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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Judith Of The Plains by Marie Manning
+
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
+restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under
+the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or
+online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+
+Title: Judith Of The Plains
+
+Author: Marie Manning
+
+Release Date: April 2005 [Ebook #15573]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO 8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JUDITH OF THE PLAINS***
+
+
+
+
+
+Judith Of The Plains
+By Marie Manning
+
+Harper & Brothers Publishers
+New York And London
+
+Copyright, 1903. By Harper & Brothers
+
+Printed In The United States Of America
+
+
+
+
+
+                                [Image #1]
+
+Peter's Hand Sought Hers, And All Her Woman's Fear Of The Vague Terrors Of
+      The Dreadful Night Spoke In Her Answering Pressure--See p. 154.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+"Town"
+The Encounter
+Leander And His Lady
+Judith, The Postmistress
+The Trail Of Sentiment
+A Daughter Of The Desert
+Chugg Takes The Ribbons
+The Rodneys At Home
+Mrs. Yellett And Her "Gov'ment"
+On Horse-thief Trail
+The Cabin In The Valley
+The Round-up
+Mary's First Day In Camp
+Judith Adjusts The Situation
+The Wolf-hunt
+In The Land Of The Red Silence
+Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst
+Foreshadowed
+"Rocked By A Hempen String"
+The Ball
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JUDITH OF THE PLAINS
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+                                  "Town"
+
+
+It was June, and a little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early
+summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like
+a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped
+curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a
+long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling air and
+discomfort.
+
+The only passenger stirring was a girl whose youth drooped under the
+unfavorable influences of foul air, fatigue, and a strained anxiety to
+come to the end of this fateful journey. She had been up while it was yet
+dark, and her hand--luggage, locked, strapped, and as pitifully new at the
+art of travelling as the girl herself, clustered about the hem of her blue
+serge skirt like chicks about a hen. The engine shrieked, but its voice
+sounded weak and far off in that still ocean of space; the girl tightened
+her grasp on the largest of the satchels and looked at the approaching
+porter tentatively.
+
+"We're late twenty-fi'e minutes," he reassured her, with the hopeless
+patience of one who has lost heart in curbing travellers' enthusiasms.
+
+She turned towards the window a pair of shoulders plainly significant of
+the burdensome last straw.
+
+"Four days and nights in this train"--they were slower in those days--"and
+now this extra twenty-five minutes!"
+
+Miss Carmichael's famous dimple hid itself in disgust. The demure lines of
+mouth and chin, that could always be relied upon for special pleading when
+sentence was about to be passed on the dimple by those who disapproved of
+dimples, drooped with disappointment. But the light-brown hair continued
+to curl facetiously--it was the sort of hair whose spontaneous rippling
+conveys to the seeing eye a sense of humor.
+
+The train plodded across the spacious vacancy that unrolled itself farther
+and farther in quest of the fugitive horizon. The scrap of view that came
+within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows like a bit of
+stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate a race at
+breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing eyes; the
+whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was but part of
+the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of homesickness was in it
+all.
+
+"My dear! my dear!"--a head in crimpers was thrust from between the
+curtains of the section opposite--"I've been awake half the night. I was so
+afraid I wouldn't see you before you got off."
+
+The head was followed, almost instinctively, by a hand travelling
+furtively to the crimpers that gripped the lady's brow like barnacles
+clinging to a keel.
+
+Mary expressed a grieved appreciation at the loss of rest in behalf of her
+early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the direction of
+the barnacles, that being a first principle as between woman and woman.
+
+"And, oh, my dear, it gets worse and worse. I've looked at it this
+morning, and it's worse in Wyoming than it was in Colorado. What it 'll be
+before I reach California, I shudder to think."
+
+"It's bound to improve," suggested Mary, with the easy optimism of one who
+was leaving it. "It couldn't be any worse than this, could it?"
+
+The neuter pronoun, it might be well to state, signified the prairie; its
+melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their train
+existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as in certain
+nether circles the head of the house receives his superlative distinction
+in "He."
+
+Again the locomotive shrieked, again the girl mechanically clutched the
+suit-case, as presenting the most difficult item in the problem of
+transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality. The
+train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped curtains
+stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth cradle. The
+porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one whose hopes of
+largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called after her redundant
+farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael was standing on the station
+platform looking helplessly after the train that toiled and puffed, yet
+seemed, in that crystalline atmosphere, still within arm's-reach. She
+watched it till its floating pennant of smoke was nothing but a gray
+feather blowing farther and farther out of sight on the flat prairie.
+
+The town--it would be unkind to mention its name--had made merry the night
+before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just disposed
+of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons, "What's the use
+of temptin' the bank?" "Town," therefore, when Mary Carmichael first made
+its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of the unjust. Those among
+last night's roisterers who had had to make an early start for their camps
+were well into the foot-hills by this time, and would remember with
+exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the dance-hall piano as inspiring music
+when the lonesomeness of the desert menaced and the young blood again
+clamored for its own.
+
+"Town"--it contained in all some two dozen buildings--was very unlovely in
+slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced urchin,
+with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in all the
+"health resorts" of the East did air sweep from the clean hill-country
+with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of abiding youth.
+Surely "Town" was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that hung in the
+unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and called good; an
+omen of the abominations that men would make when they grew blind to the
+beauty of God's world.
+
+Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret,
+wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign of
+a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening messenger,
+suggested to her that a reassuring telegram was only Aunt Adelaide's due.
+Whereupon she began to rap on the door of the office, a scared pianissimo
+which naturally had little effect on the operator, who was at home and
+asleep some three blocks distant. But the West is the place for woman if
+she would be waited upon. No seven-to-one ratio of the sexes has tempered
+the chivalry of her sons of the saddle. A loitering something in a
+sombrero saw rather than heard the rapping, and, at the sight, went in
+quest of the dreaming operator without so much as embarrassing Miss
+Carmichael with an offer of his services. And presently the operator,
+whose official day did not begin for some two hours yet, appeared, much
+dishevelled from running and the cursory nature of his toilet, prepared to
+receive a message of life and death.
+
+The wire to Aunt Adelaide ran:
+
+
+    "Practically at end of journey. Take stage to Lost Trail this
+    morning. Am well. Don't worry about me.
+
+                                                               "MARY."
+
+
+And the telegraph operator, dimly remembering that he had heard Lost Trail
+was a "pizen mean country," and that it was tucked some two hundred miles
+back in the foot-hills, did not find it very hard to forgive the girl, who
+was "practically at end of journey," particularly as the dimple had come
+out of hiding, and he had never been called upon to telegraph the word
+"practically" before. He was a progressive man and liked to extend his
+experiences.
+
+After sending the telegram, Miss Carmichael, quite herself by reason of
+the hill air, felt that she was getting along famously as a traveller, but
+that it was an expensive business, and she was glad to be "practically" at
+the end of her journey. And, drawing from her pocket a square envelope of
+heavy Irish linen, a little worn from much reading, but primarily an
+envelope that bespoke elegance of taste on the part of her correspondent,
+she read:
+
+
+                                                 "LOST TRAIL, WYOMING.
+
+    "My Dear Miss Carmichael,--Pray let me assure you of my
+    gratification that the preliminaries have been so satisfactorily
+    arranged, and that we are to have you with us by the end of June.
+    The children are profiting from the very anticipation of it, and
+    it will be most refreshing to all us isolated ones to be able to
+    welcome an Eastern girl as a member of our family.
+
+    "Although the long journey across the continent is trying,
+    particularly to one who has not made it before, I hope you may not
+    find it utterly fatiguing. Please remember that after leaving the
+    train, it will be necessary to take a stage to Lost Trail. If it
+    is possible, I shall meet you with the buckboard at one of the
+    stage stations; otherwise, keep to the stage route, being careful
+    to change at Dax's Ranch.
+
+    "Unfortunately, the children vary so in their accomplishments that
+    I fear I can make no suggestions as to what you may need to bring
+    with you in the way of text-books. But I think you will find them
+    fairly well grounded.
+
+    "I had a charming letter from Mrs. Kirkland, who said the
+    pleasantest things possible of you. I am glad the wife of our
+    Senator was able conscientiously to commend us.
+
+    "With our most cordial good wishes for a safe journey, believe me,
+    dear Miss Carmichael,
+
+                                                     "Sincerely yours,
+
+                                                      "SARAH YELLETT."
+
+
+In the mean time, "Town" came yawning to breakfast. It was not so prankish
+as it had been the night before, when it accepted the sheepman's
+broad-gauge hospitality and made merry till the sun winked from behind the
+mountains. It made its way to the low, shedlike eating-house with a
+pre-breakfast solemnity bordering on sulkiness. Not a petticoat was in
+sight to offset the spurs and sombreros that filed into breakfast from
+every point in the compass, prepared to eat primitively, joke broadly, and
+quarrel speedily if that sensitive and often inconsistent something they
+called honor should be brushed however lightly.
+
+But the eternal feminine was within, and, discovering it, the temper of
+"Town" was changed; it ate self-consciously, made jokes meet for the ears
+of ladies, and was more interested in the girl in the sailor-hat than it
+was in remembering old feuds or laying the foundations of new.
+
+In its interior aspect, the eating-house conveyed no subtle invitation to
+eat, drink, and be merry. On the contrary, its mission seemed to be that
+of confounding appetite at every turn. A long, shedlike room it was, with
+walls of unpainted pine, still sweating from the axe. Festoons of
+scalloped paper, in conflicting shades, hung from the ceiling, a menace to
+the taller of the guests. On the rough walls some one, either prompted by
+a latent spirit of æstheticism or with an idea of abetting the town
+towards merrymaking--an encouragement it hardly required--had tacked posters
+of shows, mainly representing the tank-and-sawmill school of drama.
+
+Miss Carmichael sat at the extreme end of the long, oilcloth-covered
+table, on which a straggling army of salt and pepper shakers, catsup
+bottles, and divers commercial condiments seemed to pause in a discouraged
+march. A plague of flies was on everything, and the food was a threat to
+the hardiest appetite. One man summed up the steak with, "You got to work
+your jaw so hard to eat it that it ain't fair to the next meal."
+
+His neighbor heaved a sigh. "This here formation, whatever it be"--and he
+turned the meat over for better inspection--"do shore remind me of an
+indestructible doll that an old maid aunt of mine giv' my sister when we
+was kids. That doll sort of challenged me, settin' round oncapable o'
+bein' destroyed, and one day I ups an' has a chaw at her. She war
+ondestructible, all right; 'fore that I concluded my speriments I had left
+a couple o' teeth in her."
+
+"Well, I discyards the steak and draw to a pair of aces," and the first
+man helped himself to a couple of biscuits.
+
+Miss Carmichael knew, by the continual scraping of chairs across the
+gritty floor, that the places at the table must be nearly all taken; and
+while she anticipated, with an utterly unreasonable terror, any further
+invasion of her seclusion at the end of the table, still she could not
+persuade herself to raise her eyes to detect the progress of the enemy,
+even in the interest of the diary she had kept so conscientiously for the
+past three days; which was something of a loss to the diary, as those
+untamed, manly faces were well worth looking at. Reckless they were in
+many instances, and sometimes the lines of hardship were cruelly writ
+across young faces that had not yet lost the down of adolescence, but
+there were humor and endurance and the courage that knows how to make a
+crony of death and get right good sport from the comradeship. Their faults
+were the faults of lusty, red-blooded youth, and their virtues the
+open-handed generosity, the ready sympathy of those uncertain tilters at
+life who ride or fall in the tourney of a new country.
+
+At present, "the yearling," drinking her execrable coffee in an agony of
+embarrassment, weighed heavily on their minds. They would have liked to
+rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for her. But as
+a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her discomfiture
+tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most difficult thing and
+looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael's. With a delicacy of
+perception that the casual observer might not have given them credit for,
+they had refrained from taking seats directly opposite her, or those
+immediately on her right, which, as she occupied the last seat at the
+table, gave her at least a small degree of seclusion.
+
+As one after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a
+beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could
+obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair
+opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a
+hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And the
+cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about "Town," as the case
+might be, would take the hint and the chair, leaving the petticoat
+separated from the sombreros by a table-land of oilcloth and a range of
+four chairs.
+
+But now entered a man who failed to take the hint of the spinning chair.
+In fact, he entered the eating-house with the air of one who has dropped
+in casually to look for a friend and, incidentally, to eat his breakfast.
+He stopped in the doorway, scanned the table with deliberation, and
+started to make his way towards Mary Carmichael with something of a
+swagger. Some one kicked a chair towards him at the head of the table.
+Some one else nearly upset him with one before he reached the middle, and
+the Texan remarked, quite audibly, as he passed:
+
+"The damned razor-back!"
+
+But the man made his way to the end of the table and drew out the chair
+opposite Miss Carmichael with a degree of assurance that precipitated the
+rest of the table into a pretty pother.
+
+Suppose she should countenance his audacity? The fair have been known to
+succumb to the headlong force of a charge, when the persistence of a long
+siege has failed signally. What figures they would cut if she did!--and
+Simpson, of all men! A growing tension had crept into the atmosphere of
+the eating-house; knives and forks played but intermittently, and Mary,
+sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered table, felt intuitively that
+she was the centre of the brewing storm. Oh, why hadn't she been contented
+to stay at home and make over her clothes and share the dwindling fortunes
+of her aunts, instead of coming to this savage place?
+
+"From the look of the yearling's chin, I think he'll get all that's coming
+to him," whispered the man who had nearly upset him with the second chair.
+
+"You're right, pard. If I'm any good at reading brands, she is as
+self-protective as the McKinley bill."
+
+The man Simpson was not a pleasant vis-à-vis. He wore the same picturesque
+ruffianliness of apparel as his fellows, but the resemblance stopped
+there. He lacked their dusky bloom, their clearness of eye, the suppleness
+and easy flow of muscle that is the hall-mark of these frontiersmen. He
+was fat and squat and had not the rich bronzing of wind, sun, and rain.
+His small, black eyes twinkled from his puffy, white face, like raisins in
+a dough-pudding.
+
+He was ogling Mary amiably when the woman who kept the eating-house
+brought him his breakfast. Mrs. Clark was a potent antidote for the
+prevailing spirit of romance, even in this woman-forsaken country. A good
+creature, all limp calico, Roman nose, and sharp elbows, she brought him
+his breakfast with an ill grace that she had not shown to the others. The
+men about the table gave him scant greeting, but the absence of enthusiasm
+didn't embarrass Simpson.
+
+He lounged expansively on the table, regarding Miss Carmichael attentively
+meanwhile; then favored her with the result of his observations, "From the
+East, I take it." And the dumpling face screwed into a smile whose mission
+was pacific.
+
+Every knife and fork in the room suspended action in anxiety to know how
+the "yearling" would take it. Would their chivalry, which strained at a
+gnat, be compelled to swallow such a conspicuous camel as the success of
+Simpson? With the attitude he had taken towards the girl, there had crept
+into the company an imperceptible change; deep-buried impulses sprang to
+the surface. If a scoundrel like Simpson was going to try his luck, why
+shouldn't they? They didn't see a pretty girl once in a blue moon. With
+the advent of the green-eyed monster at the board, each man unconsciously
+became the rival of his neighbor.
+
+But Miss Carmichael merely continued her breakfast, and if she heard the
+amiable deductions of Simpson regarding her, she gave no sign. But a
+rebuff to him was in the nature of an appetizer, a fillip to press the
+acquaintance. He encroached a bit farther on the narrow limits of the
+table and continued, "Nice weather we're having."
+
+Miss Carmichael gave her undivided attention to her coffee. The spurs and
+sombreros, that had not relaxed a muscle in their strained observation of
+the little drama, breathed reflectively. Perhaps it was just as well that
+they had not emulated Simpson in his brazen charge; the "yearling" was not
+to be surprised into talking, that was certain.
+
+"He shore is showing hisself to be a friendly native," commented the man
+who had sacrificed milk-teeth investigating the indestructible doll.
+
+"Seems to me that the system he's playing lacks a heap of science. My
+money's on the yearling." And the man who had "discarded the steak and
+drawn to the biscuits" leaned a little forward that he might better watch
+developments.
+
+Simpson by this time fully realized his error, but failure before all
+these bantering youngsters was a contingency not to be accepted lightly.
+As he phrased it to himself, it was worth "another throw." "Seems kind o'
+lonesome not having any one to talk to while you're eatin', don't it?"
+
+Miss Carmichael's air of perfect composure seemed a trifle out of tune
+with her surroundings; the nice elevation of eyebrow, the slightly
+questioning curl of the lip as she, for the first time apparently, became
+aware of the man opposite, seemed to demand a prim drawing-room rather
+than the atmosphere of the slouching eating-house.
+
+"Well, really, I've hardly had a chance of finding out." And her eyes were
+again on her coffee-cup. And there was joy among the men at table that
+they had not rushed in after the manner of those who have a greater
+courage than the angels.
+
+"No offence meant," deprecated Simpson, with an uneasy glance towards the
+other end of the table, where the men sat with necks craned forward in an
+attitude uncomfortably suggestive of hounds straining at the leash.
+Simpson felt rather than saw that something was afoot among the sombreros.
+There was a crowding together in whispered colloquy, and in a flash some
+half-dozen of them were on their feet as a man. Descending upon Simpson,
+they lifted him, chair and all, to the other end of the table, as far
+removed as possible from Miss Carmichael.
+
+The man who thought Simpson's system lacked science rubbed his hands in
+delight. "She took the trick all right; swept his hand clean off the
+board!"
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+                              The Encounter
+
+
+Simpson, from the seat to which he had been so rapidly transplanted,
+looked about him with blinking anxiety. It was more than probable that the
+boys intended "to have fun with him," though his talking, or rather trying
+to talk, to a girl that sat opposite him at an eating-house table was,
+according to his ethics, plainly none of their business. He knew he wasn't
+popular since he had done for Jim Rodney's sheep, though the crime had
+never been laid at his door, officially. He had his way to make, the same
+as the next one; and, all said and done, the cattle-men were glad to get
+Jim Rodney's sheep off the range, even if they treated him as a felon for
+the part he had played in their extermination.
+
+Thus reasoned Simpson, while he marked with an uneasy eye that the temper
+of the company had grown decidedly prankish with the exit of the girl,
+who, after having caused all the trouble, had, with an irritating quality
+peculiar to her sex, vanished through the kitchen door.
+
+Some three or four of the boys now ran to Simpson's former seat at the
+table and rushed towards him with his half-eaten breakfast, as if the
+errand had been one of life and death. They showered him with mock
+attentions, waiting on him with an exaggerated deference, and the pale,
+fat man, remembering the hideousness of some of their manifestations of a
+sense of humor, breathed hard and felt a falling-off of appetite.
+
+Costigan, the cattle-man, a strapping Irish giant, was clearing his throat
+with ominous sounds that suggested the tuning-up of a bass fiddle.
+
+"Sure, Simpson, me lad, if ye happen to have a matther av fifty dollars,
+'tis mesilf that can tell ye av an illegint invistmint."
+
+Simpson looked up warily, but Costigan's broad countenance did not harbor
+the wraith of a smile. "What kin I git for fifty chips? 'Tain't much,"
+mused the pariah, with the prompt inclination to spend that stamps the
+comparative stranger to ready money.
+
+"Ye can git a parrut, man--a grane parrut--to kape ye coompany while ye're
+aiting--"
+
+Simpson interrupted with an oath.
+
+"Don't be hard on old Simmy; remember he's studied for the ministry! How
+did I savey that Simpson aimed to be a sharp on doctrine?" A cow-puncher
+with a squint addressed the table in general. "I scents the aroma of dogma
+about Simpson in the way he throwed his conversational lariat at the
+yearling. He urbanes at her, and then comes his 'firstly,' it being a
+speculation as to her late grazing-ground, which he concludes to be the
+East. His 'secondly' ain't nothing startling, words familiar to us all
+from our mother's knee--'nice weather'--the congregation ain't visibly
+moved. His 'thirdly' is insinuating. In it he hints that it ain't good for
+man to be alone at meals--"
+
+"'Twas the congregation that added the 'foinelly,' though, before hastily
+leaving be the back door!" and Costigan slapped his thigh.
+
+"The gentleman in question don't seem to be makin' much use of his present
+conversational opportunities. I'm feelin' kinder turned down myself"; and
+the Texan began to look over his six-shooter.
+
+The man with the squint looked up and down the board.
+
+"Gentlemen, I believe the foregoing expresses the sentiment of this
+company, which, while it incloodes many foreign and frequent-warring
+elements, is at present held together by the natchral tie of eating."
+
+Thumping with knife and fork handles, stamping of feet, cries of "Hear!
+hear!" with at least three cow-boy yells, argued well for a resumption of
+last night's festivities. Simpson glowered, but said nothing.
+
+"Seems to me you-all goin' the wrong way 'bout drawin' Mistu' Simpson out.
+He is shy an' has to be played fo' like a trout, an' heah you-all come at
+him like a cattle stampede." The big Texan leaned towards Simpson. "Now
+you-all watch my methods. Mistu' Simpson, seh, what du think of the
+prospects of rain?"
+
+There was a general recommendation from Simpson that the entire company go
+to a locality below the rain-belt.
+
+A boy, plainly "from the East," and looking as if the ink on his
+graduating thesis had scarce had time to dry, was on his feet, swaggering;
+he would not have swapped his newly acquired _camaraderie_ with these
+bronzed Westerners for the Presidency.
+
+"Gentlemen, you have all heard Simpson say it is lonesome having no one to
+talk to during meals. We sympathized with him and offered him a choice of
+subjects. He greets our remarks by a conspicuous silence, varied by
+profanity. This, gentlemen, reflects on us, and is a matter demanding
+public satisfaction. All who feel that their powers as conversationalists
+have been impugned by the silence of Simpson, please say 'Ay.'"
+
+"Ay" was howled, sung, and roared in every note of the gamut.
+
+"If me yoong frind here an me roight"--and Costigan jerked a shoulder
+towards the boy--"will be afther closin' that silf-feeding automatic
+dictionary av his for a moment, I shud be glad to call the attintion av
+the coomp'ny to somethin' in the nature av an ixtinuatin' circoomsthance
+in the case av Simpson."
+
+"Hear! hear!" they shouted. The broad countenance of Costigan beamed with
+joy at what he was about to say. "Gintlemin, the silence av Mr. Simpson is
+jew in all probabilitee to a certain ivint recalled by many here prisint,
+an' more that's absent, an' amicablee settled out av coort--"
+
+Up to this time the unhappy Simpson had shown an almost superhuman
+endurance. Now he bristled--and after looking up and down the board for a
+sympathetic face, and not finding one, he declared, loudly and generally,
+"'Tain't so!"
+
+"Ye may have noticed that frind Simpson do be t'reatened wid lockjaw in
+the societee av min, but in the prisince av a female ye can't count on
+him. Now, talk wid a female is an agreeable, if not a profitable, way av
+passin' the toime, but sure ye niver know where it will ind--as witness
+Simpson. This lady I'm recallin'--'tis a matther av two years ago--followed
+the ancient and honorable profission av biscuit shootin' not far from
+Caspar. Siz Simpson to the lady some such passin' civilitee as,
+'Good-marnin'; plisent weather we're havin'.' Whereupon the lady filt a
+damage to her affictions an' sued him for breach av promise."
+
+"'Twan't that way, at all!" screamed Simpson. "'Sall a lie!"
+
+"Yu ought er said 'Good-evenin'' to the lady, Mistu Simpson; hit make a
+diffunce," drawled the man from Texas, pleasantly.
+
+"But 'twas 'Good-marnin'' Simpson made chyce av," resumed Costigan. "An'
+the lady replied, 'You've broke my heart.' Whereupon Simpson, havin' a
+matther av t'ree thousand dollars to pay for his passin' civilitee,
+learned thot silince was goolden."
+
+They all remembered the incident in question, and thundered applause at
+the reappearance of an old favorite. Without warning, a shadow fell across
+the sunlight-flooded room, and, as one after another of the men glanced up
+from the table, they saw standing in the doorway a man of such malignant
+aspect that his look fell across the company like a menace. The swing of
+their banter slowed suddenly; it was as if the cold of a new-turned grave
+had struck across the June sunshine checking their roughshod fun. None of
+them had the hardihood to joke with a man that stood in the shadow of
+death; and hate and murder looked from the eyes of the man in the doorway
+and looked towards Simpson. One by one they perceived the man of the
+shadow, all but Simpson, eating steak drowned in Worcestershire.
+
+The man in the doorway was tall and lean, and the prison blench upon his
+face was in unpleasant contrast to the ruddy tan of the faces about the
+table. His sombrero was tipped back and the hair hung dank about the pale,
+sweating forehead, suggestive of sickness. But weak health did not imply
+weak purpose; every feature in that hawk-like face was sharp with hatred,
+and in the narrowing eye was vengeance that is sweet.
+
+He stood still; there was in his hatred a something hypnotic that grew
+imperceptibly and imperceptibly communicated itself to the men at table.
+He gloated over the eating fat man as if he had dwelt much in imagination
+on the sight and was in no hurry to curtail his joy at the reality. The
+men began to get restless, shuffle their feet, moisten their lips; only
+the college boy spoke, and then from a wealth of ignorance, knowing
+nothing of the rugged, give-and-take justice of the plains--an eye for an
+eye, a tooth for a tooth, and the law and the courts go hang while a man's
+got a right arm to pull a trigger. Not one in all that company, even the
+cattle-men whose interests were opposed to Rodney's, but felt the justice
+of his errand.
+
+"When did they let him out?" whispered the college boy; and then,
+"Oughtn't we to do something?"
+
+"Yis, me son," whispered Costigan. "We ought to sit still and learn a
+thing or two."
+
+The fat man cleaned his plate with a crust of bread stuck on the point of
+a knife. There was nothing more to eat in the way of substantials, and he
+debated pouring a little more of the sauce on his plate and mopping it
+with a bit of bread still uneaten. Considering the pro and con of this
+extra tid-bit, he glanced up and saw the gaunt man standing in the
+doorway.
+
+Simpson dropped the knife from his shaking hand and started up with a cry
+that died away in a gurgle, an inhuman, nightmare croak. He looked about
+wildly, like a rat in a trap, then backed towards the wall. The men about
+the table got up, then cleared away in a circle, leaving the fat man. It
+was all like a dream to the college boy, who had never seen a thing of the
+kind before and could not realize now that it was happening. Rodney
+advanced, never once relaxing the look in which he seemed to hold his
+enemy as in a vise. Simpson was like a man bewitched. Once, twice, he made
+a grab for his revolver, but his right hand seemed to have lost power to
+heed the bidding of his will. Rodney, now well towards the centre of the
+room, waited, with a suggestion of ceremony, for Simpson to get his
+six-shooter.
+
+It was one of those moments in which time seems to have become petrified.
+The limp-clad proprietress of the eating-house, made curious by the sudden
+silence, looked in from the kitchen. Simpson, his eyes wandering like a
+trapped rat, saw, and called, through teeth that chattered in an ague of
+fear, "Ree--memm--her thth--there's la--dies p--present! For Gawd's sake,
+remember t--there's ladies p--present!"
+
+The pale man looked towards the kitchen, and, seeing the woman, he gave
+Simpson a look in which there was only contempt. "You've hid behind the
+law once, and this time it's petticoats. The open don't seem to have no
+charm for you. But--" He didn't finish, there was no need to. Every one
+knew and understood. He put up his revolver and walked into the street.
+
+The men broke into shouts of laughter, loud and ringing, then doubled up
+and had it out all over again. And their noisy merriment was as clear an
+indication of the suddenly lifted strain, at the averted shooting, as it
+was of their enjoyment of the farce. Simpson, relieved of the fear of
+sudden death, now sought to put a better face on his cowardice. Now that
+his enemy was well out of sight, Simpson handled his revolver with easy
+assurance.
+
+"Put ut up," shouted Costigan, above the general uproar. "'Tis toime to
+fear a revolver in the hands av Simpson whin he's no intinsions av
+shootin'."
+
+Simpson still attempted to harangue the crowd, but his voice was lost in
+the general thigh-slapping and the shouts and roars that showed no signs
+of abating. But when he caught a man by the coat lapel in his efforts to
+secure a hearing, that was another matter, and the man shook him off as if
+his touch were contagion. Simpson, craving mercy on account of petticoats,
+evading a meeting that was "up to him," they were willing to stand as a
+laughing-stock, but Simpson as an equal, grasping the lapels of their
+coats, they would have none of.
+
+He slunk away from them to a corner of the eating-house, feeling the
+stigma of their contempt, yet afraid to go out into the street where his
+enemy might be waiting for him. Much of death and blood and recklessness
+"Town" had seen and condoned, but cowardice was the unforgivable sin. It
+balked the rude justice of these frontiersmen and tampered with their
+code, and Simpson knew that the game had gone against him.
+
+"What was it all about? Were they in earnest, or was it only their way of
+amusing themselves?" inquired Mary Carmichael, who had slipped into Mrs.
+Clark's kitchen after the men at the table had taken things in hand.
+
+"Jim Rodney was in earnest, an' he had reason to be. That man Simpson was
+paid by a cattle outfit--now, mind, I ain't sayin' which--to get Jim
+Rodney's sheep off the range. They had threatened him and cut the throats
+of two hundred of his herd as a warning, but Jim went right on grazin'
+'em, same as he had always been in the habit of doing. Well, I'm told they
+up and makes Simpson an offer to get rid of the sheep. Jim has over five
+thousand, an' it's just before lambing, and them pore ewes, all heavy, is
+being druv' down to Watson's shearing-pens, that Jim always shears at. Jim
+an' two herders and a couple of dawgs--least, this is the way I heard it--is
+drivin' 'em easy, 'cause, as I said before, it's just before lambing. It
+does now seem awful cruel to me to shear just before lambing, but that's
+their way out here.
+
+"Well, nothing happens, and Jim ain't more'n two hours from the pens an'
+he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top of a
+cañon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an' dashes
+into the herd and drives the wether that's leading right over the cliff.
+The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right over the cliff
+like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried to drive 'em
+back, they tell me, an' he an' the dawg were shot at from the clump of
+willows by some one else who was there. Three hundred sheep had gone over
+the cliff before Jim knew what was happening. He rode like mad right
+through the herd to try and head 'em off; but you know what sheep is
+like--they're like lost souls headin' for damnation. Nothing can stop 'em
+when they're once started. And Jim lost every head--started for the
+shearing-pens a rich man--rich for Jim--an' seen everything he had swept
+away before his eyes, his wife an' children made paupers. My son he come
+by and found him. He said that Jim was sittin' huddled up in a heap, his
+knees drawed up under his chin, starin' straight up into the noonday sky,
+same as if he was askin' God how He could be so cruel. His dead dawg, that
+they had shot, was by the side of him. The herder that was with Jim had
+taken the one that was shot into Watson's, so when my son found Jim he was
+alone, sittin' on the edge of the cliff with his dead dawg, an' the sky
+about was black with buzzards; an' Jim he just sat an' stared up at 'em,
+and when my son spoke to him he never answered any more than a dead man.
+He shuck him by the arm, but Jim just sat there, watchin' the sun, the
+buzzards, and the dead sheep."
+
+"Was nothing done to this man Simpson?"
+
+"The cattle outfit that he done the dirty work for swore an alibi for him.
+Jim has been in hard luck ever since. He's been rustlin' cattle right
+along; but Lord, who can blame him? He got into some trouble down to
+Rawlins--shot a man he thought was with Simpson, but who wasn't--and he's
+been in jail ever since. Course now that he's out Simpson's bound to get
+peppered. Glad it didn't happen here, though. 'Twould be a kind of
+unpleasant thing to have connected with a eating-house, don't you think
+so?" she inquired, with the grim philosophy of the country.
+
+The eating-house patrons had gone their several ways, and the quiet of the
+dining-room was oppressive by contrast with its late boisterousness. Mrs.
+Clark, her hands imprisoned in bread-dough, begged Mary to look over the
+screen door and see if anything was happening. "I'm always suspicious when
+it's quiet. I know they're in deviltry of some sort."
+
+Mary tiptoed to the door and peeped over, but the room was deserted, save
+for Simpson, huddled in a corner, biting his finger-nails. "The nasty
+thing!" exploded Mrs. Clark, when she had received the bulletin. "I'd turn
+him out if it wasn't for the notoriety he might bring my place in gettin'
+killed in front of it."
+
+"I dare say I'd better go and see after my trunk; it's still on the
+station platform." Mary wondered what her prim aunts would think of her
+for sitting in Mrs. Clark's kitchen, but it had seemed so much more of a
+refuge than the sordid streets of the hideous little town, with its droves
+of men and never a glimpse of a woman that she had been only too glad to
+avail herself of the invitation of the proprietress to "make herself at
+home till the stage left."
+
+"Well, good luck to you," said Mrs. Clark, wiping her hand only partially
+free from dough and presenting it to Miss Carmichael. She had not inquired
+where the girl was going, nor even hinted to discover where she came from,
+but she gave her the godspeed that the West knows how to give, and the
+girl felt better for it.
+
+At the station, where Mary shortly presented herself, in the interest of
+that old man of the sea of all travellers, luggage, she learned that the
+stage did not leave town for some three-quarters of an hour yet. A young
+man, manipulating many sheets of flimsy, yellow paper covered with large,
+flourishing handwriting, looked up in answer to her inquiries about Lost
+Trail. This young man, whose accent, clothes, and manner proclaimed him
+"from the East," whither, in all probability, he would shortly return if
+he did not mend his ways, disclaimed all knowledge of the place as if it
+were an undesirable acquaintance. But before he could deny it thrice, a
+man who had heard the cabalistic name was making his way towards the desk,
+the pride of the traveller radiating from every feature.
+
+The cosmopolite who knew Lost Trail was the type of man who is born to be
+a Kentucky colonel, and perhaps may have achieved his destiny before
+coming to this "No Man's Land," for reasons into which no one inquired,
+and which were obviously no one's business. They knew him here by the name
+of "Lone Tooth Hank," and he wore what had been, in the days of his
+colonelcy--or its equivalent--a frock-coat, restrained by the lower button,
+and thus establishing a waist-line long after nature had had the last word
+to say on the subject. With this he wore the sombrero of the country, and
+the combination carried a rakish effect that was positively sinister.
+
+The scornful clerk introduced Mary as a young lady inquiring about some
+place in the bad-lands. Off came the sombrero with a sweep, and Lone Tooth
+smiled in a way that accented the dental solitaire to which he owed his
+name. Miss Carmichael, concealing her terror of this casual cavalier,
+inquired if he could tell her the distance to Lost Trail.
+
+"I sho'ly can, and with, consid'able pleasure." The sombrero completed a
+semicircular sweep and arrived in the neighborhood of Mr. Hank's heart in
+significance of his vassalage to the fair sex. He proceeded:
+
+"Lost Trail sutney is right lonesome. A friend of mine gets a little too
+playful fo' the evah-increasin' meetropolitan spirit of this yere camp,
+and tries a little tahget practice on the main bullyvard, an' finds the
+atmospheah onhealthful in consequence. Hearin' that the quiet solitude of
+Lost Trail is what he needs, he lit out with the following circumstance
+thereof happenin'. One day something in his harness giv' way--and he
+recollects seein' a boot sunnin' itself back in the road 'bout a quartah
+of a mile. An' he figgahs he'll borry a strip of leather off the boot to
+mend his harness. Back he goes and finds it has a kind of loaded feelin'.
+So my friend investigates--and I be blanked if there wasn't a foot and leg
+inside of it."
+
+Miss Carmichael had always exercised a super-feminine self-restraint in
+the case of casual mice, and it served her in the present instance.
+Instead of screaming, she said, after the suppression of a gasp or two:
+
+"Thank you so much, but I won't detain you any longer. Your information
+makes Lost Trail even more interesting than I had expected."
+
+Besides, Miss Carmichael had a faint suspicion that this might be a
+preconcerted plan to terrify the "lady tenderfoot," and she prided herself
+on being equal to the situation. The time at her disposal before the stage
+would embark on that unknown sea of prairies she spent in the delectable
+pastime of shopping. The financial and social interests of the town seemed
+to converge in Hugous & Co.'s "trading store," where Miss Carmichael
+invested in an extra package of needles for the mere excitement of being
+one of the shoppers, though her aunt Adelaide had stocked the little
+plaid-silk work-bag to repletion with every variety of needle known to
+woman. She pricked up her ears, meanwhile, at some of the purchases made
+by the cow-boys for their camp-larders--devilled ham, sardines, canned
+tomatoes heading the list as prime favorites. Did these strapping border
+lads live by the fruit of the tin alone? Apparently yes, with the
+sophisticated accompaniment of soda biscuit, to judge by the quantity of
+baking-powder they invested in--literally pounds of it. Men in any other
+condition of life would have died of slow poisoning as the result of it.
+
+There were other customers at Hugous' that morning besides the spurred and
+booted cow-puncher and his despised compeer, the sheep-herder. That
+restless emigrant class, whose origin, as a class, lay in the community of
+its own uncertain schemes of fortune; the West, with her splendid, lavish
+promises, called them from their thriftless farms in the South and their
+gray cabins in New England. They began their journeying towards the land
+of promise long before the Indians had ever seen the shrieking
+"fire-wagon." All day they would toil over the infinitude of prairie, the
+sun that hid nightly behind that maddeningly elusive vanishing-point, the
+horizon, their only guide. But the makeshifts of the wagon life were not
+without charm. They began to wander in quest of they knew not precisely
+what, and from these vague beginnings there had sprung into existence that
+nomadic population that was once such a feature of the far West, but is
+now going the way of the Indians and the cow-boys.
+
+This breathing-space in the long journey had for them the stimulus of a
+holiday-making. They bought their sides of bacon and their pounds of
+coffee as merrily as if they were playing a game of forfeits, the women
+fingering the calico they did not want for the joy of pricing and making
+shoppers' talk.
+
+The scene had a scriptural flavor that not even the blue overalls of the
+men nor the calico gowns of the women could altogether eliminate. Their
+wagons, bulging with household goods and trailing with kitchen utensils
+secured by bits of rope, were drawn up in front of the trading-store. From
+a pump, at some little distance, the pilgrims filled their stone
+water-bottles, for the wise traveller does not trust to the chance springs
+of the desert. Baskets of chickens were strapped to many of the wagons,
+but whether the unhappy fowls were designed to supply fresh eggs and an
+occasional fricassée, or were taken for the pleasure of their company,
+there was no means of determining short of impertinent cross-questioning.
+Sometimes a cow, and invariably a dog, formed one of the family party, and
+an edifying _esprit de corps_ seemed to dwell among them all.
+
+Lone Tooth Hank, in his capacity of man about town, stood on the steps of
+Hugous' watching the preparations; and, seeing Miss Carmichael, approached
+with the air of an old and tried family friend.
+
+"Do I obsehve yu regyarding oweh 'settleahs,' called settleahs 'cause they
+nevah settle?" Hank laughed gently, as one who has made a joke meet for
+ladies. "I've known whole famblies to bohn an' raise right in one of them
+wagons; and tuhn out a mighty fine, endurin' lot, too, this hyeh
+prospectin' round afteh somethin' they wouldn't reco'nize if they met.
+Gits to be a habit same as drink. They couldn't live in a house same as
+humans, not if yu filled their gyarden with nuggets an' their well with
+apple-jack."
+
+Miss Carmichael looked attentive but said nothing. In truth, she was more
+afraid of Hank, his obvious gallantry, and his grewsome tales of boots
+with legs in them than she was of the unknown terrors of Lost Trail.
+
+"I believe that is my stage," she said, as a red conveyance not unlike a
+circus wagon halted at some little distance from the trading-store. And as
+she spoke she saw four of her companions of the breakfast-table heading
+towards the stage, each with a piece of her precious luggage. Mary
+Carmichael was precipitated in a sudden panic; she had heard tales of the
+pranks of these playful Western squires--a little gun-play to induce the
+terrified tenderfoot to put a little more spirit into his Highland fling,
+"by request." She remembered their merrymaking with Simpson at breakfast.
+What did they intend to do with her belongings? And as she remembered the
+little plaid sewing-bag that Aunt Adelaide had made for
+her--surreptitiously drying her tears in the mean time--when she remembered
+that bag and the possibility of its being submitted to ignominy, she could
+have cried or done murder, she wasn't sure which.
+
+"Well, 'pon my wohd, heah ah the boys with yo' baggage. How time du fly!"
+
+"Oh!" she gasped, "what are they going to do with it?"
+
+"Place it on the stage, awaitin' yo' ohdahs." And to her expression of
+infinite relief--"Yo' didn't think any disrepec' would be shown the baggage
+of a lady honorin' this hyeh metropolis with her presence?"
+
+She thanked the knights of the lariat the more warmly for her unjust
+suspicions. They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men who
+have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She climbed
+beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the
+cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous
+spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver cracked his
+whip and turned the horses' heads towards the billowing sea of foot-hills,
+and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to civilization was cut.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+                           Leander And His Lady
+
+
+The only stage passenger besides Miss Carmichael was a fat lady, whose
+entire luggage seemed to consist of luncheon--pasteboard boxes of
+sandwiches, baskets of fruit, napkins of cake. These she began to dispose
+of, before the stage had fairly started, with an industry almost
+automatic, continuing faithful to her post as long as the supplies lasted.
+Then she dozed, sleeping the sleep of the just and those who keep their
+mouths open. From time to time the stage-driver invoked his team in
+cabalistic words, and each time the horses toiled forward with fresh
+energy; but progress became a mockery in that ocean of space, their
+driving seemed as futile as the sport of children who crack a whip and
+play at stage-coach with a couple of chairs; the mountains still mocked in
+the distance.
+
+A flat, unbroken sweep of country, a tangle of straggling sage-brush, a
+glimpse of foot-hills in the distance, was the outlook mile after mile.
+The day grew pitilessly hot. Clouds of alkaline dust swept aimlessly over
+the desert or whirled into spirals till lost in space. From horizon to
+horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as it dipped
+earthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the prospect was always
+the same--the red stage crawling over the wilderness, making no evident
+progress, and always the sun, the sage-brush, and the silence.
+
+It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of
+things at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red roads,
+wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more haughtily
+aloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals. This wilderness was so
+gaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of a bit of landscape
+at home. A young forest of silver beeches growing straight and fine as the
+threads on a loom; and through the gray perspective of their satin-smooth
+trunks you caught the white gleam of a fairy cascade as it tumbled over
+the moss-grown stones to the brook below. It was like a bit from a
+Japanese garden in its delicate artificiality.
+
+And harder to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been the
+old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose of
+senility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of mortgages
+that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces of Aunt
+Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it not
+sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?--it had faith in the name. But
+Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the mortgage had
+not invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing the sangaree of
+its delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer afternoons, invading the
+very dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the old mahogany table, prompting
+Aunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at the worn silver--would it go to
+pay that blood-sucking mortgage next?
+
+But hardest of all to leave had been Archie, best and most promising of
+young brothers--Archie, who had come out ahead of his class in the
+high-school, all ready to go to The University--the University of Virginia
+is always "The University"; but who, it had seemed at a certain dark
+season, must give up this long-cherished hope for lack of the wherewithal.
+Mary, being four years older than her brother and quite twenty, had long
+felt a maternal obligation to administer his affairs. If he did not go to
+the university, like his father and grandfather before him, it would be
+because she had failed in her duty. At this particular phase of the
+domestic problem there had appeared, in a certain churchly periodical, a
+carefully worded advertisement for a governess, and the subsequent
+business of references, salary, and information to be imparted and
+received proving eminently satisfactory, Mary had finally received a
+tearful permission from her aunts to depart for some place in Wyoming, the
+name of which was not even to be found on the map. She was to consider
+herself quite one of the family, and the compensation was to be fifty
+dollars a month. Archie would now be able to go to "The University."
+
+As the day wore on the sage-brush became scarcer and grayer, there were
+fewer flowering cacti, and the great white patches of alkali grew more and
+more frequent. In the distance there was a riot of rainbow tints--violet,
+pink, and pale orange. It seemed inconceivable that such barrenness could
+produce such wealth of color; nothing could have been more beautiful--not
+even the changing colors on a pigeon's neck--than the coppery iridescence,
+shading to cobalt and blue on some of the buttes.
+
+Night had fallen before they made the first break in their journey. The
+low, beetle-browed cabin that faced them in the wilderness carried in its
+rude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur's art--a world of
+desolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney and
+curtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but this
+shortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs, a
+device at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect was
+that of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actual
+rumbling of the stage, felt its confused motion the more strongly in
+imagination, and hardly knew whether she was eating canned tomatoes,
+served uncooked directly from the tin, fried steak, black coffee, and soda
+biscuit, in company with the fat lady, the stage-driver, and the woman who
+kept the road ranch, or if it was all some Alice in Wonderland delusion.
+
+The fat lady had brought her own bedding--an apoplectic roll of
+bedquilts--and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the protests
+of the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation against her
+accommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited by the
+controversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith of a
+traveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she was
+young or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and indicating
+an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss Carmichael to find a
+more comfortable bed "in the East."
+
+In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and
+groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence,
+the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to
+pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss
+Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel
+Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was
+sober enough to handle the ribbons.
+
+Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate
+condition of Mr. Chugg--would he be wholly or partially incapacitated for
+his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of Miss
+Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for her
+solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.
+
+But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Falling
+into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name, place
+of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a son on
+Sweetwater. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every death in
+her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael felt an
+especial interest in an Uncle Henry who "died of a Friday along of eating
+clams." He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a background
+of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic, and other more
+familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But loquacity,
+apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarce
+vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss Carmichael
+remained the object of her persistent attentions.
+
+But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg's
+condition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, "Before I'd trust my precious neck
+to him, I'd get Mr. Dax to shoot me."
+
+Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware
+for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. But
+so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely,
+indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax's husband.
+Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellesponts
+for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy,
+bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get the habitually apologetic
+crooks out of his knees, he would be tall; but so in the habit was he of
+repressing himself in the marital presence that Leander passed for middle
+height. He waited on the table at breakfast with the dumb submissiveness
+of a trained dog that has been taught to give pathetic imitations of human
+servility. But no sooner had his lady left the room than Leander began
+quite brazenly to call attention to himself as a man and an individual,
+coughing, rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat. Mary and the fat
+lady, out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overtures
+equally frank, and Leander ventured finally to inquire if they aimed to
+spend the night at his brother's ranch, it being the next mess-box between
+here and nowhere. They admitted that his brother's ranch was their next
+stopping-place, and Leander went through perfect contortions of apology
+and self-effacement before he could bring himself to ask them to do him a
+favor. It would have taken a very stern order of womankind to refuse
+anything so abject, and they blindly committed themselves to the pledge.
+
+"Tell him I send my compliments," he whispered, and, looking about him
+furtively, he repeated the blood-curdling request.
+
+"Is that all?" sniffed the fat lady, at no pains to conceal her
+disappointment.
+
+"It's enough, if it was known, to raise a war-whoop and stampede this yere
+family." His glance at the door through which his wife had disappeared was
+pregnant with meaning.
+
+"Family troubles?" asked the fat lady, as a gourmet might say "Truffles."
+
+"Looks like it," said Leander, dismally. "Me and Johnnie don't ask for
+nothin' better than to bask in each other's company; but our wives insists
+on keepin' up the manoeuvres of a war-dance the whole endoorin' time."
+
+"So," said the fat lady, as a gourmet might tell of a favorite way of
+preparing truffles, "it's a case of wives?"
+
+"Yes, marm, an' teeth an' nails an' husbands thrown in, when they get a
+sight of each other's petticoats."
+
+"I've known sisters-in-law not to agree," helped on the fat lady, by way
+of an encouraging parallel.
+
+"While I deplores usin' such a comparison to the refinin' and softenin'
+inflooance of wimmen, the meetin' of the Dax ladies by chanst anywheres
+has all the elements of danger and excitement that accompanies an Injun
+uprisin'."
+
+The travellers looked all manner of encouragement.
+
+"You see, my wife's a great housekeeper; her talent lies"--and here Leander
+winked knowingly--"in managin' the help."
+
+"Land's sake!" interrupted the fat lady. "Why don't you kick?"
+
+Leander sighed softly. "I tried to once. As an experiment it partook of
+the trustfulness of a mule kickin' against the stony walls of Badger
+Cañon. But to resoom about the difficulties that split the Dax family.
+Before Johnnie got mislaid in that matrimonial landslide o' his, he herds
+with us. Me an' him does the work of this yere shack, and my wife just
+roominates and gives her accomplishments as manager full play. She never
+put her hand in dirty water any more than Mrs. Cleveland sittin' up in the
+White House parlor. Johnnie done the fancy cookin'; he could make a pie
+like any one's maw, and while you was lost to the world in the delights of
+masticatin' it, he'd have all his greasy dishes washed up and put away--"
+
+"No wonder she hated to lose a man like that," interrupted the fat lady,
+feelingly.
+
+"But he took to pinin' and proclaimin' that he shore was a lone maverick,
+and he just stampeded round lookin' for trouble and bleatin' a song that
+went:
+
+  "'No one to love,
+  None to caress.'
+
+"Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don't bear none of the
+brands of this yere range. She lives back East, and him and her took up
+their claims in each other's affections through a matrimonial paper known
+as _The Heart and Hand_. So they takes their pens in hand and gets through
+a hard spell of courtin' on paper. Love plumb locoes Johnnie. His spellin'
+don't suit him, his handwritin' don't suit him, his natchral letters don't
+suit him. So off he sends to Denver for all the letter-writin' books he
+can buy--_Handbook of Correspondence, The Epistolary Guide, The Ready
+Letter-Writer_, and a stack more. There's no denyin' it, Johnnie certainly
+did sweat hisself over them letters."
+
+"Land's sakes!" said the fat lady.
+
+"Yes, marm; he used to read 'em to me, beginnin' how he had just seized
+five minutes to write to her, when he'd worked the whole day like a mule
+over it. She seemed to like the brand, an' when he sent her the money to
+come out here an' get married, she come as straight as if she had been
+mailed with a postage-stamp."
