, groping
for words, saying stupid things, supplying every requisite of the “nice
boy” as if he were acting the part. Her chaperon bore her away
presently, and he was left with a radiant impression of corn-silk hair
and a complexion that justified Bouguereau’s mother-of-pearl flesh
tints. And when she had tilted the ruffled lace parasol over her
shoulder, so that it framed her head like a fleecy halo, he had seen
that her eyes were green as jade. Withal he had a sense of having
acquitted himself stupidly.

Later, when he ran the gamut of some friends, they had chaffed him on
his hardihood. By Jove! He had nerve to look at her! Didn’t he know she
was “the” Miss Colebrooke? Now Hamilton was absolutely ignorant of Miss
Colebrooke’s right of way to the definite article, but it was
characteristic of him to make no inquiries. On the whole, he found the
situation meeting with a greater number of the artistic requirements
than such situations usually presented. He was still dallying with this
pleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine,
and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like the
flight of a comet. Her contribution was a sonnet entitled “The
Miracle.” As a naïve emotional confession, “The Miracle” interested
him; as a sonnet, he rent it unmercifully.

Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake
in a poetic fall of more or less magnitude. He rather conspicuously
avoided a reference to her poetry when they met again. To him it was
the very least of her gifts. Her hair, that had the tender yellow of
ripening corn, was worthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making
of them to some one else! By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to
shut out the world. The pupils shrank to pin-points. The green looked
deep—as many fathoms as the sea. She was all Diana by daylight, a
huntress, if you will, of the elusive epithet, but essentially a maiden
goddess, who would add no sprightly romance to the chronicles of
Olympus. By lamp-light she suggested quite another divinity. The
pin-points expanded; they burned black, like coals newly breaking into
flame.

When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had
thought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment
as a man of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be
contributors of several years’ standing to the various magazines.
Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her as
bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had
deflected the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure
of the picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the
Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin
grammar. An unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should
marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a
field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by
reason of his deference to the conventional. If she had flirted with
him, his midsummer madness would have evaporated into thin air; but she
kept him at arm’s-length, ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy
proposed.

Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that
Hamilton did not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was
swinging westward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her
work claimed her and that she must renounce those sweet
responsibilities that made the happiness of other women. It was with
the protective mien of one who sought to shield him from an adverse
destiny that she declined his suit.

This had all happened seven years ago. In the mean time he had adjusted
his disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had
fallen in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the
rôle of lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first
love was not without charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have
survived the test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney’s
compelling personality, other things being equal, it would be difficult
to hazard a guess. The coming of Judith from the convent increased the
perspective into which Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman
in the foreground, the pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to
reminiscence. But the reverence for the usual, that made up the
underlying motive for so much of Hamilton’s conduct, presented barriers
alongside of which his previous quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke’s
seniority shrank to insignificance. He might marry a woman older than
himself and swallow the grimace of it, but by no conceivable system of
argument could he persuade himself to marry into a family like that of
the Rodneys—the girl herself, for all her beauty and rare womanliness,
a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme for obloquy, her brother a
cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other men should make the heroic
marriages of a new country. He was prepared to applaud their hardihood
of temperament, but in his own case such a thing was inconceivable.
Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web of caution and
provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the shrivelled
flies dangling in the web conveying no significance, apparently, beyond
that of advertising the system.

When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit
of epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings
and arrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least,
resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated
at the hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded
pride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines
flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger,
if possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even
the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on
that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she
had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an
elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly
elusive than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.

The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of their
ages. Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; she
retained a surplus it would be rude to estimate. Her greeting of him
was radiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to
inspiration. A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling
and the curled and perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to
rouse those lightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits. But Peter
only turned the other cheek. More than once, in the days that followed,
he devoutly thanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with
Judith had been governed by characteristic prudence. Kitty admitted him
to her coterie, but he had lost nothing of his attitude of grand Turk
towards her verses. The sin be upon the heads of whomever took such
things seriously! The irony of fate that compelled a class poet to
punch cows may have tinctured his judgment.

A telegram recalled him to the ranch and prevented a final leave-taking
with Miss Colebrooke. He made his adieux by letter, and they were
frankly regretful. Miss Colebrooke’s reply mingled sorrow in parting
from her old friend with joy in having found him. Her letter, a
masterpiece of phrase-spinning, presented to Peter the one significant
fact that she would not be averse to the renewal of his suit. In
reading her letter he made no allowance for the fact that the lady had
made a fine art of saying things, and that her joy and regret at their
meeting and parting might have been reminiscent of the printed passion
that was so prominent a feature of magazinedom. Her letters—the like of
them he had never seen outside printed volumes of letters that had
achieved the distinction of classics—culminated in the one that Judith
had given him that morning, announcing that unexpectedly she had
decided to join the Wetmore girls and would be glad to see him at the
ranch.

That he had flown at her bidding, Judith knew. What she would least
have suspected was that Miss Colebrooke had received her visitor as if
his breakneck ride across the desert had been in the nature of an
afternoon call. If Judith, knowing what she did of this long-drawn-out
romance, could have known likewise of her knight’s chagrin, would she
have pitied him?

Ignorant of the recent anticlimax, and with a burden of many heavy
thoughts, Judith was penetrating a world of unleavened desolation.
Beneath the scourge of the noon-day sun the desert lay, stripped of
every illusion. Vegetation had almost ceased, nothing but sun-scorched,
dust-choked sage-brush could spring from such sterility. The fruit of
desolation, it gave back to desolation a quality more melancholy than
utter barrenness. Glittering in the sunlight, the beds of alkali
gleamed leper white; above them the agitated air was like the hot waves
that dance and quiver about iron at white heat. From horizon to horizon
the curse of God seemed to have fallen on the land; it was as if,
cursing it, He had forgotten it, and left it as the abomination of
desolation. Judith scarce heeded, her thoughts straying after first one
then another of the group that made up her little world—Peter Hamilton,
Kitty Colebrooke, Jim, his family—thoughts inconsequent as the dancing
dust-devils that whirled over that infinity of space, and, whirling,
disappeared and reappeared at some new corner of the compass.

The trail that she must take to Jim’s camp in the mountain was known to
but few honest men. Fugitives from justice—the grave, impersonal
justice of the law, or the swift justice of the plains—found there an
asylum. And while they sometimes suffered, in death by thirst or
hunger, a sentence more dreadful than the law of the land or the law of
the rope would have given them, the desert, like the sea, seldom gave
up her own. It was more than probable that no woman except Alida Rodney
had ever taken that trail before, and reasonably certain that no woman
had ever taken it alone. Dolly, when she saw the beds of alkali grow
more frequent, and that the trails of the range cattle turned back,
sniffed the lack of water in the air, slackened her pace, and turned an
interrogatory ear towards her mistress.

“It’s all right, old girl”; the gauntleted hand patted the satin neck.
“We’re in for”—Judith flung her head up and confronted the infinite
desolation yawning to the sky-line—“God knows what.”

Dolly broke into a light canter; this evidently was not an occasion for
dawdling. There was a touch of business about the way the reins were
held that made the mare settle down to work. But her flying hoofs made
little apparent progress against the space and silence of the desert.
Five, ten, fifteen miles and the curving shoulder of the mountain, that
she must cross, still mocked in the distance. Only the sun moved in
that vast world of seemingly immutable forces.

There was no stoic Sioux in Judith now. The girl that breasted the
crests of the foot-hills shrank in terror from the loneliness and the
suggestion of foes lurking in ambush. The sun dropped behind the
mountain, leaving a blood-red pool in his wake, like fugitive Cain.
Already night was sweeping over the earth from mountain shadows that
flowed imperceptibly together like blackened pools. To the girl
following the trail the silence was more dreadful than a chorus of
threatening voices. She listened till the stillness beat at her ears
like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, then pulled up her horse, and
the desert was as still as the chamber of death.

“Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women folk when the night
comes—a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and—” Dolly
whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be
completed. The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows,
as deliberately as a snake swallows its victim. They were nearing the
mountains. The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and more
intermittently. The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher
and higher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt the
tension of things loosen a little.

Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of
hard winters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian
superstition that was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings
in the empty eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her.
She dared not think of the dangers that the looming darkness might
conceal, or of what she might find at her journey’s end, or—“Whoa,
Dolly! softly, girl. Is it my foolish, white-blood nerves, or is some
one following?”

The mare had been trained to respond to the slightest touch on her
mouth, and stopped instantly. Judith swayed slightly in the saddle with
the heaving of the sweating horse. The blood beat at her temples,
confusing what she actually heard with what her imagination pictured.
She was half-way up a towering spur of the Wind River when she slid
from the saddle, and putting her ear to the ground listened, Indian
fashion. Above the throbbing stillness of the desert night, that came
to her murmurously, like the imprisoned roar of the sea from a shell,
she could hear the regular beat of horse’s hoofs following up the steep
mountain grade. She scrambled up with the desperate nimbleness of a
hunted thing, but when she attempted to vault to the saddle her limbs
failed and she sank clinging to the pommel. Twice she tried and twice
the trembling of her limbs held her captive. With the loss of each
moment the beat of the hoofs on the trail below became more distinct.
The very desperation of her plight kept her clinging to the pommel,
incapable of thought, so that when she finally flung herself to the
saddle she was surprised to find herself there. To the left the trail
dropped sharply to a precipice, choked by the close crowding of many
scrub pines. To the right the snow-clad spires of the Wind River kept
their eternal vigil. If she should call aloud for help, these white,
still mountains would echo the anguish of her woman’s cry and give no
further heed to her plight.

The trail had begun to widen. The horse behind her again stumbled,
loosening a stone that rolled with crashes and echoings down to the
precipice below. She took advantage of the widening of the trail to
urge Dolly forward. Her impulse was to put spurs to the mare and run,
to take chances with loose stones, a narrowing trail, and the
possibility of Dolly’s stumbling and breaking a leg; but discretion
prompted the showing of a brave front, the pleasantries of the road,
with flight as the last resource of desperation.

Suddenly gaining what seemed to be a plateau, she wheeled and waited
the coming of this possible friend or foe. The thudding of hoofs
through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered
the latest move of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith
could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness
of the night had become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were
one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the
gauntlet on her hand. The horse below resumed its stumbling gait.
Judith crowded Dolly close to the rocky wall. If the chance comrade of
the wilderness should pass her by in the darkness—God speed him!

“What the devil are you blocking the trail for?” sung out a voice from
the darkness. At sound of it Judith’s heart stopped beating. The voice
was Peter Hamilton’s.




XI.
The Cabin In The Valley


And Judith, taken unawares by the unexpected turn of things, comforted
as a lost child that is found, told all her feeling for him in the way
she called his name. The easy tenderness of the man awoke; his senses
swayed to the magic of her voice, the mystery of the night, the shadow
world in which they two, ’twixt earth and sky, were alone. They rode
without speaking. Peter’s hand sought hers, and all her woman’s terror
of the desolation, her fear of the vague terrors of the dreadful night,
spoke in her answering pressure. It was as if the desert had given them
to each other as they groped through the silent darkness. In the great
company of earth, sky, silence, and this great-hearted woman, Peter
grew conscious of a real thrill. There were depths to life—vast, still
depths; this woman’s unselfish love for him made him realize them. He
felt his soul sweeping out on the great tide of things. Farther and
farther it swept; his patron saint, caution, beckoning frantically from
the receding shore, was miles behind. “Judith!” he said, and he scarce
recognized his own voice. “Judith!” he struggled as a swimmer in a
drowning clutch. Then his patron saint threw him a life-line and he
saved the situation.

“Judith!” he said, a third time, and now he knew his voice. It was the
voice of the man who tilted at life picturesquely in a broad-brimmed
hat, who loved his darling griefs and fitted them as a Rembrandt fits
its background. And still, in the same voice, the voice he knew, he
said: “I feel as if we had died and our souls were meeting. You know
Aldrich’s exquisite lines:

“Somewhere in desolate, wind-swept space,
    In twilight land—no man’s land—
Two hurrying shapes met face to face
    And bade each other stand.

“‘And who are you?’ cried one, agape,
    Shuddering in the gloaming light.
I know not,’ said the other shape,
    ‘I only died last night.’”


“‘I only died last night!’” she repeated the line, slowly,
significantly. In her questioning she forgot the night, the desolation,
the presence of the man. Had she died last night? Had youth, the joy of
living, her infinite capacity for love, had they died when Peter, with
the ugly haste of the man without a nice sense of the time that should
elapse between the old and the new love, had spurred away cheerfully at
the beck of another woman? And now the desert, this earth-mother as she
called it, in the Indian way, had given him back to her, thrown them
together as driftwood in the still ocean of space. She drew a long
breath, the breath of one waking from an anguished dream. A wild,
unreasoning gladness woke in her heart, the joy of living swept her
back again to life. She had not died last night, she was riding through
the wilderness with Peter.

“Look!” she whispered. The sky had lost its forbidding blackness. The
sharp notches of the mountains, faintly outlined in white, undulated
through an eternity of space. Venus hung in the west, burning softly as
a shaded lamp. The trail they climbed seemed to end in her pale yellow
light.

Peter had saved the situation, but the wild beauty of the night stirred
in him that gift of silvery speech that was ever his tribute to the
sex, rather than the woman. He bent towards Judith. A loosened strand
of her hair blew across his cheek. The breakneck ride to Kitty was
already the madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the
pale star, and told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless
blackness through which they had groped was the way of life, but for
such as were not condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp
and they scaled the heights.

And Judith, listening, found her heart a battle-field of love and hate.
“Were women dogs, that men should play with them in idle moods, caress
them, and fling them out for other toys?” she demanded of herself, even
while the tones of his voice melted her innermost being to thankfulness
for this hour that he was wholly hers.

Gayly, with ready turns of speech and snatches of song, trolled in his
musical barytone, Peter rode through the night, even as he rode through
life, a Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart, unbrushed by the wing of
sorrow, loving his pale griefs for the values they gave the picture.
And Judith understood by reason of that exquisite perception that was
hers in all matters pertaining to him, and, knowing, only loved the
more.

Down the valley came the sharp yelp of a coyote, and in a moment the
towering crags had taken it up, the echo repeating it and giving it
back to the valley, where the coyote barked again at the shadow of his
voice. The night was full of the eerie laughter. Peter put a
restraining hand on Dolly’s bridle, and, waiting for the coyote to
stop, called Judith’s name, and all the mountains made music of it. The
echo sang the old Hebrew name as if it had been a psalm. Peter’s voice
gave it to the mountains joyously, but the mountains gave it back in
the minor. And Judith was reminded of the soft, singing syllables that
her mother, in the Indian way, had made of her daughter’s Indian name.
The remembrance tugged at her heart. In her joy at seeing Peter she had
forgotten that the errand that had brought her was an errand of life
and death—life and death for her brother!

But Peter’s ready enthusiasms pressed him hard. Surely love-making was
the business of such a night. “Ah, Judith, goddess of the heights, if I
could sing your name like the mountains, would you love me a little?”

For his pains he had a flash of white teeth in a smile that recalled
his first acquaintance with Kitty, the sort of smile one would give to
a “nice boy” when his manœuvres were a trifle obvious. “Not if you sang
my name as the chorus of all the Himalayas and the Rockies and Andes,
and with the fire of all their volcanoes and the beauty of their snows
and the strength of all their hills, for it’s not my way to love a
little!”

He bent towards her; to brush her cheek lightly as they rode was but to
imply his appreciation of the scene as a bit of chiaroscuro, the
panorama of the desert night, eternal romance typified by the man and
woman scaling the heights, the goddess of love lighting them on their
way by her flaming torch. But Judith, who said little because she felt
much, was in no mood to brook such dalliance, and, urging the mare
sharply, she cantered down the divide at peril of life and limb. Peter,
cursing the heavy-footed beast he rode, came stumbling after.

Judith rode wildly through the night, leaving Peter laps behind, to
beseech, to prophesy dire happening if she should slip, and to scramble
after, as best he might, on the heavy-footed beast he repudiated, with
all his ancestors, as oxen, to the fourth generation. But the woman
kept her pace. She had stern questions to put to herself, and they were
likely to have truer answers if Peter were elsewhere than riding beside
her. Whither was he going? They had met casually on a trail known to
few honest men. It led over a spur of the Wind River to a sort of no
man’s land, the hiding-place of horse and cattle thieves. She had gone
to warn her brother. Could he be going there—She could not bring
herself to finish.

Her heart was divided against itself. Within it were fought again the
red and the white man’s battles, bitterly, and to the finish. And now
the white man, with his open warfare, won, and all her love rose up and
scourged her little faith. She would wait on the trail for Peter,
penitent and ashamed. And while she waited suspicions bred of her
Indian blood stirred distrustfully, and she told herself that her
mother’s daughter made a worthy champion of the ways of white men. Did
Hamilton hunt her brother gallowsward, making merry with her the
meantime? He had not even been courteously concerned as to where she
was going when they met on the divide. They had met and ridden together
as casually as if it had been the most natural thing for them both to
be taking the horse-thief trail as a summer evening’s ride. And she had
not thought to wonder at his possible destination, when the man from
whom she rode in terror through the night proved to be Peter, because
the lesser question of his errand had been swallowed up in the greater
miracle of his presence.

She was by this time well down the divide. The temperature had risen
perceptibly on the down grade. The heat of the plains had already
mingled with the cool hill air; the heights, where Venus kept her love
vigil, were already past. Judith gave Dolly a breathing spell, herself
lounging easily meanwhile. She knew how to take her ease in the saddle
as well as any cow-puncher on the range.

“The Hayoka has dominion over me,” she mused, with Indian fatalism. “As
well resign myself to sorrow with dignity. Hayoka, Hayo—ka!” and she
began to croon softly a hymn of propitiation to the Hayoka, the Sioux
god of contrariety. According to the legends, he sat naked and fanned
himself in a Dakota blizzard and huddled, shivering, over a fire in the
heat of summer. Likewise the Hayoka cried for joy and laughed for
sorrow.

She remembered how the nuns at Santa Fé had been shocked at her for
praying to Indian gods, and how once she had built a little mound of
stones, which was the Sioux way of making petition, in the shadow of
the statue of the Virgin Mary, and how Sister Angela had scattered the
stones and told her to pray instead to the Blessed Lady. She still
prayed to the Blessed Lady every day; but sometimes, too, she reared
little mounds of stones in the desert when she was very sad and the
kinship between her and the dead gods of her mother’s people seemed the
closer for their common sorrow.

Peter, coming up with a much-blown horse, found her still chanting the
Indian song.

“Sing him a verse for me, Judith. Heaven knows I need something to
straighten out my infernal luck. Tell the Hayoka that I’m a good fellow
and need only half a chance. Tell him to prosper my present venture.”

She had begun to chant the invocation, then stopped suddenly. “I must
not; you know I am a Catholic.” Suspicion that had been scotched, not
killed, raised its head. “What was his present venture?” Her eye had
not changed in expression, nor a tone of her voice, but in her heart
was a sickening distrust for all things.

A belated moon had come up. The level plain, on which their horses
threw grotesque, elongated shadows, was flooded with honey-colored
light. Each straggling clump of sage-brush, whitening bone and bowlder,
gleamed mysterious, ghostly in the radiant flood-tide. They seemed to
be riding through a world that had no kinship with that black, formless
void through which they had groped but yet a little while. Then
darkness had been upon the face of the deep. Now there was a miracle of
light such as only the desert, in its desolation, knows. To Judith,
with a soul attuned to every passing expression of nature, there was
significance in this transition from darkness to light. The sudden
radiance was emblematic of her belated perception, coming as it did
after a blindness so dense as to appear almost wilful. Her mind was
busy with a multitude of schemes. Fool though she had been, she would
not be the instrument of her brother’s undoing.

“I’ve come too far,” she cried, in sudden dismay. “I should have
stopped at the foot of the divide. I’ve never been over the trail
before.”

“You foolish child, why should you stop in the middle of the
wilderness?”

She wheeled the mare about and faced him, a figure of graven
resolution.

“I promised to meet Tom Lorimer there—now you know.”

With which she cracked Dolly sharply with her heel and began to retrace
her way over the trail. Peter turned his horse and followed, with the
feeling of utter helplessness that a man has when confronted with the
granite obstinacy of women. Judith had meanwhile expected that the
announcement of her mythical appointment with Tom Lorimer would be
received differently. Tom Lorimer’s reputation was of the worst. An
Eastern man formerly, an absconder from justice, rumor was busy with
tales of ungodly merrymaking that went on at his ranch, where no woman
went except painted wisps from the dance-halls. But Peter was too loyal
a friend, despite his shortcomings as a lover, to see in Judith’s
statement anything more than a sisterly devotion so deeply unselfish
that it failed to take into account the danger to which she subjected
herself.

However, it was plainly his duty to prevent an unprotected rendezvous
with Lorimer, to reason, to plead, and, if he should fail to bring her
to a reasonable frame of mind, to go with her, come what would of the
result. There were reasons innumerable why he, a cattle-man, should
avoid the appearance of dealing with the sheep faction, he reflected,
grimly. Lorimer owned sheep, many thousand head. His herds had been
allowed to graze unmolested, while smaller owners, like Jim Rodney, had
been crowded out because his influence, politically, was a thing to be
reckoned with. So Peter followed Judith, pleading Judith’s cause; she
did not understand, he told her, what she was doing; and while perhaps
there was not another man in the country who would not honor her
unselfishness in coming to him, Lorimer’s chivalry was not a thing to
be reckoned with, drunken beast that he was. And Judith, worn with the
struggle, tried beyond measure, made reckless by the daily infusion of
ill-fortune, pulled up the mare and laughed unpleasantly.

“You think I’m going to see Lorimer about Jim? I’m going with him to a
merrymaking. We’re old pals, Lorimer and I.”

“Judith, dear, has it come to this, that you not only distrust an old
friend, but that you try to degrade yourself to hide from him the fact
that you are going to your brother’s? You’ve never spoken to Lorimer. I
heard him say, not a week ago, that he had never succeeded in making
you recognize him. You deceived me at first when you spoke of meeting
him—I thought you had a message from Jim—but this talk of merrymaking
is beneath you.” He shrugged his shoulders in disgust. He felt the
torrent of grief that rent her. No sob escaped her lips; there was no
convulsive movement of shoulder. She rode beside him, still as the
desert before the sand-storm breaks, her soul seared with white-hot
iron that knows no saving grace of sob or tear. She rode as Boadicea
might have ridden to battle; there was not a yielding line in her body.
But over and over in her woman’s heart there rang the cry: “I am so
tired! If the long night would but come!”

Peter drew out his watch. “It’s a quarter to eleven. We’ll have a hard
bit of riding to reach Blind Creek before midnight.”

Then he knew as well as she, perhaps better, the route to Jim’s
hiding-place; she had never been there as yet. And if Peter knew,
doubtless every cattle-man in the country knew. What a fool she had
been with her talk of meeting Tom Lorimer! A sense of utter defeat
seemed to paralyze her energies. She felt like a trapped thing that
after eluding its pursuers again and again finds that it has been but
running about a corral. Physical weariness was telling on her. She had
been in the saddle since a little past noon and it was now not far from
midnight. And still there was the unanswered question of Peter’s
errand. It was long since either had broken the silence. A delicious
coolness had crept into the air with the approach of midnight. Judith,
breathing deep draughts of it, reminded herself of the stoicism that
was hers by birthright.

“Peter”—her voice lost some of its old ring, but it had a deeper
note—“Peter, we make strange comrades, you and I, in a stranger world.
We meet on Horse-Thief Trail, and there is reason to suppose that our
errands are inimical. You’ve pierced all my little pretences; you know
that I am going to my brother, who is an outlaw—my brother, the rope
for whose hanging is already cut. And yet we have been friends these
many years, and we meet in this world of desolation and weigh each
other’s words, and there is no trust in our hearts. Our little faith is
more pitiful than the cruel errands that bring us. I take it you, too,
are going to my brother’s?”

“I’m going there to see that you arrive safe and sound, but I had no
intention of going when I left camp. You’ve brought me a good twenty
miles out of my way, not to mention accusing me of ulterior motives.
Now, aren’t you penitent?” He smiled at her, boyish and irresistible.
To Judith it was more reassuring than an oath. “It’s like dogs fighting
over a picked bone; the meat’s all gone. The range is overworked; it
needs a good, long rest.” He turned towards Judith, speaking slowly.
“What you have said is true. We’re friends before we’re partisans of
either faction. I’m on my way to a round-up. There’s been an unexpected
order to fill a beef contract—a thousand steers. We’re going to furnish
five hundred, the XXX two hundred and fifty, and the “Circle-Star” two
hundred and fifty. Men have been scouring the enemy’s country for days
rounding up stragglers. It will go hard with the rustlers after this
round-up, Judith.”

She felt a great wave of penitence and shame sweep over her. She had
not trusted him; in her heart she had nourished hideous suspicions of
him, and he was telling her, quite simply, of the plans of his own
faction, trusting her, as, indeed, he might, but as she never expected
to be trusted.

“Peter, do you know that sometimes I think Jim has gone quite mad with
these range troubles. He’s acted strangely ever since his sheep were
driven over the cliff. He’s not been home to Alida and the children
since he has been out of jail, and you know how devoted to them he has
always been! He spends all his time tracking Simpson. Alida wrote me
that she expects him to-night, and I’m going there on the chance.”

“It’s the devil’s own hole for desolation that he’s come to.” Peter
looked about the cup-shaped valley that was but a _cul-de-sac_ in the
mountains. Its approach was between the high rock walls of a cañon.
Passing between them, the rise of temperature was almost incredible.
The great barrier of mountain-range, that cut it off from the rest of
the world, seemed also to cut it off from light and air. The atmosphere
hung lifeless, the occasional bellow of range-cattle sounded far-off
and muffled. Vegetation was scant, the sage-brush grew close and
scrubby, even the brilliant cactus flowers seemed to have abandoned the
valley to its fate. A lone group of dead cotton-woods grew like
sentinels close to the rocky walls. Their twisted branches, gaunt and
bare, writhed upward as if in dumb supplication. There was about them a
something that made Judith come closer to Peter as they passed them by.
The night wind sang in their leafless branches with a long-drawn,
shuddering sigh. The despair of a barren, deserted thing seemed to have
settled on them.

“Those frightful trees, how can Alida stand them?” She looked back.
“Oh, I wish they were cut down!”

Before them was the cabin, its ruined condition pitifully apparent even
by night. It had been deserted ten years before Jim brought his family
to it. Rumor said it was haunted. Grim stories were told of the death
of a woman who had come there with a man, and had not lived to go away
with him. The roof of the adjoining stable had fallen in, the bars of
the corral were missing. The house was dark but for a feeble light that
glimmered in one window, the beacon that had been lighted, night after
night, against Jim’s coming. It added a further note of apprehension,
peering through the dark, still valley like a wakeful, anxious eye,
keeping a long and unrewarded vigil. Judith felt the consummation of
the threatening tragedy after her first glimpse of the sentinel trees.
She could not explain, but her heart cried, even as the wind in them
had sung of death. Perhaps her mother’s spirit spoke to her, just as
she had said, on that memorable drive, that the Great Mystery spoke to
his people in the earth, the sky, and the frowning mountains.

“Peter”—she had slid from her horse and was clinging to his arm—“when
it happens, Peter, you will have no part in it?”

“It won’t happen, Judith, if I can help it.”

