Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the

squaw in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties

attending their romance. They admitted it was square of her to “hit the

trail,” and they decided to lose no time in going to the army post,

where a chaplain, an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the

time, and have a real wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson. The

wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about

the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination

of the most decorous courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal

party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the

prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride. The

chaplain at the post was disposed to ask few questions. Parsons made

queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and it was regarded as a

patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in the man of the

gospel at all. To the question whether or not he had been married

before, Rodney answered:

“Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life

sentence.” And the ceremony proceeded.

Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding,

dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim

party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a

bride. They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty

things, as presents to Sally. And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren

Rodney, with “a home of her own” to go to.

Singing Stream did not hasten in her quest for bright fabrics with

which to stay the hand of fate. To the half-breed woman the journey to

town was not without a certain revivifying pleasure. The Indian in her

stirred to the call of the open country. The tight roof to the cabin on

Elder Creek had not the attractions for her that it had for Sally

Tumlin. She had chafed sometimes at a house with four walls. But now

the dead and gone braves rose in her as she followed the old trail

where they had so often crept to battle against their old enemies, the

Crows, before the white man’s army had scattered them. And as she drove

through the foot-hill country, she told the solemn-eyed little Judith

the story of the Sioux, and what a great fighting people they had been

before Rodney’s people drove them from their land. Judith was holding a

doll dressed exactly like herself, in soft buckskin shirt, little

trousers, and moccasins, all beautifully beaded. In her turn she told

the story to the doll.

Singing Stream told her daughter of the making of the world, as the

Sioux believe the story of creation; of the “Four who Never

Die”—Sharper, or Bladder, Rabbit, Turtle, and Monster; likewise of the

coming of a mighty flood on which swam the Turtle and a water-fowl in

whose bill was the earth atom, from which presently the world began to

grow, Turtle supporting the bird on his great back, which was hard like

rock. The rest of the myth, that deals with the rising and setting of

the sun, Singing Stream could not tell her daughter, as the old Sioux

chiefs did not think it wise to let their women folk know too much

about matters of theology. Nor did they relate to squaws the sun myth,

with its account of much cutting-off of heads—thinking, perhaps, with

wisdom, that these good ladies saw enough of carnage in their every-day

life without introducing it into their catechism.

But Singing Stream knew the story of “Sharper,” or “Bladder,” as he is

called by some of the people, because he is round and his grotesquely

fat figure resembles a bladder blown to bursting. Bladder’s province it

is to make a fool of himself, diving into water after plums he sees

reflected there from the branches of the trees. He dives again and

again in his pursuit of folly, even tying stones to his wrists and

ankles to keep himself down while he gathers the reflected fruit. After

his rescue, which he fights against valiantly, as he lies gasping on

the bank of the stream, he sees the fruit on the branches above his

head. It is this same Bladder who is one of the _dramatis personæ_ in

the moon myth, and that is told to women as safely without the limits

of that little learning that is a dangerous thing. Bladder met Rabbit

hunting; and Bladder kept throwing his eye up into the tree-tops to

look for game. The Rabbit watched him enviously, thinking what a saving

of effort it would be if he could do the same thing. Wherefore Bladder

promised to instruct him, telling him to change eyes after using one

four times, but Rabbit did not think that the first time counted, as

that was but a trial. So he lost his eye after throwing it up the fifth

time. And the eye of the rabbit is the moon, and the face seen in the

full moon is the reflection of the rabbit seen in his own eye as we see

ourselves reflected in the eye of a friend if we look closely. The

little girl was wonderfully impressed. She put her hand to her own

eyes, but they were in tight, too tight to throw up to the tree-tops.

Singing Stream also told little Judith that the Great Mystery had shown

truths, hid to man, to the trees, the streams, the hills; and the

clouds that shaped themselves, drifting hither and yon, were the Great

Mystery’s passing thoughts. But he had deprived all these things of

speech, as he did not trust them fully, and they could only speak to

man in dreams, or in some passing mood, when they could communicate to

him the feeling of one of the Great Spirits, and warn man of what was

about to befall him. Judith was not quite four when she took this

memorable drive with her mother, but the impression of these things

abided through all her years. It was to the measureless spaces of

desert loneliness that she learned to bring her sorrows in the days of

her arid youth, and to feel a kinship with all its moods and to hear in

the voice of its silence a never-failing consolation.

And when they had come within a mile of Warren Rodney’s cabin on Elder

Creek, Singing Stream halted and prepared for the great event of

reinstatement. First she made a splendid toilet of purple calico torn

into strips and tied about the waist to simulate the skirts of the

devil woman. Over these she wore a shirt of buckskin, broidered with

beads of many colors, and a necklace of elk teeth, wound twice about

the throat. On her feet she wore new moccasins of tanned elk-hide, and

these, too, were beaded in many colors. Her hair, now braided with

strips of scarlet flannel, hung below the waist. And she walked to

Rodney’s cabin, not as an outgrown mistress, but as the daughter of a

chief. The little Judith held up her head and clung tight to the doll.

She knew that something of moment was about to happen.

The gala trio, Singing Stream, Judith, and Judith’s doll, presented

themselves at Rodney’s house, before which the bride was washing

clothes, the day being fine. Sally, as usual, wore one of the

rose-colored calicoes with the collar turned well in and the sleeves

rolled above the elbows. She washed vigorously, with a steady splashing

of suds. Sally enjoyed this home of her own and all the household

duties appertaining to it. She was singing, and a strand of pale-brown

hair, crinkly as sea-weed, had blown across the rose of her cheek, when

she felt rather than saw a shadow fall across her path, and, glancing

up, she saw facing her the woman whom she had supplanted, and the

solemn-eyed little girl holding tight to her doll. Now, neither woman

knew a word of the other’s speech, but Sally was proficient in the

language of femininity, and she was not at a loss to grasp the

significance of the purple calico, the beaded buckskin shirt, and the

necklace of elk teeth. The half-breed walked as a chief’s daughter to

the woman at the tub, and Sally grew sick and chill despite her white

skin and the gold ring that made Warren Rodney her man in the face of

the law. The dark woman held Judith proudly by the hand, as a sovereign

might carry a sceptre. Judith was her staff of office, her emblem of

authority in the house of Warren Rodney.

Singing Stream held out her hands to Sally in a gesture of appeal—and

blundered. Of the chief’s daughter, walking proudly, Sally was afraid;

but a supplicating half-breed in strips of purple calico, not even

hemmed, was a matter for merriment. Sally put her hands on her hips,

arms akimbo, and laughed a dry cackle. The light in the brown woman’s

eyes, as she looked at the white, was like prairie-fires rolling

forward through darkness. There was no need of a common speech between

them. The whole destiny of woman was in the laugh and the look that

answered it.

And the man they could have murdered for came from the house, an

unheroic figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his

mouth, sullen, angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man

inevitably is when he sniffs a woman’s battle in the air. The bride, at

sight of her husband, took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and

down tumbled her hair. She felt the situation demanded a scene. Rodney,

with a marital brevity hardly to be expected so soon, commanded Sally

to go into the house and to “shut up.”

Then he faced Singing Stream and said to her in her own language: “You

must go away from here. The pale-faced woman is my wife by the white

man’s law—ring and Bible. No Indian marriage about this.”

But the brown woman only pointed to Judith. She asked Rodney had she

not been a good squaw to him.

And Rodney, who at best was but a poltroon, could only repeat: “You got

to keep away from here. It’s the white man’s law—one squaw for one

man.”

From within came the sound of Sally’s lamentation as she called for her

father and brother to take her from the squaw and contamination. Warren

Rodney was a man of few words. It had become his unpleasant duty to

act, and to act quickly. He snatched Judith from her mother and took

her into the house, and he returned with his Winchester, which was not

loaded, to Singing Stream.

“You got to go,” he said, and levelling the Winchester, he repeated the

command. Singing Stream looked at him with the dumb wonder of a forest

thing. “I was a good squaw to you,” she said; and did not even curse

him. And turning, she ran towards the foot-hills, with all the length

of purple calico trailing.

Now Mrs. Rodney, _née_ Tumlin, was but human, and her cup of happiness

as the wife of a “squaw man” was not the brimming beaker she had

anticipated. The expulsion of her predecessor, at such a time, to make

room for her own home-coming, was, it seemed, open to criticism. “The

neighborhood”—it included perhaps five families living in a radius of

as many hundred miles—felt that the Tumlins had established a bad

precedent. A “squaw man” driving out a brown wife to make room for a

white is not a heroic figure. It had been done before, but it would not

hand down well in the traditions of the settling of this great country.

Trespass of law and order, with their swift, red-handed reckoning, were

but moves of the great game of colonization. But to shove out a brown

woman for a white was a mean move. Few stopped at the Rodneys’ ranch,

though it marked the first break in the journey from town to the

gold-mining country. Rodney had fallen from his estate as a pioneer;

his political opinions were unsought in the conclaves that sat and spat

at the stove, when business brought them to the joint saloon and

post-office. The women dealt with the question more openly, scorning

feminine subtlety at this pass as inadequate ammunition. When they met

Mrs. Rodney they pulled aside their skirts and glared. This outrage

against woman it was woman’s work to settle.

Mrs. Rodney, who had no more moral sense than a rabbit, felt that she

was the victim of persecution. She knew she was a good woman. Hadn’t

she a husband? Had there ever been a word against her character? What

was the use of making all that fuss over a squaw? It was not as if she

was a white woman. The injustice of it preyed on the former Miss

Tumlin. She took to the consolations of snuff-dipping and fell from her

pink-and-white estate.

The Tumlin family did not remain long enough in the Black Hill country

to witness Sally’s failure as the wife of a pioneer. The restlessness

of the “settler,” if the paradox be permissible, was in the marrow of

their bones. The makeshifts of the wagon, the adventures of the road,

were the only home they craved. The spring after Sally’s marriage they

set forth for California, the year following for New Mexico, and still

sighed for new worlds to visit. They were happier now that Sally, the

one element of discontent, had been removed from their perennial

journeying by the merciful dispensation of marriage. Old Tumlin, his

wife, and the son gave themselves up more than ever to the day-dreams

of the road, the freedom of the open country, and the spirit of

adventure.

Rodney’s squaw wife was taken in by some neighbors, good folk who were

conversant with all phases of the romance. They stood by her in her

hour of trial, and afterwards continued to keep her as a servant. Her

son Jim grew up with their own children. When he was four years of age

his mother, Singing Stream, died, and Sally persuaded her husband to

take young Jim into their own home, partly as a sop to neighborly

criticism, partly as a salve to her own conscience. Sally had children

of her own, and looked at things differently now from the time when she

fought the squaw for Rodney’s favor.

Jim’s foster-parents were, in truth, glad to part with him. From his

earliest babyhood he had been known as a “limb of Satan.” He was an

Ishmael by every instinct of his being. And Mrs. Warren Rodney, née

Tumlin, felt that in dealing with him, in her capacity of step-mother,

she daily expiated any offence that she might have done to his mother.

Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in

a rocking-chair, dipping snuff—a consolation imported from her former

home—and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his

ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism. He farmed a little, he

raised a little stock, and he drank a great deal of whiskey. Sally

hated the Black Hill country. She felt that it knew too much about her.

The neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family

fortunes. A vague migratory impulse was on her. She wanted to go

somewhere and begin all over again. By dint of persistent nagging she

persuaded her husband to move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the

cattle industry. Those were days when steers, to speak in the cow

language, had “jumped to seventy-five.” The wilderness grew

light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful are the tales still told about

those fat years in cattle-land. It was in those halcyon days of the

Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the range, white with the dust

of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than those procurable at their

clubs in New York.