+
+"The brazen thing!" said the fat lady.
+
+"They stopped here, goin' home to their place. My Lord! warn't she a
+high-flyer! She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail--my wife called it
+a Sikey knot--and it stood out a foot from her head. Some of the boys,
+kinder playful, wanted to throw a hat at it and see if it wouldn't hang,
+but they refrained, out of respect to the feelin's of the groom.
+
+"From the start," continued Leander, "the two Mrs. Daxes just hankered to
+get at each other; an' while I, as a slave to the fair sex"--here he bowed
+to the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael--"hesitates to use such langwidge in
+their presence, the attitood of them two female wimmin shorely reminds me
+of a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin' to chaw each other.
+
+"At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an' foot, and she just read novels
+and played stylish all the time and danced. She was the hardest dancer
+that ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to any old
+war-dancin' chief up to the reservation. No dance she ever heard of was
+too far for her to go to. She just went and danced till broad daylight.
+Many a man would have took to dissipation, in his circumstances, but
+Johnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly. Why, he'd leave his dishes go
+from one day till the next--"
+
+"There's more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next if
+they wasn't looked after." And the wife of his bosom stood in the door
+like a vengeful household goddess. Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearest
+plates.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+                         Judith, The Postmistress
+
+
+The arrival of Chugg's stage with the mail should have been coincident
+with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from "Town,"
+but Chugg was late--a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local lethe
+waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to forget that
+woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence of which the
+sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving Mary Carmichael and
+the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and
+incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.
+
+Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which the
+travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of dictator,
+with absolute sway. Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and staff, executed
+marvellous feats of domestic engineering. The late breakfast-table, swept
+and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United States post-office,
+prepared to transact postal business, and for the time being to become the
+social centre of the surrounding country.
+
+Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped and climbed and dipped again
+over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world without
+end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom, so small
+that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn into a
+horseman.
+
+There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was
+ridden. No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting,
+Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground imperceptibly
+and is a delight to the eye. It needed but the solitary figure to signify
+the infinitude of space in the background. In all that great, wide world
+the only hint of life was the galloping horseman, the only sound the
+rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs. The rider, now close enough for Miss
+Carmichael to distinguish the features, was a thorough dandy of the
+saddle. No slouching garb of exigence and comfort this, but a pretty
+display of doeskin gaiter, varnished boot, and smart riding-breeches. The
+lad--he could not have been, Miss Carmichael thought, more than twenty--was
+tanned a splendid color not unlike the bloomy shading on a nasturtium. And
+when the doughty horseman made out the girl standing in the doorway, he
+smiled with a lack of formality not suggested by the town-cut of his
+trappings. Throwing the reins over the neck of the horse with the real
+Western fling, he slid from the saddle in a trice, and--Mary Carmichael
+experienced something of the gasping horror of a shocked old lady as she
+made out two splendid braids of thick, black hair. Her doughty cavalier
+was no cavalier at all, but a surprisingly handsome young woman.
+
+Miss Carmichael gasped a little even as she extended her hand, for the
+masquerader had pulled off her gauntlet and held out hers as if she was
+conferring the freedom of the wilderness. It was impossible for a homesick
+girl not to respond to such heartiness, though it was with difficulty at
+first that Mary kept her eyes on the girl's face. Curiosity, agreeably
+piqued, urged her to take another glimpse of the riding clothes that this
+young woman wore with such supreme unconcern.
+
+Now, "in the East" Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting
+black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the
+pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day at
+dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by not
+betraying this, the attempt was rather a failure.
+
+"Are you surprised that I did not wait for an introduction?" the girl in
+the riding clothes asked, noticing Mary's evident uneasiness; "but you
+don't know how good it is to see a girl. I'm so tired of spurs and
+sombreros and cattle and dust and distance, and there's nothing else
+here."
+
+"Where I come from it's just the other way--too many petticoats and
+hat-pins."
+
+The horseman who was no horseman dropped Miss Carmichael's hand and went
+into the house. Mary wondered if she ought to have been more cordial.
+
+From the back door came Leander, with dishcloths, which he began to hang
+on the line in a dumb, driven sort of way.
+
+"Who is she?" asked Mary.
+
+"Her?" he interrogated, jerking his head in the direction of the house.
+"The postmistress, Judith Rodney; yes, that's her name." He dropped his
+voice in the manner of one imparting momentous things. "She never wears a
+skirt ridin', any more than a man."
+
+Mary felt that she was tempting Leander into the paths of gossip,
+undoubtedly his besetting sin, but she could not resist the temptation to
+linger. He had disposed of his last dish-cloth, and he withdrew the
+remaining clothes-pin from his mouth in a way that was pathetically
+feminine.
+
+"She keeps the post-office here, since Mrs. Dax lost the job, and boards
+with us; p'r'aps it's because she is my wife's successor in office, or
+p'a'ps it's jest the natural grudge that wimmin seem to harbor agin each
+other, I dunno, but they don't sandwich none."
+
+Leander having disposed of his last dish-towel, squinted at it through his
+half-closed eyes, like an artist "sighting" a landscape, saw apparently
+that it was in drawing, and next brought his vision to bear on the back
+premises of his own dwelling, where he saw there was no wifely figure in
+evidence.
+
+"Sh-sh-h!" he said, creeping towards Mary, his dull face transfigured with
+the consciousness that he had news to tell. "Sh-sh--her brother's a
+rustler. If 'twan't for her"--Leander went through the grewsome pantomime
+of tying an imaginary rope round his neck and throwing it over the limb of
+an imaginary tree. "They're goin' to get him for shore this time, soon as
+he comes out of jail; but would you guess it from her bluff?"
+
+There was no mistaking the fate of a rustler after Mr. Dax's grisly
+demonstration, but of the quality of his calling Mary was as ignorant as
+before.
+
+"And why should they do that?" she inquired, with tenderfoot simplicity.
+
+"Stealin' cattle ain't good for the health hereabouts," said Leander, as
+one who spoke with authority. "It's apt to bring on throat trouble."
+
+But Mary did not find Leander's joke amusing. She had suddenly remembered
+the pale, gaunt man who had walked into the eating-house the previous
+morning and walked out again, his errand turned into farce-comedy by the
+cowardice of an unworthy antagonist. The pale man's grievance had had to
+do with sheep and cattle. His name had been Rodney, too. She understood
+now. He was Judith Rodney's brother, and he was in danger of being hanged.
+Mary Carmichael felt first the admiration of a girl, then the pity of a
+woman, for the brave young creature who so stoutly carried so unspeakable
+a burden. But she could not speak of her new knowledge to Leander.
+
+She glanced towards this childlike person and saw from his stealthy manner
+that he had more to impart. He walked towards the kitchen door, saw no
+one, and came back to Mary.
+
+"There ain't a man in this Gawd-forsaken country wouldn't lope at the
+chance to die for her--but the women!" Leander's pantomimic indication of
+absolute feminine antagonism was conclusive.
+
+"The wimmin treats her scabby--just scabby. Don't you go to thinkin' she
+ain't a good girl on that account"; and something like an attitude of
+chivalrous protection straightened the apologetic crook in his craven
+outline.
+
+"She's good, just good, and when a woman's that there's no use in sayin'
+it any more fanciful. As I says to my wife, every time she give me a
+chance, 'If Judy wasn't a good girl these boys about here would just
+natchrally become extinct shootin' each other upon account of her.' But
+she don't favor none enough to cause trouble."
+
+"Are the women jealous of her?"
+
+"It's her independence that riles 'em. They take on awful about her ridin'
+in pants, an' it certainly is a heap more modest than ridin' straddle in a
+hitched up caliker skirt, same as some of them do."
+
+"And do all the women out here ride astride?" Mary gasped.
+
+"A good many does, when you ain't watchin'; horses in these parts ain't
+broke for no such lopsided foolishness as side-saddles. But you see she
+does it becomin', and that's where the grudge comes in. You can't stir
+about these foot-hills without coming across a woman, like as not, holdin'
+on to a posse of kids, and ridin' clothes-pin fashion in a looped-up
+skirt; when she sees you comin' she'll p'r'aps upset a kid or two
+assoomin' a decorous attitood. That's feemi_nine_, and as such is approved
+by the ladies, but"--and here Leander put his head on one side and gave a
+grotesque impression of outraged decorum--"pants is considered unwomanly."
+
+"Leander! Leander!" came in accusing accents from the kitchen.
+
+"Run!" gasped Mrs. Dax's handmaiden; "don't let her catch us chinnin'."
+
+Mary Carmichael ran round one side of the house as she was bidden, but,
+like Lot's wife, could not resist the temptation of looking back. Leander,
+with incredible rapidity, grabbed two clothes-pins off the line, clutched
+a dish-towel, shook it. "Comin'! comin'!" he called, as he went through
+the farce of rehanging it.
+
+The lonesomeness of plain and foot-hill, the utter lack of the human
+element that gives to this country its character of penetrating
+desolation, had been changed while Mary Carmichael forgathered with
+Leander by the clothes-line. From the four quarters of the compass, men in
+sombreros, flannel shirts, and all manner of strange habiliments came
+galloping over the roads as if their horses were as keen on reaching Dax's
+as their riders. They came towards the house at full tilt, their horses
+stretching flat with ears laid back viciously, and Mary, who was unused to
+the tricks of cow-ponies, expected to see them ride through the front
+door, merely by way of demonstrating their sense of humor. Not so; the
+little pintos, buckskins, bays, and chestnuts dashed to the door and
+stopped short in a full gallop; as a bit of staccato equestrianism it was
+superb.
+
+And then the wherefore of all this dashing horsemanship, this curveting,
+prancing, galloping revival of knightly tourney effects was
+apparent--Judith Rodney had opened post-office. She had changed her riding
+clothes; or, rather, that portion of them to which the ladies took
+exception was now concealed by a long, black skirt. Her wonderful braids
+of black hair had been twisted high on her head. She was well worth a trip
+across the alkali wastes to see. The room was packed with men. One
+unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some
+crowd-collecting casualty had happened. Above the continual clinking of
+spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these
+United States are capable. There is no Western dialect, properly speaking.
+Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or Minnesota, as
+the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give an essential
+picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely local--the cattle
+and sheep industries, prospecting, the Indians, poker, faro, the
+dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable embellishment.
+
+Judith managed them all--cow-punchers, sheep-herders, prospectors,
+freighters--with an impersonal skill that suggested a little solitary
+exercise in the bowling-alley. The ten-pins took their tumbles in good
+part--no one could congratulate himself on escaping the levelling ball--and
+where there's a universal lack of luck, doubtless also there will be found
+a sort of grim fellowship.
+
+That they were all more or less in love with her there could be no doubt.
+As a matter of fact, Judith Rodney did not depend on the scarcity of women
+in the desert for her pre-eminence in the interests of this hot-headed
+group. Her personality--and through no conscious effort of hers--would have
+been pre-eminent anywhere. As it was, in this woman-forsaken wilderness
+she might have stirred up a modern edition of the Trojan war at any
+moment. That she did not, despite the lurking suggestion of temptation
+written all over her, brought back the words of Leander: "If Judy wasn't a
+good girl, these boys would just nacherally become extinct shooting each
+other upon account of her."
+
+And yet what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched
+Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her
+interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there might
+lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint and devil.
+One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or provoking a bar-room
+brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the vividness of color, the
+suggestion of endurance and radiating health in every line, were
+comparable to the great primeval forces about her. She was cast to be the
+mother of men of brawn and muscle, who would make this vast, unclaimed
+wilderness subject to them.
+
+At present neither pole of her character, as it had been hastily
+estimated, was even remotely suggested. The atmosphere in the post-office
+was, considering the potential violence of its visitors, singularly calm.
+And Judith, feeding these wild border lads on scraps of chaff and banter,
+and retaining their absolute loyalty, was a sight worth seeing. She had
+the alertness of a lion-tamer locked in a cage with the lords of the
+jungle; the rashly confident she humbled, the meek she exalted, and all
+with such genuine good-fellowship, such an absence of coquetry in the
+genial game of give and take, that one ceased to wonder at even the
+devotion of Leander. And since they were to her, on her own confession,
+but "spurs and sombreros," one wondered at the elaboration of the comedy,
+the endless wire-pulling in the manipulation of these most picturesque
+marionettes--until one remembered the outlaw brother and felt that what she
+did she did for him.
+
+"You right shore there ain't a letter for me, Miss Judith. My creditors
+are pretty faithful 'bout bearing me in mind." It was the third time that
+the big, shambling Texan who had been one of the company at Mrs. Clark's
+eating-house had inquired for mail, and seemed so embarrassed by his own
+bulk that he moved cautiously, as if he might step on a fellow-creature
+and maim him. Each time he had asked for a letter he took his place at the
+end of the waiting-line and patiently bided his time for the chance of an
+extra word with the postmistress.
+
+"They've begun to lose hope, Texas."
+
+She shuffled the letters impartially, as a goddess dispensing fate, and
+barely glanced at the man who had ridden a hundred and fifty miles across
+sand and cactus to see her.
+
+"That's the difference between them and me." There was a grim finality in
+his tone.
+
+"What, you're going to take your place at the end of that line again! I'll
+try and find you a circular."
+
+He tried to look at her angrily, but she smiled at him with such
+good-fellowship that he went off singing significantly that universal
+anthem of the cow-puncher the West over:
+
+  "Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,
+    In a narrow grave just six by three,
+    Where the wild coyotes will howl o'er me.
+  Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie."
+
+"Ain't there a love letter for me?" The young man who inquired seemed to
+belong to a different race from these bronzed squires of the saddle. He
+suggested over-crowded excursion boats on Sunday afternoons in swarming
+Eastern cities. He buttonholed every one and explained his presence in the
+West on the score of his health, as though leaving his native asphalt were
+a thing that demanded apology.
+
+"Yes," answered the postmistress, with a real motherly note, "here is one
+from Hugous & Co."
+
+A roar went up at this, and the blushing tenderfoot pocketed his third
+bill for the most theatrical style of Mexican sombrero; it had a brass
+snake coiled round the crown for a hat-band, and a cow-puncher in good and
+regular standing would have preferred going bareheaded to wearing it.
+
+"She seems to be pressing her suit, son; you better name the day," one of
+the loungers suggested.
+
+"The blamed thing ain't worth twenty-five dollars," the young man from the
+East declared. A conspicuous silence followed. It seemed to irritate the
+owner of the hat that no one would defend it. "It ain't worth it," he
+repeated.
+
+"I think you allowed you was out here for your health?" the big Texan, who
+had returned from the corral, inquired.
+
+"Betcher life," swaggered the man with the hat, "N'York's good enough for
+me."
+
+"But"--and the Texan smiled sweetly--"the man who sold you the hat ain't out
+here for his."
+
+Judith hid her head and stamped letters. The boys were suspiciously quiet,
+then some one began to chant:
+
+  "The devil examined the desert well,
+  And made up his mind 'twas too dry for hell;
+  He put up the prices his pockets to swell,
+  And called it a--heal-th resort."
+
+The postmistress waited for the last note of the chorus to die away, and
+read from a package she held in her hand--"'Mrs. Henry Lee, Deer Lodge,
+Wyoming.' Well, Henry, here's a wedding-present, I guess. And my
+congratulations, though you've hardly treated us well in never saying a
+word."
+
+The unfortunate Henry, who hadn't even a sweetheart, and who was noted as
+the shyest man in the "Goose Creek Outfit," had to submit to the mock
+congratulations of every man in the room and promise to set up the drinks
+later.
+
+"I never felt we'd keep you long, son; them golden curls seldom gets a
+chance to ripen singly."
+
+"Shoshone squaw, did you say she was, Henry? They ain't much for looks,
+but there's a heep of wear to 'em."
+
+"Oh, go on, now; you fellows know I ain't married." And the boy handled
+the package with a sort of dumb wonder, as if the superscription were
+indisputable evidence of a wife's existence.
+
+"Open it, Henry; you shore don't harbor sentiments of curiosity regarding
+the post-office dealings of your lady."
+
+"Now, old man, this here may be grounds for divorce."
+
+"See what the other fellow's sending your wife."
+
+Henry, badgered, jostled, the target of many a homely witticism, finally
+opened the package, which proved to be a sample bottle of baby food. At
+sight of it they howled like Apaches, and Henry was again forced to
+receive their congratulations. Judith, who had been an interested
+on-looker without joining in the merriment, now detected in the tenor of
+their humor a tendency towards breadth. In an instant her manner was
+official; rapping the table with her mailing-stamp, she announced:
+
+"Boys, this post-office closes in ten minutes, if you want to buy any
+stamps."
+
+The silence following this statement on the part of the postmistress was
+instantaneous. Henry took his mirth-provoking package and went his way;
+some of the more hilariously inclined followed him. The remainder confined
+themselves absolutely to business, scrawling postal-cards or reading their
+mail. The pounce of the official stamp on the letters, as the postmistress
+checked them off for the mail-bag, was the only sound in the hot
+stillness.
+
+A heavily built man, older than those who had been keeping the post-office
+lively, now took advantage of the lull to approach Judith. He had a
+twinkling face, all circles and pouches, but it grew graver as he spoke to
+the postmistress. He was Major Atkins, formerly a famous cavalry officer,
+but since his retirement a cattle-man whose herds grazed to the pan-handle
+of Texas. As he took his mail, talking meantime of politics, of the heat,
+of the lack of water, in the loud voice for which he was famous, he
+managed, with clumsy diplomacy, to interject a word or two for her own ear
+alone.
+
+"Jim's out," he conveyed to her, in a successfully muffled tone. "He's
+out, and they're after him, hot. Get him out of the State, Judy--get him
+out, _quick_. He tried to kill Simpson at Mrs. Clark's, in town,
+yesterday. The little Eastern girl that's here will tell you." Then the
+major was gone before Judith could perfectly realize the significance of
+what he had told her.
+
+She threw back her head and the pulse in her throat beat. Like a wild
+forest thing, at the first warning sound, she considered: Was it time for
+flight?--or was the warning but the crackling of a twig? Major Atkins was a
+cattle-man: her brother hated all cattle-men. How disinterested had been
+the major's warning! He had always been her friend. Mrs. Atkins had been
+one of the ladies at the post who had helped to send her to school to the
+nuns at Santa Fé. She despised herself for doubting; yet these were
+troublous times, and all was fair between sheep and cattle-men. Major
+Atkins had spoken of the Eastern girl; then that pretty, little,
+curly-haired creature, whom Judith had found standing in the sunshine, had
+seen Jim--had heard him threaten to kill. Should she ask her about
+it--consult her? Judith's training was not one to impel her to give her
+confidence to strangers, still she had liked the little Eastern girl.
+
+These were the perplexities that beset her, sweeping her thoughts hither
+and thither, as sea-weed is swept by the wash of the waves. She strove to
+collect her faculties. How should she rid the house of her cavaliers? She
+had regularly to refuse some half-dozen of them each day that she kept
+post-office.
+
+In a few minutes more the group in the post-office began to disperse under
+the skilful manipulation of the postmistress. To some she sold stamps with
+an air of "God speed you," and they were soon but dwindling specks on the
+horizon. To others she implied such friendly farewells that there was
+nothing to do but betake themselves to their saddles. Others had
+compromised with the saloon opposite, and their roaring mirth came in
+snatches of song and shouts of laughter. She fastened up the little pile
+of letters that had remained uncalled for with what seemed a deliberate
+slowness. Each time any one entered the room she looked up--then the hope
+died hard in her face. Leander came in with catlike tread and removed the
+pigeon-holes from the table. The post-office was closed. Family life had
+been resumed at the Daxes'.
+
+Judith left the room and stood in the blinding sunlight, basking in it as
+if she were cold. The mercury must have stood close to a hundred, and she
+was hatless. There was no trace of her ebullient spirits of the morning.
+Her head was sunk on her breast and she held her hands with locked fingers
+behind her. It was hot, hot as the breaths of a thousand belching
+furnaces. A white, burning glare had spread itself from horizon to
+horizon, and the earth wrinkled and cracked beneath it. From every corner
+of this parched wilderness came an ominous whirring, like the last
+wheezing gasp of an alarm-clock before striking the hour. This menacing
+orchestration was nothing more or less than millions of grasshoppers
+rasping legs and wings together in hoarse appreciation of the heat and
+glare; but it had a sound that boded evil. Again and again she turned
+towards the yellow road as it dipped over the hills; but there was never a
+glimpse of a horseman from that direction.
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+                          The Trail Of Sentiment
+
+
+Within the house the travellers had disposed themselves in a repressed and
+melancholy circle that suggested the suspended animation of a funeral
+gathering. The fat lady had turned back her skirt to save her travelling
+dress. The stage was late, and there was no good and sufficient reason for
+wearing it out. A similar consideration of economy led her to flirt off
+flies with her second best pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Dax presided over the
+gathering with awful severity. Every one truckled to her shamefully,
+receiving her lightest remarks as if they were to be inscribed on tablets
+of bronze. Leander, his eyes bright with excitement at being received in
+the family circle on an equal footing, balanced perilously on the edge of
+his chair, anticipating dismissal.
+
+"Chugg's never ben so late as this," said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself
+furiously. She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the
+nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending
+forth flame. Leander, the fat lady, and Miss Carmichael meekly murmured
+assent and condemnation.
+
+"And there ain't a sign of him," said Mrs. Dax, returning to the house
+after straining the landscape through her all-observant eye, and not
+detecting him in any of the remote pin-pricks on the horizon, in which
+these plainsfolk invariably decipher a herd of antelope, an elk or two, or
+a horseman.
+
+"Bet he had a woman in the stage and upset it with her," said Leander, in
+the animated manner of a poor relation currying favor with a bit of news.
+
+Mrs. Dax regarded him severely for a moment, then conspicuously addressed
+her next remark to the ladies. "Bet he had a woman in the stage, the old
+scoundrel!"
+
+"Wonder who she was?" said Leander, with the sparkling triumph of a poor
+relation whose surmise had been accepted. But Mrs. Dax had evidently
+decided that Leander had gone far enough.
+
+"Was you expectin' any of your lady friends by Chugg's stage that you are
+so frettin' anxious?" she inquired, and the poor relation collapsed
+miserably.
+
+"You've heard about Chugg's goin' on since 'Mountain Pink' jilted him?"
+inquired Mrs. Dax of the fat lady, as the only one of the party who might
+have kept abreast with the social chronicles of the neighborhood.
+
+"My land, yes," responded the fat lady, proud to be regarded as socially
+cognizant. "M' son says he's plumb locoed about it--didn't want me to
+travel by his stage. But I said he dassent upset a woman of my age--he just
+nacherally dassent!"
+
+Miss Carmichael, by dint of patient inquiry, finally got the story which
+was popularly supposed to account for the misdemeanors of the
+stage-driver, including his present delinquency that was delaying them on
+their journey.
+
+It appeared that Lemuel Chugg, then writhing in the coils of perverse
+romance, was among the last of those famous old stage-drivers whose
+talents combined skill at handling the ribbons with the diplomacy
+necessary to treat with a masked envoy on the road. His luck in these
+encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due to
+Chugg's ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, "while he had been
+shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of fight in the
+old man yet."
+
+Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the
+manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart,
+and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so
+full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance
+of the "before treatment" view of a chiropodist's sign. This darling of
+his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg's earliest manhood. It had
+been his only love--till he met Mountain Pink.
+
+Mountain Pink's husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg's
+stage-route. She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had
+not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali water.
+Furthermore, she could "bring about a dried-apple pie" to make a man
+forget the cooking of his mother. Great was the havoc wrought by Mountain
+Pink's pies and complexion, but she followed the decorous precedent of
+Cæsar's wife, and, like her pastry, remained above suspicion.
+
+Her husband, whose name was Jim Bosky, seemed, to the self-impanelled jury
+that spent its time sitting on the case, singularly insensible to his own
+advantages. Not only did he fail to take a proper pride in her beauty, but
+there were dark hints abroad that he had never tasted one of her pies.
+When delicately questioned on this point, at that stage of liquid
+refreshment that makes these little personalities not impossible, Bosky
+had grimly quoted the dearth of shoes among shoe-makers' children.
+
+Whatever were the facts of the case, Mountain Pink got the sympathy that
+might have been expected in a section of the country where the ratio of
+the sexes is fifty to one. Chugg, eating her pies regularly once a week on
+his stage-route, said nothing, but he presented her with a red plush
+photograph album with oxidized silver clasps, and by this first reckless
+expenditure of money in the life of Chugg, Natrona, Johnson, Converse, and
+Sweetwater counties knew that Cupid had at last found a vulnerable spot in
+the tough and weather-tanned hide of the old stage-driver.
+
+Nor did Cupid stop here with his pranks. Having inoculated the
+stage-driver with the virus of romance, madness began to work in the veins
+of Chugg. He presented Mountain Pink with the gray woollen stocking--not
+extracting a single coin--and urged her to get a divorce from the clodlike
+man who had never appreciated her and marry him.
+
+Mountain Pink coyly took the stocking so generously given for the divorce
+and subsequent trousseau, and Chugg continued to drive his stage with an
+Apollo-like abandon, whistling love-songs the while.
+
+Coincident with Mountain Pink's disappearance Dakotaward, in the interests
+of freedom, went also one Bob Catlin, a mule-wrangler. Bosky, with
+conspicuous pessimism, hoped for the worst from the beginning, and as time
+went on and nothing was heard of either of the wanderers, some of Mountain
+Pink's most loyal adherents confessed it looked "romancy." But crusty old
+Chugg remained true to his ideal. "She'll write when she gets good and
+ready," and then concluded, loyally, "Maybe she can't write, nohow," and
+nothing could shake his faith.
+
+When Mountain Pink and the mule-wrangler returned as bride and groom and
+set up housekeeping on the remainder of Chugg's stocking, and on his
+stage-route, too, so that he had to drive right past the honeymoon cottage
+every time he completed the circuit, they lost caste in Carbon County.
+Chugg never spoke of the faithlessness of Mountain Pink. His bitterness
+found vent in tipping over the stage when his passengers were confined to
+members of the former Mrs. Bosky's sex, and, as Leander said, "the flask
+in his innerds held more." And these were the only traces of tragedy in
+the life of Lemuel Chugg, stage-driver.
+
+Judith had continued her unquiet pacing in the blinding glare while the
+group within doors, somnolent from the heat and the incessant shrilling of
+the locusts, droningly discussed the faithlessness of Mountain Pink,
+dozed, and took up the thread of the romance. Each time she turned Judith
+would stop and scan the yellow road, shading her eyes with her hand, and
+each time she had turned away and resumed her walk. Mary, who gave the
+postmistress no unstinted share of admiration for the courage with which
+she faced her difficulties, and who had been seeking an opportunity to
+signify her friendship, and now that she saw the last of the gallants
+depart, inquired of Judith if she might join her.
+
+They walked without speaking for several minutes, enjoying a sense of
+comradeship hardly in keeping with the brevity of their acquaintance; a
+freedom from restraint spared them the necessity of exchanging small-talk,
+that frequently irritating toll exacted as tribute to possible friendship.
+
+The desert lay white and palpitating beneath the noonday glare, and from
+the outermost rim of desolation came dancing "dust-devils" whirling and
+gliding through the mazes of their eerie dance. "I think sometimes," said
+Judith, "that they are the ghosts of those who have died of thirst in the
+desert."
+
+Mary shuddered imperceptibly. "How do you stand it with never a glimpse of
+the sea?"
+
+"You'll love it, or hate it; the desert is too jealous for half measures.
+As for the sea"--Judith shrugged her fine shoulders--"from all I've heard of
+it, it must be very wet."
+
+Each felt a reticence about broaching the subject uppermost in her
+thoughts--Judith from the instinctive tendency towards secretiveness that
+was part of the heritage of her Indian blood; Mary because the subject so
+closely concerned this girl for whom she felt such genuine admiration.
+
+Judith finally brought up the matter with an abruptness that scarce
+concealed her anxiety.
+
+"You saw my brother yesterday at Mrs. Clark's eating-house; will you be
+good enough to tell me just what happened?"
+
+Mary related the incident in detail, Judith cross-examining her minutely
+as to the temper of the men at table towards Jim. Did she know if any
+cattle-men were present? Did she hear where her brother had gone?
+
+Mary had heard nothing further after he had left the eating-house; the
+only one she had talked to had been Mrs. Clark, whose sympathy had been
+entirely with Jim. Judith thanked her, but in reality she knew no more now
+than she had heard from Major Atkins.
+
+Judith now stopped in their walk and stood facing the road as it rolled
+over the foot-hills--a skein of yellow silk glimmering in the sun. Then
+Mary saw that the object spinning across it in the distance, hardly bigger
+than a doll's carriage, was the long-delayed stage. She spoke to the
+postmistress, but apparently she did not hear--Judith was watching the
+nearing stage as if it might bring some message of life and death. She
+stood still, and the drooping lines of her figure straightened, every
+fibre of her beauty kindled. She was like a flame, paling the sunlight.
+
+And presently was heard the uncouth music of sixteen iron-shod hoofs
+beating hard from the earth rhythmic notes which presently grew hollow and
+sonorous as they came rattling over the wooden bridge that spanned the
+creek.
+
+"Chugg!" exclaimed Leander, rushing to the door in a tumult. There was
+something crucial in the arrival of the delayed stage-driver. His
+delinquencies had deflected the course of the travellers, left them
+stranded in a remote corner of the wilderness; but now they should again
+resume the thread of things; Chugg's coming was an event.
+
+"'Tain't Chugg, by God!" said Leander, impelled to violent language by the
+unexpected.
+
+"It's Peter Hamilton!" exclaimed Mrs. Dax.
+
+"Land's sakes, the New-Yorker!" said the fat lady. Only Judith said
+nothing.
+
+Mr. Hamilton held the ribbons of that battered prairie-stage as if he had
+been driving past the judges' bench at the Horse Show. Furthermore, he
+wore blue overalls, a flannel shirt, and a sombrero, which sartorial
+inventory, while it highly became the slim young giant, added an extra
+comedy touch to his rôle of whip. He was as dusty as a miller;
+close-cropped, curly head, features, and clothes were covered with a fine
+alkali powdering; but he carried his youth as a banner streaming in the
+blue. And he swung from the stage with the easy flow of muscle that is the
+reward of those who live in the saddle and make a fine art of throwing the
+lariat.
+
+They greeted him heartily, all but Judith, who did not trust herself to
+speak to him before the prying eyes of Mrs. Dax, and escaped to the house.
+Chugg's latest excursion into oblivion had resulted in a fall from the
+box. He was not badly hurt, and recuperation was largely a matter of
+"sleeping it off," concluded Peter Hamilton's bulletin of the condition of
+the stage-driver. So the travellers were still marooned at Dax's, and the
+prospect of continuing their journey was as vague as ever.
+
+"Last I heard of you," said Mrs. Dax to Hamilton, with a sort of stone-age
+playfulness, "you was punching cows over to the Bitter Root."
+
+"That's true, Mrs. Dax"--he gave her his most winning smile--"but I could
+not stay away from you long."
+
+Leander grimaced and rubbed his hands in an ecstasy of delight at finding
+a man who had the temerity to bandy words with Mrs. Dax.
+
+"Hum-m-m-ph!" she whinnied, with equine coquetry. "Guess it was rustlers
+brought you back as much as me."
+
+Judith, who had entered the room in time to hear Mrs. Dax's last remark,
+greeted him casually, but her eyes, as they met his, were full of
+questioning fear. Had he come from the Bitter Root range to hunt down her
+brother? The thought was intolerable. Yet, when he had bade her good-bye
+some three weeks ago, he had told her that he did not expect to return
+much before the fall "round-up." She had heard, a day or two before, that
+he was again in the Wind River country, and her morning vigil beneath the
+glare of the desert sun had been for him.
+
+Mrs. Dax regarded them with the mercilessness of a death-watch; she
+remembered the time when Hamilton's excuses for his frequent presence at
+the post-office had been more voluble than logical. But now he no longer
+came, and Judith, for all her deliberate flow of spirits, did not quite
+convince the watchful eyes of Leander's lady--the postmistress was a trifle
+too cheerful.
+
+"Mrs. Dax," pleaded Peter, boyishly, "I'm perishing for a cup of coffee,
+and I've got to get back to my outfit before dark."
+
+"Oh, go on with you," whinnied the gorgon; but she left the room to make
+the coffee.
+
+Judith's eyes sought his. "Why don't you and Leander form a coalition for
+the overthrow of the enemy?" His voice had dropped a tone lower than in
+his parley with Mrs. Dax; it might have implied special devotion, or it
+might have implied but the passing tribute to a beautiful woman in a
+country where women were few--the generic admiration of all men for all
+women, ephemerally specialized by place and circumstance.
+
+But Judith, harassed at every turn, heart-sick with anxiety, had
+anticipated in Peter's coming, if not a solution of her troubles, at least
+some evidence of sustaining sympathy, and was in no mood for resuscitating
+the perennial pleasantries anent Leander and his masterful lady.
+
+The shrilling of the locusts emphasized their silence. She spoke to him
+casually of his change of plan, but he turned the subject, and Judith let
+the matter drop. She was too simple a woman to stoop to oblique measures
+for the gaining of her own ends. If he was here to hunt down her brother,
+if he was here to see the Eastern woman at the Wetmore ranch--well, "life
+was life," to be taken or left. Thus spoke the fatalism that was the
+heritage of her Indian blood.
+
+The thought of Miss Colebrooke at Wetmore's reminded her of a letter for
+Peter that had been brought that morning by one of the Wetmore cow-boys.
+
+"I forgot--there's a letter for you." She went to the pigeon-holes on the
+wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and brought him a
+square, blue linen envelope--distinctly a lady's letter.
+
+Peter took it with rather a forced air of magnanimity, as if in neglecting
+to present it to him sooner she drew heavily on his reserve of patience.
+Tearing open the envelope, he read it voraciously, read it to the
+exclusion of his surroundings, the world at large, and--Judith. He strode
+up and down the floor two or three times, and called to Leander, who was
+passing:
+
+"Dax, I must have that gray mare of yours right away." He went in the
+direction of the stable, without a second glance at the postmistress, and
+presently they saw him galloping off in the opposite direction from which
+he had come. Mrs. Dax came in with a tray on which were a pot of coffee
+and sundry substantial delicacies.
+
+"Where's he gone?" she demanded, putting the tray down so hard that the
+coffee slopped.
+
+"I dunno," said Leander. "He said he'd got to have the gray mare, saddled
+her hisself, and rode off like hell."
+
+Mrs. Dax looked at them all savagely for the explanation that they could
+not give. In sending her out to make coffee she felt that Peter, whom she
+regarded in the light of a weakness, had taken advantage of her affections
+to dupe her in regard to his plans.
+
+"Take them things back to the kitchen," she commanded Leander.
+
+Mary Carmichael involuntarily glanced at Judith; the fall of the leaf was
+in her cheek.
+
+Peter Hamilton, bowed in his saddle and flogging forward inhumanely, bred
+rife speculation as to his destination among the group that watched him
+from the Daxes' front door. Mrs. Dax, who entertained so profound a
+respect for her own omniscience that she disdained to arrive at a
+conclusion by a logical process of deduction, was "plumb certain that he
+had gone after 'rustlers!'" Leander, who had held no opinions since his
+marriage except that first and all-comprehensive tenet of his creed--that
+his wife was a person to be loved, honored, and obeyed instantly--agreed
+with his lady by a process of reflex action. The fat lady, who had a
+commonplace for every occasion, didn't "know what we were all coming to."
+Miss Carmichael, who was beginning to find her capacity for amazement
+overstrained, alone accepted this last incident with apathy. Mr. Hamilton
+might have gone in swift pursuit of cattle thieves or he might be riding
+the mare to death for pure whimsy. Only Judith Rodney, who said nothing,
+felt that he was spurring across the wilderness at breakneck speed to see
+a girl at Wetmore's. But her lack of comment caused no ripple of surprise
+in the flow of loose-lipped speculation that served, for the time being,
+to inject a casual interest into the talk of these folk, bored to the
+verge of demoralization by long waiting for Chugg.
+
+Judith preferred to confirm her apprehensions regarding Hamilton's ride,
+alone. She knew--had not all her woman's intuitions risen in clamorous
+warning--and yet she hoped, hoped despairingly, even though the dread
+alternative to the girl at the Wetmore ranch threatened lynch law for her
+brother. Her very gait changed as she withdrew from the group about the
+door, covertly gaining her vantage-ground inch by inch. The heels of her
+riding-boots made no sound as she stole across the kitchen floor, toeing
+in like an Indian tracking an enemy through the forest. The small window
+at the back of the kitchen commanded a view of the road in all its
+sprawling circumlocution. Seen from this prospect, it had no more design
+than the idle scrawlings of a child on a bit of paper; but the choice of
+roads to Good and Evil was not fraught with more momentous consequences
+than was each prong of that fork towards which Hamilton was galloping.
+
+The right arm swung towards the Wetmore ranch, where at certain times
+during the course of the year a hundred cow-punchers reported on the stock
+that grazed in four States. At certain seasons, likewise, despite the fact
+that the ranch was well into the foot-hill country, there might be found a
+New York family playing at life primeval with the co-operation of
+porcelain bath-tubs, a French _chef_, and electric light.
+
+The left fork of the road had a meaner destiny. It dipped straight into
+desolation, penetrating a naked wilderness where bad men skulked till the
+evil they had done was forgotten in deeds that called afresh to Heaven for
+vengeance. It was well away on this west fork of the road that they
+lynched Kate Watson--"Cattle Kate"--for the crime of loyalty. It was she,
+intrepid and reckless, who threatened the horde of masked scoundrels when
+they came to lynch her man for the iniquity of raising a few vegetables on
+a strip of ground that cut into their grazing country. And when she,
+recognizing them, masked though they were, threatened them with the
+vengeance of the law, they hanged her with her man high as Haman.
+
+Judith watched Hamilton with narrowing eyes. And now she was all Indian,
+the white woman in her dead. Only the Sioux watched, and, in the patient,
+Indian style, bided its time. "Cattle thieves," "the girl at
+Wetmore's"--the words sang themselves in her head like an incantation.
+"Cattle thieves" meant her brother, their recognized leader--her brother,
+who was dearer to her than the heart in her breast, the eye in her head,
+the right hand that held together the shambling, uncertain destiny of her
+people. Would he turn to the left, Justice, on a pale horse, hunting her
+brother gallowsward? Would he turn towards the right, the impetuous lover
+spurring his steed that he might come swiftly to the woman. A pulse in her
+bosom rose slowly until her breath was suspended, then fell again; she was
+still watching, without an outward quiver, long after he had turned to the
+right--and the woman.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+                         A Daughter Of The Desert
+
+
+Judith knew that the name of the girl whose letter sent Peter Hamilton
+vaulting to the saddle was Katherine Colebrooke. There had been a deal of
+letter-writing between her and the young cow-puncher of late, of which
+perforce, by a singular irony of fate, the postmistress had been the
+involuntary instrument. The correspondence had followed a recent hasty
+journey to New York, undertaken somewhat unwillingly by Hamilton in the
+interest of certain affairs connected with the settlement of an estate.
+
+The precipitancy of this latest turn of events bewildered Judith; but yet
+a little while--a matter of weeks and days--and her friendship with Hamilton
+had been of that pleasantly indefinite estate situated somewhere on the
+borderland of romance, a kingdom where there is no law but the mutual
+interest of the wayfarers. Judith and Peter had been pitifully new at the
+game of life when the gods vouchsafed them the equivocal blessing of
+propinquity. Judith was but lately come from the convent at Santa Fé, and
+Hamilton from the university whose honors availed him little in the
+trailing of cattle over the range or in the sweat and tumult of the
+branding-pen. It was a strange election of opportunity for a man who had
+been class poet and had rather conspicuously avoided athletics during his
+entire college course. In pursuing fortune westward Hamilton did not lack
+for chroniclers who would not have missed a good story for the want of an
+authentic dramatic interpretation of his plans. His uncle, said they, who
+had put him through college, was disposed to let him sink or swim by his
+own efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle
+and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp of
+his own hand. Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more to
+heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives. Peter made
+no confidences. He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit; he was
+a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother's side of the
+family.
+
+In those days Peter wore his rue--whether for lady fair or for towering
+prospects stricken down--with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming to a
+gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of adolescence. His
+instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little
+with his new associates had he been a whit less manly. But as he shirked
+no part of the universal hardship, they left him his reticence. He even
+came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as one who was conversant with
+the best--a nonchalant social connoisseur--yet who realized the stern
+primitive beauties of the range life.
+
+Judith's convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage of
+a gentlewoman's tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an alien in
+her father's house. When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for her
+education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw moreover
+that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt her; but
+Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands little of what
+it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold together a family,
+uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.
+
+In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to
+the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the
+beginning there had been between them the barrier of circumstance.
+Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose thriftlessness
+had become a proverb. He came of a family that numbered a signer of the
+Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice, and the dean of a
+great university; Judith was uncertain of her right to the very name she
+bore. And yet they were young, he a man, she a woman--eternal fountain of
+interest. A precocious sense of the fitness of things was the compass that
+enabled Peter to steer through the deep waters in the years that followed.
+But the girl paid the penalty of her great heart; in that troublous sea of
+friendship, she was soon adrift without rudder, sail, or compass.
+
+Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a hundred
+statues in her. Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health radiated from
+her as sparks fly upward. In sunlight, her black hair had the bluish
+iridescence of a ripe plum. The eyes were deep and questioning--the eyes of
+a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed the far distant heights of
+paradise. Again, in her pagan gladness of living, she might have been a
+Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a shooting-star. And yet, in this
+wilderness that was famishing for woman's love and tears and laughter, by
+a very perversity of fate she walked alone.
+
+She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely
+circumstance. No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly
+benediction had ushered her into being. Her maternal grandfather had been
+the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white woman, who
+knew no word of her people's tongue, nor yet her name or race. The Indians
+found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother after the massacre of an
+emigrant train. They took her with them and she grew up, in the Black Hill
+country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying a chief of the people that had
+slain her people. She accepted her squaw's portion uncomplainingly; slaved
+cheerfully at squaw's work while her brave made war on the whites, hunted,
+and smoked. She reared her half-breed children in the legends of their
+father's people, and died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who
+had robbed the Sioux of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.
+
+Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who could
+do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live with Warren
+Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek. That was before the gold
+fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the cabin that he might
+fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left it. There were reasons
+why he wanted to forget his identity as a white man in his play at being
+an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the joy of having come into her
+woman's kingdom, the half-breed squaw was pretty; she was proud, too, of
+her white man, the house he had built her, and the girl pappoose with blue
+eyes. Furthermore, she had been taught to serve man meekly, for he was the
+lord of creation.
+
+Rodney talked Sioux to her. He had all but forgotten he was a white man.
+The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and bare, but for the bead
+jacket Singing Stream had made for her in the pride of her maternity.
+Rodney called the little girl "Judith." Her Indian mother never guessed
+the significance of the strange name that she could not say, but made at
+least ten soft singing syllables of, in the Indian way. The little Judith
+greeted her father in strange lispings; Warren Rodney was far from unhappy
+in playing at primitive man. This recessional into conditions primeval
+endured for "seven snows," as the Indian tongue hath it. Then the squaw
+began to break, after the manner of the women of her father's people. She
+had begun her race with time a decade after Warren Rodney, and she had
+outdistanced him by a decade.
+
+And then the Tumlins came from Tennessee to the Black Hills. They came in
+an ox-cart, and the days of their journey were more than two years. They
+had stopped in Ohio, and again in Illinois; and, behold! neither was the
+promised land, the land that their excited imaginations had painted from
+the large talk of returning travellers, and that was further glorified
+through their own thriftless discontent with conditions at home. They had
+travelled on and on across half a continent in the wake of a vanishing
+sky-line. The vague westward impulse was luring them to California, but
+they waited in Dakota that their starved stock might fatten, and while
+they rested themselves from the long journey, Warren Rodney made the
+acquaintance of Sally Tumlin, who rallied him on being a "squaw man."
+
+Warren Rodney had almost forgotten the sorceries of the women of his
+people; he had lived so long with a brown woman, who spread no silken
+snares. Sally's blushes stirred a multitude of dead things--the wiles of
+pale women, all strength in weakness, fragile flowers for tender
+handling--the squaw had grown as withered as a raisin.
+
+Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed
+her "a home of her own." Her mother had forged the bolt of this particular
+maxim at an early date. And Sally saw from precocious observation that the
+business of women was home-getting, to which end they must be neat and
+sweet and sparing of speech. After the home was forthcoming, then, indeed,
+might a woman take ease in slippers and wrapper, and it is surely a wife's
+privilege to speak her mind. Sally knew that she hated travelling westward
+after the crawling oxen; each day the sun pursued them, caught up with
+them, outdistanced them, and at night left them stranded in the
+wilderness, and rose again and mocked them on the morrow. Her father and
+oafish brother loved the makeshifts of the wagon life, with its chance
+shots at fleeing antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails;
+a chance parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance.
+But Sally hated it all. The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren
+Rodney had money in the bank. He had had uncommon luck at trapping. His
+talk to Sally was largely of his prospects.
+
+Sally knew that the world owed her "a home of her own"; and why should she
+let a squaw keep her from it? Sally's mother giggled when consulted. She
+plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter. The ethics of the
+case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely a question of white
+skin against brown, and which should carry the day. Singing Stream knew
+not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in her very presence,
+that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but she knew that Sally
+was taking her man from her. The white-skinned woman wore white ruffles
+about her neck and calico dresses that were the color of the wild roses
+that grew among the willows at the creek. Sally Tumlin's pink calico gowns
+sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of the squaw. It was the rainbow
+things, she felt, that were robbing her of her man. All her barbaric
+craving for glowing colors asserted itself as a means towards the one
+great end of keeping him. Singing Stream began to scheme schemes. One day
+Rodney was splitting wood at the Tumlin camp--though why he should split
+wood where there were two women puzzled the squaw. But the ways of the
+pale-faces were beyond her ken. She only knew that she must make herself
+beautiful in the eyes of Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then
+perhaps the pappoose that she expected with the first snowfall would be a
+man-child; and she hoped great things of this happening.
+
+With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the
+light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood, a
+matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to make
+her like a white woman. It never occurred to the half-breed woman to make
+known her plans to Warren Rodney. In circumventing Sally Tumlin the man
+became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell plans on
+the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of the enemy,
+without a word.
+
+Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the squaw
+in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties attending
+their romance. They admitted it was square of her to "hit the trail," and
+they decided to lose no time in going to the army post, where a chaplain,
+an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the time, and have a real
+wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson. The wedding party started
+for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about the bride as complacently
+as if the ceremony had been the culmination of the most decorous
+courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests
+by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospective groom and the giggling
+protestations of the bride. The chaplain at the post was disposed to ask
+few questions. Parsons made queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and
+it was regarded as a patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in
+the man of the gospel at all. To the question whether or not he had been
+married before, Rodney answered:
+
+"Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life
+sentence." And the ceremony proceeded.
+
+Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding,
+dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim
+party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a bride.
+They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty things, as
+presents to Sally. And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren Rodney, with
+"a home of her own" to go to.
+
+Singing Stream did not hasten in her quest for bright fabrics with which
+to stay the hand of fate. To the half-breed woman the journey to town was
+not without a certain revivifying pleasure. The Indian in her stirred to
+the call of the open country. The tight roof to the cabin on Elder Creek
+had not the attractions for her that it had for Sally Tumlin. She had
+chafed sometimes at a house with four walls. But now the dead and gone
+braves rose in her as she followed the old trail where they had so often
+crept to battle against their old enemies, the Crows, before the white
+man's army had scattered them. And as she drove through the foot-hill
+country, she told the solemn-eyed little Judith the story of the Sioux,
+and what a great fighting people they had been before Rodney's people
+drove them from their land. Judith was holding a doll dressed exactly like
+herself, in soft buckskin shirt, little trousers, and moccasins, all
+beautifully beaded. In her turn she told the story to the doll.
+
+Singing Stream told her daughter of the making of the world, as the Sioux
+believe the story of creation; of the "Four who Never Die"--Sharper, or
+Bladder, Rabbit, Turtle, and Monster; likewise of the coming of a mighty
+flood on which swam the Turtle and a water-fowl in whose bill was the
+earth atom, from which presently the world began to grow, Turtle
+supporting the bird on his great back, which was hard like rock. The rest
+of the myth, that deals with the rising and setting of the sun, Singing
+Stream could not tell her daughter, as the old Sioux chiefs did not think
+it wise to let their women folk know too much about matters of theology.
+Nor did they relate to squaws the sun myth, with its account of much
+cutting-off of heads--thinking, perhaps, with wisdom, that these good
+ladies saw enough of carnage in their every-day life without introducing
+it into their catechism.
+
+But Singing Stream knew the story of "Sharper," or "Bladder," as he is
+called by some of the people, because he is round and his grotesquely fat
+figure resembles a bladder blown to bursting. Bladder's province it is to
+make a fool of himself, diving into water after plums he sees reflected
+there from the branches of the trees. He dives again and again in his
+pursuit of folly, even tying stones to his wrists and ankles to keep
+himself down while he gathers the reflected fruit. After his rescue, which
+he fights against valiantly, as he lies gasping on the bank of the stream,
+he sees the fruit on the branches above his head. It is this same Bladder
+who is one of the _dramatis personæ_ in the moon myth, and that is told to
+women as safely without the limits of that little learning that is a
+dangerous thing. Bladder met Rabbit hunting; and Bladder kept throwing his
+eye up into the tree-tops to look for game. The Rabbit watched him
+enviously, thinking what a saving of effort it would be if he could do the
+same thing. Wherefore Bladder promised to instruct him, telling him to
+change eyes after using one four times, but Rabbit did not think that the
+first time counted, as that was but a trial. So he lost his eye after
+throwing it up the fifth time. And the eye of the rabbit is the moon, and
+the face seen in the full moon is the reflection of the rabbit seen in his
+own eye as we see ourselves reflected in the eye of a friend if we look
+closely. The little girl was wonderfully impressed. She put her hand to
+her own eyes, but they were in tight, too tight to throw up to the
+tree-tops.
