Judith Of The Plains
I.
“Town”
It was June, and a little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early
summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled
like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the
green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning
and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling
air and discomfort.
The only passenger stirring was a girl whose youth drooped under the
unfavorable influences of foul air, fatigue, and a strained anxiety to
come to the end of this fateful journey. She had been up while it was
yet dark, and her hand—luggage, locked, strapped, and as pitifully new
at the art of travelling as the girl herself, clustered about the hem
of her blue serge skirt like chicks about a hen. The engine shrieked,
but its voice sounded weak and far off in that still ocean of space;
the girl tightened her grasp on the largest of the satchels and looked
at the approaching porter tentatively.
“We’re late twenty-fi’e minutes,” he reassured her, with the hopeless
patience of one who has lost heart in curbing travellers’ enthusiasms.
She turned towards the window a pair of shoulders plainly significant
of the burdensome last straw.
“Four days and nights in this train”—they were slower in those
days—“and now this extra twenty-five minutes!”
Miss Carmichael’s famous dimple hid itself in disgust. The demure lines
of mouth and chin, that could always be relied upon for special
pleading when sentence was about to be passed on the dimple by those
who disapproved of dimples, drooped with disappointment. But the
light-brown hair continued to curl facetiously—it was the sort of hair
whose spontaneous rippling conveys to the seeing eye a sense of humor.
The train plodded across the spacious vacancy that unrolled itself
farther and farther in quest of the fugitive horizon. The scrap of view
that came within a closer range of vision spun past the car windows
like a bit of stage mechanism, a gigantic panorama rotating to simulate
a race at breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing
eyes; the whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was
but part of the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of
homesickness was in it all.
“My dear! my dear!”—a head in crimpers was thrust from between the
curtains of the section opposite—“I’ve been awake half the night. I was
so afraid I wouldn’t see you before you got off.”
The head was followed, almost instinctively, by a hand travelling
furtively to the crimpers that gripped the lady’s brow like barnacles
clinging to a keel.
Mary expressed a grieved appreciation at the loss of rest in behalf of
her early departure, and conspicuously forbore to glance in the
direction of the barnacles, that being a first principle as between
woman and woman.
“And, oh, my dear, it gets worse and worse. I’ve looked at it this
morning, and it’s worse in Wyoming than it was in Colorado. What it ’ll
be before I reach California, I shudder to think.”
“It’s bound to improve,” suggested Mary, with the easy optimism of one
who was leaving it. “It couldn’t be any worse than this, could it?”
The neuter pronoun, it might be well to state, signified the prairie;
its melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their
train existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as
in certain nether circles the head of the house receives his
superlative distinction in “He.”
Again the locomotive shrieked, again the girl mechanically clutched the
suit-case, as presenting the most difficult item in the problem of
transportation, and this time the shriek was not an idle formality. The
train slowed down; the uneasy sleepers behind the green-striped
curtains stirred restlessly with the lessening motion of their uncouth
cradle. The porter came to help her, with the chastened mien of one
whose hopes of largess are small, the lady with the barnacles called
after her redundant farewells, and a moment later Miss Carmichael was
standing on the station platform looking helplessly after the train
that toiled and puffed, yet seemed, in that crystalline atmosphere,
still within arm’s-reach. She watched it till its floating pennant of
smoke was nothing but a gray feather blowing farther and farther out of
sight on the flat prairie.
The town—it would be unkind to mention its name—had made merry the
night before at the comprehensive invitation of a sheepman who had just
disposed of his wool-clip, and who said, by way of general summons,
“What’s the use of temptin’ the bank?” “Town,” therefore, when Mary
Carmichael first made its acquaintance, was still sleeping the sleep of
the unjust. Those among last night’s roisterers who had had to make an
early start for their camps were well into the foot-hills by this time,
and would remember with exhilaration the cracked tinkle of the
dance-hall piano as inspiring music when the lonesomeness of the desert
menaced and the young blood again clamored for its own.
“Town”—it contained in all some two dozen buildings—was very unlovely
in slumber. It sprawled in the lap of the prairies, a grimy-faced
urchin, with the lines of dismal sophistication writ deep. Yet where in
all the “health resorts” of the East did air sweep from the clean
hill-country with such revivifying power? It seemed a glad world of
abiding youth. Surely “Town” was but a dreary illusion, a mirage that
hung in the unmapped spaces of this new world that God had made and
called good; an omen of the abominations that men would make when they
grew blind to the beauty of God’s world.
Mary Carmichael, with much the feelings of a cat in a strange garret,
wandered about the sluggard town; and presently the blue-and-white sign
of a telegraph office, with the mythological figure of a hastening
messenger, suggested to her that a reassuring telegram was only Aunt
Adelaide’s due. Whereupon she began to rap on the door of the office, a
scared pianissimo which naturally had little effect on the operator,
who was at home and asleep some three blocks distant. But the West is
the place for woman if she would be waited upon. No seven-to-one ratio
of the sexes has tempered the chivalry of her sons of the saddle. A
loitering something in a sombrero saw rather than heard the rapping,
and, at the sight, went in quest of the dreaming operator without so
much as embarrassing Miss Carmichael with an offer of his services. And
presently the operator, whose official day did not begin for some two
hours yet, appeared, much dishevelled from running and the cursory
nature of his toilet, prepared to receive a message of life and death.
The wire to Aunt Adelaide ran:
“Practically at end of journey. Take stage to Lost Trail this morning.
Am well. Don’t worry about me.
“MARY.”
And the telegraph operator, dimly remembering that he had heard Lost
Trail was a “pizen mean country,” and that it was tucked some two
hundred miles back in the foot-hills, did not find it very hard to
forgive the girl, who was “practically at end of journey,” particularly
as the dimple had come out of hiding, and he had never been called upon
to telegraph the word “practically” before. He was a progressive man
and liked to extend his experiences.
After sending the telegram, Miss Carmichael, quite herself by reason of
the hill air, felt that she was getting along famously as a traveller,
but that it was an expensive business, and she was glad to be
“practically” at the end of her journey. And, drawing from her pocket a
square envelope of heavy Irish linen, a little worn from much reading,
but primarily an envelope that bespoke elegance of taste on the part of
her correspondent, she read:
“LOST TRAIL, WYOMING.
“My Dear Miss Carmichael,—Pray let me assure you of my gratification
that the preliminaries have been so satisfactorily arranged, and that
we are to have you with us by the end of June. The children are
profiting from the very anticipation of it, and it will be most
refreshing to all us isolated ones to be able to welcome an Eastern
girl as a member of our family.
“Although the long journey across the continent is trying,
particularly to one who has not made it before, I hope you may not
find it utterly fatiguing. Please remember that after leaving the
train, it will be necessary to take a stage to Lost Trail. If it is
possible, I shall meet you with the buckboard at one of the stage
stations; otherwise, keep to the stage route, being careful to
change at Dax’s Ranch.
“Unfortunately, the children vary so in their accomplishments that
I fear I can make no suggestions as to what you may need to bring
with you in the way of text-books. But I think you will find them
fairly well grounded.
“I had a charming letter from Mrs. Kirkland, who said the
pleasantest things possible of you. I am glad the wife of our
Senator was able conscientiously to commend us.
“With our most cordial good wishes for a safe journey, believe me,
dear Miss Carmichael,
“Sincerely yours,
“SARAH YELLETT.”
In the mean time, “Town” came yawning to breakfast. It was not so
prankish as it had been the night before, when it accepted the
sheepman’s broad-gauge hospitality and made merry till the sun winked
from behind the mountains. It made its way to the low, shedlike
eating-house with a pre-breakfast solemnity bordering on sulkiness. Not
a petticoat was in sight to offset the spurs and sombreros that filed
into breakfast from every point in the compass, prepared to eat
primitively, joke broadly, and quarrel speedily if that sensitive and
often inconsistent something they called honor should be brushed
however lightly.
But the eternal feminine was within, and, discovering it, the temper of
“Town” was changed; it ate self-consciously, made jokes meet for the
ears of ladies, and was more interested in the girl in the sailor-hat
than it was in remembering old feuds or laying the foundations of new.
In its interior aspect, the eating-house conveyed no subtle invitation
to eat, drink, and be merry. On the contrary, its mission seemed to be
that of confounding appetite at every turn. A long, shedlike room it
was, with walls of unpainted pine, still sweating from the axe.
Festoons of scalloped paper, in conflicting shades, hung from the
ceiling, a menace to the taller of the guests. On the rough walls some
one, either prompted by a latent spirit of æstheticism or with an idea
of abetting the town towards merrymaking—an encouragement it hardly
required—had tacked posters of shows, mainly representing the
tank-and-sawmill school of drama.
Miss Carmichael sat at the extreme end of the long, oilcloth-covered
table, on which a straggling army of salt and pepper shakers, catsup
bottles, and divers commercial condiments seemed to pause in a
discouraged march. A plague of flies was on everything, and the food
was a threat to the hardiest appetite. One man summed up the steak
with, “You got to work your jaw so hard to eat it that it ain’t fair to
the next meal.”
His neighbor heaved a sigh. “This here formation, whatever it be”—and
he turned the meat over for better inspection—“do shore remind me of an
indestructible doll that an old maid aunt of mine giv’ my sister when
we was kids. That doll sort of challenged me, settin’ round oncapable
o’ bein’ destroyed, and one day I ups an’ has a chaw at her. She war
ondestructible, all right; ’fore that I concluded my speriments I had
left a couple o’ teeth in her.”
“Well, I discyards the steak and draw to a pair of aces,” and the first
man helped himself to a couple of biscuits.
Miss Carmichael knew, by the continual scraping of chairs across the
gritty floor, that the places at the table must be nearly all taken;
and while she anticipated, with an utterly unreasonable terror, any
further invasion of her seclusion at the end of the table, still she
could not persuade herself to raise her eyes to detect the progress of
the enemy, even in the interest of the diary she had kept so
conscientiously for the past three days; which was something of a loss
to the diary, as those untamed, manly faces were well worth looking at.
Reckless they were in many instances, and sometimes the lines of
hardship were cruelly writ across young faces that had not yet lost the
down of adolescence, but there were humor and endurance and the courage
that knows how to make a crony of death and get right good sport from
the comradeship. Their faults were the faults of lusty, red-blooded
youth, and their virtues the open-handed generosity, the ready sympathy
of those uncertain tilters at life who ride or fall in the tourney of a
new country.
At present, “the yearling,” drinking her execrable coffee in an agony
of embarrassment, weighed heavily on their minds. They would have liked
to rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for her.
But as a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her
discomfiture tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most
difficult thing and looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael’s.
With a delicacy of perception that the casual observer might not have
given them credit for, they had refrained from taking seats directly
opposite her, or those immediately on her right, which, as she occupied
the last seat at the table, gave her at least a small degree of
seclusion.
As one after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating
a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could
obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a
chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the
floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And
the cow-puncher, sheep-herder, prospector, or man about “Town,” as the
case might be, would take the hint and the chair, leaving the petticoat
separated from the sombreros by a table-land of oilcloth and a range of
four chairs.
But now entered a man who failed to take the hint of the spinning
chair. In fact, he entered the eating-house with the air of one who has
dropped in casually to look for a friend and, incidentally, to eat his
breakfast. He stopped in the doorway, scanned the table with
deliberation, and started to make his way towards Mary Carmichael with
something of a swagger. Some one kicked a chair towards him at the head
of the table. Some one else nearly upset him with one before he reached
the middle, and the Texan remarked, quite audibly, as he passed:
“The damned razor-back!”
But the man made his way to the end of the table and drew out the chair
opposite Miss Carmichael with a degree of assurance that precipitated
the rest of the table into a pretty pother.