Nor was it all feasting and merrymaking. A heroic band it was that

battled with the wilderness, riding the range with heat and cold,

starvation and death, and making small pin-pricks in that empty blotch

of the United States map that is marked “Great Alkali Desert” blossom

into settlements. When the last word has been said about the pioneers

of these United States, let the cow-boy be remembered in the universal

toast, that bronzed son of the saddle who lived his little day bravely

and merrily, and whose real heroism is too often forgotten in the

glamour of his own picturesqueness.

Judith was ten years old when her father, his wife, and their children

moved from Dakota—they were not so particular about North and South

Dakota, in those days—to take up a claim on Sweetwater, Wyoming. Judith

gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her

dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring

wretchedness as happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old

friend, Mrs. Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had

been present at the marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who

had always felt a wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the

ceremony and contributing a lace handkerchief to the bride. Her

husband, now Major Atkins, was stationed at Fort Washakie, Wyoming.

Mrs. Atkins happening again on the Rodney family, and her husband

having increased and multiplied his army pay many times over by a

successful venture in cattle, the scheme of Judith’s convent education

was put through by the major’s wife, who had kept her New England

conscience, the discomforts of frontier posts notwithstanding.

So Judith went to the nuns to school, and stayed with them till she was

eighteen. Mrs. Atkins would have adopted her then; but Judith by this

time knew her family history in all its sordid ramifications, and felt

that duty called her to her brother, who had not improved his

unfortunate start in life, though his step-mother did not spoil him for

the staying of the rod.

VII.

Chugg Takes The Ribbons

Chugg, comforted with liquids and stayed with a head-plaster, presented

himself at the Dax ranch just twenty-four hours after he was due. His

mien combined vagueness with hostility, and he harnessed up the stage

that Peter Hamilton had driven over the day before, when his

prospective passengers were looking, with a graphic pantomimic

representation of “take it or leave it.” Under the circumstances, Miss

Carmichael and the fat lady consented to be passengers with much the

same feeling of finality that one might have on embarking for the

planet Mars in an air-ship.

There was, furthermore, a suggestion of last rites in the farewells of

the Daxes, each according to their respective personalities, that was

far from reassuring.

“Here’s some bread and meat and a bottle of cold coffee, if you live to

need it,” was Mrs. Dax’s grim prognostication of accident. Leander,

being of an emotional nature, could scarce restrain his tears—the

advent of the travellers had created a welcome variation in the

monotony of his dutiful routine—he felt all the agitation of parting

with life-long friends. Mary Carmichael and Judith promised to

write—they had found a great deal to say to each other the preceding

evening.

Chugg cracked his whip ominously, the travellers got inside, not daring

to trust themselves to the box.

The journey with the misanthrope was but a repetition of that first

day’s staging—the sage-brush was scarcer, the mountains seemed as far

off as ever, and the outlook was, if possible, more desolate. The entry

in Miss Carmichael’s diary, inscribed in malformed characters as the

stage jolted over ruts and gullies, reads: “I do not mind telling you,

in strictest confidence, ‘Dere Diary’—as the little boy called you—that

when I so lightly severed my connection with civilization, I had no

idea to what an extent I was going in for the prairie primeval. How on

earth does a woman who can write a letter like Mrs. Yellett stand it?

And where on the map of North America is Lost Trail?”

“Land sakes!” regretted the fat lady, “but I do wish I had a piece of

that ‘boy’s favorite’ cake that I had for my lunch the day we left

town. I just ate and ate it ’cause I hadn’t another thing to do. If I

hadn’t been so greedy I could offer him a piece, just to show him that

some women folk have kind hearts, and that the whole sect ain’t like

that Pink.”

“Boy’s favorite,” as adequate compensation for shattered ideals, a

broken heart, and the savings of a lifetime, seemed to Mary Carmichael

inadequate compensation, but she forbore to express her sentiments.

The fat lady had never relaxed her gaze from Chugg’s back since the

stage had started. She peered at that broad expanse of flannel shirt

through the tiny round window, like a careful sailing-master sweeping

the horizon for possible storm-clouds. At every portion of the road

presenting a steep decline she would prod Chugg in the back with the

handle of her ample umbrella, and demand that he let her out, as she

preferred walking. The stage-driver at first complied with these

requests, but when he saw they threatened to become chronic, he would

send his team galloping down grade at a rate to justify her liveliest

fears.

“Do you think you are a-picnicking, that you crave roominating round

these yere solitoodes?” And the misanthrope cracked his whip and

adjured his team with cabalistic imprecations.

“Did you notice if Mrs. Dax giv’ him any cold coffee, same as she did

us?” anxiously inquired the fat lady from her lookout.

Mary hadn’t noticed.

“He’s drinking something out of a brown bottle—seems to relish it a

heep more’n he would cold coffee,” reported the watch. “Hi there! Hi!

Mr. Chugg!” The stage-driver, thinking it was merely a request to be

allowed to walk, continued to drive with one hand and hold the brown

bottle with the other. But even his too solid flesh was not proof

against the continued bombardment of the umbrella handle.

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

window.

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

fears confirmed.

Chugg returned to his driving, as one not above the weakness of seeing

and hearing things.

“’Tain’t coffee.”

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

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

him.”

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

“His eyes had fresh watered.”

Mary collapsed under this expert testimony. “What are we going to do

about it?”

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

intonation.

“You appeal,” counselled Mary; “I saw him look at you admiringly when

you were walking down that steep grade.”

“Is that so?” said the fat lady, with a conspicuous lack of

incredulity; and she put her hand involuntarily to her frizzes.

This time she did not trust to the umbrella-handle as a medium of

communication between the stage-driver and herself. Putting her hand

through the port-hole she grasped Chugg’s arm—the bottle arm—with no

uncertain grip.

“Why, Mr. Chugg, this yere place is getting to be a regular summer

resort; think of two ladies trusting themselves to your protection and

travelling out over this great lonesome desert.”

Chugg’s mind, still submerged in local Lethe waters, grappled in

silence with the problem of the feminine invasion, and then he muttered

to himself rather than to the fat lady, “Nowhere’s safe from ’em; women

and house-flies is universally prevailing.”

The fat lady dropped his arm as if it had been a brand. “He’s no

gentleman. As for Mountain Pink, she was drove to it.”

All that day they toiled over sand and sage-brush; the sun hung like a

molten disk, paling the blue of the sky; the grasshoppers kept up their

shrill chirping—and the loneliness of that sun-scorched waste became a

tangible thing.

Chugg sipped and sipped, and sometimes swore and sometimes muttered,

and as the day wore on his driving not only became a challenge to the

endurance of the horses, but to the laws of gravitation. He lashed them

up and down grade, he drove perilously close to shelving declivities,

and sometimes he sang, with maudlin mournfulness:

“‘Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.’

The words came low and mournfully

From the cold, pale lips of a youth who lay

On his dying couch at the close of day.”

The fat lady reminded him that he was a gentleman and that he was

driving ladies; she threatened him with her son on Sweetwater, who

began, in the maternal chronicles, by being six feet in his stockings,

and who steadily grew, as the scale of threats increased, till he

reached the altitude of six feet four, growing hourly in height and

fierceness.

But Chugg gave no heed, and once he sang the “Ballad of the

Mule-Skinner,” with what seemed to both terrified passengers an awful

warning of their overthrow:

“As I was going down the road,

With a tired team and a heavy load,

I cracked my whip and the leaders sprung—

The fifth chain broke, and the wheelers hung,

The off-horse stepped on the wagon tongue—”

This harrowing ballad was repeated with accompanying Delsarte at

intervals during the afternoon, but as Mary and the fat lady managed to

escape without accident, they began to feel that they bore charmed

lives.

At sundown they came to the road-ranch of Johnnie Dax, bearing

Leander’s compliments as a secret despatch. The outward aspect of the

place was certainly an awful warning to trustful bachelors who make

acquaintances through the columns of _The Heart_ and Hand. The house

stood solitary in that scourge of desolation. The windows and doors

gaped wide like the unclosed eyes of a dead man on a battle-field.

Chugg halloed, and an old white horse put his head out of the door,

shook it upward as if in assent, then trotted off.

“That’s Jerry, and he’s the intelligentest animal I ever see,” remarked

the stage-driver, sobering up to Jerry’s good qualities, and presently

Johnnie Dax and the white horse appeared together from around the

corner of the house.

This Mr. Dax was almost an exact replica of the other, even to the

apologetic crook in the knees and a certain furtive way of glancing

over the shoulder as if anticipating missiles.

“Pshaw now, ladies! why didn’t you let me know that you was coming? and

I’d have tidied up the place and organized a few dried-apple pies.”

“Good house-keepers don’t wait for company to come before they get to

their work,” rebukefully commented the fat lady.

Mr. Dax, recognizing the voice of authority, seized a towel and began

to beat out flies, chickens, and dogs, who left the premises with the

ill grace of old residents. Two hogs, dormant, guarded either side of

the door-step and refused so absolutely to be disturbed by the flicking

of the towel that one was tempted to look twice to assure himself that

they were not the fruits of the sculptor’s chisel.

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

“Oh, my Lord! I presume she’s dancin’ a whole lot over to Ervay. She

packed her ball-gown in a gripsack and lit out of here two days ago,

p’inting that way. A locomotive couldn’t stop her none if she got a

chance to go cycloning round a dance.”

In the mean time, the two hogs having failed to grasp the fact that

they were _de trop_, continued to doze.

“Come, girls, get up,” coaxed Johnnie, persuasively. “Maude, I don’t

know when I see you so lazy. Run on, honey—run on with Ethel.” For

Ethel, the piebald hog, finally did as she was bid.

Mary Carmichael could not resist the temptation of asking how the hogs

happened to have such unusual names.

“To tell the truth, I done it to aggravate my wife. When I finds myself

a discard in the matrimonial shuffle, I figgers on a new deal that’s

going to inclood one or two anxieties for my lady partner—to which

end—viz., namely, I calls one hawg Ethel and the other hawg Maude,

allowing to my wife that they’re named after lady friends in the East.

Them lady friends might be the daughters of Ananias and Sapphira, for

all they ever happened, but they answers the purpose of riling her same

as if they were eating their three squares daily. I have hopes,

everything else failing, that she may yet quit dancing and settle down

to the sanctity of the home out of pure jealousy of them two proxy

hawgs.”

“I can just tell you this,” interrupted the fat lady: “I don’t enjoy

occupying premises after hawgs, no matter how fashionable you name ’em.

A hawg’s a hawg, with manners according, if it’s named after the

President of the United States or the King of England.”

“That’s just what I used to think, marm, of all critters before I

enjoyed that degree of friendliness that I’m now proud to own. Take

Jerry now, that old white horse—why, me and him is just like brothers.

When I have to leave the kid to his lonesome infant reflections and go

off to chop wood, I just call Jerry in, and he assoomes the

responsibility of nurse like he was going to draw wages for it.”

“I reckon there’s faults on both sides,” said the fat lady,

impartially. “No natural woman would leave her baby to a horse to mind

while she went off dancing. And no natural man would fill his house

full of critters, and them with highfalutin names. Take my advice, turn

’em out.”

Mary did not wait to hear the continuation of the fat lady’s advice.

She went out on the desert to have one last look at the west. The sun

had taken his plunge for the night, leaving his royal raiment of

crimson and gold strewn above the mountain-tops.