She kissed his hand as it held the loose reins.

“Lord, I am not worthy!” was the thought in his heart. He sat graven in
the saddle. Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart though he was, the unsought
kiss of trust gifted him with a self-reverence that would not soon
forsake him.

Judith was rapping on the door and calling to Alida not to be
frightened. And presently it was opened. Peter wanted to leave Judith,
now that she was safely at the end of her journey, but she would not
hear of it till he had eaten.

“You would have had your comfortable supper five hours ago had you not
been playing cavalier to me all over the wilderness.” And Peter
yielded.

Judith busied herself about the kitchen. Her mood of racking
apprehension had disappeared. Indian stoicism had again the guiding
hand. She waved Peter from the fire that she was kindling, as if he
were a blundering incompetent. But she let him slice the bacon and
grind the coffee as one lets a child help. Alida came in, white-faced
and anxious over the long absence of her husband, but conscientiously
hospitable nevertheless. Peter noticed that Judith made a gallant
pretence of eating, crumbling her bread and talking the meanwhile. The
pale wife, who had little to say at the best of times, was put to the
test to say anything at all. But, withal, their intent was so genuinely
hospitable that Peter himself could not speak with the pity of it.
Accustomed as he was to the roughness of these frontier cabins, never
had he seen a human habitation so desolate as this. The mud plaster had
fallen away from between the logs, showing cross sections of the
melancholy prospect. An atmosphere of tragedy brooded over the place.
Whether from its long period of emptiness, or from the vaguely hinted
murder of the woman who had died there, or whether it took its
character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was
an unlovely thing. Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making
the best of things, soften the woful aspect of the place. Rather was
the appeal the more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift
of the self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar’s whine. The
house was bare but for the few things that Alida could take in the
wagon in which they made their flight. And all through the pinch of
poverty and grinning emptiness there was visible the woman-touch, the
brave making the best of nothing, the pitiful preparation for the
coming of the man. Wild roses from the creek bloomed against the
gnarled and weather-warped logs of the walls. Sprays of clematis
trailed their white bridal beauty from cans rescued from the ashes of a
camp-fire. But Alida was a strategist when it came to adorning her
home, and the rusty receptacle was hid beneath trailing green leaves.
There was at the window a muslin curtain that in its starched and
ruffled estate was strongly suggestive of a child’s frock hastily
converted into a window drapery. The curtain was drawn aside that the
lamp might shed its beam farther on the way of the traveller who came
not. There was but one other light in the place, a bit of candle. Alida
apologized for the poor light by which they must eat, but she did not
offer to take the lamp from the window.

Peter was no longer Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart as he watched the
little, white-faced woman, who went so often to the door to look
towards the road that entered the valley that she was no longer aware
of what she did. He saw her wide eyes full of fear, the bow of the
mouth strained taut with anxiety, her unconscious fear of him as one of
the alien faction, and withal her concern for his comfort. Judith’s
control was far greater, but though she hid it skilfully, he knew the
sorrow that consumed her.

There was a cry from the room beyond, and Judith, snatching up the
candle, went in to the children. All three of them were sleeping
cross-ways in one bed, their small, round arms and legs striking out
through the land of dreams as swimmers breasting the waves. She gave a
little cry of delight and appreciation, and called Peter to look.
Little Jim, who had cried in some passing fear, sat up sleepily. He
stretched out his small arms to Peter, whom he had never seen before.
Peter took him, and again he settled to sleep, apparently assured that
he was in friendly hands.

The warm, small body, giving itself with perfect confidence, strongly
affected Peter’s heightened susceptibilities. In the very nature of the
situation he could be no friend to Jim Rodney, yet here in his arms lay
Jim Rodney’s son, loving, trusting him instinctively. Judith noticed
that his face paled beneath its many coats of tan. He was afraid of the
little sleeping boy, afraid that his unaccustomed touch might hurt him,
and yet loath to part with the small burden. Judith took the boy from
Peter and placed him between the two little girls on the bed.

Through the window they could see Alida’s dress glimmering, like a
phantom in the darkness, as she strained her eyes towards the path.
Peter hated to leave the women and children in this desolate place. The
night was far spent. To reach the round-up in season, he could at best
snatch a couple of hours’ sleep and be again in the saddle while the
stars still shone. His saddle and saddle blanket were enough for him.
The broad canopy of heaven, the bosom of mother earth, had given him
sound, dreamless sleep these many years. He bade the women good-night,
and made his bed where the cañon gave entrance to the valley. But sleep
was slow to come. Now, in that vague, uncertain world where we fall
through oceans of space, and the waking is the dream, the dream the
waking, Peter caught pale flashes of Kitty’s gold head as she ran and
ran, ever in the pursuit of something, she knew not what. And as she
ran hither and thither, she would turn her head and beckon to Peter,
and as he followed he felt the burden of years come upon him. And then
he saw Judith’s eyes, still and grave. He turned and wakened. No, it
was not Judith’s eyes, but the stars above the mountain-tops.




XII.
The Round-up


The stars were still shining when Peter Hamilton looked at his watch
next morning, but he sternly fought the temptation to lie another two
minutes by remembering the day’s work before him, and went in search of
the horse that he had not picketed overnight, as the beast required a
full belly after the hard night’s ride he had given him. Peter had
rolled out of his blankets with a keen anticipatory relish for the day
ahead. It was well, he knew, that there was ample work of a definite
nature for Peter the cow-puncher; as for Peter the man, he was
singularly at sea. Had Judith Rodney been his desert comrade all these
cheerful years for him to get his first belated insight into the real
Judith only a few little hours back? Or was it, he wondered, her
seeming unconsciousness of him, as she rode brave and sorrowful through
the night, to avert, if might be, her brother’s death—at all events, to
comfort and inspirit the frightened woman and her little children—that
had freshly tinged the friendship he had so long felt for her? Many
were the questions that Peter vaguely put to himself as he started out
for his long day in the saddle; and none of them he answered. Indeed,
he could not satisfactorily explain to himself why he should think of
Judith at all in this way—Judith, whom he had known so long, and upon
whom he counted so securely—Judith, who understood things, and was as
good a comrade as a man. Surely it was a strange thing that he should
discover himself in a sentimental dream of Judith!

For it was in such dreams that Katherine Colebrooke had figured ever
since Peter could remember. For years, indeed—and Judith knew it!—he
had stood, tame and tractable, waiting for Chloe to throw her dainty
lariat. But Chloe had intimated that her graceful fingers were engaged
with the inkpot and her head with schemes for further sonneting. Chloe
was becoming famous. To Peter, who was unmodern, there was little to be
gained in arguing against a state of affairs so crassly absurd as
career-getting for women. At such seasons it behooved sane men to pray
for patience rather than the gift of tongues. When the disheartened
fair should weary of the phantom pursuit, then might the man of
patience have his little day. Peter winced at the picture. To the world
he knew that his long waiting on the brink of the bog, while his
ambitious lady floundered after false lights, was, in truth, no more
impressive a spectacle than the anguished squawking of a hen who
watches a brood of ducklings, of her own hatching, try their luck in
the pond.

And there was Judith the great-hearted, Judith who was as inspiring as
a breath of hill air, Judith with no thought of careers beyond the
loyal doing of her woman’s part, Judith, trusty and loyal—and Judith
with that accursed family connection!

Peter tightened his cinch and turned his horse westward. The stars had
grown dim in the sky. The world that the night before had seemed to
float in a silvery effulgence looked gray and old. The cabin in the
valley flaunted its wretched squalor, like a beggar seeking alms on the
highway. Riding by, Peter lifted his sombrero. “Sweet dreams, gentle
lady!” He dug the rowel into his horse’s side and began his day at no
laggard pace. Nor did he spare his horse in the miles that lay between
him and breakfast. The beast would have no more work to do that day,
when once he reached camp, and Peter was not in his tenderest mood as
he spurred through the gray of the morning. The pale, chastened world
was all his own at this hour. Not a creature was stirring. The
mountains, the valleys, the softly huddled hills slept in the deep hush
that is just before the dawn. He looked about with questioning eyes.
Last night this very road had been a pale silver thread winding from
the mountain crests into a world of dreams. To-day it was but a trail
across the range. “Where are the snows of yester year?” he quoted, with
a certain early-morning grimness. At heart he was half inclined to
believe Judith responsible for the vanished world; Judith, Judith—he
was riding away from her as fast as his horse could gallop, and yet his
thoughts perversely lingered about the cabin in the valley.

After a couple of hours’ hard riding he could dimly make out specks
moving on that huge background of space, and presently his horse
neighed and put fresh spirit into his gait, recognizing his fellows in
moving dots on the vast perspective. And being a beast of some
intelligence, for all his heavy-footed failings, he reasoned that food
and rest would soon be his portion. Peter had no further use for the
rowel.

Breakfast was already well under way when he reached camp. The outfit,
seated on saddles in a semicircle about the chuck wagon, ate with that
peculiar combination of haste and skill that doubtless the life of the
saddle counteracts, as digestive troubles are apparently unknown among
plainsmen. The cook, in handing Peter his tin plate, cup, spoon, and
black-handled fork, asked him if “he would take overland trout or
Cincinnati chicken, this morning?” The cook never omitted these jocular
inquiries regarding the various camp names for bacon. He seemed to
think that a choice of alias was as good as a change of menu. There was
little talk at breakfast, and that bearing chiefly on the day’s work.
Every one was impatient for an early start. The horse wrangler had his
string waiting, the cook was scouring his iron pots, saddles were
thrown over horses fresh from a long night’s good grazing, cinches were
tightened, slickers and blankets were adjusted, and camp melted away in
a troup of horsemen winding away through the gray of early morning.

The scene of the beef round-up was a mighty plain, affording limitless
scope for handling the cattle of a thousand hills. In the distance rose
the first undulations of the mountains, that might be likened to the
surplusage of space that rolled the length of the sweeping levels, then
heaped high to the blue. The specks in the far distance began to grow
as if the screw of a field-glass were bringing them nearer, turning
them into horsemen, bunches of cattle, “chuck-wagons” of the different
outfits, reserves of horses restrained by temporary rope-corrals, all
the equipment of a great round-up. Dozens of men, multitudes of horses,
hordes of cattle—the mighty plain swallowed all the little, prancing,
galloping, bellowing things, and still looked mighty in its loneliness.
Fling a handful of toys from a Noah’s Ark—if they make such simple toys
now—in an ordinary field, and the little, wooden men, horses and cows,
will suggest the round-up in relation to its background. Men darted
hither and thither, yelling shrilly; cows—born apparently to be
leaders—broke from the bunches to which they had been assigned and
started at a clumsy run, followed by kindred susceptible to example.
Cow-punchers, waiting for just such manifestations of individuality,
whirled after them like comets, and soon they were again in the pawing,
heaving, sweltering bunch to which they belonged.

Peter Hamilton, whose particular skill as a cow-puncher lay in that
branch of the profession known as “cutting out,” found that the work of
the rustlers had been carried on with no unsparing hand since the early
spring round-up. Calves bearing the “H L” brand—that claimed by a
company known to be made up of cattle-thieves—followed mothers bearing
almost every brand that grazed herds in that part of the State. The
Wetmore outfit, that used a “W” enclosed in a square, were apparently
the heaviest losers. The cows and calves were herded at the right of
the plain, convenient to the branding-pen, the steers well away to the
opposite side. As Peter drove a “W-square” cow, followed by a little,
white-faced calf, whose brand had plainly been tampered with, he heard
one of his associates say:

“There’s nothing small about the ‘H L’ except their methods.”

“What’s ‘H L’ stand for, anyway?” the other cow-puncher asked.

“Why, Hell, or, How Long; depends whether you’re with ’em or again
’em.”

Peter wheeled from the men and headed for the bunch he was cutting out.
He fancied that the man had looked at him strangely as he offered a
choice of meanings for the “H L”—and yet he could not have known that
Peter had gone to Rodney’s cabin last night. He flung himself heart and
soul into his work, dashing full tilt at the snorting, stamping bedlam,
enveloped in clouds of dust that dimmed the very daylight. Calves
bleated piteously as they were jammed in the thickening pack. Peter
shouted, swung the rope right and left, thinning the bunch about him,
and a second later emerged, driving before him a cow, followed by a
calf. These were turned over to cow-boys waiting for them. Time after
time Hamilton returned to that mass of unconscious power, that with a
single rush could have annihilated the little band of horsemen that
handled them with the skill of a dealer shuffling, cutting, dealing a
pack of cards.

To the left were the steers, pawing and tearing up the earth in a very
ecstasy of impotent fury. Picture the giant propeller of an ocean liner
thrashing about in the sands of the desert and you will have an
approximate knowledge of the dust raised by a thousand steers. Their
long-drawn, shrieking bellow had a sinister note. Horns, hoofs, tails
beat the air, their bloodshot eyes looked menacingly in every
direction; but a handful of cow-boys kept them in check, circling round
and round them on ponies who did their work without waiting for quirt
or rowel.

The noonday sun looked down upon a scene that to the eye unskilled in
these things was as confusion worse confounded. Cow-boys dashed from
nowhere in particular and did amazing things with a bit of rope,
sending it through the air with snaky undulations after flying cattle.
The rope, taking on lifelike coils, would pursue the flying beast like
an aerial reptile, then the noose would fall true, and the thing was
done. A second later a couple of cow-boys would be examining the
disputed brand on the prone animal.

The smell of burning flesh and hair rose from the branding-pen and
mingled with the stench of the herds in one noisome compound. The yells
of the cow-punchers, each having its different bearing on the work in
hand, were all but lost in the dull, steady roar of the cattle,
bellowing in a chorus of fear, rage, and pain. And still the work of
sorting, branding, cutting-out, went steadily on. Though an outsider
would not have perceived it, the work was as crisp-cut and exact in its
methods as the work in a counting-house. One of the cow-boys, in hot
pursuit of a fractious heifer, encountered a gopher-hole, and horse and
rider were down in a heap. In a second a dozen helping hands were
dragging him from under the horse. He limped painfully, but stooped to
examine his horse. The beast had broken a leg, and turned on the man
eyes almost human in their pain.

“Bob, Bob!” The cow-puncher went down on his knees and put his arms
about the neck of his pet. “My God!” he said, “me and Bob was just like
brothers. Everybody knowed that.” He uncinched the saddle with clumsy
tenderness; not a man thought a whit less of him because he could not
see well at the moment. He turned his head away, that he might not see
the well-aimed shot that would release his pet from pain. Then he
limped away after another horse—it was all in the day’s work.

The beef contract called for a thousand steers, four and five years
old, and these having been well and duly counted, and some dozen extra
head added in case of accident, they were immediately started on the
trail, as they could accomplish some seven or eight miles before being
bedded down for the night. Hamilton, who had crossed to the beef side
of the round-up to have a necessary word with the “Circle-Star”
foreman, was amazed to find Simpson making ready to start with the
trail herd. Peter inquired, with a few expletives, “how long he had
been a cow-man, in good and regular standing?”

“As far as the regularity is concerned, that would be a pretty hard
thing to answer, but he’s had an interest in the ‘XXX’ since—since—”

“He drove Rodney’s sheep over the cliff?”

“Ain’t you a little hard on the beginning of his cattle career? It
usually goes by a more business-like name, but—” he shrugged his
shoulders—“it’s up to the ‘XXX.’ We wouldn’t have him help to pull
bogged cattle out of a creek.”

The beeves, hidden in a simoom of their own stamping, were gradually
being pressed forward on the trail, a huge pawn, ignorant of its own
strength, manipulated by a handful of men and horses. Its bellowing,
like the tuning of a thousand bass-fiddles, shook the stillness like
the long, sullen roar of the sea, as out of the plain they thundered,
to feed the multitude.

“Well, there goes as pretty a bunch of porterhouses as I’d want to put
tooth to. If I get away from here within the next two months, as I’m
expecting, doubtless I’ll meet some of you again with your personality
somewhat obscured by reason of fried onions.”

The foreman of the “Circle-Star” waved his hand after the slowly moving
herd that gradually pressed forward like an army in loose marching
order. Outriders galloped ahead, like darting insects, and pointing the
lumbering mass that trailed its half-mile length at a snail’s-pace. The
great column steadily advanced, checked, turned, led as easily as a
child trails his little steam-cars after him on the nursery floor, and
always by the little force of a handful of men and a few horses.

After supper came general relaxation around the camp-fire. The men, who
had all day been strung to a keen pitch of nervous energy, lounged in
loose, picturesque uncouthness, while each began to unravel his own
lively miscellany of information or invention. There was jest,
laughter, spinning of yarns, singing of songs. As Peter lay in the
fire-light, smoking his brier-wood, he noticed that the man next him
spent a great deal of time poring over a letter, holding it close to
the blaze, now at arm’s-length, which was hardly surprising,
considering the penmanship of the more common variety of _billet-doux_.
The man was plainly disappointed that Peter would not notice or
comment. Finally he folded it up, and with sentimental significance
returned it to the left side pocket of his flannel shirt, and remarked
to Peter, “It’s from her.”

“Indeed,” said Peter, who had not the faintest notion who “her” could
be. “Let me congratulate you.”

“Yes, sir,” and there was conviction in the cow-puncher’s tone; “it’s
from old man Kinson’s girl, up to the Basin, and the parson’s goin’ to
give us the life sentence soon. A man gets sick o’ helling it all over
creation.” He rolled a cigarette, lit it, took a puff or two, then
turned to Peter, as one whose acquaintance with the broader side of
life entitled him to speak with a certain authority. “Is it that, or is
it that we’re getting on, a little long in the tooth, logy in our
movements?”

“I think we’re just sick of helling it.” Peter looked towards the star
that last night had been the beacon towards which he and Judith had
scaled the heights. “Yes, we get sick of helling it after we’ve turned
thirty.”

“Then I can’t be making a mistake. If I thought it was because I was
getting on, I’d stampede this here range. It don’t seem fair to a girl
to allow that you’re broke, tamed, and know the way to the corral, when
it’s just that you’re needin’ to go to an old man’s home.”

“Now this is really love,” said Peter to himself, with interest. “This
is humility.” A sympathetic liking for the self-distrustful lover
surged hot and generous into Peter’s heart, and he continued to
himself: “Now that’s what Judith would appreciate in a man, some
directness, some humility!” Poor Judith! Poor burden-bearer! Who was to
love her as she deserved to be loved, even as old man Kinson’s girl, of
the Basin, was loved? Yet suppose some one did love her in such fashion
and she returned it? It was a picture Peter had never conjured up
before. Nonsense! he was accustomed to think of Judith a great deal,
and that was not the way to think of her. “Dear Judith!” said Peter,
half unconsciously to himself, and looked again at the fellow, who had
gone back to his dingy letter and continued to reread it in the
fire-light as if he hoped to extract some further meaning from the now
familiar words. Nature had fitted him out with a rag-bag assortment of
features—the nose of a clown, the eyes of a ferret, the mouth that
hangs agape like a badly hinged door, the mouth of the incessant
talker. And withal, as he lounged in the fire-light, dreamily turning
his love-letter, he had a sort of superphysical beauty, reflected of
the glow that many waters cannot quench.

Costigan, who had led the merriment against Simpson at Mrs. Clark’s
eating-house, was playing “mumbly-peg” with Texas Tyler. They had been
working like Trojans all day at the round-up, but they pitched their
pocket-knives with as keen a zest as school-boys, bickering over points
in the game, accusing each other of cheating, calling on the rest of
the company to umpire some disputed point.

But presently, from the opposite side of the fire, some one began to
sing, in a rich barytone, a dirgelike thing that caught the attention
of first one then another of the men, making them stop their yarning
and knife-throwing to listen. The tune, in its homely power to evoke
the image of the ceremonial of death, was more or less familiar to most
of them. There was a conscious funeral pageantry in the ring of its
measured phrases that recalled to many burials of the dead that had
taken place in their widely scattered homes. Mrs. Barbauld’s hymn,
“Flee as a Bird to the Mountain,” are the words usually sung to the
air.

Costigan presently cut across the dirgelike refrain with: “Phwat th’
divil is ut about that chune that Oi’m thinkin’ of?”

“This,” said the man with the barytone voice, “is the tune that Nick
Steele saved his neck to.”

“Begorra, that’s ut. I wasn’t there mesilf, but Oi’ve heard th’ story
told more times than Oi’ve years to me credit.”

“My father was in that necktie party,” spoke up a young cow-puncher,
“and I’ve heard him tell the story scores of times, and he always
wondered why the devil they let Steele off. Never could understand it
after the thing was done. He was talking of it once to a man who was a
sharp on things like mesmerism, and the man called it hypnotic
suggestion. Said that Steele got control of the whole outfit and
mesmerized ’em so they couldn’t do a thing to him.”

Several of the men asked for the story, echoes of which had come down
through all the forty years since its happening. And the cow-puncher,
lighting a cigarette, began:

“It was in the good old forty-nine days in California, when gold was
sometimes more plentiful than bread, and women were so scarce that one
day when they found a girl’s shoe on the trail they fitted a gold heel
to it and put it up in camp to worship. But sentiment wasn’t exactly
their long suit, and any little difficulties that cropped up were
straightened out by the vigilance committee—and a rope. One day a
saddle, or maybe it was a gun, that didn’t belong to him, was found
among this man Steele’s traps, and though he swore that some one had
put it there for a grudge, the committee thought that a hemp necktie
was the easiest way out of the argument. And this here Steele party
finds himself, at the age of twenty-four, with something like thirty
minutes of life to his credit. He don’t take on none, nor make a play
for mercy, nor try any fancy speech-making. He just waits round, kinder
pale, but seemin’ indifferent, considerin’ it was his funeral that was
impendin’. I’ve heard my father say that he was a tall, slim boy, with
a kind of girlish prettiness, and the committee looked some for
hysterics and they didn’t get none. The noose was made ready and they
told Steele he could have five minutes to pray, if he wanted to, or he
could take it out in cursing, just as he chose. The boy said he felt
that he hadn’t quite all that was coming to him in the way of
enjoyment, and that while he was far from criticising the vigilance
committee, he was not altogether partial to the nature of his demise,
and if it was just the same to them, instead of praying or cursing,
he’d take that five minutes for a song.

“They was agreeable, and he up and steps on the scaffold, what they was
mighty proud of, it bein’ about the only substantial structure the town
could boast. He began to sing that thing you’ve all been listening to,
and he had a voice like water falling light and fine in a pool below.
They crowded up close about the scaffold and listened. The words he put
to it were his own story, just like those old minstrels that you read
about, and at the end of each verse came the chorus, slow and solemn as
the moment after something great has happened. There wasn’t a
hangin’-face in the crowd after he was started. At some time or other
every man had heard somebody he thought a heap of, buried to that tune,
and his voice got to workin’ on their imaginations and turned their
hearts to water. I don’t remember anything but the chorus—that went
like this:

“‘Who’ll weep for me, on the gallows tree,
    As I sway in the wind and swing?
Is there never a tear to be shed for me,
    As I swing by a hempen string?
Who’ll weep, who’ll keep
Watch, as I’m rocked to sleep,
    Rocked by a hempen string?’”


There was a long silence, broken only by the crackle of the logs in the
camp-fire and the night sounds of the lonely plain. The leaping flames
showed a group of thoughtful faces. Finally, Costigan broke the silence
with:

“Begorra, ’tis some av thim ’ud be doin’ well to be lukin’ to their
music-lessons about here, Oi’m thinkin’, afther th’ day’s wurruk.”

The Irishman, with his instinctive loquacity, had expressed what none
of the rest would have considered politic to hint. It was like the
giving way of the pebble that starts the avalanche. Soon they were deep
in tales of lynchings. Peter knew only too well the trend of their
talk, the “XXX” men were feeling the public pulse, as it were. Now,
according to the unwritten code of the plains, lynching was “meet,
right, just, and available” for the cattle-thief. And Peter felt
himself false to his creed, false to his employer, false to himself, in
seeking to evade the question. And yet that pitiful cabin, the
white-faced woman running to the door so often that she knew not what
she did, and the little rosy boy, who had put out his arms so
trustfully! Peter broke into their grewsome yarning. “Lord, but you’re
like a lot of old women just come from a funeral!”

“Whin the carpse died hard, and th’ wake was a success.” Costigan
turned over. “Werra, werra, but we’ll be seein’ fairies the night!”

A “XXX” man turned his head with a deliberate slowness and regarded
Peter with narrowing eyes: “If the subject of cattle-thieves and their
punishment is unpleasant to the gentleman from New York, perhaps he
will favor us with something more cheerful.” It was the same man who
had given the two definitions of the “H L” brand that morning at the
round-up.

“Delighted,” said Peter, affecting not to notice the significance of
the man’s remark. “Did you ever hear of the time that Tony Neville was
burned with snow?”

The “XXX” man yawned long and audibly. No one seemed especially
interested in Tony Neville’s having been burned with snow, but Peter
struck out manfully, just in time to head off a man who said that he
had seen Jim Rodney or some one who looked like him, following the
trail-herd.

“Once on a time, when it paid to be a cattle-man,” began Peter, “there
was an outfit near Laramie that hailed from the United Kingdom, every
mother’s son of them. A fine, manly lot of fellows, but wedded to
calamity along of their cooks—not the revered range article,” and Peter
waved his hand towards the “W-square” cook, who was one of the party,
“but the pampered ranch article that boasts a real stove, planted in a
real kitchen, the spoiled darling that never has to light a fire out of
wet wood in the rain.

“These unhappy Britons had every species of ill luck that could befall
an outfit, in the way of cooks; they were of every nationality, age,
and sex, and they stole, drank, quarrelled, till the outfit determined
to sweep the house clear of them and do its own cooking. Every man was
to have a turn at it for a week. There was a Scotchman, who gave them
something called ‘pease bannocks,’ three times a day; followed by an
Irishman, who breakfasted them on potatoes and whiskey. There was an
Englishman, who had a beef slaughtered every time he fancied a
tenderloin. There was a Welshman, who sang as he cooked. There were as
many different kinds of indigestion as there were men in the outfit.
They would beg to do night-herding, anything to get them away from that
ranch. Finally, when their little tummies got so bad that their
overcoats thickened, or wore through, or whatever happens to stomachs’
overcoats that are treated unkindly, some one’s maiden aunt sent him a
tract saying that rice was the salvation of the human race, as witness
the Chinese. Whosever turn it was to cook that week determined to try
the old lady’s prescription. Rice was procured, about a peck, I think;
and the man who was cooking, pro tem, put the entire quantity on to
boil in a huge ham-boiler, over a slow fire, as per the directions of
the maiden aunt. The rice seemed to be doing nicely, when some one came
in and said that a bunch of antelope was over on the hills and there
was a good chance to get a couple. Every man got his gun, all but the
cook, and he looked at the rice, that hadn’t done a thing over the slow
fire, in a way that would melt your heart. ‘Just my luck that it should
be my week to pot-wrestle when there’s good hunting right at one’s
front door.’

“‘Oh, come on,’ some one said. ‘Didn’t Kellett’s aunt say the rice
ought to be cooked over a slow fire? Kellett, get your aunt’s letter
and read the directions for cooking that rice again.’

“The cook didn’t need a second invitation, and they got into their
saddles, cook and all, and went for the antelope.