Suppose she should countenance his audacity? The fair have been known
to succumb to the headlong force of a charge, when the persistence of a
long siege has failed signally. What figures they would cut if she
did!—and Simpson, of all men! A growing tension had crept into the
atmosphere of the eating-house; knives and forks played but
intermittently, and Mary, sitting at the end of the oilcloth-covered
table, felt intuitively that she was the centre of the brewing storm.
Oh, why hadn’t she been contented to stay at home and make over her
clothes and share the dwindling fortunes of her aunts, instead of
coming to this savage place?
“From the look of the yearling’s chin, I think he’ll get all that’s
coming to him,” whispered the man who had nearly upset him with the
second chair.
“You’re right, pard. If I’m any good at reading brands, she is as
self-protective as the McKinley bill.”
The man Simpson was not a pleasant vis-à-vis. He wore the same
picturesque ruffianliness of apparel as his fellows, but the
resemblance stopped there. He lacked their dusky bloom, their clearness
of eye, the suppleness and easy flow of muscle that is the hall-mark of
these frontiersmen. He was fat and squat and had not the rich bronzing
of wind, sun, and rain. His small, black eyes twinkled from his puffy,
white face, like raisins in a dough-pudding.
He was ogling Mary amiably when the woman who kept the eating-house
brought him his breakfast. Mrs. Clark was a potent antidote for the
prevailing spirit of romance, even in this woman-forsaken country. A
good creature, all limp calico, Roman nose, and sharp elbows, she
brought him his breakfast with an ill grace that she had not shown to
the others. The men about the table gave him scant greeting, but the
absence of enthusiasm didn’t embarrass Simpson.
He lounged expansively on the table, regarding Miss Carmichael
attentively meanwhile; then favored her with the result of his
observations, “From the East, I take it.” And the dumpling face screwed
into a smile whose mission was pacific.
Every knife and fork in the room suspended action in anxiety to know
how the “yearling” would take it. Would their chivalry, which strained
at a gnat, be compelled to swallow such a conspicuous camel as the
success of Simpson? With the attitude he had taken towards the girl,
there had crept into the company an imperceptible change; deep-buried
impulses sprang to the surface. If a scoundrel like Simpson was going
to try his luck, why shouldn’t they? They didn’t see a pretty girl once
in a blue moon. With the advent of the green-eyed monster at the board,
each man unconsciously became the rival of his neighbor.
But Miss Carmichael merely continued her breakfast, and if she heard
the amiable deductions of Simpson regarding her, she gave no sign. But
a rebuff to him was in the nature of an appetizer, a fillip to press
the acquaintance. He encroached a bit farther on the narrow limits of
the table and continued, “Nice weather we’re having.”
Miss Carmichael gave her undivided attention to her coffee. The spurs
and sombreros, that had not relaxed a muscle in their strained
observation of the little drama, breathed reflectively. Perhaps it was
just as well that they had not emulated Simpson in his brazen charge;
the “yearling” was not to be surprised into talking, that was certain.
“He shore is showing hisself to be a friendly native,” commented the
man who had sacrificed milk-teeth investigating the indestructible
doll.
“Seems to me that the system he’s playing lacks a heap of science. My
money’s on the yearling.” And the man who had “discarded the steak and
drawn to the biscuits” leaned a little forward that he might better
watch developments.
Simpson by this time fully realized his error, but failure before all
these bantering youngsters was a contingency not to be accepted
lightly. As he phrased it to himself, it was worth “another throw.”
“Seems kind o’ lonesome not having any one to talk to while you’re
eatin’, don’t it?”
Miss Carmichael’s air of perfect composure seemed a trifle out of tune
with her surroundings; the nice elevation of eyebrow, the slightly
questioning curl of the lip as she, for the first time apparently,
became aware of the man opposite, seemed to demand a prim drawing-room
rather than the atmosphere of the slouching eating-house.
“Well, really, I’ve hardly had a chance of finding out.” And her eyes
were again on her coffee-cup. And there was joy among the men at table
that they had not rushed in after the manner of those who have a
greater courage than the angels.
“No offence meant,” deprecated Simpson, with an uneasy glance towards
the other end of the table, where the men sat with necks craned forward
in an attitude uncomfortably suggestive of hounds straining at the
leash. Simpson felt rather than saw that something was afoot among the
sombreros. There was a crowding together in whispered colloquy, and in
a flash some half-dozen of them were on their feet as a man. Descending
upon Simpson, they lifted him, chair and all, to the other end of the
table, as far removed as possible from Miss Carmichael.
The man who thought Simpson’s system lacked science rubbed his hands in
delight. “She took the trick all right; swept his hand clean off the
board!”
II.
The Encounter
Simpson, from the seat to which he had been so rapidly transplanted,
looked about him with blinking anxiety. It was more than probable that
the boys intended “to have fun with him,” though his talking, or rather
trying to talk, to a girl that sat opposite him at an eating-house
table was, according to his ethics, plainly none of their business. He
knew he wasn’t popular since he had done for Jim Rodney’s sheep, though
the crime had never been laid at his door, officially. He had his way
to make, the same as the next one; and, all said and done, the
cattle-men were glad to get Jim Rodney’s sheep off the range, even if
they treated him as a felon for the part he had played in their
extermination.
Thus reasoned Simpson, while he marked with an uneasy eye that the
temper of the company had grown decidedly prankish with the exit of the
girl, who, after having caused all the trouble, had, with an irritating
quality peculiar to her sex, vanished through the kitchen door.
Some three or four of the boys now ran to Simpson’s former seat at the
table and rushed towards him with his half-eaten breakfast, as if the
errand had been one of life and death. They showered him with mock
attentions, waiting on him with an exaggerated deference, and the pale,
fat man, remembering the hideousness of some of their manifestations of
a sense of humor, breathed hard and felt a falling-off of appetite.
Costigan, the cattle-man, a strapping Irish giant, was clearing his
throat with ominous sounds that suggested the tuning-up of a bass
fiddle.
“Sure, Simpson, me lad, if ye happen to have a matther av fifty
dollars, ’tis mesilf that can tell ye av an illegint invistmint.”
Simpson looked up warily, but Costigan’s broad countenance did not
harbor the wraith of a smile. “What kin I git for fifty chips? ’Tain’t
much,” mused the pariah, with the prompt inclination to spend that
stamps the comparative stranger to ready money.
“Ye can git a parrut, man—a grane parrut—to kape ye coompany while
ye’re aiting—”
Simpson interrupted with an oath.
“Don’t be hard on old Simmy; remember he’s studied for the ministry!
How did I savey that Simpson aimed to be a sharp on doctrine?” A
cow-puncher with a squint addressed the table in general. “I scents the
aroma of dogma about Simpson in the way he throwed his conversational
lariat at the yearling. He urbanes at her, and then comes his
‘firstly,’ it being a speculation as to her late grazing-ground, which
he concludes to be the East. His ‘secondly’ ain’t nothing startling,
words familiar to us all from our mother’s knee—‘nice weather’—the
congregation ain’t visibly moved. His ‘thirdly’ is insinuating. In it
he hints that it ain’t good for man to be alone at meals—”
“’Twas the congregation that added the ‘foinelly,’ though, before
hastily leaving be the back door!” and Costigan slapped his thigh.
“The gentleman in question don’t seem to be makin’ much use of his
present conversational opportunities. I’m feelin’ kinder turned down
myself”; and the Texan began to look over his six-shooter.
The man with the squint looked up and down the board.
“Gentlemen, I believe the foregoing expresses the sentiment of this
company, which, while it incloodes many foreign and frequent-warring
elements, is at present held together by the natchral tie of eating.”
Thumping with knife and fork handles, stamping of feet, cries of “Hear!
hear!” with at least three cow-boy yells, argued well for a resumption
of last night’s festivities. Simpson glowered, but said nothing.
“Seems to me you-all goin’ the wrong way ’bout drawin’ Mistu’ Simpson
out. He is shy an’ has to be played fo’ like a trout, an’ heah you-all
come at him like a cattle stampede.” The big Texan leaned towards
Simpson. “Now you-all watch my methods. Mistu’ Simpson, seh, what du
think of the prospects of rain?”
There was a general recommendation from Simpson that the entire company
go to a locality below the rain-belt.
A boy, plainly “from the East,” and looking as if the ink on his
graduating thesis had scarce had time to dry, was on his feet,
swaggering; he would not have swapped his newly acquired _camaraderie_
with these bronzed Westerners for the Presidency.
“Gentlemen, you have all heard Simpson say it is lonesome having no one
to talk to during meals. We sympathized with him and offered him a
choice of subjects. He greets our remarks by a conspicuous silence,
varied by profanity. This, gentlemen, reflects on us, and is a matter
demanding public satisfaction. All who feel that their powers as
conversationalists have been impugned by the silence of Simpson, please
say ‘Ay.’”
“Ay” was howled, sung, and roared in every note of the gamut.
“If me yoong frind here an me roight”—and Costigan jerked a shoulder
towards the boy—“will be afther closin’ that silf-feeding automatic
dictionary av his for a moment, I shud be glad to call the attintion av
the coomp’ny to somethin’ in the nature av an ixtinuatin’
circoomsthance in the case av Simpson.”
“Hear! hear!” they shouted. The broad countenance of Costigan beamed
with joy at what he was about to say. “Gintlemin, the silence av Mr.
Simpson is jew in all probabilitee to a certain ivint recalled by many
here prisint, an’ more that’s absent, an’ amicablee settled out av
coort—”
Up to this time the unhappy Simpson had shown an almost superhuman
endurance. Now he bristled—and after looking up and down the board for
a sympathetic face, and not finding one, he declared, loudly and
generally, “’Tain’t so!”
“Ye may have noticed that frind Simpson do be t’reatened wid lockjaw in
the societee av min, but in the prisince av a female ye can’t count on
him. Now, talk wid a female is an agreeable, if not a profitable, way
av passin’ the toime, but sure ye niver know where it will ind—as
witness Simpson. This lady I’m recallin’—’tis a matther av two years
ago—followed the ancient and honorable profission av biscuit shootin’
not far from Caspar. Siz Simpson to the lady some such passin’
civilitee as, ‘Good-marnin’; plisent weather we’re havin’.’ Whereupon
the lady filt a damage to her affictions an’ sued him for breach av
promise.”
“’Twan’t that way, at all!” screamed Simpson. “’Sall a lie!”
“Yu ought er said ‘Good-evenin’’ to the lady, Mistu Simpson; hit make a
diffunce,” drawled the man from Texas, pleasantly.
“But ’twas ‘Good-marnin’’ Simpson made chyce av,” resumed Costigan.
“An’ the lady replied, ‘You’ve broke my heart.’ Whereupon Simpson,
havin’ a matther av t’ree thousand dollars to pay for his passin’
civilitee, learned thot silince was goolden.”
They all remembered the incident in question, and thundered applause at
the reappearance of an old favorite. Without warning, a shadow fell
across the sunlight-flooded room, and, as one after another of the men
glanced up from the table, they saw standing in the doorway a man of
such malignant aspect that his look fell across the company like a
menace. The swing of their banter slowed suddenly; it was as if the
cold of a new-turned grave had struck across the June sunshine checking
their roughshod fun. None of them had the hardihood to joke with a man
that stood in the shadow of death; and hate and murder looked from the
eyes of the man in the doorway and looked towards Simpson. One by one
they perceived the man of the shadow, all but Simpson, eating steak
drowned in Worcestershire.