+
+Singing Stream also told little Judith that the Great Mystery had shown
+truths, hid to man, to the trees, the streams, the hills; and the clouds
+that shaped themselves, drifting hither and yon, were the Great Mystery's
+passing thoughts. But he had deprived all these things of speech, as he
+did not trust them fully, and they could only speak to man in dreams, or
+in some passing mood, when they could communicate to him the feeling of
+one of the Great Spirits, and warn man of what was about to befall him.
+Judith was not quite four when she took this memorable drive with her
+mother, but the impression of these things abided through all her years.
+It was to the measureless spaces of desert loneliness that she learned to
+bring her sorrows in the days of her arid youth, and to feel a kinship
+with all its moods and to hear in the voice of its silence a never-failing
+consolation.
+
+And when they had come within a mile of Warren Rodney's cabin on Elder
+Creek, Singing Stream halted and prepared for the great event of
+reinstatement. First she made a splendid toilet of purple calico torn into
+strips and tied about the waist to simulate the skirts of the devil woman.
+Over these she wore a shirt of buckskin, broidered with beads of many
+colors, and a necklace of elk teeth, wound twice about the throat. On her
+feet she wore new moccasins of tanned elk-hide, and these, too, were
+beaded in many colors. Her hair, now braided with strips of scarlet
+flannel, hung below the waist. And she walked to Rodney's cabin, not as an
+outgrown mistress, but as the daughter of a chief. The little Judith held
+up her head and clung tight to the doll. She knew that something of moment
+was about to happen.
+
+The gala trio, Singing Stream, Judith, and Judith's doll, presented
+themselves at Rodney's house, before which the bride was washing clothes,
+the day being fine. Sally, as usual, wore one of the rose-colored calicoes
+with the collar turned well in and the sleeves rolled above the elbows.
+She washed vigorously, with a steady splashing of suds. Sally enjoyed this
+home of her own and all the household duties appertaining to it. She was
+singing, and a strand of pale-brown hair, crinkly as sea-weed, had blown
+across the rose of her cheek, when she felt rather than saw a shadow fall
+across her path, and, glancing up, she saw facing her the woman whom she
+had supplanted, and the solemn-eyed little girl holding tight to her doll.
+Now, neither woman knew a word of the other's speech, but Sally was
+proficient in the language of femininity, and she was not at a loss to
+grasp the significance of the purple calico, the beaded buckskin shirt,
+and the necklace of elk teeth. The half-breed walked as a chief's daughter
+to the woman at the tub, and Sally grew sick and chill despite her white
+skin and the gold ring that made Warren Rodney her man in the face of the
+law. The dark woman held Judith proudly by the hand, as a sovereign might
+carry a sceptre. Judith was her staff of office, her emblem of authority
+in the house of Warren Rodney.
+
+Singing Stream held out her hands to Sally in a gesture of appeal--and
+blundered. Of the chief's daughter, walking proudly, Sally was afraid; but
+a supplicating half-breed in strips of purple calico, not even hemmed, was
+a matter for merriment. Sally put her hands on her hips, arms akimbo, and
+laughed a dry cackle. The light in the brown woman's eyes, as she looked
+at the white, was like prairie-fires rolling forward through darkness.
+There was no need of a common speech between them. The whole destiny of
+woman was in the laugh and the look that answered it.
+
+And the man they could have murdered for came from the house, an unheroic
+figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his mouth, sullen,
+angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man inevitably is when he
+sniffs a woman's battle in the air. The bride, at sight of her husband,
+took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and down tumbled her hair. She
+felt the situation demanded a scene. Rodney, with a marital brevity hardly
+to be expected so soon, commanded Sally to go into the house and to "shut
+up."
+
+Then he faced Singing Stream and said to her in her own language: "You
+must go away from here. The pale-faced woman is my wife by the white man's
+law--ring and Bible. No Indian marriage about this."
+
+But the brown woman only pointed to Judith. She asked Rodney had she not
+been a good squaw to him.
+
+And Rodney, who at best was but a poltroon, could only repeat: "You got to
+keep away from here. It's the white man's law--one squaw for one man."
+
+From within came the sound of Sally's lamentation as she called for her
+father and brother to take her from the squaw and contamination. Warren
+Rodney was a man of few words. It had become his unpleasant duty to act,
+and to act quickly. He snatched Judith from her mother and took her into
+the house, and he returned with his Winchester, which was not loaded, to
+Singing Stream.
+
+"You got to go," he said, and levelling the Winchester, he repeated the
+command. Singing Stream looked at him with the dumb wonder of a forest
+thing. "I was a good squaw to you," she said; and did not even curse him.
+And turning, she ran towards the foot-hills, with all the length of purple
+calico trailing.
+
+Now Mrs. Rodney, _née_ Tumlin, was but human, and her cup of happiness as
+the wife of a "squaw man" was not the brimming beaker she had anticipated.
+The expulsion of her predecessor, at such a time, to make room for her own
+home-coming, was, it seemed, open to criticism. "The neighborhood"--it
+included perhaps five families living in a radius of as many hundred
+miles--felt that the Tumlins had established a bad precedent. A "squaw man"
+driving out a brown wife to make room for a white is not a heroic figure.
+It had been done before, but it would not hand down well in the traditions
+of the settling of this great country. Trespass of law and order, with
+their swift, red-handed reckoning, were but moves of the great game of
+colonization. But to shove out a brown woman for a white was a mean move.
+Few stopped at the Rodneys' ranch, though it marked the first break in the
+journey from town to the gold-mining country. Rodney had fallen from his
+estate as a pioneer; his political opinions were unsought in the conclaves
+that sat and spat at the stove, when business brought them to the joint
+saloon and post-office. The women dealt with the question more openly,
+scorning feminine subtlety at this pass as inadequate ammunition. When
+they met Mrs. Rodney they pulled aside their skirts and glared. This
+outrage against woman it was woman's work to settle.
+
+Mrs. Rodney, who had no more moral sense than a rabbit, felt that she was
+the victim of persecution. She knew she was a good woman. Hadn't she a
+husband? Had there ever been a word against her character? What was the
+use of making all that fuss over a squaw? It was not as if she was a white
+woman. The injustice of it preyed on the former Miss Tumlin. She took to
+the consolations of snuff-dipping and fell from her pink-and-white estate.
+
+The Tumlin family did not remain long enough in the Black Hill country to
+witness Sally's failure as the wife of a pioneer. The restlessness of the
+"settler," if the paradox be permissible, was in the marrow of their
+bones. The makeshifts of the wagon, the adventures of the road, were the
+only home they craved. The spring after Sally's marriage they set forth
+for California, the year following for New Mexico, and still sighed for
+new worlds to visit. They were happier now that Sally, the one element of
+discontent, had been removed from their perennial journeying by the
+merciful dispensation of marriage. Old Tumlin, his wife, and the son gave
+themselves up more than ever to the day-dreams of the road, the freedom of
+the open country, and the spirit of adventure.
+
+Rodney's squaw wife was taken in by some neighbors, good folk who were
+conversant with all phases of the romance. They stood by her in her hour
+of trial, and afterwards continued to keep her as a servant. Her son Jim
+grew up with their own children. When he was four years of age his mother,
+Singing Stream, died, and Sally persuaded her husband to take young Jim
+into their own home, partly as a sop to neighborly criticism, partly as a
+salve to her own conscience. Sally had children of her own, and looked at
+things differently now from the time when she fought the squaw for
+Rodney's favor.
+
+Jim's foster-parents were, in truth, glad to part with him. From his
+earliest babyhood he had been known as a "limb of Satan." He was an
+Ishmael by every instinct of his being. And Mrs. Warren Rodney, _née_
+Tumlin, felt that in dealing with him, in her capacity of step-mother, she
+daily expiated any offence that she might have done to his mother.
+
+Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in a
+rocking-chair, dipping snuff--a consolation imported from her former
+home--and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his
+ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism. He farmed a little, he raised
+a little stock, and he drank a great deal of whiskey. Sally hated the
+Black Hill country. She felt that it knew too much about her. The
+neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family fortunes. A
+vague migratory impulse was on her. She wanted to go somewhere and begin
+all over again. By dint of persistent nagging she persuaded her husband to
+move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry. Those were
+days when steers, to speak in the cow language, had "jumped to
+seventy-five." The wilderness grew light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful
+are the tales still told about those fat years in cattle-land. It was in
+those halcyon days of the Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the
+range, white with the dust of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than
+those procurable at their clubs in New York.
+
+Nor was it all feasting and merrymaking. A heroic band it was that battled
+with the wilderness, riding the range with heat and cold, starvation and
+death, and making small pin-pricks in that empty blotch of the United
+States map that is marked "Great Alkali Desert" blossom into settlements.
+When the last word has been said about the pioneers of these United
+States, let the cow-boy be remembered in the universal toast, that bronzed
+son of the saddle who lived his little day bravely and merrily, and whose
+real heroism is too often forgotten in the glamour of his own
+picturesqueness.
+
+Judith was ten years old when her father, his wife, and their children
+moved from Dakota--they were not so particular about North and South
+Dakota, in those days--to take up a claim on Sweetwater, Wyoming. Judith
+gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her
+dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring wretchedness
+as happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old friend, Mrs.
+Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had been present at the
+marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who had always felt a
+wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the ceremony and
+contributing a lace handkerchief to the bride. Her husband, now Major
+Atkins, was stationed at Fort Washakie, Wyoming. Mrs. Atkins happening
+again on the Rodney family, and her husband having increased and
+multiplied his army pay many times over by a successful venture in cattle,
+the scheme of Judith's convent education was put through by the major's
+wife, who had kept her New England conscience, the discomforts of frontier
+posts notwithstanding.
+
+So Judith went to the nuns to school, and stayed with them till she was
+eighteen. Mrs. Atkins would have adopted her then; but Judith by this time
+knew her family history in all its sordid ramifications, and felt that
+duty called her to her brother, who had not improved his unfortunate start
+in life, though his step-mother did not spoil him for the staying of the
+rod.
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+                         Chugg Takes The Ribbons
+
+
+Chugg, comforted with liquids and stayed with a head-plaster, presented
+himself at the Dax ranch just twenty-four hours after he was due. His mien
+combined vagueness with hostility, and he harnessed up the stage that
+Peter Hamilton had driven over the day before, when his prospective
+passengers were looking, with a graphic pantomimic representation of "take
+it or leave it." Under the circumstances, Miss Carmichael and the fat lady
+consented to be passengers with much the same feeling of finality that one
+might have on embarking for the planet Mars in an air-ship.
+
+There was, furthermore, a suggestion of last rites in the farewells of the
+Daxes, each according to their respective personalities, that was far from
+reassuring.
+
+"Here's some bread and meat and a bottle of cold coffee, if you live to
+need it," was Mrs. Dax's grim prognostication of accident. Leander, being
+of an emotional nature, could scarce restrain his tears--the advent of the
+travellers had created a welcome variation in the monotony of his dutiful
+routine--he felt all the agitation of parting with life-long friends. Mary
+Carmichael and Judith promised to write--they had found a great deal to say
+to each other the preceding evening.
+
+Chugg cracked his whip ominously, the travellers got inside, not daring to
+trust themselves to the box.
+
+The journey with the misanthrope was but a repetition of that first day's
+staging--the sage-brush was scarcer, the mountains seemed as far off as
+ever, and the outlook was, if possible, more desolate. The entry in Miss
+Carmichael's diary, inscribed in malformed characters as the stage jolted
+over ruts and gullies, reads: "I do not mind telling you, in strictest
+confidence, 'Dere Diary'--as the little boy called you--that when I so
+lightly severed my connection with civilization, I had no idea to what an
+extent I was going in for the prairie primeval. How on earth does a woman
+who can write a letter like Mrs. Yellett stand it? And where on the map of
+North America is Lost Trail?"
+
+"Land sakes!" regretted the fat lady, "but I do wish I had a piece of that
+'boy's favorite' cake that I had for my lunch the day we left town. I just
+ate and ate it 'cause I hadn't another thing to do. If I hadn't been so
+greedy I could offer him a piece, just to show him that some women folk
+have kind hearts, and that the whole sect ain't like that Pink."
+
+"Boy's favorite," as adequate compensation for shattered ideals, a broken
+heart, and the savings of a lifetime, seemed to Mary Carmichael inadequate
+compensation, but she forbore to express her sentiments.
+
+The fat lady had never relaxed her gaze from Chugg's back since the stage
+had started. She peered at that broad expanse of flannel shirt through the
+tiny round window, like a careful sailing-master sweeping the horizon for
+possible storm-clouds. At every portion of the road presenting a steep
+decline she would prod Chugg in the back with the handle of her ample
+umbrella, and demand that he let her out, as she preferred walking. The
+stage-driver at first complied with these requests, but when he saw they
+threatened to become chronic, he would send his team galloping down grade
+at a rate to justify her liveliest fears.
+
+"Do you think you are a-picnicking, that you crave roominating round these
+yere solitoodes?" And the misanthrope cracked his whip and adjured his
+team with cabalistic imprecations.
+
+"Did you notice if Mrs. Dax giv' him any cold coffee, same as she did us?"
+anxiously inquired the fat lady from her lookout.
+
+Mary hadn't noticed.
+
+"He's drinking something out of a brown bottle--seems to relish it a heep
+more'n he would cold coffee," reported the watch. "Hi there! Hi! Mr.
+Chugg!" The stage-driver, thinking it was merely a request to be allowed
+to walk, continued to drive with one hand and hold the brown bottle with
+the other. But even his too solid flesh was not proof against the
+continued bombardment of the umbrella handle.
+
+"Um-m-m," he grunted savagely, applying a watery eye to the round window.
+
+"Nothing," answered the fat lady, quite satisfied at having her worst
+fears confirmed.
+
+Chugg returned to his driving, as one not above the weakness of seeing and
+hearing things.
+
+"'Tain't coffee."
+
+"Could you smell it?" questioned Mary, anxiously.
+
+"You never can tell that way, when they are plumb pickled in it, like
+him."
+
+"Then how did you know it wasn't coffee?"
+
+"His eyes had fresh watered."
+
+Mary collapsed under this expert testimony. "What are we going to do about
+it?"
+
+"Appeal to him as a gentleman," said the fat lady, not without dramatic
+intonation.
+
+"You appeal," counselled Mary; "I saw him look at you admiringly when you
+were walking down that steep grade."
+
+"Is that so?" said the fat lady, with a conspicuous lack of incredulity;
+and she put her hand involuntarily to her frizzes.
+
+This time she did not trust to the umbrella-handle as a medium of
+communication between the stage-driver and herself. Putting her hand
+through the port-hole she grasped Chugg's arm--the bottle arm--with no
+uncertain grip.
+
+"Why, Mr. Chugg, this yere place is getting to be a regular summer resort;
+think of two ladies trusting themselves to your protection and travelling
+out over this great lonesome desert."
+
+Chugg's mind, still submerged in local Lethe waters, grappled in silence
+with the problem of the feminine invasion, and then he muttered to himself
+rather than to the fat lady, "Nowhere's safe from 'em; women and
+house-flies is universally prevailing."
+
+The fat lady dropped his arm as if it had been a brand. "He's no
+gentleman. As for Mountain Pink, she was drove to it."
+
+All that day they toiled over sand and sage-brush; the sun hung like a
+molten disk, paling the blue of the sky; the grasshoppers kept up their
+shrill chirping--and the loneliness of that sun-scorched waste became a
+tangible thing.
+
+Chugg sipped and sipped, and sometimes swore and sometimes muttered, and
+as the day wore on his driving not only became a challenge to the
+endurance of the horses, but to the laws of gravitation. He lashed them up
+and down grade, he drove perilously close to shelving declivities, and
+sometimes he sang, with maudlin mournfulness:
+
+  "'Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.'
+  The words came low and mournfully
+  From the cold, pale lips of a youth who lay
+  On his dying couch at the close of day."
+
+The fat lady reminded him that he was a gentleman and that he was driving
+ladies; she threatened him with her son on Sweetwater, who began, in the
+maternal chronicles, by being six feet in his stockings, and who steadily
+grew, as the scale of threats increased, till he reached the altitude of
+six feet four, growing hourly in height and fierceness.
+
+But Chugg gave no heed, and once he sang the "Ballad of the Mule-Skinner,"
+with what seemed to both terrified passengers an awful warning of their
+overthrow:
+
+  "As I was going down the road,
+  With a tired team and a heavy load,
+  I cracked my whip and the leaders sprung--
+  The fifth chain broke, and the wheelers hung,
+  The off-horse stepped on the wagon tongue--"
+
+This harrowing ballad was repeated with accompanying Delsarte at intervals
+during the afternoon, but as Mary and the fat lady managed to escape
+without accident, they began to feel that they bore charmed lives.
+
+At sundown they came to the road-ranch of Johnnie Dax, bearing Leander's
+compliments as a secret despatch. The outward aspect of the place was
+certainly an awful warning to trustful bachelors who make acquaintances
+through the columns of _The Heart and Hand_. The house stood solitary in
+that scourge of desolation. The windows and doors gaped wide like the
+unclosed eyes of a dead man on a battle-field. Chugg halloed, and an old
+white horse put his head out of the door, shook it upward as if in assent,
+then trotted off.
+
+"That's Jerry, and he's the intelligentest animal I ever see," remarked
+the stage-driver, sobering up to Jerry's good qualities, and presently
+Johnnie Dax and the white horse appeared together from around the corner
+of the house.
+
+This Mr. Dax was almost an exact replica of the other, even to the
+apologetic crook in the knees and a certain furtive way of glancing over
+the shoulder as if anticipating missiles.
+
+"Pshaw now, ladies! why didn't you let me know that you was coming? and
+I'd have tidied up the place and organized a few dried-apple pies."
+
+"Good house-keepers don't wait for company to come before they get to
+their work," rebukefully commented the fat lady.
+
+Mr. Dax, recognizing the voice of authority, seized a towel and began to
+beat out flies, chickens, and dogs, who left the premises with the ill
+grace of old residents. Two hogs, dormant, guarded either side of the
+door-step and refused so absolutely to be disturbed by the flicking of the
+towel that one was tempted to look twice to assure himself that they were
+not the fruits of the sculptor's chisel.
+
+"Where's your wife?" sternly demanded the fat lady.
+
+"Oh, my Lord! I presume she's dancin' a whole lot over to Ervay. She
+packed her ball-gown in a gripsack and lit out of here two days ago,
+p'inting that way. A locomotive couldn't stop her none if she got a chance
+to go cycloning round a dance."
+
+In the mean time, the two hogs having failed to grasp the fact that they
+were _de trop_, continued to doze.
+
+"Come, girls, get up," coaxed Johnnie, persuasively. "Maude, I don't know
+when I see you so lazy. Run on, honey--run on with Ethel." For Ethel, the
+piebald hog, finally did as she was bid.
+
+Mary Carmichael could not resist the temptation of asking how the hogs
+happened to have such unusual names.
+
+"To tell the truth, I done it to aggravate my wife. When I finds myself a
+discard in the matrimonial shuffle, I figgers on a new deal that's going
+to inclood one or two anxieties for my lady partner--to which end--viz.,
+namely, I calls one hawg Ethel and the other hawg Maude, allowing to my
+wife that they're named after lady friends in the East. Them lady friends
+might be the daughters of Ananias and Sapphira, for all they ever
+happened, but they answers the purpose of riling her same as if they were
+eating their three squares daily. I have hopes, everything else failing,
+that she may yet quit dancing and settle down to the sanctity of the home
+out of pure jealousy of them two proxy hawgs."
+
+"I can just tell you this," interrupted the fat lady: "I don't enjoy
+occupying premises after hawgs, no matter how fashionable you name 'em. A
+hawg's a hawg, with manners according, if it's named after the President
+of the United States or the King of England."
+
+"That's just what I used to think, marm, of all critters before I enjoyed
+that degree of friendliness that I'm now proud to own. Take Jerry now,
+that old white horse--why, me and him is just like brothers. When I have to
+leave the kid to his lonesome infant reflections and go off to chop wood,
+I just call Jerry in, and he assoomes the responsibility of nurse like he
+was going to draw wages for it."
+
+"I reckon there's faults on both sides," said the fat lady, impartially.
+"No natural woman would leave her baby to a horse to mind while she went
+off dancing. And no natural man would fill his house full of critters, and
+them with highfalutin names. Take my advice, turn 'em out."
+
+Mary did not wait to hear the continuation of the fat lady's advice. She
+went out on the desert to have one last look at the west. The sun had
+taken his plunge for the night, leaving his royal raiment of crimson and
+gold strewn above the mountain-tops.
+
+Her sunset reflections were presently interrupted by the fat lady, who
+proposed that they should walk till Mr. Dax had tidied up his house,
+observing, with logic, that it did not devolve on them to clean the place,
+since they were paying for supper and lodging. They had gone but a little
+way when sudden apprehension caused the fat lady to grasp Mary's arm. Miss
+Carmichael turned, expecting mountain-lions, rattlesnakes, or
+stage-robbers, but none of these casualties had come to pass.
+
+"Land sakes! Here we be parading round the prairie, and I never found out
+how that man cooked his coffee."
+
+"What difference does it make, if we can drink it?"
+
+"The ways of men cooks is a sealed book to you, I reckon, or you wouldn't
+be so unconcerned--'specially in the matter of coffee. All men has got the
+notion that coffee must be b'iled in a bag, and if they 'ain't got a
+regular bag real handy, they take what they can get. Oh, I've caught 'em,"
+went on the fat lady, darkly, "b'iling coffee in improvisations that'd
+turn your stomach."
+
+"Yes, yes," Mary hastily agreed, hoping against hope that she wasn't going
+to be more explicit.
+
+"And they are so cute about it, too; it's next to impossible to catch 'em.
+You ask a man if he b'iles his coffee loose or tight, and he'll declare he
+b'iles it loose, knowing well how suspicious and prone to investigate is
+the female mind. But you watch your chance and take a look in the
+coffee-pot, and maybe you'll find--"
+
+"Yes, yes, I've heard--"
+
+"I've seen--"
+
+"Let's hurry," implored Mary.
+
+"Have you made your coffee yet?" inquired the fat lady.
+
+"Yes, marm," promptly responded Johnnie.
+
+"I hope you b'iled it in a bag--it clears it beautiful, a bag does."
+
+Johnnie shifted uneasily. "No, marm, I b'iles it loose. You see, bags
+ain't always handy."
+
+The fat lady plied her eye as a weapon. No Dax could stand up before an
+accusing feminine eye. He quailed, made a grab for the coffee-pot, and
+rushed with it out into the night.
+
+"What did I tell you?" she asked, with an air of triumph.
+
+Johnnie returned with the empty coffee-pot. "To tell the truth, marm, I
+made a mistake. I 'ain't made the coffee. I plumb forgot it. P'raps you
+could be prevailed on to assist this yere outfit to coffee while I
+organizes a few sody-biscuits."
+
+After supper, when the fat lady was so busy talking "goo-goo" language to
+the baby as to be oblivious of everything else, Mary Carmichael took the
+opportunity to ask Johnnie if he knew anything about Lost Trail. The name
+of her destination had come to sound unpleasantly ominous in the ears of
+the tired young traveller, and she feared that her inquiry did not sound
+as casual as she tried to have it. Nor was Johnnie's candid reply
+reassuring.
+
+"It's a pizen-mean country, from all I ever heard tell. The citizens
+tharof consists mainly of coyotes and mountain-lions, with a few rattlers
+thrown in just to make things neighborly. This yere place"--waving his hand
+towards the arid wastes which night was making more desolate--"is a summer
+resort, with modern improvements, compared to it."
+
+Mary screwed her courage to a still more desperate point, and inquired if
+Mr. Dax knew a family named Yellett living in Lost Trail.
+
+"Never heard of no family living there, excepting the bluff at family life
+maintained by the wild beasts before referred to. See here, miss, I ain't
+makin' no play to inquire into your affairs, but you ain't thinkin' o'
+visitin' Lost Trail, be you?"
+
+"Perhaps," said Mary, faintly; and then she, too, talked "goo-goo" to the
+baby.
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+                           The Rodneys At Home
+
+
+All that long and never-to-be-forgotten night the stage lurched through
+the darkness with Mary Carmichael the solitary passenger. The fat lady had
+warned Johnnie Dax that he was on no account to replenish Chugg's flask,
+if he had the wherewithal for replenishment on the premises. Moreover, she
+threatened Dax with the fury of her son should he fail in this particular;
+and Johnnie, hurt to the quick by the unjust suspicion that he could fail
+so signally in his duty to a lady, not only refused to replenish the
+flask, but threatened Chugg with a conditional vengeance in the event of
+accident befalling the stage. It was with a partially sobered and
+much-threatened stage-driver, therefore, that Mary continued her journey
+after the supper at Johnnie Dax's, but the knowledge of it brought scant
+reassurance, and it is doubtful if the red stage ever harbored any one
+more wakeful than the pale, tired girl who watched all the changes from
+dark to dawn at the stage window.
+
+Once or twice she caught a glimpse of distant camp-fires burning and knew
+that some cattle outfit was camped there for the night; and once they
+drove so close that she could hear the cow-boys' voices, enriched and
+mellowed by distance, borne to them on the cool, evening wind. It gave a
+sense of security to know that these big-hearted, manly lads were within
+call, and she watched the dwindling spark of their camp-fires and strained
+her ears to catch the last note of their singing, with something of the
+feeling of severed comradeship. Range cattle, startled from sleep by the
+stage, scrambled to their feet and bolted headlong in the blind impulse of
+panic, their horns and the confused massing of their bodies showing in
+sharp silhouette against the horizon for a moment, then all would settle
+into quiet again. There was no moon that night, but the stars were sown
+broadcast--softly yellow stars, lighting the darkness with a shaded luster,
+like lamps veiled in pale-yellow gauze. The chill electric glitter of the
+stars, as we know it from between the roofs of high houses, this world of
+far-flung distance knows not. There the stars are big and still, like the
+eyes of a contented woman.
+
+The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking of
+a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote would
+yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way that made
+Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale streak of
+dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks
+heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture
+brought before her one of Vedder's pictures that hung in the shabby old
+library at home.
+
+They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage. She
+knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had left
+the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now toiled over
+the sand and desolation were apparently brown. She could not be certain
+that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the sand and
+desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of anything.
+Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries in the stage,
+eliminated any certainty as to anything. She could only sit huddled into a
+heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.
+
+Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner. He drove rigidly as an
+automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the "lightning" when it
+was bottled. Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that
+separated him from his passenger, and asked questions relative to her
+comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than
+monosyllables. As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage
+creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in endless
+journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one of those
+maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate things are
+given in seasons of nervous tension. This time it was: "All the world's--a
+stage--creak--screech--all--the world's a stage--creak--screech!" over and over
+till Mary found herself fast succumbing to the hypnotic effect of the
+constant repetition, listening for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness
+of overwrought nerves, when the stage-driver broke the spell with, "This
+here stage gets to naggin' me along about here. She's hungry for her
+axle-grease--that's what ails her."
+
+"I suppose," Mary roused herself to say, "you have quite a feeling of
+comradeship for the stage."
+
+"Me and Clara"--the stage had this name painted on the side--"have been
+travelling together nigh onto four year. And while there's times that I
+would prefer a greater degree of reciprocity, these yere silent companions
+has their advantages. Why, compare Clara to them female blizzards--the two
+Mrs. Daxes--and you see Clara's good p'ints immejit. Yes, miss, the
+thirst-quenchers are on me if either one of the Dax boys wouldn't be glad
+to swap, but I'd have to be a heap more locoed than I am now to consent to
+the transaction."
+
+At sunset the interminable monotony of the wilderness was broken by a
+house of curious architecture, the like of which the tired young traveller
+had never seen before, and whose singular candor of design made her doubt
+the evidence of her own thoroughly exhausted faculties. The house seemed
+to consist of a series of rooms thrown, or rather blown, together by some
+force of nature rather than by formal design of builder or carpenter. The
+original log-cabin of this composite dwelling looked better built, more
+finished, neater of aspect than those they had previously stopped at in
+crossing the Desert. Springing from the main building, like claws from a
+crustacean, were a series of rooms minus either side walls or flooring.
+Indeed, they might easily have passed for porches of more than usually
+commodious size had it not been for the beds, bureaus, chairs, stove with
+attendant pots, kettles, and supper in the course of preparation. Seen
+from any vantage-point in the surrounding country, the effect was that of
+an interior on the stage--the background of some homely drama where pioneer
+life was being realistically depicted. The _dramatis persona_ who occupied
+the centre of the stage when Mary Carmichael drove up was an elderly woman
+in a rocking-chair. She was dressed in a faded pink calico gown, limp and
+bedraggled, whose color brought out the parchment-like hue and texture of
+her skin in merciless contrast. Perhaps because she still harbored
+illusions about the perishable quality of her complexion, which gave every
+evidence of having borne the brunt of merciless desert suns, snows,
+blizzards, and the ubiquitous alkali dust of all seasons, she wore a pink
+sun-bonnet, though the hour was one past sundown, and though she sat
+beneath her own roof-tree, even if lacking the protection of four walls.
+From the corner of her mouth protruded a snuff-brush, so constantly in
+this accustomed place that it had come to be regarded by members of her
+family as part and parcel of her attire--the first thing assumed in the
+morning, the last thing laid aside at night. Mary Carmichael had little
+difficulty in recognizing Judith Rodney's step-mother, _née_ Tumlin--she
+who had been the heroine of the romance lately recorded.
+
+Mrs. Rodney's interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced in
+the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and forth in
+place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear the hours
+away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission,
+but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her.
+Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to
+enunciation, she said: "Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett's gov'ment, ain't ye?"
+There was something threatening in her aspect, as if the office of
+governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging quality.
+
+"Government?" repeated Mary, vaguely, her head still rumbling with the
+noise and motion of the stage; "I'm afraid I hardly understand."
+
+"Ain't you-uns goin' to teach the Yellett outfit ther spellin', writin',
+and about George Washington, an' how the Yankees kem along arter he was in
+his grave an' fit us and broke up the kentry so we had ter leave our home
+in Tennessee an' kem to this yere outdacious place, where nobody knows the
+diffunce between aig-bread an' corn-dodger? I war a Miss Tumlin from
+Tennessee."
+
+The rocking-chair now began to recover its accustomed momentum. This
+much-heralded educational expert was far from terrifying. Indeed, to Mrs.
+Rodney's hawklike gaze, that devoured every visible item of Mary's
+extremely modest travelling-dress, there was nothing so very wonderful
+about "the gov'ment from the East." With a deftness compatible only with
+long practice, Mrs. Rodney now put a foot on the round of an adjoining
+chair and shoved it towards Mary Carmichael in hospitable pantomime, never
+once relaxing her continual rocking the meantime. Mary took the chair, and
+Mrs. Rodney, after freshening up the snuff-brush from a small, tin box in
+her lap, put spurs to her rocking-chair, so to speak, and started off at a
+brisk canter.
+
+"I 'low it's mighty queer you-uns don't recognize the job you-uns kem out
+yere to take, when I call it by name." From the sheltering flap of the
+pink sun-bonnet she turned a pair of black eyes full of ill-concealed
+suspicion. "Miz Yellett givin' herself as many airs 'bout hirin' a
+gov'ment 's if she wuz goin' to Congress. Queer you don't know whether you
+be one or not!" She withdrew into the sun-bonnet, muttering to herself.
+She could not be more than fifty, Mary thought, but her habit of muttering
+and exhibiting her depopulated gums while she was in the act of
+revivifying the snuff-brush gave her a cronish aspect.
+
+A babel of voices came from the open-faced room on the opposite side of
+the house corresponding to the one in which Mary and Mrs. Rodney were
+sitting. Apparently supper was being prepared by some half-dozen young
+people, each of whom thought he or she was being imposed upon by the
+others. "Hand me that knife." "Git it yourself." "I'll tell maw how you
+air wolfing down the potatoes as fast as I can fry 'em." "Go on,
+tattle-tale." This was the repartee, mingled with the hiss of frying meat,
+the grinding of coffee, the thumping sound made by bread being hastily
+mixed in a wooden bowl standing on a wooden table. The babel grew in
+volume. Dogs added to it by yelping emotionally when the smell of the
+newly fried meat tempted them too near the platter and some one with a
+disengaged foot at his disposal would kick them out of doors.
+Personalities were exchanged more freely by members of the family, and the
+meat hissed harder as it was newly turned. "Laws-a-massy!" muttered Mrs.
+Rodney; and then, shoving back the sun-bonnet, she lifted her voice in a
+shrill, feminine shriek:
+
+"Eudory! Eu-dory! You-do-ry!"
+
+A Hebe-like creature, blond and pink-cheeked, in a blue-checked apron
+besmeared with grease and flour, came sulkily into her mother's presence.
+Seeing Mary Carmichael, she grasped the skirt of the greasy apron with the
+sleight of hand of a prestidigitateur and pleated it into a single
+handful. Her manner, too, was no slower of transformation. The family
+sulks were instantly replaced by a company bridle, aided and abetted by a
+company simper. "I didn't know the stage was in yet, maw. I been talking
+to Iry."
+
+"This here be Miz Yellett's gov'ment. Maybe she'd like to pearten up some
+before she eats." She started the rocking-chair at a gallop, to signify to
+her daughter that she washed her hands of further responsibility. Being
+proficient in the sign language of Mrs. Rodney's second self, as indeed
+was every member of the family, Eudora led Mary to a bench placed in one
+of the rooms enjoying the distinction of a side wall, and indicated a
+family toilet service, which displayed every indication of having lately
+seen active service. A roll-towel, more frankly significant of the
+multitude of the Rodneys than had been the babel of voices, a discouraged
+fragment of comb, a tin basin, a slippery atom of soap, these Eudora
+proffered with an unction worthy of better things. "I declare Mist' Chugg
+have scarce left any soap, an' I don't believe thar's 'nother bit in the
+house." Eudora's accent was but faintly reminiscent of her mother's strong
+Smoky Mountain dialect, as a crude feature is sometimes softened in the
+second generation. It was not unpleasing on her full, rosy mouth. The girl
+had the seductiveness of her half-sister, Judith, without a hint of
+Judith's spiritual quality.
+
+Mary told her not to mind about the soap, and went to fetch her hand-bag,
+which, consistent with the democratic spirit of its surroundings, was
+resting against a clump of sage-brush, whither it had been lifted by
+Chugg. Miss Carmichael's individual toilet service, which was neither
+handsome nor elaborate, impressed Eudora far more potently in ranking Mary
+as a personage than did her dignity of office as "gov'ment."
+
+"I reckon you-uns must have seen Sist' Judy up to Miz Dax's. I hope she
+war lookin' right well." There was in the inquiry an unmistakable note of
+pride. The connection was plainly one to be flaunted. Judith, with her
+gentle bearing and her simple, convent accomplishments, was plainly the
+_grande dame_ of the family. Eudora had now divested herself of the
+greasy, flour-smeared apron, flinging it under the wash-bench with a
+single all-sufficient movement, while Mary's look was directed towards her
+dressing-bag. In glancing up to make some remark about Judith, Mary was
+confronted by a radiant apparition whose lilac calico skirts looked fresh
+from the iron.
+
+At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden, running
+over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the
+purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the direction
+of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless,
+pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention was presently
+rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the
+slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of
+age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose keen glance and slightly
+grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual labor. The head, and face
+were finely modelled. Unless nature had fashioned them in some vagrant,
+prankish mood, such elegance of line betokened prior generations in which
+gentlemen and scholars had played some part--the vagabond scion of a good
+family, perhaps. A multitude of such had grafted on the pioneer stock of
+the West, under names that carried no significance in the places whence
+they came.
+
+Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep, on
+the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of deeper
+significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a curiously
+ambiguous effect of a fine head modelled by a 'prentice hand; a lady's
+copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first lessons, might
+approximate it.
+
+A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost institutional
+proportions. There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin union,
+strapping lads and lasses all of them, with more than a common dower of
+lusty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the perishable
+iridescence of youth. There was Fremont, named for the explorer-soldier;
+there was Orlando, named from his mother's vague, idle musings over
+paper-backed literature at certain "unchancy" seasons; there was Richards,
+named from pure policy, for a local great man of whom Warren Rodney had
+anticipated a helping hand at the time; there was Eudora, whose nominal
+origin was uncertain, unless it bore affiliation to that of Orlando; there
+was Sadie, thus termed to avoid the painful distinctions of "old Sally"
+and "young Sally"; and, lastly, like a postscript, came Dan--with him,
+fancy, in the matter of names, seemed to have failed. Dan was now six, a
+plump little caricature of a man in blue overalls, which, as they had
+descended to him from Richards in the nature of an heirloom, reached high
+under his armpits and shortened the function of his suspenders to the
+vanishing point.
+
+Eudora was now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted
+her with a surprising precocity. Eudora knew her value and meant to make
+the most of it. Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she expected
+more than a "home of her own." To-night four suitors sat at table with
+Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it. Any one of the
+four would have cheerfully murdered the remaining three had opportunity
+presented itself. Supper was a mockery to them, a Barmecide feast. Each
+watched his rivals--and Eudora. This was a matter of life and death. There
+was no time for food. The girl revelled in the situation to the full of
+her untaught, unthinking, primitive nature. She gave the incident a
+tighter twist by languishing at them in turns. She smiled, she sighed, she
+drove them mad by taking crescent bites out of a slice of bread and
+exhibiting the havoc of her little, white teeth with a delectably dainty
+gluttony.
+
+Her mother, mumbling her supper with toothless impotency, renewed her
+youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the
+rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw to
+the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort Eudora
+was to her and how handy she was about the house.
+
+Warren Rodney supported the air of an exile at his own table. Beyond a
+preliminary greeting to his daughter's guests, he said nothing. His
+family, in their dealings with him, seemed to accord him the exemptions of
+extreme age. He ate with the enthusiasm of a man to whom meals have become
+the main business in life.
+
+"How's your mine up to Bad Water comin' along, Iry?" Orlando inquired, not
+from any hospitable interest in Ira's claim, but because he had sundry
+romantic interests in that neighborhood and hoped to make use of the young
+prospector's interest in his sister by securing an invitation to return
+with him. Ira regarded the inquiry in the light of a special providence.
+Here was his chance to impress Eudora with the splendor of his prospects
+and at the same time smite the claims of his rivals, and behold! a brother
+of his lady had led the way.
+
+Ira cleared his throat. "They tell me she air like to yield a million any
+day." At this Eudora gave him the wealth of her eyes, and her mother
+reached across two of the glowering suitors and dropped a hot flapjack on
+his plate.
+
+"Who sez that she air likely to yield a million any day?" inquired Ben
+Swift, openly flouting such prophecy. "Yes, who sez it?" inquired Hawks
+and Taylor, joining forces for the overthrow of the common enemy.
+
+"'They sez' is easy talkin', shore 'nuff," mumbled Mrs. Rodney, as she
+helped herself to butter with her own knife.
+
+"A sharp from the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, he said it, and he
+has taken back speciments with him."
+
+"Ye can't keep lackings from freightin' round speciments--naw, sir, ye
+can't, not till the fool-killer has finished his job." Ben Swift charged
+the table with the statement as the prosecution subtly appeals to the high
+grade of intelligence on the part of the jury. The point told. Eudora,
+wavering in her donation of hot flapjacks, gave them to Ben Swift.
+
+Hawks now leaned across the table with a sinuous, beguiling motion, and,
+extending his long neck towards the prospector, with the air of a
+turkey-gobbler about to peck, he crooned, softly: "Ira, it's a heap risky
+puttin' your faith in maverick sharps that trail around the country,
+God-a'mightying it, renaming little, old rocks into precious stones,
+seein' gold mines in every gopher-hole they come to. They names your
+backyard and the rocks appertainin' thereunto a heap fashionable, and like
+as not some sucker gives him good money to float the trash back East."
+
+Mrs. Rodney, whose partisanship in any discussion was analogous to the
+position of a hen perching on a fence unable to decide on which side to
+flutter, was visibly impressed by Hawks's presentation of the case.
+Looking towards her daughter from under the eaves of her sun-bonnet, she
+"'lowed she had hearn that Bad Water was hard on the skin, an' that it
+warn't much of a place arter all. Folks over thar war mostly half-livers."
+
+Ira, now losing all semblance of policy at being thus grievously put down
+by his possible mother-in-law, "reckoned that herdin' sheep over to the
+Basin was a heap easier on the skin than livin' in a comf'table house over
+to Bad Water"--this as a fling at Hawks, who herded a small bunch of sheep
+"over in the Basin."
+
+"Ai-yi," openly scoffed the former Miss Tumlin; "talk's cheap before--" She
+would have considered it indelicate to supply the word "marriage," but by
+breaking off her sentence before she came to the pith of it she continued
+to maintain the proprieties, and at the same time conveyed to her audience
+that she was too old and experienced to permit any fledgling from her nest
+to be caught, for want of a warning, by such obvious ante-matrimonial
+chaff as fair promises.
+
+"Laws a massy!" she continued, reminiscently, working her toothless jaw to
+free it from an escaped splinter from the snuff-brush. "When me an' paw
+war keepin' comp'ny, satin warn't good enough for me. He lowed I wuz to
+have half creation. Sence we wuz married he 'ain't never found time,
+endurin' all these years, to build me a bird-house."
+
+The unbuilt bird-house was the Banquo's ghost at the Rodney board, Mrs.
+Rodney hearkening back to it in and out of season. If the family made
+merry over a chance windfall of game or fresh vegetables, a prospect of
+possible employment for one of the boys, a donation of money from Judith,
+Mrs. Rodney remembered the unbuilt bird-house and indulged herself to the
+full of melancholy. It is not improbable that, if she had been asked to
+name the chiefest disappointment of her wretched married life, she would
+have mentioned the bird-house that was never built.
+
+At mention of it Warren Rodney murmured broken, deprecatory excuses. His
+dull eyes nervously travelled about the table for some one to make excuses
+for him. The family broke into hearty peals of laughter; the tragedy of
+the first generation had grown to be the unfailing source of merriment for
+the second.
+
+"Maw," began Orlando, "the reason you don't get no bird-house built out
+hyear is that they ain't no birds. We have offered time and time again to
+build you a house fo' buzzuds, they bein' the only birds hyearabouts, but
+you 'low that you ain't fav'ble to tamin' 'em."
+
+"I wuz raised in Tennessee, an' we-uns had a house for martins made out'n
+gourds, an' it was pearty." The pride with which she repeated this
+particular claim to honor in an alien land never diminished with
+repetition. As she advanced further through the dim perspective of years,
+the little mountain town in Tennessee became more and more the centre of
+cultivation and civic importance. The desolate cabin that she had left for
+the interminable journey westward was recalled flatteringly through the
+hallowing mists of time. The children, by reason of these chronicles, had
+grown to regard their mother as a sort of princess in exile.
+
+"Mrs. Rodney"--Swift leaned towards her and whispered something in her ear.
+She regarded him tentatively, then grinned. At her time of life, why
+should she put faith in the promises of men? "You fix it up, an' you get
+your bird-house," was the conclusion of his sentence.
+
+While this discussion had been in progress the viands had not been
+neglected except by such members of the company as had been bereft of
+appetite by loftier emotions--in consequence of which the table appeared to
+have sustained a visitation of seventeen-year locusts. Eudora, ever
+economic in the value she placed not only upon herself but her
+environment, proposed to her guests that they should wash the dishes, an
+art in which they were by no means deficient, being no exception to the
+majority of range bachelors in their skill in homely pursuits. And thus it
+came to pass that Eudora's suitors, swathed in aprons, meekly washed
+dishes shoulder to shoulder, while their souls craved the performance of
+valorous deeds.
+
+As this was the last stage station on the way to Lost Trail, Mary
+Carmichael was perforce obliged to content herself till Mrs. Yellett
+should call or send for her. After supper, Chugg, with fresh horses to the
+stage, left Rodney's, apparently for some port in that seemingly pathless
+sea of foot-hills. That there should be trails and defined routes over
+this vast, unvaried stretch of space seemed more wonderful to Mary than
+the charted high-roads of the Atlantic. The foot-hills seemed to have
+grown during the long journey till they were foot-hills no longer; they
+had come to be the smaller peaks of the towering range that had formed the
+spine of the desert. The air, that seemed to have lost some of its
+crystalline quality on the flat stretches of the plains, was again
+sparkling and heady in the clean hill country. It stirred the pulses like
+some rare vintage, some subtle distillation of sun-warmed fruit that had
+been mellowing for centuries.
+
+Very lonely seemed the Rodney home among the great company of mountains. A
+brooding desolation had settled on it at close of day, and all the
+laughter and light footsteps and gayly ringing voices of the young folk
+could not dispel the feeling of being adrift in a tiny shell on the black
+waters of some unknown sea; or thus it seemed to the stranger within their
+gate.
+
+Mrs. Rodney retired within the flap of her sun-bonnet after the evening
+meal, settling herself in the rocking-chair as if it were some sort of
+conveyance. Her family, who might have told the hour of day or her passing
+mood by the action of the chair, knew by her pacific gait that she would
+lament the unbuilt bird-house no more that night. The snuff-brush, newly
+replenished from the tin box, kept perfect time to the motion of the
+chair. With the lady of the house it was one of the brief seasons of
+passing content vouchsafed by an ample meal and a good digestion.
+
+Warren Rodney took down a gun from the wall and began to clean it. His
+hands had the fumbling, indefinite movements, the obscure action, directed
+by a brain already begun to crumble. His industry with the gun was of a
+part with the impotent dawdling in the garden. His eyes would seek for the
+rag or the bottle of oil in a dull, glazed way, and, having found them, he
+would forget the reason of his quest. Not once that evening had they
+rested on his wife or any member of his family. He had shown no interest
+in any of the small happenings of home, the frank rivalry of Eudora's
+suitors, the bickerings of the girls and boys over the division of
+household labor. The one thing that had momentarily aroused his somnolent
+intelligence was a revival of his wife's plaint anent the unbuilt
+bird-house. That, and a certain furtive anxiety during supper lest his
+daughter Eudora should forget to keep his plate piled high, were the only
+signs of a participation in the life about him.
+
+From one of the rooms that opened to the world like a stage to the
+audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil. The last faint amethystine
+haze on the mountains was deepening. They towered about the valley where
+the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the pitiful grasp of
+these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the taller of the peaks
+still held the high lights. But all the valleys and the spaces between the
+mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the crazy house invading the
+great company of mountains, penetrating brazenly to the very threshold of
+their silent councils, seemed but a pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some
+possible giant tread. The ill-adjusted family, disputing every inch of
+ground with the wilderness, became invested with a dignity quite out of
+keeping with its achievements. Their very weaknesses and vanities, old
+Sally still clinging to her sun-bonnet and her limp rose-colored skirts,
+an eternal requiem for the dead and gone complexion, lost the
+picturesqueness of the pioneer and ranked as universal qualities,
+admissible in the austerest setting. Perhaps in some far distant council
+of the Daughters of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of
+Rodney would unctuously announce: "My great-great-grandmother was a Miss
+Tumlin of Tennessee; great-great-grandfather's first wife had been a Sioux
+squaw. Isn't it interesting and romantic?"
+
+Eudora now came to her mother with great news. Hawks had taken the first
+opportunity of being alone with her to tell her of Jim's release from jail
+and of his abortive encounter with Simpson in the eating-house. He had not
+deferred the telling from any feeling of reticence regarding the
+disclosure of family affairs before strangers. News travels in the desert
+by some unknown agency. Twenty-four hours after a thing happened it would
+be safe to assume that every cow and sheep outfit in a radius of three
+hundred miles would be discussing it over their camp-fires; and this long
+before there was an inch of telegraph wire or a railroad tire in the
+country. Hawks had merely reserved the news for Eudora's private ear
+because he hoped thus to gain an advantage over his three rivals.
+
+"Ai-yi!" said old Sally, sharply, and the chair came to an abrupt
+stand-still. "In the name o' Heaven, how kem they to let him out?" Mrs.
+Rodney's knowledge of the law was of the vaguest; and if incarceration
+would keep a prisoner out of more grievous trouble, she could not
+understand giving him his freedom. To her the case was analogous to
+releasing a child from the duress of a corner and turning him loose to
+play with matches. "How kem they to let him out?" she repeated, the still
+rocking-chair conveying the impersonal dignity of the pulpit or the
+justice-seat. "I 'ain't hearn tell of so pearty a couple as the jail an'
+Jim in years."
+
+The meaning that she put into her words belied their harsh face-value.
+With Jim in jail, her mind was comparatively at rest about him. She knew
+he had been branding other men's cattle since the destruction of his
+sheep, and she knew the fate of cattle-thieves, and that Jim would be no
+exception to the rule. With her purely instinctive maternity, she had been
+fond of Jim. He had been one more boy to mother. She harbored no
+ill-feeling towards him that he was not her own. Moreover, she wanted no
+gallows-tree intermingled with the annals of her family. It suited her
+convenience at this particular time that Jim should stay in jail. That he
+had been given his freedom loosed the phials of her condemnation on the
+incompetents that released him.
+
+"I 'low they wuz grudgin' him the mouthful they fed to him, that they ack
+so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu'n a man out to get hisself hanged.
+An' Jim never wuz a hearty eater. He never seemed to relish his food, even
+when he wuz a growin' kid."
+
+A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast solitudes
+above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling constellation
+before the girl and her mother. "It's a warning!" shivered the old woman.
+"Some'um's bound to happen." She began to rock herself slowly. The thing
+she dreaded had already come to pass in her imagination. Jim a free man
+was Jim a dead man. He was so dead that already his step-mother was going
+on with a full acceptance of the idea. She reviewed her relationship to
+him. No, she had nothing to blame herself for. He had been more
+troublesome than any of her own children and for that reason she had been
+more liberal with the rod. And yet--the face of the squaw rose before her,
+wraithlike, accusing! "Ai-yi!" she said; but this time her favorite
+expletive was hardly more than a sigh.