“Now antelope are not like stationary wash-tubs; they move about. And
when that particular outfit arrived at the spot where those antelope
were last seen, they had moved, but the boys found traces of them, and
continued on their trail. They went in the foot-hills and they searched
for those antelope all day. They caught up with old man Hall’s outfit
at dinner-time and were invited to take a bite. Coming home by way of
the ‘Circle-Star’ ranch, Colonel Semmes asked them in to have a
mint-julep; the colonel was a South Carolinian, and he had just
succeeded in raising some mint. They had several—I fear more than
several—drinks before leaving for home, with never a trace of antelope
nor a thought of the rice cooking over the slow fire. The colonel
remembered some hard cider that he had, and topping off on that, they
set out. The weather was pretty warm, and on their way home they
experienced some remorse over the hard cider. Now hard cider is an
accumulative drink; it piles up interest like debt or unpaid taxes. And
by the time those Englishmen had turned the little lane leading into
their home corral, they saw a sight that made their sombreros rise. As
I have said before, it was hot, being somewhere in the month of August.
Gentlemen, I hardly expect you to believe me when I say it was snowing
on their house, and not on another God blessed thing in the landscape.

“The blame thing about it was, that every man took the phenomenon to be
his own private view of snakes, or their bibulous equivalent,
manifested in another and more terrifying form. Here was the August sun
pouring down on the plain where their ranch-house was situated;
everything in sight hot and dry as a lime-kiln, grasshoppers chirping
in a hot-wave prophecy, and snow covering the house and the ground,
about to what seemed a depth of four inches. Every one of them felt
sensitive about mentioning what he saw to the others. You see,
gentlemen, being unfamiliar with American drinks, and especially old
Massachusetts cider, they merely looked to keep their saddles and no
questions asked.

“But when they got a bit closer the horror increased. Flying right out
of their windows were perfect drifts of snow, banks of it, gentlemen,
and the thermometer up past a hundred. One of the men looked about him
and noticed the pallor on the faces of the rest:

“‘Do you notice anything strange, old chap? These cursed American
drinks!’

“‘Strange!’—the boy he had spoken to was about eighteen, a nice,
red-cheeked English lad out with his uncle learning the cattle
business. ‘Good God!’ the boy said. ‘I’ve always tried to lead a good
life, and here I am a paretic before I’ve come of age.’

“They halted their horses and held a consultation. The boss came to the
conclusion that since they had all seen it, there was nothing to do but
continue the investigation and send the details to the ‘Society for
Psychical Research,’ when he got down from his horse and walked towards
the door of the house. At his approach, as if to rebuke his wanton
curiosity, a great blast of snow blew out of the window and got him
full in the face. He howled—the snow was scalding hot.

“Then they remembered the rice.”

“Is that all?” demanded the man who had wanted to talk about rustling.

“Isn’t it enough?” said Peter, who could afford to be magnanimous, now
that he had accomplished his point.

“When I first heard that story, ’bout ten years ago, it ended with the
Britishers riding like hell over to the Wolcott ranch to borrow
umbrellas to keep off the hot rice while they got into the house,” said
the man, still sulky.

“That’s the way they tell it to tenderfeet,” and Peter turned on his
heel. The story-telling for the evening was over, the boys got their
blankets and set about making their beds for the night.




XIII.
Mary’s First Day In Camp


The first day spent as governess to the family of Yellett reminded Mary
Carmichael of those days mentioned in the opening chapter of Genesis,
days wherein whole geological ages developed and decayed. Any era,
geological or otherwise, she felt might have had its rise, decline, and
fall during that first day spent in a sheep camp.

She awoke to the sound of faint tinklings, and accepted the towering
peaks of the Wind River mountains, with their snowy mantles all shadowy
in the whitening dawn, and the warmer grays of huddling foot-hills, as
one receives, without question, the fantastic visions of sleep. The
faint tinkling grew nearer, mingled with a light pitter patter and a
far off baa-ing and bleating; then, as shadowy as the sheep in dreams,
a great flock came winding round the hill; in and out through the
sage-brush they went and came, elusive as the early morning shadows
they moved among. The air was crystalline and sparkling; creation’s
first morning could not have promised more. It would have been
inconsistent in such a place to waken in a house; the desert, that
seemed a lifeless sea, the sheep moving like gray shadows, were all
parts of a big, new world that had no need of houses built by hands.

Ben, oldest of the Brobdingnag tribe, who had greeted Mary’s request to
be directed to “the house” as a bit of dry Eastern humor, led the herd
to pasture. Ben’s right-hand man was “Stump,” the collie, so named
because he had no tail worth mentioning, but otherwise in full
possession of his faculties. Stump was newly broken to his official
duties and authority sat heavily on him. Keenly alert, he flew hither
and thither, first after one straying member of the herd, then another,
barking an early morning roll-call as he went. Two other male
Brobdingnags came from some sequestered spot in the landscape and
joined Ben—Mary recognized two more pupils.

Mrs. Yellett then unrolled the pillow constructed the night previous of
such garments as she had been willing to dispense with, and put them
on. The vastness of her surroundings did not prevent her from locating
the minutest article, and Mary gave her the respectful admiration of a
woman who has spent a great deal of time searching for things in an
infinitely smaller space. The matriarch then called the remaining
members of her household officially—the Misses Yellett accomplished
their early morning toilets with the simplicity of young robins. Only
the new governess hung back, but finally mustered up enough courage to
say that if such a thing was possible she would like to have a bath.

Mrs. Yellett greeted her request with the amused tolerance of one who
has never given such a trifle a thought.

“The habit of bathing,” she commented, “is shore like religion: them
that observes it wonders how them that neglects it gets along.” She
beckoned Mary to follow, and led the way to a bunch of willows that
grew about a stone’s-throw from the camp. “Here be a whole creek full
of water, if you don’t lack the fortitood. It’s cold enough to sell for
ten cents a glass down to Texas.”

Somewhat dismayed, Mary stepped gingerly into the creek. Its intense
cold numbed her at first, but a second later awoke all her young
lustiness, and she returned to camp in a fine glow of courage to
encounter whatever else there might be of novelty. Mrs. Yellett was
preparing breakfast at a sheet-iron stove, assisted by Cacta and
Clematis.

“Your hankering after a bath like this”—she added another handful of
flour to the biscuit dough—“do shore remind me of an Englishman who
come to visit near Laramie in the days of plenty, when steers had
jumped to forty-five. This yere Britisher was exhibit stock, shore
enough, being what’s called a peer of the realm, which means, in his
own country, that he is just nacherally entitled from the start to
h’ist his nose high.

“The outfit he was goin’ to visit wasn’t in the habit of havin’ peers
drop in on them casual, but they aimed to make him feel that he wasn’t
the first of the herd that headed that way by a quart”—she cut four
biscuits with a tin cup, and resumed—“to which end they rounded up
every specimen of canned food that’s ever come across the Rockies.

“‘Let him ask for “salmon esplinade,” let him ask for “chicken
marine-go,” let him ask for plum-pudding, let him ask for hair-oil or
throat lozengers, this yere outfit calls his bluff,’ says Billy Ames,
who owns the ‘twin star’ outfit and is anticipatin’ this peer as a
guest.

“Well, just as everything is ready, the can-opener, sharp as a razor,
waitin’ to open up such effete luxuries as the peer may demand, Bill
Ames gets called to California by the sickness of his wife. He feels
mean about abandonin’ the peer, but he don’t seem to have no choice,
his wife bein’ one of them women who shares her bad health pretty
impartially round the family. So Billy he departs. But before he goes
he expounds to Joplin Joe, his foreman, the nature of a peer and how
his wants is apt to be a heap fashionable, and that when he asks for
anything to grasp the can-opener and run to the store-house—Cacta, you
put on the coffee!

“That peer arrives in the afternoon, and he never makes a request any
more than a corpse. Beyond a marked disposition to herd by himself and
to maintain the greatest possible distance between his own person and a
six-shooter, he don’t vary none from the bulk of tenderfeet. At night,
when all parties retires, and Joplin Joe ponders on them untouched,
effete luxuries in the store-room, and how the can-opener ’ain’t once
been dimmed in the cause of hospitality, it frets him considerable, and
he feels he ain’t doin’ his duty to the absent Billy Ames.

“At sunrise he can stand it no longer. He thunders on the Britisher’s
door with the butt of his six-shooter, calling out:

“‘Peer, peer, be you awake?’

“The peer allowed he was, though his teeth was rattling like broken
crockery.

“‘Peer, would you relish some “salmon esplinade”?’

“The peer allowed he wouldn’t.

“‘Peer, would you relish some “chicken marine-go”?’

“The peer allowed he shore wouldn’t, and the crockery rattled harder
than ever. Joplin Joe then tried him on the hair-oil and the throat
lozengers, the peer declining each with thanks.

“‘Peer,’ said Joplin Joe, fair busting with hospitality, ‘is there
anything in this Gawd’s world that you do want?’

“The crockery rattled an interlood, then Joplin Joe made out:

“‘Thanks, very much. I should like a ba-ath’—Clematis, you see if them
biscuits is brownin’.

“Joe he ran to the store-room, and his eye encountered a barrel of
corned-beef. He calls to a couple of cow-punchers, and the first thing
you know that late corned steer is piled onto the prairie and them
cow-punchers is hustling the empty barrel in to the peer. Next they
detaches the steps from the kitchen door, ropes ’em to the barrel and
introduces the peer to his bath. He’s good people all right, and when
he sees they calls his bluff he steps in all right and lets ’em soak
him a couple of buckets. This here move restores all parties to a
mutual understanding, and the peer he bathes in the corned-beef barrel
regular durin’ his stay—you see the habit had cinched him.”

Ned had shot an antelope a day or two previous, and antelope steak,
broiled over a glowing bed of wood coals, with black coffee, stewed
dried apples, and soda biscuit made up what Mary found to be an
unexpectedly palatable breakfast. As camp did not include a cow, no
milk or butter was served with meals. Nevertheless, the hungry
tenderfoot was quite content, and missed none of the appurtenances she
had been brought up to believe essential to a civilized meal, not even
the little silver jug that Aunt Martha always insisted came over with
William the Conqueror—Aunt Martha scorned the _May-flower_ contingent
as parvenus.

The family sat on the grass, tailor fashion, and every one helped
himself to what appetite prompted, in a fashion that suggested
brilliant gymnastic powers. To pass a dish to any one, the governess
discovered, was construed as an evidence of mental weakness and
eccentricity. The family satisfied its appetite without assistance or
amenities, but with the skill of a troupe of jugglers.

Breakfast was half over when Mrs. Yellett laid down her knife, which
she had handled throughout the meal with masterly efficiency. Mary
watched her in hopeless embarrassment, and wondered if her own timid
use of a tin fork could be construed as an unfriendly comment upon the
Yelletts’ more simple and direct code of table etiquette.

“Land’s sakes! I just felt, all the time we’ve been eating, we was
forgettin’ something. You children ought to remember, I got so much on
my mind.”

All eyes turned anxiously to the cooking-stove, while an expression of
frank regret began to settle over the different faces. The backbone of
their appetites had been broken, and there was something else, perhaps
something even more appetizing, to come.

Interpreting the trend of their glance and expression, up flared Mrs.
Yellett, with as great a show of indignation as if some one had set a
match to her petticoats.

“I declare, I never see such children; no more nacheral feelin’s than a
herd of coyotes; never thinks of a plumb thing but grub. No, make no
mistake about the character of the objec’ we’ve forgot. ’Tain’t sweet
pertaters, ’tain’t molasses, ’tain’t corn-bread—it’s paw! It’s your
pore old paw—him settin’ in the tent, forsook and neglected by his own
children.”

All started up to remedy their filial neglect without loss of time, but
Mrs. Yellett waved them back to their places.

“Don’t the whole posse of you go after him, like he’d done something
and was to be apprehended. Ben, you go after your father.”

Ben strode over to the little white tent that Mary had noticed
glimmering in the moonlight the preceding evening, and presently
emerged, supporting on his arm a partially paralyzed old man, who might
have been Rip Van Winkle in the worst of tempers. His white hair and
beard encircled a shrivelled, hawklike face, the mouth was sucked back
in a toothless eddy that brought tip of nose and tip of chin into
whispering distance, the eyes glittered from behind the overhanging,
ragged brows like those of a hungry animal searching through the brush
for its prey.

“If you’ve done eatin’,” whispered Mrs. Yellett to Miss Carmichael,
“you’d better run on. Paw’s langwidge is simply awful when we forget to
bring him to meals.” Mary ran on.

When, after the lapse of some thirty minutes or so, the stentorian
voice of Mrs. Yellett recalled Mary to camp, she found that the tin
breakfast service had been washed and returned to the mess-box, the
beds had been neatly folded and piled in one of the wagons—in fact, the
extremely simple tent-hold, to coin a word, was in absolute order. It
was just 6 A.M., and Mrs. Yellett thought it high time to begin school.
Mary tried to convey to her that the hour was somewhat unusual, but she
seemed to think that for pupils who were beginning their tasks
comparatively late in life it would be impossible to start sufficiently
early in the morning. So at this young and tender hour, with many
misgivings, Mary set about preparing her _al fresco_ class-room.

She chose a nice, flat little piece of the United States, situated in
the shade of the clump of willows that bordered a trickling creek not
far from her sylvan bath-room of the early morning. How she was to sit
on the ground all day and yet preserve a properly pedagogical demeanor
was the first question to be settled. That there was nothing even
remotely resembling a chair in camp she felt reasonably assured, as
“paw” was sitting on an inverted soap-box under a pine-tree, and “paw,”
by reason of age and infirmity, appropriated all luxuries. Mrs.
Yellett, with her usual acumen, grasped the situation.

“I’m figgerin’,” she commented, “that there must be easier ways of
governin’ than sittin’ up like a prairie-dog while you’re at it.”

Mrs. Yellett took a hurried survey of the camp, lessening the distance
between herself and one of the light wagons with a gait in which grace
was entirely subservient to speed; then, with one capacious wrench of
the arms, she loosened the spring seat from the wagon and bore it to
the governess with an artless air of triumph. It was difficult, under
these circumstances, to explain to Mrs. Yellett that without that
symbol of scholastic authority, a desk, the wagon seat was useless.
Nevertheless, Mary set forth, with all her eloquence, the mission of a
desk. Mrs. Yellett was genuinely depressed. Had she imported the
magician without his wand—Aladdin without his lamp? She proposed a
bewildering choice—an inverted wash-tub, two buckets sustaining the
relation of caryatides to a board, the sheet-iron cooking-stove. In an
excess of solicitude she even suggested robbing “paw” of his soap-box.

Mary chose the wash-tub on condition that Mrs. Yellett consented to
sacrifice the handles in the cause of lower education. She felt that an
inverted tub that was likely to see-saw during class hours would tend
rather to develop a sense of humor in her pupils than to contribute to
her pedagogical dignity.

The camp, as may already have been inferred, enjoyed a matriarchal form
of government. Its feminine dictator was no exception to the race of
autocrats in that she was not an absolute stranger to the rosy byways
of self-indulgence. There was a strenuous quality in her pleasuring
perhaps not inconsistent in one whose daily tasks included
sheep-herding, ditch-digging, varied by irrigating and shearing in
their proper seasons. Under the circumstances, it was not surprising
that her wash-tub bore about the same relationship to her real duties
as does the crochet needle or embroidery hoop to the lives of less
arduously engaged women. It was at once her fad and her relaxation, the
dainty feminine accomplishment with which she whiled away the hours
after a busy day spent with pick and shovel. Of all this Mary was
ignorant when she proposed that Mrs. Yellett saw off the tub-handles in
the cause of culture. However, Mrs. Yellett procured a saw, yet the
hand that held it lingered in its descent on the handles. She
contemplated the tub as affectionately as Hamlet regarding the skull of
“Alas, poor Yorick!”

“This,” she observed, “is the only thing about camp that reminds me I’m
a woman. I’d plumb forget it many a time if it warn’t for this little
tub. The identity of a woman is mighty apt to get mislaid when dooty
compels her to assoome the pants cast aside by the nacheral head of the
house in sickness or death. It’s ben six years now since paw’s done a
thing but set ’round and wait for meals.” Mrs. Yellett sighed
laboriously. “Not that I’m holdin’ it agin him none. When a man sees
eighty, it’s time he bedded himself down comfortable and waited for the
nacheral course of events to weed him out. But when the boys get old
enough to tend to herdin’, irrigatin’, and the work that God A’mighty
provided that man might get the chance to sweat hisself for bread,
accordin’ to the Scriptures, I aim to indulge myself by doin’ a wash of
clothes every day, even if I have to take clean clothes and do ’em over
again.”

The poor “gov’ment’s” tender heart could not resist this presentation
of the case.

“We won’t touch the handles, Mrs. Yellett,” she laughed. “I’m glad you
told me you had a personal sentiment for the tub. There are some things
I should feel the same way about—my hoe and rake, for instance, that I
care for my garden with, at home. And that suggests to me, why not dig
two little trenches for the handles and plant the tub? Then I shall
have an even firmer foundation on which to arrange the—the—the
educational miscellany.”

The suggestion of this harmless expedient was gratefully received, and
the “desk” duly implanted, whereupon Mary pathetically sought to
embellish her “class-room” from such scanty materials as happened to be
at hand. A hemstitched bureau scarf that she had tucked in her trunk,
in unquestioning faith in the bureau that was to be part of the ranch
equipment, took the “raw edge,” as it were, off the desk. A bunch of
prairie flowers, flaming cactus blossoms in scarlet and yellow, ox-eyed
daisies, white clematis from the creek, seemed none the less decorative
for the tin cup that held them. Mary grimly told herself that her
school was to have refining influences, even if it had no furniture.

The books, pencils, and paper arranged in decorous little piles, Miss
Carmichael announced to her patroness that school was ready to open.
Mrs. Yellett, who had never heard that “a soft voice is an excellent
thing in woman,” and whose chest-notes were not unlike those of a
Durham in sustained volume of sound, made the valley of the Wind River
echo with the summons of the pupils to school, upon which the teacher
herself was overcome by the absurdity of the situation and had barely
time to escape back of the willows, where she laughed till she cried.

As the pupils trooped obediently to school, Mary noted that they
carried no flowers to their dear teacher, but that Ben, the oldest
pupil, twenty-one years old, six feet four inches in height and deeply
saturnine in manner, carried a six-shooter in his cartridge-belt. The
teacher felt that she was the last to deny a pupil any reasonable
palliative of the tedium of class-hours—the nearness of her own
school-days inclined her to leniency in this particular—but she was
hardly prepared to condone a six-shooter, and confided her fears to
Mrs. Yellett, who received them with the indulgent tolerance a
strong-minded woman might extend to the feminine flutter aroused by a
mouse. She explained that Ben did not shoot for “glory,” but to defend
the herd from the casual calls of mountain-lions, bears, and coyotes.
Jack and Ned, who were very nearly as tall as their older brother,
carried similar weapons. Mary prayed that a fraternal spirit might
dwell among her pupils.

The Misses Yellett were hardly less terrifying than their brothers.
They had their father’s fierce, hawklike profile, softened by youth,
and the appalling height and robustness due to the freedom and fresh
air of a nomadic existence. Their costumes might, Mary thought, have
been fashioned out of gunny-sacks by the simple expedient of cutting
holes for the head and arms. The description of the dress worn by the
charcoal-burner’s daughter in any mediaeval novel of modern
construction would approximate fairly well the school toilets of these
young lady pupils. The boys wore overalls and flannel shirts, which, in
contrast to the sketchy effects of their sisters’ costumes, seemed
almost modish. Mrs. Yellett then left the “class-room,” saying she must
take Ben’s place with the sheep.

The Brobdingnags, huge of stature, sinister of aspect, deeply
distrustful of the rites in which they were about to participate,
closed in about their teacher. From the pigeon-holes of memory Mary
drew forth the academic smile with which a certain teacher of hers had
invariably opened school. The pupils greeted the academic smile with
obvious suspicion. No one smiled in camp. When anything according with
their conception of the humorous happened, they laughed uproariously.
Thus, early in the morning, on his way to breakfast, Ned had stumbled
over an ax and severely cut his head. Every one but Ned saw the point
of this joke immediately, and hearty guffaws testified to their
appreciation.

Miss Carmichael took her place behind the upturned tub.

“Will you please be seated?” she said.

The class complied with the instantaneous precision of automata newly
greased and in excellent working order. Their abrupt obedience was
disconcerting. Some one must have been drilling them, thought their
anxious teacher, in the art of simultaneous squatting. The temper of
the class respecting scholastic deportment leaned towards rigidity
bordering on self-torture.

Mary made out a roll-call, and by unanimous consent it was agreed to
arrange the class as it then stood, or rather squatted, with the
Herculean Ben at the top, and gradually diminishing in size till it
reached the vanishing point with Cacta, who was ten and the least
terrifying of all.

“And now,” ventured the teacher, with the courage of a white rabbit,
“what have you been in the habit of studying?”

Absolute silence on the part of the class, which confronted its
questioner straight as a row of bottles, presenting faces imperturbable
as so many sphinxes.

Other questions met with an equally disheartening response. Miss
Carmichael sat up straight, pushed back the persistent curls from her
face, and bent every energy towards the achievement of a “firm”
demeanor.

“Clematis,” said she, wisely selecting perhaps the least formidable of
the class, “I want you to give me some idea of the kind of work you
have been doing, so that we may all be able to understand each other.
Now, in your mathematics, for instance, which of you have finished with
your arithmetic, and which—”

“What do you mean?” begged Clematis, somewhat tearful.

“Where are you in your arithmetic?

“Nowhere, ma’am.”

“Do you mean you have never learned any?” Mary Carmichael shuddered as
she icily put the question.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is that the case with all of you?”

Emphatic nods left no room for doubt.

“Then we’ll leave that for the present. If you will tell me, Clematis,
what kind of work you have been doing in your history and English, we
will get to work on those to-day. What books have you been using?”

Not unnaturally, Clematis, who was emotional and easily impressed,
began to feel as though she were a criminal. She sobbed in a helpless,
feminine way. Ben spoke up, fearsomely, from the top of the class.

“We ’ain’t got no books,” said he, in grim rebuke, as though to put an
end to a profitless discussion.

“Do you wish me to understand,” quavered Mary, “that you have had no
studies—that you—can’t read?—that you—don’t know—anything?”

“That’s it,” said Ben, with the nearest approach to cheerfulness he had
yet manifested.

Meanwhile there lay on the teacher’s “desk” copies of Clodd’s
_Childhood of the World_, two of that excellent series of _History
Primers_, and _The Young Geologist_, all carefully selected, in the
fulness of Mary’s ignorance, for the little pupils of her imagination.
She had brought no primer, as Mrs. Yellett’s letter had distinctly said
that the youngest child was ten and that all were comparatively
advanced in their studies. More than ever Mary longed to penetrate the
mystery of that Irish linen decoy, for without doubt it was to be her
melancholy fate to conduct this giant band through the alphabet!

Accordingly she wrote out the letters of the alphabet with large
simplicity and a sublime renunciation of flourish. The class received
it tepidly. Mary grew eloquent over its unswerving verities. The class
remained lukewarm. The difference between a and b was a matter of
indifference to the house of Yellett. They regarded their teacher’s
strenuous efforts to furnish a key to the acquirement of the alphabet
with the amused superiority of “grown-ups” watching infant antics with
pencil and paper. Meanwhile her fear of the class increased in
proportion as her ability to hold its attention diminished. The
backbone of the school was plainly wilting. The little scholars, armed
to the teeth, no longer sat up straight as tenpins. After twenty-five
minutes of educational experience, satiety bowled them over.

A single glance had convinced Ben that the alphabet was beneath
contempt. He yawned automatically at regular intervals—long, dismal
yawns that threatened to terminate in a howl, the unchecked, primitive
type of yawn that one hears in the cages of the zoological gardens on a
dull day. Miss Carmichael raised interrogatory eyebrows, but she might
as well have looked reproof at a Bengal tiger.

The class was rapidly promoted to c-a-t, cat; but these dizzy
intellectual heights left them cold and dull. Ben began to clean his
revolver, and on being asked why he did not pay attention to his
lessons, answered, briefly:

“It’s all d——d foolishness.”

Cacta and Clem were pulling each other’s hair. Mary affected not to see
this sisterly exchange of torture. Ned whittled a stick; and, in
chorus, when their teacher told them that d-o-g spelled dog, they
shouted derision, and affirmed that they had no difficulty in
compelling the obedience of Stump even without this particular bit of
erudition. Though Mary had always abhorred corporal punishment, she
began to see arguments in its favor.

With the handleless tub as an elbow-rest the teacher took counsel with
herself. Strategy must be employed with the intellectual conquest of
the Brobdingnags. Summoning all the pedagogical dignity of which she
was capable, she asked:

“Boys, don’t you want to know how to read?”

“Noap,” responded the head of the class.

“Don’t you want to know how to write?”

“Noap.”

“But, my dear boy, what would you do if you left here and went out into
the world, where every one knows these things and your ignorance would
be evident at every turn. What would you do?”

“Slug the whole blamed outfit!”

Mary looked at her watch. School had lasted just forty-five minutes.
Had time become petrified?




XIV.
Judith Adjusts The Situation


Mary had been a member of the Yellett household for something over a
week, and the intellectual conquest of her Brobdingnag pupils seemed as
hopeless as on that first day. School seemed to be regarded by them as
a sort of neutral territory, admirably adapted for the settlement of
long-standing grudges, the pleasant exchange of practical jokes, peace
and war conferences; also as a mart of trade, where fire-arms, knives,
bear and elk teeth might be swapped with a greater expenditure of time
and conversation than under the maternal eye. “Teacher,” as she was
understood and accepted by the house of Yellett, undoubtedly filled a
long-felt want. Presiding over a school of six-imp power for a week,
however, had humbled Mary to the point of seriously considering a
letter to the home government, meekly asking for return transportation.
But this was before feminine wile had struggled with feminine vanity,
and feminine wile won the day. School still continued to open at six,
from which early and unusual hour it continued, without recess or
interruption, till noon, when dinner pleasantly invaded the scholastic
monotony, to the infinite relief of all parties concerned.

Mary had dismissed her pupils a few minutes before the usual hour, on a
particularly bad day, that she might rally her scattered faculties and
present something of a countenance to the watchful eye of Mrs. Yellett.
Every element of humor had vanished from the situation. The inverted
tub was no longer a theme for merriment in her diary; home-life without
a house was no longer a diverting epigram; she had closed her eyes that
she might not see the mountains in all their grandeur. In her present
mood of abject homesickness the white-capped peaks were part and parcel
of the affront. With head sunk in the palms of her hands, and elbows
resting on the inverted tub, Mary presented a picture of woe, in which
the wicked element of comedy was not wholly lacking. Looking up
suddenly, she saw Judith Rodney advancing. The first glimpse of her put
Mary in a more rational mood.

“I’m so glad to see you! Behold my class-room appointments! They may
seem a trifle novel, but, for that matter, so are my pupils,” began
Mary, determining to present the same front to Judith that she had to
Mrs. Yellett. But Judith was not to be put off. She looked into Mary’s
eyes and did not relax her gaze until she was rewarded with an
answering twinkle. Then Mary laughed long and merrily, the first good,
hearty laugh since the beginning of her teaching.

“Tell me,” Mary broke out, suddenly, “or the suspense will kill me, who
wrote that lovely letter—on such good quality Irish linen, too? Snob
that I was, it was the letter that did it.”

“So you have your suspicions that it was not a home product?”