Her sunset reflections were presently interrupted by the fat lady, who

proposed that they should walk till Mr. Dax had tidied up his house,

observing, with logic, that it did not devolve on them to clean the

place, since they were paying for supper and lodging. They had gone but

a little way when sudden apprehension caused the fat lady to grasp

Mary’s arm. Miss Carmichael turned, expecting mountain-lions,

rattlesnakes, or stage-robbers, but none of these casualties had come

to pass.

“Land sakes! Here we be parading round the prairie, and I never found

out how that man cooked his coffee.”

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

“The ways of men cooks is a sealed book to you, I reckon, or you

wouldn’t be so unconcerned—’specially in the matter of coffee. All men

has got the notion that coffee must be b’iled in a bag, and if they

’ain’t got a regular bag real handy, they take what they can get. Oh,

I’ve caught ’em,” went on the fat lady, darkly, “b’iling coffee in

improvisations that’d turn your stomach.”

“Yes, yes,” Mary hastily agreed, hoping against hope that she wasn’t

going to be more explicit.

“And they are so cute about it, too; it’s next to impossible to catch

’em. You ask a man if he b’iles his coffee loose or tight, and he’ll

declare he b’iles it loose, knowing well how suspicious and prone to

investigate is the female mind. But you watch your chance and take a

look in the coffee-pot, and maybe you’ll find—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard—”

“I’ve seen—”

“Let’s hurry,” implored Mary.

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

“Yes, marm,” promptly responded Johnnie.

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

Johnnie shifted uneasily. “No, marm, I b’iles it loose. You see, bags

ain’t always handy.”

The fat lady plied her eye as a weapon. No Dax could stand up before an

accusing feminine eye. He quailed, made a grab for the coffee-pot, and

rushed with it out into the night.

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

Johnnie returned with the empty coffee-pot. “To tell the truth, marm, I

made a mistake. I ’ain’t made the coffee. I plumb forgot it. P’raps you

could be prevailed on to assist this yere outfit to coffee while I

organizes a few sody-biscuits.”

After supper, when the fat lady was so busy talking “goo-goo” language

to the baby as to be oblivious of everything else, Mary Carmichael took

the opportunity to ask Johnnie if he knew anything about Lost Trail.

The name of her destination had come to sound unpleasantly ominous in

the ears of the tired young traveller, and she feared that her inquiry

did not sound as casual as she tried to have it. Nor was Johnnie’s

candid reply reassuring.

“It’s a pizen-mean country, from all I ever heard tell. The citizens

tharof consists mainly of coyotes and mountain-lions, with a few

rattlers thrown in just to make things neighborly. This yere

place”—waving his hand towards the arid wastes which night was making

more desolate—“is a summer resort, with modern improvements, compared

to it.”

Mary screwed her courage to a still more desperate point, and inquired

if Mr. Dax knew a family named Yellett living in Lost Trail.

“Never heard of no family living there, excepting the bluff at family

life maintained by the wild beasts before referred to. See here, miss,

I ain’t makin’ no play to inquire into your affairs, but you ain’t

thinkin’ o’ visitin’ Lost Trail, be you?”

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

the baby.

VIII.

The Rodneys At Home

All that long and never-to-be-forgotten night the stage lurched through

the darkness with Mary Carmichael the solitary passenger. The fat lady

had warned Johnnie Dax that he was on no account to replenish Chugg’s

flask, if he had the wherewithal for replenishment on the premises.

Moreover, she threatened Dax with the fury of her son should he fail in

this particular; and Johnnie, hurt to the quick by the unjust suspicion

that he could fail so signally in his duty to a lady, not only refused

to replenish the flask, but threatened Chugg with a conditional

vengeance in the event of accident befalling the stage. It was with a

partially sobered and much-threatened stage-driver, therefore, that

Mary continued her journey after the supper at Johnnie Dax’s, but the

knowledge of it brought scant reassurance, and it is doubtful if the

red stage ever harbored any one more wakeful than the pale, tired girl

who watched all the changes from dark to dawn at the stage window.

Once or twice she caught a glimpse of distant camp-fires burning and

knew that some cattle outfit was camped there for the night; and once

they drove so close that she could hear the cow-boys’ voices, enriched

and mellowed by distance, borne to them on the cool, evening wind. It

gave a sense of security to know that these big-hearted, manly lads

were within call, and she watched the dwindling spark of their

camp-fires and strained her ears to catch the last note of their

singing, with something of the feeling of severed comradeship. Range

cattle, startled from sleep by the stage, scrambled to their feet and

bolted headlong in the blind impulse of panic, their horns and the

confused massing of their bodies showing in sharp silhouette against

the horizon for a moment, then all would settle into quiet again. There

was no moon that night, but the stars were sown broadcast—softly yellow

stars, lighting the darkness with a shaded luster, like lamps veiled in

pale-yellow gauze. The chill electric glitter of the stars, as we know

it from between the roofs of high houses, this world of far-flung

distance knows not. There the stars are big and still, like the eyes of

a contented woman.

The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking

of a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote

would yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way

that made Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale

streak of dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like

jagged rocks heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the

whole dread picture brought before her one of Vedder’s pictures that

hung in the shabby old library at home.

They breakfasted somewhere, and Chugg put fresh horses to the stage.

She knew this from their difference of color; the horses that they had

left the second Dax ranch with had been white, and these that now

toiled over the sand and desolation were apparently brown. She could

not be certain that they were brown, or that they were toiling over the

sand and desolation, or that her name was Mary Carmichael, or indeed of

anything. Four days in the train, and what seemed like four centuries

in the stage, eliminated any certainty as to anything. She could only

sit huddled into a heap and wait for things to become adjusted by time.

Chugg was behaving in a most exemplary manner. He drove rigidly as an

automaton, and apparently he looked no longer on the “lightning” when

it was bottled. Once or twice he had applied his eye to the pane that

separated him from his passenger, and asked questions relative to her

comfort, but Mary was too utterly dejected to reply in more than

monosyllables. As they crept along, the sun-dried timbers of the stage

creaked and groaned in seeming protest at wearing its life away in

endless journeyings over this desert waste, then settled down into one

of those maddeningly monotonous reiterations to which certain inanimate

things are given in seasons of nervous tension. This time it was: “All

the world’s—a stage—creak—screech—all—the world’s a

stage—creak—screech!” over and over till Mary found herself fast

succumbing to the hypnotic effect of the constant repetition, listening

for it, even, with the tyrannous eagerness of overwrought nerves, when

the stage-driver broke the spell with, “This here stage gets to naggin’

me along about here. She’s hungry for her axle-grease—that’s what ails

her.”

“I suppose,” Mary roused herself to say, “you have quite a feeling of

comradeship for the stage.”

“Me and Clara”—the stage had this name painted on the side—“have been

travelling together nigh onto four year. And while there’s times that I

would prefer a greater degree of reciprocity, these yere silent

companions has their advantages. Why, compare Clara to them female

blizzards—the two Mrs. Daxes—and you see Clara’s good p’ints immejit.

Yes, miss, the thirst-quenchers are on me if either one of the Dax boys

wouldn’t be glad to swap, but I’d have to be a heap more locoed than I

am now to consent to the transaction.”

At sunset the interminable monotony of the wilderness was broken by a

house of curious architecture, the like of which the tired young

traveller had never seen before, and whose singular candor of design

made her doubt the evidence of her own thoroughly exhausted faculties.

The house seemed to consist of a series of rooms thrown, or rather

blown, together by some force of nature rather than by formal design of

builder or carpenter. The original log-cabin of this composite dwelling

looked better built, more finished, neater of aspect than those they

had previously stopped at in crossing the Desert. Springing from the

main building, like claws from a crustacean, were a series of rooms

minus either side walls or flooring. Indeed, they might easily have

passed for porches of more than usually commodious size had it not been

for the beds, bureaus, chairs, stove with attendant pots, kettles, and

supper in the course of preparation. Seen from any vantage-point in the

surrounding country, the effect was that of an interior on the

stage—the background of some homely drama where pioneer life was being

realistically depicted. The _dramatis persona_ who occupied the centre

of the stage when Mary Carmichael drove up was an elderly woman in a

rocking-chair. She was dressed in a faded pink calico gown, limp and

bedraggled, whose color brought out the parchment-like hue and texture

of her skin in merciless contrast. Perhaps because she still harbored

illusions about the perishable quality of her complexion, which gave

every evidence of having borne the brunt of merciless desert suns,

snows, blizzards, and the ubiquitous alkali dust of all seasons, she

wore a pink sun-bonnet, though the hour was one past sundown, and

though she sat beneath her own roof-tree, even if lacking the

protection of four walls. From the corner of her mouth protruded a

snuff-brush, so constantly in this accustomed place that it had come to

be regarded by members of her family as part and parcel of her

attire—the first thing assumed in the morning, the last thing laid

aside at night. Mary Carmichael had little difficulty in recognizing

Judith Rodney’s step-mother, _née_ Tumlin—she who had been the heroine

of the romance lately recorded.

Mrs. Rodney’s interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced

in the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and

forth in place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear

the hours away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active

commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few

inches of her. Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more

favorable to enunciation, she said: “Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett’s

gov’ment, ain’t ye?” There was something threatening in her aspect, as

if the office of governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging

quality.

“Government?” repeated Mary, vaguely, her head still rumbling with the

noise and motion of the stage; “I’m afraid I hardly understand.”

“Ain’t you-uns goin’ to teach the Yellett outfit ther spellin’,

writin’, and about George Washington, an’ how the Yankees kem along

arter he was in his grave an’ fit us and broke up the kentry so we had

ter leave our home in Tennessee an’ kem to this yere outdacious place,

where nobody knows the diffunce between aig-bread an’ corn-dodger? I

war a Miss Tumlin from Tennessee.”

The rocking-chair now began to recover its accustomed momentum. This

much-heralded educational expert was far from terrifying. Indeed, to

Mrs. Rodney’s hawklike gaze, that devoured every visible item of Mary’s

extremely modest travelling-dress, there was nothing so very wonderful

about “the gov’ment from the East.” With a deftness compatible only

with long practice, Mrs. Rodney now put a foot on the round of an

adjoining chair and shoved it towards Mary Carmichael in hospitable

pantomime, never once relaxing her continual rocking the meantime. Mary

took the chair, and Mrs. Rodney, after freshening up the snuff-brush

from a small, tin box in her lap, put spurs to her rocking-chair, so to

speak, and started off at a brisk canter.

“I ’low it’s mighty queer you-uns don’t recognize the job you-uns kem

out yere to take, when I call it by name.” From the sheltering flap of

the pink sun-bonnet she turned a pair of black eyes full of

ill-concealed suspicion. “Miz Yellett givin’ herself as many airs ’bout

hirin’ a gov’ment ’s if she wuz goin’ to Congress. Queer you don’t know

whether you be one or not!” She withdrew into the sun-bonnet, muttering

to herself. She could not be more than fifty, Mary thought, but her

habit of muttering and exhibiting her depopulated gums while she was in

the act of revivifying the snuff-brush gave her a cronish aspect.

A babel of voices came from the open-faced room on the opposite side of

the house corresponding to the one in which Mary and Mrs. Rodney were

sitting. Apparently supper was being prepared by some half-dozen young

people, each of whom thought he or she was being imposed upon by the

others. “Hand me that knife.” “Git it yourself.” “I’ll tell maw how you

air wolfing down the potatoes as fast as I can fry ’em.” “Go on,

tattle-tale.” This was the repartee, mingled with the hiss of frying

meat, the grinding of coffee, the thumping sound made by bread being

hastily mixed in a wooden bowl standing on a wooden table. The babel

grew in volume. Dogs added to it by yelping emotionally when the smell

of the newly fried meat tempted them too near the platter and some one

with a disengaged foot at his disposal would kick them out of doors.