+
+"I mind Jim when he first kem to us," she said, more to herself than to
+Eudora, who sat at her feet. The impending tragedy in the family had
+robbed her of all the joy in her suitors. They sat on a bench on the
+opposite side of the house, divided by the very nature of their interests
+yet companions in misery.
+
+"He wuz scarce four, an' yet he had never been broke of the habit of
+sucking his thumb. Ef he'd ben my child, I'd a lammed it out'n him before
+he'd a seen two, but seem' he was aged for an infant havin' such
+practices, I tried to shame him out'n it. But, Lord a massy, men folks is
+hard to shame even at four. I hissed at him like a gyander every time I
+seen him do it. Now I'd a knowed better--I'd a sewed it up in a pepper
+rag."
+
+"What's suckin' his thumb as an infant got to do with his gettin' lynched
+now?" demanded Eudora, with the scepticism of the second generation.
+
+"Wait till you-uns has children of your own," sniffed her mother, from the
+assured position of maternal experience, "an' see the infant that's
+allowed to suck its thumb has the makin's in him of a felon or a
+unfortunit." She rocked a slow accompaniment to her dismal, prophecy.
+
+Eudora's eyes, big with wonder, were fixed on the crouching flank of a
+distant mountain. Her mother broke the silence. Not often did they speak
+thus intimately. Old Sally belonged to that class of mothers who feel a
+pride in their reticent dealings with their daughters, and who consider
+the management of all affairs of the heart peculiarly the province of
+youth and inexperience.
+
+But to-night she was prompted by a force beyond her ken to speak to the
+girl. "Eudory, in pickin' out one of them men," she jerked her thumb
+towards the opposite side of the house, "git one tha's clar o' the trick
+o' stampedin' round other wimming. It's bound to kem back to ye, same as
+counterfeit money."
+
+Eudora giggled. She was of an age when the fascinations of curiosity as to
+the unknown male animal prompt lavish conjecture. "I 'lowed they all
+stampeded."
+
+"Yes," leered the old woman--and she grinned the whole horrid length of her
+empty gums--"the most of 'em does. But you must shet your eyes to it. The
+moment they know you swallow it, they's wuthless, like horses that has run
+away once."
+
+"Hark!" said Eudora. "Ain't that wheels?"
+
+"It be," answered her mother. "It be that old Ma'am Yellett after her
+gov'ment."
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+                     Mrs. Yellett And Her "Gov'ment"
+
+
+The buckboard drew up to the back or open-faced entrance of the Rodney
+house with a splendid sweep, terminating in a brilliantly staccato halt,
+as if to convey to the residents the flattering implication that their
+house was reached via a gravelled driveway, rather than across lumpish
+inequalities of prairie overgrown with cactus stumps and clumps of
+sage-brush. From the buckboard stepped a figure whose agility was
+compatible with her driving.
+
+No sketchy outline can do justice to Mrs. Yellett or her costume. Like the
+bee, the ant, and other wonders of the economy of nature, she was not to
+be disposed of with a glance. And yet there was no attempt at subtlety on
+her part; on the contrary, no one could have an appearance of greater
+candor than the lady whose children Mary Carmichael had come West to
+teach. Her costume was a thing apart, suggesting neither sex, epoch, nor
+personal vanity, but what it lacked of these more usual sartorial
+characteristics, it more than made up in a passionate individualism; an
+excessively short skirt, so innocent of "fit" or "hang" in its wavering,
+indeterminate outline as to suggest the possible workmanship of teeth
+rather than of scissors; and riding-boots coming well to the knee,
+displaying a well-shaped, ample foot, perched aloft on the usual high heel
+that cow-punchers affect as the expression of their chiefest vanity. But
+Mrs. Yellett was not wholly mannish in her tastes, and to offset the boots
+she wore a bodice of the type that a generation ago used to be known as a
+"basque." It fitted her ample form as a cover fits a pin-cushion, the row
+of jet buttons down the front looking as if a deep breath might cause them
+to shoot into space at any moment with the force of Mauser bullets.
+
+Such a garb was not, after all, incongruous with this original lady's
+weather-beaten face. Her skin was tanned to a fine russet, showing tiny,
+radiating lines about the eyes when they twinkled with laughter, which was
+often. No individual feature was especially striking, but the general
+impression of her countenance was of animation and activity, mingled with
+geniality and with native shrewdness.
+
+"Howdy, Miz Yellett," called out old Sally, hitching her rocker forward,
+in an excitement she could ill conceal. "You-uns' gov'ment come, an' she
+ain't much bigger'n a lettle green gourd. Don't seem to have drawed all
+the growth comin' to her yit."
+
+"In roundin' up the p'ints of my gov'ment, Mis' Rodney, you don't want to
+forget that green gourds and green grapes is mighty apt to belong to the
+sour fambly, when they hangs beyant your reach."
+
+"Ai-yi!" grimaced old Sally. "It's tol'able far to send East for green
+fruit. We can take our own pep'mint."
+
+The prospective advent of a governess in the Yellett family, moreover, one
+from that mysterious centre of culture, the East, had not only rent the
+neighborhood with bitter factions, but had submitted the Yelletts to the
+reproach of ostentation. In those days there were no schools in that
+portion of the Wind River country where the Yelletts grazed their flocks
+and herds. Parents anxious to obtain "educational advantages"--that was the
+term, irrespective of the age of the student or the school he
+attended--sent them, often, with parental blindness as to the equivocal
+nature of the blessing thus conferred, to visit friends in the neighboring
+towns while they "got their education." Or they went uneducated, or they
+picked up such crumbs of knowledge as fell from the scant parental board.
+But never, up to the present moment, had any one flown into the face of
+neighborly precedent except sturdy Sarah Yellett.
+
+Old Sally, in her eagerness to convey that she was in no degree impressed
+with the pedagogical importation, like many another belligerent lost the
+first round of the battle through an excess of personal feeling. But
+though down, Sally was by no means out, and after a brief session with the
+snuff-brush she returned to the field prepared to maintain that the
+Yellett children, for all their pampering in the matter of having a
+governess imported for their benefit, were no better off than her own
+brood, who had taken the learning the gods provided.
+
+"Too bad, Miz Yellett, that you-uns had to hire that gov'ment without
+lookin' over her p'ints. I've ben takin' her in durin' supper, and she'll
+never be able to thrash 'em past Clem. She mought be able to thrash Clem
+if she got plumb mad, these yere slim wimmin is tarrible wiry 'n' active
+at such times, but she'll never be able to thrash beyant her." And having
+injected the vitriolic drop in her neighbor's cup of happiness, Old Sally
+struck a gait on her chair which was the equivalent of a gallop.
+
+But Mrs. Yellett was not the sort of antagonist to be left gaping on the
+road, awed to silence by the action of a rocking-chair, no matter how
+brilliant.
+
+"I reckon I can thrash my own children when it's needed, without gettin'
+in help from the East, or hereabouts either, for that matter. If other
+folks would only take out their public-spirited reformin' tendencies on
+their own famblies, there'd be a heap less lynchin' likely to happen round
+the country in the course of the next ten years."
+
+Old Sally let the home-thrust pass. "Who ever hearn tell of a good teacher
+that wasn't a fine thrasher in the bargain?" She swung the chair about
+with a pivotal motion, as if she were addressing an assemblage instead of
+a single listener, and then, bethinking herself of a clinching
+illustration, she called aloud to her daughter to bear witness. "Eudory!
+Eu-do-ry! You-do-ry!"
+
+"Ye-'s ma'am," drawled the daughter, coming most unwillingly from the
+open-faced room opposite, where she had been inciting all four of the
+suitors to battle.
+
+"What was it they called that teacher down to Caspar that larruped the
+hide off'n the boys?"
+
+"A fine dis-a-_ply_-narian, maw."
+
+"Yes, that's it--a dis-a-_ply_-narian. What kin a lettle green gourd like
+her know 'bout dis-apply-in?"
+
+"Your remarks shore remind me of a sayin' that 'the discomfort of havin'
+to swallow other folks' dust causes a heap of anxiety over their reckless
+driving.'"
+
+Mrs. Yellett flicked her riding-boot with her whip. Her voice dropped a
+couple of tones, her accent became one of honeyed sweetness.
+
+"Your consumin' anxiety regardin' my gov'ment and my children shore
+reminds me of a narrative appertainin' to two dawgs. Them dawgs was
+neighbors, livin' in adj'inin' yards separated by a fence, and one day one
+of them got a good meaty bone and settled hisself down to the enj'yment
+thereof. And his intimate friend and neighbor on the other side of the
+fence, who had no bone to engage his faculties, he began to fret hisself
+'bout the business of his friend. S'pose he was to choke hisself over that
+bone. S'pose the meat disagreed with him. And he begins to bark warnin's,
+but the dawg with the bone he keeps right on. But the other dawg he dashes
+hisself again the fence and he scratches with his claws. He whines
+pitiful, he's that anxious about his friend. But the dawg with the bone he
+went right on till he gnawed it down to the last morsel, and, goin' to the
+hole in the fence whar his friend had kep' that anxious vigil, he says:
+'Friend, the only thing that consoled me while having to endure the
+anguish of eatin' that bone was the thought of your watchful sympathy!'
+Which bein' the case, I'd thank you to tell me whar I can find my
+gov'ment."
+
+"Ai-yi!" said old Sally. "I ain't seein' no bone this deal. Just a lettle
+green gourd 's all I see with my strongest specs."
+
+Mary Carmichael, in one of the inner rooms, was writing a home letter,
+which was chiefly remarkable for what it failed to relate. It gave long
+accounts of the scenery, it waxed didactic over the future of the country;
+but the adventures of the trip, with her incidental acquaintance with the
+Daxes and Chugg, were not recorded. Eudora announced the arrival of Mrs.
+Yellett, and Mary, at the news, dropped the contents of her portfolio and
+started up with much the feeling a marooned sailor might have on hearing a
+sail has been sighted. At this particular stage of her career Miss
+Carmichael had not developed the philosophy that later in life was
+destined to become her most valuable asset. Her sense of humor no longer
+responded to the vagaries of pioneer life. The comedy element was coming a
+little too thick and fast. She was getting a bit heart-sick for a glimpse
+of her own kind, a word with some one who spoke her language. And here, at
+last, was the woman who had written such a charming letter, who had so
+graciously intimated that there was room for her at the hearth-stone. Mary
+was, indeed, eager to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Yellett.
+
+To the end of her life she never forgot that first meeting--the perfect
+confidence with which she followed Eudora to the open room, the ensuing
+blank amazement, the utter inability to reconcile the Mrs. Yellett of the
+letter with the Mrs. Yellett of fact. The lamp on the table, burning
+feebly, seemed to burst into a thousand shooting-stars as the girl
+struggled with her tears. Home was so far, and Mrs. Yellett was so
+different from what she had expected! And yet, as she felt her fingers
+crush in the grip of that hard but not unkindly hand, there was in the
+woman's rugged personality a sustaining quality; and, thinking again of
+Archie's prospects, Mary was not altogether sorry that she had come.
+
+"You be a right smart young maverick not to get lost none on this long
+trail, and no one to p'int you right if you strayed," commented Mary's
+patroness, affably. "But we won't roominate here no longer than we can
+help. It's too hard on old Ma'am Rodney. She's just 'bout the color of
+withered cabbage now, 'long of me havin' you."
+
+While she talked, Mrs. Yellett picked up Mary's trunk and bags and stowed
+them in the back of the buckboard with the ease with which another woman
+might handle pasteboard boxes. One or two of the male Rodneys offered to
+help, but she waved them aside and lashed the luggage to the buckboard,
+handling the ropes with the skill of an old sailor. The entire Rodney
+family and the suitors of Eudora assembled to witness the departure. "It's
+a heap friendly of you to fret so," was the parting stab of Sarah Yellett
+to Sally Rodney; and she swung the backboard about, cleared the cactus
+stumps in the Rodney door-yard, and gained the mountain-road.
+
+"Ai-yi!" said old Sally. "What's this country comin' to?"
+
+"A few more women, thank God!" remarked Ira. Eudora had just snubbed him,
+and he put a wealth of meaning into his look after the vanishing
+buckboard.
+
+The night was magnificent. From horizon to horizon the sky was sown with
+quivering points of light. Each straggling clump of sage-brush, rocky
+ledge, and bowlder borrowed a beauty not its own from the yellow radiance
+of the stars.
+
+They had gone a good two miles before Mary's patroness broke the silence
+with, "Nothing plumb stampedes my temper like that Rodney outfit--old Sally
+buckin' an' pitchin' in her rockin'-chair same as if she was breakin' a
+bronco, an' that Eudory always corallin', deceivin', and jiltin' one
+outfit of men after another. If she was a daughter of mine, I'd medjure
+her length across my knee, full growed and courted though she is. The only
+one of the outfit that's wuth while is Judith, an' she ain't old woman
+Rodney's girl, neither. You hyeard that already, did you? Well, this yere
+country may be lackin' in population, but it's handy as a sewin'-circle in
+distributin' news."
+
+Mary mentioned Leander. "Yes," answered Mrs. Yellett, reflectively,
+"Leander's mouth do run about eight and a half octaves. Sometimes I don't
+blame his wife for bangin' down the lid."
+
+They talked of Jim Rodney's troubles, and the growing hatred between sheep
+and cattle men, because of range rights.
+
+"Now that pore Jim had a heap of good citizen in him, before that
+pestiferous cattle outfit druv' his sheep over the cliff. Relations 'twixt
+sheep and cattle men in this yere country is strained beyant the
+goin'-back place, I can tell you. My pistol-eye 'ain't had a wink of sleep
+for nigh on eighteen months, an' is broke to wakefulness same as a
+teethin' babe.
+
+"Jim was wild as a coyote 'fore he marries that girl. She come all the way
+from Topeka, Kansas, thinking she was goin' to find a respectable home,
+and when she come out hyear and found the place was a dance-hall, she
+cried all the time. She didn't add none to the hilarity of the place. An'
+one day Jim he strolled in, an' seem' the girl a-cryin' like a freshet and
+wishin' she was dead, he inquired the cause. She told him how that old
+harpy wrote her, an', bein' an orphant, she come out thinkin' she was
+goin' to a respectable place as waitress, an' Jim he 'lowed it was a case
+for the law. He was a little shy of twenty at the time, just a young
+cockerel 'bout br'ilin' size. Some of the old hangers-on 'bout the place
+they see a heap of fun in Jim's takin' on 'bout the girl, he bein' that
+young that he had scarce growed a pair of spurs yet. An' one of 'em says
+to him,' Sonny, if you're afeerd that this yere corral is onjurious to the
+young lady's morals, we'll call in the gospel sharp, if you'll stand for
+the brand.' Now Jim hadn't a cent, nor no callin', nor a prospect to his
+back, but he struts up to the man that was doin' the talkin', game as a
+bantam, an' he says, 'The lady ain't rakin' in anythin' but a lettle white
+chip, in takin' me, but if she's willin', here's my hand.'
+
+"At which that pore young thing cried harder than ever. Well, Jim he up
+an' marries the girl an' it turns out fine. He gets a job herdin' sheep on
+shares, an' she stays with the Rodney outfit till he saves enough to build
+a cabin. Things is goin' with Jim like a prairie afire. In a few years he
+acquires a herd of his own, a fine herd, not a scabby sheep in the bunch.
+Alida she makes him the best kind of a wife, them kids is the pride of his
+life, and then, them cursed cattle-men do for him. Of course, he takes to
+rustlin'; I'd do more'n rustle if they'd touch mine."
+
+The pair of broncos that Mrs. Yellett was driving humped their backs like
+cats as they climbed the steep mountain-road. With her, driving was an
+exact science. It was a treat to see her handle the ribbons. Mary asked
+some trifling question about the children and it elicited the information
+that one of the girls was named Cacta. "Yes," she said, "I like new names
+for children, not old ones that is all frazzled out and folks has suffered
+an' died to. It seems to start 'em fair, like playin' cards with a new
+deck. Cacta's my oldest daughter, and I named her after the flowers that
+blooms all over the desert spite of everything, heat, cold, an' rain an'
+alkali dust--the cactus blooms right through it all. Even its own thorns
+don't seem to fret it none. I called her plain Cactus till she was three,
+and along came a sharp studyin' the flowers an' weeds out here, and he
+'lowed that Cactus was a boy's name an' Cacta was for girls--called it a
+_fee_minin tarnation, or somethin' like that, so we changed it. My second
+daughter 'ain't got quite so much of a name. She's called Clematis. That
+holds its own out here pretty well, 'long by the willows on the creek. Paw
+'lowed he was terrible afraid that I'd name the youngest girl Sage-brush,
+so he spoke to call her Lessie Viola, an' I giv' in. The boys is all plain
+named, Ben, Jack, and Ned. Paw wouldn't hear of a fancy brand bein' run
+onto 'em."
+
+The temperature fell perceptibly as they climbed the heights, and the air
+had the heady quality of wine. It was awesome, this entering into the
+great company of the mountains. Presently Mary caught the glimmer of
+something white against the dark background of the hills. It gleamed like
+a snow-bank, though they were far below the snow-line on the mountain-side
+they were climbing.
+
+"Well, here be camp," announced Mrs. Yellett. What Mary had taken for a
+bank of snow was a huge, canvas-covered wagon. Several dogs ran down to
+greet the buckboard, barking a welcome. In the background was a shadowy
+group, huge of stature, making its way down the mountain-path. "And here's
+all the children come to meet teacher." Mrs. Yellett's tone was tenderly
+maternal, as if it was something of a feat for the children to walk down
+the mountain-path to meet their teacher. But Mary, straining her eyes to
+catch a glimpse of her little pupils, could discover nothing but a group
+of persons that seemed to be the sole survivors of some titanic race. Not
+one among them but seemed to have reached the high-water mark of six feet.
+Was it an optical illusion, a hallucination born of the wonderful
+starlight? Or were they as huge as they seemed? The young men looked
+giants, the girls as if they had wandered out of the first chapters of
+Genesis. Their mother introduced them. They all had huge, warm, perspiring
+hands, with grips like bears. Mary looked about for a house into which she
+could escape to gather her scattered faculties, but the starlight, yellow
+and luminous, revealed none. There was the huge covered wagon that she had
+taken for a snow-bank, there was a small tent, there were two light
+wagons, there were dogs innumerable, but there was no sign of a house.
+
+"What do you think of it?" inquired Mrs. Yellett, smilingly, anticipating
+a favorable answer.
+
+"It's almost too beautiful to leave." Mary innocently supposed that Mrs.
+Yellett referred to the starlit landscape. "But I'm so tired, Mrs.
+Yellett, and so glad to get to a real home at last, that I'm going to ask
+if you will not show me the way to the house so that I may go to bed right
+away."
+
+This apparently reasonable request was greeted by a fine chorus of titanic
+laughter from Mary's pupils. Mrs. Yellett waved her hand over the
+surrounding landscape in comprehensive gesture.
+
+"Ain't all this large enough for you?" she asked, gayly.
+
+"You mean the mountains? They're wonderful. But--I really think I'd like to
+go in the house."
+
+"I shore hope you ain't figgerin' on goin' into no house, 'cause there
+ain't no house to go into." She laughed merrily, as if the idea of such an
+effete luxury as a house were amusing. "This yere family 'ain't ever had a
+house--it camps."
+
+Mary gasped. The real meaning of words no longer had the power of making
+an impression on her. If Mrs. Yellett had announced that they were in the
+habit of sleeping in the moon, it would not have surprised her.
+
+"If you are tired, an' want to go to bed, you can shuck off and lie down
+any time. Ben, Jack, Ned, go an' set with paw in the tent while the
+gov'ment gets ready for bed. Cacta and Clem, you help me with them
+quilts."
+
+Mary stood helpless in the wilderness while quilts and pillows were
+fetched somewhere from the adjacent scenery, and Mrs. Yellett asked her,
+with the gravity of a Pullman porter interrogating a passenger as to the
+location of head and foot, if she liked to sleep "light or dark." She
+chose "dark" at random, hating to display her ignorance of the
+alternatives, with the happy result that her bed was made up to leeward of
+the great sheep-wagon, in a nice little corner of the State of Wyoming.
+Mary was grateful that she had chosen dark.
+
+As she dozed off, she was reminded of a certain magazine illustration that
+Archie had pinned over his bed after the aunts had given a grudging
+consent to this westward journey. There was a line beneath the pictorial
+decoy which read: "Ranch Life in the New West." And there were piazzas
+with fringed Mexican hammocks, wild-grass cushions, a tea-table with a
+samovar, and, last, a lady in white muslin pouring tea. The stern reality
+apparently consisted in scorching alkali plains, with houses of the
+packing-box school of architecture at a distance of seventy or eighty
+miles apart. No ladies in white muslin poured tea; they garbed themselves
+in simple gunny-sacking, and their repartee had an acrid, personal note.
+But Mary was glad to know that Archie had that picture, and that he
+thought of her in such ideal surroundings.
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+                           On Horse-thief Trail
+
+
+Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-day
+meal to go in quest of her brother. He had left his comfortable cabin on
+the Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the "bad man's
+country," one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in Wyoming
+and furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice. Judith took
+the left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen the right, the
+day she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke with never a
+glance backward. Judith strove now to put him and the memory of that day
+from her mind by turning towards the open country without a glance in the
+direction he had taken. But her thoughts were weary of journeying over
+that trail that she would not look towards; in imagination she had
+travelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each dip and turn of the
+yellow road, each feature of the landscape as he rode exultant to Kitty,
+to be turned, tried, taken or left as her mood should prompt. But Judith
+was more woman than saint, and in her heart there was a blending of joy
+and pain. For she knew--such skill has love in inference from detail--that
+the mysterious far-away girl, who was so powerful that she could have
+whatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved her own ambitions better than
+she did Peter or Peter's happiness, and that she would not marry him
+except as a makeshift. For Miss Colebrooke wrote verses; Peter had a
+white-and-gold volume of them that Judith fancied he said his prayers to.
+
+As for Peter himself, he had never been able to explain the magic Kitty
+had brewed for him. There was a heady quality in the very ring of her
+name. His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hat
+that to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf of
+poppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen of
+corn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings. He had
+no difficulty in securing an introduction. She was a connection of the
+Wetmores, as was he, though through opposite sides of the house. In the
+few minutes' talk that followed, he had the disconcerting sensation of
+being "talked down to." There was the indulgent tolerance of the woman of
+the world to the "nice boy" about this amazing young woman, who might have
+been eighteen. Hamilton had repudiated the very suggestion of being a
+"nice boy." But he felt himself blushing, groping for words, saying stupid
+things, supplying every requisite of the "nice boy" as if he were acting
+the part. Her chaperon bore her away presently, and he was left with a
+radiant impression of corn-silk hair and a complexion that justified
+Bouguereau's mother-of-pearl flesh tints. And when she had tilted the
+ruffled lace parasol over her shoulder, so that it framed her head like a
+fleecy halo, he had seen that her eyes were green as jade. Withal he had a
+sense of having acquitted himself stupidly.
+
+Later, when he ran the gamut of some friends, they had chaffed him on his
+hardihood. By Jove! He had nerve to look at her! Didn't he know she was
+"the" Miss Colebrooke? Now Hamilton was absolutely ignorant of Miss
+Colebrooke's right of way to the definite article, but it was
+characteristic of him to make no inquiries. On the whole, he found the
+situation meeting with a greater number of the artistic requirements than
+such situations usually presented. He was still dallying with this
+pleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine,
+and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like the
+flight of a comet. Her contribution was a sonnet entitled "The Miracle."
+As a naïve emotional confession, "The Miracle" interested him; as a
+sonnet, he rent it unmercifully.
+
+Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake in
+a poetic fall of more or less magnitude. He rather conspicuously avoided a
+reference to her poetry when they met again. To him it was the very least
+of her gifts. Her hair, that had the tender yellow of ripening corn, was
+worthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making of them to some one
+else! By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to shut out the world. The
+pupils shrank to pin-points. The green looked deep--as many fathoms as the
+sea. She was all Diana by daylight, a huntress, if you will, of the
+elusive epithet, but essentially a maiden goddess, who would add no
+sprightly romance to the chronicles of Olympus. By lamp-light she
+suggested quite another divinity. The pin-points expanded; they burned
+black, like coals newly breaking into flame.
+
+When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had
+thought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment as a
+man of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be
+contributors of several years' standing to the various magazines.
+Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her as
+bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had deflected
+the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the
+picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when
+he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. An
+unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an older
+woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had
+not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to
+the conventional. If she had flirted with him, his midsummer madness would
+have evaporated into thin air; but she kept him at arm's-length,
+ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy proposed.
+
+Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that Hamilton
+did not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was swinging
+westward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her work claimed
+her and that she must renounce those sweet responsibilities that made the
+happiness of other women. It was with the protective mien of one who
+sought to shield him from an adverse destiny that she declined his suit.
+
+This had all happened seven years ago. In the mean time he had adjusted
+his disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had fallen
+in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the rôle of
+lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first love was not
+without charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have survived the
+test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney's compelling personality,
+other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess. The
+coming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into which
+Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, the
+pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence. But the
+reverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much of
+Hamilton's conduct, presented barriers alongside of which his previous
+quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke's seniority shrank to insignificance.
+He might marry a woman older than himself and swallow the grimace of it,
+but by no conceivable system of argument could he persuade himself to
+marry into a family like that of the Rodneys--the girl herself, for all her
+beauty and rare womanliness, a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme for
+obloquy, her brother a cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other men
+should make the heroic marriages of a new country. He was prepared to
+applaud their hardihood of temperament, but in his own case such a thing
+was inconceivable. Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web
+of caution and provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the
+shrivelled flies dangling in the web conveying no significance,
+apparently, beyond that of advertising the system.
+
+When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit of
+epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings and
+arrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least,
+resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated at
+the hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded
+pride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines
+flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger, if
+possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even the
+pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that
+alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had
+accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin
+youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive
+than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.
+
+The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of their
+ages. Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; she
+retained a surplus it would be rude to estimate. Her greeting of him was
+radiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to inspiration.
+A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling and the curled
+and perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to rouse those
+lightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits. But Peter only turned
+the other cheek. More than once, in the days that followed, he devoutly
+thanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with Judith had been
+governed by characteristic prudence. Kitty admitted him to her coterie,
+but he had lost nothing of his attitude of grand Turk towards her verses.
+The sin be upon the heads of whomever took such things seriously! The
+irony of fate that compelled a class poet to punch cows may have tinctured
+his judgment.
+
+A telegram recalled him to the ranch and prevented a final leave-taking
+with Miss Colebrooke. He made his adieux by letter, and they were frankly
+regretful. Miss Colebrooke's reply mingled sorrow in parting from her old
+friend with joy in having found him. Her letter, a masterpiece of
+phrase-spinning, presented to Peter the one significant fact that she
+would not be averse to the renewal of his suit. In reading her letter he
+made no allowance for the fact that the lady had made a fine art of saying
+things, and that her joy and regret at their meeting and parting might
+have been reminiscent of the printed passion that was so prominent a
+feature of magazinedom. Her letters--the like of them he had never seen
+outside printed volumes of letters that had achieved the distinction of
+classics--culminated in the one that Judith had given him that morning,
+announcing that unexpectedly she had decided to join the Wetmore girls and
+would be glad to see him at the ranch.
+
+That he had flown at her bidding, Judith knew. What she would least have
+suspected was that Miss Colebrooke had received her visitor as if his
+breakneck ride across the desert had been in the nature of an afternoon
+call. If Judith, knowing what she did of this long-drawn-out romance,
+could have known likewise of her knight's chagrin, would she have pitied
+him?
+
+Ignorant of the recent anticlimax, and with a burden of many heavy
+thoughts, Judith was penetrating a world of unleavened desolation. Beneath
+the scourge of the noon-day sun the desert lay, stripped of every
+illusion. Vegetation had almost ceased, nothing but sun-scorched,
+dust-choked sage-brush could spring from such sterility. The fruit of
+desolation, it gave back to desolation a quality more melancholy than
+utter barrenness. Glittering in the sunlight, the beds of alkali gleamed
+leper white; above them the agitated air was like the hot waves that dance
+and quiver about iron at white heat. From horizon to horizon the curse of
+God seemed to have fallen on the land; it was as if, cursing it, He had
+forgotten it, and left it as the abomination of desolation. Judith scarce
+heeded, her thoughts straying after first one then another of the group
+that made up her little world--Peter Hamilton, Kitty Colebrooke, Jim, his
+family--thoughts inconsequent as the dancing dust-devils that whirled over
+that infinity of space, and, whirling, disappeared and reappeared at some
+new corner of the compass.
+
+The trail that she must take to Jim's camp in the mountain was known to
+but few honest men. Fugitives from justice--the grave, impersonal justice
+of the law, or the swift justice of the plains--found there an asylum. And
+while they sometimes suffered, in death by thirst or hunger, a sentence
+more dreadful than the law of the land or the law of the rope would have
+given them, the desert, like the sea, seldom gave up her own. It was more
+than probable that no woman except Alida Rodney had ever taken that trail
+before, and reasonably certain that no woman had ever taken it alone.
+Dolly, when she saw the beds of alkali grow more frequent, and that the
+trails of the range cattle turned back, sniffed the lack of water in the
+air, slackened her pace, and turned an interrogatory ear towards her
+mistress.
+
+"It's all right, old girl"; the gauntleted hand patted the satin neck.
+"We're in for"--Judith flung her head up and confronted the infinite
+desolation yawning to the sky-line--"God knows what."
+
+Dolly broke into a light canter; this evidently was not an occasion for
+dawdling. There was a touch of business about the way the reins were held
+that made the mare settle down to work. But her flying hoofs made little
+apparent progress against the space and silence of the desert. Five, ten,
+fifteen miles and the curving shoulder of the mountain, that she must
+cross, still mocked in the distance. Only the sun moved in that vast world
+of seemingly immutable forces.
+
+There was no stoic Sioux in Judith now. The girl that breasted the crests
+of the foot-hills shrank in terror from the loneliness and the suggestion
+of foes lurking in ambush. The sun dropped behind the mountain, leaving a
+blood-red pool in his wake, like fugitive Cain. Already night was sweeping
+over the earth from mountain shadows that flowed imperceptibly together
+like blackened pools. To the girl following the trail the silence was more
+dreadful than a chorus of threatening voices. She listened till the
+stillness beat at her ears like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, then
+pulled up her horse, and the desert was as still as the chamber of death.
+
+"Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women folk when the night
+comes--a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and--" Dolly
+whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be completed.
+The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows, as
+deliberately as a snake swallows its victim. They were nearing the
+mountains. The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and more
+intermittently. The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher and
+higher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt the
+tension of things loosen a little.
+
+Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of hard
+winters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian superstition that
+was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings in the empty
+eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her. She dared not
+think of the dangers that the looming darkness might conceal, or of what
+she might find at her journey's end, or--"Whoa, Dolly! softly, girl. Is it
+my foolish, white-blood nerves, or is some one following?"
+
+The mare had been trained to respond to the slightest touch on her mouth,
+and stopped instantly. Judith swayed slightly in the saddle with the
+heaving of the sweating horse. The blood beat at her temples, confusing
+what she actually heard with what her imagination pictured. She was
+half-way up a towering spur of the Wind River when she slid from the
+saddle, and putting her ear to the ground listened, Indian fashion. Above
+the throbbing stillness of the desert night, that came to her murmurously,
+like the imprisoned roar of the sea from a shell, she could hear the
+regular beat of horse's hoofs following up the steep mountain grade. She
+scrambled up with the desperate nimbleness of a hunted thing, but when she
+attempted to vault to the saddle her limbs failed and she sank clinging to
+the pommel. Twice she tried and twice the trembling of her limbs held her
+captive. With the loss of each moment the beat of the hoofs on the trail
+below became more distinct. The very desperation of her plight kept her
+clinging to the pommel, incapable of thought, so that when she finally
+flung herself to the saddle she was surprised to find herself there. To
+the left the trail dropped sharply to a precipice, choked by the close
+crowding of many scrub pines. To the right the snow-clad spires of the
+Wind River kept their eternal vigil. If she should call aloud for help,
+these white, still mountains would echo the anguish of her woman's cry and
+give no further heed to her plight.
+
+The trail had begun to widen. The horse behind her again stumbled,
+loosening a stone that rolled with crashes and echoings down to the
+precipice below. She took advantage of the widening of the trail to urge
+Dolly forward. Her impulse was to put spurs to the mare and run, to take
+chances with loose stones, a narrowing trail, and the possibility of
+Dolly's stumbling and breaking a leg; but discretion prompted the showing
+of a brave front, the pleasantries of the road, with flight as the last
+resource of desperation.
+
+Suddenly gaining what seemed to be a plateau, she wheeled and waited the
+coming of this possible friend or foe. The thudding of hoofs through the
+inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest move
+of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith could hear the
+labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness of the night had
+become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were one piece with the
+gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gauntlet on her hand.
+The horse below resumed its stumbling gait. Judith crowded Dolly close to
+the rocky wall. If the chance comrade of the wilderness should pass her by
+in the darkness--God speed him!
+
+"What the devil are you blocking the trail for?" sung out a voice from the
+darkness. At sound of it Judith's heart stopped beating. The voice was
+Peter Hamilton's.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+                         The Cabin In The Valley
+
+
+And Judith, taken unawares by the unexpected turn of things, comforted as
+a lost child that is found, told all her feeling for him in the way she
+called his name. The easy tenderness of the man awoke; his senses swayed
+to the magic of her voice, the mystery of the night, the shadow world in
+which they two, 'twixt earth and sky, were alone. They rode without
+speaking. Peter's hand sought hers, and all her woman's terror of the
+desolation, her fear of the vague terrors of the dreadful night, spoke in
+her answering pressure. It was as if the desert had given them to each
+other as they groped through the silent darkness. In the great company of
+earth, sky, silence, and this great-hearted woman, Peter grew conscious of
+a real thrill. There were depths to life--vast, still depths; this woman's
+unselfish love for him made him realize them. He felt his soul sweeping
+out on the great tide of things. Farther and farther it swept; his patron
+saint, caution, beckoning frantically from the receding shore, was miles
+behind. "Judith!" he said, and he scarce recognized his own voice.
+"Judith!" he struggled as a swimmer in a drowning clutch. Then his patron
+saint threw him a life-line and he saved the situation.
+
+"Judith!" he said, a third time, and now he knew his voice. It was the
+voice of the man who tilted at life picturesquely in a broad-brimmed hat,
+who loved his darling griefs and fitted them as a Rembrandt fits its
+background. And still, in the same voice, the voice he knew, he said: "I
+feel as if we had died and our souls were meeting. You know Aldrich's
+exquisite lines:
+
+  "Somewhere in desolate, wind-swept space,
+    In twilight land--no man's land--
+  Two hurrying shapes met face to face
+    And bade each other stand.
+
+  "'And who are you?' cried one, agape,
+    Shuddering in the gloaming light.
+  I know not,' said the other shape,
+  'I only died last night.'"
+
+"'I only died last night!'" she repeated the line, slowly, significantly.
+In her questioning she forgot the night, the desolation, the presence of
+the man. Had she died last night? Had youth, the joy of living, her
+infinite capacity for love, had they died when Peter, with the ugly haste
+of the man without a nice sense of the time that should elapse between the
+old and the new love, had spurred away cheerfully at the beck of another
+woman? And now the desert, this earth-mother as she called it, in the
+Indian way, had given him back to her, thrown them together as driftwood
+in the still ocean of space. She drew a long breath, the breath of one
+waking from an anguished dream. A wild, unreasoning gladness woke in her
+heart, the joy of living swept her back again to life. She had not died
+last night, she was riding through the wilderness with Peter.
+
+"Look!" she whispered. The sky had lost its forbidding blackness. The
+sharp notches of the mountains, faintly outlined in white, undulated
+through an eternity of space. Venus hung in the west, burning softly as a
+shaded lamp. The trail they climbed seemed to end in her pale yellow
+light.
+
+Peter had saved the situation, but the wild beauty of the night stirred in
+him that gift of silvery speech that was ever his tribute to the sex,
+rather than the woman. He bent towards Judith. A loosened strand of her
+hair blew across his cheek. The breakneck ride to Kitty was already the
+madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the pale star, and
+told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless blackness through
+which they had groped was the way of life, but for such as were not
+condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp and they scaled the
+heights.
+
+And Judith, listening, found her heart a battle-field of love and hate.
+"Were women dogs, that men should play with them in idle moods, caress
+them, and fling them out for other toys?" she demanded of herself, even
+while the tones of his voice melted her innermost being to thankfulness
+for this hour that he was wholly hers.
+
+Gayly, with ready turns of speech and snatches of song, trolled in his
+musical barytone, Peter rode through the night, even as he rode through
+life, a Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart, unbrushed by the wing of sorrow,
+loving his pale griefs for the values they gave the picture. And Judith
+understood by reason of that exquisite perception that was hers in all
+matters pertaining to him, and, knowing, only loved the more.
+
+Down the valley came the sharp yelp of a coyote, and in a moment the
+towering crags had taken it up, the echo repeating it and giving it back
+to the valley, where the coyote barked again at the shadow of his voice.
+The night was full of the eerie laughter. Peter put a restraining hand on
+Dolly's bridle, and, waiting for the coyote to stop, called Judith's name,
+and all the mountains made music of it. The echo sang the old Hebrew name
+as if it had been a psalm. Peter's voice gave it to the mountains
+joyously, but the mountains gave it back in the minor. And Judith was
+reminded of the soft, singing syllables that her mother, in the Indian
+way, had made of her daughter's Indian name. The remembrance tugged at her
+heart. In her joy at seeing Peter she had forgotten that the errand that
+had brought her was an errand of life and death--life and death for her
+brother!
+
+But Peter's ready enthusiasms pressed him hard. Surely love-making was the
+business of such a night. "Ah, Judith, goddess of the heights, if I could
+sing your name like the mountains, would you love me a little?"
+
+For his pains he had a flash of white teeth in a smile that recalled his
+first acquaintance with Kitty, the sort of smile one would give to a "nice
+boy" when his manoeuvres were a trifle obvious. "Not if you sang my name
+as the chorus of all the Himalayas and the Rockies and Andes, and with the
+fire of all their volcanoes and the beauty of their snows and the strength
+of all their hills, for it's not my way to love a little!"
+
+He bent towards her; to brush her cheek lightly as they rode was but to
+imply his appreciation of the scene as a bit of chiaroscuro, the panorama
+of the desert night, eternal romance typified by the man and woman scaling
+the heights, the goddess of love lighting them on their way by her flaming
+torch. But Judith, who said little because she felt much, was in no mood
+to brook such dalliance, and, urging the mare sharply, she cantered down
+the divide at peril of life and limb. Peter, cursing the heavy-footed
+beast he rode, came stumbling after.
+
+Judith rode wildly through the night, leaving Peter laps behind, to
+beseech, to prophesy dire happening if she should slip, and to scramble
+after, as best he might, on the heavy-footed beast he repudiated, with all
+his ancestors, as oxen, to the fourth generation. But the woman kept her
+pace. She had stern questions to put to herself, and they were likely to
+have truer answers if Peter were elsewhere than riding beside her. Whither
+was he going? They had met casually on a trail known to few honest men. It
+led over a spur of the Wind River to a sort of no man's land, the
+hiding-place of horse and cattle thieves. She had gone to warn her
+brother. Could he be going there--She could not bring herself to finish.
+
+Her heart was divided against itself. Within it were fought again the red
+and the white man's battles, bitterly, and to the finish. And now the
+white man, with his open warfare, won, and all her love rose up and
+scourged her little faith. She would wait on the trail for Peter, penitent
+and ashamed. And while she waited suspicions bred of her Indian blood
+stirred distrustfully, and she told herself that her mother's daughter
+made a worthy champion of the ways of white men. Did Hamilton hunt her
+brother gallowsward, making merry with her the meantime? He had not even
+been courteously concerned as to where she was going when they met on the
+divide. They had met and ridden together as casually as if it had been the
+most natural thing for them both to be taking the horse-thief trail as a
+summer evening's ride. And she had not thought to wonder at his possible
+destination, when the man from whom she rode in terror through the night
+proved to be Peter, because the lesser question of his errand had been
+swallowed up in the greater miracle of his presence.
+
+She was by this time well down the divide. The temperature had risen
+perceptibly on the down grade. The heat of the plains had already mingled
+with the cool hill air; the heights, where Venus kept her love vigil, were
+already past. Judith gave Dolly a breathing spell, herself lounging easily
+meanwhile. She knew how to take her ease in the saddle as well as any
+cow-puncher on the range.
+
+"The Hayoka has dominion over me," she mused, with Indian fatalism. "As
+well resign myself to sorrow with dignity. Hayoka, Hayo--ka!" and she began
+to croon softly a hymn of propitiation to the Hayoka, the Sioux god of
+contrariety. According to the legends, he sat naked and fanned himself in
+a Dakota blizzard and huddled, shivering, over a fire in the heat of
+summer. Likewise the Hayoka cried for joy and laughed for sorrow.
+
+She remembered how the nuns at Santa Fé had been shocked at her for
+praying to Indian gods, and how once she had built a little mound of
+stones, which was the Sioux way of making petition, in the shadow of the
+statue of the Virgin Mary, and how Sister Angela had scattered the stones
+and told her to pray instead to the Blessed Lady. She still prayed to the
+Blessed Lady every day; but sometimes, too, she reared little mounds of
+stones in the desert when she was very sad and the kinship between her and
+the dead gods of her mother's people seemed the closer for their common
+sorrow.
+
+Peter, coming up with a much-blown horse, found her still chanting the
+Indian song.
+
+"Sing him a verse for me, Judith. Heaven knows I need something to
+straighten out my infernal luck. Tell the Hayoka that I'm a good fellow
+and need only half a chance. Tell him to prosper my present venture."
+
+She had begun to chant the invocation, then stopped suddenly. "I must not;
+you know I am a Catholic." Suspicion that had been scotched, not killed,
+raised its head. "What was his present venture?" Her eye had not changed
+in expression, nor a tone of her voice, but in her heart was a sickening
+distrust for all things.
+
+A belated moon had come up. The level plain, on which their horses threw
+grotesque, elongated shadows, was flooded with honey-colored light. Each
+straggling clump of sage-brush, whitening bone and bowlder, gleamed
+mysterious, ghostly in the radiant flood-tide. They seemed to be riding
+through a world that had no kinship with that black, formless void through
+which they had groped but yet a little while. Then darkness had been upon
+the face of the deep. Now there was a miracle of light such as only the
+desert, in its desolation, knows. To Judith, with a soul attuned to every
+passing expression of nature, there was significance in this transition
+from darkness to light. The sudden radiance was emblematic of her belated
+perception, coming as it did after a blindness so dense as to appear
+almost wilful. Her mind was busy with a multitude of schemes. Fool though
+she had been, she would not be the instrument of her brother's undoing.
+
+"I've come too far," she cried, in sudden dismay. "I should have stopped
+at the foot of the divide. I've never been over the trail before."
+
+"You foolish child, why should you stop in the middle of the wilderness?"
+
+She wheeled the mare about and faced him, a figure of graven resolution.
+
+"I promised to meet Tom Lorimer there--now you know."
+
+With which she cracked Dolly sharply with her heel and began to retrace
+her way over the trail. Peter turned his horse and followed, with the
+feeling of utter helplessness that a man has when confronted with the
+granite obstinacy of women. Judith had meanwhile expected that the
+announcement of her mythical appointment with Tom Lorimer would be
+received differently. Tom Lorimer's reputation was of the worst. An
+Eastern man formerly, an absconder from justice, rumor was busy with tales
+of ungodly merrymaking that went on at his ranch, where no woman went
+except painted wisps from the dance-halls. But Peter was too loyal a
+friend, despite his shortcomings as a lover, to see in Judith's statement
+anything more than a sisterly devotion so deeply unselfish that it failed
+to take into account the danger to which she subjected herself.
+
+However, it was plainly his duty to prevent an unprotected rendezvous with
+Lorimer, to reason, to plead, and, if he should fail to bring her to a
+reasonable frame of mind, to go with her, come what would of the result.
+There were reasons innumerable why he, a cattle-man, should avoid the
+appearance of dealing with the sheep faction, he reflected, grimly.
+Lorimer owned sheep, many thousand head. His herds had been allowed to
+graze unmolested, while smaller owners, like Jim Rodney, had been crowded
+out because his influence, politically, was a thing to be reckoned with.
+So Peter followed Judith, pleading Judith's cause; she did not understand,
+he told her, what she was doing; and while perhaps there was not another
+man in the country who would not honor her unselfishness in coming to him,
+Lorimer's chivalry was not a thing to be reckoned with, drunken beast that
+he was. And Judith, worn with the struggle, tried beyond measure, made
+reckless by the daily infusion of ill-fortune, pulled up the mare and
+laughed unpleasantly.
+
+"You think I'm going to see Lorimer about Jim? I'm going with him to a
+merrymaking. We're old pals, Lorimer and I."
+
+"Judith, dear, has it come to this, that you not only distrust an old
+friend, but that you try to degrade yourself to hide from him the fact
+that you are going to your brother's? You've never spoken to Lorimer. I
+heard him say, not a week ago, that he had never succeeded in making you
+recognize him. You deceived me at first when you spoke of meeting him--I
+thought you had a message from Jim--but this talk of merrymaking is beneath
+you." He shrugged his shoulders in disgust. He felt the torrent of grief
+that rent her. No sob escaped her lips; there was no convulsive movement
+of shoulder. She rode beside him, still as the desert before the
+sand-storm breaks, her soul seared with white-hot iron that knows no
+saving grace of sob or tear. She rode as Boadicea might have ridden to
+battle; there was not a yielding line in her body. But over and over in
+her woman's heart there rang the cry: "I am so tired! If the long night
+would but come!"
+
+Peter drew out his watch. "It's a quarter to eleven. We'll have a hard bit
+of riding to reach Blind Creek before midnight."
+
+Then he knew as well as she, perhaps better, the route to Jim's
+hiding-place; she had never been there as yet. And if Peter knew,
+doubtless every cattle-man in the country knew. What a fool she had been
+with her talk of meeting Tom Lorimer! A sense of utter defeat seemed to
+paralyze her energies. She felt like a trapped thing that after eluding
+its pursuers again and again finds that it has been but running about a
+corral. Physical weariness was telling on her. She had been in the saddle
+since a little past noon and it was now not far from midnight. And still
+there was the unanswered question of Peter's errand. It was long since
+either had broken the silence. A delicious coolness had crept into the air
+with the approach of midnight. Judith, breathing deep draughts of it,
+reminded herself of the stoicism that was hers by birthright.
+
+"Peter"--her voice lost some of its old ring, but it had a deeper
+note--"Peter, we make strange comrades, you and I, in a stranger world. We
+meet on Horse-Thief Trail, and there is reason to suppose that our errands
+are inimical. You've pierced all my little pretences; you know that I am
+going to my brother, who is an outlaw--my brother, the rope for whose
+hanging is already cut. And yet we have been friends these many years, and
+we meet in this world of desolation and weigh each other's words, and
+there is no trust in our hearts. Our little faith is more pitiful than the
+cruel errands that bring us. I take it you, too, are going to my
+brother's?"
+
+"I'm going there to see that you arrive safe and sound, but I had no
+intention of going when I left camp. You've brought me a good twenty miles
+out of my way, not to mention accusing me of ulterior motives. Now, aren't
+you penitent?" He smiled at her, boyish and irresistible. To Judith it was
+more reassuring than an oath. "It's like dogs fighting over a picked bone;
+the meat's all gone. The range is overworked; it needs a good, long rest."
+He turned towards Judith, speaking slowly. "What you have said is true.
+We're friends before we're partisans of either faction. I'm on my way to a
+round-up. There's been an unexpected order to fill a beef contract--a
+thousand steers. We're going to furnish five hundred, the XXX two hundred
+and fifty, and the "Circle-Star" two hundred and fifty. Men have been
+scouring the enemy's country for days rounding up stragglers. It will go
+hard with the rustlers after this round-up, Judith."
+
+She felt a great wave of penitence and shame sweep over her. She had not
+trusted him; in her heart she had nourished hideous suspicions of him, and
+he was telling her, quite simply, of the plans of his own faction,
+trusting her, as, indeed, he might, but as she never expected to be
+trusted.
+
+"Peter, do you know that sometimes I think Jim has gone quite mad with
+these range troubles. He's acted strangely ever since his sheep were
+driven over the cliff. He's not been home to Alida and the children since
+he has been out of jail, and you know how devoted to them he has always
+been! He spends all his time tracking Simpson. Alida wrote me that she
+expects him to-night, and I'm going there on the chance."
+
+"It's the devil's own hole for desolation that he's come to." Peter looked
+about the cup-shaped valley that was but a _cul-de-sac_ in the mountains.
+Its approach was between the high rock walls of a cañon. Passing between
+them, the rise of temperature was almost incredible. The great barrier of
+mountain-range, that cut it off from the rest of the world, seemed also to
+cut it off from light and air. The atmosphere hung lifeless, the
+occasional bellow of range-cattle sounded far-off and muffled. Vegetation
+was scant, the sage-brush grew close and scrubby, even the brilliant
+cactus flowers seemed to have abandoned the valley to its fate. A lone
+group of dead cotton-woods grew like sentinels close to the rocky walls.
+Their twisted branches, gaunt and bare, writhed upward as if in dumb
+supplication. There was about them a something that made Judith come
+closer to Peter as they passed them by. The night wind sang in their
+leafless branches with a long-drawn, shuddering sigh. The despair of a
+barren, deserted thing seemed to have settled on them.
+
+"Those frightful trees, how can Alida stand them?" She looked back. "Oh, I
+wish they were cut down!"
+
+Before them was the cabin, its ruined condition pitifully apparent even by
+night. It had been deserted ten years before Jim brought his family to it.