“You didn’t do it, did you?”

“Oh no; though I was asked, and so was Miss Wetmore, I believe. Of
course poor Mrs. Yellett had no other recourse, as I suppose you know.
I chose to be disobliging that time, and was sorry for it
afterwards—sorry when I heard about the letter that really went! Do you
find the sheep-wagon so very dreadful?”

“I thought,” laughed Mary, “that it was going to be like a picture I
saw in a magazine, Mexican hammocks, grass cushions, and a lady pouring
tea from a samovar; instead it was the sheep-wagon and ‘Do you sleep
light or dark?’ There is Mrs. Yellett calling us to dinner. Shall I
have a chance to talk to you alone afterwards?”

“I’ve come all the way from Dax’s to see you,” explained Judith, with
characteristic directness. “We have all the afternoon.”

“Really!” Mary displayed a flash of school-girl enthusiasm. “I feel as
if I could almost bear the scenery.”

Presumably Judith was a favorite guest of the Yellett household, and
not without reason. She took her place in the circle about the homely,
steaming fare, with an ease and grace that suggested that dining off
the ground was an every-day affair with her, and chairs and tables
undreamed-of luxuries. Mary envied her ready tact. Why could she not
meet these people with Judith’s poise—bring out the best of them, as
she did? The boys talked readily and naturally—there was even a flavor
to what they said. As for herself, try never so conscientiously and she
would be confronted by frank amusement or shy distrust. Even “paw”
beamed at Judith appreciatively as he consumed his meal with infinite,
toothless labor. The Spartan family became almost sprightly under the
pleasantly stimulating influence of its guest.

“What kind of basques are they wearing this summer, Judy?” inquired
Mrs. Yellett, regarding her guest’s trim shirt-waist judicially. “I
reckon them loose, meal-sack things must be all the go since you and
Miss Mary both have ’em; but give me a good, tight-fittin’ basque,
every time. How’s any one to know whether you got a figure or not, in a
thing that never hits you anywhere?” questioned the matriarch, not
without a touch of pride anent her own fine proportions.

“You really ought to have a shirt-waist, Mrs. Yellett. You’ve no idea
of the comfort of them, till you’ve worn them.”

“I don’t see but I’ll have to come to it.” Her tone was frankly
regretful, as one who feels obliged to follow the behests of fashion,
yet, in so doing, sacrifices a cherished ideal. Mary Carmichael choked
over her coffee in an abortive attempt to restrain her audible
hilarity. Judith, without a trace of amusement, was discussing
materials, cut, and buttons; the plainswoman had proved herself the
better gentlewoman of the two.

“Get me a spotty calico, white, with a red dot, will you, the next time
you’re over to Ervay? Buttons accordin’ to your judgment; but if you
could get some white chiny with a red ring, I think they’d match it
handsome.” She frowned reflectively. “You’re sure one of them loose,
hangy things ’d become me? Then you can bring it over Tuesday, when you
come to the hunt.”

“What hunt?” asked Judith, in all simplicity.

“Why, the wolf-hunt. Peter Hamilton come here three days ago and made
arrangements for ’em all to have supper here after it was done. ’Lowed
there was a young Eastern lady in the party, Miss Colebrooke, who
couldn’t wait to meet me. Course you’re goin’, Judy? You’ve plumb
forgot it, or somethin’ happened to the messenger. Who ever hyeard tell
of anythin’ happenin’ in this yere county ’thout you bein’ the very
axle of it?”

Judith had not betrayed her chagrin by the least change of countenance.
To the most searching glance every faculty was intent on the
shirt-waist with the ringed buttons. Yet both women felt—by a species
of telepathy wholly feminine—that Judith was deeply wounded. Loyal
Sarah Yellett decided that Hamilton’s guests would get but a scant
supper from her if her friend Judith was to be unfavored with an
invitation, while Judith, in her own warm heart, resented as deeply as
Peter’s slight of herself, his tale of Miss Colebrooke’s impatience to
meet Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch’s dominant personality evoked many a
smile even from those most deeply conscious of her worth; but it wasn’t
like Peter to make a spectacle of his ruggedly honest neighbor.
Nevertheless she remarked, coolly:

“I sha’n’t be able to bring your shirt-waist things up Tuesday, I’m
afraid, Mrs. Yellett, but I’ll try to bring them towards the end of the
week.” Then, with a swift change of subject, “How are the boys getting
on with their education, Miss Carmichael?”

The boys looked at Mary out of the corners of their eyes. Their prowess
in the field of letters had not been publicly discussed before. Mary
Carmichael, emboldened by Judith’s presence, looked at her tormentors
with a judicious glance.

“The girls are doing fairly well,” she replied, suppressing the
mischief in her eyes, “but the boys, poor fellows, I think something
must be the matter with them. Did they ever fall on their heads when
they were babies, Mrs. Yellett?”

“Not more than common. All babies fall on their heads; it’s as common
as colic.”

“Poor boys!” said Mary, with a manner that suggested they were miles
away, rather than within a few feet of her. “Poor boys! I’ve never seen
anything like it. They try so hard, too, yet they can make nothing of
work that would be play for a child of three. They must have fallen on
their heads harder than you supposed, Mrs. Yellett.”

“Perhaps their skulls were a heap frailer than I allowed for at the
time,” said Mrs. Yellett, with similar remoteness, yet with a twinkle
that showed Mary she understood the situation.

“An infant’s skull doesn’t stand much knocking about, I suppose, Mrs.
Yellett?”

“Not a great deal, if there ain’t plenty of vinegar and brown paper
handy, and I seldom had such fancy fixings in camp. It’s too bad my
boys should be dumb ’n account of a little thing like vinegar and brown
paper.”

“Maw, they be dumb as Injuns,” declared Cacta, preening herself, while
the Messrs. Yellett reapplied themselves to their dinner with
ostentatious interest.

“Well, well!” said Mrs. Yellett; “it be a hard blow to me to know that
my sons are lackings; there’s mothers I know as would give vent to
their disapp’inted ambition in ways I’d consider crool to the
absent-minded. Now hearken, the whole outfit of you! Any offspring of
mine now present and forever after holding his peace, who proves
feebleminded by the end of the coming week, takes over all the work,
labor, and chores of such offspring as demonstrates himself in full
possession of his faculties, the matter to be reported on by the
gov’ment.”

No sovereign, issuing a proclamation of war, could have assumed a more
formidable mien than Mrs. Yellett, squatting erect on the prairie,
crowned by her rabbit-skin cap. Mary and Judith, with bland, impassive
expressions, noted the effect of the mandate. There was not the
faintest symptom of rebellion; each Brobdingnag accepted the
matriarch’s edict without a murmur.

With an air of further meditation on the efficacy of brown paper and
vinegar at the crucial moment, Mrs. Yellett suddenly observed:

“The lacking, like the dog, may be taught to fetch and carry a book;
but to learn it he is unable.”

“Maw, does it say that in the Book of Hiram?” asked Clematis.

“It says that, an’ more, too. It says, ‘The words of the wise are an
expense, but the lovin’ parent don’t grudge ’em.’”

Mary Carmichael had noticed, as her alien presence came to be less of a
check on Mrs. Yellett’s natural medium of expression, that she was much
addicted to a species of quotation with which she impartially adorned
her conversation, pointed family morals, or administered an occasional
reproof. These family aphorisms were sometimes semi-legal, sometimes
semi-scriptural in turn of phrase, and built on a foundation of homely
philosophy. They were ascribed to the “Book of Hiram” and never failed
of salutary effect in the family circle. But the apt quotations that
she had just heard piqued Mary’s curiosity more than before.

“Do you happen to have a copy of the Book of Hiram, Mrs. Yellett?” she
asked, in all innocence, supposing that the ‘homely apothegms were to
be found at the back of some patent-medicine almanac. Judith Rodney
listened in wonder. The question had never before been asked in her
hearing.

“I lost mine.” Mrs. Yellett folded her arms and looked at her
questioner with something of a challenging mien.

“What a pity! I’ve been so interested in the quotations I’ve heard you
make from it.”

“What’s the matter with ’em?” she demanded, pride and apprehension
equally commingled.

Judith Rodney rushed to the rescue:

“Nothing is the matter with them, Mrs. Yellett,” she said, with her
disarming smile, “except that there is not quite enough to go around.”

The matriarch had the air of gathering herself together for something
really worth while. Then she tossed off:

“‘’Tain’t always the quality of the grub that confers the flavor, but
sometimes the scarcity thereof.’”

Perhaps it has been the good-fortune of some of us to say a word of
praise to an author, while unconscious of his relationship to the book
praised. Mark the genial glow radiating from every feature of our
auditor! How we feel ourselves anointed with his approval, our good
taste and critical faculty how commended! It is a luxury that goes a
long way towards mitigating the discomfitures caused by the reverse of
this unctuous blunder.

“The Book of Hiram,” said Mrs. Yellett, angling for time, “is a book—it
do surprise me that it escapes your notice back East. You ever heard
tell of the Book of Mormon?”

Mary assented.

“Well, the Book of Hiram is like the Book of Mormon, only a heap more
undefiled. The youngest child can read it without asking a single
embarrassing question of its elder, and the oldest sinner can read it
without having any fleshly meditations intrudin’ on his piety.”

The Yellett family had by this time dispersed itself for the afternoon,
and the matriarch and the two girls started in to clear away the meal
and wash the dishes.

“That’s the kind of book for me,” continued Mrs. Yellett, vigorously
swishing about in the soapy water. “Story-books don’t count none with
me these days. It’s my opinion that things are snarled up a whole lot
too much in real life without pestering over the anguish of print
folks. Flesh and blood suffering goes without a groan of sympathy from
the on-lookers, while novel characters wade to the neck in compassion.
I’ve pondered on that a whole lot, seem’ a heap of indifference to
every-day calamity, and the way I assay it is like this: print folks
has terrible fanciful layouts given to their griefs and worriments by
the authors of their being. The trimmings to their troubles is mighty
attractive. Don’t you reckon I’d be willin’ to have a spell of trouble
if I had a sweeping black velvet dress to do it in? Yes, indeed, I’d be
willin’ to turn a few of them shades of anguish, ‘gray’s ashes,’ ‘pale
as death,’ and so on, if they’d give me the dress novel ladies seems to
have for them special occasions.”

“But you used to like novels, you know you did, Mrs. Yellett,” observed
Judith Rodney.

“Yes, I didn’t always entertain these views concernin’ romance. You
wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when I just nacherally went
careerin’ round enveloped in fantasies. I was young then—just about the
time I married paw. Every novel that was read to me, I mean that I
read”—Mrs. Yellett blushed a deep copper color through her many coats
of tan—“convinced me that I was the heroine thereof. And, nacherally, I
turned over to paw the feachers and characteristics of the hero in said
book I happened to be enjoyin’ at the time. Paw never knew it, but
sometimes he was a dook, and it was plumb hard work. Just about as hard
as ropin’ a mountain-lion an’ sayin’, ‘remember, you are a sheep from
this time henceforth, and trim your action accordin’.’ I’d say to paw,
‘Let’s walk together in the gloaming, here in this deserted garden’;
and paw would say, ‘Name o’ Gawd, woman, have you lost your mind? It’s
plumb three hundred and fifty miles to the Tivoli beer-garden in
Cheyenne, and it ain’t deserted, either!’

“Then I’d wring my hands in anguish, same as the Lady Mary, an’ paw
would declare I was locoed. He seemed a heap more nacheral when I
pretended he was ‘Black Ranger, the Pirate King.’ His language came in
handy, and his cartridge-belt and pistol all came in Black Ranger’s
outfit. Yes, it was a heap easier playing he was a pirate than a dook.
All this happened back to Salt Lake, where me an’ paw was married.”

Mrs. Yellett looked towards the mountain-range that separated her from
the Mormon country, and her listeners realized that she was verging
perilously close to confidences. Mary Carmichael, who dreaded missing
any detail of the chronicle that dealt with paw in the rôle of
apocryphal duke, hastened to say:

“And you lost your taste for romance, finally?”

“In Salt Lake I was left to myself a whole lot-there was reasons why I
didn’t mingle with the Mormon herd. Paw was mighty attentive to me, but
them was troublous times for paw. I pastures myself with the fleetin’
figures of romance the endoorin’ time and enjoys myself a heap. When
paw wasn’t a dook or a pirate king, unbeknownst to himself, like as not
he was Sir Marmaduke Trevelyun, or somebody entitled to the same amount
of dog.

“’Bout this time a little stranger was due in our midst, and the woman
who came to take care of me was plumb locoed over novels, same as me,
only worse. She just hungered for ’em, same as if she had a longin’ for
something out of season. She brought a batch of them with her in her
trunk, we borrowed her a lot more, some I don’t know how she come by.
But they didn’t have no effect; it was like feedin’ an’ Injun—you
couldn’t strike bottom. She read out of ’em to me with disastrous
results happenin’, an’ that cured me. The brand on this here book that
effected my change of heart was _The Bride of the Tomb_. I forget the
name of the girl in that romance, but she was in hard luck from the
start. She couldn’t head off the man pursooin’ her, any way she turned.
She’d wheel out of his way cl’ar across country, but he’d land thar
fust an’ wait for her, a smile on his satanine feachers.

“I got so wrought up along o’ that book, an’ worried as to the outcome,
’most as bad as the girl. Think of it! An’ me with only three
baby-shirts an’ a flannel petticoat made at the time! Seemed ’s if I
couldn’t hustle my meals fast enough, I just hankered so to know what
was goin’ to happen next! I plumb detested the man with the handsome
feachers, same as the girl. Me an’ her felt precisely alike about him.
And when he shut her up in the family vault I just giv’ up an’ was took
then an’ there, an’ me without so much as finishin’ the flannel
petticoat! I never could endure the sight of a novel since. Perhaps
that’s why Ben is so dumb about his books—just holds a nacheral grudge
against ’em along of my havin’ to borrow slips for him.”

“Has the Book of Hiram anything to say against the habit of novel
reading, Mrs. Yellett?” inquired Judith, demurely.

She paused for a moment. “It’s mighty inconvenient that I should have
mislaid that book, but rounding up my recollections of it, I recall
something like this: ‘Romance is the loco-weed of humanity.’”

“So you don’t approve of the Mormon Bible?” ventured Mary.

“I jest nacherally execrates Mormonism, spoken, printed, or in action,”
she said, with an emphasis that suggested the subject had a strong
personal bearing. “I recall a text from the Book of Hiram touching on
Mormon deportment in particklar an’ human nature at large. It says,
‘Where several women and one man are gathered together for the purpose
of serving the Lord, the man gets the bulk of the service.”

She broke off suddenly, as if she feared she had said too much. “Judy,”
she demanded, “is Mis’ Dax busy with Leander now?”

“Not more than usual,” smiled Judith.

“Jest tell her for me, will you, that I want to hire her husband to do
some herdin’; Leander’s handy, ’n’ can work good an’ sharp, if he is an
infidel. An’ I like to have him over now an’ then, as you know, Judy.
As the Book of Hiram says, ‘It’s neighborly to ease the check-rein of a
gentled husband.’ But you tell him I don’t want to hear any of his
ever-lastin’ fool argufyin’ ’bout religion. Leander ’d stop in the
middle of shearin’ a sheep to argue that Jonah never came out o’ the
whale’s belly. I ain’t no use for infidels, ’less they’re muzzled,
which Leander mos’ generally is.”

With the feeling that there was an excellent though unspoken
understanding between them, the two girls walked together to the top of
the path that wandered away from camp towards a bluff overlooking wave
after wave of foot-hills, lying blue and still like a petrified sea.

“I’m still dying to know who wrote that letter,” begged Mary.

“It was written by a lady who is very anxious to return to Washington,
and she took that means of getting one more vote. Her husband is going
to run for the Senate next term. We hear a good deal of that side of
politics, you know.”

“It was certainly convincing,” remarked the victim of the letter. “My
aunts detected many virtues in the handwriting.”

“But now that you are really here, isn’t it splendid? Mountains are
such good neighbors. They give you their great company and yet leave
you your own little reservations.”

“But I fear I can never feel at home out-of-doors,” Mary announced,
with such a rueful expression that they both smiled.

“Perhaps, then, it depends on the frame of mind. I’ve had longer than
you to cultivate it.”

Mary looked towards the mountains, serene in their strength. “Awesome
as they are,” she laughed, “they don’t frighten me nearly as much as
Ben and Ned. They are really very difficile, my pupils, and I feel so
ridiculous sitting up back of that tub, teaching them letters and the
spelling of foolish words, when they know things I’ve never dreamed of.
The other day, out of a few scratches in the dust that I should never
have given a second glance, one of them made out that some one’s horses
had broken the corral and one was trailing a rope. Whereupon my pupil
got on a horse, went in search of the strays, and returned them to men
going to a round-up. After that, the spelling of cat didn’t seem quite
so much of an achievement as it had before.”

“But they need the spelling of cat so much more than you need to
understand trail-marks. Why don’t you try a little strategy with them?
Perhaps a bribe, even? It seems to me I remember something in history
about the part played in colonization by the bright-colored bead.”

Sundry wood-cuts from a long-forgotten primer history of the United
States came back to Mary. In that tear-stained, dog-eared volume, all
explorers, from Columbus down to Lewis and Clarke, were unfailingly
depicted in the attitude of salesmen displaying squares of cloth to
savages apparently in urgent need of them.

“How stupid of me not to remember Father Marquette concluding
negotiations with a necklace!”

“Frankly plagiarize the terms of your treaty from Père Marquette, and
there you are!”

“You are so splendid!” said Mary, impulsively, remembering Judith’s own
sorrows and the smiling fortitude with which she kept them hidden. “You
make me feel like a horrid little girl that has been whining.”

Judith looked towards the mountains a long time without speaking.

“When you know them well, they whisper great things that little folk
can’t take away.”

She turned back towards camp, walking lightly, with head thrown back.
Mary watched her. Yes, the mountains might have admitted her to their
company.




XV.
The Wolf-hunt


Judith awakened with all the starry infinitude of sky for a canopy. In
the distance loomed the foot-hills, watchful sentinels of her slumbers;
and, sloping gently away from them, rolled the plain, like some smooth,
dark sea flowing deep and silently. Judith, a solitary figure adrift in
that still ocean of space, sat up and watched the stars fade and saw
the young day peer timorously at the world that lay before it. Her
mind, refreshed by long hours of dreamless sleep, turned to the problem
of impending things, serenely contemplative. The passing of many
mornings and many peoples had the mountains seen as the wreathed mists
came and went about their brows, and to all who knew the value of the
gift they gave their great company, and to such as could hear, they
told their great secrets. Judith’s prayer was an outflowing of soul to
the great forces about her, a wish to be in harmony with them, to
remember her kinship, to keep some measure of their serenity in the
press of burdens. The way of the Indian was ever her way when
circumstance raised no barriers; the four walls of a house were a
prison to her after the days lengthened and the summer nights grew
warm. To the infinite disapproval of that custodian of propriety, Mrs.
Dax, she would make her bed beneath the stars, night after night, and
bathe in the cold, clear waters of the stream that purled from the
white-capped crest of the mountains.

“Nasty Injun ways!” scoffed Leander’s masterful lady, consciously
superior from the intrenchment of her stuffy bedroom, that boasted
crochet-work on the backs of the chairs and a scant lace curtain at its
solitary window.

Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk
till it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows. A quarter of a
mile above was another pool, hidden like a jewel in its case of green,
broidered with scarlet roseberries and white clematis; and towards this
she bent her steps, as time was a-plenty that morning. She kept to the
stones of the creek for a pathway, jumping lightly from those that were
moss-grown to those that hid their nakedness in the dark, velvet
shadows of early morning, her white feet touching the shallow stream
like pale gulls that dipped and skimmed. “Diana’s Pool,” as she called
it, was always clear. It lay half hid beneath a shelving rock, a fount
for the tiny, white fall that crooned and sang as it fell. And here she
bathed, as the east flamed where the mountains blackened against it.
Gold halos tipped the clouds, that melted presently into fiery waves,
then burst into one great aureole through which the sun rode
triumphant, and it was day.

She had kept post-office the day before, and it would not be till day
after to-morrow that the squires of the lariat would come again to
offer their hearts, their worldly goods, their complete reformation, if
she would only change her mind. It was all such an old story that she
had grown to regard them with a tenderness almost maternal. But to-day
was all her own, and the spirit of adventure swelled high in her bosom
as she thought of what she had planned. It was warm and close and still
in the Dax house as Judith made her way softly to her own room and
began her preparations for the long journey she was to take afoot. To
walk in the abominations devised by the white man for the purpose of
cramping his feet would have been a serious handicap to Judith. The
twenty miles that she would walk before nightfall was no very great
undertaking to her, but it was part of her primitive directness to
accomplish it with as little expenditure of fatigue and comfort as
possible. Moreover, who could steal through the forest in those heeled
things without announcing his coming and frightening the forest folk,
and sending them skurrying? And Judith loved to surprise them and see
them busy with their affairs—to creep along in her soft, elk-hide
moccasins and catch their watchful eyes and see the things that were
not for the heavy-booted white man.

She might have inspired Kitty Colebrooke to a sonnet as she stepped out
into the glad morning light, in short skirt and jacket, green-clad as
the pines that girdled the mountains, with a knapsack with rations of
bread and meat and the wherewithal to build a fire should she wander
belated. She softly closed the door, not to awaken Leander and his
slumbering lady, and broke into the running gait that the Indians use
on their all-day journeys, the elk-hide moccasins falling soft as
snow-flakes on the trail. Dolly she missed chiefly for her
companionship, for Judith had not the white man’s utter helplessness
without a horse in this country of high altitudes. When she walked she
breathed, carried herself, covered ground like her mother’s people, and
loved the inspiration of it.

The eerie shadows of the desert drew back and hid themselves in the
mountains. The day began with splendid promise—the day of the
wolf-hunt, of which no word had been spoken to her by Peter. She, too,
was going hunting, but silently and unbidden she would steal through
the forest and see this mysterious woman who played fast and loose with
Peter, who loved her apparently all the better for the game she played.
What manner of woman could do these things? What manner of woman could
be indifferent to Peter? Judith was consumingly curious to see. And,
apart from this naked and unashamed curiosity, there was the
possibility that at sight of Miss Colebrooke there might come a
relaxation of Peter’s tyrannous hold upon her thoughts, her life, her
very heart’s blood. Would her loyalty bear the test of seeing Peter
made a fool of by a woman she could dismiss with a shrug—a softly
speaking shrew, perhaps, who played a waiting game with her finger on
the pulse of Peter’s prospects? For there was talk of a partnership
with the Wetmores. Or a fool, perhaps, for all her sonneting, for there
are men who relish a weak headpiece as the chiefest ornament of women,
especially when its indeterminate vagaries boast an escape-valve
remotely connected with the fine arts. Or a devil-woman, perhaps—an
upright wanton who could think no wrong from very poverty of
temperament, yet kept him dangling. The possibility of Kitty’s honesty,
Judith in her jealousy would not admit. Had she gone to the devil for
him, stood and faced the drift of opinion for his sake, that Judith
could have understood. But what was the spinning of verses to a woman’s
portion of loving and being loved? Even Alida, through all her
distracting anxieties, had in her heart the thrice-blessed leaven,
reasoned the woman of the plains, who might, according to modern
standards, be reckoned a trifle primitive in her psychological
deductions. And, withal, Judith was forced to admit that there was
something simple and true about a man who would let a woman make a fool
of him, whoever the woman was.

Perhaps with this hunting would end the long reign of Peter as a
divinity. Judith was tired, not in her vigorous young body, because
that was strong and healthful as the hill wind, but tired in heart and
mind and life. Her destiny had not been beautiful or happy before he
invaded it, but it had been calm, and now serenity seemed the worthiest
gift of the gods. It was not that she loved him less, but that she had
so long reflected upon him that her imagination was numb; her thoughts,
arid, unfruitful as the desert, turned from him to the problems that
beset her, and from them back to him again, in dull, subconscious
yearning. She could no longer project an anguished consciousness to
those scenes wherein he walked and talked with Kitty. Her Indian
fatalism had intervened. “Life was life,” to be lived or left. And yet
she felt herself a poor creature, one who had lived long on illusion,
who had bent her neck to the yoke of arid unrealities. The pale-haired
woman who kept him with her miserliness of self, who intruded no sombre
tragedy of loving, was well worth a trip across the foot-hills to see.
And yet, Judith reflected, it was the portion of her mother’s daughter
to make of loving the whole business of life, even if she rebelled and
fought against it as an accursed destiny. It was in her inheritance to
know and live for the wild thrill of ecstasy in her pulses, to feel
trembling joy and despair and frantic hope, that exacted its tribute
hardly less poignant; as it was, also, to feel a shivering
sensitiveness in regard to the loneliness and bitterness of her life,
to have the same measureless capacity for sorrow that she had for
loving, to have a soul attuned to the tragedy of things, to love the
mighty forces about her, to feel the reflection of all their moods in
her heart, and, lastly, it was her destiny to be the daughter of a
half-Sioux and a border adventurer, and to feel the counter influences
of the two races make forever of her heart a battleground.

Her light feet scarcely touched the ground as she sped swiftly through
all the network of the hills; and more than once her woman’s heart
asked the question, “And, prithee, Judith, if from henceforth you are
only to hold fellowship with the stars and have no part in the ways of
men, why do you walk a day’s journey to catch a glimpse of a
pale-haired woman?”

She knew the probable course of the wolf-hunt. She had been on scores
of them, galloped with Peter after the fleeing gray thing that swept
along the ground like the nucleus of a whirling dust-devil. At least
she was sure of the place of their nooning—a limpid stream that ran
close to many young pine-trees. Here was a pause in the rugged ascent,
a level space of open green, thick with buffalo grass. Many times had
she been here with Peter, sometimes with many other people on the
chase—sometimes, and these occasions were enshrined in her memory, each
with its own particular halo, with Peter alone; and they had fished for
trout and cooked their supper on the grassy levels. It was in Judith’s
planning to arrive before the hunting-party, to hide among the thickets
of scrub pine that grew along the steep cliffs and overlooked the
grassy level, to take her fill of looking at the pale-haired girl and
the hunters at their merrymaking, and, when she had seen, to steal back
across the trail to the Daxes’. They would not penetrate the thickets
where she meant to hide, and, should they, she was prepared for that
contingency, too. She had brought with her a bright-colored shawl that
she would throw over her head, and with the start of them she could
outrun them all, even Peter. Had she not outdistanced him easily, many
times, in fun? Through the tangle of tree-trunks that grew not far from
the thicket, they would think she was but a poor Shoshone squaw lying
in wait for the broken meat of the revellers.

By crossing and recrossing the tiny creeks that trickled slow and
obstructed through the gaunt levels of plain and foot-hill, she had
come by a direct route to the fringes of the pine country. And here she
found a world dim, green, and mysterious. It was wellnigh inconceivable
that the land of sage-brush and silence could, within walking distance
of desolation, show such wealth of young timber, such shade and beauty.
Her noiseless footfalls scarce startled a sage-hen that, realizing too
late her presence, froze to the dead stump—a ruffled gray excrescence
with glittering bead eyes that stared at her furtively, the one live
thing in the tense body.