Personalities were exchanged more freely by members of the family, and

the meat hissed harder as it was newly turned. “Laws-a-massy!” muttered

Mrs. Rodney; and then, shoving back the sun-bonnet, she lifted her

voice in a shrill, feminine shriek:

“Eudory! Eu-dory! You-do-ry!”

A Hebe-like creature, blond and pink-cheeked, in a blue-checked apron

besmeared with grease and flour, came sulkily into her mother’s

presence. Seeing Mary Carmichael, she grasped the skirt of the greasy

apron with the sleight of hand of a prestidigitateur and pleated it

into a single handful. Her manner, too, was no slower of

transformation. The family sulks were instantly replaced by a company

bridle, aided and abetted by a company simper. “I didn’t know the stage

was in yet, maw. I been talking to Iry.”

“This here be Miz Yellett’s gov’ment. Maybe she’d like to pearten up

some before she eats.” She started the rocking-chair at a gallop, to

signify to her daughter that she washed her hands of further

responsibility. Being proficient in the sign language of Mrs. Rodney’s

second self, as indeed was every member of the family, Eudora led Mary

to a bench placed in one of the rooms enjoying the distinction of a

side wall, and indicated a family toilet service, which displayed every

indication of having lately seen active service. A roll-towel, more

frankly significant of the multitude of the Rodneys than had been the

babel of voices, a discouraged fragment of comb, a tin basin, a

slippery atom of soap, these Eudora proffered with an unction worthy of

better things. “I declare Mist’ Chugg have scarce left any soap, an’ I

don’t believe thar’s ’nother bit in the house.” Eudora’s accent was but

faintly reminiscent of her mother’s strong Smoky Mountain dialect, as a

crude feature is sometimes softened in the second generation. It was

not unpleasing on her full, rosy mouth. The girl had the seductiveness

of her half-sister, Judith, without a hint of Judith’s spiritual

quality.

Mary told her not to mind about the soap, and went to fetch her

hand-bag, which, consistent with the democratic spirit of its

surroundings, was resting against a clump of sage-brush, whither it had

been lifted by Chugg. Miss Carmichael’s individual toilet service,

which was neither handsome nor elaborate, impressed Eudora far more

potently in ranking Mary as a personage than did her dignity of office

as “gov’ment.”

“I reckon you-uns must have seen Sist’ Judy up to Miz Dax’s. I hope she

war lookin’ right well.” There was in the inquiry an unmistakable note

of pride. The connection was plainly one to be flaunted. Judith, with

her gentle bearing and her simple, convent accomplishments, was plainly

the _grande dame_ of the family. Eudora had now divested herself of the

greasy, flour-smeared apron, flinging it under the wash-bench with a

single all-sufficient movement, while Mary’s look was directed towards

her dressing-bag. In glancing up to make some remark about Judith, Mary

was confronted by a radiant apparition whose lilac calico skirts looked

fresh from the iron.

At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden,

running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with

the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the

direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again

in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention

was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood

erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter

of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose

keen glance and slightly grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual

labor. The head, and face were finely modelled. Unless nature had

fashioned them in some vagrant, prankish mood, such elegance of line

betokened prior generations in which gentlemen and scholars had played

some part—the vagabond scion of a good family, perhaps. A multitude of

such had grafted on the pioneer stock of the West, under names that

carried no significance in the places whence they came.

Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep,

on the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of

deeper significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a

curiously ambiguous effect of a fine head modelled by a ’prentice hand;

a lady’s copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first

lessons, might approximate it.

A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost institutional

proportions. There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin

union, strapping lads and lasses all of them, with more than a common

dower of lusty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the

perishable iridescence of youth. There was Frémont, named for the

explorer-soldier; there was Orlando, named from his mother’s vague,

idle musings over paper-backed literature at certain “unchancy”

seasons; there was Richards, named from pure policy, for a local great

man of whom Warren Rodney had anticipated a helping hand at the time;

there was Eudora, whose nominal origin was uncertain, unless it bore

affiliation to that of Orlando; there was Sadie, thus termed to avoid

the painful distinctions of “old Sally” and “young Sally”; and, lastly,

like a postscript, came Dan—with him, fancy, in the matter of names,

seemed to have failed. Dan was now six, a plump little caricature of a

man in blue overalls, which, as they had descended to him from Richards

in the nature of an heirloom, reached high under his armpits and

shortened the function of his suspenders to the vanishing point.

Eudora was now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted

her with a surprising precocity. Eudora knew her value and meant to

make the most of it. Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she

expected more than a “home of her own.” To-night four suitors sat at

table with Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it. Any

one of the four would have cheerfully murdered the remaining three had

opportunity presented itself. Supper was a mockery to them, a Barmecide

feast. Each watched his rivals—and Eudora. This was a matter of life

and death. There was no time for food. The girl revelled in the

situation to the full of her untaught, unthinking, primitive nature.

She gave the incident a tighter twist by languishing at them in turns.

She smiled, she sighed, she drove them mad by taking crescent bites out

of a slice of bread and exhibiting the havoc of her little, white teeth

with a delectably dainty gluttony.

Her mother, mumbling her supper with toothless impotency, renewed her

youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the

rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw

to the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort

Eudora was to her and how handy she was about the house.

Warren Rodney supported the air of an exile at his own table. Beyond a

preliminary greeting to his daughter’s guests, he said nothing. His

family, in their dealings with him, seemed to accord him the exemptions

of extreme age. He ate with the enthusiasm of a man to whom meals have

become the main business in life.

“How’s your mine up to Bad Water comin’ along, Iry?” Orlando inquired,

not from any hospitable interest in Ira’s claim, but because he had

sundry romantic interests in that neighborhood and hoped to make use of

the young prospector’s interest in his sister by securing an invitation

to return with him. Ira regarded the inquiry in the light of a special

providence. Here was his chance to impress Eudora with the splendor of

his prospects and at the same time smite the claims of his rivals, and

behold! a brother of his lady had led the way.

Ira cleared his throat. “They tell me she air like to yield a million

any day.” At this Eudora gave him the wealth of her eyes, and her

mother reached across two of the glowering suitors and dropped a hot

flapjack on his plate.

“Who sez that she air likely to yield a million any day?” inquired Ben

Swift, openly flouting such prophecy. “Yes, who sez it?” inquired Hawks

and Taylor, joining forces for the overthrow of the common enemy.

“‘They sez’ is easy talkin’, shore ’nuff,” mumbled Mrs. Rodney, as she

helped herself to butter with her own knife.

“A sharp from the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, he said it, and

he has taken back speciments with him.”

“Ye can’t keep lackings from freightin’ round speciments—naw, sir, ye

can’t, not till the fool-killer has finished his job.” Ben Swift

charged the table with the statement as the prosecution subtly appeals

to the high grade of intelligence on the part of the jury. The point

told. Eudora, wavering in her donation of hot flapjacks, gave them to

Ben Swift.

Hawks now leaned across the table with a sinuous, beguiling motion,

and, extending his long neck towards the prospector, with the air of a

turkey-gobbler about to peck, he crooned, softly: “Ira, it’s a heap

risky puttin’ your faith in maverick sharps that trail around the

country, God-a’mightying it, renaming little, old rocks into precious

stones, seein’ gold mines in every gopher-hole they come to. They names

your backyard and the rocks appertainin’ thereunto a heap fashionable,

and like as not some sucker gives him good money to float the trash

back East.”

Mrs. Rodney, whose partisanship in any discussion was analogous to the

position of a hen perching on a fence unable to decide on which side to

flutter, was visibly impressed by Hawks’s presentation of the case.

Looking towards her daughter from under the eaves of her sun-bonnet,

she “’lowed she had hearn that Bad Water was hard on the skin, an’ that

it warn’t much of a place arter all. Folks over thar war mostly

half-livers.”

Ira, now losing all semblance of policy at being thus grievously put

down by his possible mother-in-law, “reckoned that herdin’ sheep over

to the Basin was a heap easier on the skin than livin’ in a comf’table

house over to Bad Water”—this as a fling at Hawks, who herded a small

bunch of sheep “over in the Basin.”

“Ai-yi,” openly scoffed the former Miss Tumlin; “talk’s cheap before—”

She would have considered it indelicate to supply the word “marriage,”

but by breaking off her sentence before she came to the pith of it she

continued to maintain the proprieties, and at the same time conveyed to

her audience that she was too old and experienced to permit any

fledgling from her nest to be caught, for want of a warning, by such

obvious ante-matrimonial chaff as fair promises.

“Laws a massy!” she continued, reminiscently, working her toothless jaw

to free it from an escaped splinter from the snuff-brush. “When me an’

paw war keepin’ comp’ny, satin warn’t good enough for me. He lowed I

wuz to have half creation. Sence we wuz married he ’ain’t never found

time, endurin’ all these years, to build me a bird-house.”

The unbuilt bird-house was the Banquo’s ghost at the Rodney board, Mrs.

Rodney hearkening back to it in and out of season. If the family made

merry over a chance windfall of game or fresh vegetables, a prospect of

possible employment for one of the boys, a donation of money from

Judith, Mrs. Rodney remembered the unbuilt bird-house and indulged

herself to the full of melancholy. It is not improbable that, if she

had been asked to name the chiefest disappointment of her wretched

married life, she would have mentioned the bird-house that was never

built.

At mention of it Warren Rodney murmured broken, deprecatory excuses.

His dull eyes nervously travelled about the table for some one to make

excuses for him. The family broke into hearty peals of laughter; the

tragedy of the first generation had grown to be the unfailing source of

merriment for the second.

“Maw,” began Orlando, “the reason you don’t get no bird-house built out

hyear is that they ain’t no birds. We have offered time and time again

to build you a house fo’ buzzuds, they bein’ the only birds

hyearabouts, but you ’low that you ain’t fav’ble to tamin’ ’em.”

“I wuz raised in Tennessee, an’ we-uns had a house for martins made

out’n gourds, an’ it was pearty.” The pride with which she repeated

this particular claim to honor in an alien land never diminished with

repetition. As she advanced further through the dim perspective of

years, the little mountain town in Tennessee became more and more the

centre of cultivation and civic importance. The desolate cabin that she

had left for the interminable journey westward was recalled

flatteringly through the hallowing mists of time. The children, by

reason of these chronicles, had grown to regard their mother as a sort

of princess in exile.

“Mrs. Rodney”—Swift leaned towards her and whispered something in her

ear. She regarded him tentatively, then grinned. At her time of life,

why should she put faith in the promises of men? “You fix it up, an’

you get your bird-house,” was the conclusion of his sentence.

While this discussion had been in progress the viands had not been

neglected except by such members of the company as had been bereft of

appetite by loftier emotions—in consequence of which the table appeared

to have sustained a visitation of seventeen-year locusts. Eudora, ever

economic in the value she placed not only upon herself but her

environment, proposed to her guests that they should wash the dishes,

an art in which they were by no means deficient, being no exception to

the majority of range bachelors in their skill in homely pursuits. And

thus it came to pass that Eudora’s suitors, swathed in aprons, meekly

washed dishes shoulder to shoulder, while their souls craved the

performance of valorous deeds.