The man in the doorway was tall and lean, and the prison blench upon
his face was in unpleasant contrast to the ruddy tan of the faces about
the table. His sombrero was tipped back and the hair hung dank about
the pale, sweating forehead, suggestive of sickness. But weak health
did not imply weak purpose; every feature in that hawk-like face was
sharp with hatred, and in the narrowing eye was vengeance that is
sweet.
He stood still; there was in his hatred a something hypnotic that grew
imperceptibly and imperceptibly communicated itself to the men at
table. He gloated over the eating fat man as if he had dwelt much in
imagination on the sight and was in no hurry to curtail his joy at the
reality. The men began to get restless, shuffle their feet, moisten
their lips; only the college boy spoke, and then from a wealth of
ignorance, knowing nothing of the rugged, give-and-take justice of the
plains—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and the law and the
courts go hang while a man’s got a right arm to pull a trigger. Not one
in all that company, even the cattle-men whose interests were opposed
to Rodney’s, but felt the justice of his errand.
“When did they let him out?” whispered the college boy; and then,
“Oughtn’t we to do something?”
“Yis, me son,” whispered Costigan. “We ought to sit still and learn a
thing or two.”
The fat man cleaned his plate with a crust of bread stuck on the point
of a knife. There was nothing more to eat in the way of substantials,
and he debated pouring a little more of the sauce on his plate and
mopping it with a bit of bread still uneaten. Considering the pro and
con of this extra tid-bit, he glanced up and saw the gaunt man standing
in the doorway.
Simpson dropped the knife from his shaking hand and started up with a
cry that died away in a gurgle, an inhuman, nightmare croak. He looked
about wildly, like a rat in a trap, then backed towards the wall. The
men about the table got up, then cleared away in a circle, leaving the
fat man. It was all like a dream to the college boy, who had never seen
a thing of the kind before and could not realize now that it was
happening. Rodney advanced, never once relaxing the look in which he
seemed to hold his enemy as in a vise. Simpson was like a man
bewitched. Once, twice, he made a grab for his revolver, but his right
hand seemed to have lost power to heed the bidding of his will. Rodney,
now well towards the centre of the room, waited, with a suggestion of
ceremony, for Simpson to get his six-shooter.
It was one of those moments in which time seems to have become
petrified. The limp-clad proprietress of the eating-house, made curious
by the sudden silence, looked in from the kitchen. Simpson, his eyes
wandering like a trapped rat, saw, and called, through teeth that
chattered in an ague of fear, “Ree—memm—her thth—there’s la—dies
p—present! For Gawd’s sake, remember t—there’s ladies p—present!”
The pale man looked towards the kitchen, and, seeing the woman, he gave
Simpson a look in which there was only contempt. “You’ve hid behind the
law once, and this time it’s petticoats. The open don’t seem to have no
charm for you. But—” He didn’t finish, there was no need to. Every one
knew and understood. He put up his revolver and walked into the street.
The men broke into shouts of laughter, loud and ringing, then doubled
up and had it out all over again. And their noisy merriment was as
clear an indication of the suddenly lifted strain, at the averted
shooting, as it was of their enjoyment of the farce. Simpson, relieved
of the fear of sudden death, now sought to put a better face on his
cowardice. Now that his enemy was well out of sight, Simpson handled
his revolver with easy assurance.
“Put ut up,” shouted Costigan, above the general uproar. “’Tis toime to
fear a revolver in the hands av Simpson whin he’s no intinsions av
shootin’.”
Simpson still attempted to harangue the crowd, but his voice was lost
in the general thigh-slapping and the shouts and roars that showed no
signs of abating. But when he caught a man by the coat lapel in his
efforts to secure a hearing, that was another matter, and the man shook
him off as if his touch were contagion. Simpson, craving mercy on
account of petticoats, evading a meeting that was “up to him,” they
were willing to stand as a laughing-stock, but Simpson as an equal,
grasping the lapels of their coats, they would have none of.
He slunk away from them to a corner of the eating-house, feeling the
stigma of their contempt, yet afraid to go out into the street where
his enemy might be waiting for him. Much of death and blood and
recklessness “Town” had seen and condoned, but cowardice was the
unforgivable sin. It balked the rude justice of these frontiersmen and
tampered with their code, and Simpson knew that the game had gone
against him.
“What was it all about? Were they in earnest, or was it only their way
of amusing themselves?” inquired Mary Carmichael, who had slipped into
Mrs. Clark’s kitchen after the men at the table had taken things in
hand.
“Jim Rodney was in earnest, an’ he had reason to be. That man Simpson
was paid by a cattle outfit—now, mind, I ain’t sayin’ which—to get Jim
Rodney’s sheep off the range. They had threatened him and cut the
throats of two hundred of his herd as a warning, but Jim went right on
grazin’ ’em, same as he had always been in the habit of doing. Well,
I’m told they up and makes Simpson an offer to get rid of the sheep.
Jim has over five thousand, an’ it’s just before lambing, and them pore
ewes, all heavy, is being druv’ down to Watson’s shearing-pens, that
Jim always shears at. Jim an’ two herders and a couple of dawgs—least,
this is the way I heard it—is drivin’ ’em easy, ’cause, as I said
before, it’s just before lambing. It does now seem awful cruel to me to
shear just before lambing, but that’s their way out here.
“Well, nothing happens, and Jim ain’t more’n two hours from the pens
an’ he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top
of a cañon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an’
dashes into the herd and drives the wether that’s leading right over
the cliff. The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right
over the cliff like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried
to drive ’em back, they tell me, an’ he an’ the dawg were shot at from
the clump of willows by some one else who was there. Three hundred
sheep had gone over the cliff before Jim knew what was happening. He
rode like mad right through the herd to try and head ’em off; but you
know what sheep is like—they’re like lost souls headin’ for damnation.
Nothing can stop ’em when they’re once started. And Jim lost every
head—started for the shearing-pens a rich man—rich for Jim—an’ seen
everything he had swept away before his eyes, his wife an’ children
made paupers. My son he come by and found him. He said that Jim was
sittin’ huddled up in a heap, his knees drawed up under his chin,
starin’ straight up into the noonday sky, same as if he was askin’ God
how He could be so cruel. His dead dawg, that they had shot, was by the
side of him. The herder that was with Jim had taken the one that was
shot into Watson’s, so when my son found Jim he was alone, sittin’ on
the edge of the cliff with his dead dawg, an’ the sky about was black
with buzzards; an’ Jim he just sat an’ stared up at ’em, and when my
son spoke to him he never answered any more than a dead man. He shuck
him by the arm, but Jim just sat there, watchin’ the sun, the buzzards,
and the dead sheep.”
“Was nothing done to this man Simpson?”
“The cattle outfit that he done the dirty work for swore an alibi for
him. Jim has been in hard luck ever since. He’s been rustlin’ cattle
right along; but Lord, who can blame him? He got into some trouble down
to Rawlins—shot a man he thought was with Simpson, but who wasn’t—and
he’s been in jail ever since. Course now that he’s out Simpson’s bound
to get peppered. Glad it didn’t happen here, though. ’Twould be a kind
of unpleasant thing to have connected with a eating-house, don’t you
think so?” she inquired, with the grim philosophy of the country.
The eating-house patrons had gone their several ways, and the quiet of
the dining-room was oppressive by contrast with its late
boisterousness. Mrs. Clark, her hands imprisoned in bread-dough, begged
Mary to look over the screen door and see if anything was happening.
“I’m always suspicious when it’s quiet. I know they’re in deviltry of
some sort.”
Mary tiptoed to the door and peeped over, but the room was deserted,
save for Simpson, huddled in a corner, biting his finger-nails. “The
nasty thing!” exploded Mrs. Clark, when she had received the bulletin.
“I’d turn him out if it wasn’t for the notoriety he might bring my
place in gettin’ killed in front of it.”
“I dare say I’d better go and see after my trunk; it’s still on the
station platform.” Mary wondered what her prim aunts would think of her
for sitting in Mrs. Clark’s kitchen, but it had seemed so much more of
a refuge than the sordid streets of the hideous little town, with its
droves of men and never a glimpse of a woman that she had been only too
glad to avail herself of the invitation of the proprietress to “make
herself at home till the stage left.”
“Well, good luck to you,” said Mrs. Clark, wiping her hand only
partially free from dough and presenting it to Miss Carmichael. She had
not inquired where the girl was going, nor even hinted to discover
where she came from, but she gave her the godspeed that the West knows
how to give, and the girl felt better for it.
At the station, where Mary shortly presented herself, in the interest
of that old man of the sea of all travellers, luggage, she learned that
the stage did not leave town for some three-quarters of an hour yet. A
young man, manipulating many sheets of flimsy, yellow paper covered
with large, flourishing handwriting, looked up in answer to her
inquiries about Lost Trail. This young man, whose accent, clothes, and
manner proclaimed him “from the East,” whither, in all probability, he
would shortly return if he did not mend his ways, disclaimed all
knowledge of the place as if it were an undesirable acquaintance. But
before he could deny it thrice, a man who had heard the cabalistic name
was making his way towards the desk, the pride of the traveller
radiating from every feature.
The cosmopolite who knew Lost Trail was the type of man who is born to
be a Kentucky colonel, and perhaps may have achieved his destiny before
coming to this “No Man’s Land,” for reasons into which no one inquired,
and which were obviously no one’s business. They knew him here by the
name of “Lone Tooth Hank,” and he wore what had been, in the days of
his colonelcy—or its equivalent—a frock-coat, restrained by the lower
button, and thus establishing a waist-line long after nature had had
the last word to say on the subject. With this he wore the sombrero of
the country, and the combination carried a rakish effect that was
positively sinister.
The scornful clerk introduced Mary as a young lady inquiring about some
place in the bad-lands. Off came the sombrero with a sweep, and Lone
Tooth smiled in a way that accented the dental solitaire to which he
owed his name. Miss Carmichael, concealing her terror of this casual
cavalier, inquired if he could tell her the distance to Lost Trail.
“I sho’ly can, and with, consid’able pleasure.” The sombrero completed
a semicircular sweep and arrived in the neighborhood of Mr. Hank’s
heart in significance of his vassalage to the fair sex. He proceeded:
“Lost Trail sutney is right lonesome. A friend of mine gets a little
too playful fo’ the evah-increasin’ meetropolitan spirit of this yere
camp, and tries a little tahget practice on the main bullyvard, an’
finds the atmospheah onhealthful in consequence. Hearin’ that the quiet
solitude of Lost Trail is what he needs, he lit out with the following
circumstance thereof happenin’. One day something in his harness giv’
way—and he recollects seein’ a boot sunnin’ itself back in the road
’bout a quartah of a mile. An’ he figgahs he’ll borry a strip of
leather off the boot to mend his harness. Back he goes and finds it has
a kind of loaded feelin’. So my friend investigates—and I be blanked if
there wasn’t a foot and leg inside of it.”
Miss Carmichael had always exercised a super-feminine self-restraint in
the case of casual mice, and it served her in the present instance.
Instead of screaming, she said, after the suppression of a gasp or two:
“Thank you so much, but I won’t detain you any longer. Your information
makes Lost Trail even more interesting than I had expected.”
Besides, Miss Carmichael had a faint suspicion that this might be a
preconcerted plan to terrify the “lady tenderfoot,” and she prided
herself on being equal to the situation. The time at her disposal
before the stage would embark on that unknown sea of prairies she spent
in the delectable pastime of shopping. The financial and social
interests of the town seemed to converge in Hugous & Co.’s “trading
store,” where Miss Carmichael invested in an extra package of needles
for the mere excitement of being one of the shoppers, though her aunt
Adelaide had stocked the little plaid-silk work-bag to repletion with
every variety of needle known to woman. She pricked up her ears,
meanwhile, at some of the purchases made by the cow-boys for their
camp-larders—devilled ham, sardines, canned tomatoes heading the list
as prime favorites. Did these strapping border lads live by the fruit
of the tin alone? Apparently yes, with the sophisticated accompaniment
of soda biscuit, to judge by the quantity of baking-powder they
invested in—literally pounds of it. Men in any other condition of life
would have died of slow poisoning as the result of it.