The sun wanted an hour of noon when Judith rested by the stream, bathed
her face and hands, flushed from the long walk, ate the bread and meat,
then lay on the bed of pine-needles, brown and soft from the weathering
of many suns and snows. She had been all day in the company she loved
best—the earth, the sky, the sun and wind—and in her heart at last was
a deep tranquillity. Thus she could face life and ask nothing but to
watch the cloud fleeces as they are spun and heaped high in the long
days of summer; in soberer moods to watch the thoughts of the Great
Mystery as He reveals them in the shifting cloud shapes; to penetrate
further and further into the councils of the great forces. Thus did she
dream the moments away till the sun was high in the blue and threw
long, yellow splashes of light on her still body, on the soft
pine-needles, beneath the boughs. But there was no time for further
day-dreams if she intended to forestall the hunters at the place of
nooning. She followed a game trail that lay along the stream, ascending
through the dense growths till she reached the top of the jutting
rocks. Her hair was loosened, her skirt awry, and the pine-needles
stood out from it as from a cushion. Much of the way she gained by
creeping beneath the low branches on her hands and knees. No white
woman would be likely to follow her reasoned the daughter of the
plains. It would be a little too hard on her appearance. And here, by
lying flat and hanging over the jutting knob of rock, with a pine
branch in her hand, she could see this mysterious woman and Peter and
the hunters.

She broke a branch to shade her face, she looked down on the grassy
level. She waited, but there was no sound of hoofs falling muffled on
the soft ground. The shadows of the pines contended with the splashes
of sunlight for the little world beneath the trees. They trembled in
mimic battle, then the shadows stole the sunlight, bit by bit, till all
was pale-green twilight, and there was no sound of the hunters.

The hunters, meanwhile, had not been altogether successful in the
chase. The necessary wolf had been coy, and they, perforce, had to
compromise with his poor relation, the coyote—a poor relation, indeed,
whose shabby coat, thinned by the process of summer shedding, made it
an unworthy souvenir to Miss Colebrooke. But it was not the lack of a
wolf that robbed the hunting-party of its zest for Kitty. She could not
tell what it was, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the day
from the beginning. She rode beside her cavalier in a habit the like of
which the country had never before seen, and Peter, usually the most
observant of men, had no word for its multitude of perfections. In the
first realization of disappointment with the day, the hunt, the
hardships of the long ride, her perturbed consciousness took up the
problem of this missing element and tried to adjust itself to the
irritating absence. Kitty wondered if it were something she had
forgotten. No, there were her two little cambric pocket-handkerchiefs,
remotely suggestive of orris, and bearing her monogram delicately
wrought and characteristic. It was not her watch, the ribbon fob of
which fluttered now and then in the breeze. It was not veil nor
scarf-pin nor any of the paraphernalia of the properly garbed
horsewoman. And yet there was something missing, something she should
have had with her, something the absence of which was taking the savor
from the day’s hunting.

It must be the very bigness of this great, splendid world that gave her
the sense of being alone at sea. Intuitively she turned and looked at
Peter riding beside her. There was something in his face that made her
look again before accepting the realization at first incredulously,
then with frank amusement. Peter had scarcely spoken since they left
the ranch. She had come down to breakfast so sure of her new
riding-habit. The Wetmore girls had been moved to hyperboles about its
cut and fit and the trim shortness of the skirt—short riding-skirts
were something of a novelty then. The fine gold hair, twisted tight at
the back of the shapely head, was like a coiled mass of burnished
metal, some safe-keeping device of mint or gold-worker till the season
of coining or fashioning should come round. The translucent
flesh-tints, pearl-white flushing into pink—“Bouguereau realized at
last,” as Nannie Wetmore was in the habit of summing up her cousin’s
complexion—was as marvellous as ever. The delicate firmness of profile
gave to the face the artificial perfection of an old miniature, rather
than of a flesh-and-blood countenance, and all these were there as of
yore, but the marvel of them failed of the customary tribute. Kitty, on
scanty reflection, was at no loss to translate Peter’s reserve into a
language at once flattering and retributive. In her scheme of life he
was always to be her devoted cavalier, as indeed he had been from the
beginning. She loved her own small eminence too well to imperil her
tenure of it by sharing its pretty view of men and things with any one.
In country house parties she loved the mild wonder that the successful
_littérateuse_ could fight and play and win her social triumphs so
well. She loved the star part, and next to playing it she enjoyed
wresting it from other women or eclipsing them completely in some
conspicuously minor rôle, while, in the matter of dress, Miss
Colebrooke went beyond the point decreed by the most exigent mandates
of fashion. When hats were worn over the face, her admirers had to
content themselves with a glimpse of her charming mouth and chin. When
they flared, hers fairly challenged the laws of equilibrium. She danced
with the same facility with which she rode, swam, and played tennis. In
doing these things supremely well she felt that she vindicated the
position of the woman of letters. Why should one be a frump because one
wrote?

Her friendship with Peter was to endure to greenest old age, more
platonic, perhaps, than that of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand. It
was to be fruitful in letters that would compare favorably with the
best of the seventeenth century series. Even now her own letters to
Peter were no sprightly scrawl of passing events, but efforts whose
seriousness suggested, at least in their carefully elaborated stages of
structure, the letters of the ladies of Cranford.

But in the course of these Western wanderings, undertaken not wholly
without consideration of Peter, there had appeared in the maplike
exactness of her plans an indefinite territory that threatened
undreamed-of proportions. It menaced the scheme of the letters, it
shook the foundations of the Chateaubriand-Récamier friendship. The
unknown quantity was none other than the frequent and irritating
mention of one Judith Rodney, who, from all accounts, appeared a
half-breed. Her name, her beauty, some intrinsic charm of personality
made her an all too frequent topic, except in the case of Peter. He had
been singularly keen in scenting any interrogatory venue that led to
the mysterious half-breed; when questioned he persistently refused to
exhibit her as a type.

Kitty knew that she had treated her long-suffering cavalier with scant
consideration the day he had spurred across the desert to see her.
True, she had written him on her arrival, but, with feminine perversity
of logic, thought it a trifle inconsiderate of him to come so soon
after that trying railroad journey. An ardent resumption of his
suit—and Peter could be depended on for renewing it early and often—was
farthest from her inclination at that particular time. She intended to
salve her conscience at the wolf-hunt for her casual reception of his
impetuous visit. But apparently Peter did not intend to be prodigal of
opportunity.

“How garrulous you people are this morning!” Nannie Wetmore challenged
them. Peter came out of his brown study with the look of one who has
again returned to earth.

“You don’t find it like the drop-curtain of a theatre, now that you’ve
seen it?” he questioned Kitty. For she had doubted her pleasure in the
mountains, in the conviction that they would be too dramatic for her
simple taste.

Kitty closed her eyes and sighted the peaks as if she were getting the
color scheme for an afternoon toilet.

“Mass, bulk, rather than line—no, it’s not like a drop-curtain, but
it’s distinctly ‘hand-painted.’ All it needs is a stag surveying the
prospect from that great cliff. It’s the kind of thing that would sound
well in a description. Oh, I assure you I intend to make lavish use of
it, but it leaves nothing to one’s poor imagination!”

Peter had a distinct feeling of being annoyed. No, she could not
appreciate the mountains any more than they could appreciate her. They
were incongruous, antipathetic, antipodal. Kitty, in her pink and white
and flaxen prettiness and her trim habit, was in harmony with the
bridle-path of a city park; in this great, lonely country she was an
alien. He thought of Judith and the night they had climbed Horse-Thief
Trail, of her quiet endurance, her keen pleasure in the wild beauty of
the night, her quality of companionship, her loyalty, her silent
bearing of many burdens. Yet until he had seen them both against the
same relentless background, he had never been conscious of comparing
the two women.

Nannie Wetmore had fallen behind. She was riding with a bronzed young
lieutenant from Fort Washakie. The two ahead rode long without
speaking. Then Peter broke the silence impatiently:

“You did not really mean that, did you?” He was boyishly hurt at her
flippant summing up of his beloved blue country. And Kitty, tired with
the long, hard ride, and missing that something in Peter that had
always been hers, turned on him a pair of blue eyes in which the tears
were brimming suspiciously. They were well out of sight of the others,
and had come to the heavy fringes of a pine wood. Was it the
psychological moment at last? Then suddenly their horses, that had been
sniffing the air suspiciously, stopped. Kitty’s horse, which was in
advance of Peter’s, rushed towards the thicker growth of pines as if
all Bedlam were in pursuit. Peter’s horse, swerving from the cause of
alarm, bolted back across the trail over which they had just made their
way. A large brown bear, feeding with her cub, and hidden by the trees
till they were directly in front of her, had caused the alarm.

And presently the hush of the shadowy green world in which Judith lay
was broken by a light, sobbing sound. It had been so still that, lying
on her bed of pine-needles, she had likened it to great waves of
silence, rolling up from the valley, breaking over her and sweeping
back again, noiseless, green from the billowing ocean of pine branches,
and sunlit. Judith bent over the rocky ledge and saw a girl making her
way down the game trail, dishevelled and tearful. Her hat was gone, her
pale-yellow hair, that in shadow had the greenish tinge of corn-silk,
blew about her shoulders, her trim skirt was torn and dusty, and she
looked about, bewildered, hardly realizing that through the unexpected
course of things she had been stranded in this great world of sunlit
splendor and loneliness. She closed her eyes. The awful vastness and
solitude oppressed her with a deepening sense of calamity. Suppose they
never found her? How could she find her way in this endless wilderness,
afoot? She sank to the turf and began to cry hysterically.

Judith knew in a flash of instant cognition that this was Miss
Colebrooke. Amazement seemed to have dulled her powers of
action—amazement that she, who had stolen to this place and crouched
close to earth that she might see the triumph of this preferred woman,
and, having seen and paid her grievous dole, steal away and take up the
thread of endless little things that spun for her the web of life, was
forced instead to be an unwilling witness of the other’s distress.
Judith had risen with her first impulse, which had been to go to Kitty,
but half-way through the thicket she hesitated and reconsidered.
Undoubtedly Peter would come soon, and Peter’s consolation would be
more potent than any she could offer. She shrank in shuddering
self-consciousness at the thought of her presence at their meeting, the
uninvited guest, the outgrown friend and confidante, blundering in at
such a time, pitifully full of good intentions. She recoiled from the
picture as from a precipice that all unwittingly she had escaped. What
madness had induced her to come on this expedition? A sudden panic at
the possibility of discovery possessed her; suppose Peter should find
her skulking like a beggar, waiting for broken meats? She looked at the
image of herself that she carried in her heart. It was that of a proud
woman who made no moan at the scourge of the inevitable. Many burdens
had she carried in her proud, lonely heart, but of them her lips gave
no sign. In her contemplative stoicism she felt with pride that she was
no unworthy daughter of her mother’s people, and catching a glimpse
through the trees of the abjectly waiting woman who, though safe and
sound, could but wait, wretched and dispirited, for some one to come
and adjust her to the situation, Judith felt for her a wondering pity
at her helplessness. She waited, expectant, for the sound of Peter’s
horse. Surely he must come at any moment, overcome with apologies, and
she—Judith hid her face in her hands at the thought—she would steal
away through the thicket at the first sound of hoofs. But as the
minutes slipped by and still no sign of Peter, a sickening anxiety
began to gnaw at her heart. Had something happened to him?

She did not wait to ask herself the question twice. She crawled the
length of the thicket with incredible rapidity, gained the pine forest,
and made her way beneath the low-hanging boughs; without stopping to
protect herself from them she gained the open space and ran quickly to
Kitty.

“Are you hurt? What has happened?”

Kitty looked up, startled at the voice. She had not heard the sound of
the moccasined feet. Her wandering, forlorn thoughts crystallized at
sight of the woman before her. A new lightning leaped into her eyes as
she recognized Judith. There was between them a thrilling consciousness
that gave to their mutual perception a something sharp and fine, that
grasped the drama of the moment with the precision and fidelity of a
camera. And through all the wonder of the meeting there was in the
heart of each an outflowing that met and mingled and understood the
potential tragedy element of the situation.

“You are Miss Rodney, I believe?”

Kitty was conscious of something strange in her voice as she looked
into the dark eyes, wide with questioning fear. Ah, but she had amazing
beauty, and a something that seemed of the very essence of deep-souled
womanliness! The two women presented a fine bit of antithesis, Kitty,
flower-like, small, delicately wrought, the finished product of the
town, exotic as some rare transplanted orchid growth. And in Judith
there was a gemlike quality: it was in the bloom of her skin, the
iridescent radiance of her hair, that was bluish, like a plum in
sunlight; it was in the warm, red life in her lips, in the pulsing
vitality of the slim, brown throat; in every line was sensuous force
restrained by spiritual passion.

Kitty told of the accident in which her horse had thrown her and
disappeared in the pine fringes, leaving her stunned for a moment or
two; and how she had finally pulled herself together and followed what
appeared to be a trail, in the hope of finding some one. She dwelt long
on the details of the accident.

“Yes, but Peter, what has happened him?” Judith chose her words
impatiently. She was racked with anxiety at his long delay, and now she
hung over Kitty, waiting for her answer, without the semblance of a
cloak for her alarm.

There was reproof in Kitty’s amendment. “I don’t know which way Mr.
Hamilton’s horse went. It started back over the trail, I think.”

Judith clasped her hands. “Let us go and look for him. Why do we waste
time?” But Kitty hung back. She was shaken from her fall, and upset by
the events of the morning. Besides, her faith in Peter’s ability to
cope with all the exigencies of this country was supreme. And chiefest
reason of all for her not going was a something within her that winced
at the thought of this fellowship that had for its object the quest of
Peter.

“Oh, don’t you see,” pleaded Judith, “that if something had not
happened to him he would have been here long ago?”

Judith’s anxiety awoke in Kitty a new consciousness. What was she to
him, that at the possibility of harm, a fear not shared by Kitty, she
should throw off a reserve that every line of her face pronounced
habitual? In her very energy of attitude, an energy that all
unconsciously communicated itself to Kitty, there was the power that
belongs to all elemental human emotion—the power that compels. Kitty
rose to follow Judith, then hesitated.

“I’m sure nothing has happened him. No, I’m really too unstrung by my
fall to walk.” She sank again to the bowlder on which she had been
sitting.

To the woman of the world, Judith’s ingenuous display of feeling had in
its very sincerity a something pitiable. How could she strip from her
soul every fold of reserve and stand unloved and unashamed, sanctified,
as it were, by the very hopelessness of her passion? How could women
make of their whole existence a thing to be rejected, reflected Kitty,
who, giving nothing, could not understand. She looked again at the
bronzed face beside her, so bold in outline, so expressive in detail.
Yes, she was beautiful, and yet, what had her beauty availed her? The
thought that she herself was the preferred woman throbbed through her
for a moment with a sense of exaltation. The next moment a haunting
doubt laid hold of her heart, held up mockingly the little that she and
Peter had lived through together, the lofty plane of friendship along
which she had tried to lead his unwilling feet sedately, his protests,
his frank amusement at her serious pretensions to a career. How much
fuller might not have been the intercourse between him and this woman,
who, in all probability, had been his comrade for years? And she had
been idealizing him, and his love for her, and his loneliness! Kitty
stood with eyes cast down, while images crowded upon her, leaving her
cold and smiling.

“But think,” pleaded Judith; “if you don’t come it will take me longer
to search the trail-marks. You could show me just where the horses
ran—”

Kitty’s eyes were still on the ground. She did not lift them, and
Judith, realizing that further appeal was but a waste of time, turned
and ran swiftly down the trail.

“He is her lover,” said Kitty; and all the wilderness before her was no
lonelier than her heart.

Swift, intent, Judith traced Kitty’s footprints. They followed the game
trail, the one she herself had taken earlier in the day. She traced
them back through the pine wood about a hundred rods, and then the
trail-marks grew confused. This was unquestionably the place where the
horses had taken fright, circled, reared, then dashed in different
directions. She traced the other horse, whose tracks led under
low-hanging boughs. It would have been a difficult matter for a horse
with a rider to clear; and now the impression of the horse’s shoes grew
fainter, from the lighter footfalls of a horse at full gallop.

“Ah!” A cry broke from her as she saw the marks had become almost
eliminated by something that had dragged, something heavy. Those
long-drawn lines were finger-prints, where a hand had dragged in its
vain endeavor to grasp at something. A sickening image came
persistently before her eyes—Peter’s upturned face, blood-smeared and
disfigured.

“Sh-sh-sh!” She put her hand to her breast to still the beating of her
heart. She could hear the sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft
ground, and a man’s voice speaking in a soothing sing-song. She
listened. It was Peter’s voice, reassuring the horse, asking him what
kind of a bag of nerves he was for a cow pony, to get frightened at a
bear? Judith stood tall and straight among the pines. Surely he could
not blindly pass her by. He must feel the joy in her heart that all was
well with him. The hoofs came nearer, the man’s voice sounded but
intermittently, as he got his horse under better control. She felt as
if he must come to her, as if some overpowering consciousness of her
presence would speak from her heart to his; but his eyes scanned the
distant trail for a glimpse of Kitty or Kitty’s horse. Judith saw that
his head was bound in something white and that it bore a red stain, but
he held himself well in the saddle. He was not the man to heed a
tumble. He urged the horse forward, never looking towards the
tree-trunks, his face white and strained with anxiety as he scoured the
trail for evidences of Kitty. The horse, with a keener sense than his
master, shied slightly as he passed the group of pines where Judith
stood; but Peter’s glance was for the open trail, and as she heard him
canter by, so close that she could have touched his stirrup with her
hand, it seemed as if he must hear the beating of her heart.

“Oh, blind eyes, and ears that will not hear, and heart that has
forgotten how to beat! Yes, go to that pale, cold girl! You speak one
language, and life for you is the way of little things!”

She waited till the last sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away and
all was still in the tremulous green of the forest. Judith’s mind was
busy with the image of their meeting, the man bringing the joy of his
youth to the calm divinity who could feel no thrill of fear in his
absence. She broke into the running gait and hurried through the forest
to the Daxes’.




XVI.
In The Land Of The Red Silence


The beef-herd, that had been the pivotal point of the round-up and had
made the mighty plain echo to its stampings and bellowings, beating up
simooms that choked it with thirst, blinded it with dust, confounding
itself on every side by the very fury of its blind force, had trailed
for a week, tractable as toys in the hands of children. Little had
happened to vary the monotony for the cow-punchers that handled the
herd—they grazed, guarded, watered, night-herded the cattle day after
day, night after night. Pasturage had been sufficient, if not abundant.
The creeks were running low and slimy with the advance of summer, but
there had been sufficient water to let the herd drink its fill at least
once a day.

The outfit ate its “sow-belly,” soda-biscuit, and coffee three times a
day, and smoked its pipes, but was a little shy on yarns round the
camp-fire.

“This yere outfit don’t lather none,” commented the cook to the
horse-wrangler, over the smoke of an early morning fire.

“Don’t lather no more than a chunk of wood,” agreed the horse-wrangler.
“That’s the trouble with a picked-up outfit like this. Catch ‘W-square’
men kowtowing to a ‘XXX’ boss, even if he is only acting foreman.”

Simpson, the origin of whose connection with the “XXX” was rather a
sensitive subject with that outfit, had begun to take his duties as a
cattle-man with grim seriousness; he was untiring in his labors; he
spent long hours in the saddle, he took his turn at night herding,
though he was old for this kind of work. He condemned the sheep-men
with foul-mouthed denunciations, scoffed at their range-rights, said
the sheep question should be dealt with in the business-like manner in
which the Indian question had been settled. He was an advocate of
violence—in short, a swaggering, bombastic wind-bag. He talked much of
“his outfit” and “his men.” “What was good enough for them was good
enough for him,” he would announce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone,
when the food happened to be particularly bad. He split the temporary
outfit, brought together for the purpose of handling the beef-herd,
into factions. He put the “XXX” in worse repute than it already
enjoyed—he was, in fact, the discordant spirit of the expedition. The
men attended to their work sullenly. Discord was rife. The one thought
they shared in common was that of the wages that would come to them at
the end of the drive; of the feverish joy of “blowing in,” in a single
night; perchance, of forgetting, in one long, riotous evening, the
monotony, the hardship, the lack of comradery that made this particular
drive one long to be remembered in the mind of every man who had taken
part in it.

Meanwhile the herd trailed its half-mile length to the slaughtering
pens day after day, all unconscious of its power. When the steers had
trailed for about a fortnight, the question of finding sufficient water
for them began to be a serious one. The preceding winter had been
unusually mild, the snow-fall on the mountains averaging less than in
the recollection of the oldest plains-man. Summer had begun early and
waxed hot and dry. The earth began to wrinkle, and cracked into
trenches, like gaping mouths, thirsty for the water that came not. Such
streams as had not dried shrank and crawled among the willows like
slimy things, that the herd, thirsty though it was from the long
drives, had to be coaxed to drink from.

Discontent grew. The acting foreman, who was a “XXX” man, and a
comparative stranger to that part of the country, refused to consult
with the “W-square” men in the outfit, who knew every inch of the
ground. The acting foreman thought the Wetmore men looked down on him,
“put on dog”; and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven
due west instead of skirting to the north by the longer route, where
they would have had the advantage of drinking at several creeks before
crossing Green River. Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard,
and he insisted upon his order in spite of the Wetmore men’s
protestations.

The character of the country began to change, the soil took on the
color of blood, even the omnipresent sage-brush began to fail the
landscape; sun-bleached bones glistened on the red soil, white as
ulcers. All the animal trails led back from the country into which they
were proceeding. The sky, a vivid, cloudless blue, paled as it dipped
earthward. The sun looked down, a flaming copper shield. There was no
sign of life in all the land. Even the grasshoppers had left it to the
sun, the silence, and the desolation. To ears accustomed to the
incessant shrilling of the insects, the cessation was ominous, like the
sudden stopping of a clock in a chamber of death. Above the angry
bellow of the thirsty herd the men strained their ears again and again
for this familiar sound of life, but there was nothing but the
bellowing of the cattle, the trampling of their hoofs, and sometimes
the long, squealing whinny of a horse as he threw back his head in
seeming demand to know the justice of this thing.

Across the red plain snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric
reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A
cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a
weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a
thousand steers, a handful of men and horses, in the land of the red
silence? It had seen the comings and goings of many peoples, and once
it had flowed with streams; but that was before the curse of God came
upon it, and in its harsh, dry barrenness it grew to be a menace to
living things.

The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had
scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had
weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for
thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as
rapidly as the enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit.
Creek after creek that they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.

The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun,
tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red
plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over
which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing
its tortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as a
fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen,
perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper’s bed. Sometimes the
dragon curled itself into a ball, and the foreman sung out that they
were milling, and the men turned and rode away from it, then dashed
back at it, after getting the necessary momentum, entered like a flying
wedge, fought their way into the rocking sea of surging bodies, shouted
from their thirst-parched throats imprecations that were lost in the
dull, sullen roar. Then the dragon would uncoil and again trail its way
over the red waste-lands.

A red sun had begun to set over a red earth, and the men who had been
out since noon-scouring the country for water, returned to say that
none had been found, and they began to look into each other’s faces for
the answer that none could give. At sunset they made a dry camp; there
was but enough water left to cook with. Each man received, as a
thirst-quenching ration, a can of tomatoes. After supper they
consulted, and it was agreed to trail the herd till midnight, taking
advantage of the coolness to hurry them on as fast as possible to Green
River. The grave nature of their plight was indicated by the fact that
no one smoked after supper. Silent, sullen, they sat round, waiting for
the foreman to give the order to advance. He waited for the moon to
come up. Slowly it rose over the Bad Land Hills and hung round and full
like a gigantic lantern. The watches were arranged for the night with a
double guard. Every man in the outfit was beginning to have a feeling
of panic that communicated itself to every other man, and as they
looked at the herd, tractable now no longer, but a blind force that
they must take chances with through the long watches of the night,
while the thirst grew in the beasts’ parched throats, they foresaw what
would in all probability happen; they thought of their women, of all
that most strongly bound them to life, and they sat and waited dumbly.

The moon that night was too brilliant for benisons; the gaunt, red
world lay naked and unshriven for the sin that long ago had brought
upon it the wrath of God. The picture was still that of the grotesque
Chinese screen, with the headless dragon crawling endlessly; but the
dream was long, centuries long, it seemed to the men listening to the
bellowing of the herd. And while they waited, the red grew dull and the
dragon dingy, and its fury made its contortions the more horrible; and
that was all the difference between day and night in the land of the
red silence. Sometimes the dragon split, and joints of it tried to turn
back to the last water it had drunk; for cattle, though blinded with
thirst, never forget the last stream at which they have quenched
thirst, and will turn back to it, though they drop on the way. But the
men pressed them farther and farther, and for yet a little while the
cattle yielded.

At midnight the saddle-stock was incapable of moving farther. One horse
had fallen and lay too weak to rise. The others, limping and foot-sore,
no longer responded to quirt and rowel. The foreman ordered the herd
thrown on the bed ground for the night. The herders for the first watch
began to circle. The rest of the outfit took to its blankets to snatch
a little rest for the double duty that awaited every man that night.
Now it is a time-honored belief among cow-men that the herd must be
sung to, particularly when it is restless, and to-night they tried all
the old favorites, the “Cow-boy’s Lament” being chief among them. But
the herd refused to be soothed, and round and round it circled; not
once would it lie down.

The moon gleamed almost brazen, showing the cruel scars, the trenches
torn by cloud-bursts, the lines wrought by the long, patient waiting of
the earth for the lifting of the wrath of God. Imperishable grief was
writ on the land as on a human face. The night wore on, the watches
changed, the herd continued restless; not more than a third of it had
bedded down. The third watch was from one o’clock to half-past three in
the morning. Simpson and another “XXX” man, with two of the Wetmore
outfit, made up a double watch, and rode, singing, about the herd, as
the long, dreary watch wore away. The cattle’s lowing had taken on a
gasping, cracked sound that was more frightful than the maddened bellow
of the early evening. Simpson, who was past the age when men live the
life of the saddle, felt the hardship keenly. He had ridden since
sunrise, but for the respite at noon and the scant time at the dry camp
while the evening meal was being eaten. He was more than half asleep
now, as he lurched heavily in the saddle, crossing and recrossing his
partner in the half-circle they completed about the herd. Suddenly the
sharp yelp of a coyote rang out; it seemed to come from no farther than
twenty yards away. The cattle heard it, too, and a wave of panic swept
through them. Simpson stiffened in his saddle. The sound, which was
repeated, was an exact reproduction of a coyote’s yelp, yet he knew
that it was not a coyote.

The herd rose to its feet as a single steer, and for a second stood
undetermined. From a clump of sage-brush not more than two feet high
fluttered something long and white like a sheet. It waved in the wind
as the cry was repeated. The herd crashed forward in a stampede,
Simpson in the lead on a tired horse, but a scant length ahead of a
thousand maddened steers bolting in a panic of thirst and fear.