As this was the last stage station on the way to Lost Trail, Mary

Carmichael was perforce obliged to content herself till Mrs. Yellett

should call or send for her. After supper, Chugg, with fresh horses to

the stage, left Rodney’s, apparently for some port in that seemingly

pathless sea of foot-hills. That there should be trails and defined

routes over this vast, unvaried stretch of space seemed more wonderful

to Mary than the charted high-roads of the Atlantic. The foot-hills

seemed to have grown during the long journey till they were foot-hills

no longer; they had come to be the smaller peaks of the towering range

that had formed the spine of the desert. The air, that seemed to have

lost some of its crystalline quality on the flat stretches of the

plains, was again sparkling and heady in the clean hill country. It

stirred the pulses like some rare vintage, some subtle distillation of

sun-warmed fruit that had been mellowing for centuries.

Very lonely seemed the Rodney home among the great company of

mountains. A brooding desolation had settled on it at close of day, and

all the laughter and light footsteps and gayly ringing voices of the

young folk could not dispel the feeling of being adrift in a tiny shell

on the black waters of some unknown sea; or thus it seemed to the

stranger within their gate.

Mrs. Rodney retired within the flap of her sun-bonnet after the evening

meal, settling herself in the rocking-chair as if it were some sort of

conveyance. Her family, who might have told the hour of day or her

passing mood by the action of the chair, knew by her pacific gait that

she would lament the unbuilt bird-house no more that night. The

snuff-brush, newly replenished from the tin box, kept perfect time to

the motion of the chair. With the lady of the house it was one of the

brief seasons of passing content vouchsafed by an ample meal and a good

digestion.

Warren Rodney took down a gun from the wall and began to clean it. His

hands had the fumbling, indefinite movements, the obscure action,

directed by a brain already begun to crumble. His industry with the gun

was of a part with the impotent dawdling in the garden. His eyes would

seek for the rag or the bottle of oil in a dull, glazed way, and,

having found them, he would forget the reason of his quest. Not once

that evening had they rested on his wife or any member of his family.

He had shown no interest in any of the small happenings of home, the

frank rivalry of Eudora’s suitors, the bickerings of the girls and boys

over the division of household labor. The one thing that had

momentarily aroused his somnolent intelligence was a revival of his

wife’s plaint anent the unbuilt bird-house. That, and a certain furtive

anxiety during supper lest his daughter Eudora should forget to keep

his plate piled high, were the only signs of a participation in the

life about him.

From one of the rooms that opened to the world like a stage to the

audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil. The last faint

amethystine haze on the mountains was deepening. They towered about the

valley where the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the

pitiful grasp of these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the

taller of the peaks still held the high lights. But all the valleys and

the spaces between the mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the

crazy house invading the great company of mountains, penetrating

brazenly to the very threshold of their silent councils, seemed but a

pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some possible giant tread. The

ill-adjusted family, disputing every inch of ground with the

wilderness, became invested with a dignity quite out of keeping with

its achievements. Their very weaknesses and vanities, old Sally still

clinging to her sun-bonnet and her limp rose-colored skirts, an eternal

requiem for the dead and gone complexion, lost the picturesqueness of

the pioneer and ranked as universal qualities, admissible in the

austerest setting. Perhaps in some far distant council of the Daughters

of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of Rodney would

unctuously announce: “My great-great-grandmother was a Miss Tumlin of

Tennessee; great-great-grandfather’s first wife had been a Sioux squaw.

Isn’t it interesting and romantic?”

Eudora now came to her mother with great news. Hawks had taken the

first opportunity of being alone with her to tell her of Jim’s release

from jail and of his abortive encounter with Simpson in the

eating-house. He had not deferred the telling from any feeling of

reticence regarding the disclosure of family affairs before strangers.

News travels in the desert by some unknown agency. Twenty-four hours

after a thing happened it would be safe to assume that every cow and

sheep outfit in a radius of three hundred miles would be discussing it

over their camp-fires; and this long before there was an inch of

telegraph wire or a railroad tire in the country. Hawks had merely

reserved the news for Eudora’s private ear because he hoped thus to

gain an advantage over his three rivals.

“Ai-yi!” said old Sally, sharply, and the chair came to an abrupt

stand-still. “In the name o’ Heaven, how kem they to let him out?” Mrs.

Rodney’s knowledge of the law was of the vaguest; and if incarceration

would keep a prisoner out of more grievous trouble, she could not

understand giving him his freedom. To her the case was analogous to

releasing a child from the duress of a corner and turning him loose to

play with matches. “How kem they to let him out?” she repeated, the

still rocking-chair conveying the impersonal dignity of the pulpit or

the justice-seat. “I ’ain’t hearn tell of so pearty a couple as the

jail an’ Jim in years.”

The meaning that she put into her words belied their harsh face-value.

With Jim in jail, her mind was comparatively at rest about him. She

knew he had been branding other men’s cattle since the destruction of

his sheep, and she knew the fate of cattle-thieves, and that Jim would

be no exception to the rule. With her purely instinctive maternity, she

had been fond of Jim. He had been one more boy to mother. She harbored

no ill-feeling towards him that he was not her own. Moreover, she

wanted no gallows-tree intermingled with the annals of her family. It

suited her convenience at this particular time that Jim should stay in

jail. That he had been given his freedom loosed the phials of her

condemnation on the incompetents that released him.

“I ’low they wuz grudgin’ him the mouthful they fed to him, that they

ack so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu’n a man out to get hisself

hanged. An’ Jim never wuz a hearty eater. He never seemed to relish his

food, even when he wuz a growin’ kid.”

A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast

solitudes above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling

constellation before the girl and her mother. “It’s a warning!”

shivered the old woman. “Some’um’s bound to happen.” She began to rock

herself slowly. The thing she dreaded had already come to pass in her

imagination. Jim a free man was Jim a dead man. He was so dead that

already his step-mother was going on with a full acceptance of the

idea. She reviewed her relationship to him. No, she had nothing to

blame herself for. He had been more troublesome than any of her own

children and for that reason she had been more liberal with the rod.

And yet—the face of the squaw rose before her, wraithlike, accusing!

“Ai-yi!” she said; but this time her favorite expletive was hardly more

than a sigh.

“I mind Jim when he first kem to us,” she said, more to herself than to

Eudora, who sat at her feet. The impending tragedy in the family had

robbed her of all the joy in her suitors. They sat on a bench on the

opposite side of the house, divided by the very nature of their

interests yet companions in misery.

“He wuz scarce four, an’ yet he had never been broke of the habit of

sucking his thumb. Ef he’d ben my child, I’d a lammed it out’n him

before he’d a seen two, but seem’ he was aged for an infant havin’ such

practices, I tried to shame him out’n it. But, Lord a massy, men folks

is hard to shame even at four. I hissed at him like a gyander every

time I seen him do it. Now I’d a knowed better—I’d a sewed it up in a

pepper rag.”

“What’s suckin’ his thumb as an infant got to do with his gettin’

lynched now?” demanded Eudora, with the scepticism of the second

generation.

“Wait till you-uns has children of your own,” sniffed her mother, from

the assured position of maternal experience, “an’ see the infant that’s

allowed to suck its thumb has the makin’s in him of a felon or a

unfortunit.” She rocked a slow accompaniment to her dismal, prophecy.

Eudora’s eyes, big with wonder, were fixed on the crouching flank of a

distant mountain. Her mother broke the silence. Not often did they

speak thus intimately. Old Sally belonged to that class of mothers who

feel a pride in their reticent dealings with their daughters, and who

consider the management of all affairs of the heart peculiarly the

province of youth and inexperience.

But to-night she was prompted by a force beyond her ken to speak to the

girl. “Eudory, in pickin’ out one of them men,” she jerked her thumb

towards the opposite side of the house, “git one tha’s clar o’ the

trick o’ stampedin’ round other wimming. It’s bound to kem back to ye,

same as counterfeit money.”

Eudora giggled. She was of an age when the fascinations of curiosity as

to the unknown male animal prompt lavish conjecture. “I ’lowed they all

stampeded.”

“Yes,” leered the old woman—and she grinned the whole horrid length of

her empty gums—“the most of ’em does. But you must shet your eyes to

it. The moment they know you swallow it, they’s wuthless, like horses

that has run away once.”

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

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

gov’ment.”

IX.

Mrs. Yellett And Her “Gov’ment”

The buckboard drew up to the back or open-faced entrance of the Rodney

house with a splendid sweep, terminating in a brilliantly staccato

halt, as if to convey to the residents the flattering implication that

their house was reached via a gravelled driveway, rather than across

lumpish inequalities of prairie overgrown with cactus stumps and clumps

of sage-brush. From the buckboard stepped a figure whose agility was

compatible with her driving.

No sketchy outline can do justice to Mrs. Yellett or her costume. Like

the bee, the ant, and other wonders of the economy of nature, she was

not to be disposed of with a glance. And yet there was no attempt at

subtlety on her part; on the contrary, no one could have an appearance

of greater candor than the lady whose children Mary Carmichael had come

West to teach. Her costume was a thing apart, suggesting neither sex,

epoch, nor personal vanity, but what it lacked of these more usual

sartorial characteristics, it more than made up in a passionate

individualism; an excessively short skirt, so innocent of “fit” or

“hang” in its wavering, indeterminate outline as to suggest the

possible workmanship of teeth rather than of scissors; and riding-boots

coming well to the knee, displaying a well-shaped, ample foot, perched

aloft on the usual high heel that cow-punchers affect as the expression

of their chiefest vanity. But Mrs. Yellett was not wholly mannish in

her tastes, and to offset the boots she wore a bodice of the type that

a generation ago used to be known as a “basque.” It fitted her ample

form as a cover fits a pin-cushion, the row of jet buttons down the

front looking as if a deep breath might cause them to shoot into space

at any moment with the force of Mauser bullets.

Such a garb was not, after all, incongruous with this original lady’s

weather-beaten face. Her skin was tanned to a fine russet, showing

tiny, radiating lines about the eyes when they twinkled with laughter,

which was often. No individual feature was especially striking, but the

general impression of her countenance was of animation and activity,

mingled with geniality and with native shrewdness.

“Howdy, Miz Yellett,” called out old Sally, hitching her rocker

forward, in an excitement she could ill conceal. “You-uns’ gov’ment

come, an’ she ain’t much bigger’n a lettle green gourd. Don’t seem to

have drawed all the growth comin’ to her yit.”

“In roundin’ up the p’ints of my gov’ment, Mis’ Rodney, you don’t want

to forget that green gourds and green grapes is mighty apt to belong to

the sour fambly, when they hangs beyant your reach.”

“Ai-yi!” grimaced old Sally. “It’s tol’able far to send East for green

fruit. We can take our own pep’mint.”

The prospective advent of a governess in the Yellett family, moreover,

one from that mysterious centre of culture, the East, had not only rent

the neighborhood with bitter factions, but had submitted the Yelletts

to the reproach of ostentation. In those days there were no schools in

that portion of the Wind River country where the Yelletts grazed their

flocks and herds. Parents anxious to obtain “educational

advantages”—that was the term, irrespective of the age of the student

or the school he attended—sent them, often, with parental blindness as

to the equivocal nature of the blessing thus conferred, to visit

friends in the neighboring towns while they “got their education.” Or

they went uneducated, or they picked up such crumbs of knowledge as

fell from the scant parental board. But never, up to the present

moment, had any one flown into the face of neighborly precedent except

sturdy Sarah Yellett.

Old Sally, in her eagerness to convey that she was in no degree

impressed with the pedagogical importation, like many another

belligerent lost the first round of the battle through an excess of

personal feeling. But though down, Sally was by no means out, and after

a brief session with the snuff-brush she returned to the field prepared

to maintain that the Yellett children, for all their pampering in the

matter of having a governess imported for their benefit, were no better

off than her own brood, who had taken the learning the gods provided.