+Rumor said it was haunted. Grim stories were told of the death of a woman
+who had come there with a man, and had not lived to go away with him. The
+roof of the adjoining stable had fallen in, the bars of the corral were
+missing. The house was dark but for a feeble light that glimmered in one
+window, the beacon that had been lighted, night after night, against Jim's
+coming. It added a further note of apprehension, peering through the dark,
+still valley like a wakeful, anxious eye, keeping a long and unrewarded
+vigil. Judith felt the consummation of the threatening tragedy after her
+first glimpse of the sentinel trees. She could not explain, but her heart
+cried, even as the wind in them had sung of death. Perhaps her mother's
+spirit spoke to her, just as she had said, on that memorable drive, that
+the Great Mystery spoke to his people in the earth, the sky, and the
+frowning mountains.
+
+"Peter"--she had slid from her horse and was clinging to his arm--"when it
+happens, Peter, you will have no part in it?"
+
+"It won't happen, Judith, if I can help it."
+
+She kissed his hand as it held the loose reins.
+
+"Lord, I am not worthy!" was the thought in his heart. He sat graven in
+the saddle. Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart though he was, the unsought
+kiss of trust gifted him with a self-reverence that would not soon forsake
+him.
+
+Judith was rapping on the door and calling to Alida not to be frightened.
+And presently it was opened. Peter wanted to leave Judith, now that she
+was safely at the end of her journey, but she would not hear of it till he
+had eaten.
+
+"You would have had your comfortable supper five hours ago had you not
+been playing cavalier to me all over the wilderness." And Peter yielded.
+
+Judith busied herself about the kitchen. Her mood of racking apprehension
+had disappeared. Indian stoicism had again the guiding hand. She waved
+Peter from the fire that she was kindling, as if he were a blundering
+incompetent. But she let him slice the bacon and grind the coffee as one
+lets a child help. Alida came in, white-faced and anxious over the long
+absence of her husband, but conscientiously hospitable nevertheless. Peter
+noticed that Judith made a gallant pretence of eating, crumbling her bread
+and talking the meanwhile. The pale wife, who had little to say at the
+best of times, was put to the test to say anything at all. But, withal,
+their intent was so genuinely hospitable that Peter himself could not
+speak with the pity of it. Accustomed as he was to the roughness of these
+frontier cabins, never had he seen a human habitation so desolate as this.
+The mud plaster had fallen away from between the logs, showing cross
+sections of the melancholy prospect. An atmosphere of tragedy brooded over
+the place. Whether from its long period of emptiness, or from the vaguely
+hinted murder of the woman who had died there, or whether it took its
+character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was an
+unlovely thing. Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making the best
+of things, soften the woful aspect of the place. Rather was the appeal the
+more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift of the
+self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar's whine. The house was
+bare but for the few things that Alida could take in the wagon in which
+they made their flight. And all through the pinch of poverty and grinning
+emptiness there was visible the woman-touch, the brave making the best of
+nothing, the pitiful preparation for the coming of the man. Wild roses
+from the creek bloomed against the gnarled and weather-warped logs of the
+walls. Sprays of clematis trailed their white bridal beauty from cans
+rescued from the ashes of a camp-fire. But Alida was a strategist when it
+came to adorning her home, and the rusty receptacle was hid beneath
+trailing green leaves. There was at the window a muslin curtain that in
+its starched and ruffled estate was strongly suggestive of a child's frock
+hastily converted into a window drapery. The curtain was drawn aside that
+the lamp might shed its beam farther on the way of the traveller who came
+not. There was but one other light in the place, a bit of candle. Alida
+apologized for the poor light by which they must eat, but she did not
+offer to take the lamp from the window.
+
+Peter was no longer Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart as he watched the
+little, white-faced woman, who went so often to the door to look towards
+the road that entered the valley that she was no longer aware of what she
+did. He saw her wide eyes full of fear, the bow of the mouth strained taut
+with anxiety, her unconscious fear of him as one of the alien faction, and
+withal her concern for his comfort. Judith's control was far greater, but
+though she hid it skilfully, he knew the sorrow that consumed her.
+
+There was a cry from the room beyond, and Judith, snatching up the candle,
+went in to the children. All three of them were sleeping cross-ways in one
+bed, their small, round arms and legs striking out through the land of
+dreams as swimmers breasting the waves. She gave a little cry of delight
+and appreciation, and called Peter to look. Little Jim, who had cried in
+some passing fear, sat up sleepily. He stretched out his small arms to
+Peter, whom he had never seen before. Peter took him, and again he settled
+to sleep, apparently assured that he was in friendly hands.
+
+The warm, small body, giving itself with perfect confidence, strongly
+affected Peter's heightened susceptibilities. In the very nature of the
+situation he could be no friend to Jim Rodney, yet here in his arms lay
+Jim Rodney's son, loving, trusting him instinctively. Judith noticed that
+his face paled beneath its many coats of tan. He was afraid of the little
+sleeping boy, afraid that his unaccustomed touch might hurt him, and yet
+loath to part with the small burden. Judith took the boy from Peter and
+placed him between the two little girls on the bed.
+
+Through the window they could see Alida's dress glimmering, like a phantom
+in the darkness, as she strained her eyes towards the path. Peter hated to
+leave the women and children in this desolate place. The night was far
+spent. To reach the round-up in season, he could at best snatch a couple
+of hours' sleep and be again in the saddle while the stars still shone.
+His saddle and saddle blanket were enough for him. The broad canopy of
+heaven, the bosom of mother earth, had given him sound, dreamless sleep
+these many years. He bade the women good-night, and made his bed where the
+cañon gave entrance to the valley. But sleep was slow to come. Now, in
+that vague, uncertain world where we fall through oceans of space, and the
+waking is the dream, the dream the waking, Peter caught pale flashes of
+Kitty's gold head as she ran and ran, ever in the pursuit of something,
+she knew not what. And as she ran hither and thither, she would turn her
+head and beckon to Peter, and as he followed he felt the burden of years
+come upon him. And then he saw Judith's eyes, still and grave. He turned
+and wakened. No, it was not Judith's eyes, but the stars above the
+mountain-tops.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+                               The Round-up
+
+
+The stars were still shining when Peter Hamilton looked at his watch next
+morning, but he sternly fought the temptation to lie another two minutes
+by remembering the day's work before him, and went in search of the horse
+that he had not picketed overnight, as the beast required a full belly
+after the hard night's ride he had given him. Peter had rolled out of his
+blankets with a keen anticipatory relish for the day ahead. It was well,
+he knew, that there was ample work of a definite nature for Peter the
+cow-puncher; as for Peter the man, he was singularly at sea. Had Judith
+Rodney been his desert comrade all these cheerful years for him to get his
+first belated insight into the real Judith only a few little hours back?
+Or was it, he wondered, her seeming unconsciousness of him, as she rode
+brave and sorrowful through the night, to avert, if might be, her
+brother's death--at all events, to comfort and inspirit the frightened
+woman and her little children--that had freshly tinged the friendship he
+had so long felt for her? Many were the questions that Peter vaguely put
+to himself as he started out for his long day in the saddle; and none of
+them he answered. Indeed, he could not satisfactorily explain to himself
+why he should think of Judith at all in this way--Judith, whom he had known
+so long, and upon whom he counted so securely--Judith, who understood
+things, and was as good a comrade as a man. Surely it was a strange thing
+that he should discover himself in a sentimental dream of Judith!
+
+For it was in such dreams that Katherine Colebrooke had figured ever since
+Peter could remember. For years, indeed--and Judith knew it!--he had stood,
+tame and tractable, waiting for Chloe to throw her dainty lariat. But
+Chloe had intimated that her graceful fingers were engaged with the inkpot
+and her head with schemes for further sonneting. Chloe was becoming
+famous. To Peter, who was unmodern, there was little to be gained in
+arguing against a state of affairs so crassly absurd as career-getting for
+women. At such seasons it behooved sane men to pray for patience rather
+than the gift of tongues. When the disheartened fair should weary of the
+phantom pursuit, then might the man of patience have his little day. Peter
+winced at the picture. To the world he knew that his long waiting on the
+brink of the bog, while his ambitious lady floundered after false lights,
+was, in truth, no more impressive a spectacle than the anguished squawking
+of a hen who watches a brood of ducklings, of her own hatching, try their
+luck in the pond.
+
+And there was Judith the great-hearted, Judith who was as inspiring as a
+breath of hill air, Judith with no thought of careers beyond the loyal
+doing of her woman's part, Judith, trusty and loyal--and Judith with that
+accursed family connection!
+
+Peter tightened his cinch and turned his horse westward. The stars had
+grown dim in the sky. The world that the night before had seemed to float
+in a silvery effulgence looked gray and old. The cabin in the valley
+flaunted its wretched squalor, like a beggar seeking alms on the highway.
+Riding by, Peter lifted his sombrero. "Sweet dreams, gentle lady!" He dug
+the rowel into his horse's side and began his day at no laggard pace. Nor
+did he spare his horse in the miles that lay between him and breakfast.
+The beast would have no more work to do that day, when once he reached
+camp, and Peter was not in his tenderest mood as he spurred through the
+gray of the morning. The pale, chastened world was all his own at this
+hour. Not a creature was stirring. The mountains, the valleys, the softly
+huddled hills slept in the deep hush that is just before the dawn. He
+looked about with questioning eyes. Last night this very road had been a
+pale silver thread winding from the mountain crests into a world of
+dreams. To-day it was but a trail across the range. "Where are the snows
+of yester year?" he quoted, with a certain early-morning grimness. At
+heart he was half inclined to believe Judith responsible for the vanished
+world; Judith, Judith--he was riding away from her as fast as his horse
+could gallop, and yet his thoughts perversely lingered about the cabin in
+the valley.
+
+After a couple of hours' hard riding he could dimly make out specks moving
+on that huge background of space, and presently his horse neighed and put
+fresh spirit into his gait, recognizing his fellows in moving dots on the
+vast perspective. And being a beast of some intelligence, for all his
+heavy-footed failings, he reasoned that food and rest would soon be his
+portion. Peter had no further use for the rowel.
+
+Breakfast was already well under way when he reached camp. The outfit,
+seated on saddles in a semicircle about the chuck wagon, ate with that
+peculiar combination of haste and skill that doubtless the life of the
+saddle counteracts, as digestive troubles are apparently unknown among
+plainsmen. The cook, in handing Peter his tin plate, cup, spoon, and
+black-handled fork, asked him if "he would take overland trout or
+Cincinnati chicken, this morning?" The cook never omitted these jocular
+inquiries regarding the various camp names for bacon. He seemed to think
+that a choice of alias was as good as a change of menu. There was little
+talk at breakfast, and that bearing chiefly on the day's work. Every one
+was impatient for an early start. The horse wrangler had his string
+waiting, the cook was scouring his iron pots, saddles were thrown over
+horses fresh from a long night's good grazing, cinches were tightened,
+slickers and blankets were adjusted, and camp melted away in a troup of
+horsemen winding away through the gray of early morning.
+
+The scene of the beef round-up was a mighty plain, affording limitless
+scope for handling the cattle of a thousand hills. In the distance rose
+the first undulations of the mountains, that might be likened to the
+surplusage of space that rolled the length of the sweeping levels, then
+heaped high to the blue. The specks in the far distance began to grow as
+if the screw of a field-glass were bringing them nearer, turning them into
+horsemen, bunches of cattle, "chuck-wagons" of the different outfits,
+reserves of horses restrained by temporary rope-corrals, all the equipment
+of a great round-up. Dozens of men, multitudes of horses, hordes of
+cattle--the mighty plain swallowed all the little, prancing, galloping,
+bellowing things, and still looked mighty in its loneliness. Fling a
+handful of toys from a Noah's Ark--if they make such simple toys now--in an
+ordinary field, and the little, wooden men, horses and cows, will suggest
+the round-up in relation to its background. Men darted hither and thither,
+yelling shrilly; cows--born apparently to be leaders--broke from the bunches
+to which they had been assigned and started at a clumsy run, followed by
+kindred susceptible to example. Cow-punchers, waiting for just such
+manifestations of individuality, whirled after them like comets, and soon
+they were again in the pawing, heaving, sweltering bunch to which they
+belonged.
+
+Peter Hamilton, whose particular skill as a cow-puncher lay in that branch
+of the profession known as "cutting out," found that the work of the
+rustlers had been carried on with no unsparing hand since the early spring
+round-up. Calves bearing the "H L" brand--that claimed by a company known
+to be made up of cattle-thieves--followed mothers bearing almost every
+brand that grazed herds in that part of the State. The Wetmore outfit,
+that used a "W" enclosed in a square, were apparently the heaviest losers.
+The cows and calves were herded at the right of the plain, convenient to
+the branding-pen, the steers well away to the opposite side. As Peter
+drove a "W-square" cow, followed by a little, white-faced calf, whose
+brand had plainly been tampered with, he heard one of his associates say:
+
+"There's nothing small about the 'H L' except their methods."
+
+"What's 'H L' stand for, anyway?" the other cow-puncher asked.
+
+"Why, Hell, or, How Long; depends whether you're with 'em or again 'em."
+
+Peter wheeled from the men and headed for the bunch he was cutting out. He
+fancied that the man had looked at him strangely as he offered a choice of
+meanings for the "H L"--and yet he could not have known that Peter had gone
+to Rodney's cabin last night. He flung himself heart and soul into his
+work, dashing full tilt at the snorting, stamping bedlam, enveloped in
+clouds of dust that dimmed the very daylight. Calves bleated piteously as
+they were jammed in the thickening pack. Peter shouted, swung the rope
+right and left, thinning the bunch about him, and a second later emerged,
+driving before him a cow, followed by a calf. These were turned over to
+cow-boys waiting for them. Time after time Hamilton returned to that mass
+of unconscious power, that with a single rush could have annihilated the
+little band of horsemen that handled them with the skill of a dealer
+shuffling, cutting, dealing a pack of cards.
+
+To the left were the steers, pawing and tearing up the earth in a very
+ecstasy of impotent fury. Picture the giant propeller of an ocean liner
+thrashing about in the sands of the desert and you will have an
+approximate knowledge of the dust raised by a thousand steers. Their
+long-drawn, shrieking bellow had a sinister note. Horns, hoofs, tails beat
+the air, their bloodshot eyes looked menacingly in every direction; but a
+handful of cow-boys kept them in check, circling round and round them on
+ponies who did their work without waiting for quirt or rowel.
+
+The noonday sun looked down upon a scene that to the eye unskilled in
+these things was as confusion worse confounded. Cow-boys dashed from
+nowhere in particular and did amazing things with a bit of rope, sending
+it through the air with snaky undulations after flying cattle. The rope,
+taking on lifelike coils, would pursue the flying beast like an aerial
+reptile, then the noose would fall true, and the thing was done. A second
+later a couple of cow-boys would be examining the disputed brand on the
+prone animal.
+
+The smell of burning flesh and hair rose from the branding-pen and mingled
+with the stench of the herds in one noisome compound. The yells of the
+cow-punchers, each having its different bearing on the work in hand, were
+all but lost in the dull, steady roar of the cattle, bellowing in a chorus
+of fear, rage, and pain. And still the work of sorting, branding,
+cutting-out, went steadily on. Though an outsider would not have perceived
+it, the work was as crisp-cut and exact in its methods as the work in a
+counting-house. One of the cow-boys, in hot pursuit of a fractious heifer,
+encountered a gopher-hole, and horse and rider were down in a heap. In a
+second a dozen helping hands were dragging him from under the horse. He
+limped painfully, but stooped to examine his horse. The beast had broken a
+leg, and turned on the man eyes almost human in their pain.
+
+"Bob, Bob!" The cow-puncher went down on his knees and put his arms about
+the neck of his pet. "My God!" he said, "me and Bob was just like
+brothers. Everybody knowed that." He uncinched the saddle with clumsy
+tenderness; not a man thought a whit less of him because he could not see
+well at the moment. He turned his head away, that he might not see the
+well-aimed shot that would release his pet from pain. Then he limped away
+after another horse--it was all in the day's work.
+
+The beef contract called for a thousand steers, four and five years old,
+and these having been well and duly counted, and some dozen extra head
+added in case of accident, they were immediately started on the trail, as
+they could accomplish some seven or eight miles before being bedded down
+for the night. Hamilton, who had crossed to the beef side of the round-up
+to have a necessary word with the "Circle-Star" foreman, was amazed to
+find Simpson making ready to start with the trail herd. Peter inquired,
+with a few expletives, "how long he had been a cow-man, in good and
+regular standing?"
+
+"As far as the regularity is concerned, that would be a pretty hard thing
+to answer, but he's had an interest in the 'XXX' since--since--"
+
+"He drove Rodney's sheep over the cliff?"
+
+"Ain't you a little hard on the beginning of his cattle career? It usually
+goes by a more business-like name, but--" he shrugged his shoulders--"it's
+up to the 'XXX.' We wouldn't have him help to pull bogged cattle out of a
+creek."
+
+The beeves, hidden in a simoom of their own stamping, were gradually being
+pressed forward on the trail, a huge pawn, ignorant of its own strength,
+manipulated by a handful of men and horses. Its bellowing, like the tuning
+of a thousand bass-fiddles, shook the stillness like the long, sullen roar
+of the sea, as out of the plain they thundered, to feed the multitude.
+
+"Well, there goes as pretty a bunch of porterhouses as I'd want to put
+tooth to. If I get away from here within the next two months, as I'm
+expecting, doubtless I'll meet some of you again with your personality
+somewhat obscured by reason of fried onions."
+
+The foreman of the "Circle-Star" waved his hand after the slowly moving
+herd that gradually pressed forward like an army in loose marching order.
+Outriders galloped ahead, like darting insects, and pointing the lumbering
+mass that trailed its half-mile length at a snail's-pace. The great column
+steadily advanced, checked, turned, led as easily as a child trails his
+little steam-cars after him on the nursery floor, and always by the little
+force of a handful of men and a few horses.
+
+After supper came general relaxation around the camp-fire. The men, who
+had all day been strung to a keen pitch of nervous energy, lounged in
+loose, picturesque uncouthness, while each began to unravel his own lively
+miscellany of information or invention. There was jest, laughter, spinning
+of yarns, singing of songs. As Peter lay in the fire-light, smoking his
+brier-wood, he noticed that the man next him spent a great deal of time
+poring over a letter, holding it close to the blaze, now at arm's-length,
+which was hardly surprising, considering the penmanship of the more common
+variety of _billet-doux_. The man was plainly disappointed that Peter
+would not notice or comment. Finally he folded it up, and with sentimental
+significance returned it to the left side pocket of his flannel shirt, and
+remarked to Peter, "It's from her."
+
+"Indeed," said Peter, who had not the faintest notion who "her" could be.
+"Let me congratulate you."
+
+"Yes, sir," and there was conviction in the cow-puncher's tone; "it's from
+old man Kinson's girl, up to the Basin, and the parson's goin' to give us
+the life sentence soon. A man gets sick o' helling it all over creation."
+He rolled a cigarette, lit it, took a puff or two, then turned to Peter,
+as one whose acquaintance with the broader side of life entitled him to
+speak with a certain authority. "Is it that, or is it that we're getting
+on, a little long in the tooth, logy in our movements?"
+
+"I think we're just sick of helling it." Peter looked towards the star
+that last night had been the beacon towards which he and Judith had scaled
+the heights. "Yes, we get sick of helling it after we've turned thirty."
+
+"Then I can't be making a mistake. If I thought it was because I was
+getting on, I'd stampede this here range. It don't seem fair to a girl to
+allow that you're broke, tamed, and know the way to the corral, when it's
+just that you're needin' to go to an old man's home."
+
+"Now this is really love," said Peter to himself, with interest. "This is
+humility." A sympathetic liking for the self-distrustful lover surged hot
+and generous into Peter's heart, and he continued to himself: "Now that's
+what Judith would appreciate in a man, some directness, some humility!"
+Poor Judith! Poor burden-bearer! Who was to love her as she deserved to be
+loved, even as old man Kinson's girl, of the Basin, was loved? Yet suppose
+some one did love her in such fashion and she returned it? It was a
+picture Peter had never conjured up before. Nonsense! he was accustomed to
+think of Judith a great deal, and that was not the way to think of her.
+"Dear Judith!" said Peter, half unconsciously to himself, and looked again
+at the fellow, who had gone back to his dingy letter and continued to
+reread it in the fire-light as if he hoped to extract some further meaning
+from the now familiar words. Nature had fitted him out with a rag-bag
+assortment of features--the nose of a clown, the eyes of a ferret, the
+mouth that hangs agape like a badly hinged door, the mouth of the
+incessant talker. And withal, as he lounged in the fire-light, dreamily
+turning his love-letter, he had a sort of superphysical beauty, reflected
+of the glow that many waters cannot quench.
+
+Costigan, who had led the merriment against Simpson at Mrs. Clark's
+eating-house, was playing "mumbly-peg" with Texas Tyler. They had been
+working like Trojans all day at the round-up, but they pitched their
+pocket-knives with as keen a zest as school-boys, bickering over points in
+the game, accusing each other of cheating, calling on the rest of the
+company to umpire some disputed point.
+
+But presently, from the opposite side of the fire, some one began to sing,
+in a rich barytone, a dirgelike thing that caught the attention of first
+one then another of the men, making them stop their yarning and
+knife-throwing to listen. The tune, in its homely power to evoke the image
+of the ceremonial of death, was more or less familiar to most of them.
+There was a conscious funeral pageantry in the ring of its measured
+phrases that recalled to many burials of the dead that had taken place in
+their widely scattered homes. Mrs. Barbauld's hymn, "Flee as a Bird to the
+Mountain," are the words usually sung to the air.
+
+Costigan presently cut across the dirgelike refrain with: "Phwat th' divil
+is ut about that chune that Oi'm thinkin' of?"
+
+"This," said the man with the barytone voice, "is the tune that Nick
+Steele saved his neck to."
+
+"Begorra, that's ut. I wasn't there mesilf, but Oi've heard th' story told
+more times than Oi've years to me credit."
+
+"My father was in that necktie party," spoke up a young cow-puncher, "and
+I've heard him tell the story scores of times, and he always wondered why
+the devil they let Steele off. Never could understand it after the thing
+was done. He was talking of it once to a man who was a sharp on things
+like mesmerism, and the man called it hypnotic suggestion. Said that
+Steele got control of the whole outfit and mesmerized 'em so they couldn't
+do a thing to him."
+
+Several of the men asked for the story, echoes of which had come down
+through all the forty years since its happening. And the cow-puncher,
+lighting a cigarette, began:
+
+"It was in the good old forty-nine days in California, when gold was
+sometimes more plentiful than bread, and women were so scarce that one day
+when they found a girl's shoe on the trail they fitted a gold heel to it
+and put it up in camp to worship. But sentiment wasn't exactly their long
+suit, and any little difficulties that cropped up were straightened out by
+the vigilance committee--and a rope. One day a saddle, or maybe it was a
+gun, that didn't belong to him, was found among this man Steele's traps,
+and though he swore that some one had put it there for a grudge, the
+committee thought that a hemp necktie was the easiest way out of the
+argument. And this here Steele party finds himself, at the age of
+twenty-four, with something like thirty minutes of life to his credit. He
+don't take on none, nor make a play for mercy, nor try any fancy
+speech-making. He just waits round, kinder pale, but seemin' indifferent,
+considerin' it was his funeral that was impendin'. I've heard my father
+say that he was a tall, slim boy, with a kind of girlish prettiness, and
+the committee looked some for hysterics and they didn't get none. The
+noose was made ready and they told Steele he could have five minutes to
+pray, if he wanted to, or he could take it out in cursing, just as he
+chose. The boy said he felt that he hadn't quite all that was coming to
+him in the way of enjoyment, and that while he was far from criticising
+the vigilance committee, he was not altogether partial to the nature of
+his demise, and if it was just the same to them, instead of praying or
+cursing, he'd take that five minutes for a song.
+
+"They was agreeable, and he up and steps on the scaffold, what they was
+mighty proud of, it bein' about the only substantial structure the town
+could boast. He began to sing that thing you've all been listening to, and
+he had a voice like water falling light and fine in a pool below. They
+crowded up close about the scaffold and listened. The words he put to it
+were his own story, just like those old minstrels that you read about, and
+at the end of each verse came the chorus, slow and solemn as the moment
+after something great has happened. There wasn't a hangin'-face in the
+crowd after he was started. At some time or other every man had heard
+somebody he thought a heap of, buried to that tune, and his voice got to
+workin' on their imaginations and turned their hearts to water. I don't
+remember anything but the chorus--that went like this:
+
+  "'Who'll weep for me, on the gallows tree,
+    As I sway in the wind and swing?
+  Is there never a tear to be shed for me,
+    As I swing by a hempen string?
+  Who'll weep, who'll keep
+  Watch, as I'm rocked to sleep,
+    Rocked by a hempen string?'"
+
+There was a long silence, broken only by the crackle of the logs in the
+camp-fire and the night sounds of the lonely plain. The leaping flames
+showed a group of thoughtful faces. Finally, Costigan broke the silence
+with:
+
+"Begorra, 'tis some av thim 'ud be doin' well to be lukin' to their
+music-lessons about here, Oi'm thinkin', afther th' day's wurruk."
+
+The Irishman, with his instinctive loquacity, had expressed what none of
+the rest would have considered politic to hint. It was like the giving way
+of the pebble that starts the avalanche. Soon they were deep in tales of
+lynchings. Peter knew only too well the trend of their talk, the "XXX" men
+were feeling the public pulse, as it were. Now, according to the unwritten
+code of the plains, lynching was "meet, right, just, and available" for
+the cattle-thief. And Peter felt himself false to his creed, false to his
+employer, false to himself, in seeking to evade the question. And yet that
+pitiful cabin, the white-faced woman running to the door so often that she
+knew not what she did, and the little rosy boy, who had put out his arms
+so trustfully! Peter broke into their grewsome yarning. "Lord, but you're
+like a lot of old women just come from a funeral!"
+
+"Whin the carpse died hard, and th' wake was a success." Costigan turned
+over. "Werra, werra, but we'll be seein' fairies the night!"
+
+A "XXX" man turned his head with a deliberate slowness and regarded Peter
+with narrowing eyes: "If the subject of cattle-thieves and their
+punishment is unpleasant to the gentleman from New York, perhaps he will
+favor us with something more cheerful." It was the same man who had given
+the two definitions of the "H L" brand that morning at the round-up.
+
+"Delighted," said Peter, affecting not to notice the significance of the
+man's remark. "Did you ever hear of the time that Tony Neville was burned
+with snow?"
+
+The "XXX" man yawned long and audibly. No one seemed especially interested
+in Tony Neville's having been burned with snow, but Peter struck out
+manfully, just in time to head off a man who said that he had seen Jim
+Rodney or some one who looked like him, following the trail-herd.
+
+"Once on a time, when it paid to be a cattle-man," began Peter, "there was
+an outfit near Laramie that hailed from the United Kingdom, every mother's
+son of them. A fine, manly lot of fellows, but wedded to calamity along of
+their cooks--not the revered range article," and Peter waved his hand
+towards the "W-square" cook, who was one of the party, "but the pampered
+ranch article that boasts a real stove, planted in a real kitchen, the
+spoiled darling that never has to light a fire out of wet wood in the
+rain.
+
+"These unhappy Britons had every species of ill luck that could befall an
+outfit, in the way of cooks; they were of every nationality, age, and sex,
+and they stole, drank, quarrelled, till the outfit determined to sweep the
+house clear of them and do its own cooking. Every man was to have a turn
+at it for a week. There was a Scotchman, who gave them something called
+'pease bannocks,' three times a day; followed by an Irishman, who
+breakfasted them on potatoes and whiskey. There was an Englishman, who had
+a beef slaughtered every time he fancied a tenderloin. There was a
+Welshman, who sang as he cooked. There were as many different kinds of
+indigestion as there were men in the outfit. They would beg to do
+night-herding, anything to get them away from that ranch. Finally, when
+their little tummies got so bad that their overcoats thickened, or wore
+through, or whatever happens to stomachs' overcoats that are treated
+unkindly, some one's maiden aunt sent him a tract saying that rice was the
+salvation of the human race, as witness the Chinese. Whosever turn it was
+to cook that week determined to try the old lady's prescription. Rice was
+procured, about a peck, I think; and the man who was cooking, pro tem, put
+the entire quantity on to boil in a huge ham-boiler, over a slow fire, as
+per the directions of the maiden aunt. The rice seemed to be doing nicely,
+when some one came in and said that a bunch of antelope was over on the
+hills and there was a good chance to get a couple. Every man got his gun,
+all but the cook, and he looked at the rice, that hadn't done a thing over
+the slow fire, in a way that would melt your heart. 'Just my luck that it
+should be my week to pot-wrestle when there's good hunting right at one's
+front door.'
+
+"'Oh, come on,' some one said. 'Didn't Kellett's aunt say the rice ought
+to be cooked over a slow fire? Kellett, get your aunt's letter and read
+the directions for cooking that rice again.'
+
+"The cook didn't need a second invitation, and they got into their
+saddles, cook and all, and went for the antelope.
+
+"Now antelope are not like stationary wash-tubs; they move about. And when
+that particular outfit arrived at the spot where those antelope were last
+seen, they had moved, but the boys found traces of them, and continued on
+their trail. They went in the foot-hills and they searched for those
+antelope all day. They caught up with old man Hall's outfit at dinner-time
+and were invited to take a bite. Coming home by way of the 'Circle-Star'
+ranch, Colonel Semmes asked them in to have a mint-julep; the colonel was
+a South Carolinian, and he had just succeeded in raising some mint. They
+had several--I fear more than several--drinks before leaving for home, with
+never a trace of antelope nor a thought of the rice cooking over the slow
+fire. The colonel remembered some hard cider that he had, and topping off
+on that, they set out. The weather was pretty warm, and on their way home
+they experienced some remorse over the hard cider. Now hard cider is an
+accumulative drink; it piles up interest like debt or unpaid taxes. And by
+the time those Englishmen had turned the little lane leading into their
+home corral, they saw a sight that made their sombreros rise. As I have
+said before, it was hot, being somewhere in the month of August.
+Gentlemen, I hardly expect you to believe me when I say it was snowing on
+their house, and not on another God blessed thing in the landscape.
+
+"The blame thing about it was, that every man took the phenomenon to be
+his own private view of snakes, or their bibulous equivalent, manifested
+in another and more terrifying form. Here was the August sun pouring down
+on the plain where their ranch-house was situated; everything in sight hot
+and dry as a lime-kiln, grasshoppers chirping in a hot-wave prophecy, and
+snow covering the house and the ground, about to what seemed a depth of
+four inches. Every one of them felt sensitive about mentioning what he saw
+to the others. You see, gentlemen, being unfamiliar with American drinks,
+and especially old Massachusetts cider, they merely looked to keep their
+saddles and no questions asked.
+
+"But when they got a bit closer the horror increased. Flying right out of
+their windows were perfect drifts of snow, banks of it, gentlemen, and the
+thermometer up past a hundred. One of the men looked about him and noticed
+the pallor on the faces of the rest:
+
+"'Do you notice anything strange, old chap? These cursed American drinks!'
+
+"'Strange!'--the boy he had spoken to was about eighteen, a nice,
+red-cheeked English lad out with his uncle learning the cattle business.
+'Good God!' the boy said. 'I've always tried to lead a good life, and here
+I am a paretic before I've come of age.'
+
+"They halted their horses and held a consultation. The boss came to the
+conclusion that since they had all seen it, there was nothing to do but
+continue the investigation and send the details to the 'Society for
+Psychical Research,' when he got down from his horse and walked towards
+the door of the house. At his approach, as if to rebuke his wanton
+curiosity, a great blast of snow blew out of the window and got him full
+in the face. He howled--the snow was scalding hot.
+
+"Then they remembered the rice."
+
+"Is that all?" demanded the man who had wanted to talk about rustling.
+
+"Isn't it enough?" said Peter, who could afford to be magnanimous, now
+that he had accomplished his point.
+
+"When I first heard that story, 'bout ten years ago, it ended with the
+Britishers riding like hell over to the Wolcott ranch to borrow umbrellas
+to keep off the hot rice while they got into the house," said the man,
+still sulky.
+
+"That's the way they tell it to tenderfeet," and Peter turned on his heel.
+The story-telling for the evening was over, the boys got their blankets
+and set about making their beds for the night.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+                         Mary's First Day In Camp
+
+
+The first day spent as governess to the family of Yellett reminded Mary
+Carmichael of those days mentioned in the opening chapter of Genesis, days
+wherein whole geological ages developed and decayed. Any era, geological
+or otherwise, she felt might have had its rise, decline, and fall during
+that first day spent in a sheep camp.
+
+She awoke to the sound of faint tinklings, and accepted the towering peaks
+of the Wind River mountains, with their snowy mantles all shadowy in the
+whitening dawn, and the warmer grays of huddling foot-hills, as one
+receives, without question, the fantastic visions of sleep. The faint
+tinkling grew nearer, mingled with a light pitter patter and a far off
+baa-ing and bleating; then, as shadowy as the sheep in dreams, a great
+flock came winding round the hill; in and out through the sage-brush they
+went and came, elusive as the early morning shadows they moved among. The
+air was crystalline and sparkling; creation's first morning could not have
+promised more. It would have been inconsistent in such a place to waken in
+a house; the desert, that seemed a lifeless sea, the sheep moving like
+gray shadows, were all parts of a big, new world that had no need of
+houses built by hands.
+
+Ben, oldest of the Brobdingnag tribe, who had greeted Mary's request to be
+directed to "the house" as a bit of dry Eastern humor, led the herd to
+pasture. Ben's right-hand man was "Stump," the collie, so named because he
+had no tail worth mentioning, but otherwise in full possession of his
+faculties. Stump was newly broken to his official duties and authority sat
+heavily on him. Keenly alert, he flew hither and thither, first after one
+straying member of the herd, then another, barking an early morning
+roll-call as he went. Two other male Brobdingnags came from some
+sequestered spot in the landscape and joined Ben--Mary recognized two more
+pupils.
+
+Mrs. Yellett then unrolled the pillow constructed the night previous of
+such garments as she had been willing to dispense with, and put them on.
+The vastness of her surroundings did not prevent her from locating the
+minutest article, and Mary gave her the respectful admiration of a woman
+who has spent a great deal of time searching for things in an infinitely
+smaller space. The matriarch then called the remaining members of her
+household officially--the Misses Yellett accomplished their early morning
+toilets with the simplicity of young robins. Only the new governess hung
+back, but finally mustered up enough courage to say that if such a thing
+was possible she would like to have a bath.
+
+Mrs. Yellett greeted her request with the amused tolerance of one who has
+never given such a trifle a thought.
+
+"The habit of bathing," she commented, "is shore like religion: them that
+observes it wonders how them that neglects it gets along." She beckoned
+Mary to follow, and led the way to a bunch of willows that grew about a
+stone's-throw from the camp. "Here be a whole creek full of water, if you
+don't lack the fortitood. It's cold enough to sell for ten cents a glass
+down to Texas."
+
+Somewhat dismayed, Mary stepped gingerly into the creek. Its intense cold
+numbed her at first, but a second later awoke all her young lustiness, and
+she returned to camp in a fine glow of courage to encounter whatever else
+there might be of novelty. Mrs. Yellett was preparing breakfast at a
+sheet-iron stove, assisted by Cacta and Clematis.
+
+"Your hankering after a bath like this"--she added another handful of flour
+to the biscuit dough--"do shore remind me of an Englishman who come to
+visit near Laramie in the days of plenty, when steers had jumped to
+forty-five. This yere Britisher was exhibit stock, shore enough, being
+what's called a peer of the realm, which means, in his own country, that
+he is just nacherally entitled from the start to h'ist his nose high.
+
+"The outfit he was goin' to visit wasn't in the habit of havin' peers drop
+in on them casual, but they aimed to make him feel that he wasn't the
+first of the herd that headed that way by a quart"--she cut four biscuits
+with a tin cup, and resumed--"to which end they rounded up every specimen
+of canned food that's ever come across the Rockies.
+
+"'Let him ask for "salmon esplinade," let him ask for "chicken marine-go,"
+let him ask for plum-pudding, let him ask for hair-oil or throat
+lozengers, this yere outfit calls his bluff,' says Billy Ames, who owns
+the 'twin star' outfit and is anticipatin' this peer as a guest.
+
+"Well, just as everything is ready, the can-opener, sharp as a razor,
+waitin' to open up such effete luxuries as the peer may demand, Bill Ames
+gets called to California by the sickness of his wife. He feels mean about
+abandonin' the peer, but he don't seem to have no choice, his wife bein'
+one of them women who shares her bad health pretty impartially round the
+family. So Billy he departs. But before he goes he expounds to Joplin Joe,
+his foreman, the nature of a peer and how his wants is apt to be a heap
+fashionable, and that when he asks for anything to grasp the can-opener
+and run to the store-house--Cacta, you put on the coffee!
+
+"That peer arrives in the afternoon, and he never makes a request any more
+than a corpse. Beyond a marked disposition to herd by himself and to
+maintain the greatest possible distance between his own person and a
+six-shooter, he don't vary none from the bulk of tenderfeet. At night,
+when all parties retires, and Joplin Joe ponders on them untouched, effete
+luxuries in the store-room, and how the can-opener 'ain't once been dimmed
+in the cause of hospitality, it frets him considerable, and he feels he
+ain't doin' his duty to the absent Billy Ames.
+
+"At sunrise he can stand it no longer. He thunders on the Britisher's door
+with the butt of his six-shooter, calling out:
+
+"'Peer, peer, be you awake?'
+
+"The peer allowed he was, though his teeth was rattling like broken
+crockery.
+
+"'Peer, would you relish some "salmon esplinade"?'
+
+"The peer allowed he wouldn't.
+
+"'Peer, would you relish some "chicken marine-go"?'
+
+"The peer allowed he shore wouldn't, and the crockery rattled harder than
+ever. Joplin Joe then tried him on the hair-oil and the throat lozengers,
+the peer declining each with thanks.
+
+"'Peer,' said Joplin Joe, fair busting with hospitality, 'is there
+anything in this Gawd's world that you do want?'
+
+"The crockery rattled an interlood, then Joplin Joe made out:
+
+"'Thanks, very much. I should like a ba-ath'--Clematis, you see if them
+biscuits is brownin'.
+
+"Joe he ran to the store-room, and his eye encountered a barrel of
+corned-beef. He calls to a couple of cow-punchers, and the first thing you
+know that late corned steer is piled onto the prairie and them
+cow-punchers is hustling the empty barrel in to the peer. Next they
+detaches the steps from the kitchen door, ropes 'em to the barrel and
+introduces the peer to his bath. He's good people all right, and when he
+sees they calls his bluff he steps in all right and lets 'em soak him a
+couple of buckets. This here move restores all parties to a mutual
+understanding, and the peer he bathes in the corned-beef barrel regular
+durin' his stay--you see the habit had cinched him."
+
+Ned had shot an antelope a day or two previous, and antelope steak,
+broiled over a glowing bed of wood coals, with black coffee, stewed dried
+apples, and soda biscuit made up what Mary found to be an unexpectedly
+palatable breakfast. As camp did not include a cow, no milk or butter was
+served with meals. Nevertheless, the hungry tenderfoot was quite content,
+and missed none of the appurtenances she had been brought up to believe
+essential to a civilized meal, not even the little silver jug that Aunt
+Martha always insisted came over with William the Conqueror--Aunt Martha
+scorned the _May-flower_ contingent as parvenus.
+
+The family sat on the grass, tailor fashion, and every one helped himself
+to what appetite prompted, in a fashion that suggested brilliant gymnastic
+powers. To pass a dish to any one, the governess discovered, was construed
+as an evidence of mental weakness and eccentricity. The family satisfied
+its appetite without assistance or amenities, but with the skill of a
+troupe of jugglers.
+
+Breakfast was half over when Mrs. Yellett laid down her knife, which she
+had handled throughout the meal with masterly efficiency. Mary watched her
+in hopeless embarrassment, and wondered if her own timid use of a tin fork
+could be construed as an unfriendly comment upon the Yelletts' more simple
+and direct code of table etiquette.
+
+"Land's sakes! I just felt, all the time we've been eating, we was
+forgettin' something. You children ought to remember, I got so much on my
+mind."
+
+All eyes turned anxiously to the cooking-stove, while an expression of
+frank regret began to settle over the different faces. The backbone of
+their appetites had been broken, and there was something else, perhaps
+something even more appetizing, to come.
+
+Interpreting the trend of their glance and expression, up flared Mrs.
+Yellett, with as great a show of indignation as if some one had set a
+match to her petticoats.
+
+"I declare, I never see such children; no more nacheral feelin's than a
+herd of coyotes; never thinks of a plumb thing but grub. No, make no
+mistake about the character of the objec' we've forgot. 'Tain't sweet
+pertaters, 'tain't molasses, 'tain't corn-bread--it's paw! It's your pore
+old paw--him settin' in the tent, forsook and neglected by his own
+children."
+
+All started up to remedy their filial neglect without loss of time, but
+Mrs. Yellett waved them back to their places.
+
+"Don't the whole posse of you go after him, like he'd done something and
+was to be apprehended. Ben, you go after your father."
+
+Ben strode over to the little white tent that Mary had noticed glimmering
+in the moonlight the preceding evening, and presently emerged, supporting
+on his arm a partially paralyzed old man, who might have been Rip Van
+Winkle in the worst of tempers. His white hair and beard encircled a
+shrivelled, hawklike face, the mouth was sucked back in a toothless eddy
+that brought tip of nose and tip of chin into whispering distance, the
+eyes glittered from behind the overhanging, ragged brows like those of a
+hungry animal searching through the brush for its prey.
+
+"If you've done eatin'," whispered Mrs. Yellett to Miss Carmichael, "you'd
+better run on. Paw's langwidge is simply awful when we forget to bring him
+to meals." Mary ran on.
+
+When, after the lapse of some thirty minutes or so, the stentorian voice
+of Mrs. Yellett recalled Mary to camp, she found that the tin breakfast
+service had been washed and returned to the mess-box, the beds had been
+neatly folded and piled in one of the wagons--in fact, the extremely simple
+tent-hold, to coin a word, was in absolute order. It was just 6 A.M., and
+Mrs. Yellett thought it high time to begin school. Mary tried to convey to
+her that the hour was somewhat unusual, but she seemed to think that for
+pupils who were beginning their tasks comparatively late in life it would
+be impossible to start sufficiently early in the morning. So at this young
+and tender hour, with many misgivings, Mary set about preparing her _al
+fresco_ class-room.
+
+She chose a nice, flat little piece of the United States, situated in the
+shade of the clump of willows that bordered a trickling creek not far from
+her sylvan bath-room of the early morning. How she was to sit on the
+ground all day and yet preserve a properly pedagogical demeanor was the
+first question to be settled. That there was nothing even remotely
+resembling a chair in camp she felt reasonably assured, as "paw" was
+sitting on an inverted soap-box under a pine-tree, and "paw," by reason of
+age and infirmity, appropriated all luxuries. Mrs. Yellett, with her usual
+acumen, grasped the situation.
+
+"I'm figgerin'," she commented, "that there must be easier ways of
+governin' than sittin' up like a prairie-dog while you're at it."
+
+Mrs. Yellett took a hurried survey of the camp, lessening the distance
+between herself and one of the light wagons with a gait in which grace was
+entirely subservient to speed; then, with one capacious wrench of the
+arms, she loosened the spring seat from the wagon and bore it to the
+governess with an artless air of triumph. It was difficult, under these
+circumstances, to explain to Mrs. Yellett that without that symbol of
+scholastic authority, a desk, the wagon seat was useless. Nevertheless,
+Mary set forth, with all her eloquence, the mission of a desk. Mrs.
+Yellett was genuinely depressed. Had she imported the magician without his
+wand--Aladdin without his lamp? She proposed a bewildering choice--an
+inverted wash-tub, two buckets sustaining the relation of caryatides to a
+board, the sheet-iron cooking-stove. In an excess of solicitude she even
+suggested robbing "paw" of his soap-box.
+
+Mary chose the wash-tub on condition that Mrs. Yellett consented to
+sacrifice the handles in the cause of lower education. She felt that an
+inverted tub that was likely to see-saw during class hours would tend
+rather to develop a sense of humor in her pupils than to contribute to her
+pedagogical dignity.
+
+The camp, as may already have been inferred, enjoyed a matriarchal form of
+government. Its feminine dictator was no exception to the race of
+autocrats in that she was not an absolute stranger to the rosy byways of
+self-indulgence. There was a strenuous quality in her pleasuring perhaps
+not inconsistent in one whose daily tasks included sheep-herding,
+ditch-digging, varied by irrigating and shearing in their proper seasons.
+Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that her wash-tub bore
+about the same relationship to her real duties as does the crochet needle
+or embroidery hoop to the lives of less arduously engaged women. It was at
+once her fad and her relaxation, the dainty feminine accomplishment with
+which she whiled away the hours after a busy day spent with pick and
+shovel. Of all this Mary was ignorant when she proposed that Mrs. Yellett
+saw off the tub-handles in the cause of culture. However, Mrs. Yellett
+procured a saw, yet the hand that held it lingered in its descent on the
+handles. She contemplated the tub as affectionately as Hamlet regarding
+the skull of "Alas, poor Yorick!"
+
+"This," she observed, "is the only thing about camp that reminds me I'm a
+woman. I'd plumb forget it many a time if it warn't for this little tub.
+The identity of a woman is mighty apt to get mislaid when dooty compels
+her to assoome the pants cast aside by the nacheral head of the house in
+sickness or death. It's ben six years now since paw's done a thing but set
+'round and wait for meals." Mrs. Yellett sighed laboriously. "Not that I'm
+holdin' it agin him none. When a man sees eighty, it's time he bedded
+himself down comfortable and waited for the nacheral course of events to
+weed him out. But when the boys get old enough to tend to herdin',
+irrigatin', and the work that God A'mighty provided that man might get the
+chance to sweat hisself for bread, accordin' to the Scriptures, I aim to
+indulge myself by doin' a wash of clothes every day, even if I have to
+take clean clothes and do 'em over again."
+
+The poor "gov'ment's" tender heart could not resist this presentation of
+the case.
+
+"We won't touch the handles, Mrs. Yellett," she laughed. "I'm glad you
+told me you had a personal sentiment for the tub. There are some things I
+should feel the same way about--my hoe and rake, for instance, that I care
+for my garden with, at home. And that suggests to me, why not dig two
+little trenches for the handles and plant the tub? Then I shall have an
+even firmer foundation on which to arrange the--the--the educational
+miscellany."
+
+The suggestion of this harmless expedient was gratefully received, and the
+"desk" duly implanted, whereupon Mary pathetically sought to embellish her
+"class-room" from such scanty materials as happened to be at hand. A
+hemstitched bureau scarf that she had tucked in her trunk, in
+unquestioning faith in the bureau that was to be part of the ranch
+equipment, took the "raw edge," as it were, off the desk. A bunch of
+prairie flowers, flaming cactus blossoms in scarlet and yellow, ox-eyed
+daisies, white clematis from the creek, seemed none the less decorative
+for the tin cup that held them. Mary grimly told herself that her school
+was to have refining influences, even if it had no furniture.
+
+The books, pencils, and paper arranged in decorous little piles, Miss
+Carmichael announced to her patroness that school was ready to open. Mrs.
+Yellett, who had never heard that "a soft voice is an excellent thing in
+woman," and whose chest-notes were not unlike those of a Durham in
+sustained volume of sound, made the valley of the Wind River echo with the
+summons of the pupils to school, upon which the teacher herself was
+overcome by the absurdity of the situation and had barely time to escape
+back of the willows, where she laughed till she cried.
+
+As the pupils trooped obediently to school, Mary noted that they carried
+no flowers to their dear teacher, but that Ben, the oldest pupil,
+twenty-one years old, six feet four inches in height and deeply saturnine
+in manner, carried a six-shooter in his cartridge-belt. The teacher felt
+that she was the last to deny a pupil any reasonable palliative of the
+tedium of class-hours--the nearness of her own school-days inclined her to
+leniency in this particular--but she was hardly prepared to condone a
+six-shooter, and confided her fears to Mrs. Yellett, who received them
+with the indulgent tolerance a strong-minded woman might extend to the
+feminine flutter aroused by a mouse. She explained that Ben did not shoot
+for "glory," but to defend the herd from the casual calls of
+mountain-lions, bears, and coyotes. Jack and Ned, who were very nearly as
+tall as their older brother, carried similar weapons. Mary prayed that a
+fraternal spirit might dwell among her pupils.
+
+The Misses Yellett were hardly less terrifying than their brothers. They
+had their father's fierce, hawklike profile, softened by youth, and the
+appalling height and robustness due to the freedom and fresh air of a
+nomadic existence. Their costumes might, Mary thought, have been fashioned
+out of gunny-sacks by the simple expedient of cutting holes for the head
+and arms. The description of the dress worn by the charcoal-burner's
+daughter in any mediaeval novel of modern construction would approximate
+fairly well the school toilets of these young lady pupils. The boys wore
+overalls and flannel shirts, which, in contrast to the sketchy effects of
+their sisters' costumes, seemed almost modish. Mrs. Yellett then left the
+"class-room," saying she must take Ben's place with the sheep.
+
+The Brobdingnags, huge of stature, sinister of aspect, deeply distrustful
+of the rites in which they were about to participate, closed in about
+their teacher. From the pigeon-holes of memory Mary drew forth the
+academic smile with which a certain teacher of hers had invariably opened
+school. The pupils greeted the academic smile with obvious suspicion. No
+one smiled in camp. When anything according with their conception of the
+humorous happened, they laughed uproariously. Thus, early in the morning,
+on his way to breakfast, Ned had stumbled over an ax and severely cut his
+head. Every one but Ned saw the point of this joke immediately, and hearty
+guffaws testified to their appreciation.
+
+Miss Carmichael took her place behind the upturned tub.
+
+"Will you please be seated?" she said.