“Hell’s loose!” yelled the men in their blankets, making for the
temporary rope corral to secure horses. Simpson, tallow-colored with
fear, clung like a cat to his horse, and dug the rowels in the beast’s
flanks till they were bloody and dripping. He had seen Jim Rodney’s
face above the white cloth as it fluttered in the face of the herd that
came pounding behind him with the rumble of nearing thunder. He was too
close to them to attempt to fire his revolver in the air in the hope of
turning them, but the boys had evidently got into their saddles, to
judge by the volley of shots that rang out and were answered. Simpson
alone rode ahead of the herd that tore after him, ripping up the earth
as it came, bellowing in its blind fury. His horse, a thoroughly
seasoned cow-pony, sniffed the bedlam and responded to the goading
spur. She had been in cattle stampedes before, and, though every fibre
ached with fatigue, she flattened out her lean body and covered ground
to the length of her stride at each gallop. The herd was so close that
Simpson could smell the stench of their sweating bodies, taste their
dust, and feel the scorch of their breath. The sound of their hoofs was
like the pounding of a thousand propellers. From above looked the moon,
round and serene; she had watched the passing of many peoples in the
land of the red silence. The horse seemed to be gaining. A few more
lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one side and let the
maddened cattle race to their own destruction. All he asked of God was
to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug the rowel
and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; the chorus
of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the pound,
pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.

Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly. “God! What is
it?” as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole. “Up, up,
you damned brute!” but the mare’s leg had cracked like a pipe-stem. In
his fury at the beast Simpson began kicking her, then started to run as
the cattle swept forward like a black storm-cloud.

The next second the great sea of cattle had broken over horse and
rider. When it had passed there was not enough left of either to
warrant burial or to furnish a feast for the buzzards. A few shreds of
clothes, that had once been a man, lay scattered there; a something
that had been a horse.




XVII.
Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst


The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent
with her habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were
involved. Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the
experience of moving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the
delay, and could only explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett
received reports of the dearth of pasturage on the ground that she
wished each fresh educational germ to take as deep root as possible
before transplantation. So that when Mrs. Yellett, shortly after
Leander Dax’s arrival at camp in the capacity of herder, announced that
she and Leander were to make a trip to the dipping-vat that had kept
Ben from his classes for the past ten days, and invited the “gov’ment”
to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.

The Yelletts’ “bunch” of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and
the matriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that
number, as she wished always to give the flock her personal
supervision.

“‘The hen that’s the surest of her chicks is the one that does her own
settin’,’” was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellett
succinctly summed up the case.

Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to
the market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the
matriarch had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in
Wyoming. Often she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the
wonders of this new world with remarkable aptness, that she had
constantly to fight against the inclination to increase her business of
sheep-raising, but that as soon as she should begin to hire herders or
depend on strangers things would go wrong. With the assistance of her
sons, she therefore managed the entire details of the herd, with the
exception of those occasions on which Leander lent his
semi-professional co-operation.

As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness,
surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological
doctrine that Mrs. Dax’s husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed
from his wife’s masterful presence, Leander dared to be an “agnostic,”
as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His
iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw’s gusty protests against life
in general, but it was Leander’s way of asserting himself, on the rare
occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet
advanced by every religion. The mere use of certain familiar expletives
drove him, ordinarily mild and submissive though he was, to frantic
gesticulation and diatribe. Mary Carmichael could not make out, as she
watched the comedy with growing amusement, whether poor Leander really
believed that he was the first of doubting Thomases, or whether he took
an unfair advantage of the lack of general information in his casual
audiences to set forth well-known opinions as his own. Whatever its
basis may have been, Leander sustained the rôle of doubter with
passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of rage and hoarseness over
arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by cow-punchers and
sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw the traps,
going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling headlong
into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale
constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from
food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.

“The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue
that Jonah never come out of the whale’s belly,” the matriarch had told
Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander’s disadvantages as a herder. And
the first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: “Leander
Dax, you’d have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from
bein’ a infidel, but there’s one p’int on which you are particularly
locoed, and that’s Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in
the hist’ry of the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no
call to fret hisself over Jonah and his whereabouts—none whatever.
There’s a lot of business round this here camp that’s a heap more
pressin’. Now, Leander Dax, if I do hereby undertake to hire, engage,
and employ you to herd sheep, do you agree to renounce discussions,
arguments, and debates on the late Jonah and his whereabouts durin’
them three days? God A’mighty, man, any one would think you was Jonah’s
wife, the interest you have in his absence!”

“I come here to herd sheep,” Leander had brazenly retaliated. “I ’ain’t
come to try to make you think.”

Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the
journey to the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon
was the rudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout
pole. Though she saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary
Carmichael, discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to
ask where she was going to sit, and listened with interest to a
discussion between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses
it would take to get the dip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp
and splendor, was for taking six, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried
simplicity to a fault, was in favor of only two. They finally
compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch the extra two.

Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage of
the delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of “Brainard’s Beneficial
Blackthorn.”

“Paw’s as hard to manage as a bent pin,” she remarked, in an aside to
Mary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she,
with the agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head
under her arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, if
beneficial, dose.

“There, there, paw,” she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a
baby, “don’t take on so! It’s all gone, and I can’t have you sick on my
hands.”

But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent
language, whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with
a drink of condensed-milk and water, “to wash down the nasty taste,”
she told him, soothingly.

A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels
of sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while
Mrs. Yellett looked doubtfully at a “gov’ment” who could not handle
barrels. Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and
Leander, the long pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral
column, from which huge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at
the rear a foot or so of bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing
about the same proportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a
fox-terrier does to the dog.

Mrs. Yellett kissed “paw” good-bye, explaining to Mary, in extenuation
of her weakness, that she would never forgive herself if she neglected
it and anything happened to him during her absence. She then climbed to
the front barrel and secured the ribbons. Leander had brought out three
rolls of bedding of the inevitable bed-quilt variety, but Mrs. Yellett
scorned such luxury while driving, and accordingly gave hers to the
“gov’ment” for a back-rest. Mary sat on the lower row of barrels, with
her feet dangling, using one roll of bedding for a seat and the other
comfortably arranged at her back as a cushion.

Madam called sharply to the horses, “Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat-kerat!”
and they started off at a rattling pace, the barrels of dip creaking
and squeaking as they swayed under their rope lashings. Mary bounced
about like a bean in a bag, working loose from between the bed-quilt
rolls at each gulley, clinging frantically to barrel ends, shaken back
and forth like a shuttle. Indeed, the drive seemed to combine every
known form of physical exercise. Mrs. Yellett herself was in fine
fettle; she drove sitting for a while, then rose, standing on a narrow
ledge while she held the four ribbons lightly in one hand and tickled
the leaders with a long whip carried in the other. She drove her four
horses over the rough road with the skill of a circus equestrienne,
balancing easily on the crazy ledge, shifting her weight from side to
side as the wagon rattled down gullies and up ridges, the horses
responding gallantly to the shrill “Hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat! hi-kerat!”
Her costume on this occasion represented joint concessions to her sex
and the work that was before her, as the head of a family at the
dipping-vat. She still wore the drum-shaped rabbit-skin cap pulled well
down over her forehead for driving. The great, cable-like braids of
hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head an appearance of
denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were still blowing about
her face, perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness. She wore a
man’s shirt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from which the
bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr.
Yellett’s trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher’s boots, that met
the hem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the
originality of her dress.

The wagon had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert
dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became
conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in
her back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the
freight carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch
of the wagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the
peril of life and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of
barrels, gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving
camp some two hours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have
shrivelled away to a wraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin,
had waned to the vanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed
horribly, yet his frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called
to Mrs. Yellett, but her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon,
the clatter of four horses’ hoofs, and the continual “Hi-hi-hi-kerat!
hi-kerat!” of the driver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth
and back to the road in indescribably pathetic pantomime. “Perhaps the
poor creature wants to turn back and die in his bed, like a Christian,
even if he isn’t one,” thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander
still emitting the most inhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf
mutes in distress. Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the
name of many profane things what was the matter with her companions.

Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett
proved a better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.

“God A’mighty!” she said, “he’s lost his false teeth!” And without
another word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that
fell little short of sleight-of-hand.

The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how
far back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the
inadequacy of the English language to reproduce his toothless
enunciation. Catching, as Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett’s
remarks only, she received something of the one-sided impression given
by overhearing a telephone conversation:

“What did you have ’em out for?... You didn’t have ’em out?... I just
shook ’em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth
had been shut, you couldn’t have lost ’em.... You was a-yawnin’, eh?
Well, you are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your
mouth full o’ china teeth. Your yawnin’ ’ll put us back a good hour an’
we won’t reach camp before sundown.”

At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to
search along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the
place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them
by this landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary
get down “and help to prospect for them teeth.” As Mary clambered down
she heard a fragment of the matriarch’s monologue, which, being duly
expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather
take ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in
the way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally
speaking, man had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.

“Talk about a woman bein’ at the bottom of everything!” sniffed Mrs.
Yellett; “I be so sick of always hearin’ about ‘the woman in the case!’
Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left
exclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: ‘A skunk may have his
good p’ints, but few folks is takin’ the risk of waitin’ round to get
acquainted with ’em.’”

While Mary was still “prospecting,” a glad cry roused her attention,
and Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.

“Quit smilin’ like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!” called out Mrs.
Yellett. “Do you want to lose ’em again?”

So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the
Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was
resumed.

It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had been
oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly
penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some
unknown quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to
the marrow. The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and
plunging as if they had scent of something menacing. Across the horizon
a dark cloud scudded, no bigger than your hand.

“Cloud-burst!” announced Mrs. Yellett.

“Cloud-burst, all right enough,” agreed Leander, and he turned up his
coat-collar in simple preparation for the deluge.

There flashed into Mary Carmichael’s mind a sentence from her physical
geography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her
school-days: “A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the
whole cloud had been precipitated at once.” She wanted to question her
companions as to the accuracy of this definition, but before she had
time to frame a sentence the real cloud-burst came, with a splitting
crack of thunder; then the lightning flashed out its message in the
short-hand of the storm, across the inky blackness, and the water fell
as if the ocean had been inverted. In the fraction of a second all
three were drenched to the skin, the water pouring from them in sheets,
as if they had been some slight obstruction in the path of a waterfall.
The wagon was soon in a deep gully, with frothing, foaming, yellow
water up to the hubs of the wheels. Mrs. Yellett, like some goddess of
the storm, lashed her horses forward to keep them from foundering in
the mud, and the wagon creaked and groaned in all its timbers as it
lurched and jolted through the angry torrents.

Each moment Mary expected to be flung from the barrels, and clung till
her finger-tips were white and aching. From the drenched red bedquilts
a sticky crimson trail ran over the barrel heads, as well as over
Mary’s hands, face, and dress. Still they forged on through the deluge,
Mrs. Yellett shouting and lashing the horses, holding them erect and
safe with the skill she never lost. The fur on her rabbit-skin cap was
beaten flat. The great, wet braids had fallen from the force of the
water and hung straight and black, like huge snakes uncoiled. She was
far from losing her grip on either the horses or the situation, and
from the inspiring ring of her voice as she urged them forward it was
plain that she took a fierce joy in this conflict of the elements.

It was bitterly cold, and Mary reflected that if Leander’s teeth
chattered half as hard as hers did, without breaking, they must,
indeed, be of excellent quality. The storm began to abate, and the sky
became lighter, though the water still poured in torrents. As soon as
her responsibility as driver left her time to speak, Mrs. Yellett lost
no time in fastening the cloud-burst to Leander.

“This here is what comes of settin’ up your back against God A’mighty
and encouragin’ the heathen and the infidel in his idolatry. I might
’a’ knowed somethin’ would happen, takin’ you along! ‘And the heathen
and the infidel went out, and the Lord God sent a cloud-burst to wet
him,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett from the apocryphal Scriptures that never
yet failed to furnish her with verse and text.

The infidel, from his side of the wagon, began to display agitation.
His jaws worked, but he said nothing.

“You ’ain’t lost them teeth again, have you?”

He nodded his head wretchedly.

“‘And the Lord took away the teeth of his enemy, so that he could
neither bite nor talk,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett to the miserable man, who
could make no reply.

“Wonder you wouldn’t see the foolishness o’ being a heathen and a
infidel, and turn to the Lord! You ’ain’t got no teeth, and it takes
your wife to herd you. ‘And the Lord multiplied the tribulations of his
enemy.’ You got no more show standin’ up agin the Lord than an insect
would have standin’ up agin me.”

She had Leander, at last, just where she wanted him. He was forced to
listen, and he could make no reply. She alternately abused him for his
lack of faith and urged him to repentance. Leander raged, gesticulated,
turned his back on her, mouthed, and finally put his fingers in his
ears. But nothing stemmed the tide of Mrs. Yellett’s eloquence; it was
as inexhaustible and as remorseless as the cloud-burst.

It continued bitterly cold, even after the rain had stopped falling,
and the heap of sodden bedclothes furnished no protection against the
chilling dampness. It was growing dark; there was no red in the sunset,
only a streak of vivid orange along the horizon, chill and clear as the
empty, soulless flame of burning paper. There were no deep, glowing
coals, no amethystine opalescence, fading into gold and violet. All was
cold and subdued, and the scrub pines on the mountain-tops stood out
sharply against this cold background like an etching on yellow paper.

Mrs. Yellett’s self-inspired scriptural maxims were discontinued after
a while, either because she could think of no more, or because the
rain-soaked, shivering, chattering object towards which they were
directed was too abject to inspire further efforts. Leander huddled on
the barrel that was farthest from Mrs. Yellett, and wrapped himself in
the soaked red bedquilt. The dye smeared his face till he looked like
an Indian brave ready for battle, but there was no further suggestion
of the fighting red man in the utter desolation of his attitude. Mary
Carmichael, on her barrel, shivered with grim patience and longed for a
cup of tea. Only Mrs. Yellett gave no sign of anxiety or discomfort;
she drove along, sometimes whistling, sometimes swearing, erect as an
Indian, and to all appearances as oblivious of cold and wet as if she
were in her own home.

The gathering darkness into which the horses were plunging was
mysterious and appalling. Objects stood out enormously magnified, or
distorted grotesquely, in the uncertain light. It was like penetrating
into the real Inferno, like stumbling across the inspiration of Dante
in all its sinister splendor. It was the Inferno of his dream rather
than the Inferno of his poem; it had the ghastly reality of the unreal.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if we had a smash-up in Clear Creek,” said
Mrs. Yellett, just by way of adding her quota of cheerful speculation.
She ducked her head and whispered in Mary’s ear:

“It’s all along of me hirin’ _him!_ I wouldn’t be surprised if paw
died. I’m thinkin’ of shakin’ him out after his teeth. ‘Take not up
with the enemy of the Lord, lest he make of you also an enemy.’”

But there was no accent of apprehension in Mrs. Yellett’s dismal
prognostications of the evil that might befall her for employing
Leander. She spoke more with the air of one who produces incidents to
prove an argument than of one who anticipates a calamity.

Leander, toothless and wretched, sitting on the side of the wagon,
began to show symptoms of joy comparable to that of the vanguard of the
Israelites, catching their first glimpse of the Promised Land. Touching
Mary Carmichael on the shoulder, he pointed to a white tent and the
remains of a camp-fire. Already Mrs. Yellett had begun to “Hallo, Ben!”
But Ben was at work at the vat, which was still a quarter of a mile
further up the mountain; so Mrs. Yellett, throwing the reins to Leander
and bidding him turn out the horses, lost no time in building a fire,
putting on coffee, and making her little party comfortable. So various
was her efficiency that she seemed no less at home in these simple
domestic tasks than when guiding her horses, goddess-like, through the
cloud-burst. And Mary Carmichael, succumbing gradually to the
revivifying influence of the fire and the hot coffee, acknowledged
honestly to herself a warmth of affection for her hostess and for the
atmosphere Mrs. Yellett created about her that made even Virginia and
her aunts seem less the only pivot of rational existence. She felt that
she had come West with but one eye, as it were, and countless
prejudices, whereas her powers of vision were fast becoming increased a
hundredfold. How very tame life must be, she reflected, as she sat
smiling to herself, to those who did not know Mrs. Yellett, how
over-serious to those who did not know Leander! Yet, after all, she
knew that the real basis of her readjusted vision was her brief but
illuminating acquaintance with Judith Rodney. To Mary, freed for the
first time in her life from the most elegantly provincial of
surroundings, Judith seemed the incarnation of all the splendor and
heroism of the West. And in the glow of her enthusiasm she decided then
and there not to abandon the Yellett educational problem till she
should have solved it successfully. She might not be born to valiant
achievement, like these sturdy folk about her, but she might as well
prove to them that an Eastern tenderfoot was not all feebleness and
inefficiency.

“Leander!” called Mrs. Yellett. “Just act as if you was to home and
wash up these dishes.”




XVIII.
Foreshadowed


Alida awoke, knowing what was to happen. She had dreamed of it, just
before daylight, and lay in bed stupefied by the horror of it, living,
again and again, through each frightful detail. It had happened—there,
in the very room, and before the children; the noise of it had startled
them; and then she woke and knew she had been dreaming. In the dream
the noise had wakened the children—when it really happened they must
never know. It wouldn’t be fair to them; they needed a “clean start.”

What had she done to keep them quiet? There had been a thunderous
knocking at the door. She had expected it and was prepared; because the
lock was feeble, she had shoved the old brown bureau against the door.

Nothing had happened. What a fool she was to lie there and think of it!
There was the brown bureau against the wall; she could hear the deep
breathing of Jim in the room beyond. Jim had been unequal to the task
of conventionally going to bed the night before, and she had put a
pillow under his head and a quilt over him. She was the last woman in
the world to worry about Jim, drunk, or to nag him for it when sober.
But she didn’t like the children to see him that way.

What was it that she had done to quiet the children when “they” rode
up? She had done something and they had gone to sleep again, and
she—and she—oh no, it hadn’t happened. What a fool she was to lie there
thinking! There were the children to rouse and dress, and breakfast to
cook, and Jim—Jim would be feeling pretty mean this morning; he’d like
a good cup of coffee. She was glad he was alive to make coffee for.

She got up and, in the uncertainty bred of the dream, felt the brown
bureau, felt it hungrily, almost incredulously. The brown bureau had
been pushed against the door when they had come, and knocked and
knocked. Then they had thundered with the butts of their six-shooters,
and the children had wakened, and she had called out to them:

“Sh-sh! It’s only a bad dream. Mammy will give you some dough to bake
to-morrow.”

And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call,
“For God’s sake, don’t wake the children!”

And they had called out, “Let him come out quiet, then.”

And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door—the
weather-beaten door—with its crazy lock that didn’t half catch. The
brown bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded
in. Then she had done something to quiet the children—it was queer that
she could not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream
still lived within her, horribly distinct and real.

What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not
think about it another minute. She began to dress, but her fingers were
heavy, and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency.
Repeatedly she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some
one of the links in that pitiless memory—what they had said to Jim; his
undaunted replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room
because Jim had told her to.

She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with
sleep, did not reassure her.

“Mammy,” said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid
list, the victim of a cactus thorn, “my toe’s all well; can I go
barefoot?”

“Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a
young lady, if you run barefoot now?”

Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her
small feet together and contemplated them. The toe was still
suspiciously inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with
a Spartan courage that won her a place in the annals of household
valor, had the day before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle
the torturing cactus thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the
operation, though afterwards she had taken the piece of dried apple
that was offered her and devoured it to the last bite, as only just
compensation for her sufferings.

“Dimmy dot a tore toe, too.” But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about
offering proofs of his affliction. At the peril of his equilibrium, he
clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over
on the bed in apparent anguish.

“Less see, Jimmy,” asked his mother, anxiously.

“Don’t bleeve him, mammy. He ’ain’t ever cried. He’d a cried, for sure,
if his toe was sore.” At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of
her aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.

“Let mammy see, Jimmy,” and Alida bent over her son and heir.

“Doth Dimmy det any apple?” The wee man sometimes succeeded in making
terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though
feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with
the air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother
squarely in the eyes.

She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted
the horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she
answered him with quiet firmness.

“Jimmy must not tell stories.”

“Less see,” insisted Topeka.

“He dassent,” affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.

“It hurths me,” and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. “It hurths me,
my tore toe!”

His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby
hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by
the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus
thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to
make coffee.

“I with I had a tore toe,” he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery
of his deception. “I with I toud det a tore toe ’thout the hurt.”

But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in
the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go
into the room where their father was sleeping. She went back and found
that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still
regretted that his perfectly well toe did not entitle him to
gastronomic consideration. Topeka, who had arrived at an age where
little girls, in the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no
keener delight than plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till
they present an appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a
peeled onion, put down the brush with guilty haste at sight of her
mother.

“I’m goin’ to dress him soon as I’ve done my hair.”

“Any one think you was goin’ to be married, the time you’ve took to
it.”

“It’s gettin’ so long,” urged Topeka.

“I wouldn’t give it a chance to grow no longer while Jimmy was waitin’
to get dressed. And don’t go into the front room. Your father’s gettin’
his sleep out.”

Topeka opened her round eyes. There was always something suspicious
about that sleep her father had to get out, but she felt it was
something she must not ask questions about. Her mother lingered; she
dreaded to be alone in the kitchen. The little, familiar intimacies
between herself and her children scattered the horrors of the dream
which would come back to her when she was again at the mercy of her
thoughts.

“Judy, s’pose you dress Jimmy this morning! I want Topeka to help me
get breakfast.”

“Yessum,” said Judith, dutifully. “Is he to have his face washed?”

“He certainly is, Judy. I’s ashamed to have you ask such a question.
’Ain’t you all been brought up to have your faces washed?”

But young Judith seemed disinclined to take up this phase of family
superiority. She merely inquired further:

“Is he to have it washed with soap, maw?”

“He shore is. Any one would think you had been born and raised in
Arizony or Nebrasky, to hear you talk. I’m plumb ashamed of you, Judy.”

“But, ’deed, maw, I ain’t big enough to wash his face with soap. It
takes Topeka to hold his head.”

The subject of the discussion still sat on the edge of the bed, a small
lord of creation, letting his women folk arrange among themselves who
should minister to his wants. As an instrument of torture the
washcloth, in the hands of his sister Judy, was no ignoble rival of the
cactus thorn. The question of making terms for his sufferings again
appealed to him in the light of a feasible business proposition.

“Muvvy, tan’t I have the apple? Judy hurts me a lot when she wathes my
face wis soap.”

“Yes, you can have the apple, honey; and, Judy, you be gentle with him.
Don’t rub his features up, and be careful and don’t get soap in his
eyes.”

“No’m.” And Judy heroically stifled the longing to slick her hair, like
Topeka’s, with the wet hairbrush. There were easier tasks than washing
the face of her younger brother.

When Topeka and her mother were alone in the kitchen, Topeka grinding
the coffee and all unconsciously working her jaw in an accompaniment to
the coffee-mill, her mother bent over her and said:

“Did you dream of anything last night?”

Topeka simultaneously stopped working the coffee-mill and her jaw, and
regarded her mother solemnly. She did not remember having been thus
questioned about her dreams before.

“No’m,” she answered, after laborious consideration. But something in
her mother’s face held her.

“You’re sure you didn’t dream nothing?”

“Yes, maw.”

“Did Judy or Jim say that they dreamed anything?”

“Jim said he dreamed he had a pup.”

“Was that all? Think hard, Topeka!”

Topeka held the handle of the coffee-mill in her hand; her jaw
continued to work with the labor of her mental process. “I’ve thought
hard, maw, and all he told was about the pup.”

Alida went back to her bedroom and again felt the brown bureau. “What’s
the matter with me, anyhow? It’s the lonesomeness, and they bein’ agin
Jim the way they are. God, this country’s hard on women and horses!”

When breakfast was over, and young Jim had received the reward of his
valor in presenting a brave face to his ablution, and Judith the reward
of her skill, the evidence of which almost prevented the young martyr
from smiling while he enjoyed his treat, their mother sent them all to
play in the cañon. She told them not to come home till she should come
for them, and if any one should ask about their father, to say that he
was away from home. And this, as well as the mystery of her father’s
“getting his sleep out,” roused some slight apprehension in Topeka, who
was old for her age. They were seldom sent to the cañon to play. Topeka
looked at her mother as she had when questioned about the dream, but
there was no further confidence between them.

“You do as your sister Topeka tells you, and remember what I said about
your papa,” Alida said to the younger children. Jim and Judy clasped
each other’s hands in mute compact at the edict. Their sister Topeka
had a real genius for authority; they were minded all too well when she
swayed the maternal sceptre vicariously.

Alida made fresh coffee for Jim when the children had gone. She made it
carefully; there was this morning, unconsciously, about each little
thing that she did for him, the solemnity of a funeral rite. Struggle
as she would, she could not divest her mind of the conviction that what
she did this day she did for the dead. She would go to the door and
listen to his breathing, and tell herself that she was a fool, then
wring her hands at the remembrance of the dream.

As he tossed, half waking, she heard him groan and curse the cattle-men
with oaths that made her glad she had sent the children from home. Then
she bent over him and woke him from his uneasy slumber.

“Jim, don’t you want me to bathe your head? And here’s some nice, hot
coffee all ready for you.”

Jim woke slowly to a realization of his troubles and his blessings. His
wife was bathing his head with hands that trembled. Not always had she
greeted his indiscretions with such loving forbearance. He noticed,
though his waking faculties were not over-keen, that her face was pale
and frightened, and that her eyes, meeting his, held a dumb,
measureless affection.

“What th’ hell are you babying me for?” But his roughness did not
deceive her woman’s wits. He was not getting the lecture he
anticipated, and this was his way of showing that he was not
embarrassed by her kindness. The morning sunlight was pitilessly frank
in its exposure of the grim pinch of poverty in the mean little room,
but the woman was unconscious of these things; what she saw was that
Jim, the reckless, Jim, the dare-devil terror of the country, Jim, who
had married and settled with her into home-keeping respectability, Jim,
who had struggled with misfortune and fallen, had, young as he was,
lost every look of youth; that hope had gone from his dull eyes, and
that his face had become drawn until the death’s-head grinned beneath
the scant padding of flesh. But he was to-day, as always, the one man
in the world for her. In making a world of their own and reducing their
parents to supplementary consideration, their children, whom she had
sent away that she might be alone with him, had given a different
quality to the love of this pair that had known so many curious
vicissitudes. The responsibilities of parenthood had placed them on a
tenderer, as well as a securer footing; and as she saw his age and
weariness, he recognized hers, and both felt a self-accusing twinge.

“That’s a blamed good cup of coffee,” he said, by way of relieving the
tension that had crept into the situation. “Any one would think you was
settin’ your cap for me ’stead of us being married for years.”

Alida sighed. “It’s better to end than to begin like this,” she said,
in the far-away voice of one who thinks aloud. The word “end” had
slipped out before she realized what she was saying, and the knowledge
haunted her as an omen. She glanced at him quickly, to see if he had
noticed it.

“Why did you say end?” He saw that her eyes were full of tears and
chafed her. “You ain’t thinking of divorcing me, like Mountain Pink
done Bosky?”

“Oh, Jim,” she said, and her face was all aquiver, “I never could
divorce you, no matter what you done.” And then the grim philosophy of
the plains-woman asserted itself. “I never can understand why women
feed their pride on their heart’s blood; it never was my way.”

He did not like to remember that he had given her cause for a way.
“There’s a lot of women as wouldn’t exactly regard me as a Merino, or a
Southdown, either;” he gulped the coffee to ease the tightness in his
throat.

“They’d be women of no judgment, then,” she said, with conviction.

Jim’s head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand. His
profile, sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain
of Sioux blood. He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk
himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl
and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her
woman’s penalty and come into her woman’s kingdom; who had made a man
of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly
gone with him into the wilderness and become an alien and an outcast.