There were other customers at Hugous’ that morning besides the spurred
and booted cow-puncher and his despised compeer, the sheep-herder. That
restless emigrant class, whose origin, as a class, lay in the community
of its own uncertain schemes of fortune; the West, with her splendid,
lavish promises, called them from their thriftless farms in the South
and their gray cabins in New England. They began their journeying
towards the land of promise long before the Indians had ever seen the
shrieking “fire-wagon.” All day they would toil over the infinitude of
prairie, the sun that hid nightly behind that maddeningly elusive
vanishing-point, the horizon, their only guide. But the makeshifts of
the wagon life were not without charm. They began to wander in quest of
they knew not precisely what, and from these vague beginnings there had
sprung into existence that nomadic population that was once such a
feature of the far West, but is now going the way of the Indians and
the cow-boys.
This breathing-space in the long journey had for them the stimulus of a
holiday-making. They bought their sides of bacon and their pounds of
coffee as merrily as if they were playing a game of forfeits, the women
fingering the calico they did not want for the joy of pricing and
making shoppers’ talk.
The scene had a scriptural flavor that not even the blue overalls of
the men nor the calico gowns of the women could altogether eliminate.
Their wagons, bulging with household goods and trailing with kitchen
utensils secured by bits of rope, were drawn up in front of the
trading-store. From a pump, at some little distance, the pilgrims
filled their stone water-bottles, for the wise traveller does not trust
to the chance springs of the desert. Baskets of chickens were strapped
to many of the wagons, but whether the unhappy fowls were designed to
supply fresh eggs and an occasional fricassée, or were taken for the
pleasure of their company, there was no means of determining short of
impertinent cross-questioning. Sometimes a cow, and invariably a dog,
formed one of the family party, and an edifying _esprit de corps_
seemed to dwell among them all.
Lone Tooth Hank, in his capacity of man about town, stood on the steps
of Hugous’ watching the preparations; and, seeing Miss Carmichael,
approached with the air of an old and tried family friend.
“Do I obsehve yu regyarding oweh ‘settleahs,’ called settleahs ’cause
they nevah settle?” Hank laughed gently, as one who has made a joke
meet for ladies. “I’ve known whole famblies to bohn an’ raise right in
one of them wagons; and tuhn out a mighty fine, endurin’ lot, too, this
hyeh prospectin’ round afteh somethin’ they wouldn’t reco’nize if they
met. Gits to be a habit same as drink. They couldn’t live in a house
same as humans, not if yu filled their gyarden with nuggets an’ their
well with apple-jack.”
Miss Carmichael looked attentive but said nothing. In truth, she was
more afraid of Hank, his obvious gallantry, and his grewsome tales of
boots with legs in them than she was of the unknown terrors of Lost
Trail.
“I believe that is my stage,” she said, as a red conveyance not unlike
a circus wagon halted at some little distance from the trading-store.
And as she spoke she saw four of her companions of the breakfast-table
heading towards the stage, each with a piece of her precious luggage.
Mary Carmichael was precipitated in a sudden panic; she had heard tales
of the pranks of these playful Western squires—a little gun-play to
induce the terrified tenderfoot to put a little more spirit into his
Highland fling, “by request.” She remembered their merrymaking with
Simpson at breakfast. What did they intend to do with her belongings?
And as she remembered the little plaid sewing-bag that Aunt Adelaide
had made for her—surreptitiously drying her tears in the mean time—when
she remembered that bag and the possibility of its being submitted to
ignominy, she could have cried or done murder, she wasn’t sure which.
“Well, ’pon my wohd, heah ah the boys with yo’ baggage. How time du
fly!”
“Oh!” she gasped, “what are they going to do with it?”
“Place it on the stage, awaitin’ yo’ ohdahs.” And to her expression of
infinite relief—“Yo’ didn’t think any disrepec’ would be shown the
baggage of a lady honorin’ this hyeh metropolis with her presence?”
She thanked the knights of the lariat the more warmly for her unjust
suspicions. They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men
who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She
climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and
the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a
simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver
cracked his whip and turned the horses’ heads towards the billowing sea
of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to
civilization was cut.
III.
Leander And His Lady
The only stage passenger besides Miss Carmichael was a fat lady, whose
entire luggage seemed to consist of luncheon—pasteboard boxes of
sandwiches, baskets of fruit, napkins of cake. These she began to
dispose of, before the stage had fairly started, with an industry
almost automatic, continuing faithful to her post as long as the
supplies lasted. Then she dozed, sleeping the sleep of the just and
those who keep their mouths open. From time to time the stage-driver
invoked his team in cabalistic words, and each time the horses toiled
forward with fresh energy; but progress became a mockery in that ocean
of space, their driving seemed as futile as the sport of children who
crack a whip and play at stage-coach with a couple of chairs; the
mountains still mocked in the distance.
A flat, unbroken sweep of country, a tangle of straggling sage-brush, a
glimpse of foot-hills in the distance, was the outlook mile after mile.
The day grew pitilessly hot. Clouds of alkaline dust swept aimlessly
over the desert or whirled into spirals till lost in space. From
horizon to horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as
it dipped earthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the
prospect was always the same—the red stage crawling over the
wilderness, making no evident progress, and always the sun, the
sage-brush, and the silence.
It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of
things at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red
roads, wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more
haughtily aloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals. This
wilderness was so gaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of
a bit of landscape at home. A young forest of silver beeches growing
straight and fine as the threads on a loom; and through the gray
perspective of their satin-smooth trunks you caught the white gleam of
a fairy cascade as it tumbled over the moss-grown stones to the brook
below. It was like a bit from a Japanese garden in its delicate
artificiality.
And harder to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been the
old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose
of senility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of
mortgages that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces
of Aunt Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it
not sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?—it had faith in the name.
But Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the
mortgage had not invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing
the sangaree of its delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer
afternoons, invading the very dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the
old mahogany table, prompting Aunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at
the worn silver—would it go to pay that blood-sucking mortgage next?
But hardest of all to leave had been Archie, best and most promising of
young brothers—Archie, who had come out ahead of his class in the
high-school, all ready to go to The University—the University of
Virginia is always “The University”; but who, it had seemed at a
certain dark season, must give up this long-cherished hope for lack of
the wherewithal. Mary, being four years older than her brother and
quite twenty, had long felt a maternal obligation to administer his
affairs. If he did not go to the university, like his father and
grandfather before him, it would be because she had failed in her duty.
At this particular phase of the domestic problem there had appeared, in
a certain churchly periodical, a carefully worded advertisement for a
governess, and the subsequent business of references, salary, and
information to be imparted and received proving eminently satisfactory,
Mary had finally received a tearful permission from her aunts to depart
for some place in Wyoming, the name of which was not even to be found
on the map. She was to consider herself quite one of the family, and
the compensation was to be fifty dollars a month. Archie would now be
able to go to “The University.”
As the day wore on the sage-brush became scarcer and grayer, there were
fewer flowering cacti, and the great white patches of alkali grew more
and more frequent. In the distance there was a riot of rainbow
tints—violet, pink, and pale orange. It seemed inconceivable that such
barrenness could produce such wealth of color; nothing could have been
more beautiful—not even the changing colors on a pigeon’s neck—than the
coppery iridescence, shading to cobalt and blue on some of the buttes.
Night had fallen before they made the first break in their journey. The
low, beetle-browed cabin that faced them in the wilderness carried in
its rude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur’s art—a world of
desolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney
and curtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but this
shortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs,
a device at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect
was that of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actual
rumbling of the stage, felt its confused motion the more strongly in
imagination, and hardly knew whether she was eating canned tomatoes,
served uncooked directly from the tin, fried steak, black coffee, and
soda biscuit, in company with the fat lady, the stage-driver, and the
woman who kept the road ranch, or if it was all some Alice in
Wonderland delusion.
The fat lady had brought her own bedding—an apoplectic roll of
bedquilts—and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the
protests of the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation
against her accommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited
by the controversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith
of a traveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she
was young or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and
indicating an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss
Carmichael to find a more comfortable bed “in the East.”
In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and
groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering
inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch
left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North
Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their
journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the
Red Desert, when he was sober enough to handle the ribbons.
Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate
condition of Mr. Chugg—would he be wholly or partially incapacitated
for his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of
Miss Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason
for her solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the
situation.
But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Falling
into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name,
place of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a
son on Sweetwater. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every
death in her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael
felt an especial interest in an Uncle Henry who “died of a Friday along
of eating clams.” He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a
background of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic,
and other more familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But
loquacity, apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady
scarce vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss
Carmichael remained the object of her persistent attentions.
But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg’s
condition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, “Before I’d trust my precious
neck to him, I’d get Mr. Dax to shoot me.”
Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became
aware for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic
economy. But so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to
scrutinize very closely, indeed, to detect the evanescent personality
of Mrs. Dax’s husband. Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that
he swam no Hellesponts for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise
he was slender, willowy, bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get
the habitually apologetic crooks out of his knees, he would be tall;
but so in the habit was he of repressing himself in the marital
presence that Leander passed for middle height. He waited on the table
at breakfast with the dumb submissiveness of a trained dog that has
been taught to give pathetic imitations of human servility. But no
sooner had his lady left the room than Leander began quite brazenly to
call attention to himself as a man and an individual, coughing,
rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat. Mary and the fat lady,
out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overtures
equally frank, and Leander ventured finally to inquire if they aimed to
spend the night at his brother’s ranch, it being the next mess-box
between here and nowhere. They admitted that his brother’s ranch was
their next stopping-place, and Leander went through perfect contortions
of apology and self-effacement before he could bring himself to ask
them to do him a favor. It would have taken a very stern order of
womankind to refuse anything so abject, and they blindly committed
themselves to the pledge.
“Tell him I send my compliments,” he whispered, and, looking about him
furtively, he repeated the blood-curdling request.
“Is that all?” sniffed the fat lady, at no pains to conceal her
disappointment.
“It’s enough, if it was known, to raise a war-whoop and stampede this
yere family.” His glance at the door through which his wife had
disappeared was pregnant with meaning.
“Family troubles?” asked the fat lady, as a gourmet might say
“Truffles.”
“Looks like it,” said Leander, dismally. “Me and Johnnie don’t ask for
nothin’ better than to bask in each other’s company; but our wives
insists on keepin’ up the manœuvres of a war-dance the whole endoorin’
time.”
“So,” said the fat lady, as a gourmet might tell of a favorite way of
preparing truffles, “it’s a case of wives?”
“Yes, marm, an’ teeth an’ nails an’ husbands thrown in, when they get a
sight of each other’s petticoats.”
“I’ve known sisters-in-law not to agree,” helped on the fat lady, by
way of an encouraging parallel.
“While I deplores usin’ such a comparison to the refinin’ and softenin’
inflooance of wimmen, the meetin’ of the Dax ladies by chanst anywheres
has all the elements of danger and excitement that accompanies an Injun
uprisin’.”
The travellers looked all manner of encouragement.
“You see, my wife’s a great housekeeper; her talent lies”—and here
Leander winked knowingly—“in managin’ the help.”
“Land’s sake!” interrupted the fat lady. “Why don’t you kick?”
Leander sighed softly. “I tried to once. As an experiment it partook of
the trustfulness of a mule kickin’ against the stony walls of Badger
Cañon. But to resoom about the difficulties that split the Dax family.
