Chapter 2
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