These things unmanned him as the sight of the gallows and the rope for
his hanging could not have done. Shielding himself with an affected
roughness, he asked:

“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve been drinking like a beast
of an Indian, and you give me coffee instead of a tongue-lashing.”

The color had all gone out of her face. She gasped the words:

“Jim, I dreamed it last night—they came for you!”

She cowered at the recollection.

“Did they get me?” he asked. There was no surprise in his tone. He
spoke as one who knew the answer.

“Yes, the children saw. The noise woke them.”

“You mustn’t let ’em see, when—they come. They’ve a right to a fair
start; we didn’t get it, old girl.”

“The children gave it to us,” and she faced him.

“Yes, yes, but we want them to have it from the start, like good
folks.”

They looked into each other’s eyes. The memory of dead and gone madness
twinkled there a moment, then each remembered:

“You must hurry, Jim. You haven’t a moment to lose. I dreamed it was to
be to-night—they’ll come to-night!”

“The game’s all up, old girl! If I had a month I couldn’t get away.
Morrison’s been looking for me over to the Owl Creek Range; he’s
back—Stevens told me yesterday. He’ll be heading here soon. The price
on my head is a strain on friendship.”

“Have the sheep-men gone back on you?”

“Yes, damn them! A thousand dollars is big money, and they’ve had hard
luck!”

“They deserve it; I hope every herd in the State dies of scab.”

“There wasn’t a scabby sheep in our bunch. What a sight they were,
loaded with tallow! There wasn’t one of them that couldn’t have
weathered a blizzard; they could have lived on their own tallow for a
month.”

She tried to divert his attention from his lost flock. When he began to
talk about them the despair of his loss drove him to drink. She was
ground between the millstones of his going or staying. If he stayed
they would come for him; if he went, they would apprehend him before he
was ten miles from the house.

“Jim, we got to think. If there’s a chance in a thousand that you can
get away, you got to take it; if there ain’t, the children mustn’t
know. We got to think it out!”

“There ain’t a chance in a thousand, old girl. There ain’t one in a
million. They’re circling round in the hills out here now, waitin’ for
me, like buzzards waitin’ for the eyes of a dyin’ horse.”

She rocked herself, and the clutching fingers left white marks on her
face, but the eyes that met his glittered tearless:

“Then there ain’t nothing left but to face it like a man?”

“That’s all there be.” He might have been giving an opinion on a matter
in which he had no interest.

“Then there ain’t no use in our having any more talk about it?”

“’Tain’t just what you’d call an agreeable subject,” he answered, with
the sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony
of death.

She was tempted to kiss him—they were not given to demonstrations, this
pair—then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they
anticipated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.

“Do you want your breakfast now?”

“I guess you might bring it along.”

And for the same reason that she refrained from kissing him, she
repressed a desire to wring the neck of a young broiler and cook it for
his breakfast, remembering that she had heard they gave folks pretty
much what they wanted when they wouldn’t want it long. So Jim got his
usual breakfast of bacon, uncooked canned tomatoes, soda-biscuit, and
coffee. She sat with him while he ate, but they spoke no more of “them”
or of how soon “they” might be expected. She told him that young Jim
had pretended that morning that he had a cactus thorn in his foot, so
that he might have a piece of dried apple. And old Jim, in an excess of
parental fondness and pride, said: “The damned little liar, he’ll get
to Congress yet!”

But the children were a dangerous topic for overstrained nerves at this
particular time, so Alida told Jim that she had put the black hen to
set and she thought they’d have some chickens at last. Jim smoked while
Alida washed the dishes, and when Jim’s back was turned she examined
the lock on the door—a good push would open it. Then she looked at the
brown bureau, and the recklessness of despair came into her eyes. In
the room beyond, Jim was reading a two weeks’ old newspaper and
smoking. He looked like a lazy ranchman taking his ease.

As she went about her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed
things as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the
shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as
if it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color
of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the
grasshoppers, that was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried,
and their slimy beds crept along the willows like sluggish snakes.
Gaunt range-cattle bellowed in their thirst, and the parched earth
crackled beneath the sun that hung above the house like a flaming disk.
Sometimes she sank beneath the burden of it; then she would wring her
hands and call on God to help them; they were beyond human power. She
and Jim were alone all the morning; they did not again refer to what
they knew would happen. He read his old paper and she put her house in
order. She did it with especial care. It was meet to have things seemly
in the house of the dead. And every time she glanced at Jim she
repressed the desire to fling herself on his breast and cry out the
anguish that consumed her.

At noon she brought the children home to dinner, and afterwards Jim
taught them to throw the lasso and played buffalo with them. Alida did
not trust herself to watch them; she stayed in the kitchen and saw the
sunbeam grow pale with the waning of the day, the day whose minutes
dragged like lead, yet had rushed from her, leaving her the night to
face. At sundown she cooked supper, but she no longer knew what she
did. A crazy agility had taken possession of her and she spun about the
kitchen, doing the same errand many times, finding herself doing always
something different from that she had set about doing. The molten day
was burning itself out like a fever; hot gusts of air beat up from the
earth, but the woman who waited felt chilled to the marrow, and took a
cloak down from a peg and wrapped it about her while she waited for the
biscuit to bake. At supper they sat down together, the man and his wife
and their three children. The children were in fine spirits from the
fun they had had that afternoon. Never had daddy been so nice to them.
He had taught Topeka to throw the lasso so well that she had caught the
cat once and little Jim twice; and daddy had played he was a buffalo
and had charged them all with his head down, till they screamed in
terror. But daddy seemed more quiet through the meal, and once mother
started up and cried:

“What’s that?”

She ran to the door with her hand pressed to her side, but daddy called
after her:

“Don’t you know the cowards better than that? They’ll wait for
nightfall.”

But these things had not worried the children, with their heads full of
playing buffalo and throwing the lariat.

“Jim,” said his father, before they went to bed, “remember you are the
man of the family.” But young Jim was already nodding with sleep.
Topeka and Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were
glad to go to bed.

The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun
had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool
of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The
outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the
half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day
the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves
flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to
palpitate with the intensity of its fever. The bellowing of the
thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped with the twilight that brought
no dew to slake their parched throats. In the hills the coyotes wailed
like lost souls. It was night bereft of benisons, day made frightful by
darkness. All the heat of a cycle of desert summers seemed concentrated
in that house in the valley where the man and his wife waited. Each
sound of the desert night Alida translated into the trampling of
horses’ feet; then, as the sound would die away, or prove to be but
some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose its pinch on
her features, and she would stare into her husband’s face with eyes
that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked and
filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting.

“Jim,” she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, “I am
going to fasten up the house.”

“Do you hear them?” he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred
to the finer senses of women.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till
it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he
put into:

“Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by
fastening that?”

“Jim, I must,” and her voice broke. “They may think you are not here,
that it’s only me and the children, and that’s why the house is
fastened.” She got up and began to move about as though her thoughts
scourged her to action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his
pipe.

“Do anything you blame please,” he said, more by way of humoring her
than from faith in her stratagem. He felt strong enough to face his
destiny, to meet it in a way worthy of his mother’s people.

Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night. Each
thing she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was
as if she were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a
sinister prophecy. Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she
might not break the spell by doing things differently from the way she
had dreamed them. Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly,
and she swung it to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind
seemed likewise to sway hither and thither. Should she fasten the door
and push the bureau against it, as it had been in the dream, or should
she leave door and windows gaping wide for them? And then, as one who
walks and does familiar things in sleep, she shut the door and turned
the key. Jim smiled at her, but she could no longer look at him. One of
the children wailed fretfully from the room beyond. Sleep had become a
scourge in the stifling heat. One by one she lowered the windows and
nailed them down; then she dragged the brown bureau against the door,
took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and sat down with Jim to
wait.

“What are you going to do with them toys?” he asked, as he saw her
examine the chambers of one of the six-shooters.

“You ain’t going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are
you?” she reproached him.

“’Ain’t we agreed that it’s best to keep onpleasant family matters from
the kids?” He smiled at her bravely. “The remembrance of what we’re
anticipatin’ ain’t going to help young Jim to get to Congress when his
time comes, nor it ain’t going to help the girls get good husbands,
either. This here country ain’t what it was in the way of liberality
since it’s got to be a State.”

“Sh-sh-sh!” she said. “Is that the range-cattle stampedin’ after water,
or is it—” They listened. The furniture in the room crackled; there was
not a fibre of it to which the resistless heat had not penetrated. On
the range the cattle bellowed in their thirst-torture; in the intervals
of their cries sounded something far off, but regular as the thumping
of a ship’s screw. The woman did not need an answer to her question.
The steady trampling of hoofs came muffled through the dead air, but
the sound was unmistakable. She put her arms about the man’s neck and
crushed him to her with all her woman strength. “Oh, Jim, you’ve been a
good man to me!”

“Steady—steady.” He strained her close to him. “They’d be, by the sound
of them, on the straight bit of road now, before the turn. Soon we’ll
hear their hoofs ring hollow as they cross the plank bridge.”

His plainsman’s faculty was as keen as ever; his calculation of the
horsemen’s distance was made as though he were the least concerned. All
Alida’s courage had gone, with the dread thing at hand. She clung to
him, dazed.

“They’re sober, all right enough.”

“How do you know?”

“They’d be cursing and bellowing if they were drunk.”

The hoofs rang hollow on the little plank bridge that crossed the ditch
about a stone’s-throw from the door. Not a word was said either within
or without. The lynchers seemed to have drilled for their part; there
was no whispering, no deferring to a leader. On they came, so close
that Jim and Alida could hear the creaking of their saddles. There was
the clank of spurs and the straining of leather as they dismounted,
then some one knocked at the door till the warped boards rattled.

Jim could feel the thudding of Alida’s heart as she clung to him, but
when the knock was repeated a new courage came to her, and she left Jim
and went on her knees close to the outer wall.

“Jim, is that you?” she called, and now every sense was trained to
battle; her voice had even a sleepy cadence, as if she had been
suddenly roused.

“That won’t do at all, Miz Rodney. We know you got Jim in there, just
as certain as we’re out here, and we want him to come out and we’ll do
the thing square, otherwise he can take the consequences.”

Jim opened his mouth to speak, but she, still on her knees beside the
wall, gained his silence by one supplicating gesture. There was a
sleepy, fretful cry from the room beyond—the noise had roused one of
the children.

“Sh-sh, dear,” she called. “It’s only a bad dream. Go to sleep again;
mother is here.”

Through the warped door came sounds of the whispering voices without,
drowned by the shrieking bellow of the cattle. There was not a breath
of air in the suffocating room. Jim bent towards Alida:

“I’m goin out to ’em. They’ll do it square, over on the cotton-woods;
this rumpus’ll only wake the kids.”

But she shook her head imploringly, putting her finger to her lips as a
sign that he was not to speak, and he had not the heart to refuse,
though knowing that she made a desperate situation worse.

“Gentlemen”—she spoke in a low, distinct voice—“Jim ain’t here. He’s
been away from home five days. There’s no one here but me and the
children; you’ve woke them up and frightened them by pounding on the
door. I ask you to go away.”

“If he ain’t in there, will you let us search the house?” It was
Henderson that spoke, Henderson, foreman of the “XXX” outfit.

“I can’t have them frightened; please take my word and go away.”

“Whas er matter, muvvy?” called Judith, sleepily. Young Jim was by this
time crying lustily. Only Topeka said nothing. With the precocity of a
frontier child, she half realized the truth. She tried to comfort
little Jim, though her teeth chattered in fear and she felt cold in the
hot, still room. Then Judith called out, “Make papa send them away.”

“Your papa ain’t here, Judith.” But the fight had all gone out of
Alida’s voice; it was the groan of an animal in a trap.

“Where’s papa gone to?”

“Sh-sh, Judith! Topeka, keep your sister quiet.”

It was absolutely still, within and without, for a full minute. Then
Alida heard the shoving of shoulders against the door. Once, twice,
thrice the lock resisted them. The brown bureau spun across the room
like a child’s toy. The lynchers, bursting in, saw Alida with her arms
around Jim. When the last hope had gone it was instinct with her to
protect him with her own body.

“Go into the kids, old girl, this is no place for you.” And there was
that in his voice that made her obey.

Something of the glory of old Chief Flying Hawk, riding to battle, was
in the face of his grandson.

“Remember, the children ain’t to know,” he said to his wife; and to the
lynchers, “Gentlemen, I’m ready.”




XIX.
“Rocked By A Hempen String”


Alida heard the mingled sounds of footsteps and hoofs grow fainter on
the trail. The children looked at her to tell them why this night was
different from all others—what was happening. But she could only cower
among them, more terrified than they. She seemed to be shrunken from
the happenings of that day. They hardly knew the little, shrivelled,
gray woman who looked at them with unfamiliar eyes. Alida gazed at the
little Judith, and there was something in her mother’s glance that made
the little one hide her face in her sister’s shoulder. Young Judith it
was who all unwittingly had told the lynchers that her father was at
home, and in Alida’s heart there was towards this child a blind,
unreasoning hate. Better had she never been born than live to do this
thing!

It was the wee man, Jim, who first began to reflect resentfully on this
intrusion on his slumbers. He had been sleeping well and comfortably
when some grown-ups came with a lot of noise, and his father had gone
away with them. It had frightened him, but his mother was here, and why
should she not put him to sleep again?

“Muvvy, sing ‘Dway Wolf.’” And as she paid no heed, but looked at him,
white-faced and strange, he again repeated, with his most insinuating
and beguiling tricks of eye and smile:

“Muvvy, sing ‘Dway Wolf’ for Dimmy.”

The child put his head in his mother’s lap, and Alida began, scarce
knowing what she did:

“‘The gray wolves are coming fast over the hill,
    Run fast, little lamb, do not baa, do not bleat,
For the gray wolves are hungry, they come here to kill,
    And the lambs shall be scattered—’


No, no, Jimmy, muvvy cannot sing. Oh, can’t you feel, child? Judith,
Judith, why were you ever born?”

It was still in the valley. Had they come to the dead cotton-woods yet?
Had they begun it? The children shrank from this gray-faced woman whom
they did not know and but yet a little while had been their mother. An
awful silence had fallen on the night. The range-cattle no longer
bellowed in their thirst; the hot wind no longer blew from the desert.
A hush not of earth nor air nor the things that were of her ken seemed
to have fallen about them, muffing the dark loneliness as by invisible
flakes. The children had crouched close together for comfort. They
feared the little, gray-faced woman who seemed to have stolen into
their mother’s place and looked at them with strange eyes.

Jimmy looked at the woman who held him, hoping his mother would come,
and he could see them both. And while he waited he dropped off to
sleep; and little Judith, hiding her head on Topeka’s shoulder, that
she might not see the look in those accusing eyes, presently dreamed
that all was well with her again; and Topeka reflected that if her
mother should ask her in the morning whether she had dreamed last
night, she would have a fine tale to tell of men riding up, and loud
voices, and trying of the door, and father going away with them. Her
mother had questioned her this morning when nothing had happened to
warrant it. Surely she would ask again to-morrow, and Topeka could
tell—she could tell—all.

Alida looked at her three sleeping children—his children, and yet they
could sleep. Into her mind came that cry of utter desolation, “Could ye
not watch with me one hour?” And God had been deaf to Him, His son,
even as He was deaf to her.

The children were sleeping easily. The hush that had hung like a pall
over the valley had not lifted. Had they done it? Was it over yet? She
went to the door and listened. Surely the silence that wrapped the
valley was a thing apart. It was as no other silence that she could
remember. It was still, still, and yet there was vibration to it, like
the muffled roar within a shell. She strained her ears—was that the
sound of horsemen going down the trail? No, no, it was only the beating
of her foolish heart that would not be still, but beat and fluttered
and would not let her hear. Yes, surely, that was the sound of hoofs.
It was over then—they were going.

She would go and look for him. Perhaps it would not be too late—she had
heard of such things. A dynamic force consumed her. She had no
consciousness of her body. Her feet and hands did things with
incredible swiftness—lighted a lantern, selected a knife, ran to the
corral for an old ladder that had been there when they took possession
of the deserted house; and through all her frantic haste she could feel
this new force, as it were, lick up the red blood in her veins, burn
her body to ashes as it gave her new power. She felt that never again
would she have need of meat and drink and sleep. This force would abide
with her till all was over, then leave her, like the whitened bones of
the desert.

It was dark in the valley, but the menacing stillness seemed to be
lifting. The range-cattle had again taken up their plaint, the sounds
of the desert night swept across the stony walls of the cañon. Alida
knew that it must have happened at the dead cotton-woods. There were no
other high trees about for miles. Again she listened before advancing.
There was no sound of hoof or champing bit or men moving quickly. They
had gone their way into the valley. She ran swiftly, her lantern
throwing its beam across the scrubby inequalities of ground, but for
her there was no need of its beacon. To-night she was beyond the
halting, stumbling uncertainties of tread to which man is subject.
There was magic in her feet and in her hands and brain. Like the wind
she ran, the wind on the great plain where there are no foot-hills to
hinder its course. The black, dead trees stood out distinctly against
the starry sky, and from a cross-limb of one of them dangled something
with head awry, like a broken jumping-jack, something that had once
been a man—and her husband. She could touch the feet of this frightful
thing and feel its human warmth. A wind came up from the desert and
blew across the cañon’s rocky walls into the valley, and the parody of
a man swayed to it.

She had been expecting this thing. For weeks the image of it had been
graven on her heart. Sleeping or waking, she had seen nothing but his
dangling body from the cross-limb. Yet with the actual consummation
before her, she felt its hideous novelty as though it were unexpected.
At sight of it the force that had borne her up through the happenings
of that day went out of her, and as she stood with the knife and the
rope, that she had brought in the hope of cheating the lynchers,
dangling from her nerveless hand her helplessness overcame her. Again
and again she called to the dead man for help, called to him as she had
been accustomed to call when her woman’s strength had been unequal to
some heavy household task.

Far down the trail she could hear the gallop of a horse coming closer,
and mingled with the sounds of its flying feet was a voice urging the
horse to greater speed in the shrill cabalistic “Hi-hi-hi-ki!” of the
plains-man. What was it—one of them returning to see that she did not
cheat the rope of its due?—to hang her beside him, as an after-thought,
as they hanged Kate Watson beside her man? Let them. She was standing
near the swaying thing when horse and rider gained the ground beside
her, and what was left to her of consciousness made out that the rider
was Judith. She pointed to it, and stood helpless with the dangling
rope in her hand.

“Are we too late?” Judith almost whispered, as she caught Alida’s cold,
inert hands. “I dreamed it all and came. If I could have dreamed it
sooner!”

Alida did not seem to hear, neither could she speak. She only pointed
again to the thing beside her.

Judith understood. The women had a task to share, and in silence they
began it. The lynchers had done their work all too well. Again and
again the women strove with all their strength to take down the
dangling parody of a man, which in its dead-weight resistance seemed in
league with the forces against them. At last the thing was done. Down
to a pale world, that in the haggard gray of morning seemed to bear in
its countenance something of the pinch of death, Judith lowered the
thing that had so lately been a man. She cut the rope away from the
neck, she straightened the wry neck that seemed to wag in pantomimic
representation of the last word to the lynchers. They’d have to reckon
with him on dark nights, and when the wind wailed like a famished wolf
and when things not to be explained lurked in the shadows of the
desert.

The morning stillness came flooding into the cup-shaped valley like a
soft, resistless wave. Something had come to the gray, old
earth—another day, with all its human gift of joy and woe, and the
earth welcomed it though it had known so many. The sun burst through
the gold-tipped aureole of cloud, scattering far and wide lavish
promises of a perfect day. The earth seemed to respond with a thrill.
No longer was the pinch of death in her countenance. The valley, the
mountains, the invisible wind, even the dead cotton-woods, seemed
endowed with throbbing life that contrasted fearsomely with the
terrible nullity of this thing that once had been Jim Rodney.

Alida had ceased to take any part in the hideous drama. She sat on the
ground, a crouching thing with glittering eyes. It was past
comprehension that the sun could shine and the world go on with her man
dead before her. Judith had become the force that planned and did to
save the family pride. While her hands were busy with preparations for
the dead, she rehearsed what she would say to this and that one to
account for Jim’s absence. The silence of the men who had done this
thing would be as steadfast as their own.

And there were the children. Through all her frantic search for things
in the house, Judith remembered that she must step softly and not waken
the children. With each turn of the screw, as her numbed consciousness
rallied and responded afresh to the hideous realization of this thing,
there came no release from the tyrannous hold of petty detail. She
remembered that she must be back at noon to hold post-office, and there
would be the endless comedy to be played once more with her cavaliers.
They must never suspect from word or look of hers. And there was the
dance to-night at the Benton ranch—she hid her face in her hands. Ah,
no, she could not do this thing! And yet they must not suspect. She
must contrive to give the impression that Jim had cheated the rope.
Yes, she must go and dance, and, if need be, dance with his very
murderers. Jim’s children were to have the “clean start” that he
intended, and they would have to get it here. There was no money for an
exodus and a beginning elsewhere.

Alida still crouched beside the long, even tarpaulin roll that Judith
had prepared with hands that knew not what they did. But now Judith
gently roused her and put in her hand a spade; already she herself had
begun. But Alida stared at it dully, as if she did not understand. Then
Judith pointed to something black that had begun to wheel in the sky,
wheel, and with each circular swoop come closer to the roll of
tarpaulin. Then Alida knew, and, taking the spade, she and Judith began
to dig the grave.




XX.
The Ball


The dance in the Benton ranch was the great social event of the
midsummer season. The Bentons had begun to give dances in the days of
plenty, when the cattle industry had been at its dizziest height; and
they had continued to give dances through all the depressing
fluctuations of the trade, perhaps in much the same spirit as one
whistles in the dark to keep up his courage. Thus, though cattle fell
and continued to fall in the scale of prices till the end no man dared
surmise, the Benton “boys”—they were two brothers, aged respectively
forty-five and fifty years—continued to hold out facilities to dance
and be merry.

All day strange wagons—ludicrous, makeshift things—had been discharging
loads of women and children at the Benton ranch, tired mothers and
their insistent offspring. To the women this strenuous relaxation came
as manna in the wilderness. What was the dreary round of washing,
ironing, baking, and the chain of household tasks that must be done as
primitively as in Genesis, if only they might dance and forget? So the
mothers came early and stayed late, and the primary sessions of the
dances fulfilled all the functions of the latter-day mothers’
congresses—there were infant ailments to be discussed, there were the
questions of food and of teething, of paregoric and of flannel bands,
which, strange heresy, seemed to be “going out,” according to the
latest advices from those compendiums of all domestic information, the
“Woman’s Pages” of the daily papers.

Inasmuch as these more than punctual debaters must be cooked for, there
was, to speak plainly, “feeling” on the part of the housekeeper at the
Bentons’. Wasn’t it enough for folks to come to a dance and get a good
supper, and go away like Christians when the thing was over, instead of
coming a day before it began and lingering on as if they had no home to
go to? This, at least, was the housekeeper’s point of view, a crochety
one, be it said, not shared by the brothers Benton, whose hospitality
was as genuine as it was primitive. To this same difficult lady the
infants, who were too tender in years to be separated from their
mothers, were as productive of anxiety as their elders. A room had been
set apart for their especial accommodation, the floor of which,
carefully spread with bed-quilts and pillows, prevented any great
damage from happening to the more tender of the guests; and they rolled
and crooned and dug their small fists into each other’s faces while
their mothers danced in the room beyond.

By nightfall the Benton ranch gleamed on the dark prairie like a
constellation. Lights burned at every window; a broad beam issued from
the door and threw a welcoming beacon across the darkness and silence
of the night. The scraping of fiddles mingled with the rhythmic scuffle
of feet and the singsong of the words that the dancers sung as they
whirled through the figures of the quadrille and lancers. About the
walls of the room where the dancing was in progress stood a fringe of
gallants, their heads newly oiled, and proclaiming the fact in a
bewildering variety of strong perfumes. Red silk neckerchiefs knotted
with elaborate carelessness displayed to advantage bronzed throats; new
overalls, and of the shaggiest species, amply testified to the social
importance of the Benton dance.

As yet the dancing was but intermittent and was engaged in chiefly by
the mothers with large progeny, who felt that after the arrival of a
greater number of guests, and among them the unmarried girls, their
opportunities might not be as plentiful as at present. One or two
cow-punchers, in an excess of civility at the presence of the fair, had
insisted on giving up their six-shooters, mumbling something about
“there being ladies present and a man being hasty at times.” In the
“bunk-room,” which did duty as a gentleman’s cloak-room, things were
really warming up. There was much drinking of healths, as the brothers
Benton had thoughtfully provided the wherewithal, and that in excellent
quality.

Costigan was there, and Texas Tyler, who had ridden sixty miles to
“swing a petticoat,” or, if there were not enough to go round, to dance
with a handkerchief tied to some fellow’s sleeve. By “swinging a
petticoat” it was perfectly understood among all his friends that he
meant a chance to dance with Judith Rodney. Year in and year out Texas
never failed to present himself at the post-office on mail-days, if his
work took him within a radius of fifty miles of the Daxes. No dance
where the possibility of seeing Judith was even remote was too long a
ride for him to undertake, even when it took him across the dreariest
wastes of the desert. Texas had been devoted to Judith since she had
left the convent, and sometimes, perhaps twice a year, she told him
that she valued his friendship. On all other occasions she rejected his
suit as if his continual pressing of it were something in the nature of
an affront. Yet Texas persevered.

“Well, here’s lukin’ at you, since in the way of a frind there’s
nothing better to look at!” and Costigan drained a tin cup at Texas
Tyler.

“Your very good health,” said Texas, who was somewhat embarrassed by
what was regarded as Costigan’s “floweriness.”

“Begorra, is that Hinderson or the ghost av the b’y?” Costigan’s roving
eye was arrested by the foreman of the “XXX,” who stood drinking with
two or three men of his outfit. He was pale and ill-looking. He drank
several times in succession, as if he needed the stimulant, and without
the formality of drinking to any one. The two or three “XXX” men who
were with him seemed to be equally in need of restoratives.

They talked of the cattle stampede in which several of the outfits had
been heavy losers. Some nine hundred head of cattle had been recovered,
and members of the different outfits were still scouring the Red Desert
for strays.

Something in the nature of a sensation was created by the arrival of
the Wetmore party. The women were frankly interested in the clothes,
bearing, and general deportment of the New-Yorkers. Rumors of Miss
Colebrooke’s beauty were rife, and there was a general inclination to
compare her with local belles. Such exotic types—they had seen these
city beauties before—were as a rule too colorless for their
appreciation. They liked faces that had “more go to them,” was the
verdict passed upon one famous beauty who had visited the Wetmores the
year before. In arrangement of the hair, perhaps, in matters of dress,
the judges were willing to concede the laurels to city damsels, but
there concession stopped. But evidently Kitty, to judge from the
elaboration of her toilet, did not intend to be dismissed thus
cursorily. She herself was delicately, palely pretty, as always, but
her hair was tortured to a fashionable fluffiness, and the simplicity
of her green muslin gown was only in the name. It was muslin disguised,
elaborated, beribboned, lace-trimmed till its identity was all but lost
in the multitude of pretty complications.

“Did you know that old Ma’am Yellett had a school-marm up to her
place?” asked one of the men, apropos of Eastern prettiness.