+
+The class complied with the instantaneous precision of automata newly
+greased and in excellent working order. Their abrupt obedience was
+disconcerting. Some one must have been drilling them, thought their
+anxious teacher, in the art of simultaneous squatting. The temper of the
+class respecting scholastic deportment leaned towards rigidity bordering
+on self-torture.
+
+Mary made out a roll-call, and by unanimous consent it was agreed to
+arrange the class as it then stood, or rather squatted, with the Herculean
+Ben at the top, and gradually diminishing in size till it reached the
+vanishing point with Cacta, who was ten and the least terrifying of all.
+
+"And now," ventured the teacher, with the courage of a white rabbit, "what
+have you been in the habit of studying?"
+
+Absolute silence on the part of the class, which confronted its questioner
+straight as a row of bottles, presenting faces imperturbable as so many
+sphinxes.
+
+Other questions met with an equally disheartening response. Miss
+Carmichael sat up straight, pushed back the persistent curls from her
+face, and bent every energy towards the achievement of a "firm" demeanor.
+
+"Clematis," said she, wisely selecting perhaps the least formidable of the
+class, "I want you to give me some idea of the kind of work you have been
+doing, so that we may all be able to understand each other. Now, in your
+mathematics, for instance, which of you have finished with your
+arithmetic, and which--"
+
+"What do you mean?" begged Clematis, somewhat tearful.
+
+"Where are you in your arithmetic?
+
+"Nowhere, ma'am."
+
+"Do you mean you have never learned any?" Mary Carmichael shuddered as she
+icily put the question.
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"Is that the case with all of you?"
+
+Emphatic nods left no room for doubt.
+
+"Then we'll leave that for the present. If you will tell me, Clematis,
+what kind of work you have been doing in your history and English, we will
+get to work on those to-day. What books have you been using?"
+
+Not unnaturally, Clematis, who was emotional and easily impressed, began
+to feel as though she were a criminal. She sobbed in a helpless, feminine
+way. Ben spoke up, fearsomely, from the top of the class.
+
+"We 'ain't got no books," said he, in grim rebuke, as though to put an end
+to a profitless discussion.
+
+"Do you wish me to understand," quavered Mary, "that you have had no
+studies--that you--can't read?--that you--don't know--anything?"
+
+"That's it," said Ben, with the nearest approach to cheerfulness he had
+yet manifested.
+
+Meanwhile there lay on the teacher's "desk" copies of Clodd's _Childhood
+of the World_, two of that excellent series of _History Primers_, and _The
+Young Geologist_, all carefully selected, in the fulness of Mary's
+ignorance, for the little pupils of her imagination. She had brought no
+primer, as Mrs. Yellett's letter had distinctly said that the youngest
+child was ten and that all were comparatively advanced in their studies.
+More than ever Mary longed to penetrate the mystery of that Irish linen
+decoy, for without doubt it was to be her melancholy fate to conduct this
+giant band through the alphabet!
+
+Accordingly she wrote out the letters of the alphabet with large
+simplicity and a sublime renunciation of flourish. The class received it
+tepidly. Mary grew eloquent over its unswerving verities. The class
+remained lukewarm. The difference between a and b was a matter of
+indifference to the house of Yellett. They regarded their teacher's
+strenuous efforts to furnish a key to the acquirement of the alphabet with
+the amused superiority of "grown-ups" watching infant antics with pencil
+and paper. Meanwhile her fear of the class increased in proportion as her
+ability to hold its attention diminished. The backbone of the school was
+plainly wilting. The little scholars, armed to the teeth, no longer sat up
+straight as tenpins. After twenty-five minutes of educational experience,
+satiety bowled them over.
+
+A single glance had convinced Ben that the alphabet was beneath contempt.
+He yawned automatically at regular intervals--long, dismal yawns that
+threatened to terminate in a howl, the unchecked, primitive type of yawn
+that one hears in the cages of the zoological gardens on a dull day. Miss
+Carmichael raised interrogatory eyebrows, but she might as well have
+looked reproof at a Bengal tiger.
+
+The class was rapidly promoted to c-a-t, cat; but these dizzy intellectual
+heights left them cold and dull. Ben began to clean his revolver, and on
+being asked why he did not pay attention to his lessons, answered,
+briefly:
+
+"It's all d----d foolishness."
+
+Cacta and Clem were pulling each other's hair. Mary affected not to see
+this sisterly exchange of torture. Ned whittled a stick; and, in chorus,
+when their teacher told them that d-o-g spelled dog, they shouted
+derision, and affirmed that they had no difficulty in compelling the
+obedience of Stump even without this particular bit of erudition. Though
+Mary had always abhorred corporal punishment, she began to see arguments
+in its favor.
+
+With the handleless tub as an elbow-rest the teacher took counsel with
+herself. Strategy must be employed with the intellectual conquest of the
+Brobdingnags. Summoning all the pedagogical dignity of which she was
+capable, she asked:
+
+"Boys, don't you want to know how to read?"
+
+"Noap," responded the head of the class.
+
+"Don't you want to know how to write?"
+
+"Noap."
+
+"But, my dear boy, what would you do if you left here and went out into
+the world, where every one knows these things and your ignorance would be
+evident at every turn. What would you do?"
+
+"Slug the whole blamed outfit!"
+
+Mary looked at her watch. School had lasted just forty-five minutes. Had
+time become petrified?
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+                       Judith Adjusts The Situation
+
+
+Mary had been a member of the Yellett household for something over a week,
+and the intellectual conquest of her Brobdingnag pupils seemed as hopeless
+as on that first day. School seemed to be regarded by them as a sort of
+neutral territory, admirably adapted for the settlement of long-standing
+grudges, the pleasant exchange of practical jokes, peace and war
+conferences; also as a mart of trade, where fire-arms, knives, bear and
+elk teeth might be swapped with a greater expenditure of time and
+conversation than under the maternal eye. "Teacher," as she was understood
+and accepted by the house of Yellett, undoubtedly filled a long-felt want.
+Presiding over a school of six-imp power for a week, however, had humbled
+Mary to the point of seriously considering a letter to the home
+government, meekly asking for return transportation. But this was before
+feminine wile had struggled with feminine vanity, and feminine wile won
+the day. School still continued to open at six, from which early and
+unusual hour it continued, without recess or interruption, till noon, when
+dinner pleasantly invaded the scholastic monotony, to the infinite relief
+of all parties concerned.
+
+Mary had dismissed her pupils a few minutes before the usual hour, on a
+particularly bad day, that she might rally her scattered faculties and
+present something of a countenance to the watchful eye of Mrs. Yellett.
+Every element of humor had vanished from the situation. The inverted tub
+was no longer a theme for merriment in her diary; home-life without a
+house was no longer a diverting epigram; she had closed her eyes that she
+might not see the mountains in all their grandeur. In her present mood of
+abject homesickness the white-capped peaks were part and parcel of the
+affront. With head sunk in the palms of her hands, and elbows resting on
+the inverted tub, Mary presented a picture of woe, in which the wicked
+element of comedy was not wholly lacking. Looking up suddenly, she saw
+Judith Rodney advancing. The first glimpse of her put Mary in a more
+rational mood.
+
+"I'm so glad to see you! Behold my class-room appointments! They may seem
+a trifle novel, but, for that matter, so are my pupils," began Mary,
+determining to present the same front to Judith that she had to Mrs.
+Yellett. But Judith was not to be put off. She looked into Mary's eyes and
+did not relax her gaze until she was rewarded with an answering twinkle.
+Then Mary laughed long and merrily, the first good, hearty laugh since the
+beginning of her teaching.
+
+"Tell me," Mary broke out, suddenly, "or the suspense will kill me, who
+wrote that lovely letter--on such good quality Irish linen, too? Snob that
+I was, it was the letter that did it."
+
+"So you have your suspicions that it was not a home product?"
+
+"You didn't do it, did you?"
+
+"Oh no; though I was asked, and so was Miss Wetmore, I believe. Of course
+poor Mrs. Yellett had no other recourse, as I suppose you know. I chose to
+be disobliging that time, and was sorry for it afterwards--sorry when I
+heard about the letter that really went! Do you find the sheep-wagon so
+very dreadful?"
+
+"I thought," laughed Mary, "that it was going to be like a picture I saw
+in a magazine, Mexican hammocks, grass cushions, and a lady pouring tea
+from a samovar; instead it was the sheep-wagon and 'Do you sleep light or
+dark?' There is Mrs. Yellett calling us to dinner. Shall I have a chance
+to talk to you alone afterwards?"
+
+"I've come all the way from Dax's to see you," explained Judith, with
+characteristic directness. "We have all the afternoon."
+
+"Really!" Mary displayed a flash of school-girl enthusiasm. "I feel as if
+I could almost bear the scenery."
+
+Presumably Judith was a favorite guest of the Yellett household, and not
+without reason. She took her place in the circle about the homely,
+steaming fare, with an ease and grace that suggested that dining off the
+ground was an every-day affair with her, and chairs and tables
+undreamed-of luxuries. Mary envied her ready tact. Why could she not meet
+these people with Judith's poise--bring out the best of them, as she did?
+The boys talked readily and naturally--there was even a flavor to what they
+said. As for herself, try never so conscientiously and she would be
+confronted by frank amusement or shy distrust. Even "paw" beamed at Judith
+appreciatively as he consumed his meal with infinite, toothless labor. The
+Spartan family became almost sprightly under the pleasantly stimulating
+influence of its guest.
+
+"What kind of basques are they wearing this summer, Judy?" inquired Mrs.
+Yellett, regarding her guest's trim shirt-waist judicially. "I reckon them
+loose, meal-sack things must be all the go since you and Miss Mary both
+have 'em; but give me a good, tight-fittin' basque, every time. How's any
+one to know whether you got a figure or not, in a thing that never hits
+you anywhere?" questioned the matriarch, not without a touch of pride
+anent her own fine proportions.
+
+"You really ought to have a shirt-waist, Mrs. Yellett. You've no idea of
+the comfort of them, till you've worn them."
+
+"I don't see but I'll have to come to it." Her tone was frankly regretful,
+as one who feels obliged to follow the behests of fashion, yet, in so
+doing, sacrifices a cherished ideal. Mary Carmichael choked over her
+coffee in an abortive attempt to restrain her audible hilarity. Judith,
+without a trace of amusement, was discussing materials, cut, and buttons;
+the plainswoman had proved herself the better gentlewoman of the two.
+
+"Get me a spotty calico, white, with a red dot, will you, the next time
+you're over to Ervay? Buttons accordin' to your judgment; but if you could
+get some white chiny with a red ring, I think they'd match it handsome."
+She frowned reflectively. "You're sure one of them loose, hangy things 'd
+become me? Then you can bring it over Tuesday, when you come to the hunt."
+
+"What hunt?" asked Judith, in all simplicity.
+
+"Why, the wolf-hunt. Peter Hamilton come here three days ago and made
+arrangements for 'em all to have supper here after it was done. 'Lowed
+there was a young Eastern lady in the party, Miss Colebrooke, who couldn't
+wait to meet me. Course you're goin', Judy? You've plumb forgot it, or
+somethin' happened to the messenger. Who ever hyeard tell of anythin'
+happenin' in this yere county 'thout you bein' the very axle of it?"
+
+Judith had not betrayed her chagrin by the least change of countenance. To
+the most searching glance every faculty was intent on the shirt-waist with
+the ringed buttons. Yet both women felt--by a species of telepathy wholly
+feminine--that Judith was deeply wounded. Loyal Sarah Yellett decided that
+Hamilton's guests would get but a scant supper from her if her friend
+Judith was to be unfavored with an invitation, while Judith, in her own
+warm heart, resented as deeply as Peter's slight of herself, his tale of
+Miss Colebrooke's impatience to meet Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch's
+dominant personality evoked many a smile even from those most deeply
+conscious of her worth; but it wasn't like Peter to make a spectacle of
+his ruggedly honest neighbor. Nevertheless she remarked, coolly:
+
+"I sha'n't be able to bring your shirt-waist things up Tuesday, I'm
+afraid, Mrs. Yellett, but I'll try to bring them towards the end of the
+week." Then, with a swift change of subject, "How are the boys getting on
+with their education, Miss Carmichael?"
+
+The boys looked at Mary out of the corners of their eyes. Their prowess in
+the field of letters had not been publicly discussed before. Mary
+Carmichael, emboldened by Judith's presence, looked at her tormentors with
+a judicious glance.
+
+"The girls are doing fairly well," she replied, suppressing the mischief
+in her eyes, "but the boys, poor fellows, I think something must be the
+matter with them. Did they ever fall on their heads when they were babies,
+Mrs. Yellett?"
+
+"Not more than common. All babies fall on their heads; it's as common as
+colic."
+
+"Poor boys!" said Mary, with a manner that suggested they were miles away,
+rather than within a few feet of her. "Poor boys! I've never seen anything
+like it. They try so hard, too, yet they can make nothing of work that
+would be play for a child of three. They must have fallen on their heads
+harder than you supposed, Mrs. Yellett."
+
+"Perhaps their skulls were a heap frailer than I allowed for at the time,"
+said Mrs. Yellett, with similar remoteness, yet with a twinkle that showed
+Mary she understood the situation.
+
+"An infant's skull doesn't stand much knocking about, I suppose, Mrs.
+Yellett?"
+
+"Not a great deal, if there ain't plenty of vinegar and brown paper handy,
+and I seldom had such fancy fixings in camp. It's too bad my boys should
+be dumb 'n account of a little thing like vinegar and brown paper."
+
+"Maw, they be dumb as Injuns," declared Cacta, preening herself, while the
+Messrs. Yellett reapplied themselves to their dinner with ostentatious
+interest.
+
+"Well, well!" said Mrs. Yellett; "it be a hard blow to me to know that my
+sons are lackings; there's mothers I know as would give vent to their
+disapp'inted ambition in ways I'd consider crool to the absent-minded. Now
+hearken, the whole outfit of you! Any offspring of mine now present and
+forever after holding his peace, who proves feebleminded by the end of the
+coming week, takes over all the work, labor, and chores of such offspring
+as demonstrates himself in full possession of his faculties, the matter to
+be reported on by the gov'ment."
+
+No sovereign, issuing a proclamation of war, could have assumed a more
+formidable mien than Mrs. Yellett, squatting erect on the prairie, crowned
+by her rabbit-skin cap. Mary and Judith, with bland, impassive
+expressions, noted the effect of the mandate. There was not the faintest
+symptom of rebellion; each Brobdingnag accepted the matriarch's edict
+without a murmur.
+
+With an air of further meditation on the efficacy of brown paper and
+vinegar at the crucial moment, Mrs. Yellett suddenly observed:
+
+"The lacking, like the dog, may be taught to fetch and carry a book; but
+to learn it he is unable."
+
+"Maw, does it say that in the Book of Hiram?" asked Clematis.
+
+"It says that, an' more, too. It says, 'The words of the wise are an
+expense, but the lovin' parent don't grudge 'em.'"
+
+Mary Carmichael had noticed, as her alien presence came to be less of a
+check on Mrs. Yellett's natural medium of expression, that she was much
+addicted to a species of quotation with which she impartially adorned her
+conversation, pointed family morals, or administered an occasional
+reproof. These family aphorisms were sometimes semi-legal, sometimes
+semi-scriptural in turn of phrase, and built on a foundation of homely
+philosophy. They were ascribed to the "Book of Hiram" and never failed of
+salutary effect in the family circle. But the apt quotations that she had
+just heard piqued Mary's curiosity more than before.
+
+"Do you happen to have a copy of the Book of Hiram, Mrs. Yellett?" she
+asked, in all innocence, supposing that the 'homely apothegms were to be
+found at the back of some patent-medicine almanac. Judith Rodney listened
+in wonder. The question had never before been asked in her hearing.
+
+"I lost mine." Mrs. Yellett folded her arms and looked at her questioner
+with something of a challenging mien.
+
+"What a pity! I've been so interested in the quotations I've heard you
+make from it."
+
+"What's the matter with 'em?" she demanded, pride and apprehension equally
+commingled.
+
+Judith Rodney rushed to the rescue:
+
+"Nothing is the matter with them, Mrs. Yellett," she said, with her
+disarming smile, "except that there is not quite enough to go around."
+
+The matriarch had the air of gathering herself together for something
+really worth while. Then she tossed off:
+
+"''Tain't always the quality of the grub that confers the flavor, but
+sometimes the scarcity thereof.'"
+
+Perhaps it has been the good-fortune of some of us to say a word of praise
+to an author, while unconscious of his relationship to the book praised.
+Mark the genial glow radiating from every feature of our auditor! How we
+feel ourselves anointed with his approval, our good taste and critical
+faculty how commended! It is a luxury that goes a long way towards
+mitigating the discomfitures caused by the reverse of this unctuous
+blunder.
+
+"The Book of Hiram," said Mrs. Yellett, angling for time, "is a book--it do
+surprise me that it escapes your notice back East. You ever heard tell of
+the Book of Mormon?"
+
+Mary assented.
+
+"Well, the Book of Hiram is like the Book of Mormon, only a heap more
+undefiled. The youngest child can read it without asking a single
+embarrassing question of its elder, and the oldest sinner can read it
+without having any fleshly meditations intrudin' on his piety."
+
+The Yellett family had by this time dispersed itself for the afternoon,
+and the matriarch and the two girls started in to clear away the meal and
+wash the dishes.
+
+"That's the kind of book for me," continued Mrs. Yellett, vigorously
+swishing about in the soapy water. "Story-books don't count none with me
+these days. It's my opinion that things are snarled up a whole lot too
+much in real life without pestering over the anguish of print folks. Flesh
+and blood suffering goes without a groan of sympathy from the on-lookers,
+while novel characters wade to the neck in compassion. I've pondered on
+that a whole lot, seem' a heap of indifference to every-day calamity, and
+the way I assay it is like this: print folks has terrible fanciful layouts
+given to their griefs and worriments by the authors of their being. The
+trimmings to their troubles is mighty attractive. Don't you reckon I'd be
+willin' to have a spell of trouble if I had a sweeping black velvet dress
+to do it in? Yes, indeed, I'd be willin' to turn a few of them shades of
+anguish, 'gray's ashes,' 'pale as death,' and so on, if they'd give me the
+dress novel ladies seems to have for them special occasions."
+
+"But you used to like novels, you know you did, Mrs. Yellett," observed
+Judith Rodney.
+
+"Yes, I didn't always entertain these views concernin' romance. You
+wouldn't believe it, but there was a time when I just nacherally went
+careerin' round enveloped in fantasies. I was young then--just about the
+time I married paw. Every novel that was read to me, I mean that I
+read"--Mrs. Yellett blushed a deep copper color through her many coats of
+tan--"convinced me that I was the heroine thereof. And, nacherally, I
+turned over to paw the feachers and characteristics of the hero in said
+book I happened to be enjoyin' at the time. Paw never knew it, but
+sometimes he was a dook, and it was plumb hard work. Just about as hard as
+ropin' a mountain-lion an' sayin', 'remember, you are a sheep from this
+time henceforth, and trim your action accordin'.' I'd say to paw, 'Let's
+walk together in the gloaming, here in this deserted garden'; and paw
+would say, 'Name o' Gawd, woman, have you lost your mind? It's plumb three
+hundred and fifty miles to the Tivoli beer-garden in Cheyenne, and it
+ain't deserted, either!'
+
+"Then I'd wring my hands in anguish, same as the Lady Mary, an' paw would
+declare I was locoed. He seemed a heap more nacheral when I pretended he
+was 'Black Ranger, the Pirate King.' His language came in handy, and his
+cartridge-belt and pistol all came in Black Ranger's outfit. Yes, it was a
+heap easier playing he was a pirate than a dook. All this happened back to
+Salt Lake, where me an' paw was married."
+
+Mrs. Yellett looked towards the mountain-range that separated her from the
+Mormon country, and her listeners realized that she was verging perilously
+close to confidences. Mary Carmichael, who dreaded missing any detail of
+the chronicle that dealt with paw in the rôle of apocryphal duke, hastened
+to say:
+
+"And you lost your taste for romance, finally?"
+
+"In Salt Lake I was left to myself a whole lot-there was reasons why I
+didn't mingle with the Mormon herd. Paw was mighty attentive to me, but
+them was troublous times for paw. I pastures myself with the fleetin'
+figures of romance the endoorin' time and enjoys myself a heap. When paw
+wasn't a dook or a pirate king, unbeknownst to himself, like as not he was
+Sir Marmaduke Trevelyun, or somebody entitled to the same amount of dog.
+
+"'Bout this time a little stranger was due in our midst, and the woman who
+came to take care of me was plumb locoed over novels, same as me, only
+worse. She just hungered for 'em, same as if she had a longin' for
+something out of season. She brought a batch of them with her in her
+trunk, we borrowed her a lot more, some I don't know how she come by. But
+they didn't have no effect; it was like feedin' an' Injun--you couldn't
+strike bottom. She read out of 'em to me with disastrous results
+happenin', an' that cured me. The brand on this here book that effected my
+change of heart was _The Bride of the Tomb_. I forget the name of the girl
+in that romance, but she was in hard luck from the start. She couldn't
+head off the man pursooin' her, any way she turned. She'd wheel out of his
+way cl'ar across country, but he'd land thar fust an' wait for her, a
+smile on his satanine feachers.
+
+"I got so wrought up along o' that book, an' worried as to the outcome,
+'most as bad as the girl. Think of it! An' me with only three baby-shirts
+an' a flannel petticoat made at the time! Seemed 's if I couldn't hustle
+my meals fast enough, I just hankered so to know what was goin' to happen
+next! I plumb detested the man with the handsome feachers, same as the
+girl. Me an' her felt precisely alike about him. And when he shut her up
+in the family vault I just giv' up an' was took then an' there, an' me
+without so much as finishin' the flannel petticoat! I never could endure
+the sight of a novel since. Perhaps that's why Ben is so dumb about his
+books--just holds a nacheral grudge against 'em along of my havin' to
+borrow slips for him."
+
+"Has the Book of Hiram anything to say against the habit of novel reading,
+Mrs. Yellett?" inquired Judith, demurely.
+
+She paused for a moment. "It's mighty inconvenient that I should have
+mislaid that book, but rounding up my recollections of it, I recall
+something like this: 'Romance is the loco-weed of humanity.'"
+
+"So you don't approve of the Mormon Bible?" ventured Mary.
+
+"I jest nacherally execrates Mormonism, spoken, printed, or in action,"
+she said, with an emphasis that suggested the subject had a strong
+personal bearing. "I recall a text from the Book of Hiram touching on
+Mormon deportment in particklar an' human nature at large. It says, 'Where
+several women and one man are gathered together for the purpose of serving
+the Lord, the man gets the bulk of the service."
+
+She broke off suddenly, as if she feared she had said too much. "Judy,"
+she demanded, "is Mis' Dax busy with Leander now?"
+
+"Not more than usual," smiled Judith.
+
+"Jest tell her for me, will you, that I want to hire her husband to do
+some herdin'; Leander's handy, 'n' can work good an' sharp, if he is an
+infidel. An' I like to have him over now an' then, as you know, Judy. As
+the Book of Hiram says, 'It's neighborly to ease the check-rein of a
+gentled husband.' But you tell him I don't want to hear any of his
+ever-lastin' fool argufyin' 'bout religion. Leander 'd stop in the middle
+of shearin' a sheep to argue that Jonah never came out o' the whale's
+belly. I ain't no use for infidels, 'less they're muzzled, which Leander
+mos' generally is."
+
+With the feeling that there was an excellent though unspoken understanding
+between them, the two girls walked together to the top of the path that
+wandered away from camp towards a bluff overlooking wave after wave of
+foot-hills, lying blue and still like a petrified sea.
+
+"I'm still dying to know who wrote that letter," begged Mary.
+
+"It was written by a lady who is very anxious to return to Washington, and
+she took that means of getting one more vote. Her husband is going to run
+for the Senate next term. We hear a good deal of that side of politics,
+you know."
+
+"It was certainly convincing," remarked the victim of the letter. "My
+aunts detected many virtues in the handwriting."
+
+"But now that you are really here, isn't it splendid? Mountains are such
+good neighbors. They give you their great company and yet leave you your
+own little reservations."
+
+"But I fear I can never feel at home out-of-doors," Mary announced, with
+such a rueful expression that they both smiled.
+
+"Perhaps, then, it depends on the frame of mind. I've had longer than you
+to cultivate it."
+
+Mary looked towards the mountains, serene in their strength. "Awesome as
+they are," she laughed, "they don't frighten me nearly as much as Ben and
+Ned. They are really very difficile, my pupils, and I feel so ridiculous
+sitting up back of that tub, teaching them letters and the spelling of
+foolish words, when they know things I've never dreamed of. The other day,
+out of a few scratches in the dust that I should never have given a second
+glance, one of them made out that some one's horses had broken the corral
+and one was trailing a rope. Whereupon my pupil got on a horse, went in
+search of the strays, and returned them to men going to a round-up. After
+that, the spelling of cat didn't seem quite so much of an achievement as
+it had before."
+
+"But they need the spelling of cat so much more than you need to
+understand trail-marks. Why don't you try a little strategy with them?
+Perhaps a bribe, even? It seems to me I remember something in history
+about the part played in colonization by the bright-colored bead."
+
+Sundry wood-cuts from a long-forgotten primer history of the United States
+came back to Mary. In that tear-stained, dog-eared volume, all explorers,
+from Columbus down to Lewis and Clarke, were unfailingly depicted in the
+attitude of salesmen displaying squares of cloth to savages apparently in
+urgent need of them.
+
+"How stupid of me not to remember Father Marquette concluding negotiations
+with a necklace!"
+
+"Frankly plagiarize the terms of your treaty from Père Marquette, and
+there you are!"
+
+"You are so splendid!" said Mary, impulsively, remembering Judith's own
+sorrows and the smiling fortitude with which she kept them hidden. "You
+make me feel like a horrid little girl that has been whining."
+
+Judith looked towards the mountains a long time without speaking.
+
+"When you know them well, they whisper great things that little folk can't
+take away."
+
+She turned back towards camp, walking lightly, with head thrown back. Mary
+watched her. Yes, the mountains might have admitted her to their company.
+
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+                              The Wolf-hunt
+
+
+Judith awakened with all the starry infinitude of sky for a canopy. In the
+distance loomed the foot-hills, watchful sentinels of her slumbers; and,
+sloping gently away from them, rolled the plain, like some smooth, dark
+sea flowing deep and silently. Judith, a solitary figure adrift in that
+still ocean of space, sat up and watched the stars fade and saw the young
+day peer timorously at the world that lay before it. Her mind, refreshed
+by long hours of dreamless sleep, turned to the problem of impending
+things, serenely contemplative. The passing of many mornings and many
+peoples had the mountains seen as the wreathed mists came and went about
+their brows, and to all who knew the value of the gift they gave their
+great company, and to such as could hear, they told their great secrets.
+Judith's prayer was an outflowing of soul to the great forces about her, a
+wish to be in harmony with them, to remember her kinship, to keep some
+measure of their serenity in the press of burdens. The way of the Indian
+was ever her way when circumstance raised no barriers; the four walls of a
+house were a prison to her after the days lengthened and the summer nights
+grew warm. To the infinite disapproval of that custodian of propriety,
+Mrs. Dax, she would make her bed beneath the stars, night after night, and
+bathe in the cold, clear waters of the stream that purled from the
+white-capped crest of the mountains.
+
+"Nasty Injun ways!" scoffed Leander's masterful lady, consciously superior
+from the intrenchment of her stuffy bedroom, that boasted crochet-work on
+the backs of the chairs and a scant lace curtain at its solitary window.
+
+Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk till
+it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows. A quarter of a mile
+above was another pool, hidden like a jewel in its case of green,
+broidered with scarlet roseberries and white clematis; and towards this
+she bent her steps, as time was a-plenty that morning. She kept to the
+stones of the creek for a pathway, jumping lightly from those that were
+moss-grown to those that hid their nakedness in the dark, velvet shadows
+of early morning, her white feet touching the shallow stream like pale
+gulls that dipped and skimmed. "Diana's Pool," as she called it, was
+always clear. It lay half hid beneath a shelving rock, a fount for the
+tiny, white fall that crooned and sang as it fell. And here she bathed, as
+the east flamed where the mountains blackened against it. Gold halos
+tipped the clouds, that melted presently into fiery waves, then burst into
+one great aureole through which the sun rode triumphant, and it was day.
+
+She had kept post-office the day before, and it would not be till day
+after to-morrow that the squires of the lariat would come again to offer
+their hearts, their worldly goods, their complete reformation, if she
+would only change her mind. It was all such an old story that she had
+grown to regard them with a tenderness almost maternal. But to-day was all
+her own, and the spirit of adventure swelled high in her bosom as she
+thought of what she had planned. It was warm and close and still in the
+Dax house as Judith made her way softly to her own room and began her
+preparations for the long journey she was to take afoot. To walk in the
+abominations devised by the white man for the purpose of cramping his feet
+would have been a serious handicap to Judith. The twenty miles that she
+would walk before nightfall was no very great undertaking to her, but it
+was part of her primitive directness to accomplish it with as little
+expenditure of fatigue and comfort as possible. Moreover, who could steal
+through the forest in those heeled things without announcing his coming
+and frightening the forest folk, and sending them skurrying? And Judith
+loved to surprise them and see them busy with their affairs--to creep along
+in her soft, elk-hide moccasins and catch their watchful eyes and see the
+things that were not for the heavy-booted white man.
+
+She might have inspired Kitty Colebrooke to a sonnet as she stepped out
+into the glad morning light, in short skirt and jacket, green-clad as the
+pines that girdled the mountains, with a knapsack with rations of bread
+and meat and the wherewithal to build a fire should she wander belated.
+She softly closed the door, not to awaken Leander and his slumbering lady,
+and broke into the running gait that the Indians use on their all-day
+journeys, the elk-hide moccasins falling soft as snow-flakes on the trail.
+Dolly she missed chiefly for her companionship, for Judith had not the
+white man's utter helplessness without a horse in this country of high
+altitudes. When she walked she breathed, carried herself, covered ground
+like her mother's people, and loved the inspiration of it.
+
+The eerie shadows of the desert drew back and hid themselves in the
+mountains. The day began with splendid promise--the day of the wolf-hunt,
+of which no word had been spoken to her by Peter. She, too, was going
+hunting, but silently and unbidden she would steal through the forest and
+see this mysterious woman who played fast and loose with Peter, who loved
+her apparently all the better for the game she played. What manner of
+woman could do these things? What manner of woman could be indifferent to
+Peter? Judith was consumingly curious to see. And, apart from this naked
+and unashamed curiosity, there was the possibility that at sight of Miss
+Colebrooke there might come a relaxation of Peter's tyrannous hold upon
+her thoughts, her life, her very heart's blood. Would her loyalty bear the
+test of seeing Peter made a fool of by a woman she could dismiss with a
+shrug--a softly speaking shrew, perhaps, who played a waiting game with her
+finger on the pulse of Peter's prospects? For there was talk of a
+partnership with the Wetmores. Or a fool, perhaps, for all her sonneting,
+for there are men who relish a weak headpiece as the chiefest ornament of
+women, especially when its indeterminate vagaries boast an escape-valve
+remotely connected with the fine arts. Or a devil-woman, perhaps--an
+upright wanton who could think no wrong from very poverty of temperament,
+yet kept him dangling. The possibility of Kitty's honesty, Judith in her
+jealousy would not admit. Had she gone to the devil for him, stood and
+faced the drift of opinion for his sake, that Judith could have
+understood. But what was the spinning of verses to a woman's portion of
+loving and being loved? Even Alida, through all her distracting anxieties,
+had in her heart the thrice-blessed leaven, reasoned the woman of the
+plains, who might, according to modern standards, be reckoned a trifle
+primitive in her psychological deductions. And, withal, Judith was forced
+to admit that there was something simple and true about a man who would
+let a woman make a fool of him, whoever the woman was.
+
+Perhaps with this hunting would end the long reign of Peter as a divinity.
+Judith was tired, not in her vigorous young body, because that was strong
+and healthful as the hill wind, but tired in heart and mind and life. Her
+destiny had not been beautiful or happy before he invaded it, but it had
+been calm, and now serenity seemed the worthiest gift of the gods. It was
+not that she loved him less, but that she had so long reflected upon him
+that her imagination was numb; her thoughts, arid, unfruitful as the
+desert, turned from him to the problems that beset her, and from them back
+to him again, in dull, subconscious yearning. She could no longer project
+an anguished consciousness to those scenes wherein he walked and talked
+with Kitty. Her Indian fatalism had intervened. "Life was life," to be
+lived or left. And yet she felt herself a poor creature, one who had lived
+long on illusion, who had bent her neck to the yoke of arid unrealities.
+The pale-haired woman who kept him with her miserliness of self, who
+intruded no sombre tragedy of loving, was well worth a trip across the
+foot-hills to see. And yet, Judith reflected, it was the portion of her
+mother's daughter to make of loving the whole business of life, even if
+she rebelled and fought against it as an accursed destiny. It was in her
+inheritance to know and live for the wild thrill of ecstasy in her pulses,
+to feel trembling joy and despair and frantic hope, that exacted its
+tribute hardly less poignant; as it was, also, to feel a shivering
+sensitiveness in regard to the loneliness and bitterness of her life, to
+have the same measureless capacity for sorrow that she had for loving, to
+have a soul attuned to the tragedy of things, to love the mighty forces
+about her, to feel the reflection of all their moods in her heart, and,
+lastly, it was her destiny to be the daughter of a half-Sioux and a border
+adventurer, and to feel the counter influences of the two races make
+forever of her heart a battleground.
+
+Her light feet scarcely touched the ground as she sped swiftly through all
+the network of the hills; and more than once her woman's heart asked the
+question, "And, prithee, Judith, if from henceforth you are only to hold
+fellowship with the stars and have no part in the ways of men, why do you
+walk a day's journey to catch a glimpse of a pale-haired woman?"
+
+She knew the probable course of the wolf-hunt. She had been on scores of
+them, galloped with Peter after the fleeing gray thing that swept along
+the ground like the nucleus of a whirling dust-devil. At least she was
+sure of the place of their nooning--a limpid stream that ran close to many
+young pine-trees. Here was a pause in the rugged ascent, a level space of
+open green, thick with buffalo grass. Many times had she been here with
+Peter, sometimes with many other people on the chase--sometimes, and these
+occasions were enshrined in her memory, each with its own particular halo,
+with Peter alone; and they had fished for trout and cooked their supper on
+the grassy levels. It was in Judith's planning to arrive before the
+hunting-party, to hide among the thickets of scrub pine that grew along
+the steep cliffs and overlooked the grassy level, to take her fill of
+looking at the pale-haired girl and the hunters at their merrymaking, and,
+when she had seen, to steal back across the trail to the Daxes'. They
+would not penetrate the thickets where she meant to hide, and, should
+they, she was prepared for that contingency, too. She had brought with her
+a bright-colored shawl that she would throw over her head, and with the
+start of them she could outrun them all, even Peter. Had she not
+outdistanced him easily, many times, in fun? Through the tangle of
+tree-trunks that grew not far from the thicket, they would think she was
+but a poor Shoshone squaw lying in wait for the broken meat of the
+revellers.
+
+By crossing and recrossing the tiny creeks that trickled slow and
+obstructed through the gaunt levels of plain and foot-hill, she had come
+by a direct route to the fringes of the pine country. And here she found a
+world dim, green, and mysterious. It was wellnigh inconceivable that the
+land of sage-brush and silence could, within walking distance of
+desolation, show such wealth of young timber, such shade and beauty. Her
+noiseless footfalls scarce startled a sage-hen that, realizing too late
+her presence, froze to the dead stump--a ruffled gray excrescence with
+glittering bead eyes that stared at her furtively, the one live thing in
+the tense body.
+
+The sun wanted an hour of noon when Judith rested by the stream, bathed
+her face and hands, flushed from the long walk, ate the bread and meat,
+then lay on the bed of pine-needles, brown and soft from the weathering of
+many suns and snows. She had been all day in the company she loved
+best--the earth, the sky, the sun and wind--and in her heart at last was a
+deep tranquillity. Thus she could face life and ask nothing but to watch
+the cloud fleeces as they are spun and heaped high in the long days of
+summer; in soberer moods to watch the thoughts of the Great Mystery as He
+reveals them in the shifting cloud shapes; to penetrate further and
+further into the councils of the great forces. Thus did she dream the
+moments away till the sun was high in the blue and threw long, yellow
+splashes of light on her still body, on the soft pine-needles, beneath the
+boughs. But there was no time for further day-dreams if she intended to
+forestall the hunters at the place of nooning. She followed a game trail
+that lay along the stream, ascending through the dense growths till she
+reached the top of the jutting rocks. Her hair was loosened, her skirt
+awry, and the pine-needles stood out from it as from a cushion. Much of
+the way she gained by creeping beneath the low branches on her hands and
+knees. No white woman would be likely to follow her reasoned the daughter
+of the plains. It would be a little too hard on her appearance. And here,
+by lying flat and hanging over the jutting knob of rock, with a pine
+branch in her hand, she could see this mysterious woman and Peter and the
+hunters.
+
+She broke a branch to shade her face, she looked down on the grassy level.
+She waited, but there was no sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft
+ground. The shadows of the pines contended with the splashes of sunlight
+for the little world beneath the trees. They trembled in mimic battle,
+then the shadows stole the sunlight, bit by bit, till all was pale-green
+twilight, and there was no sound of the hunters.
+
+
+
+The hunters, meanwhile, had not been altogether successful in the chase.
+The necessary wolf had been coy, and they, perforce, had to compromise
+with his poor relation, the coyote--a poor relation, indeed, whose shabby
+coat, thinned by the process of summer shedding, made it an unworthy
+souvenir to Miss Colebrooke. But it was not the lack of a wolf that robbed
+the hunting-party of its zest for Kitty. She could not tell what it was,
+but something seemed to have gone wrong with the day from the beginning.
+She rode beside her cavalier in a habit the like of which the country had
+never before seen, and Peter, usually the most observant of men, had no
+word for its multitude of perfections. In the first realization of
+disappointment with the day, the hunt, the hardships of the long ride, her
+perturbed consciousness took up the problem of this missing element and
+tried to adjust itself to the irritating absence. Kitty wondered if it
+were something she had forgotten. No, there were her two little cambric
+pocket-handkerchiefs, remotely suggestive of orris, and bearing her
+monogram delicately wrought and characteristic. It was not her watch, the
+ribbon fob of which fluttered now and then in the breeze. It was not veil
+nor scarf-pin nor any of the paraphernalia of the properly garbed
+horsewoman. And yet there was something missing, something she should have
+had with her, something the absence of which was taking the savor from the
+day's hunting.
+
+It must be the very bigness of this great, splendid world that gave her
+the sense of being alone at sea. Intuitively she turned and looked at
+Peter riding beside her. There was something in his face that made her
+look again before accepting the realization at first incredulously, then
+with frank amusement. Peter had scarcely spoken since they left the ranch.
+She had come down to breakfast so sure of her new riding-habit. The
+Wetmore girls had been moved to hyperboles about its cut and fit and the
+trim shortness of the skirt--short riding-skirts were something of a
+novelty then. The fine gold hair, twisted tight at the back of the shapely
+head, was like a coiled mass of burnished metal, some safe-keeping device
+of mint or gold-worker till the season of coining or fashioning should
+come round. The translucent flesh-tints, pearl-white flushing into
+pink--"Bouguereau realized at last," as Nannie Wetmore was in the habit of
+summing up her cousin's complexion--was as marvellous as ever. The delicate
+firmness of profile gave to the face the artificial perfection of an old
+miniature, rather than of a flesh-and-blood countenance, and all these
+were there as of yore, but the marvel of them failed of the customary
+tribute. Kitty, on scanty reflection, was at no loss to translate Peter's
+reserve into a language at once flattering and retributive. In her scheme
+of life he was always to be her devoted cavalier, as indeed he had been
+from the beginning. She loved her own small eminence too well to imperil
+her tenure of it by sharing its pretty view of men and things with any
+one. In country house parties she loved the mild wonder that the
+successful _littérateuse_ could fight and play and win her social triumphs
+so well. She loved the star part, and next to playing it she enjoyed
+wresting it from other women or eclipsing them completely in some
+conspicuously minor rôle, while, in the matter of dress, Miss Colebrooke
+went beyond the point decreed by the most exigent mandates of fashion.
+When hats were worn over the face, her admirers had to content themselves
+with a glimpse of her charming mouth and chin. When they flared, hers
+fairly challenged the laws of equilibrium. She danced with the same
+facility with which she rode, swam, and played tennis. In doing these
+things supremely well she felt that she vindicated the position of the
+woman of letters. Why should one be a frump because one wrote?
+
+Her friendship with Peter was to endure to greenest old age, more
+platonic, perhaps, than that of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand. It was
+to be fruitful in letters that would compare favorably with the best of
+the seventeenth century series. Even now her own letters to Peter were no
+sprightly scrawl of passing events, but efforts whose seriousness
+suggested, at least in their carefully elaborated stages of structure, the
+letters of the ladies of Cranford.
+
+But in the course of these Western wanderings, undertaken not wholly
+without consideration of Peter, there had appeared in the maplike
+exactness of her plans an indefinite territory that threatened
+undreamed-of proportions. It menaced the scheme of the letters, it shook
+the foundations of the Chateaubriand-Récamier friendship. The unknown
+quantity was none other than the frequent and irritating mention of one
+Judith Rodney, who, from all accounts, appeared a half-breed. Her name,
+her beauty, some intrinsic charm of personality made her an all too
+frequent topic, except in the case of Peter. He had been singularly keen
+in scenting any interrogatory venue that led to the mysterious half-breed;
+when questioned he persistently refused to exhibit her as a type.
+
+Kitty knew that she had treated her long-suffering cavalier with scant
+consideration the day he had spurred across the desert to see her. True,
+she had written him on her arrival, but, with feminine perversity of
+logic, thought it a trifle inconsiderate of him to come so soon after that
+trying railroad journey. An ardent resumption of his suit--and Peter could
+be depended on for renewing it early and often--was farthest from her
+inclination at that particular time. She intended to salve her conscience
+at the wolf-hunt for her casual reception of his impetuous visit. But
+apparently Peter did not intend to be prodigal of opportunity.
+
+"How garrulous you people are this morning!" Nannie Wetmore challenged
+them. Peter came out of his brown study with the look of one who has again
+returned to earth.
+
+"You don't find it like the drop-curtain of a theatre, now that you've
+seen it?" he questioned Kitty. For she had doubted her pleasure in the
+mountains, in the conviction that they would be too dramatic for her
+simple taste.
+
+Kitty closed her eyes and sighted the peaks as if she were getting the
+color scheme for an afternoon toilet.
+
+"Mass, bulk, rather than line--no, it's not like a drop-curtain, but it's
+distinctly 'hand-painted.' All it needs is a stag surveying the prospect
+from that great cliff. It's the kind of thing that would sound well in a
+description. Oh, I assure you I intend to make lavish use of it, but it
+leaves nothing to one's poor imagination!"
+
+Peter had a distinct feeling of being annoyed. No, she could not
+appreciate the mountains any more than they could appreciate her. They
+were incongruous, antipathetic, antipodal. Kitty, in her pink and white
+and flaxen prettiness and her trim habit, was in harmony with the
+bridle-path of a city park; in this great, lonely country she was an
+alien. He thought of Judith and the night they had climbed Horse-Thief
+Trail, of her quiet endurance, her keen pleasure in the wild beauty of the
+night, her quality of companionship, her loyalty, her silent bearing of
+many burdens. Yet until he had seen them both against the same relentless
+background, he had never been conscious of comparing the two women.
+
+Nannie Wetmore had fallen behind. She was riding with a bronzed young
+lieutenant from Fort Washakie. The two ahead rode long without speaking.
+Then Peter broke the silence impatiently:
+
+"You did not really mean that, did you?" He was boyishly hurt at her
+flippant summing up of his beloved blue country. And Kitty, tired with the
+long, hard ride, and missing that something in Peter that had always been
+hers, turned on him a pair of blue eyes in which the tears were brimming
+suspiciously. They were well out of sight of the others, and had come to
+the heavy fringes of a pine wood. Was it the psychological moment at last?
+Then suddenly their horses, that had been sniffing the air suspiciously,
+stopped. Kitty's horse, which was in advance of Peter's, rushed towards
+the thicker growth of pines as if all Bedlam were in pursuit. Peter's
+horse, swerving from the cause of alarm, bolted back across the trail over
+which they had just made their way. A large brown bear, feeding with her
+cub, and hidden by the trees till they were directly in front of her, had
+caused the alarm.
+
+And presently the hush of the shadowy green world in which Judith lay was
+broken by a light, sobbing sound. It had been so still that, lying on her
+bed of pine-needles, she had likened it to great waves of silence, rolling
+up from the valley, breaking over her and sweeping back again, noiseless,
+green from the billowing ocean of pine branches, and sunlit. Judith bent
+over the rocky ledge and saw a girl making her way down the game trail,
+dishevelled and tearful. Her hat was gone, her pale-yellow hair, that in
+shadow had the greenish tinge of corn-silk, blew about her shoulders, her
+trim skirt was torn and dusty, and she looked about, bewildered, hardly
+realizing that through the unexpected course of things she had been
+stranded in this great world of sunlit splendor and loneliness. She closed
+her eyes. The awful vastness and solitude oppressed her with a deepening
+sense of calamity. Suppose they never found her? How could she find her
+way in this endless wilderness, afoot? She sank to the turf and began to
+cry hysterically.
+
+Judith knew in a flash of instant cognition that this was Miss Colebrooke.
+Amazement seemed to have dulled her powers of action--amazement that she,
+who had stolen to this place and crouched close to earth that she might
+see the triumph of this preferred woman, and, having seen and paid her
+grievous dole, steal away and take up the thread of endless little things
+that spun for her the web of life, was forced instead to be an unwilling
+witness of the other's distress. Judith had risen with her first impulse,
+which had been to go to Kitty, but half-way through the thicket she
+hesitated and reconsidered. Undoubtedly Peter would come soon, and Peter's
+consolation would be more potent than any she could offer. She shrank in
+shuddering self-consciousness at the thought of her presence at their
+meeting, the uninvited guest, the outgrown friend and confidante,
+blundering in at such a time, pitifully full of good intentions. She
+recoiled from the picture as from a precipice that all unwittingly she had
+escaped. What madness had induced her to come on this expedition? A sudden
+panic at the possibility of discovery possessed her; suppose Peter should
+find her skulking like a beggar, waiting for broken meats? She looked at
+the image of herself that she carried in her heart. It was that of a proud
+woman who made no moan at the scourge of the inevitable. Many burdens had
+she carried in her proud, lonely heart, but of them her lips gave no sign.
+In her contemplative stoicism she felt with pride that she was no unworthy
+daughter of her mother's people, and catching a glimpse through the trees
+of the abjectly waiting woman who, though safe and sound, could but wait,
+wretched and dispirited, for some one to come and adjust her to the
+situation, Judith felt for her a wondering pity at her helplessness. She
+waited, expectant, for the sound of Peter's horse. Surely he must come at
+any moment, overcome with apologies, and she--Judith hid her face in her
+hands at the thought--she would steal away through the thicket at the first
+sound of hoofs. But as the minutes slipped by and still no sign of Peter,
+a sickening anxiety began to gnaw at her heart. Had something happened to
+him?
+
+She did not wait to ask herself the question twice. She crawled the length
+of the thicket with incredible rapidity, gained the pine forest, and made
+her way beneath the low-hanging boughs; without stopping to protect
+herself from them she gained the open space and ran quickly to Kitty.
+
+"Are you hurt? What has happened?"
+
+Kitty looked up, startled at the voice. She had not heard the sound of the
+moccasined feet. Her wandering, forlorn thoughts crystallized at sight of
+the woman before her. A new lightning leaped into her eyes as she
+recognized Judith. There was between them a thrilling consciousness that
+gave to their mutual perception a something sharp and fine, that grasped
+the drama of the moment with the precision and fidelity of a camera. And
+through all the wonder of the meeting there was in the heart of each an
+outflowing that met and mingled and understood the potential tragedy
+element of the situation.
+
+"You are Miss Rodney, I believe?"
+
+Kitty was conscious of something strange in her voice as she looked into
+the dark eyes, wide with questioning fear. Ah, but she had amazing beauty,
+and a something that seemed of the very essence of deep-souled
+womanliness! The two women presented a fine bit of antithesis, Kitty,
+flower-like, small, delicately wrought, the finished product of the town,
+exotic as some rare transplanted orchid growth. And in Judith there was a
+gemlike quality: it was in the bloom of her skin, the iridescent radiance
+of her hair, that was bluish, like a plum in sunlight; it was in the warm,
+red life in her lips, in the pulsing vitality of the slim, brown throat;
+in every line was sensuous force restrained by spiritual passion.
+
+Kitty told of the accident in which her horse had thrown her and
+disappeared in the pine fringes, leaving her stunned for a moment or two;
+and how she had finally pulled herself together and followed what appeared
+to be a trail, in the hope of finding some one. She dwelt long on the
+details of the accident.
+
+"Yes, but Peter, what has happened him?" Judith chose her words
+impatiently. She was racked with anxiety at his long delay, and now she
+hung over Kitty, waiting for her answer, without the semblance of a cloak
+for her alarm.
+
+There was reproof in Kitty's amendment. "I don't know which way Mr.
+Hamilton's horse went. It started back over the trail, I think."
+
+Judith clasped her hands. "Let us go and look for him. Why do we waste
+time?" But Kitty hung back. She was shaken from her fall, and upset by the
+events of the morning. Besides, her faith in Peter's ability to cope with
+all the exigencies of this country was supreme. And chiefest reason of all
+for her not going was a something within her that winced at the thought of
+this fellowship that had for its object the quest of Peter.
+
+"Oh, don't you see," pleaded Judith, "that if something had not happened
+to him he would have been here long ago?"