Before Johnnie got mislaid in that matrimonial landslide o’ his, he
herds with us. Me an’ him does the work of this yere shack, and my wife
just roominates and gives her accomplishments as manager full play. She
never put her hand in dirty water any more than Mrs. Cleveland sittin’
up in the White House parlor. Johnnie done the fancy cookin’; he could
make a pie like any one’s maw, and while you was lost to the world in
the delights of masticatin’ it, he’d have all his greasy dishes washed
up and put away—”
“No wonder she hated to lose a man like that,” interrupted the fat
lady, feelingly.
“But he took to pinin’ and proclaimin’ that he shore was a lone
maverick, and he just stampeded round lookin’ for trouble and bleatin’
a song that went:
“‘No one to love,
None to caress.’
“Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don’t bear none of
the brands of this yere range. She lives back East, and him and her
took up their claims in each other’s affections through a matrimonial
paper known as _The Heart and Hand_. So they takes their pens in hand
and gets through a hard spell of courtin’ on paper. Love plumb locoes
Johnnie. His spellin’ don’t suit him, his handwritin’ don’t suit him,
his natchral letters don’t suit him. So off he sends to Denver for all
the letter-writin’ books he can buy—_Handbook of Correspondence_, _The
Epistolary Guide_, _The Ready Letter-Writer_, and a stack more. There’s
no denyin’ it, Johnnie certainly did sweat hisself over them letters.”
“Land’s sakes!” said the fat lady.
“Yes, marm; he used to read ’em to me, beginnin’ how he had just seized
five minutes to write to her, when he’d worked the whole day like a
mule over it. She seemed to like the brand, an’ when he sent her the
money to come out here an’ get married, she come as straight as if she
had been mailed with a postage-stamp.”
“The brazen thing!” said the fat lady.
“They stopped here, goin’ home to their place. My Lord! warn’t she a
high-flyer! She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail—my wife called
it a Sikey knot—and it stood out a foot from her head. Some of the
boys, kinder playful, wanted to throw a hat at it and see if it
wouldn’t hang, but they refrained, out of respect to the feelin’s of
the groom.
“From the start,” continued Leander, “the two Mrs. Daxes just hankered
to get at each other; an’ while I, as a slave to the fair sex”—here he
bowed to the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael—“hesitates to use such
langwidge in their presence, the attitood of them two female wimmin
shorely reminds me of a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin’ to
chaw each other.
“At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an’ foot, and she just read
novels and played stylish all the time and danced. She was the hardest
dancer that ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to
any old war-dancin’ chief up to the reservation. No dance she ever
heard of was too far for her to go to. She just went and danced till
broad daylight. Many a man would have took to dissipation, in his
circumstances, but Johnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly. Why,
he’d leave his dishes go from one day till the next—”
“There’s more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next if
they wasn’t looked after.” And the wife of his bosom stood in the door
like a vengeful household goddess. Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearest
plates.
IV.
Judith, The Postmistress
The arrival of Chugg’s stage with the mail should have been coincident
with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from
“Town,” but Chugg was late—a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local
lethe waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to
forget that woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence
of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving
Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent
Chugg, and incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.
Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which
the travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of
dictator, with absolute sway. Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and
staff, executed marvellous feats of domestic engineering. The late
breakfast-table, swept and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United
States post-office, prepared to transact postal business, and for the
time being to become the social centre of the surrounding country.
Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped and climbed and dipped
again over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world
without end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom,
so small that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn
into a horseman.
There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was
ridden. No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting,
Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground
imperceptibly and is a delight to the eye. It needed but the solitary
figure to signify the infinitude of space in the background. In all
that great, wide world the only hint of life was the galloping
horseman, the only sound the rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs. The
rider, now close enough for Miss Carmichael to distinguish the
features, was a thorough dandy of the saddle. No slouching garb of
exigence and comfort this, but a pretty display of doeskin gaiter,
varnished boot, and smart riding-breeches. The lad—he could not have
been, Miss Carmichael thought, more than twenty—was tanned a splendid
color not unlike the bloomy shading on a nasturtium. And when the
doughty horseman made out the girl standing in the doorway, he smiled
with a lack of formality not suggested by the town-cut of his
trappings. Throwing the reins over the neck of the horse with the real
Western fling, he slid from the saddle in a trice, and—Mary Carmichael
experienced something of the gasping horror of a shocked old lady as
she made out two splendid braids of thick, black hair. Her doughty
cavalier was no cavalier at all, but a surprisingly handsome young
woman.
Miss Carmichael gasped a little even as she extended her hand, for the
masquerader had pulled off her gauntlet and held out hers as if she was
conferring the freedom of the wilderness. It was impossible for a
homesick girl not to respond to such heartiness, though it was with
difficulty at first that Mary kept her eyes on the girl’s face.
Curiosity, agreeably piqued, urged her to take another glimpse of the
riding clothes that this young woman wore with such supreme unconcern.
Now, “in the East” Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting
black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the
pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day
at dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by
not betraying this, the attempt was rather a failure.
“Are you surprised that I did not wait for an introduction?” the girl
in the riding clothes asked, noticing Mary’s evident uneasiness; “but
you don’t know how good it is to see a girl. I’m so tired of spurs and
sombreros and cattle and dust and distance, and there’s nothing else
here.”
“Where I come from it’s just the other way—too many petticoats and
hat-pins.”
The horseman who was no horseman dropped Miss Carmichael’s hand and
went into the house. Mary wondered if she ought to have been more
cordial.
From the back door came Leander, with dishcloths, which he began to
hang on the line in a dumb, driven sort of way.
“Who is she?” asked Mary.
“Her?” he interrogated, jerking his head in the direction of the house.
“The postmistress, Judith Rodney; yes, that’s her name.” He dropped his
voice in the manner of one imparting momentous things. “She never wears
a skirt ridin’, any more than a man.”
Mary felt that she was tempting Leander into the paths of gossip,
undoubtedly his besetting sin, but she could not resist the temptation
to linger. He had disposed of his last dish-cloth, and he withdrew the
remaining clothes-pin from his mouth in a way that was pathetically
feminine.
“She keeps the post-office here, since Mrs. Dax lost the job, and
boards with us; p’r’aps it’s because she is my wife’s successor in
office, or p’a’ps it’s jest the natural grudge that wimmin seem to
harbor agin each other, I dunno, but they don’t sandwich none.”
Leander having disposed of his last dish-towel, squinted at it through
his half-closed eyes, like an artist “sighting” a landscape, saw
apparently that it was in drawing, and next brought his vision to bear
on the back premises of his own dwelling, where he saw there was no
wifely figure in evidence.
“Sh-sh-h!” he said, creeping towards Mary, his dull face transfigured
with the consciousness that he had news to tell. “Sh-sh—her brother’s a
rustler. If ’twan’t for her”—Leander went through the grewsome
pantomime of tying an imaginary rope round his neck and throwing it
over the limb of an imaginary tree. “They’re goin’ to get him for shore
this time, soon as he comes out of jail; but would you guess it from
her bluff?”
There was no mistaking the fate of a rustler after Mr. Dax’s grisly
demonstration, but of the quality of his calling Mary was as ignorant
as before.
“And why should they do that?” she inquired, with tenderfoot
simplicity.
“Stealin’ cattle ain’t good for the health hereabouts,” said Leander,
as one who spoke with authority. “It’s apt to bring on throat trouble.”
But Mary did not find Leander’s joke amusing. She had suddenly
remembered the pale, gaunt man who had walked into the eating-house the
previous morning and walked out again, his errand turned into
farce-comedy by the cowardice of an unworthy antagonist. The pale man’s
grievance had had to do with sheep and cattle. His name had been
Rodney, too. She understood now. He was Judith Rodney’s brother, and he
was in danger of being hanged. Mary Carmichael felt first the
admiration of a girl, then the pity of a woman, for the brave young
creature who so stoutly carried so unspeakable a burden. But she could
not speak of her new knowledge to Leander.
She glanced towards this childlike person and saw from his stealthy
manner that he had more to impart. He walked towards the kitchen door,
saw no one, and came back to Mary.
“There ain’t a man in this Gawd-forsaken country wouldn’t lope at the
chance to die for her—but the women!” Leander’s pantomimic indication
of absolute feminine antagonism was conclusive.
“The wimmin treats her scabby—just scabby. Don’t you go to thinkin’ she
ain’t a good girl on that account”; and something like an attitude of
chivalrous protection straightened the apologetic crook in his craven
outline.
“She’s good, just good, and when a woman’s that there’s no use in
sayin’ it any more fanciful. As I says to my wife, every time she give
me a chance, ‘If Judy wasn’t a good girl these boys about here would
just natchrally become extinct shootin’ each other upon account of
her.’ But she don’t favor none enough to cause trouble.”
“Are the women jealous of her?”
“It’s her independence that riles ’em. They take on awful about her
ridin’ in pants, an’ it certainly is a heap more modest than ridin’
straddle in a hitched up caliker skirt, same as some of them do.”
“And do all the women out here ride astride?” Mary gasped.
“A good many does, when you ain’t watchin’; horses in these parts ain’t
broke for no such lopsided foolishness as side-saddles. But you see she
does it becomin’, and that’s where the grudge comes in. You can’t stir
about these foot-hills without coming across a woman, like as not,
holdin’ on to a posse of kids, and ridin’ clothes-pin fashion in a
looped-up skirt; when she sees you comin’ she’ll p’r’aps upset a kid or
two assoomin’ a decorous attitood. That’s feemi_nine_, and as such is
approved by the ladies, but”—and here Leander put his head on one side
and gave a grotesque impression of outraged decorum—“pants is
considered unwomanly.”
“Leander! Leander!” came in accusing accents from the kitchen.
“Run!” gasped Mrs. Dax’s handmaiden; “don’t let her catch us chinnin’.”
Mary Carmichael ran round one side of the house as she was bidden, but,
like Lot’s wife, could not resist the temptation of looking back.
Leander, with incredible rapidity, grabbed two clothes-pins off the
line, clutched a dish-towel, shook it. “Comin’! comin’!” he called, as
he went through the farce of rehanging it.
The lonesomeness of plain and foot-hill, the utter lack of the human
element that gives to this country its character of penetrating
desolation, had been changed while Mary Carmichael forgathered with
Leander by the clothes-line. From the four quarters of the compass, men
in sombreros, flannel shirts, and all manner of strange habiliments
came galloping over the roads as if their horses were as keen on
reaching Dax’s as their riders. They came towards the house at full
tilt, their horses stretching flat with ears laid back viciously, and
Mary, who was unused to the tricks of cow-ponies, expected to see them
ride through the front door, merely by way of demonstrating their sense
of humor. Not so; the little pintos, buckskins, bays, and chestnuts
dashed to the door and stopped short in a full gallop; as a bit of
staccato equestrianism it was superb.
And then the wherefore of all this dashing horsemanship, this
curveting, prancing, galloping revival of knightly tourney effects was
apparent—Judith Rodney had opened post-office. She had changed her
riding clothes; or, rather, that portion of them to which the ladies
took exception was now concealed by a long, black skirt. Her wonderful
braids of black hair had been twisted high on her head. She was well
worth a trip across the alkali wastes to see. The room was packed with
men. One unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some
crowd-collecting casualty had happened. Above the continual clinking of
spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these
United States are capable. There is no Western dialect, properly
speaking. Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or
Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give
an essential picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely
local—the cattle and sheep industries, prospecting, the Indians, poker,
faro, the dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable
embellishment.