“Too bad, Miz Yellett, that you-uns had to hire that gov’ment without

lookin’ over her p’ints. I’ve ben takin’ her in durin’ supper, and

she’ll never be able to thrash ’em past Clem. She mought be able to

thrash Clem if she got plumb mad, these yere slim wimmin is tarrible

wiry ’n’ active at such times, but she’ll never be able to thrash

beyant her.” And having injected the vitriolic drop in her neighbor’s

cup of happiness, Old Sally struck a gait on her chair which was the

equivalent of a gallop.

But Mrs. Yellett was not the sort of antagonist to be left gaping on

the road, awed to silence by the action of a rocking-chair, no matter

how brilliant.

“I reckon I can thrash my own children when it’s needed, without

gettin’ in help from the East, or hereabouts either, for that matter.

If other folks would only take out their public-spirited reformin’

tendencies on their own famblies, there’d be a heap less lynchin’

likely to happen round the country in the course of the next ten

years.”

Old Sally let the home-thrust pass. “Who ever hearn tell of a good

teacher that wasn’t a fine thrasher in the bargain?” She swung the

chair about with a pivotal motion, as if she were addressing an

assemblage instead of a single listener, and then, bethinking herself

of a clinching illustration, she called aloud to her daughter to bear

witness. “Eudory! Eu-do-ry! You-do-ry!”

“Ye-’s ma’am,” drawled the daughter, coming most unwillingly from the

open-faced room opposite, where she had been inciting all four of the

suitors to battle.

“What was it they called that teacher down to Caspar that larruped the

hide off’n the boys?”

“A fine dis-a-ply-narian, maw.”

“Yes, that’s it—a dis-a-_ply_-narian. What kin a lettle green gourd

like her know ’bout dis-apply-in?”

“Your remarks shore remind me of a sayin’ that ‘the discomfort of

havin’ to swallow other folks’ dust causes a heap of anxiety over their

reckless driving.’”

Mrs. Yellett flicked her riding-boot with her whip. Her voice dropped a

couple of tones, her accent became one of honeyed sweetness.

“Your consumin’ anxiety regardin’ my gov’ment and my children shore

reminds me of a narrative appertainin’ to two dawgs. Them dawgs was

neighbors, livin’ in adj’inin’ yards separated by a fence, and one day

one of them got a good meaty bone and settled hisself down to the

enj’yment thereof. And his intimate friend and neighbor on the other

side of the fence, who had no bone to engage his faculties, he began to

fret hisself ’bout the business of his friend. S’pose he was to choke

hisself over that bone. S’pose the meat disagreed with him. And he

begins to bark warnin’s, but the dawg with the bone he keeps right on.

But the other dawg he dashes hisself again the fence and he scratches

with his claws. He whines pitiful, he’s that anxious about his friend.

But the dawg with the bone he went right on till he gnawed it down to

the last morsel, and, goin’ to the hole in the fence whar his friend

had kep’ that anxious vigil, he says: ‘Friend, the only thing that

consoled me while having to endure the anguish of eatin’ that bone was

the thought of your watchful sympathy!’ Which bein’ the case, I’d thank

you to tell me whar I can find my gov’ment.”

“Ai-yi!” said old Sally. “I ain’t seein’ no bone this deal. Just a

lettle green gourd ’s all I see with my strongest specs.”

Mary Carmichael, in one of the inner rooms, was writing a home letter,

which was chiefly remarkable for what it failed to relate. It gave long

accounts of the scenery, it waxed didactic over the future of the

country; but the adventures of the trip, with her incidental

acquaintance with the Daxes and Chugg, were not recorded. Eudora

announced the arrival of Mrs. Yellett, and Mary, at the news, dropped

the contents of her portfolio and started up with much the feeling a

marooned sailor might have on hearing a sail has been sighted. At this

particular stage of her career Miss Carmichael had not developed the

philosophy that later in life was destined to become her most valuable

asset. Her sense of humor no longer responded to the vagaries of

pioneer life. The comedy element was coming a little too thick and

fast. She was getting a bit heart-sick for a glimpse of her own kind, a

word with some one who spoke her language. And here, at last, was the

woman who had written such a charming letter, who had so graciously

intimated that there was room for her at the hearth-stone. Mary was,

indeed, eager to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Yellett.

To the end of her life she never forgot that first meeting—the perfect

confidence with which she followed Eudora to the open room, the ensuing

blank amazement, the utter inability to reconcile the Mrs. Yellett of

the letter with the Mrs. Yellett of fact. The lamp on the table,

burning feebly, seemed to burst into a thousand shooting-stars as the

girl struggled with her tears. Home was so far, and Mrs. Yellett was so

different from what she had expected! And yet, as she felt her fingers

crush in the grip of that hard but not unkindly hand, there was in the

woman’s rugged personality a sustaining quality; and, thinking again of

Archie’s prospects, Mary was not altogether sorry that she had come.

“You be a right smart young maverick not to get lost none on this long

trail, and no one to p’int you right if you strayed,” commented Mary’s

patroness, affably. “But we won’t roominate here no longer than we can

help. It’s too hard on old Ma’am Rodney. She’s just ’bout the color of

withered cabbage now, ’long of me havin’ you.”

While she talked, Mrs. Yellett picked up Mary’s trunk and bags and

stowed them in the back of the buckboard with the ease with which

another woman might handle pasteboard boxes. One or two of the male

Rodneys offered to help, but she waved them aside and lashed the

luggage to the buckboard, handling the ropes with the skill of an old

sailor. The entire Rodney family and the suitors of Eudora assembled to

witness the departure. “It’s a heap friendly of you to fret so,” was

the parting stab of Sarah Yellett to Sally Rodney; and she swung the

backboard about, cleared the cactus stumps in the Rodney door-yard, and

gained the mountain-road.

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

“A few more women, thank God!” remarked Ira. Eudora had just snubbed

him, and he put a wealth of meaning into his look after the vanishing

buckboard.

The night was magnificent. From horizon to horizon the sky was sown

with quivering points of light. Each straggling clump of sage-brush,

rocky ledge, and bowlder borrowed a beauty not its own from the yellow

radiance of the stars.

They had gone a good two miles before Mary’s patroness broke the

silence with, “Nothing plumb stampedes my temper like that Rodney

outfit—old Sally buckin’ an’ pitchin’ in her rockin’-chair same as if

she was breakin’ a bronco, an’ that Eudory always corallin’, deceivin’,

and jiltin’ one outfit of men after another. If she was a daughter of

mine, I’d medjure her length across my knee, full growed and courted

though she is. The only one of the outfit that’s wuth while is Judith,

an’ she ain’t old woman Rodney’s girl, neither. You hyeard that

already, did you? Well, this yere country may be lackin’ in population,

but it’s handy as a sewin’-circle in distributin’ news.”

Mary mentioned Leander. “Yes,” answered Mrs. Yellett, reflectively,

“Leander’s mouth do run about eight and a half octaves. Sometimes I

don’t blame his wife for bangin’ down the lid.”

They talked of Jim Rodney’s troubles, and the growing hatred between

sheep and cattle men, because of range rights.

“Now that pore Jim had a heap of good citizen in him, before that

pestiferous cattle outfit druv’ his sheep over the cliff. Relations

’twixt sheep and cattle men in this yere country is strained beyant the

goin’-back place, I can tell you. My pistol-eye ’ain’t had a wink of

sleep for nigh on eighteen months, an’ is broke to wakefulness same as

a teethin’ babe.

“Jim was wild as a coyote ’fore he marries that girl. She come all the

way from Topeka, Kansas, thinking she was goin’ to find a respectable

home, and when she come out hyear and found the place was a dance-hall,

she cried all the time. She didn’t add none to the hilarity of the

place. An’ one day Jim he strolled in, an’ seem’ the girl a-cryin’ like

a freshet and wishin’ she was dead, he inquired the cause. She told him

how that old harpy wrote her, an’, bein’ an orphant, she come out

thinkin’ she was goin’ to a respectable place as waitress, an’ Jim he

’lowed it was a case for the law. He was a little shy of twenty at the

time, just a young cockerel ’bout br’ilin’ size. Some of the old

hangers-on ’bout the place they see a heap of fun in Jim’s takin’ on

’bout the girl, he bein’ that young that he had scarce growed a pair of

spurs yet. An’ one of ’em says to him,’ Sonny, if you’re afeerd that

this yere corral is onjurious to the young lady’s morals, we’ll call in

the gospel sharp, if you’ll stand for the brand.’ Now Jim hadn’t a

cent, nor no callin’, nor a prospect to his back, but he struts up to

the man that was doin’ the talkin’, game as a bantam, an’ he says, ‘The

lady ain’t rakin’ in anythin’ but a lettle white chip, in takin’ me,

but if she’s willin’, here’s my hand.’

“At which that pore young thing cried harder than ever. Well, Jim he up

an’ marries the girl an’ it turns out fine. He gets a job herdin’ sheep

on shares, an’ she stays with the Rodney outfit till he saves enough to

build a cabin. Things is goin’ with Jim like a prairie afire. In a few

years he acquires a herd of his own, a fine herd, not a scabby sheep in

the bunch. Alida she makes him the best kind of a wife, them kids is

the pride of his life, and then, them cursed cattle-men do for him. Of

course, he takes to rustlin’; I’d do more’n rustle if they’d touch

mine.”

The pair of broncos that Mrs. Yellett was driving humped their backs

like cats as they climbed the steep mountain-road. With her, driving

was an exact science. It was a treat to see her handle the ribbons.

Mary asked some trifling question about the children and it elicited

the information that one of the girls was named Cacta. “Yes,” she said,

“I like new names for children, not old ones that is all frazzled out

and folks has suffered an’ died to. It seems to start ’em fair, like

playin’ cards with a new deck. Cacta’s my oldest daughter, and I named

her after the flowers that blooms all over the desert spite of

everything, heat, cold, an’ rain an’ alkali dust—the cactus blooms

right through it all. Even its own thorns don’t seem to fret it none. I

called her plain Cactus till she was three, and along came a sharp

studyin’ the flowers an’ weeds out here, and he ’lowed that Cactus was

a boy’s name an’ Cacta was for girls—called it a _fee_minin tarnation,

or somethin’ like that, so we changed it. My second daughter ’ain’t got

quite so much of a name. She’s called Clematis. That holds its own out

here pretty well, ’long by the willows on the creek. Paw ’lowed he was

terrible afraid that I’d name the youngest girl Sage-brush, so he spoke

to call her Lessie Viola, an’ I giv’ in. The boys is all plain named,

Ben, Jack, and Ned. Paw wouldn’t hear of a fancy brand bein’ run onto

’em.”

The temperature fell perceptibly as they climbed the heights, and the

air had the heady quality of wine. It was awesome, this entering into

the great company of the mountains. Presently Mary caught the glimmer

of something white against the dark background of the hills. It gleamed

like a snow-bank, though they were far below the snow-line on the

mountain-side they were climbing.

“Well, here be camp,” announced Mrs. Yellett. What Mary had taken for a

bank of snow was a huge, canvas-covered wagon. Several dogs ran down to

greet the buckboard, barking a welcome. In the background was a shadowy

group, huge of stature, making its way down the mountain-path. “And

here’s all the children come to meet teacher.” Mrs. Yellett’s tone was

tenderly maternal, as if it was something of a feat for the children to

walk down the mountain-path to meet their teacher. But Mary, straining

her eyes to catch a glimpse of her little pupils, could discover

nothing but a group of persons that seemed to be the sole survivors of

some titanic race. Not one among them but seemed to have reached the

high-water mark of six feet. Was it an optical illusion, a

hallucination born of the wonderful starlight? Or were they as huge as

they seemed? The young men looked giants, the girls as if they had

wandered out of the first chapters of Genesis. Their mother introduced

them. They all had huge, warm, perspiring hands, with grips like bears.