+
+Judith's anxiety awoke in Kitty a new consciousness. What was she to him,
+that at the possibility of harm, a fear not shared by Kitty, she should
+throw off a reserve that every line of her face pronounced habitual? In
+her very energy of attitude, an energy that all unconsciously communicated
+itself to Kitty, there was the power that belongs to all elemental human
+emotion--the power that compels. Kitty rose to follow Judith, then
+hesitated.
+
+"I'm sure nothing has happened him. No, I'm really too unstrung by my fall
+to walk." She sank again to the bowlder on which she had been sitting.
+
+To the woman of the world, Judith's ingenuous display of feeling had in
+its very sincerity a something pitiable. How could she strip from her soul
+every fold of reserve and stand unloved and unashamed, sanctified, as it
+were, by the very hopelessness of her passion? How could women make of
+their whole existence a thing to be rejected, reflected Kitty, who, giving
+nothing, could not understand. She looked again at the bronzed face beside
+her, so bold in outline, so expressive in detail. Yes, she was beautiful,
+and yet, what had her beauty availed her? The thought that she herself was
+the preferred woman throbbed through her for a moment with a sense of
+exaltation. The next moment a haunting doubt laid hold of her heart, held
+up mockingly the little that she and Peter had lived through together, the
+lofty plane of friendship along which she had tried to lead his unwilling
+feet sedately, his protests, his frank amusement at her serious
+pretensions to a career. How much fuller might not have been the
+intercourse between him and this woman, who, in all probability, had been
+his comrade for years? And she had been idealizing him, and his love for
+her, and his loneliness! Kitty stood with eyes cast down, while images
+crowded upon her, leaving her cold and smiling.
+
+"But think," pleaded Judith; "if you don't come it will take me longer to
+search the trail-marks. You could show me just where the horses ran--"
+
+Kitty's eyes were still on the ground. She did not lift them, and Judith,
+realizing that further appeal was but a waste of time, turned and ran
+swiftly down the trail.
+
+"He is her lover," said Kitty; and all the wilderness before her was no
+lonelier than her heart.
+
+Swift, intent, Judith traced Kitty's footprints. They followed the game
+trail, the one she herself had taken earlier in the day. She traced them
+back through the pine wood about a hundred rods, and then the trail-marks
+grew confused. This was unquestionably the place where the horses had
+taken fright, circled, reared, then dashed in different directions. She
+traced the other horse, whose tracks led under low-hanging boughs. It
+would have been a difficult matter for a horse with a rider to clear; and
+now the impression of the horse's shoes grew fainter, from the lighter
+footfalls of a horse at full gallop.
+
+"Ah!" A cry broke from her as she saw the marks had become almost
+eliminated by something that had dragged, something heavy. Those
+long-drawn lines were finger-prints, where a hand had dragged in its vain
+endeavor to grasp at something. A sickening image came persistently before
+her eyes--Peter's upturned face, blood-smeared and disfigured.
+
+"Sh-sh-sh!" She put her hand to her breast to still the beating of her
+heart. She could hear the sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft
+ground, and a man's voice speaking in a soothing sing-song. She listened.
+It was Peter's voice, reassuring the horse, asking him what kind of a bag
+of nerves he was for a cow pony, to get frightened at a bear? Judith stood
+tall and straight among the pines. Surely he could not blindly pass her
+by. He must feel the joy in her heart that all was well with him. The
+hoofs came nearer, the man's voice sounded but intermittently, as he got
+his horse under better control. She felt as if he must come to her, as if
+some overpowering consciousness of her presence would speak from her heart
+to his; but his eyes scanned the distant trail for a glimpse of Kitty or
+Kitty's horse. Judith saw that his head was bound in something white and
+that it bore a red stain, but he held himself well in the saddle. He was
+not the man to heed a tumble. He urged the horse forward, never looking
+towards the tree-trunks, his face white and strained with anxiety as he
+scoured the trail for evidences of Kitty. The horse, with a keener sense
+than his master, shied slightly as he passed the group of pines where
+Judith stood; but Peter's glance was for the open trail, and as she heard
+him canter by, so close that she could have touched his stirrup with her
+hand, it seemed as if he must hear the beating of her heart.
+
+"Oh, blind eyes, and ears that will not hear, and heart that has forgotten
+how to beat! Yes, go to that pale, cold girl! You speak one language, and
+life for you is the way of little things!"
+
+She waited till the last sound of the horse's hoofs had died away and all
+was still in the tremulous green of the forest. Judith's mind was busy
+with the image of their meeting, the man bringing the joy of his youth to
+the calm divinity who could feel no thrill of fear in his absence. She
+broke into the running gait and hurried through the forest to the Daxes'.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+                      In The Land Of The Red Silence
+
+
+The beef-herd, that had been the pivotal point of the round-up and had
+made the mighty plain echo to its stampings and bellowings, beating up
+simooms that choked it with thirst, blinded it with dust, confounding
+itself on every side by the very fury of its blind force, had trailed for
+a week, tractable as toys in the hands of children. Little had happened to
+vary the monotony for the cow-punchers that handled the herd--they grazed,
+guarded, watered, night-herded the cattle day after day, night after
+night. Pasturage had been sufficient, if not abundant. The creeks were
+running low and slimy with the advance of summer, but there had been
+sufficient water to let the herd drink its fill at least once a day.
+
+The outfit ate its "sow-belly," soda-biscuit, and coffee three times a
+day, and smoked its pipes, but was a little shy on yarns round the
+camp-fire.
+
+"This yere outfit don't lather none," commented the cook to the
+horse-wrangler, over the smoke of an early morning fire.
+
+"Don't lather no more than a chunk of wood," agreed the horse-wrangler.
+"That's the trouble with a picked-up outfit like this. Catch 'W-square'
+men kowtowing to a 'XXX' boss, even if he is only acting foreman."
+
+Simpson, the origin of whose connection with the "XXX" was rather a
+sensitive subject with that outfit, had begun to take his duties as a
+cattle-man with grim seriousness; he was untiring in his labors; he spent
+long hours in the saddle, he took his turn at night herding, though he was
+old for this kind of work. He condemned the sheep-men with foul-mouthed
+denunciations, scoffed at their range-rights, said the sheep question
+should be dealt with in the business-like manner in which the Indian
+question had been settled. He was an advocate of violence--in short, a
+swaggering, bombastic wind-bag. He talked much of "his outfit" and "his
+men." "What was good enough for them was good enough for him," he would
+announce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone, when the food happened to be
+particularly bad. He split the temporary outfit, brought together for the
+purpose of handling the beef-herd, into factions. He put the "XXX" in
+worse repute than it already enjoyed--he was, in fact, the discordant
+spirit of the expedition. The men attended to their work sullenly. Discord
+was rife. The one thought they shared in common was that of the wages that
+would come to them at the end of the drive; of the feverish joy of
+"blowing in," in a single night; perchance, of forgetting, in one long,
+riotous evening, the monotony, the hardship, the lack of comradery that
+made this particular drive one long to be remembered in the mind of every
+man who had taken part in it.
+
+Meanwhile the herd trailed its half-mile length to the slaughtering pens
+day after day, all unconscious of its power. When the steers had trailed
+for about a fortnight, the question of finding sufficient water for them
+began to be a serious one. The preceding winter had been unusually mild,
+the snow-fall on the mountains averaging less than in the recollection of
+the oldest plains-man. Summer had begun early and waxed hot and dry. The
+earth began to wrinkle, and cracked into trenches, like gaping mouths,
+thirsty for the water that came not. Such streams as had not dried shrank
+and crawled among the willows like slimy things, that the herd, thirsty
+though it was from the long drives, had to be coaxed to drink from.
+
+Discontent grew. The acting foreman, who was a "XXX" man, and a
+comparative stranger to that part of the country, refused to consult with
+the "W-square" men in the outfit, who knew every inch of the ground. The
+acting foreman thought the Wetmore men looked down on him, "put on dog";
+and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven due west instead
+of skirting to the north by the longer route, where they would have had
+the advantage of drinking at several creeks before crossing Green River.
+Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard, and he insisted upon his
+order in spite of the Wetmore men's protestations.
+
+The character of the country began to change, the soil took on the color
+of blood, even the omnipresent sage-brush began to fail the landscape;
+sun-bleached bones glistened on the red soil, white as ulcers. All the
+animal trails led back from the country into which they were proceeding.
+The sky, a vivid, cloudless blue, paled as it dipped earthward. The sun
+looked down, a flaming copper shield. There was no sign of life in all the
+land. Even the grasshoppers had left it to the sun, the silence, and the
+desolation. To ears accustomed to the incessant shrilling of the insects,
+the cessation was ominous, like the sudden stopping of a clock in a
+chamber of death. Above the angry bellow of the thirsty herd the men
+strained their ears again and again for this familiar sound of life, but
+there was nothing but the bellowing of the cattle, the trampling of their
+hoofs, and sometimes the long, squealing whinny of a horse as he threw
+back his head in seeming demand to know the justice of this thing.
+
+Across the red plain snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric
+reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A
+cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a
+weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a
+thousand steers, a handful of men and horses, in the land of the red
+silence? It had seen the comings and goings of many peoples, and once it
+had flowed with streams; but that was before the curse of God came upon
+it, and in its harsh, dry barrenness it grew to be a menace to living
+things.
+
+The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had
+scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had
+weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six
+hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as the
+enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit. Creek after creek
+that they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.
+
+The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun,
+tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red plain
+stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over which
+writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing its
+tortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as a
+fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen,
+perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper's bed. Sometimes the
+dragon curled itself into a ball, and the foreman sung out that they were
+milling, and the men turned and rode away from it, then dashed back at it,
+after getting the necessary momentum, entered like a flying wedge, fought
+their way into the rocking sea of surging bodies, shouted from their
+thirst-parched throats imprecations that were lost in the dull, sullen
+roar. Then the dragon would uncoil and again trail its way over the red
+waste-lands.
+
+A red sun had begun to set over a red earth, and the men who had been out
+since noon-scouring the country for water, returned to say that none had
+been found, and they began to look into each other's faces for the answer
+that none could give. At sunset they made a dry camp; there was but enough
+water left to cook with. Each man received, as a thirst-quenching ration,
+a can of tomatoes. After supper they consulted, and it was agreed to trail
+the herd till midnight, taking advantage of the coolness to hurry them on
+as fast as possible to Green River. The grave nature of their plight was
+indicated by the fact that no one smoked after supper. Silent, sullen,
+they sat round, waiting for the foreman to give the order to advance. He
+waited for the moon to come up. Slowly it rose over the Bad Land Hills and
+hung round and full like a gigantic lantern. The watches were arranged for
+the night with a double guard. Every man in the outfit was beginning to
+have a feeling of panic that communicated itself to every other man, and
+as they looked at the herd, tractable now no longer, but a blind force
+that they must take chances with through the long watches of the night,
+while the thirst grew in the beasts' parched throats, they foresaw what
+would in all probability happen; they thought of their women, of all that
+most strongly bound them to life, and they sat and waited dumbly.
+
+The moon that night was too brilliant for benisons; the gaunt, red world
+lay naked and unshriven for the sin that long ago had brought upon it the
+wrath of God. The picture was still that of the grotesque Chinese screen,
+with the headless dragon crawling endlessly; but the dream was long,
+centuries long, it seemed to the men listening to the bellowing of the
+herd. And while they waited, the red grew dull and the dragon dingy, and
+its fury made its contortions the more horrible; and that was all the
+difference between day and night in the land of the red silence. Sometimes
+the dragon split, and joints of it tried to turn back to the last water it
+had drunk; for cattle, though blinded with thirst, never forget the last
+stream at which they have quenched thirst, and will turn back to it,
+though they drop on the way. But the men pressed them farther and farther,
+and for yet a little while the cattle yielded.
+
+At midnight the saddle-stock was incapable of moving farther. One horse
+had fallen and lay too weak to rise. The others, limping and foot-sore, no
+longer responded to quirt and rowel. The foreman ordered the herd thrown
+on the bed ground for the night. The herders for the first watch began to
+circle. The rest of the outfit took to its blankets to snatch a little
+rest for the double duty that awaited every man that night. Now it is a
+time-honored belief among cow-men that the herd must be sung to,
+particularly when it is restless, and to-night they tried all the old
+favorites, the "Cow-boy's Lament" being chief among them. But the herd
+refused to be soothed, and round and round it circled; not once would it
+lie down.
+
+The moon gleamed almost brazen, showing the cruel scars, the trenches torn
+by cloud-bursts, the lines wrought by the long, patient waiting of the
+earth for the lifting of the wrath of God. Imperishable grief was writ on
+the land as on a human face. The night wore on, the watches changed, the
+herd continued restless; not more than a third of it had bedded down. The
+third watch was from one o'clock to half-past three in the morning.
+Simpson and another "XXX" man, with two of the Wetmore outfit, made up a
+double watch, and rode, singing, about the herd, as the long, dreary watch
+wore away. The cattle's lowing had taken on a gasping, cracked sound that
+was more frightful than the maddened bellow of the early evening. Simpson,
+who was past the age when men live the life of the saddle, felt the
+hardship keenly. He had ridden since sunrise, but for the respite at noon
+and the scant time at the dry camp while the evening meal was being eaten.
+He was more than half asleep now, as he lurched heavily in the saddle,
+crossing and recrossing his partner in the half-circle they completed
+about the herd. Suddenly the sharp yelp of a coyote rang out; it seemed to
+come from no farther than twenty yards away. The cattle heard it, too, and
+a wave of panic swept through them. Simpson stiffened in his saddle. The
+sound, which was repeated, was an exact reproduction of a coyote's yelp,
+yet he knew that it was not a coyote.
+
+The herd rose to its feet as a single steer, and for a second stood
+undetermined. From a clump of sage-brush not more than two feet high
+fluttered something long and white like a sheet. It waved in the wind as
+the cry was repeated. The herd crashed forward in a stampede, Simpson in
+the lead on a tired horse, but a scant length ahead of a thousand maddened
+steers bolting in a panic of thirst and fear.
+
+"Hell's loose!" yelled the men in their blankets, making for the temporary
+rope corral to secure horses. Simpson, tallow-colored with fear, clung
+like a cat to his horse, and dug the rowels in the beast's flanks till
+they were bloody and dripping. He had seen Jim Rodney's face above the
+white cloth as it fluttered in the face of the herd that came pounding
+behind him with the rumble of nearing thunder. He was too close to them to
+attempt to fire his revolver in the air in the hope of turning them, but
+the boys had evidently got into their saddles, to judge by the volley of
+shots that rang out and were answered. Simpson alone rode ahead of the
+herd that tore after him, ripping up the earth as it came, bellowing in
+its blind fury. His horse, a thoroughly seasoned cow-pony, sniffed the
+bedlam and responded to the goading spur. She had been in cattle stampedes
+before, and, though every fibre ached with fatigue, she flattened out her
+lean body and covered ground to the length of her stride at each gallop.
+The herd was so close that Simpson could smell the stench of their
+sweating bodies, taste their dust, and feel the scorch of their breath.
+The sound of their hoofs was like the pounding of a thousand propellers.
+From above looked the moon, round and serene; she had watched the passing
+of many peoples in the land of the red silence. The horse seemed to be
+gaining. A few more lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one side
+and let the maddened cattle race to their own destruction. All he asked of
+God was to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug the
+rowel and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; the
+chorus of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the
+pound, pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.
+
+Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly. "God! What is
+it?" as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole. "Up, up,
+you damned brute!" but the mare's leg had cracked like a pipe-stem. In his
+fury at the beast Simpson began kicking her, then started to run as the
+cattle swept forward like a black storm-cloud.
+
+The next second the great sea of cattle had broken over horse and rider.
+When it had passed there was not enough left of either to warrant burial
+or to furnish a feast for the buzzards. A few shreds of clothes, that had
+once been a man, lay scattered there; a something that had been a horse.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+                 Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst
+
+
+The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent with
+her habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were involved.
+Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the experience of
+moving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the delay, and could
+only explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett received reports of the
+dearth of pasturage on the ground that she wished each fresh educational
+germ to take as deep root as possible before transplantation. So that when
+Mrs. Yellett, shortly after Leander Dax's arrival at camp in the capacity
+of herder, announced that she and Leander were to make a trip to the
+dipping-vat that had kept Ben from his classes for the past ten days, and
+invited the "gov'ment" to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.
+
+The Yelletts' "bunch" of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and the
+matriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that number,
+as she wished always to give the flock her personal supervision.
+
+"'The hen that's the surest of her chicks is the one that does her own
+settin','" was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellett
+succinctly summed up the case.
+
+Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to the
+market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the matriarch
+had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in Wyoming. Often
+she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the wonders of this new
+world with remarkable aptness, that she had constantly to fight against
+the inclination to increase her business of sheep-raising, but that as
+soon as she should begin to hire herders or depend on strangers things
+would go wrong. With the assistance of her sons, she therefore managed the
+entire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on which
+Leander lent his semi-professional co-operation.
+
+As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness,
+surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine
+that Mrs. Dax's husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his
+wife's masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he called
+himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a
+pattern with paw's gusty protests against life in general, but it was
+Leander's way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a
+chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion. The
+mere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild and
+submissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe. Mary
+Carmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growing
+amusement, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first of
+doubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack of
+general information in his casual audiences to set forth well-known
+opinions as his own. Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustained
+the rôle of doubter with passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of
+rage and hoarseness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by
+cow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw
+the traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling
+headlong into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale
+constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food,
+sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.
+
+"The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that
+Jonah never come out of the whale's belly," the matriarch had told Mary
+Carmichael, in summing up Leander's disadvantages as a herder. And the
+first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: "Leander Dax,
+you'd have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein' a
+infidel, but there's one p'int on which you are particularly locoed, and
+that's Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in the hist'ry of
+the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no call to fret hisself
+over Jonah and his whereabouts--none whatever. There's a lot of business
+round this here camp that's a heap more pressin'. Now, Leander Dax, if I
+do hereby undertake to hire, engage, and employ you to herd sheep, do you
+agree to renounce discussions, arguments, and debates on the late Jonah
+and his whereabouts durin' them three days? God A'mighty, man, any one
+would think you was Jonah's wife, the interest you have in his absence!"
+
+"I come here to herd sheep," Leander had brazenly retaliated. "I 'ain't
+come to try to make you think."
+
+Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the journey
+to the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon was the
+rudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout pole. Though
+she saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary Carmichael,
+discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to ask where she
+was going to sit, and listened with interest to a discussion between Mrs.
+Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses it would take to get the
+dip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp and splendor, was for taking
+six, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried simplicity to a fault, was in favor of
+only two. They finally compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch the
+extra two.
+
+Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage of
+the delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of "Brainard's Beneficial
+Blackthorn."
+
+"Paw's as hard to manage as a bent pin," she remarked, in an aside to
+Mary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she, with
+the agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head under
+her arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, if
+beneficial, dose.
+
+"There, there, paw," she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a baby,
+"don't take on so! It's all gone, and I can't have you sick on my hands."
+
+But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent language,
+whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with a drink of
+condensed-milk and water, "to wash down the nasty taste," she told him,
+soothingly.
+
+A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels of
+sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while Mrs.
+Yellett looked doubtfully at a "gov'ment" who could not handle barrels.
+Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and Leander, the
+long pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral column, from which
+huge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at the rear a foot or so
+of bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing about the same
+proportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a fox-terrier does to
+the dog.
+
+Mrs. Yellett kissed "paw" good-bye, explaining to Mary, in extenuation of
+her weakness, that she would never forgive herself if she neglected it and
+anything happened to him during her absence. She then climbed to the front
+barrel and secured the ribbons. Leander had brought out three rolls of
+bedding of the inevitable bed-quilt variety, but Mrs. Yellett scorned such
+luxury while driving, and accordingly gave hers to the "gov'ment" for a
+back-rest. Mary sat on the lower row of barrels, with her feet dangling,
+using one roll of bedding for a seat and the other comfortably arranged at
+her back as a cushion.
+
+Madam called sharply to the horses, "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat-kerat!" and
+they started off at a rattling pace, the barrels of dip creaking and
+squeaking as they swayed under their rope lashings. Mary bounced about
+like a bean in a bag, working loose from between the bed-quilt rolls at
+each gulley, clinging frantically to barrel ends, shaken back and forth
+like a shuttle. Indeed, the drive seemed to combine every known form of
+physical exercise. Mrs. Yellett herself was in fine fettle; she drove
+sitting for a while, then rose, standing on a narrow ledge while she held
+the four ribbons lightly in one hand and tickled the leaders with a long
+whip carried in the other. She drove her four horses over the rough road
+with the skill of a circus equestrienne, balancing easily on the crazy
+ledge, shifting her weight from side to side as the wagon rattled down
+gullies and up ridges, the horses responding gallantly to the shrill
+"Hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" Her costume on this occasion
+represented joint concessions to her sex and the work that was before her,
+as the head of a family at the dipping-vat. She still wore the drum-shaped
+rabbit-skin cap pulled well down over her forehead for driving. The great,
+cable-like braids of hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head an
+appearance of denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were still
+blowing about her face, perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness.
+She wore a man's shirt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from which
+the bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr.
+Yellett's trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher's boots, that met the
+hem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the originality
+of her dress.
+
+The wagon had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert
+dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became
+conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in her
+back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freight
+carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch of the
+wagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the peril of
+life and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of barrels,
+gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving camp some two
+hours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have shrivelled away to a
+wraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin, had waned to the
+vanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed horribly, yet his
+frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called to Mrs. Yellett, but
+her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon, the clatter of four
+horses' hoofs, and the continual "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" of the
+driver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth and back to the road
+in indescribably pathetic pantomime. "Perhaps the poor creature wants to
+turn back and die in his bed, like a Christian, even if he isn't one,"
+thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander still emitting the most
+inhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf mutes in distress.
+Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the name of many profane
+things what was the matter with her companions.
+
+Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved a
+better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.
+
+"God A'mighty!" she said, "he's lost his false teeth!" And without another
+word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that fell
+little short of sleight-of-hand.
+
+The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how far
+back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the inadequacy of
+the English language to reproduce his toothless enunciation. Catching, as
+Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett's remarks only, she received
+something of the one-sided impression given by overhearing a telephone
+conversation:
+
+"What did you have 'em out for?... You didn't have 'em out?... I just
+shook 'em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth had
+been shut, you couldn't have lost 'em.... You was a-yawnin', eh? Well, you
+are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your mouth full o'
+china teeth. Your yawnin' 'll put us back a good hour an' we won't reach
+camp before sundown."
+
+At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to
+search along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the
+place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them by
+this landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary get
+down "and help to prospect for them teeth." As Mary clambered down she
+heard a fragment of the matriarch's monologue, which, being duly
+expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather take
+ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in the
+way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally speaking, man
+had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.
+
+"Talk about a woman bein' at the bottom of everything!" sniffed Mrs.
+Yellett; "I be so sick of always hearin' about 'the woman in the case!'
+Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left
+exclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: 'A skunk may have his good
+p'ints, but few folks is takin' the risk of waitin' round to get
+acquainted with 'em.'"
+
+While Mary was still "prospecting," a glad cry roused her attention, and
+Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.
+
+"Quit smilin' like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!" called out Mrs.
+Yellett. "Do you want to lose 'em again?"
+
+So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the
+Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was
+resumed.
+
+It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had been
+oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly
+penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some unknown
+quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to the marrow.
+The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and plunging as if
+they had scent of something menacing. Across the horizon a dark cloud
+scudded, no bigger than your hand.
+
+"Cloud-burst!" announced Mrs. Yellett.
+
+"Cloud-burst, all right enough," agreed Leander, and he turned up his
+coat-collar in simple preparation for the deluge.
+
+There flashed into Mary Carmichael's mind a sentence from her physical
+geography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her school-days:
+"A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the whole cloud had
+been precipitated at once." She wanted to question her companions as to
+the accuracy of this definition, but before she had time to frame a
+sentence the real cloud-burst came, with a splitting crack of thunder;
+then the lightning flashed out its message in the short-hand of the storm,
+across the inky blackness, and the water fell as if the ocean had been
+inverted. In the fraction of a second all three were drenched to the skin,
+the water pouring from them in sheets, as if they had been some slight
+obstruction in the path of a waterfall. The wagon was soon in a deep
+gully, with frothing, foaming, yellow water up to the hubs of the wheels.
+Mrs. Yellett, like some goddess of the storm, lashed her horses forward to
+keep them from foundering in the mud, and the wagon creaked and groaned in
+all its timbers as it lurched and jolted through the angry torrents.
+
+Each moment Mary expected to be flung from the barrels, and clung till her
+finger-tips were white and aching. From the drenched red bedquilts a
+sticky crimson trail ran over the barrel heads, as well as over Mary's
+hands, face, and dress. Still they forged on through the deluge, Mrs.
+Yellett shouting and lashing the horses, holding them erect and safe with
+the skill she never lost. The fur on her rabbit-skin cap was beaten flat.
+The great, wet braids had fallen from the force of the water and hung
+straight and black, like huge snakes uncoiled. She was far from losing her
+grip on either the horses or the situation, and from the inspiring ring of
+her voice as she urged them forward it was plain that she took a fierce
+joy in this conflict of the elements.
+
+It was bitterly cold, and Mary reflected that if Leander's teeth chattered
+half as hard as hers did, without breaking, they must, indeed, be of
+excellent quality. The storm began to abate, and the sky became lighter,
+though the water still poured in torrents. As soon as her responsibility
+as driver left her time to speak, Mrs. Yellett lost no time in fastening
+the cloud-burst to Leander.
+
+"This here is what comes of settin' up your back against God A'mighty and
+encouragin' the heathen and the infidel in his idolatry. I might 'a'
+knowed somethin' would happen, takin' you along! 'And the heathen and the
+infidel went out, and the Lord God sent a cloud-burst to wet him,'" quoted
+Mrs. Yellett from the apocryphal Scriptures that never yet failed to
+furnish her with verse and text.
+
+The infidel, from his side of the wagon, began to display agitation. His
+jaws worked, but he said nothing.
+
+"You 'ain't lost them teeth again, have you?"
+
+He nodded his head wretchedly.
+
+"'And the Lord took away the teeth of his enemy, so that he could neither
+bite nor talk,'" quoted Mrs. Yellett to the miserable man, who could make
+no reply.
+
+"Wonder you wouldn't see the foolishness o' being a heathen and a infidel,
+and turn to the Lord! You 'ain't got no teeth, and it takes your wife to
+herd you. 'And the Lord multiplied the tribulations of his enemy.' You got
+no more show standin' up agin the Lord than an insect would have standin'
+up agin me."
+
+She had Leander, at last, just where she wanted him. He was forced to
+listen, and he could make no reply. She alternately abused him for his
+lack of faith and urged him to repentance. Leander raged, gesticulated,
+turned his back on her, mouthed, and finally put his fingers in his ears.
+But nothing stemmed the tide of Mrs. Yellett's eloquence; it was as
+inexhaustible and as remorseless as the cloud-burst.
+
+It continued bitterly cold, even after the rain had stopped falling, and
+the heap of sodden bedclothes furnished no protection against the chilling
+dampness. It was growing dark; there was no red in the sunset, only a
+streak of vivid orange along the horizon, chill and clear as the empty,
+soulless flame of burning paper. There were no deep, glowing coals, no
+amethystine opalescence, fading into gold and violet. All was cold and
+subdued, and the scrub pines on the mountain-tops stood out sharply
+against this cold background like an etching on yellow paper.
+
+Mrs. Yellett's self-inspired scriptural maxims were discontinued after a
+while, either because she could think of no more, or because the
+rain-soaked, shivering, chattering object towards which they were directed
+was too abject to inspire further efforts. Leander huddled on the barrel
+that was farthest from Mrs. Yellett, and wrapped himself in the soaked red
+bedquilt. The dye smeared his face till he looked like an Indian brave
+ready for battle, but there was no further suggestion of the fighting red
+man in the utter desolation of his attitude. Mary Carmichael, on her
+barrel, shivered with grim patience and longed for a cup of tea. Only Mrs.
+Yellett gave no sign of anxiety or discomfort; she drove along, sometimes
+whistling, sometimes swearing, erect as an Indian, and to all appearances
+as oblivious of cold and wet as if she were in her own home.
+
+The gathering darkness into which the horses were plunging was mysterious
+and appalling. Objects stood out enormously magnified, or distorted
+grotesquely, in the uncertain light. It was like penetrating into the real
+Inferno, like stumbling across the inspiration of Dante in all its
+sinister splendor. It was the Inferno of his dream rather than the Inferno
+of his poem; it had the ghastly reality of the unreal.
+
+"It wouldn't surprise me if we had a smash-up in Clear Creek," said Mrs.
+Yellett, just by way of adding her quota of cheerful speculation. She
+ducked her head and whispered in Mary's ear:
+
+"It's all along of me hirin' _him_! I wouldn't be surprised if paw died.
+I'm thinkin' of shakin' him out after his teeth. 'Take not up with the
+enemy of the Lord, lest he make of you also an enemy.'"
+
+But there was no accent of apprehension in Mrs. Yellett's dismal
+prognostications of the evil that might befall her for employing Leander.
+She spoke more with the air of one who produces incidents to prove an
+argument than of one who anticipates a calamity.
+
+Leander, toothless and wretched, sitting on the side of the wagon, began
+to show symptoms of joy comparable to that of the vanguard of the
+Israelites, catching their first glimpse of the Promised Land. Touching
+Mary Carmichael on the shoulder, he pointed to a white tent and the
+remains of a camp-fire. Already Mrs. Yellett had begun to "Hallo, Ben!"
+But Ben was at work at the vat, which was still a quarter of a mile
+further up the mountain; so Mrs. Yellett, throwing the reins to Leander
+and bidding him turn out the horses, lost no time in building a fire,
+putting on coffee, and making her little party comfortable. So various was
+her efficiency that she seemed no less at home in these simple domestic
+tasks than when guiding her horses, goddess-like, through the cloud-burst.
+And Mary Carmichael, succumbing gradually to the revivifying influence of
+the fire and the hot coffee, acknowledged honestly to herself a warmth of
+affection for her hostess and for the atmosphere Mrs. Yellett created
+about her that made even Virginia and her aunts seem less the only pivot
+of rational existence. She felt that she had come West with but one eye,
+as it were, and countless prejudices, whereas her powers of vision were
+fast becoming increased a hundredfold. How very tame life must be, she
+reflected, as she sat smiling to herself, to those who did not know Mrs.
+Yellett, how over-serious to those who did not know Leander! Yet, after
+all, she knew that the real basis of her readjusted vision was her brief
+but illuminating acquaintance with Judith Rodney. To Mary, freed for the
+first time in her life from the most elegantly provincial of surroundings,
+Judith seemed the incarnation of all the splendor and heroism of the West.
+And in the glow of her enthusiasm she decided then and there not to
+abandon the Yellett educational problem till she should have solved it
+successfully. She might not be born to valiant achievement, like these
+sturdy folk about her, but she might as well prove to them that an Eastern
+tenderfoot was not all feebleness and inefficiency.
+
+"Leander!" called Mrs. Yellett. "Just act as if you was to home and wash
+up these dishes."
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+                               Foreshadowed
+
+
+Alida awoke, knowing what was to happen. She had dreamed of it, just
+before daylight, and lay in bed stupefied by the horror of it, living,
+again and again, through each frightful detail. It had happened--there, in
+the very room, and before the children; the noise of it had startled them;
+and then she woke and knew she had been dreaming. In the dream the noise
+had wakened the children--when it really happened they must never know. It
+wouldn't be fair to them; they needed a "clean start."
+
+What had she done to keep them quiet? There had been a thunderous knocking
+at the door. She had expected it and was prepared; because the lock was
+feeble, she had shoved the old brown bureau against the door.
+
+Nothing had happened. What a fool she was to lie there and think of it!
+There was the brown bureau against the wall; she could hear the deep
+breathing of Jim in the room beyond. Jim had been unequal to the task of
+conventionally going to bed the night before, and she had put a pillow
+under his head and a quilt over him. She was the last woman in the world
+to worry about Jim, drunk, or to nag him for it when sober. But she didn't
+like the children to see him that way.
+
+What was it that she had done to quiet the children when "they" rode up?
+She had done something and they had gone to sleep again, and she--and
+she--oh no, it hadn't happened. What a fool she was to lie there thinking!
+There were the children to rouse and dress, and breakfast to cook, and
+Jim--Jim would be feeling pretty mean this morning; he'd like a good cup of
+coffee. She was glad he was alive to make coffee for.
+
+She got up and, in the uncertainty bred of the dream, felt the brown
+bureau, felt it hungrily, almost incredulously. The brown bureau had been
+pushed against the door when they had come, and knocked and knocked. Then
+they had thundered with the butts of their six-shooters, and the children
+had wakened, and she had called out to them:
+
+"Sh-sh! It's only a bad dream. Mammy will give you some dough to bake
+to-morrow."
+
+And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call, "For
+God's sake, don't wake the children!"
+
+And they had called out, "Let him come out quiet, then."
+
+And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door--the
+weather-beaten door--with its crazy lock that didn't half catch. The brown
+bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded in. Then
+she had done something to quiet the children--it was queer that she could
+not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream still lived
+within her, horribly distinct and real.
+
+What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not think
+about it another minute. She began to dress, but her fingers were heavy,
+and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency. Repeatedly
+she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some one of the
+links in that pitiless memory--what they had said to Jim; his undaunted
+replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room because Jim had
+told her to.
+
+She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with
+sleep, did not reassure her.
+
+"Mammy," said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid
+list, the victim of a cactus thorn, "my toe's all well; can I go
+barefoot?"
+
+"Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a
+young lady, if you run barefoot now?"
+
+Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her small
+feet together and contemplated them. The toe was still suspiciously
+inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with a Spartan
+courage that won her a place in the annals of household valor, had the day
+before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle the torturing cactus
+thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the operation, though afterwards she
+had taken the piece of dried apple that was offered her and devoured it to
+the last bite, as only just compensation for her sufferings.
+
+"Dimmy dot a tore toe, too." But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about
+offering proofs of his affliction. At the peril of his equilibrium, he
+clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over on
+the bed in apparent anguish.
+
+"Less see, Jimmy," asked his mother, anxiously.
+
+"Don't bleeve him, mammy. He 'ain't ever cried. He'd a cried, for sure, if
+his toe was sore." At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of her
+aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.
+
+"Let mammy see, Jimmy," and Alida bent over her son and heir.
+
+"Doth Dimmy det any apple?" The wee man sometimes succeeded in making
+terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though
+feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with the
+air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother squarely in
+the eyes.
+
+She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted the
+horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she answered him
+with quiet firmness.
+
+"Jimmy must not tell stories."
+
+"Less see," insisted Topeka.
+
+"He dassent," affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.
+
+"It hurths me," and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. "It hurths me, my
+tore toe!"
+
+His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby
+hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by
+the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus
+thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to
+make coffee.
+
+"I with I had a tore toe," he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery of
+his deception. "I with I toud det a tore toe 'thout the hurt."
+
+But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in
+the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go
+into the room where their father was sleeping. She went back and found
+that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still
+regretted that his perfectly well toe did not entitle him to gastronomic
+consideration. Topeka, who had arrived at an age where little girls, in
+the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no keener delight than
+plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till they present an
+appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a peeled onion, put down
+the brush with guilty haste at sight of her mother.
+
+"I'm goin' to dress him soon as I've done my hair."
+
+"Any one think you was goin' to be married, the time you've took to it."
+
+"It's gettin' so long," urged Topeka.
+
+"I wouldn't give it a chance to grow no longer while Jimmy was waitin' to
+get dressed. And don't go into the front room. Your father's gettin' his
+sleep out."
+
+Topeka opened her round eyes. There was always something suspicious about
+that sleep her father had to get out, but she felt it was something she
+must not ask questions about. Her mother lingered; she dreaded to be alone
+in the kitchen. The little, familiar intimacies between herself and her
+children scattered the horrors of the dream which would come back to her
+when she was again at the mercy of her thoughts.
+
+"Judy, s'pose you dress Jimmy this morning! I want Topeka to help me get
+breakfast."
+
+"Yessum," said Judith, dutifully. "Is he to have his face washed?"
+
+"He certainly is, Judy. I's ashamed to have you ask such a question.
+'Ain't you all been brought up to have your faces washed?"
+
+But young Judith seemed disinclined to take up this phase of family
+superiority. She merely inquired further:
+
+"Is he to have it washed with soap, maw?"
+
+"He shore is. Any one would think you had been born and raised in Arizony
+or Nebrasky, to hear you talk. I'm plumb ashamed of you, Judy."
+
+"But, 'deed, maw, I ain't big enough to wash his face with soap. It takes
+Topeka to hold his head."
+
+The subject of the discussion still sat on the edge of the bed, a small
+lord of creation, letting his women folk arrange among themselves who
+should minister to his wants. As an instrument of torture the washcloth,
+in the hands of his sister Judy, was no ignoble rival of the cactus thorn.
+The question of making terms for his sufferings again appealed to him in
+the light of a feasible business proposition.
+
+"Muvvy, tan't I have the apple? Judy hurts me a lot when she wathes my
+face wis soap."
+
+"Yes, you can have the apple, honey; and, Judy, you be gentle with him.
+Don't rub his features up, and be careful and don't get soap in his eyes."
+
+"No'm." And Judy heroically stifled the longing to slick her hair, like
+Topeka's, with the wet hairbrush. There were easier tasks than washing the
+face of her younger brother.
+
+When Topeka and her mother were alone in the kitchen, Topeka grinding the
+coffee and all unconsciously working her jaw in an accompaniment to the
+coffee-mill, her mother bent over her and said:
+
+"Did you dream of anything last night?"
+
+Topeka simultaneously stopped working the coffee-mill and her jaw, and
+regarded her mother solemnly. She did not remember having been thus
+questioned about her dreams before.
+
+"No'm," she answered, after laborious consideration. But something in her
+mother's face held her.
+
+"You're sure you didn't dream nothing?"
+
+"Yes, maw."
+
+"Did Judy or Jim say that they dreamed anything?"
+
+"Jim said he dreamed he had a pup."
+
+"Was that all? Think hard, Topeka!"
+
+Topeka held the handle of the coffee-mill in her hand; her jaw continued
+to work with the labor of her mental process. "I've thought hard, maw, and
+all he told was about the pup."
+
+Alida went back to her bedroom and again felt the brown bureau. "What's
+the matter with me, anyhow? It's the lonesomeness, and they bein' agin Jim
+the way they are. God, this country's hard on women and horses!"
+
+When breakfast was over, and young Jim had received the reward of his
+valor in presenting a brave face to his ablution, and Judith the reward of
+her skill, the evidence of which almost prevented the young martyr from
+smiling while he enjoyed his treat, their mother sent them all to play in
+the cañon. She told them not to come home till she should come for them,
+and if any one should ask about their father, to say that he was away from
+home. And this, as well as the mystery of her father's "getting his sleep
+out," roused some slight apprehension in Topeka, who was old for her age.
+They were seldom sent to the cañon to play. Topeka looked at her mother as
+she had when questioned about the dream, but there was no further
+confidence between them.
+
+"You do as your sister Topeka tells you, and remember what I said about
+your papa," Alida said to the younger children. Jim and Judy clasped each
+other's hands in mute compact at the edict. Their sister Topeka had a real
+genius for authority; they were minded all too well when she swayed the
+maternal sceptre vicariously.
+
+Alida made fresh coffee for Jim when the children had gone. She made it
+carefully; there was this morning, unconsciously, about each little thing
+that she did for him, the solemnity of a funeral rite. Struggle as she
+would, she could not divest her mind of the conviction that what she did
+this day she did for the dead. She would go to the door and listen to his
+breathing, and tell herself that she was a fool, then wring her hands at
+the remembrance of the dream.
+
+As he tossed, half waking, she heard him groan and curse the cattle-men
+with oaths that made her glad she had sent the children from home. Then
+she bent over him and woke him from his uneasy slumber.
+
+"Jim, don't you want me to bathe your head? And here's some nice, hot
+coffee all ready for you."
+
+Jim woke slowly to a realization of his troubles and his blessings. His
+wife was bathing his head with hands that trembled. Not always had she
+greeted his indiscretions with such loving forbearance. He noticed, though
+his waking faculties were not over-keen, that her face was pale and
+frightened, and that her eyes, meeting his, held a dumb, measureless
+affection.
+
+"What th' hell are you babying me for?" But his roughness did not deceive
+her woman's wits. He was not getting the lecture he anticipated, and this
+was his way of showing that he was not embarrassed by her kindness. The
+morning sunlight was pitilessly frank in its exposure of the grim pinch of
+poverty in the mean little room, but the woman was unconscious of these
+things; what she saw was that Jim, the reckless, Jim, the dare-devil
+terror of the country, Jim, who had married and settled with her into
+home-keeping respectability, Jim, who had struggled with misfortune and
+fallen, had, young as he was, lost every look of youth; that hope had gone
+from his dull eyes, and that his face had become drawn until the
+death's-head grinned beneath the scant padding of flesh. But he was
+to-day, as always, the one man in the world for her. In making a world of
+their own and reducing their parents to supplementary consideration, their
+children, whom she had sent away that she might be alone with him, had
+given a different quality to the love of this pair that had known so many
+curious vicissitudes. The responsibilities of parenthood had placed them
+on a tenderer, as well as a securer footing; and as she saw his age and
+weariness, he recognized hers, and both felt a self-accusing twinge.
+
+"That's a blamed good cup of coffee," he said, by way of relieving the
+tension that had crept into the situation. "Any one would think you was
+settin' your cap for me 'stead of us being married for years."
+
+Alida sighed. "It's better to end than to begin like this," she said, in
+the far-away voice of one who thinks aloud. The word "end" had slipped out
+before she realized what she was saying, and the knowledge haunted her as
+an omen. She glanced at him quickly, to see if he had noticed it.
+
+"Why did you say end?" He saw that her eyes were full of tears and chafed
+her. "You ain't thinking of divorcing me, like Mountain Pink done Bosky?"
+
+"Oh, Jim," she said, and her face was all aquiver, "I never could divorce
+you, no matter what you done." And then the grim philosophy of the
+plains-woman asserted itself. "I never can understand why women feed their
+pride on their heart's blood; it never was my way."
+
+He did not like to remember that he had given her cause for a way.
+"There's a lot of women as wouldn't exactly regard me as a Merino, or a
+Southdown, either;" he gulped the coffee to ease the tightness in his
+throat.
+
+"They'd be women of no judgment, then," she said, with conviction.
+
+Jim's head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand. His profile,
+sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain of Sioux
+blood. He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk himself, as he
+looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl and reckless, when
+he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her woman's penalty and come
+into her woman's kingdom; who had made a man of him by the mystery of her
+motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly gone with him into the wilderness
+and become an alien and an outcast.
+
+These things unmanned him as the sight of the gallows and the rope for his
+hanging could not have done. Shielding himself with an affected roughness,
+he asked:
+
+"What the hell's the matter with you? I've been drinking like a beast of
+an Indian, and you give me coffee instead of a tongue-lashing."
+
+The color had all gone out of her face. She gasped the words:
+
+"Jim, I dreamed it last night--they came for you!"
+
+She cowered at the recollection.
+
+"Did they get me?" he asked. There was no surprise in his tone. He spoke
+as one who knew the answer.
+
+"Yes, the children saw. The noise woke them."
+
+"You mustn't let 'em see, when--they come. They've a right to a fair start;
+we didn't get it, old girl."
+
+"The children gave it to us," and she faced him.
+
+"Yes, yes, but we want them to have it from the start, like good folks."
+
+They looked into each other's eyes. The memory of dead and gone madness
+twinkled there a moment, then each remembered:
+
+"You must hurry, Jim. You haven't a moment to lose. I dreamed it was to be
+to-night--they'll come to-night!"
+
+"The game's all up, old girl! If I had a month I couldn't get away.
+Morrison's been looking for me over to the Owl Creek Range; he's
+back--Stevens told me yesterday. He'll be heading here soon. The price on
+my head is a strain on friendship."
+
+"Have the sheep-men gone back on you?"
+
+"Yes, damn them! A thousand dollars is big money, and they've had hard
+luck!"
+
+"They deserve it; I hope every herd in the State dies of scab."
+
+"There wasn't a scabby sheep in our bunch. What a sight they were, loaded
+with tallow! There wasn't one of them that couldn't have weathered a
+blizzard; they could have lived on their own tallow for a month."
+
+She tried to divert his attention from his lost flock. When he began to
+talk about them the despair of his loss drove him to drink. She was ground
+between the millstones of his going or staying. If he stayed they would
+come for him; if he went, they would apprehend him before he was ten miles
+from the house.
+
+"Jim, we got to think. If there's a chance in a thousand that you can get
+away, you got to take it; if there ain't, the children mustn't know. We
+got to think it out!"
+
+"There ain't a chance in a thousand, old girl. There ain't one in a
+million. They're circling round in the hills out here now, waitin' for me,
+like buzzards waitin' for the eyes of a dyin' horse."
+
+She rocked herself, and the clutching fingers left white marks on her
+face, but the eyes that met his glittered tearless:
+
+"Then there ain't nothing left but to face it like a man?"
+
+"That's all there be." He might have been giving an opinion on a matter in
+which he had no interest.
+
+"Then there ain't no use in our having any more talk about it?"
+
+"'Tain't just what you'd call an agreeable subject," he answered, with the
+sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony of
+death.
+
+She was tempted to kiss him--they were not given to demonstrations, this
+pair--then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they
+anticipated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.
+
+"Do you want your breakfast now?"
+
+"I guess you might bring it along."
+
+And for the same reason that she refrained from kissing him, she repressed
+a desire to wring the neck of a young broiler and cook it for his
+breakfast, remembering that she had heard they gave folks pretty much what
+they wanted when they wouldn't want it long. So Jim got his usual
+breakfast of bacon, uncooked canned tomatoes, soda-biscuit, and coffee.
+She sat with him while he ate, but they spoke no more of "them" or of how
+soon "they" might be expected. She told him that young Jim had pretended
+that morning that he had a cactus thorn in his foot, so that he might have
+a piece of dried apple. And old Jim, in an excess of parental fondness and
+pride, said: "The damned little liar, he'll get to Congress yet!"
+
+But the children were a dangerous topic for overstrained nerves at this
+particular time, so Alida told Jim that she had put the black hen to set
+and she thought they'd have some chickens at last. Jim smoked while Alida
+washed the dishes, and when Jim's back was turned she examined the lock on
+the door--a good push would open it. Then she looked at the brown bureau,
+and the recklessness of despair came into her eyes. In the room beyond,
+Jim was reading a two weeks' old newspaper and smoking. He looked like a
+lazy ranchman taking his ease.
+
+As she went about her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed things
+as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the
+shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if
+it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color of the
+sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the grasshoppers, that
+was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried, and their slimy beds
+crept along the willows like sluggish snakes. Gaunt range-cattle bellowed
+in their thirst, and the parched earth crackled beneath the sun that hung
+above the house like a flaming disk. Sometimes she sank beneath the burden
+of it; then she would wring her hands and call on God to help them; they
+were beyond human power. She and Jim were alone all the morning; they did
+not again refer to what they knew would happen. He read his old paper and
+she put her house in order. She did it with especial care. It was meet to
+have things seemly in the house of the dead. And every time she glanced at
+Jim she repressed the desire to fling herself on his breast and cry out
+the anguish that consumed her.
+
+At noon she brought the children home to dinner, and afterwards Jim taught
+them to throw the lasso and played buffalo with them. Alida did not trust
+herself to watch them; she stayed in the kitchen and saw the sunbeam grow
+pale with the waning of the day, the day whose minutes dragged like lead,
+yet had rushed from her, leaving her the night to face. At sundown she
+cooked supper, but she no longer knew what she did. A crazy agility had
+taken possession of her and she spun about the kitchen, doing the same
+errand many times, finding herself doing always something different from
+that she had set about doing. The molten day was burning itself out like a
+fever; hot gusts of air beat up from the earth, but the woman who waited
+felt chilled to the marrow, and took a cloak down from a peg and wrapped
+it about her while she waited for the biscuit to bake. At supper they sat
+down together, the man and his wife and their three children. The children
+were in fine spirits from the fun they had had that afternoon. Never had
+daddy been so nice to them. He had taught Topeka to throw the lasso so
+well that she had caught the cat once and little Jim twice; and daddy had
+played he was a buffalo and had charged them all with his head down, till
+they screamed in terror. But daddy seemed more quiet through the meal, and
+once mother started up and cried:
+
+"What's that?"
+
+She ran to the door with her hand pressed to her side, but daddy called
+after her:
+
+"Don't you know the cowards better than that? They'll wait for nightfall."
+
+But these things had not worried the children, with their heads full of
+playing buffalo and throwing the lariat.
+
+"Jim," said his father, before they went to bed, "remember you are the man
+of the family." But young Jim was already nodding with sleep. Topeka and
+Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were glad to go to
+bed.
+
+The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun had
+hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red
+that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the
+foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a
+world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had
+quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live
+coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity of
+its fever. The bellowing of the thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped
+with the twilight that brought no dew to slake their parched throats. In
+the hills the coyotes wailed like lost souls. It was night bereft of
+benisons, day made frightful by darkness. All the heat of a cycle of
+desert summers seemed concentrated in that house in the valley where the
+man and his wife waited. Each sound of the desert night Alida translated
+into the trampling of horses' feet; then, as the sound would die away, or
+prove to be but some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose
+its pinch on her features, and she would stare into her husband's face
+with eyes that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked
+and filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting.
+
+"Jim," she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, "I am going
+to fasten up the house."
+
+"Do you hear them?" he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred to
+the finer senses of women.
+
+She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
+
+He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it
+barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he put
+into:
+
+"Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by
+fastening that?"
+
+"Jim, I must," and her voice broke. "They may think you are not here, that
+it's only me and the children, and that's why the house is fastened." She
+got up and began to move about as though her thoughts scourged her to
+action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his pipe.