Judith managed them all—cow-punchers, sheep-herders, prospectors,
freighters—with an impersonal skill that suggested a little solitary
exercise in the bowling-alley. The ten-pins took their tumbles in good
part—no one could congratulate himself on escaping the levelling
ball—and where there’s a universal lack of luck, doubtless also there
will be found a sort of grim fellowship.
That they were all more or less in love with her there could be no
doubt. As a matter of fact, Judith Rodney did not depend on the
scarcity of women in the desert for her pre-eminence in the interests
of this hot-headed group. Her personality—and through no conscious
effort of hers—would have been pre-eminent anywhere. As it was, in this
woman-forsaken wilderness she might have stirred up a modern edition of
the Trojan war at any moment. That she did not, despite the lurking
suggestion of temptation written all over her, brought back the words
of Leander: “If Judy wasn’t a good girl, these boys would just
nacherally become extinct shooting each other upon account of her.”
And yet what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched
Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her
interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there
might lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint
and devil. One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or
provoking a bar-room brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the
vividness of color, the suggestion of endurance and radiating health in
every line, were comparable to the great primeval forces about her. She
was cast to be the mother of men of brawn and muscle, who would make
this vast, unclaimed wilderness subject to them.
At present neither pole of her character, as it had been hastily
estimated, was even remotely suggested. The atmosphere in the
post-office was, considering the potential violence of its visitors,
singularly calm. And Judith, feeding these wild border lads on scraps
of chaff and banter, and retaining their absolute loyalty, was a sight
worth seeing. She had the alertness of a lion-tamer locked in a cage
with the lords of the jungle; the rashly confident she humbled, the
meek she exalted, and all with such genuine good-fellowship, such an
absence of coquetry in the genial game of give and take, that one
ceased to wonder at even the devotion of Leander. And since they were
to her, on her own confession, but “spurs and sombreros,” one wondered
at the elaboration of the comedy, the endless wire-pulling in the
manipulation of these most picturesque marionettes—until one remembered
the outlaw brother and felt that what she did she did for him.
“You right shore there ain’t a letter for me, Miss Judith. My creditors
are pretty faithful ’bout bearing me in mind.” It was the third time
that the big, shambling Texan who had been one of the company at Mrs.
Clark’s eating-house had inquired for mail, and seemed so embarrassed
by his own bulk that he moved cautiously, as if he might step on a
fellow-creature and maim him. Each time he had asked for a letter he
took his place at the end of the waiting-line and patiently bided his
time for the chance of an extra word with the postmistress.
“They’ve begun to lose hope, Texas.”
She shuffled the letters impartially, as a goddess dispensing fate, and
barely glanced at the man who had ridden a hundred and fifty miles
across sand and cactus to see her.
“That’s the difference between them and me.” There was a grim finality
in his tone.
“What, you’re going to take your place at the end of that line again!
I’ll try and find you a circular.”
He tried to look at her angrily, but she smiled at him with such
good-fellowship that he went off singing significantly that universal
anthem of the cow-puncher the West over:
“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,
In a narrow grave just six by three,
Where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me.
Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.”
“Ain’t there a love letter for me?” The young man who inquired seemed
to belong to a different race from these bronzed squires of the saddle.
He suggested over-crowded excursion boats on Sunday afternoons in
swarming Eastern cities. He buttonholed every one and explained his
presence in the West on the score of his health, as though leaving his
native asphalt were a thing that demanded apology.
“Yes,” answered the postmistress, with a real motherly note, “here is
one from Hugous & Co.”
A roar went up at this, and the blushing tenderfoot pocketed his third
bill for the most theatrical style of Mexican sombrero; it had a brass
snake coiled round the crown for a hat-band, and a cow-puncher in good
and regular standing would have preferred going bareheaded to wearing
it.
“She seems to be pressing her suit, son; you better name the day,” one
of the loungers suggested.
“The blamed thing ain’t worth twenty-five dollars,” the young man from
the East declared. A conspicuous silence followed. It seemed to
irritate the owner of the hat that no one would defend it. “It ain’t
worth it,” he repeated.
“I think you allowed you was out here for your health?” the big Texan,
who had returned from the corral, inquired.
“Betcher life,” swaggered the man with the hat, “N’York’s good enough
for me.”
“But”—and the Texan smiled sweetly—“the man who sold you the hat ain’t
out here for his.”
Judith hid her head and stamped letters. The boys were suspiciously
quiet, then some one began to chant:
“The devil examined the desert well,
And made up his mind ’twas too dry for hell;
He put up the prices his pockets to swell,
And called it a—heal-th resort.”
The postmistress waited for the last note of the chorus to die away,
and read from a package she held in her hand—“‘Mrs. Henry Lee, Deer
Lodge, Wyoming.’ Well, Henry, here’s a wedding-present, I guess. And my
congratulations, though you’ve hardly treated us well in never saying a
word.”
The unfortunate Henry, who hadn’t even a sweetheart, and who was noted
as the shyest man in the “Goose Creek Outfit,” had to submit to the
mock congratulations of every man in the room and promise to set up the
drinks later.
“I never felt we’d keep you long, son; them golden curls seldom gets a
chance to ripen singly.”
“Shoshone squaw, did you say she was, Henry? They ain’t much for looks,
but there’s a heep of wear to ’em.”
“Oh, go on, now; you fellows know I ain’t married.” And the boy handled
the package with a sort of dumb wonder, as if the superscription were
indisputable evidence of a wife’s existence.
“Open it, Henry; you shore don’t harbor sentiments of curiosity
regarding the post-office dealings of your lady.”
“Now, old man, this here may be grounds for divorce.”
“See what the other fellow’s sending your wife.”
Henry, badgered, jostled, the target of many a homely witticism,
finally opened the package, which proved to be a sample bottle of baby
food. At sight of it they howled like Apaches, and Henry was again
forced to receive their congratulations. Judith, who had been an
interested on-looker without joining in the merriment, now detected in
the tenor of their humor a tendency towards breadth. In an instant her
manner was official; rapping the table with her mailing-stamp, she
announced:
“Boys, this post-office closes in ten minutes, if you want to buy any
stamps.”
The silence following this statement on the part of the postmistress
was instantaneous. Henry took his mirth-provoking package and went his
way; some of the more hilariously inclined followed him. The remainder
confined themselves absolutely to business, scrawling postal-cards or
reading their mail. The pounce of the official stamp on the letters, as
the postmistress checked them off for the mail-bag, was the only sound
in the hot stillness.
A heavily built man, older than those who had been keeping the
post-office lively, now took advantage of the lull to approach Judith.
He had a twinkling face, all circles and pouches, but it grew graver as
he spoke to the postmistress. He was Major Atkins, formerly a famous
cavalry officer, but since his retirement a cattle-man whose herds
grazed to the pan-handle of Texas. As he took his mail, talking
meantime of politics, of the heat, of the lack of water, in the loud
voice for which he was famous, he managed, with clumsy diplomacy, to
interject a word or two for her own ear alone.
“Jim’s out,” he conveyed to her, in a successfully muffled tone. “He’s
out, and they’re after him, hot. Get him out of the State, Judy—get him
out, quick. He tried to kill Simpson at Mrs. Clark’s, in town,
yesterday. The little Eastern girl that’s here will tell you.” Then the
major was gone before Judith could perfectly realize the significance
of what he had told her.
She threw back her head and the pulse in her throat beat. Like a wild
forest thing, at the first warning sound, she considered: Was it time
for flight?—or was the warning but the crackling of a twig? Major
Atkins was a cattle-man: her brother hated all cattle-men. How
disinterested had been the major’s warning! He had always been her
friend. Mrs. Atkins had been one of the ladies at the post who had
helped to send her to school to the nuns at Santa Fé. She despised
herself for doubting; yet these were troublous times, and all was fair
between sheep and cattle-men. Major Atkins had spoken of the Eastern
girl; then that pretty, little, curly-haired creature, whom Judith had
found standing in the sunshine, had seen Jim—had heard him threaten to
kill. Should she ask her about it—consult her? Judith’s training was
not one to impel her to give her confidence to strangers, still she had
liked the little Eastern girl.
These were the perplexities that beset her, sweeping her thoughts
hither and thither, as sea-weed is swept by the wash of the waves. She
strove to collect her faculties. How should she rid the house of her
cavaliers? She had regularly to refuse some half-dozen of them each day
that she kept post-office.
In a few minutes more the group in the post-office began to disperse
under the skilful manipulation of the postmistress. To some she sold
stamps with an air of “God speed you,” and they were soon but dwindling
specks on the horizon. To others she implied such friendly farewells
that there was nothing to do but betake themselves to their saddles.
Others had compromised with the saloon opposite, and their roaring
mirth came in snatches of song and shouts of laughter. She fastened up
the little pile of letters that had remained uncalled for with what
seemed a deliberate slowness. Each time any one entered the room she
looked up—then the hope died hard in her face. Leander came in with
catlike tread and removed the pigeon-holes from the table. The
post-office was closed. Family life had been resumed at the Daxes’.
Judith left the room and stood in the blinding sunlight, basking in it
as if she were cold. The mercury must have stood close to a hundred,
and she was hatless. There was no trace of her ebullient spirits of the
morning. Her head was sunk on her breast and she held her hands with
locked fingers behind her. It was hot, hot as the breaths of a thousand
belching furnaces. A white, burning glare had spread itself from
horizon to horizon, and the earth wrinkled and cracked beneath it. From
every corner of this parched wilderness came an ominous whirring, like
the last wheezing gasp of an alarm-clock before striking the hour. This
menacing orchestration was nothing more or less than millions of
grasshoppers rasping legs and wings together in hoarse appreciation of
the heat and glare; but it had a sound that boded evil. Again and again
she turned towards the yellow road as it dipped over the hills; but
there was never a glimpse of a horseman from that direction.
V.
The Trail Of Sentiment
Within the house the travellers had disposed themselves in a repressed
and melancholy circle that suggested the suspended animation of a
funeral gathering. The fat lady had turned back her skirt to save her
travelling dress. The stage was late, and there was no good and
sufficient reason for wearing it out. A similar consideration of
economy led her to flirt off flies with her second best
pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Dax presided over the gathering with awful
severity. Every one truckled to her shamefully, receiving her lightest
remarks as if they were to be inscribed on tablets of bronze. Leander,
his eyes bright with excitement at being received in the family circle
on an equal footing, balanced perilously on the edge of his chair,
anticipating dismissal.
“Chugg’s never ben so late as this,” said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself
furiously. She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the
nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending
forth flame. Leander, the fat lady, and Miss Carmichael meekly murmured
assent and condemnation.
“And there ain’t a sign of him,” said Mrs. Dax, returning to the house
after straining the landscape through her all-observant eye, and not
detecting him in any of the remote pin-pricks on the horizon, in which
these plainsfolk invariably decipher a herd of antelope, an elk or two,
or a horseman.
“Bet he had a woman in the stage and upset it with her,” said Leander,
in the animated manner of a poor relation currying favor with a bit of
news.
Mrs. Dax regarded him severely for a moment, then conspicuously
addressed her next remark to the ladies. “Bet he had a woman in the
stage, the old scoundrel!”
“Wonder who she was?” said Leander, with the sparkling triumph of a
poor relation whose surmise had been accepted. But Mrs. Dax had
evidently decided that Leander had gone far enough.
“Was you expectin’ any of your lady friends by Chugg’s stage that you
are so frettin’ anxious?” she inquired, and the poor relation collapsed
miserably.
“You’ve heard about Chugg’s goin’ on since ‘Mountain Pink’ jilted him?”
inquired Mrs. Dax of the fat lady, as the only one of the party who
might have kept abreast with the social chronicles of the neighborhood.