Mary looked about for a house into which she could escape to gather her

scattered faculties, but the starlight, yellow and luminous, revealed

none. There was the huge covered wagon that she had taken for a

snow-bank, there was a small tent, there were two light wagons, there

were dogs innumerable, but there was no sign of a house.

“What do you think of it?” inquired Mrs. Yellett, smilingly,

anticipating a favorable answer.

“It’s almost too beautiful to leave.” Mary innocently supposed that

Mrs. Yellett referred to the starlit landscape. “But I’m so tired, Mrs.

Yellett, and so glad to get to a real home at last, that I’m going to

ask if you will not show me the way to the house so that I may go to

bed right away.”

This apparently reasonable request was greeted by a fine chorus of

titanic laughter from Mary’s pupils. Mrs. Yellett waved her hand over

the surrounding landscape in comprehensive gesture.

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

“You mean the mountains? They’re wonderful. But—I really think I’d like

to go in the house.”

“I shore hope you ain’t figgerin’ on goin’ into no house, ’cause there

ain’t no house to go into.” She laughed merrily, as if the idea of such

an effete luxury as a house were amusing. “This yere family ’ain’t ever

had a house—it camps.”

Mary gasped. The real meaning of words no longer had the power of

making an impression on her. If Mrs. Yellett had announced that they

were in the habit of sleeping in the moon, it would not have surprised

her.

“If you are tired, an’ want to go to bed, you can shuck off and lie

down any time. Ben, Jack, Ned, go an’ set with paw in the tent while

the gov’ment gets ready for bed. Cacta and Clem, you help me with them

quilts.”

Mary stood helpless in the wilderness while quilts and pillows were

fetched somewhere from the adjacent scenery, and Mrs. Yellett asked

her, with the gravity of a Pullman porter interrogating a passenger as

to the location of head and foot, if she liked to sleep “light or

dark.” She chose “dark” at random, hating to display her ignorance of

the alternatives, with the happy result that her bed was made up to

leeward of the great sheep-wagon, in a nice little corner of the State

of Wyoming. Mary was grateful that she had chosen dark.

As she dozed off, she was reminded of a certain magazine illustration

that Archie had pinned over his bed after the aunts had given a

grudging consent to this westward journey. There was a line beneath the

pictorial decoy which read: “Ranch Life in the New West.” And there

were piazzas with fringed Mexican hammocks, wild-grass cushions, a

tea-table with a samovar, and, last, a lady in white muslin pouring

tea. The stern reality apparently consisted in scorching alkali plains,

with houses of the packing-box school of architecture at a distance of

seventy or eighty miles apart. No ladies in white muslin poured tea;

they garbed themselves in simple gunny-sacking, and their repartee had

an acrid, personal note. But Mary was glad to know that Archie had that

picture, and that he thought of her in such ideal surroundings.

X.

On Horse-thief Trail

Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-day

meal to go in quest of her brother. He had left his comfortable cabin

on the Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the “bad

man’s country,” one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in

Wyoming and furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice.

Judith took the left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen

the right, the day she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke

with never a glance backward. Judith strove now to put him and the

memory of that day from her mind by turning towards the open country

without a glance in the direction he had taken. But her thoughts were

weary of journeying over that trail that she would not look towards; in

imagination she had travelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each

dip and turn of the yellow road, each feature of the landscape as he

rode exultant to Kitty, to be turned, tried, taken or left as her mood

should prompt. But Judith was more woman than saint, and in her heart

there was a blending of joy and pain. For she knew—such skill has love

in inference from detail—that the mysterious far-away girl, who was so

powerful that she could have whatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved

her own ambitions better than she did Peter or Peter’s happiness, and

that she would not marry him except as a makeshift. For Miss Colebrooke

wrote verses; Peter had a white-and-gold volume of them that Judith

fancied he said his prayers to.

As for Peter himself, he had never been able to explain the magic Kitty

had brewed for him. There was a heady quality in the very ring of her

name. His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hat

that to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf of

poppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen of

corn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings. He

had no difficulty in securing an introduction. She was a connection of

the Wetmores, as was he, though through opposite sides of the house. In

the few minutes’ talk that followed, he had the disconcerting sensation

of being “talked down to.” There was the indulgent tolerance of the

woman of the world to the “nice boy” about this amazing young woman,

who might have been eighteen. Hamilton had repudiated the very

suggestion of being a “nice boy.” But he felt himself blushing, groping

for words, saying stupid things, supplying every requisite of the “nice

boy” as if he were acting the part. Her chaperon bore her away

presently, and he was left with a radiant impression of corn-silk hair

and a complexion that justified Bouguereau’s mother-of-pearl flesh

tints. And when she had tilted the ruffled lace parasol over her

shoulder, so that it framed her head like a fleecy halo, he had seen

that her eyes were green as jade. Withal he had a sense of having

acquitted himself stupidly.

Later, when he ran the gamut of some friends, they had chaffed him on

his hardihood. By Jove! He had nerve to look at her! Didn’t he know she

was “the” Miss Colebrooke? Now Hamilton was absolutely ignorant of Miss

Colebrooke’s right of way to the definite article, but it was

characteristic of him to make no inquiries. On the whole, he found the

situation meeting with a greater number of the artistic requirements

than such situations usually presented. He was still dallying with this

pleasant vagueness of sensation when he picked up a copy of a magazine,

and the name Katherine Colebrooke caught his eye and held it like the

flight of a comet. Her contribution was a sonnet entitled “The

Miracle.” As a naïve emotional confession, “The Miracle” interested

him; as a sonnet, he rent it unmercifully.

Peter was to learn, however, that this sonnet was but a solitary flake

in a poetic fall of more or less magnitude. He rather conspicuously

avoided a reference to her poetry when they met again. To him it was

the very least of her gifts. Her hair, that had the tender yellow of

ripening corn, was worthy a cycle of sonnets, but pray leave the making

of them to some one else! By daylight the jade-colored eyes seemed to

shut out the world. The pupils shrank to pin-points. The green looked

deep—as many fathoms as the sea. She was all Diana by daylight, a

huntress, if you will, of the elusive epithet, but essentially a maiden

goddess, who would add no sprightly romance to the chronicles of

Olympus. By lamp-light she suggested quite another divinity. The

pin-points expanded; they burned black, like coals newly breaking into

flame.

When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had

thought her eighteen at their first meeting. It impugned his judgment

as a man of the world. Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be

contributors of several years’ standing to the various magazines.

Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him. He heard of her as

bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had

deflected the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure

of the picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the

Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin

grammar. An unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should

marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a

field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by

reason of his deference to the conventional. If she had flirted with

him, his midsummer madness would have evaporated into thin air; but she

kept him at arm’s-length, ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy

proposed.

Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that

Hamilton did not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was

swinging westward over the prairies. She had confided to him that her

work claimed her and that she must renounce those sweet

responsibilities that made the happiness of other women. It was with

the protective mien of one who sought to shield him from an adverse

destiny that she declined his suit.

This had all happened seven years ago. In the mean time he had adjusted

his disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had

fallen in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the

rôle of lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first

love was not without charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have

survived the test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney’s

compelling personality, other things being equal, it would be difficult

to hazard a guess. The coming of Judith from the convent increased the

perspective into which Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman

in the foreground, the pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to

reminiscence. But the reverence for the usual, that made up the

underlying motive for so much of Hamilton’s conduct, presented barriers

alongside of which his previous quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke’s

seniority shrank to insignificance. He might marry a woman older than

himself and swallow the grimace of it, but by no conceivable system of

argument could he persuade himself to marry into a family like that of

the Rodneys—the girl herself, for all her beauty and rare womanliness,

a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme for obloquy, her brother a

cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other men should make the heroic

marriages of a new country. He was prepared to applaud their hardihood

of temperament, but in his own case such a thing was inconceivable.

Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web of caution and

provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the shrivelled

flies dangling in the web conveying no significance, apparently, beyond

that of advertising the system.

When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit

of epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings

and arrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least,

resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated

at the hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded

pride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines

flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger,

if possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even

the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on

that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she

had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an

elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly

elusive than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.

The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of their

ages. Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; she

retained a surplus it would be rude to estimate. Her greeting of him

was radiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to

inspiration. A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling

and the curled and perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to

rouse those lightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits. But Peter

only turned the other cheek. More than once, in the days that followed,

he devoutly thanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with

Judith had been governed by characteristic prudence. Kitty admitted him

to her coterie, but he had lost nothing of his attitude of grand Turk

towards her verses. The sin be upon the heads of whomever took such

things seriously! The irony of fate that compelled a class poet to

punch cows may have tinctured his judgment.

A telegram recalled him to the ranch and prevented a final leave-taking

with Miss Colebrooke. He made his adieux by letter, and they were

frankly regretful. Miss Colebrooke’s reply mingled sorrow in parting

from her old friend with joy in having found him. Her letter, a

masterpiece of phrase-spinning, presented to Peter the one significant

fact that she would not be averse to the renewal of his suit. In

reading her letter he made no allowance for the fact that the lady had

made a fine art of saying things, and that her joy and regret at their

meeting and parting might have been reminiscent of the printed passion

that was so prominent a feature of magazinedom. Her letters—the like of

them he had never seen outside printed volumes of letters that had

achieved the distinction of classics—culminated in the one that Judith

had given him that morning, announcing that unexpectedly she had

decided to join the Wetmore girls and would be glad to see him at the

ranch.

That he had flown at her bidding, Judith knew. What she would least

have suspected was that Miss Colebrooke had received her visitor as if

his breakneck ride across the desert had been in the nature of an

afternoon call. If Judith, knowing what she did of this long-drawn-out

romance, could have known likewise of her knight’s chagrin, would she

have pitied him?

Ignorant of the recent anticlimax, and with a burden of many heavy

thoughts, Judith was penetrating a world of unleavened desolation.

Beneath the scourge of the noon-day sun the desert lay, stripped of

every illusion. Vegetation had almost ceased, nothing but sun-scorched,

dust-choked sage-brush could spring from such sterility. The fruit of

desolation, it gave back to desolation a quality more melancholy than

utter barrenness. Glittering in the sunlight, the beds of alkali

gleamed leper white; above them the agitated air was like the hot waves

that dance and quiver about iron at white heat. From horizon to horizon

the curse of God seemed to have fallen on the land; it was as if,

cursing it, He had forgotten it, and left it as the abomination of

desolation. Judith scarce heeded, her thoughts straying after first one

then another of the group that made up her little world—Peter Hamilton,

Kitty Colebrooke, Jim, his family—thoughts inconsequent as the dancing

dust-devils that whirled over that infinity of space, and, whirling,

disappeared and reappeared at some new corner of the compass.

The trail that she must take to Jim’s camp in the mountain was known to

but few honest men. Fugitives from justice—the grave, impersonal

justice of the law, or the swift justice of the plains—found there an

asylum. And while they sometimes suffered, in death by thirst or

hunger, a sentence more dreadful than the law of the land or the law of

the rope would have given them, the desert, like the sea, seldom gave

up her own. It was more than probable that no woman except Alida Rodney

had ever taken that trail before, and reasonably certain that no woman

had ever taken it alone. Dolly, when she saw the beds of alkali grow

more frequent, and that the trails of the range cattle turned back,

sniffed the lack of water in the air, slackened her pace, and turned an

interrogatory ear towards her mistress.

“It’s all right, old girl”; the gauntleted hand patted the satin neck.