+
+"Do anything you blame please," he said, more by way of humoring her than
+from faith in her stratagem. He felt strong enough to face his destiny, to
+meet it in a way worthy of his mother's people.
+
+Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night. Each thing
+she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was as if she
+were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a sinister
+prophecy. Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she might not
+break the spell by doing things differently from the way she had dreamed
+them. Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly, and she swung it
+to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind seemed likewise to sway
+hither and thither. Should she fasten the door and push the bureau against
+it, as it had been in the dream, or should she leave door and windows
+gaping wide for them? And then, as one who walks and does familiar things
+in sleep, she shut the door and turned the key. Jim smiled at her, but she
+could no longer look at him. One of the children wailed fretfully from the
+room beyond. Sleep had become a scourge in the stifling heat. One by one
+she lowered the windows and nailed them down; then she dragged the brown
+bureau against the door, took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and
+sat down with Jim to wait.
+
+"What are you going to do with them toys?" he asked, as he saw her examine
+the chambers of one of the six-shooters.
+
+"You ain't going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are you?"
+she reproached him.
+
+"'Ain't we agreed that it's best to keep onpleasant family matters from
+the kids?" He smiled at her bravely. "The remembrance of what we're
+anticipatin' ain't going to help young Jim to get to Congress when his
+time comes, nor it ain't going to help the girls get good husbands,
+either. This here country ain't what it was in the way of liberality since
+it's got to be a State."
+
+"Sh-sh-sh!" she said. "Is that the range-cattle stampedin' after water, or
+is it--" They listened. The furniture in the room crackled; there was not a
+fibre of it to which the resistless heat had not penetrated. On the range
+the cattle bellowed in their thirst-torture; in the intervals of their
+cries sounded something far off, but regular as the thumping of a ship's
+screw. The woman did not need an answer to her question. The steady
+trampling of hoofs came muffled through the dead air, but the sound was
+unmistakable. She put her arms about the man's neck and crushed him to her
+with all her woman strength. "Oh, Jim, you've been a good man to me!"
+
+"Steady--steady." He strained her close to him. "They'd be, by the sound of
+them, on the straight bit of road now, before the turn. Soon we'll hear
+their hoofs ring hollow as they cross the plank bridge."
+
+His plainsman's faculty was as keen as ever; his calculation of the
+horsemen's distance was made as though he were the least concerned. All
+Alida's courage had gone, with the dread thing at hand. She clung to him,
+dazed.
+
+"They're sober, all right enough."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"They'd be cursing and bellowing if they were drunk."
+
+The hoofs rang hollow on the little plank bridge that crossed the ditch
+about a stone's-throw from the door. Not a word was said either within or
+without. The lynchers seemed to have drilled for their part; there was no
+whispering, no deferring to a leader. On they came, so close that Jim and
+Alida could hear the creaking of their saddles. There was the clank of
+spurs and the straining of leather as they dismounted, then some one
+knocked at the door till the warped boards rattled.
+
+Jim could feel the thudding of Alida's heart as she clung to him, but when
+the knock was repeated a new courage came to her, and she left Jim and
+went on her knees close to the outer wall.
+
+"Jim, is that you?" she called, and now every sense was trained to battle;
+her voice had even a sleepy cadence, as if she had been suddenly roused.
+
+"That won't do at all, Miz Rodney. We know you got Jim in there, just as
+certain as we're out here, and we want him to come out and we'll do the
+thing square, otherwise he can take the consequences."
+
+Jim opened his mouth to speak, but she, still on her knees beside the
+wall, gained his silence by one supplicating gesture. There was a sleepy,
+fretful cry from the room beyond--the noise had roused one of the children.
+
+"Sh-sh, dear," she called. "It's only a bad dream. Go to sleep again;
+mother is here."
+
+Through the warped door came sounds of the whispering voices without,
+drowned by the shrieking bellow of the cattle. There was not a breath of
+air in the suffocating room. Jim bent towards Alida:
+
+"I'm goin out to 'em. They'll do it square, over on the cotton-woods; this
+rumpus'll only wake the kids."
+
+But she shook her head imploringly, putting her finger to her lips as a
+sign that he was not to speak, and he had not the heart to refuse, though
+knowing that she made a desperate situation worse.
+
+"Gentlemen"--she spoke in a low, distinct voice--"Jim ain't here. He's been
+away from home five days. There's no one here but me and the children;
+you've woke them up and frightened them by pounding on the door. I ask you
+to go away."
+
+"If he ain't in there, will you let us search the house?" It was Henderson
+that spoke, Henderson, foreman of the "XXX" outfit.
+
+"I can't have them frightened; please take my word and go away."
+
+"Whas er matter, muvvy?" called Judith, sleepily. Young Jim was by this
+time crying lustily. Only Topeka said nothing. With the precocity of a
+frontier child, she half realized the truth. She tried to comfort little
+Jim, though her teeth chattered in fear and she felt cold in the hot,
+still room. Then Judith called out, "Make papa send them away."
+
+"Your papa ain't here, Judith." But the fight had all gone out of Alida's
+voice; it was the groan of an animal in a trap.
+
+"Where's papa gone to?"
+
+"Sh-sh, Judith! Topeka, keep your sister quiet."
+
+It was absolutely still, within and without, for a full minute. Then Alida
+heard the shoving of shoulders against the door. Once, twice, thrice the
+lock resisted them. The brown bureau spun across the room like a child's
+toy. The lynchers, bursting in, saw Alida with her arms around Jim. When
+the last hope had gone it was instinct with her to protect him with her
+own body.
+
+"Go into the kids, old girl, this is no place for you." And there was that
+in his voice that made her obey.
+
+Something of the glory of old Chief Flying Hawk, riding to battle, was in
+the face of his grandson.
+
+"Remember, the children ain't to know," he said to his wife; and to the
+lynchers, "Gentlemen, I'm ready."
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+                       "Rocked By A Hempen String"
+
+
+Alida heard the mingled sounds of footsteps and hoofs grow fainter on the
+trail. The children looked at her to tell them why this night was
+different from all others--what was happening. But she could only cower
+among them, more terrified than they. She seemed to be shrunken from the
+happenings of that day. They hardly knew the little, shrivelled, gray
+woman who looked at them with unfamiliar eyes. Alida gazed at the little
+Judith, and there was something in her mother's glance that made the
+little one hide her face in her sister's shoulder. Young Judith it was who
+all unwittingly had told the lynchers that her father was at home, and in
+Alida's heart there was towards this child a blind, unreasoning hate.
+Better had she never been born than live to do this thing!
+
+It was the wee man, Jim, who first began to reflect resentfully on this
+intrusion on his slumbers. He had been sleeping well and comfortably when
+some grown-ups came with a lot of noise, and his father had gone away with
+them. It had frightened him, but his mother was here, and why should she
+not put him to sleep again?
+
+"Muvvy, sing 'Dway Wolf.'" And as she paid no heed, but looked at him,
+white-faced and strange, he again repeated, with his most insinuating and
+beguiling tricks of eye and smile:
+
+"Muvvy, sing 'Dway Wolf' for Dimmy."
+
+The child put his head in his mother's lap, and Alida began, scarce
+knowing what she did:
+
+  "'The gray wolves are coming fast over the hill,
+    Run fast, little lamb, do not baa, do not bleat,
+  For the gray wolves are hungry, they come here to kill,
+    And the lambs shall be scattered--'
+
+"No, no, Jimmy, muvvy cannot sing. Oh, can't you feel, child? Judith,
+Judith, why were you ever born?"
+
+It was still in the valley. Had they come to the dead cotton-woods yet?
+Had they begun it? The children shrank from this gray-faced woman whom
+they did not know and but yet a little while had been their mother. An
+awful silence had fallen on the night. The range-cattle no longer bellowed
+in their thirst; the hot wind no longer blew from the desert. A hush not
+of earth nor air nor the things that were of her ken seemed to have fallen
+about them, muffing the dark loneliness as by invisible flakes. The
+children had crouched close together for comfort. They feared the little,
+gray-faced woman who seemed to have stolen into their mother's place and
+looked at them with strange eyes.
+
+Jimmy looked at the woman who held him, hoping his mother would come, and
+he could see them both. And while he waited he dropped off to sleep; and
+little Judith, hiding her head on Topeka's shoulder, that she might not
+see the look in those accusing eyes, presently dreamed that all was well
+with her again; and Topeka reflected that if her mother should ask her in
+the morning whether she had dreamed last night, she would have a fine tale
+to tell of men riding up, and loud voices, and trying of the door, and
+father going away with them. Her mother had questioned her this morning
+when nothing had happened to warrant it. Surely she would ask again
+to-morrow, and Topeka could tell--she could tell--all.
+
+Alida looked at her three sleeping children--his children, and yet they
+could sleep. Into her mind came that cry of utter desolation, "Could ye
+not watch with me one hour?" And God had been deaf to Him, His son, even
+as He was deaf to her.
+
+The children were sleeping easily. The hush that had hung like a pall over
+the valley had not lifted. Had they done it? Was it over yet? She went to
+the door and listened. Surely the silence that wrapped the valley was a
+thing apart. It was as no other silence that she could remember. It was
+still, still, and yet there was vibration to it, like the muffled roar
+within a shell. She strained her ears--was that the sound of horsemen going
+down the trail? No, no, it was only the beating of her foolish heart that
+would not be still, but beat and fluttered and would not let her hear.
+Yes, surely, that was the sound of hoofs. It was over then--they were
+going.
+
+She would go and look for him. Perhaps it would not be too late--she had
+heard of such things. A dynamic force consumed her. She had no
+consciousness of her body. Her feet and hands did things with incredible
+swiftness--lighted a lantern, selected a knife, ran to the corral for an
+old ladder that had been there when they took possession of the deserted
+house; and through all her frantic haste she could feel this new force, as
+it were, lick up the red blood in her veins, burn her body to ashes as it
+gave her new power. She felt that never again would she have need of meat
+and drink and sleep. This force would abide with her till all was over,
+then leave her, like the whitened bones of the desert.
+
+It was dark in the valley, but the menacing stillness seemed to be
+lifting. The range-cattle had again taken up their plaint, the sounds of
+the desert night swept across the stony walls of the cañon. Alida knew
+that it must have happened at the dead cotton-woods. There were no other
+high trees about for miles. Again she listened before advancing. There was
+no sound of hoof or champing bit or men moving quickly. They had gone
+their way into the valley. She ran swiftly, her lantern throwing its beam
+across the scrubby inequalities of ground, but for her there was no need
+of its beacon. To-night she was beyond the halting, stumbling
+uncertainties of tread to which man is subject. There was magic in her
+feet and in her hands and brain. Like the wind she ran, the wind on the
+great plain where there are no foot-hills to hinder its course. The black,
+dead trees stood out distinctly against the starry sky, and from a
+cross-limb of one of them dangled something with head awry, like a broken
+jumping-jack, something that had once been a man--and her husband. She
+could touch the feet of this frightful thing and feel its human warmth. A
+wind came up from the desert and blew across the cañon's rocky walls into
+the valley, and the parody of a man swayed to it.
+
+She had been expecting this thing. For weeks the image of it had been
+graven on her heart. Sleeping or waking, she had seen nothing but his
+dangling body from the cross-limb. Yet with the actual consummation before
+her, she felt its hideous novelty as though it were unexpected. At sight
+of it the force that had borne her up through the happenings of that day
+went out of her, and as she stood with the knife and the rope, that she
+had brought in the hope of cheating the lynchers, dangling from her
+nerveless hand her helplessness overcame her. Again and again she called
+to the dead man for help, called to him as she had been accustomed to call
+when her woman's strength had been unequal to some heavy household task.
+
+Far down the trail she could hear the gallop of a horse coming closer, and
+mingled with the sounds of its flying feet was a voice urging the horse to
+greater speed in the shrill cabalistic "Hi-hi-hi-ki!" of the plains-man.
+What was it--one of them returning to see that she did not cheat the rope
+of its due?--to hang her beside him, as an after-thought, as they hanged
+Kate Watson beside her man? Let them. She was standing near the swaying
+thing when horse and rider gained the ground beside her, and what was left
+to her of consciousness made out that the rider was Judith. She pointed to
+it, and stood helpless with the dangling rope in her hand.
+
+"Are we too late?" Judith almost whispered, as she caught Alida's cold,
+inert hands. "I dreamed it all and came. If I could have dreamed it
+sooner!"
+
+Alida did not seem to hear, neither could she speak. She only pointed
+again to the thing beside her.
+
+Judith understood. The women had a task to share, and in silence they
+began it. The lynchers had done their work all too well. Again and again
+the women strove with all their strength to take down the dangling parody
+of a man, which in its dead-weight resistance seemed in league with the
+forces against them. At last the thing was done. Down to a pale world,
+that in the haggard gray of morning seemed to bear in its countenance
+something of the pinch of death, Judith lowered the thing that had so
+lately been a man. She cut the rope away from the neck, she straightened
+the wry neck that seemed to wag in pantomimic representation of the last
+word to the lynchers. They'd have to reckon with him on dark nights, and
+when the wind wailed like a famished wolf and when things not to be
+explained lurked in the shadows of the desert.
+
+The morning stillness came flooding into the cup-shaped valley like a
+soft, resistless wave. Something had come to the gray, old earth--another
+day, with all its human gift of joy and woe, and the earth welcomed it
+though it had known so many. The sun burst through the gold-tipped aureole
+of cloud, scattering far and wide lavish promises of a perfect day. The
+earth seemed to respond with a thrill. No longer was the pinch of death in
+her countenance. The valley, the mountains, the invisible wind, even the
+dead cotton-woods, seemed endowed with throbbing life that contrasted
+fearsomely with the terrible nullity of this thing that once had been Jim
+Rodney.
+
+Alida had ceased to take any part in the hideous drama. She sat on the
+ground, a crouching thing with glittering eyes. It was past comprehension
+that the sun could shine and the world go on with her man dead before her.
+Judith had become the force that planned and did to save the family pride.
+While her hands were busy with preparations for the dead, she rehearsed
+what she would say to this and that one to account for Jim's absence. The
+silence of the men who had done this thing would be as steadfast as their
+own.
+
+And there were the children. Through all her frantic search for things in
+the house, Judith remembered that she must step softly and not waken the
+children. With each turn of the screw, as her numbed consciousness rallied
+and responded afresh to the hideous realization of this thing, there came
+no release from the tyrannous hold of petty detail. She remembered that
+she must be back at noon to hold post-office, and there would be the
+endless comedy to be played once more with her cavaliers. They must never
+suspect from word or look of hers. And there was the dance to-night at the
+Benton ranch--she hid her face in her hands. Ah, no, she could not do this
+thing! And yet they must not suspect. She must contrive to give the
+impression that Jim had cheated the rope. Yes, she must go and dance, and,
+if need be, dance with his very murderers. Jim's children were to have the
+"clean start" that he intended, and they would have to get it here. There
+was no money for an exodus and a beginning elsewhere.
+
+Alida still crouched beside the long, even tarpaulin roll that Judith had
+prepared with hands that knew not what they did. But now Judith gently
+roused her and put in her hand a spade; already she herself had begun. But
+Alida stared at it dully, as if she did not understand. Then Judith
+pointed to something black that had begun to wheel in the sky, wheel, and
+with each circular swoop come closer to the roll of tarpaulin. Then Alida
+knew, and, taking the spade, she and Judith began to dig the grave.
+
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+                                 The Ball
+
+
+The dance in the Benton ranch was the great social event of the midsummer
+season. The Bentons had begun to give dances in the days of plenty, when
+the cattle industry had been at its dizziest height; and they had
+continued to give dances through all the depressing fluctuations of the
+trade, perhaps in much the same spirit as one whistles in the dark to keep
+up his courage. Thus, though cattle fell and continued to fall in the
+scale of prices till the end no man dared surmise, the Benton "boys"--they
+were two brothers, aged respectively forty-five and fifty years--continued
+to hold out facilities to dance and be merry.
+
+All day strange wagons--ludicrous, makeshift things--had been discharging
+loads of women and children at the Benton ranch, tired mothers and their
+insistent offspring. To the women this strenuous relaxation came as manna
+in the wilderness. What was the dreary round of washing, ironing, baking,
+and the chain of household tasks that must be done as primitively as in
+Genesis, if only they might dance and forget? So the mothers came early
+and stayed late, and the primary sessions of the dances fulfilled all the
+functions of the latter-day mothers' congresses--there were infant ailments
+to be discussed, there were the questions of food and of teething, of
+paregoric and of flannel bands, which, strange heresy, seemed to be "going
+out," according to the latest advices from those compendiums of all
+domestic information, the "Woman's Pages" of the daily papers.
+
+Inasmuch as these more than punctual debaters must be cooked for, there
+was, to speak plainly, "feeling" on the part of the housekeeper at the
+Bentons'. Wasn't it enough for folks to come to a dance and get a good
+supper, and go away like Christians when the thing was over, instead of
+coming a day before it began and lingering on as if they had no home to go
+to? This, at least, was the housekeeper's point of view, a crochety one,
+be it said, not shared by the brothers Benton, whose hospitality was as
+genuine as it was primitive. To this same difficult lady the infants, who
+were too tender in years to be separated from their mothers, were as
+productive of anxiety as their elders. A room had been set apart for their
+especial accommodation, the floor of which, carefully spread with
+bed-quilts and pillows, prevented any great damage from happening to the
+more tender of the guests; and they rolled and crooned and dug their small
+fists into each other's faces while their mothers danced in the room
+beyond.
+
+By nightfall the Benton ranch gleamed on the dark prairie like a
+constellation. Lights burned at every window; a broad beam issued from the
+door and threw a welcoming beacon across the darkness and silence of the
+night. The scraping of fiddles mingled with the rhythmic scuffle of feet
+and the singsong of the words that the dancers sung as they whirled
+through the figures of the quadrille and lancers. About the walls of the
+room where the dancing was in progress stood a fringe of gallants, their
+heads newly oiled, and proclaiming the fact in a bewildering variety of
+strong perfumes. Red silk neckerchiefs knotted with elaborate carelessness
+displayed to advantage bronzed throats; new overalls, and of the shaggiest
+species, amply testified to the social importance of the Benton dance.
+
+As yet the dancing was but intermittent and was engaged in chiefly by the
+mothers with large progeny, who felt that after the arrival of a greater
+number of guests, and among them the unmarried girls, their opportunities
+might not be as plentiful as at present. One or two cow-punchers, in an
+excess of civility at the presence of the fair, had insisted on giving up
+their six-shooters, mumbling something about "there being ladies present
+and a man being hasty at times." In the "bunk-room," which did duty as a
+gentleman's cloak-room, things were really warming up. There was much
+drinking of healths, as the brothers Benton had thoughtfully provided the
+wherewithal, and that in excellent quality.
+
+Costigan was there, and Texas Tyler, who had ridden sixty miles to "swing
+a petticoat," or, if there were not enough to go round, to dance with a
+handkerchief tied to some fellow's sleeve. By "swinging a petticoat" it
+was perfectly understood among all his friends that he meant a chance to
+dance with Judith Rodney. Year in and year out Texas never failed to
+present himself at the post-office on mail-days, if his work took him
+within a radius of fifty miles of the Daxes. No dance where the
+possibility of seeing Judith was even remote was too long a ride for him
+to undertake, even when it took him across the dreariest wastes of the
+desert. Texas had been devoted to Judith since she had left the convent,
+and sometimes, perhaps twice a year, she told him that she valued his
+friendship. On all other occasions she rejected his suit as if his
+continual pressing of it were something in the nature of an affront. Yet
+Texas persevered.
+
+"Well, here's lukin' at you, since in the way of a frind there's nothing
+better to look at!" and Costigan drained a tin cup at Texas Tyler.
+
+"Your very good health," said Texas, who was somewhat embarrassed by what
+was regarded as Costigan's "floweriness."
+
+"Begorra, is that Hinderson or the ghost av the b'y?" Costigan's roving
+eye was arrested by the foreman of the "XXX," who stood drinking with two
+or three men of his outfit. He was pale and ill-looking. He drank several
+times in succession, as if he needed the stimulant, and without the
+formality of drinking to any one. The two or three "XXX" men who were with
+him seemed to be equally in need of restoratives.
+
+They talked of the cattle stampede in which several of the outfits had
+been heavy losers. Some nine hundred head of cattle had been recovered,
+and members of the different outfits were still scouring the Red Desert
+for strays.
+
+Something in the nature of a sensation was created by the arrival of the
+Wetmore party. The women were frankly interested in the clothes, bearing,
+and general deportment of the New-Yorkers. Rumors of Miss Colebrooke's
+beauty were rife, and there was a general inclination to compare her with
+local belles. Such exotic types--they had seen these city beauties
+before--were as a rule too colorless for their appreciation. They liked
+faces that had "more go to them," was the verdict passed upon one famous
+beauty who had visited the Wetmores the year before. In arrangement of the
+hair, perhaps, in matters of dress, the judges were willing to concede the
+laurels to city damsels, but there concession stopped. But evidently
+Kitty, to judge from the elaboration of her toilet, did not intend to be
+dismissed thus cursorily. She herself was delicately, palely pretty, as
+always, but her hair was tortured to a fashionable fluffiness, and the
+simplicity of her green muslin gown was only in the name. It was muslin
+disguised, elaborated, beribboned, lace-trimmed till its identity was all
+but lost in the multitude of pretty complications.
+
+"Did you know that old Ma'am Yellett had a school-marm up to her place?"
+asked one of the men, apropos of Eastern prettiness.
+
+"Well, well," Costigan reminisced, "'tis some av thim Yillitt lambs thot's
+six fut in their shtockings, if Oi be rimimbering right. Sure, the tacher
+ought to be something av a pugilist, Oi'm thinkin'."
+
+"I seen her the other day, and a neater little heifer never turned out to
+pasture. Lord, I'd like to be gnawing the corners of the primer right now,
+if she was there to whale the ruler."
+
+"Arrah," bayed Costigan, "but the women question is gittin' complicated
+ontoirely, wid Miss Rodney--an' herself lukin' loike a saint in a church
+window--dalin' the mails an' th' other wan tachin' in the mountains. Sure,
+this place is gittin' to be but a sorry shpot for bachelors loike mesilf."
+
+"I ain't mentionin' no names, but there's a man here ain't treatin' a
+mighty fine woman square and accordin' to the way she ought to be
+treated."
+
+The information ran through the circle like an electric shock. Men stopped
+in the act of pledging each other's healths to listen. Loungers
+straightened up; every topic was dropped. The man who had made the
+statement was the loose-lipped busybody who had suggested to his host that
+he give up his six-shooter since there were "ladies present."
+
+"What the hell are you waiting for?" queried Texas Tyler, savagely.
+"You've cracked your whip, made your bow, and got our attention; why the
+hell don't you go on?"
+
+The man looked about nervously. He was rather alarmed at the interest he
+had excited. The next moment Peter Hamilton had walked into the room.
+There was something crucial in his entrance at this particular time; it
+crystallized suspicion. The gossip took advantage of the greetings to
+Hamilton to make his escape. Texas Tyler left the bunk-room immediately
+and looked for him in the room with the dancers. The fiddles, in the hands
+of a couple of Mexicans, had set the whole room whirling as if by magic.
+As they danced they sang, joining with the "caller-out," who held his
+vociferous post between the rooms, till the room was full of singing,
+dancing men and women, who spun and pirouetted as if they had not a care
+in the world. But Texas Tyler was not of these, as he looked through the
+dancers for his man. There was a red flash in the pupils of his eyes, and
+he told himself that he was going to do things the way they did them in
+Texas, for, of course, he knew that the loose-lipped idiot had meant
+Judith Rodney and Peter Hamilton. Never before had such an idea occurred
+to him, and now that it had been presented to his mind's eye, he wondered
+why he had been such a blind fool. Never had the singing to these dances
+seemed so absurd.
+
+  "Hawk hop out and the crow hop in,
+  Three hands round and go it ag'in.
+  Allemane left, back to the missus,
+  Grande right and left and sneak a few kisses."
+
+He rushed from the room and down to the stable. At sight of him some one
+leaped on a horse and rode out into the darkness.
+
+"Who was that?" asked Texas of a man lounging by the corral.
+
+"That was--" and he gave the name of the loose-lipped man.
+
+Texas cursed long and picturesquely. Then he went back to the bunk-room
+and tried to pick a quarrel with Peter Hamilton, who good-naturedly
+assumed that his old friend had been drinking and refused to take offence.
+
+Peter went in to ask Kitty to dance with him. All that evening he had been
+waiting anxiously for Judith. Meanwhile he had used all his influence as a
+newly appointed member of the Wetmore outfit to soothe the ruffled
+feelings of the cattle-men. Of the tragedy in the valley he had heard no
+rumor.
+
+Kitty had come to the point where she was willing to waive the
+Récamier-Chateaubriand friendship in favor of one more personal and
+ordinary. In fact, as Peter showed a disposition to regard as final her
+answer to him on the day he had spurred across the desert, Kitty, with
+true feminine perversity, inclined to permit him to resume his suit. His
+acquiescence in her refusal she had at first regarded as the turning of
+the worm; after the wolf-hunt, however, her meditations were more
+disturbing. She had never told Peter of that strange woodland meeting with
+Judith, yet Judith's beauty, her probable hold over Peter, the degree of
+his affection for her were rankling questions in Kitty's consciousness. In
+the stress of these considerations Kitty lost her head completely for so
+old a campaigner. She drew the apron-string tight--attempted force instead
+of strategy.
+
+Kitty and Peter finished their waltz, one of the few round dances of the
+evening.
+
+"How perfectly you dance, Kitty! It's a long time since we've had a waltz
+together."
+
+The cow-punchers looked at Kitty as if she were not quite flesh and blood.
+Such flaxen daintiness, femininty etherealized to angelic perfection, was
+new to them, but their admiration was like that given to a delicate exotic
+which, wonderful as it is, one is well pleased to view through the glass
+of the florist's window.
+
+Peter was deferentially attentive and zealous to make the Wetmore party
+have a thoroughly good time, yet he did all these things, as it were, with
+his eye on the door. He was not obviously distrait; he was the man of the
+world, talking, making himself agreeable, "doing his duty," while his
+subconsciousness was busy with other matters. It was rather through
+telepathy than through any lack of attention paid to her that Kitty
+realized the state of things, and in proportion to her realization came a
+feeling of helplessness; it was so new, so unexpected, so cruel. He seemed
+drifting away from her on some tide of affairs of the very existence of
+which she had been unconscious. Further and further he had drifted, till
+intelligible speech no longer seemed possible between them. They said the
+foolish, empty things that people call out as the boat glides away from
+the shore, the things that all the world may hear, and in his eyes there
+was only that smiling kindness. How had it come about after all these
+years? What was it that had first cut the cable that sent him drifting?
+What was it? She must think. Oh, who could think with that noise! How
+silly was their singing as they danced, how uncouth!
+
+  "All dance as pretty as you can,
+  Turn your toes and left alleman;
+    First gent sashay to the right,
+  Now swing the girl you last swung about,
+  And now the one that's cut her out,
+    And now the one that's dressed in white,
+  And now the belle of the ball."
+
+The dancers seemed bitten to the quick with the tarantula of an ecstatic
+hilarity; their bodies swayed in perfect harmony to the swing of the
+fiddles and the swell of the chorus. The most uncouth of them came under
+the spell of that mad magic. Their movements, that in the beginning of the
+dance had been shy and awkward, became almost beautiful; they forgot arms,
+hands, feet; their bodies had become like the strings of some skilfully
+played instrument, obediently responsive to rhythm, and in that composite
+blending of races each in his dancing brought some of the poetry of his
+own far land. The scene was amazing in its beauty and simplicity, like the
+strong, inspirational power and rugged rhythm of some old border minstrel.
+One by one the dancers glowed with better understanding; discordant
+elements, alien nations were fused to harmony in this vivid picture.
+
+Peter turned to Kitty, expecting to see her face aglow with the warmth of
+it. She stood beside him, the one unresponsive soul in the room, on her
+lips a pale, tolerant smile.
+
+"Aren't they splendid, Kitty, these women? More than half of them work
+like beavers all day, and they have young children and dozens of worries,
+but would you suspect it? They're just the women for this country."
+
+Now in the present state of affairs almost any other subject would have
+been better calculated to promote good feeling than the one on which Peter
+had alighted. Kitty's thoughts had perversely lingered about one who,
+though not one with these women, had yet their sturdy self-reliance, their
+acquiescence in grim conditions, their pleasure in simple things. Kitty's
+apprehension, slow to kindle, had taken fire like a forest, and by its
+blaze she saw things in a distorted light; her present vision magnified
+the relations of Peter and Judith to a degree that a month ago she would
+have regarded as impossible. "He is her lover!" was the accusation that
+suddenly flashed through her mind, and with the thought an overwhelming
+desire to say something unkind, something that should hurt him, supplanted
+all judgment and reason.
+
+"Oh, it's a decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you. And
+an artist, of course--but isn't it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to idealize
+them because they are having a good time? There's no virtue in it. It is
+conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and have just as
+many little children to look after, and yet not have these dances you
+praise them for coming to."
+
+"I'm afraid you find us and our amusements a little crude. Evidently the
+spirit of our dances does not appeal to you; but I did not suppose it
+necessary to remind you that they should not be judged by the standard of
+conventional evening parties," said Peter, hurt and angry in his turn.
+
+"Us, our amusements, our dances? So you are quite identified with these
+people, my dear Peter, and I had thought you an ornament of cotillions and
+country clubs. I can only infer that it is somebody in particular who has
+brought about your change of heart."
+
+Peter flushed a little, and Kitty kept on: "Some of the native belles are
+quite wonderful, I believe. Nannie Wetmore tells of a half-breed who is
+very handsome."
+
+Peter set his lips. "At the expense of spoiling Nannie's pretty romance, I
+must tell you that the lady she refers to is not only the most beautiful
+of women, but she would be at ease in any drawing-room. It would be as
+ridiculous to apply the petty standards of ladyhood to her as it would
+to--well, imagine some foolish girl bringing up the question at a woman's
+club--'Was Joan of Arc a lady?'" Peter spoke without calculating the
+conviction that his words carried. He was angry, and his manner, voice,
+intonation showed it.
+
+Kitty, now that her most unworthy suspicions had been confirmed by Peter's
+ardent championing of Judith, lost her discretion in the pang that gnawed
+her little soul: "I beg your pardon, Peter. When I spoke I did not, of
+course, know that this young woman was anything to you."
+
+"Anything to me? My dear Kitty, I've never had a better friend than Judith
+Rodney."
+
+The dance was at its flood-tide. The exhilaration had grown with each
+sweep of the fiddle-bow, with the sorcery of sinuous, swaying bodies, with
+the song of the dancers as they joined in the calling out of the figures,
+with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses, with the
+leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled as leaves
+circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool. The dancing Mrs. Dax split her
+favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of which her long
+list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel if need be. Her
+dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had something of the surge of
+the west wind sweeping over a field of grain. Sometimes she waved back her
+partner and alone danced a figure, putting to the music her own
+interpretation--barbaric, passionate, rude, but magnificently vivid. And
+the dancers would stop and crowd about her, clapping hands and stamping
+feet to the rhyming movement of her body, while against the wall her
+hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood and glared in a fury of
+disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly meanwhile and exercising the
+utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs. Johnnie's train.
+
+The "XXX" men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the merriment,
+keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the hospitable bottles
+were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell that had bound them all
+day. Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not lost its tallow paleness
+despite the number of his potations, put his head through the door to have
+a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was caught in the outermost eddy of the
+whirling throng, and was soon dancing as madly as the others. The rest of
+the "XXX" party still hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed
+hospitable. They were still dusty from their long ride of the early
+morning, and more than once their fear-quickened imaginations had been
+haunted by the spectre of the dead cotton-woods, from which something
+heavy and limp and warm had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had
+secured the dancing Mrs. Dax for a partner. The "caller-out," stationed
+between the two rooms, warmed to his genial task. He improvised, he put a
+wealth of imagination and personality into his work, he showered
+compliments on the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax's feet, he joked Henderson on
+his pallor, he attempted a florid venture at Kitty. Miguel put fresh magic
+into his bowing, José's fiddle rioted with the madness of it.
+
+Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her heart
+cried out in protest at the thing she must do. It was the utmost cruelty
+of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day that they
+had killed him. But she must do it, that his children might evade the
+stigma of "cattle-thief," that the shadow of the gallows-tree might not
+fall across their young lives, that the neighbors might give credence to
+the tale of Jim's escape from his enemies, that Alida and she might earn
+the pittance that would give the children the "clean start" that Jim had
+set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance and be the merriest of
+them all that these things might happen, but again and again she deferred
+the dread moment. The light, the music, the voices, the shuffle of the
+feet came to her as she stood forlorn in the grateful darkness. On the
+wall the shadows of the dancers, magnified and grotesque, parodied their
+movements, as they contended there, monstrous, uncouth shapes, like
+prehistoric monsters gripping, clinching in some mighty struggle; and
+above it all sang out the wild rhythm of Miguel's fiddle, and young José's
+bow capered madly.
+
+Judith drew close to the window, and the merriment struck chill at her
+heart like the tolling of a knell. She saw the pale face of Henderson
+gleam yellow-white among the dancers, and, watching him, the blood-lust of
+the Indian woke in her heart. The rest of the room was but a blur; the
+dancers faded into swaying shadows; she saw nothing but Henderson as he
+danced that he might forget the gray of morning, the black, dead trees,
+and the grotesque thing with head awry that swayed in the breeze like a
+pendulum. He dreaded the long, black ride that would bring him to his
+camp, for he alone of the lynchers remained. Something was drawing his
+gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled against the
+temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax woman till her
+twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the accompaniment of Miguel's
+fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that dangled before his eyes, having
+the incontrovertible last word with a vengeance. And as he danced and
+swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell on the window opposite, and Jim
+Rodney's face looked in at him, beautiful in its ecstasy of hate--Rodney's
+face, refined, sharpened, tried in some bitter crucible, but Rodney's
+face! Henderson could not withdraw his fascinated gaze. He stood in the
+midst of the dancers like a man turned to stone. He put up his hand to his
+eyes as if to brush away a cloud of swarming gnats, then threw up his arms
+and rushed from the room. The dancers paused in their mad whirl. Miguel's
+bow stopped with a wailing shriek. Every eye turned towards the window for
+an explanation of Henderson's sudden panic, but all was dark without on
+the prairie. The magic had gone from the dance, the whirlwind of drapery
+that had swung like flags in a breeze dropped in dead air. "What was it?"
+the dancers asked one another in whispers.
+
+And for answer Judith entered, but a Judith that was strange to them.
+There was about her a white radiance that kept the dancers back, and in
+her eyes something of Mary's look, as she turned from Calvary. The dancers
+still kept the position of the figures, the men with their arms about
+their partners' waists, the women stepping forward; they were like the
+painted figures of dancers in a fresco. And among them stood Judith,
+waiting to play her part, waiting to show her world that she could dance
+and be merry because all was well with her and hers. But the bronzed sons
+of the saddle hung back, they who a day before would have quarrelled for
+the honor of a dance. They were afraid of her; it would be like dancing
+with the death angel. She looked from face to face. Surely some one would
+ask her to dance, and her eyes fell on Henderson, returning from the
+bottled courage in the bunk-room. Some word was due from him to explain
+his terror of a moment ago.
+
+"Oh, Miss Judith, I thought you was a ghost when I seen you at the
+window."
+
+"A ghost that's ready to dance." She held out her hand to him. In her
+gesture there was something of royal command, and Henderson, reading the
+meaning in her eyes, stepped forward. Her face, almost a perfect replica
+of the dead man's, looked at him.
+
+"I bring you greeting from my brother," she said. "He has gone on a long
+journey."
+
+Henderson started. Through the still room ran the murmur, "Rodney's
+outwitted them; he's played a joke on the rope!" And Judith, his
+dare-devil sister, had come with his greetings to Henderson, leader of the
+faction against him! The tide had turned. The applause that is ever the
+meed of the winner was hers to command. The cattle faction were ready to
+sing the praises of her splendid audacity. In their hearts they were glad
+in the thought that Jim had outwitted them.
+
+Miguel's bow dashed across the strings, and he drew from the little brown
+fiddle music that again made them merry and glowing. The magic came back
+to the dance, the blood leaped again with the merry madness, and they
+swept to the bowing like leaves when the first faint wail of winter cries
+in the trees.
+
+Hamilton, standing apart with Kitty Colebrooke, had been a dazed witness
+of the scene. With the rest he had watched the entrance of Judith, had
+been stunned by the change in her appearance, had seen her triumph and
+heard the rumor of Jim's escape, and his heart had warmed with the good
+word. She had probably managed the plan, and had come to-night, in the joy
+of her triumph, to hurl in their faces that she had outwitted them. And
+she had paid the penalty of her courage--her face told that. What a woman
+she was! Her heart would pay the penalty to the last throb, and yet she
+could dance with the merriest of them. And as she danced she seemed to
+Peter Hamilton, in her white draperies, like a cloud of whirling
+snow-flakes drifting across the silence of the desert night. She was the
+one woman in all the world for him, though his blind eyes had faced the
+light for years and had not known it. He had squandered the strength of
+his youth in the pursuit of a little wax light, and had not marked the
+serene shining of the moon.
+
+"And a man there was and he made his prayer--" he quoted to himself. Well,
+thank God that it had not been answered. He would take her away from here.
+She could take her place in his family and reflect credit on his choice.
+His family, his friends--he winced at the thought of their possible
+reception of the news. But Judith's presence would adjust these
+difficulties. He would present her to Kitty now, that his old friend might
+see what manner of woman she was. Kitty, he felt, would be kind in memory
+of the old days. She would give to them both in friendship what she had
+denied him in love. And as he warmed to the thought he turned to the woman
+of his youth. And she read a look in his face that had not been there in a
+long time. Had he, then, come back to her? Was the distance from bark to
+shore lessening as the sea of misunderstanding diminished?
+
+"Kitty, we were speaking a moment ago of Miss Rodney. You would like to
+know her, I'm sure. We've been such good friends all these years while you
+were deciding that what I wanted was not good for us--and deciding wisely,
+as I know now. Look at her! You'll understand how she has helped me keep
+the balance of things. When she's finished dancing you'll let me bring her
+to you, won't you?"
+
+And Kitty, who had expected much different words, struggled with the
+meaning of these unexpected ones. The strangeness of the pain bewildered
+her. Her dazed consciousness refused to accept that Peter was asking
+permission to present to her a woman whom she thought should not have been
+permitted to enter her presence. There was about her a white flame of
+anger that seemed to lick up the red blood in her veins as she turned to
+answer:
+
+"She is undeniably handsome, Peter, but I do not care to meet your
+mistress."
+
+He bowed low to her as Lieutenant Swift, of Fort Washakie, who was of the
+Wetmore party, came to claim Kitty's hand for the next dance. Judith and
+Henderson were leading the last figure, their hands clasped high in an
+arch through which the dancers trooped in couples. Again and again he
+tried to catch Judith's eye, but her glance never once met his. Her great,
+wide eyes had a far-away look as if they saw some tragedy, the shadow of
+which would never fall from her. She was, indeed, the tragic muse in her
+floating white drapery, the tragic muse whose grief is too deep for tears.
+He watched her as she swept towards him in the figure of the dance, the
+head thrown back, slightly foreshortened, the mouth smiling with the smile
+that knows all things, the eyes holy wells of truth. He saw in her
+something of the tenderness of Eve, for all the blending of the calm
+modern woman, capable in affairs, equal to emergency. It was like her to
+contrive her brother's escape and then to dance with the very men who had
+knotted the noose for his hanging. Henderson was bowing to her, the dance
+was over, and the next moment she was alone.
+
+"Is it you, Peter?" She thrust a strand of hair back from her temple. Her
+eyes rested on him for a moment, then wandered, till in their absent look
+was the rapt expression of the sleep-walker. The dark-rimmed eyes had in
+their depths the quiet of a conflagration, and Peter, seeing these things,
+and knowing the gamut of all her moods, saw that he had been mistaken. She
+had not come, to dance in triumph, in the face of her brother's enemies.
+There was no triumph in her face, but white, consuming despair.
+
+"Did you ask me to dance?" Again she put back the strand of hair. "Forgive
+me for being so stupid, but I've kept post-office to-day, and had a long
+ride, and I danced with Henderson."
+
+He drew her arm within his and led the way out through the crowd of
+dancers to the star-strewn night. She did not speak again, nor did she
+seem to notice that they had left the room with the dancers. She turned
+her face towards the lonely valley, where the drama of her brother's
+passing had been consummated, and something there was in her look as it
+turned towards the hills that told Peter.
+
+"Tell me, Judith, 'what has happened?"
+
+For answer she pointed towards the valley. "They did it last night at the
+dead cotton-woods. Henderson led them. I could not stay with Alida. I had
+to come here to dance that no one might suspect."
+
+Her voice was steady, but low and thrilling. In its deep resonance was the
+echo of all human sorrow. There was no hint of accusation, yet Peter felt
+accused. He felt, now when it was too late, that his position had been one
+of almost pusillanimous negligence. From the beginning he had taken a firm
+stand against violent measures. He had talked, argued, reasoned, inveighed
+against violence; no later than a week ago he had ridden across the desert
+to tell Henderson that the Wetmore outfit would take no part in violence
+of any sort, and that the cattle outfit that did resort to extreme
+measures would miss the support of the "W-Square" in any future range
+business. But it had not been enough. He should have made plain his
+position in regard to Judith. With her as his future wife the tragedy of
+the valley would not have been possible.
+
+From the ranch-house came the swell of the fiddles, the rhythmic shuffle
+of feet, the song of the dancers, dulled by distance. Beside him was
+Judith, a white spirit, the woman in her dead of grief. And yet, through
+all the grim horror of the tragedy she remembered the part that had been
+allotted to her, threw all the weight of her personality on the side of
+the game she was playing.
+
+"You must be on our side, Peter, and when there is talk of Jim's absence
+you must imply that he is East somewhere. You will know how to meet such
+inquiries better than we women. Henderson will be only too glad. You
+should have seen the wretch when I held out my hand to him and told him to
+dance with me. He came, white and shambling; we have nothing to fear from
+Henderson. Alida has no money to go away with. She and I must stay here
+and make a beginning for the children, and, Peter, we want you to help
+us."
+
+He had no voice to answer her brave words for a minute, and then his
+sentences came uncertain and halting.
+
+"You must think me a poor sort of friend, Judith, one who has been blind
+till the eleventh hour and is then found wanting. I feel so guilty to you,
+to your brother's wife, to that little child who put out his arms so
+trustfully to me that night, but I never imagined that things would come
+to such a pass as this. The smaller cattle outfits have been doing a good
+deal of blustering, but the more conservative element supposed that they
+had them in check, and did not for a moment think that they would take the
+law into their own hands. Believe me, this lawlessness has been in the
+face of every influence that could be brought to bear, and it shall not go
+unpunished."
+
+She spoke to him from the darkness, as the spirit of grief might speak.
+"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that is the justice of the
+plains. But, Peter, it is but poor justice. What's done is done, and fresh
+violence will not give back Alida her husband nor the little ones their
+father. What we need is friends, one or two loyal souls who, though
+knowing the hideous truth of this thing, will stand by us in our pitiful
+falsehood. I have told no one, nor shall I, but you and--Peter, you must
+not laugh at your fellow-conspirator--Leander."
+
+He took her hands in his and pressed them; big hands they were, and
+hardened by many a homely task, but withal tender and with the healing
+quality of womanliness in the touch of their warm, supple fingers. But
+to-night she did not seem to know that he held them, nor to be conscious
+of his presence. The woman in her was dead of grief. The white spirit in
+her place, that plotted and planned that Jim's children and Jim's wife
+might not from henceforth walk in the shadow of the gallows, was beyond
+the prompting of the flesh. And again she spoke to him in the same
+far-away voice, with the same far-away look in her eyes.
+
+"You must know, Peter, that Leander is at heart of the salt of the earth.
+I told him about it all, and he asked to be given the commission to deal
+with the men. He has risen to his post magnificently. I heard him swear
+the wretches to secrecy, hint to them that he had a great story to tell
+them. They were frightened, and listened. And the poor little man that we
+have so despised told them convincingly how Jim had made good his
+escape--even Henderson half believes we saved him."
+
+Peter hoped that she would accuse him of his half-heartedness indirectly,
+if not openly. It would have made his conscience more comfortable, and his
+conscience troubled him sorely to-night. It was that fatal habit of
+procrastination that had brought this thing about. He had hesitated all
+these weeks about Judith, and while he had threshed out the pro and con of
+her disadvantageous family connection, this hideous tragedy had happened.
+
+"Peter"--and now her eyes seemed to come back to earth again, to lose
+something of the far-away look of the sleep-walker--"Peter, I'm cruel to
+speak to you of these things now. When your heart is full of your own
+happiness, I come to you like a dark shadow with this tragedy. But I am
+glad for the good that has come to you, Peter. Perhaps Miss Colebrooke
+told you of the day I met her in the wood, the day of the wolf-hunt. She
+was so beautiful, I understood--"
+
+"Judith, I hardly know how to say what I am going to, I feel that I have
+been such a bad friend to you, but you must hear me patiently. Together,
+if you are willing, after knowing all of me that you do, we must look
+after your brother's children. That night in the little house in the
+valley, when the little chap came to me, don't you remember, there was
+something fine and fearless in the way he did it. 'You may belong to the
+cattle side of the argument,' he seemed to say, 'but I trust you.' Now,
+Judith dear, that boy's faith in me is not going to be shaken. We must
+look after them together. It is a very little thing you have asked of me,
+my dearest, but a very big one that I am asking of you. Do you understand,
+my Judith, it is _you_ that I want? Don't think of me as I have been,
+Judith, but as you are going to make me. I want you to give me the right
+now, this evening, to share all this trouble with you. Do we understand
+each other, Judith? Is it to be? And will you come back with me now, into
+the room where they are dancing, and let me present you to them, to the
+Wetmores, as _my_ Judith, my betrothed?"
+
+"But, Peter, I don't understand. I--I thought you and Miss Colebrooke
+were--"
+
+"That's all over, Judith. I did love her once. Oh, you dear, brave woman,
+I'm not a hero from any point of view, and you know it. It's but a sorry
+lover that's making his prayer to you, my dearest; but you won't judge, I
+know, beloved, you will love me instead?"
+
+Judith turned towards the valley. Her whole being throbbed with a
+passionate response to the man who stood so humbly before her, but there
+were duties that came first. Her mind was full of Alida and her children,
+and her eyes still sought Peter's imploringly.
+
+"You will be a good friend to them, Peter--to Jim's people? I cannot talk
+to you of anything else to-night. Your heart is big, Peter, but you cannot
+feel, perhaps--"
+
+"Listen, Judith. Whatever friendship and protection I can give your family
+you may count upon from now till the end of time. I will be theirs as I am
+yours. I feel your grief, but I want to soothe it, too. And if you love
+me, and I feel, Judith, that you do, you must let them all see to-night,
+these people who know us both, that we stand together before all the world
+for better or worse. Think, Judith, and you will see that you owe it to
+yourself, to me, to all these men, who reverence you as the one woman, the
+one ideal in their lonely lives."
+
+She could not speak. The moment was too full, the strain had been too
+great; but she smiled surrender, and Peter caught her tenderly in his arms
+and kissed her once--his Judith she was now, his heroine. Then, without
+another word, he drew her arm through his and led her back to the lights,
+where the dancers still held high carnival.
+
+Judith's half-sister, Eudora, was making a pretty quarrel by perversely
+forgetting the order in which she had given her dances. The girl was so
+undeniably happy that Judith dreaded the grim news she must tell her.
+Eudora blushed as she encountered Judith's eye. Her half-sister ever
+offered a check on Eudora's exuberant coquetry, with its precipitation of
+discussions that often ended in bullets. Leander stood on the outermost
+fringe of Eudora's potential partners. He would not have dared to maintain
+it openly, yet he was sure the pretty minx had promised that dance to him.
+
+"Dance with Leander, dear, and don't let those men begin quarrelling. I've
+something to tell you, presently," said Judith.
+
+Texas Tyler stood glowering at them from the doorway. He would not catch
+Judith's eye as she tried to speak to him. Kitty sat alone for the moment.
+She had sent the young lieutenant to fetch her a cup of coffee, but as
+Peter approached with Judith she averted her eyes.
+
+"Kitty, may I present to you my fiancée, Miss Rodney?"
+
+Kitty rose superbly to the situation. She might, indeed, have made the
+match she was so overjoyed in the good-fortune of her old friend Peter.
+She made no reference to the woodland meeting--she hoped for the happiness
+of seeing them in town. And she bade Peter tell the good news to Nannie
+Wetmore, they would be so glad. Nannie swallowed a grimace and proffered a
+cousinly hand. She had suspected some such news as this when she saw that
+things were not going well with Kitty and Peter.
+
+"Better one dance with a good partner that can swing ye than several with
+a feeble partner that leaves ye to swing your own corners!"
+
+Judith looked up, smiling. She recognized the characteristic utterance of
+her old friend Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch had sustained a breakdown, and
+arrived, in consequence, when the dance was half over, but she was
+philosophical, as always, in the face of misfortune, and loudly attested
+her pleasure in the renowned pedal feats of her partner, Costigan.
+
+Behind came Mary Carmichael, looking brown and happy. From the attitude of
+the group around Judith and Peter Mary divined what had happened, and came
+to add her congratulations. Even Mrs. Yellett forgot to choose an axiom as
+her medium of expression, and kissed Judith publicly, with affectionate
+unction. Henderson had effaced himself, and Leander, proud of his triumph
+and Judith's commendation, sat in a corner and smiled contentedly.
+Ignorant of the drama to which they had played chorus, the dancers still
+riotously swung one another up and down the length of the room, and from
+the little brown fiddles came the gay music of Judith's betrothal.
+
+                                *THE END*
+
+
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JUDITH OF THE PLAINS***
+
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