“My land, yes,” responded the fat lady, proud to be regarded as
socially cognizant. “M’ son says he’s plumb locoed about it—didn’t want
me to travel by his stage. But I said he dassent upset a woman of my
age—he just nacherally dassent!”
Miss Carmichael, by dint of patient inquiry, finally got the story
which was popularly supposed to account for the misdemeanors of the
stage-driver, including his present delinquency that was delaying them
on their journey.
It appeared that Lemuel Chugg, then writhing in the coils of perverse
romance, was among the last of those famous old stage-drivers whose
talents combined skill at handling the ribbons with the diplomacy
necessary to treat with a masked envoy on the road. His luck in these
encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due
to Chugg’s ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, “while he
had been shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of
fight in the old man yet.”
Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the
manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his
heart, and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking,
stuffed so full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the
bulbous appearance of the “before treatment” view of a chiropodist’s
sign. This darling of his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg’s
earliest manhood. It had been his only love—till he met Mountain Pink.
Mountain Pink’s husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg’s
stage-route. She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had
not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali
water. Furthermore, she could “bring about a dried-apple pie” to make a
man forget the cooking of his mother. Great was the havoc wrought by
Mountain Pink’s pies and complexion, but she followed the decorous
precedent of Cæsar’s wife, and, like her pastry, remained above
suspicion.
Her husband, whose name was Jim Bosky, seemed, to the self-impanelled
jury that spent its time sitting on the case, singularly insensible to
his own advantages. Not only did he fail to take a proper pride in her
beauty, but there were dark hints abroad that he had never tasted one
of her pies. When delicately questioned on this point, at that stage of
liquid refreshment that makes these little personalities not
impossible, Bosky had grimly quoted the dearth of shoes among
shoe-makers’ children.
Whatever were the facts of the case, Mountain Pink got the sympathy
that might have been expected in a section of the country where the
ratio of the sexes is fifty to one. Chugg, eating her pies regularly
once a week on his stage-route, said nothing, but he presented her with
a red plush photograph album with oxidized silver clasps, and by this
first reckless expenditure of money in the life of Chugg, Natrona,
Johnson, Converse, and Sweetwater counties knew that Cupid had at last
found a vulnerable spot in the tough and weather-tanned hide of the old
stage-driver.
Nor did Cupid stop here with his pranks. Having inoculated the
stage-driver with the virus of romance, madness began to work in the
veins of Chugg. He presented Mountain Pink with the gray woollen
stocking—not extracting a single coin—and urged her to get a divorce
from the clodlike man who had never appreciated her and marry him.
Mountain Pink coyly took the stocking so generously given for the
divorce and subsequent trousseau, and Chugg continued to drive his
stage with an Apollo-like abandon, whistling love-songs the while.
Coincident with Mountain Pink’s disappearance Dakotaward, in the
interests of freedom, went also one Bob Catlin, a mule-wrangler. Bosky,
with conspicuous pessimism, hoped for the worst from the beginning, and
as time went on and nothing was heard of either of the wanderers, some
of Mountain Pink’s most loyal adherents confessed it looked “romancy.”
But crusty old Chugg remained true to his ideal. “She’ll write when she
gets good and ready,” and then concluded, loyally, “Maybe she can’t
write, nohow,” and nothing could shake his faith.
When Mountain Pink and the mule-wrangler returned as bride and groom
and set up housekeeping on the remainder of Chugg’s stocking, and on
his stage-route, too, so that he had to drive right past the honeymoon
cottage every time he completed the circuit, they lost caste in Carbon
County. Chugg never spoke of the faithlessness of Mountain Pink. His
bitterness found vent in tipping over the stage when his passengers
were confined to members of the former Mrs. Bosky’s sex, and, as
Leander said, “the flask in his innerds held more.” And these were the
only traces of tragedy in the life of Lemuel Chugg, stage-driver.
Judith had continued her unquiet pacing in the blinding glare while the
group within doors, somnolent from the heat and the incessant shrilling
of the locusts, droningly discussed the faithlessness of Mountain Pink,
dozed, and took up the thread of the romance. Each time she turned
Judith would stop and scan the yellow road, shading her eyes with her
hand, and each time she had turned away and resumed her walk. Mary, who
gave the postmistress no unstinted share of admiration for the courage
with which she faced her difficulties, and who had been seeking an
opportunity to signify her friendship, and now that she saw the last of
the gallants depart, inquired of Judith if she might join her.
They walked without speaking for several minutes, enjoying a sense of
comradeship hardly in keeping with the brevity of their acquaintance; a
freedom from restraint spared them the necessity of exchanging
small-talk, that frequently irritating toll exacted as tribute to
possible friendship.
The desert lay white and palpitating beneath the noonday glare, and
from the outermost rim of desolation came dancing “dust-devils”
whirling and gliding through the mazes of their eerie dance. “I think
sometimes,” said Judith, “that they are the ghosts of those who have
died of thirst in the desert.”
Mary shuddered imperceptibly. “How do you stand it with never a glimpse
of the sea?”
“You’ll love it, or hate it; the desert is too jealous for half
measures. As for the sea”—Judith shrugged her fine shoulders—“from all
I’ve heard of it, it must be very wet.”
Each felt a reticence about broaching the subject uppermost in her
thoughts—Judith from the instinctive tendency towards secretiveness
that was part of the heritage of her Indian blood; Mary because the
subject so closely concerned this girl for whom she felt such genuine
admiration.
Judith finally brought up the matter with an abruptness that scarce
concealed her anxiety.
“You saw my brother yesterday at Mrs. Clark’s eating-house; will you be
good enough to tell me just what happened?”
Mary related the incident in detail, Judith cross-examining her
minutely as to the temper of the men at table towards Jim. Did she know
if any cattle-men were present? Did she hear where her brother had
gone?
Mary had heard nothing further after he had left the eating-house; the
only one she had talked to had been Mrs. Clark, whose sympathy had been
entirely with Jim. Judith thanked her, but in reality she knew no more
now than she had heard from Major Atkins.
Judith now stopped in their walk and stood facing the road as it rolled
over the foot-hills—a skein of yellow silk glimmering in the sun. Then
Mary saw that the object spinning across it in the distance, hardly
bigger than a doll’s carriage, was the long-delayed stage. She spoke to
the postmistress, but apparently she did not hear—Judith was watching
the nearing stage as if it might bring some message of life and death.
She stood still, and the drooping lines of her figure straightened,
every fibre of her beauty kindled. She was like a flame, paling the
sunlight.
And presently was heard the uncouth music of sixteen iron-shod hoofs
beating hard from the earth rhythmic notes which presently grew hollow
and sonorous as they came rattling over the wooden bridge that spanned
the creek.
“Chugg!” exclaimed Leander, rushing to the door in a tumult. There was
something crucial in the arrival of the delayed stage-driver. His
delinquencies had deflected the course of the travellers, left them
stranded in a remote corner of the wilderness; but now they should
again resume the thread of things; Chugg’s coming was an event.
“’Tain’t Chugg, by God!” said Leander, impelled to violent language by
the unexpected.
“It’s Peter Hamilton!” exclaimed Mrs. Dax.
“Land’s sakes, the New-Yorker!” said the fat lady. Only Judith said
nothing.
Mr. Hamilton held the ribbons of that battered prairie-stage as if he
had been driving past the judges’ bench at the Horse Show. Furthermore,
he wore blue overalls, a flannel shirt, and a sombrero, which sartorial
inventory, while it highly became the slim young giant, added an extra
comedy touch to his rôle of whip. He was as dusty as a miller;
close-cropped, curly head, features, and clothes were covered with a
fine alkali powdering; but he carried his youth as a banner streaming
in the blue. And he swung from the stage with the easy flow of muscle
that is the reward of those who live in the saddle and make a fine art
of throwing the lariat.
They greeted him heartily, all but Judith, who did not trust herself to
speak to him before the prying eyes of Mrs. Dax, and escaped to the
house. Chugg’s latest excursion into oblivion had resulted in a fall
from the box. He was not badly hurt, and recuperation was largely a
matter of “sleeping it off,” concluded Peter Hamilton’s bulletin of the
condition of the stage-driver. So the travellers were still marooned at
Dax’s, and the prospect of continuing their journey was as vague as
ever.
“Last I heard of you,” said Mrs. Dax to Hamilton, with a sort of
stone-age playfulness, “you was punching cows over to the Bitter Root.”
“That’s true, Mrs. Dax”—he gave her his most winning smile—“but I could
not stay away from you long.”
Leander grimaced and rubbed his hands in an ecstasy of delight at
finding a man who had the temerity to bandy words with Mrs. Dax.
“Hum-m-m-ph!” she whinnied, with equine coquetry. “Guess it was
rustlers brought you back as much as me.”
Judith, who had entered the room in time to hear Mrs. Dax’s last
remark, greeted him casually, but her eyes, as they met his, were full
of questioning fear. Had he come from the Bitter Root range to hunt
down her brother? The thought was intolerable. Yet, when he had bade
her good-bye some three weeks ago, he had told her that he did not
expect to return much before the fall “round-up.” She had heard, a day
or two before, that he was again in the Wind River country, and her
morning vigil beneath the glare of the desert sun had been for him.
Mrs. Dax regarded them with the mercilessness of a death-watch; she
remembered the time when Hamilton’s excuses for his frequent presence
at the post-office had been more voluble than logical. But now he no
longer came, and Judith, for all her deliberate flow of spirits, did
not quite convince the watchful eyes of Leander’s lady—the postmistress
was a trifle too cheerful.
“Mrs. Dax,” pleaded Peter, boyishly, “I’m perishing for a cup of
coffee, and I’ve got to get back to my outfit before dark.”
“Oh, go on with you,” whinnied the gorgon; but she left the room to
make the coffee.
Judith’s eyes sought his. “Why don’t you and Leander form a coalition
for the overthrow of the enemy?” His voice had dropped a tone lower
than in his parley with Mrs. Dax; it might have implied special
devotion, or it might have implied but the passing tribute to a
beautiful woman in a country where women were few—the generic
admiration of all men for all women, ephemerally specialized by place
and circumstance.
But Judith, harassed at every turn, heart-sick with anxiety, had
anticipated in Peter’s coming, if not a solution of her troubles, at
least some evidence of sustaining sympathy, and was in no mood for
resuscitating the perennial pleasantries anent Leander and his
masterful lady.
The shrilling of the locusts emphasized their silence. She spoke to him
casually of his change of plan, but he turned the subject, and Judith
let the matter drop. She was too simple a woman to stoop to oblique
measures for the gaining of her own ends. If he was here to hunt down
her brother, if he was here to see the Eastern woman at the Wetmore
ranch—well, “life was life,” to be taken or left. Thus spoke the
fatalism that was the heritage of her Indian blood.
The thought of Miss Colebrooke at Wetmore’s reminded her of a letter
for Peter that had been brought that morning by one of the Wetmore
cow-boys.
“I forgot—there’s a letter for you.” She went to the pigeon-holes on
the wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and
brought him a square, blue linen envelope—distinctly a lady’s letter.
Peter took it with rather a forced air of magnanimity, as if in
neglecting to present it to him sooner she drew heavily on his reserve
of patience. Tearing open the envelope, he read it voraciously, read it
to the exclusion of his surroundings, the world at large, and—Judith.
He strode up and down the floor two or three times, and called to
Leander, who was passing:
“Dax, I must have that gray mare of yours right away.” He went in the
direction of the stable, without a second glance at the postmistress,
and presently they saw him galloping off in the opposite direction from
which he had come. Mrs. Dax came in with a tray on which were a pot of
coffee and sundry substantial delicacies.
“Where’s he gone?” she demanded, putting the tray down so hard that the
coffee slopped.