“Well, well,” Costigan reminisced, “’tis some av thim Yillitt lambs
thot’s six fut in their shtockings, if Oi be rimimbering right. Sure,
the tacher ought to be something av a pugilist, Oi’m thinkin’.”

“I seen her the other day, and a neater little heifer never turned out
to pasture. Lord, I’d like to be gnawing the corners of the primer
right now, if she was there to whale the ruler.”

“Arrah,” bayed Costigan, “but the women question is gittin’ complicated
ontoirely, wid Miss Rodney—an’ herself lukin’ loike a saint in a church
window—dalin’ the mails an’ th’ other wan tachin’ in the mountains.
Sure, this place is gittin’ to be but a sorry shpot for bachelors loike
mesilf.”

“I ain’t mentionin’ no names, but there’s a man here ain’t treatin’ a
mighty fine woman square and accordin’ to the way she ought to be
treated.”

The information ran through the circle like an electric shock. Men
stopped in the act of pledging each other’s healths to listen. Loungers
straightened up; every topic was dropped. The man who had made the
statement was the loose-lipped busybody who had suggested to his host
that he give up his six-shooter since there were “ladies present.”

“What the hell are you waiting for?” queried Texas Tyler, savagely.
“You’ve cracked your whip, made your bow, and got our attention; why
the hell don’t you go on?”

The man looked about nervously. He was rather alarmed at the interest
he had excited. The next moment Peter Hamilton had walked into the
room. There was something crucial in his entrance at this particular
time; it crystallized suspicion. The gossip took advantage of the
greetings to Hamilton to make his escape. Texas Tyler left the
bunk-room immediately and looked for him in the room with the dancers.
The fiddles, in the hands of a couple of Mexicans, had set the whole
room whirling as if by magic. As they danced they sang, joining with
the “caller-out,” who held his vociferous post between the rooms, till
the room was full of singing, dancing men and women, who spun and
pirouetted as if they had not a care in the world. But Texas Tyler was
not of these, as he looked through the dancers for his man. There was a
red flash in the pupils of his eyes, and he told himself that he was
going to do things the way they did them in Texas, for, of course, he
knew that the loose-lipped idiot had meant Judith Rodney and Peter
Hamilton. Never before had such an idea occurred to him, and now that
it had been presented to his mind’s eye, he wondered why he had been
such a blind fool. Never had the singing to these dances seemed so
absurd.

“Hawk hop out and the crow hop in,
Three hands round and go it ag’in.
Allemane left, back to the missus,
Grande right and left and sneak a few kisses.”


He rushed from the room and down to the stable. At sight of him some
one leaped on a horse and rode out into the darkness.

“Who was that?” asked Texas of a man lounging by the corral.

“That was—” and he gave the name of the loose-lipped man.

Texas cursed long and picturesquely. Then he went back to the bunk-room
and tried to pick a quarrel with Peter Hamilton, who good-naturedly
assumed that his old friend had been drinking and refused to take
offence.

Peter went in to ask Kitty to dance with him. All that evening he had
been waiting anxiously for Judith. Meanwhile he had used all his
influence as a newly appointed member of the Wetmore outfit to soothe
the ruffled feelings of the cattle-men. Of the tragedy in the valley he
had heard no rumor.

Kitty had come to the point where she was willing to waive the
Récamier-Chateaubriand friendship in favor of one more personal and
ordinary. In fact, as Peter showed a disposition to regard as final her
answer to him on the day he had spurred across the desert, Kitty, with
true feminine perversity, inclined to permit him to resume his suit.
His acquiescence in her refusal she had at first regarded as the
turning of the worm; after the wolf-hunt, however, her meditations were
more disturbing. She had never told Peter of that strange woodland
meeting with Judith, yet Judith’s beauty, her probable hold over Peter,
the degree of his affection for her were rankling questions in Kitty’s
consciousness. In the stress of these considerations Kitty lost her
head completely for so old a campaigner. She drew the apron-string
tight—attempted force instead of strategy.

Kitty and Peter finished their waltz, one of the few round dances of
the evening.

“How perfectly you dance, Kitty! It’s a long time since we’ve had a
waltz together.”

The cow-punchers looked at Kitty as if she were not quite flesh and
blood. Such flaxen daintiness, femininty etherealized to angelic
perfection, was new to them, but their admiration was like that given
to a delicate exotic which, wonderful as it is, one is well pleased to
view through the glass of the florist’s window.

Peter was deferentially attentive and zealous to make the Wetmore party
have a thoroughly good time, yet he did all these things, as it were,
with his eye on the door. He was not obviously distrait; he was the man
of the world, talking, making himself agreeable, “doing his duty,”
while his subconsciousness was busy with other matters. It was rather
through telepathy than through any lack of attention paid to her that
Kitty realized the state of things, and in proportion to her
realization came a feeling of helplessness; it was so new, so
unexpected, so cruel. He seemed drifting away from her on some tide of
affairs of the very existence of which she had been unconscious.
Further and further he had drifted, till intelligible speech no longer
seemed possible between them. They said the foolish, empty things that
people call out as the boat glides away from the shore, the things that
all the world may hear, and in his eyes there was only that smiling
kindness. How had it come about after all these years? What was it that
had first cut the cable that sent him drifting? What was it? She must
think. Oh, who could think with that noise! How silly was their singing
as they danced, how uncouth!

“All dance as pretty as you can,
Turn your toes and left alleman;
    First gent sashay to the right,
Now swing the girl you last swung about,
And now the one that’s cut her out,
    And now the one that’s dressed in white,
And now the belle of the ball.”


The dancers seemed bitten to the quick with the tarantula of an
ecstatic hilarity; their bodies swayed in perfect harmony to the swing
of the fiddles and the swell of the chorus. The most uncouth of them
came under the spell of that mad magic. Their movements, that in the
beginning of the dance had been shy and awkward, became almost
beautiful; they forgot arms, hands, feet; their bodies had become like
the strings of some skilfully played instrument, obediently responsive
to rhythm, and in that composite blending of races each in his dancing
brought some of the poetry of his own far land. The scene was amazing
in its beauty and simplicity, like the strong, inspirational power and
rugged rhythm of some old border minstrel. One by one the dancers
glowed with better understanding; discordant elements, alien nations
were fused to harmony in this vivid picture.

Peter turned to Kitty, expecting to see her face aglow with the warmth
of it. She stood beside him, the one unresponsive soul in the room, on
her lips a pale, tolerant smile.

“Aren’t they splendid, Kitty, these women? More than half of them work
like beavers all day, and they have young children and dozens of
worries, but would you suspect it? They’re just the women for this
country.”

Now in the present state of affairs almost any other subject would have
been better calculated to promote good feeling than the one on which
Peter had alighted. Kitty’s thoughts had perversely lingered about one
who, though not one with these women, had yet their sturdy
self-reliance, their acquiescence in grim conditions, their pleasure in
simple things. Kitty’s apprehension, slow to kindle, had taken fire
like a forest, and by its blaze she saw things in a distorted light;
her present vision magnified the relations of Peter and Judith to a
degree that a month ago she would have regarded as impossible. “He is
her lover!” was the accusation that suddenly flashed through her mind,
and with the thought an overwhelming desire to say something unkind,
something that should hurt him, supplanted all judgment and reason.

“Oh, it’s a decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you.
And an artist, of course—but isn’t it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to
idealize them because they are having a good time? There’s no virtue in
it. It is conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and
have just as many little children to look after, and yet not have these
dances you praise them for coming to.”

“I’m afraid you find us and our amusements a little crude. Evidently
the spirit of our dances does not appeal to you; but I did not suppose
it necessary to remind you that they should not be judged by the
standard of conventional evening parties,” said Peter, hurt and angry
in his turn.

“Us, our amusements, our dances? So you are quite identified with these
people, my dear Peter, and I had thought you an ornament of cotillions
and country clubs. I can only infer that it is somebody in particular
who has brought about your change of heart.”

Peter flushed a little, and Kitty kept on: “Some of the native belles
are quite wonderful, I believe. Nannie Wetmore tells of a half-breed
who is very handsome.”

Peter set his lips. “At the expense of spoiling Nannie’s pretty
romance, I must tell you that the lady she refers to is not only the
most beautiful of women, but she would be at ease in any drawing-room.
It would be as ridiculous to apply the petty standards of ladyhood to
her as it would to—well, imagine some foolish girl bringing up the
question at a woman’s club—‘Was Joan of Arc a lady?’” Peter spoke
without calculating the conviction that his words carried. He was
angry, and his manner, voice, intonation showed it.

Kitty, now that her most unworthy suspicions had been confirmed by
Peter’s ardent championing of Judith, lost her discretion in the pang
that gnawed her little soul: “I beg your pardon, Peter. When I spoke I
did not, of course, know that this young woman was anything to you.”

“Anything to me? My dear Kitty, I’ve never had a better friend than
Judith Rodney.”

The dance was at its flood-tide. The exhilaration had grown with each
sweep of the fiddle-bow, with the sorcery of sinuous, swaying bodies,
with the song of the dancers as they joined in the calling out of the
figures, with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses,
with the leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled
as leaves circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool. The dancing Mrs.
Dax split her favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of
which her long list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel
if need be. Her dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had
something of the surge of the west wind sweeping over a field of grain.
Sometimes she waved back her partner and alone danced a figure, putting
to the music her own interpretation—barbaric, passionate, rude, but
magnificently vivid. And the dancers would stop and crowd about her,
clapping hands and stamping feet to the rhyming movement of her body,
while against the wall her hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood
and glared in a fury of disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly
meanwhile and exercising the utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs.
Johnnie’s train.

The “XXX” men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the
merriment, keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the
hospitable bottles were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell
that had bound them all day. Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not
lost its tallow paleness despite the number of his potations, put his
head through the door to have a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was
caught in the outermost eddy of the whirling throng, and was soon
dancing as madly as the others. The rest of the “XXX” party still
hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed hospitable. They were
still dusty from their long ride of the early morning, and more than
once their fear-quickened imaginations had been haunted by the spectre
of the dead cotton-woods, from which something heavy and limp and warm
had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had secured the dancing
Mrs. Dax for a partner. The “caller-out,” stationed between the two
rooms, warmed to his genial task. He improvised, he put a wealth of
imagination and personality into his work, he showered compliments on
the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax’s feet, he joked Henderson on his pallor, he
attempted a florid venture at Kitty. Miguel put fresh magic into his
bowing, José’s fiddle rioted with the madness of it.

Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her
heart cried out in protest at the thing she must do. It was the utmost
cruelty of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day
that they had killed him. But she must do it, that his children might
evade the stigma of “cattle-thief,” that the shadow of the gallows-tree
might not fall across their young lives, that the neighbors might give
credence to the tale of Jim’s escape from his enemies, that Alida and
she might earn the pittance that would give the children the “clean
start” that Jim had set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance
and be the merriest of them all that these things might happen, but
again and again she deferred the dread moment. The light, the music,
the voices, the shuffle of the feet came to her as she stood forlorn in
the grateful darkness. On the wall the shadows of the dancers,
magnified and grotesque, parodied their movements, as they contended
there, monstrous, uncouth shapes, like prehistoric monsters gripping,
clinching in some mighty struggle; and above it all sang out the wild
rhythm of Miguel’s fiddle, and young José’s bow capered madly.

Judith drew close to the window, and the merriment struck chill at her
heart like the tolling of a knell. She saw the pale face of Henderson
gleam yellow-white among the dancers, and, watching him, the blood-lust
of the Indian woke in her heart. The rest of the room was but a blur;
the dancers faded into swaying shadows; she saw nothing but Henderson
as he danced that he might forget the gray of morning, the black, dead
trees, and the grotesque thing with head awry that swayed in the breeze
like a pendulum. He dreaded the long, black ride that would bring him
to his camp, for he alone of the lynchers remained. Something was
drawing his gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled
against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax
woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the
accompaniment of Miguel’s fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that
dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a
vengeance. And as he danced and swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell
on the window opposite, and Jim Rodney’s face looked in at him,
beautiful in its ecstasy of hate—Rodney’s face, refined, sharpened,
tried in some bitter crucible, but Rodney’s face! Henderson could not
withdraw his fascinated gaze. He stood in the midst of the dancers like
a man turned to stone. He put up his hand to his eyes as if to brush
away a cloud of swarming gnats, then threw up his arms and rushed from
the room. The dancers paused in their mad whirl. Miguel’s bow stopped
with a wailing shriek. Every eye turned towards the window for an
explanation of Henderson’s sudden panic, but all was dark without on
the prairie. The magic had gone from the dance, the whirlwind of
drapery that had swung like flags in a breeze dropped in dead air.
“What was it?” the dancers asked one another in whispers.

And for answer Judith entered, but a Judith that was strange to them.
There was about her a white radiance that kept the dancers back, and in
her eyes something of Mary’s look, as she turned from Calvary. The
dancers still kept the position of the figures, the men with their arms
about their partners’ waists, the women stepping forward; they were
like the painted figures of dancers in a fresco. And among them stood
Judith, waiting to play her part, waiting to show her world that she
could dance and be merry because all was well with her and hers. But
the bronzed sons of the saddle hung back, they who a day before would
have quarrelled for the honor of a dance. They were afraid of her; it
would be like dancing with the death angel. She looked from face to
face. Surely some one would ask her to dance, and her eyes fell on
Henderson, returning from the bottled courage in the bunk-room. Some
word was due from him to explain his terror of a moment ago.

“Oh, Miss Judith, I thought you was a ghost when I seen you at the
window.”

“A ghost that’s ready to dance.” She held out her hand to him. In her
gesture there was something of royal command, and Henderson, reading
the meaning in her eyes, stepped forward. Her face, almost a perfect
replica of the dead man’s, looked at him.

“I bring you greeting from my brother,” she said. “He has gone on a
long journey.”

Henderson started. Through the still room ran the murmur, “Rodney’s
outwitted them; he’s played a joke on the rope!” And Judith, his
dare-devil sister, had come with his greetings to Henderson, leader of
the faction against him! The tide had turned. The applause that is ever
the meed of the winner was hers to command. The cattle faction were
ready to sing the praises of her splendid audacity. In their hearts
they were glad in the thought that Jim had outwitted them.

Miguel’s bow dashed across the strings, and he drew from the little
brown fiddle music that again made them merry and glowing. The magic
came back to the dance, the blood leaped again with the merry madness,
and they swept to the bowing like leaves when the first faint wail of
winter cries in the trees.

Hamilton, standing apart with Kitty Colebrooke, had been a dazed
witness of the scene. With the rest he had watched the entrance of
Judith, had been stunned by the change in her appearance, had seen her
triumph and heard the rumor of Jim’s escape, and his heart had warmed
with the good word. She had probably managed the plan, and had come
to-night, in the joy of her triumph, to hurl in their faces that she
had outwitted them. And she had paid the penalty of her courage—her
face told that. What a woman she was! Her heart would pay the penalty
to the last throb, and yet she could dance with the merriest of them.
And as she danced she seemed to Peter Hamilton, in her white draperies,
like a cloud of whirling snow-flakes drifting across the silence of the
desert night. She was the one woman in all the world for him, though
his blind eyes had faced the light for years and had not known it. He
had squandered the strength of his youth in the pursuit of a little wax
light, and had not marked the serene shining of the moon.

“And a man there was and he made his prayer—” he quoted to himself.
Well, thank God that it had not been answered. He would take her away
from here. She could take her place in his family and reflect credit on
his choice. His family, his friends—he winced at the thought of their
possible reception of the news. But Judith’s presence would adjust
these difficulties. He would present her to Kitty now, that his old
friend might see what manner of woman she was. Kitty, he felt, would be
kind in memory of the old days. She would give to them both in
friendship what she had denied him in love. And as he warmed to the
thought he turned to the woman of his youth. And she read a look in his
face that had not been there in a long time. Had he, then, come back to
her? Was the distance from bark to shore lessening as the sea of
misunderstanding diminished?

“Kitty, we were speaking a moment ago of Miss Rodney. You would like to
know her, I’m sure. We’ve been such good friends all these years while
you were deciding that what I wanted was not good for us—and deciding
wisely, as I know now. Look at her! You’ll understand how she has
helped me keep the balance of things. When she’s finished dancing
you’ll let me bring her to you, won’t you?”

And Kitty, who had expected much different words, struggled with the
meaning of these unexpected ones. The strangeness of the pain
bewildered her. Her dazed consciousness refused to accept that Peter
was asking permission to present to her a woman whom she thought should
not have been permitted to enter her presence. There was about her a
white flame of anger that seemed to lick up the red blood in her veins
as she turned to answer:

“She is undeniably handsome, Peter, but I do not care to meet your
mistress.”

He bowed low to her as Lieutenant Swift, of Fort Washakie, who was of
the Wetmore party, came to claim Kitty’s hand for the next dance.
Judith and Henderson were leading the last figure, their hands clasped
high in an arch through which the dancers trooped in couples. Again and
again he tried to catch Judith’s eye, but her glance never once met
his. Her great, wide eyes had a far-away look as if they saw some
tragedy, the shadow of which would never fall from her. She was,
indeed, the tragic muse in her floating white drapery, the tragic muse
whose grief is too deep for tears. He watched her as she swept towards
him in the figure of the dance, the head thrown back, slightly
foreshortened, the mouth smiling with the smile that knows all things,
the eyes holy wells of truth. He saw in her something of the tenderness
of Eve, for all the blending of the calm modern woman, capable in
affairs, equal to emergency. It was like her to contrive her brother’s
escape and then to dance with the very men who had knotted the noose
for his hanging. Henderson was bowing to her, the dance was over, and
the next moment she was alone.

“Is it you, Peter?” She thrust a strand of hair back from her temple.
Her eyes rested on him for a moment, then wandered, till in their
absent look was the rapt expression of the sleep-walker. The
dark-rimmed eyes had in their depths the quiet of a conflagration, and
Peter, seeing these things, and knowing the gamut of all her moods, saw
that he had been mistaken. She had not come, to dance in triumph, in
the face of her brother’s enemies. There was no triumph in her face,
but white, consuming despair.

“Did you ask me to dance?” Again she put back the strand of hair.
“Forgive me for being so stupid, but I’ve kept post-office to-day, and
had a long ride, and I danced with Henderson.”

He drew her arm within his and led the way out through the crowd of
dancers to the star-strewn night. She did not speak again, nor did she
seem to notice that they had left the room with the dancers. She turned
her face towards the lonely valley, where the drama of her brother’s
passing had been consummated, and something there was in her look as it
turned towards the hills that told Peter.

“Tell me, Judith, ‘what has happened?”

For answer she pointed towards the valley. “They did it last night at
the dead cotton-woods. Henderson led them. I could not stay with Alida.
I had to come here to dance that no one might suspect.”

Her voice was steady, but low and thrilling. In its deep resonance was
the echo of all human sorrow. There was no hint of accusation, yet
Peter felt accused. He felt, now when it was too late, that his
position had been one of almost pusillanimous negligence. From the
beginning he had taken a firm stand against violent measures. He had
talked, argued, reasoned, inveighed against violence; no later than a
week ago he had ridden across the desert to tell Henderson that the
Wetmore outfit would take no part in violence of any sort, and that the
cattle outfit that did resort to extreme measures would miss the
support of the “W-Square” in any future range business. But it had not
been enough. He should have made plain his position in regard to
Judith. With her as his future wife the tragedy of the valley would not
have been possible.

From the ranch-house came the swell of the fiddles, the rhythmic
shuffle of feet, the song of the dancers, dulled by distance. Beside
him was Judith, a white spirit, the woman in her dead of grief. And
yet, through all the grim horror of the tragedy she remembered the part
that had been allotted to her, threw all the weight of her personality
on the side of the game she was playing.

“You must be on our side, Peter, and when there is talk of Jim’s
absence you must imply that he is East somewhere. You will know how to
meet such inquiries better than we women. Henderson will be only too
glad. You should have seen the wretch when I held out my hand to him
and told him to dance with me. He came, white and shambling; we have
nothing to fear from Henderson. Alida has no money to go away with. She
and I must stay here and make a beginning for the children, and, Peter,
we want you to help us.”

He had no voice to answer her brave words for a minute, and then his
sentences came uncertain and halting.

“You must think me a poor sort of friend, Judith, one who has been
blind till the eleventh hour and is then found wanting. I feel so
guilty to you, to your brother’s wife, to that little child who put out
his arms so trustfully to me that night, but I never imagined that
things would come to such a pass as this. The smaller cattle outfits
have been doing a good deal of blustering, but the more conservative
element supposed that they had them in check, and did not for a moment
think that they would take the law into their own hands. Believe me,
this lawlessness has been in the face of every influence that could be
brought to bear, and it shall not go unpunished.”

She spoke to him from the darkness, as the spirit of grief might speak.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that is the justice of the
plains. But, Peter, it is but poor justice. What’s done is done, and
fresh violence will not give back Alida her husband nor the little ones
their father. What we need is friends, one or two loyal souls who,
though knowing the hideous truth of this thing, will stand by us in our
pitiful falsehood. I have told no one, nor shall I, but you and—Peter,
you must not laugh at your fellow-conspirator—Leander.”

He took her hands in his and pressed them; big hands they were, and
hardened by many a homely task, but withal tender and with the healing
quality of womanliness in the touch of their warm, supple fingers. But
to-night she did not seem to know that he held them, nor to be
conscious of his presence. The woman in her was dead of grief. The
white spirit in her place, that plotted and planned that Jim’s children
and Jim’s wife might not from henceforth walk in the shadow of the
gallows, was beyond the prompting of the flesh. And again she spoke to
him in the same far-away voice, with the same far-away look in her
eyes.

“You must know, Peter, that Leander is at heart of the salt of the
earth. I told him about it all, and he asked to be given the commission
to deal with the men. He has risen to his post magnificently. I heard
him swear the wretches to secrecy, hint to them that he had a great
story to tell them. They were frightened, and listened. And the poor
little man that we have so despised told them convincingly how Jim had
made good his escape—even Henderson half believes we saved him.”

Peter hoped that she would accuse him of his half-heartedness
indirectly, if not openly. It would have made his conscience more
comfortable, and his conscience troubled him sorely to-night. It was
that fatal habit of procrastination that had brought this thing about.
He had hesitated all these weeks about Judith, and while he had
threshed out the pro and con of her disadvantageous family connection,
this hideous tragedy had happened.

“Peter”—and now her eyes seemed to come back to earth again, to lose
something of the far-away look of the sleep-walker—“Peter, I’m cruel to
speak to you of these things now. When your heart is full of your own
happiness, I come to you like a dark shadow with this tragedy. But I am
glad for the good that has come to you, Peter. Perhaps Miss Colebrooke
told you of the day I met her in the wood, the day of the wolf-hunt.
She was so beautiful, I understood—”

“Judith, I hardly know how to say what I am going to, I feel that I
have been such a bad friend to you, but you must hear me patiently.
Together, if you are willing, after knowing all of me that you do, we
must look after your brother’s children. That night in the little house
in the valley, when the little chap came to me, don’t you remember,
there was something fine and fearless in the way he did it. ‘You may
belong to the cattle side of the argument,’ he seemed to say, ‘but I
trust you.’ Now, Judith dear, that boy’s faith in me is not going to be
shaken. We must look after them together. It is a very little thing you
have asked of me, my dearest, but a very big one that I am asking of
you. Do you understand, my Judith, it is you that I want? Don’t think
of me as I have been, Judith, but as you are going to make me. I want
you to give me the right now, this evening, to share all this trouble
with you. Do we understand each other, Judith? Is it to be? And will
you come back with me now, into the room where they are dancing, and
let me present you to them, to the Wetmores, as _my_ Judith, my
betrothed?”

“But, Peter, I don’t understand. I—I thought you and Miss Colebrooke
were—”

“That’s all over, Judith. I did love her once. Oh, you dear, brave
woman, I’m not a hero from any point of view, and you know it. It’s but
a sorry lover that’s making his prayer to you, my dearest; but you
won’t judge, I know, beloved, you will love me instead?”

Judith turned towards the valley. Her whole being throbbed with a
passionate response to the man who stood so humbly before her, but
there were duties that came first. Her mind was full of Alida and her
children, and her eyes still sought Peter’s imploringly.

“You will be a good friend to them, Peter—to Jim’s people? I cannot
talk to you of anything else to-night. Your heart is big, Peter, but
you cannot feel, perhaps—”

“Listen, Judith. Whatever friendship and protection I can give your
family you may count upon from now till the end of time. I will be
theirs as I am yours. I feel your grief, but I want to soothe it, too.
And if you love me, and I feel, Judith, that you do, you must let them
all see to-night, these people who know us both, that we stand together
before all the world for better or worse. Think, Judith, and you will
see that you owe it to yourself, to me, to all these men, who reverence
you as the one woman, the one ideal in their lonely lives.”

She could not speak. The moment was too full, the strain had been too
great; but she smiled surrender, and Peter caught her tenderly in his
arms and kissed her once—his Judith she was now, his heroine. Then,
without another word, he drew her arm through his and led her back to
the lights, where the dancers still held high carnival.

Judith’s half-sister, Eudora, was making a pretty quarrel by perversely
forgetting the order in which she had given her dances. The girl was so
undeniably happy that Judith dreaded the grim news she must tell her.
Eudora blushed as she encountered Judith’s eye. Her half-sister ever
offered a check on Eudora’s exuberant coquetry, with its precipitation
of discussions that often ended in bullets. Leander stood on the
outermost fringe of Eudora’s potential partners. He would not have
dared to maintain it openly, yet he was sure the pretty minx had
promised that dance to him.

“Dance with Leander, dear, and don’t let those men begin quarrelling.
I’ve something to tell you, presently,” said Judith.

Texas Tyler stood glowering at them from the doorway. He would not
catch Judith’s eye as she tried to speak to him. Kitty sat alone for
the moment. She had sent the young lieutenant to fetch her a cup of
coffee, but as Peter approached with Judith she averted her eyes.

“Kitty, may I present to you my fiancée, Miss Rodney?”

Kitty rose superbly to the situation. She might, indeed, have made the
match she was so overjoyed in the good-fortune of her old friend Peter.
She made no reference to the woodland meeting—she hoped for the
happiness of seeing them in town. And she bade Peter tell the good news
to Nannie Wetmore, they would be so glad. Nannie swallowed a grimace
and proffered a cousinly hand. She had suspected some such news as this
when she saw that things were not going well with Kitty and Peter.

“Better one dance with a good partner that can swing ye than several
with a feeble partner that leaves ye to swing your own corners!”

Judith looked up, smiling. She recognized the characteristic utterance
of her old friend Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch had sustained a
breakdown, and arrived, in consequence, when the dance was half over,
but she was philosophical, as always, in the face of misfortune, and
loudly attested her pleasure in the renowned pedal feats of her
partner, Costigan.

Behind came Mary Carmichael, looking brown and happy. From the attitude
of the group around Judith and Peter Mary divined what had happened,
and came to add her congratulations. Even Mrs. Yellett forgot to choose
an axiom as her medium of expression, and kissed Judith publicly, with
affectionate unction. Henderson had effaced himself, and Leander, proud
of his triumph and Judith’s commendation, sat in a corner and smiled
contentedly. Ignorant of the drama to which they had played chorus, the
dancers still riotously swung one another up and down the length of the
room, and from the little brown fiddles came the gay music of Judith’s
betrothal.

THE END