“I dunno,” said Leander. “He said he’d got to have the gray mare,
saddled her hisself, and rode off like hell.”
Mrs. Dax looked at them all savagely for the explanation that they
could not give. In sending her out to make coffee she felt that Peter,
whom she regarded in the light of a weakness, had taken advantage of
her affections to dupe her in regard to his plans.
“Take them things back to the kitchen,” she commanded Leander.
Mary Carmichael involuntarily glanced at Judith; the fall of the leaf
was in her cheek.
Peter Hamilton, bowed in his saddle and flogging forward inhumanely,
bred rife speculation as to his destination among the group that
watched him from the Daxes’ front door. Mrs. Dax, who entertained so
profound a respect for her own omniscience that she disdained to arrive
at a conclusion by a logical process of deduction, was “plumb certain
that he had gone after ‘rustlers!’” Leander, who had held no opinions
since his marriage except that first and all-comprehensive tenet of his
creed—that his wife was a person to be loved, honored, and obeyed
instantly—agreed with his lady by a process of reflex action. The fat
lady, who had a commonplace for every occasion, didn’t “know what we
were all coming to.” Miss Carmichael, who was beginning to find her
capacity for amazement overstrained, alone accepted this last incident
with apathy. Mr. Hamilton might have gone in swift pursuit of cattle
thieves or he might be riding the mare to death for pure whimsy. Only
Judith Rodney, who said nothing, felt that he was spurring across the
wilderness at breakneck speed to see a girl at Wetmore’s. But her lack
of comment caused no ripple of surprise in the flow of loose-lipped
speculation that served, for the time being, to inject a casual
interest into the talk of these folk, bored to the verge of
demoralization by long waiting for Chugg.
Judith preferred to confirm her apprehensions regarding Hamilton’s
ride, alone. She knew—had not all her woman’s intuitions risen in
clamorous warning—and yet she hoped, hoped despairingly, even though
the dread alternative to the girl at the Wetmore ranch threatened lynch
law for her brother. Her very gait changed as she withdrew from the
group about the door, covertly gaining her vantage-ground inch by inch.
The heels of her riding-boots made no sound as she stole across the
kitchen floor, toeing in like an Indian tracking an enemy through the
forest. The small window at the back of the kitchen commanded a view of
the road in all its sprawling circumlocution. Seen from this prospect,
it had no more design than the idle scrawlings of a child on a bit of
paper; but the choice of roads to Good and Evil was not fraught with
more momentous consequences than was each prong of that fork towards
which Hamilton was galloping.
The right arm swung towards the Wetmore ranch, where at certain times
during the course of the year a hundred cow-punchers reported on the
stock that grazed in four States. At certain seasons, likewise, despite
the fact that the ranch was well into the foot-hill country, there
might be found a New York family playing at life primeval with the
co-operation of porcelain bath-tubs, a French _chef_, and electric
light.
The left fork of the road had a meaner destiny. It dipped straight into
desolation, penetrating a naked wilderness where bad men skulked till
the evil they had done was forgotten in deeds that called afresh to
Heaven for vengeance. It was well away on this west fork of the road
that they lynched Kate Watson—“Cattle Kate”—for the crime of loyalty.
It was she, intrepid and reckless, who threatened the horde of masked
scoundrels when they came to lynch her man for the iniquity of raising
a few vegetables on a strip of ground that cut into their grazing
country. And when she, recognizing them, masked though they were,
threatened them with the vengeance of the law, they hanged her with her
man high as Haman.
Judith watched Hamilton with narrowing eyes. And now she was all
Indian, the white woman in her dead. Only the Sioux watched, and, in
the patient, Indian style, bided its time. “Cattle thieves,” “the girl
at Wetmore’s”—the words sang themselves in her head like an
incantation. “Cattle thieves” meant her brother, their recognized
leader—her brother, who was dearer to her than the heart in her breast,
the eye in her head, the right hand that held together the shambling,
uncertain destiny of her people. Would he turn to the left, Justice, on
a pale horse, hunting her brother gallowsward? Would he turn towards
the right, the impetuous lover spurring his steed that he might come
swiftly to the woman. A pulse in her bosom rose slowly until her breath
was suspended, then fell again; she was still watching, without an
outward quiver, long after he had turned to the right—and the woman.
VI.
A Daughter Of The Desert
Judith knew that the name of the girl whose letter sent Peter Hamilton
vaulting to the saddle was Katherine Colebrooke. There had been a deal
of letter-writing between her and the young cow-puncher of late, of
which perforce, by a singular irony of fate, the postmistress had been
the involuntary instrument. The correspondence had followed a recent
hasty journey to New York, undertaken somewhat unwillingly by Hamilton
in the interest of certain affairs connected with the settlement of an
estate.
The precipitancy of this latest turn of events bewildered Judith; but
yet a little while—a matter of weeks and days—and her friendship with
Hamilton had been of that pleasantly indefinite estate situated
somewhere on the borderland of romance, a kingdom where there is no law
but the mutual interest of the wayfarers. Judith and Peter had been
pitifully new at the game of life when the gods vouchsafed them the
equivocal blessing of propinquity. Judith was but lately come from the
convent at Santa Fé, and Hamilton from the university whose honors
availed him little in the trailing of cattle over the range or in the
sweat and tumult of the branding-pen. It was a strange election of
opportunity for a man who had been class poet and had rather
conspicuously avoided athletics during his entire college course. In
pursuing fortune westward Hamilton did not lack for chroniclers who
would not have missed a good story for the want of an authentic
dramatic interpretation of his plans. His uncle, said they, who had put
him through college, was disposed to let him sink or swim by his own
efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle
and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp
of his own hand. Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more
to heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives. Peter
made no confidences. He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit;
he was a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother’s side
of the family.
In those days Peter wore his rue—whether for lady fair or for towering
prospects stricken down—with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming
to a gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of
adolescence. His instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would
have availed him little with his new associates had he been a whit less
manly. But as he shirked no part of the universal hardship, they left
him his reticence. He even came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as
one who was conversant with the best—a nonchalant social
connoisseur—yet who realized the stern primitive beauties of the range
life.
Judith’s convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage
of a gentlewoman’s tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an
alien in her father’s house. When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for
her education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw
moreover that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt
her; but Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands
little of what it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold
together a family, uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.
In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to
the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the
beginning there had been between them the barrier of circumstance.
Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose
thriftlessness had become a proverb. He came of a family that numbered
a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice,
and the dean of a great university; Judith was uncertain of her right
to the very name she bore. And yet they were young, he a man, she a
woman—eternal fountain of interest. A precocious sense of the fitness
of things was the compass that enabled Peter to steer through the deep
waters in the years that followed. But the girl paid the penalty of her
great heart; in that troublous sea of friendship, she was soon adrift
without rudder, sail, or compass.
Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a
hundred statues in her. Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health
radiated from her as sparks fly upward. In sunlight, her black hair had
the bluish iridescence of a ripe plum. The eyes were deep and
questioning—the eyes of a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed
the far distant heights of paradise. Again, in her pagan gladness of
living, she might have been a Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a
shooting-star. And yet, in this wilderness that was famishing for
woman’s love and tears and laughter, by a very perversity of fate she
walked alone.
She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely
circumstance. No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly
benediction had ushered her into being. Her maternal grandfather had
been the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white
woman, who knew no word of her people’s tongue, nor yet her name or
race. The Indians found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother
after the massacre of an emigrant train. They took her with them and
she grew up, in the Black Hill country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying
a chief of the people that had slain her people. She accepted her
squaw’s portion uncomplainingly; slaved cheerfully at squaw’s work
while her brave made war on the whites, hunted, and smoked. She reared
her half-breed children in the legends of their father’s people, and
died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who had robbed the Sioux
of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.
Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who
could do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live
with Warren Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek. That was
before the gold fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the
cabin that he might fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left
it. There were reasons why he wanted to forget his identity as a white
man in his play at being an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the
joy of having come into her woman’s kingdom, the half-breed squaw was
pretty; she was proud, too, of her white man, the house he had built
her, and the girl pappoose with blue eyes. Furthermore, she had been
taught to serve man meekly, for he was the lord of creation.
Rodney talked Sioux to her. He had all but forgotten he was a white
man. The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and bare, but for the
bead jacket Singing Stream had made for her in the pride of her
maternity. Rodney called the little girl “Judith.” Her Indian mother
never guessed the significance of the strange name that she could not
say, but made at least ten soft singing syllables of, in the Indian
way. The little Judith greeted her father in strange lispings; Warren
Rodney was far from unhappy in playing at primitive man. This
recessional into conditions primeval endured for “seven snows,” as the
Indian tongue hath it. Then the squaw began to break, after the manner
of the women of her father’s people. She had begun her race with time a
decade after Warren Rodney, and she had outdistanced him by a decade.
And then the Tumlins came from Tennessee to the Black Hills. They came
in an ox-cart, and the days of their journey were more than two years.
They had stopped in Ohio, and again in Illinois; and, behold! neither
was the promised land, the land that their excited imaginations had
painted from the large talk of returning travellers, and that was
further glorified through their own thriftless discontent with
conditions at home. They had travelled on and on across half a
continent in the wake of a vanishing sky-line. The vague westward
impulse was luring them to California, but they waited in Dakota that
their starved stock might fatten, and while they rested themselves from
the long journey, Warren Rodney made the acquaintance of Sally Tumlin,
who rallied him on being a “squaw man.”
Warren Rodney had almost forgotten the sorceries of the women of his
people; he had lived so long with a brown woman, who spread no silken
snares. Sally’s blushes stirred a multitude of dead things—the wiles of
pale women, all strength in weakness, fragile flowers for tender
handling—the squaw had grown as withered as a raisin.
Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed
her “a home of her own.” Her mother had forged the bolt of this
particular maxim at an early date. And Sally saw from precocious
observation that the business of women was home-getting, to which end
they must be neat and sweet and sparing of speech. After the home was
forthcoming, then, indeed, might a woman take ease in slippers and
wrapper, and it is surely a wife’s privilege to speak her mind. Sally
knew that she hated travelling westward after the crawling oxen; each
day the sun pursued them, caught up with them, outdistanced them, and
at night left them stranded in the wilderness, and rose again and
mocked them on the morrow. Her father and oafish brother loved the
makeshifts of the wagon life, with its chance shots at fleeing
antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails; a chance
parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance. But
Sally hated it all. The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren
Rodney had money in the bank. He had had uncommon luck at trapping. His
talk to Sally was largely of his prospects.
Sally knew that the world owed her “a home of her own”; and why should
she let a squaw keep her from it? Sally’s mother giggled when
consulted. She plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter.
The ethics of the case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely
a question of white skin against brown, and which should carry the day.
Singing Stream knew not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in
her very presence, that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but
she knew that Sally was taking her man from her. The white-skinned
woman wore white ruffles about her neck and calico dresses that were
the color of the wild roses that grew among the willows at the creek.
Sally Tumlin’s pink calico gowns sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of
the squaw. It was the rainbow things, she felt, that were robbing her
of her man. All her barbaric craving for glowing colors asserted itself
as a means towards the one great end of keeping him. Singing Stream
began to scheme schemes. One day Rodney was splitting wood at the
Tumlin camp—though why he should split wood where there were two women
puzzled the squaw. But the ways of the pale-faces were beyond her ken.
She only knew that she must make herself beautiful in the eyes of
Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then perhaps the pappoose
that she expected with the first snowfall would be a man-child; and she
hoped great things of this happening.
With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the
light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood,
a matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to
make her like a white woman. It never occurred to the half-breed woman
to make known her plans to Warren Rodney. In circumventing Sally Tumlin
the man became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell
plans on the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of
the enemy, without a word.