“We’re in for”—Judith flung her head up and confronted the infinite

desolation yawning to the sky-line—“God knows what.”

Dolly broke into a light canter; this evidently was not an occasion for

dawdling. There was a touch of business about the way the reins were

held that made the mare settle down to work. But her flying hoofs made

little apparent progress against the space and silence of the desert.

Five, ten, fifteen miles and the curving shoulder of the mountain, that

she must cross, still mocked in the distance. Only the sun moved in

that vast world of seemingly immutable forces.

There was no stoic Sioux in Judith now. The girl that breasted the

crests of the foot-hills shrank in terror from the loneliness and the

suggestion of foes lurking in ambush. The sun dropped behind the

mountain, leaving a blood-red pool in his wake, like fugitive Cain.

Already night was sweeping over the earth from mountain shadows that

flowed imperceptibly together like blackened pools. To the girl

following the trail the silence was more dreadful than a chorus of

threatening voices. She listened till the stillness beat at her ears

like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, then pulled up her horse, and

the desert was as still as the chamber of death.

“Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women folk when the night

comes—a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and—” Dolly

whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be

completed. The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows,

as deliberately as a snake swallows its victim. They were nearing the

mountains. The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and more

intermittently. The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher

and higher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt the

tension of things loosen a little.

Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of

hard winters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian

superstition that was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings

in the empty eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her.

She dared not think of the dangers that the looming darkness might

conceal, or of what she might find at her journey’s end, or—“Whoa,

Dolly! softly, girl. Is it my foolish, white-blood nerves, or is some

one following?”

The mare had been trained to respond to the slightest touch on her

mouth, and stopped instantly. Judith swayed slightly in the saddle with

the heaving of the sweating horse. The blood beat at her temples,

confusing what she actually heard with what her imagination pictured.

She was half-way up a towering spur of the Wind River when she slid

from the saddle, and putting her ear to the ground listened, Indian

fashion. Above the throbbing stillness of the desert night, that came

to her murmurously, like the imprisoned roar of the sea from a shell,

she could hear the regular beat of horse’s hoofs following up the steep

mountain grade. She scrambled up with the desperate nimbleness of a

hunted thing, but when she attempted to vault to the saddle her limbs

failed and she sank clinging to the pommel. Twice she tried and twice

the trembling of her limbs held her captive. With the loss of each

moment the beat of the hoofs on the trail below became more distinct.

The very desperation of her plight kept her clinging to the pommel,

incapable of thought, so that when she finally flung herself to the

saddle she was surprised to find herself there. To the left the trail

dropped sharply to a precipice, choked by the close crowding of many

scrub pines. To the right the snow-clad spires of the Wind River kept

their eternal vigil. If she should call aloud for help, these white,

still mountains would echo the anguish of her woman’s cry and give no

further heed to her plight.

The trail had begun to widen. The horse behind her again stumbled,

loosening a stone that rolled with crashes and echoings down to the

precipice below. She took advantage of the widening of the trail to

urge Dolly forward. Her impulse was to put spurs to the mare and run,

to take chances with loose stones, a narrowing trail, and the

possibility of Dolly’s stumbling and breaking a leg; but discretion

prompted the showing of a brave front, the pleasantries of the road,

with flight as the last resource of desperation.

Suddenly gaining what seemed to be a plateau, she wheeled and waited

the coming of this possible friend or foe. The thudding of hoofs

through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered

the latest move of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith

could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness

of the night had become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were

one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the

gauntlet on her hand. The horse below resumed its stumbling gait.

Judith crowded Dolly close to the rocky wall. If the chance comrade of

the wilderness should pass her by in the darkness—God speed him!

“What the devil are you blocking the trail for?” sung out a voice from

the darkness. At sound of it Judith’s heart stopped beating. The voice

was Peter Hamilton’s.

XI.

The Cabin In The Valley

And Judith, taken unawares by the unexpected turn of things, comforted

as a lost child that is found, told all her feeling for him in the way

she called his name. The easy tenderness of the man awoke; his senses

swayed to the magic of her voice, the mystery of the night, the shadow

world in which they two, ’twixt earth and sky, were alone. They rode

without speaking. Peter’s hand sought hers, and all her woman’s terror

of the desolation, her fear of the vague terrors of the dreadful night,

spoke in her answering pressure. It was as if the desert had given them

to each other as they groped through the silent darkness. In the great

company of earth, sky, silence, and this great-hearted woman, Peter

grew conscious of a real thrill. There were depths to life—vast, still

depths; this woman’s unselfish love for him made him realize them. He

felt his soul sweeping out on the great tide of things. Farther and

farther it swept; his patron saint, caution, beckoning frantically from

the receding shore, was miles behind. “Judith!” he said, and he scarce

recognized his own voice. “Judith!” he struggled as a swimmer in a

drowning clutch. Then his patron saint threw him a life-line and he

saved the situation.

“Judith!” he said, a third time, and now he knew his voice. It was the

voice of the man who tilted at life picturesquely in a broad-brimmed

hat, who loved his darling griefs and fitted them as a Rembrandt fits

its background. And still, in the same voice, the voice he knew, he

said: “I feel as if we had died and our souls were meeting. You know

Aldrich’s exquisite lines:

“Somewhere in desolate, wind-swept space,

In twilight land—no man’s land—

Two hurrying shapes met face to face

And bade each other stand.

“‘And who are you?’ cried one, agape,

Shuddering in the gloaming light.

I know not,’ said the other shape,

‘I only died last night.’”

“‘I only died last night!’” she repeated the line, slowly,

significantly. In her questioning she forgot the night, the desolation,

the presence of the man. Had she died last night? Had youth, the joy of

living, her infinite capacity for love, had they died when Peter, with

the ugly haste of the man without a nice sense of the time that should

elapse between the old and the new love, had spurred away cheerfully at

the beck of another woman? And now the desert, this earth-mother as she

called it, in the Indian way, had given him back to her, thrown them

together as driftwood in the still ocean of space. She drew a long

breath, the breath of one waking from an anguished dream. A wild,

unreasoning gladness woke in her heart, the joy of living swept her

back again to life. She had not died last night, she was riding through

the wilderness with Peter.

“Look!” she whispered. The sky had lost its forbidding blackness. The

sharp notches of the mountains, faintly outlined in white, undulated

through an eternity of space. Venus hung in the west, burning softly as

a shaded lamp. The trail they climbed seemed to end in her pale yellow

light.

Peter had saved the situation, but the wild beauty of the night stirred

in him that gift of silvery speech that was ever his tribute to the

sex, rather than the woman. He bent towards Judith. A loosened strand

of her hair blew across his cheek. The breakneck ride to Kitty was

already the madness of a dead and gone incarnation. He pointed to the

pale star, and told her it was the omen of their destiny; the formless

blackness through which they had groped was the way of life, but for

such as were not condemned to eternal darkness Venus held high her lamp

and they scaled the heights.

And Judith, listening, found her heart a battle-field of love and hate.

“Were women dogs, that men should play with them in idle moods, caress

them, and fling them out for other toys?” she demanded of herself, even

while the tones of his voice melted her innermost being to thankfulness

for this hour that he was wholly hers.

Gayly, with ready turns of speech and snatches of song, trolled in his

musical barytone, Peter rode through the night, even as he rode through

life, a Sir Knight of the Joyous Heart, unbrushed by the wing of

sorrow, loving his pale griefs for the values they gave the picture.

And Judith understood by reason of that exquisite perception that was

hers in all matters pertaining to him, and, knowing, only loved the

more.

Down the valley came the sharp yelp of a coyote, and in a moment the

towering crags had taken it up, the echo repeating it and giving it

back to the valley, where the coyote barked again at the shadow of his

voice. The night was full of the eerie laughter. Peter put a

restraining hand on Dolly’s bridle, and, waiting for the coyote to

stop, called Judith’s name, and all the mountains made music of it. The

echo sang the old Hebrew name as if it had been a psalm. Peter’s voice

gave it to the mountains joyously, but the mountains gave it back in

the minor. And Judith was reminded of the soft, singing syllables that

her mother, in the Indian way, had made of her daughter’s Indian name.

The remembrance tugged at her heart. In her joy at seeing Peter she had

forgotten that the errand that had brought her was an errand of life

and death—life and death for her brother!

But Peter’s ready enthusiasms pressed him hard. Surely love-making was

the business of such a night. “Ah, Judith, goddess of the heights, if I

could sing your name like the mountains, would you love me a little?”

For his pains he had a flash of white teeth in a smile that recalled

his first acquaintance with Kitty, the sort of smile one would give to

a “nice boy” when his manœuvres were a trifle obvious. “Not if you sang

my name as the chorus of all the Himalayas and the Rockies and Andes,

and with the fire of all their volcanoes and the beauty of their snows

and the strength of all their hills, for it’s not my way to love a

little!”

He bent towards her; to brush her cheek lightly as they rode was but to

imply his appreciation of the scene as a bit of chiaroscuro, the

panorama of the desert night, eternal romance typified by the man and

woman scaling the heights, the goddess of love lighting them on their

way by her flaming torch. But Judith, who said little because she felt

much, was in no mood to brook such dalliance, and, urging the mare

sharply, she cantered down the divide at peril of life and limb. Peter,

cursing the heavy-footed beast he rode, came stumbling after.

Judith rode wildly through the night, leaving Peter laps behind, to

beseech, to prophesy dire happening if she should slip, and to scramble

after, as best he might, on the heavy-footed beast he repudiated, with

all his ancestors, as oxen, to the fourth generation. But the woman

kept her pace. She had stern questions to put to herself, and they were

likely to have truer answers if Peter were elsewhere than riding beside

her. Whither was he going? They had met casually on a trail known to

few honest men. It led over a spur of the Wind River to a sort of no

man’s land, the hiding-place of horse and cattle thieves. She had gone

to warn her brother. Could he be going there—She could not bring

herself to finish.

Her heart was divided against itself. Within it were fought again the

red and the white man’s battles, bitterly, and to the finish. And now

the white man, with his open warfare, won, and all her love rose up and

scourged her little faith. She would wait on the trail for Peter,

penitent and ashamed. And while she waited suspicions bred of her

Indian blood stirred distrustfully, and she told herself that her

mother’s daughter made a worthy champion of the ways of white men. Did

Hamilton hunt her brother gallowsward, making merry with her the

meantime? He had not even been courteously concerned as to where she

was going when they met on the divide. They had met and ridden together

as casually as if it had been the most natural thing for them both to

be taking the horse-thief trail as a summer evening’s ride. And she had

not thought to wonder at his possible destination, when the man from

whom she rode in terror through the night proved to be Peter, because

the lesser question of his errand had been swallowed up in the greater

miracle of his presence.

She was by this time well down the divide. The temperature had risen

perceptibly on the down grade. The heat of the plains had already

mingled with the cool hill air; the heights, where Venus kept her love

vigil, were already past. Judith gave Dolly a breathing spell, herself

lounging easily meanwhile. She knew how to take her ease in the saddle

as well as any cow-puncher on the range.

“The Hayoka has dominion over me,” she mused, with Indian fatalism. “As

well resign myself to sorrow with dignity. Hayoka, Hayo—ka!” and she

began to croon softly a hymn of propitiation to the Hayoka, the Sioux

god of contrariety. According to the legends, he sat naked and fanned

himself in a Dakota blizzard and huddled, shivering, over a fire in the

heat of summer. Likewise the Hayoka cried for joy and laughed for

sorrow.

She remembered how the nuns at Santa Fé had been shocked at her for

praying to Indian gods, and how once she had built a little mound of

stones, which was the Sioux way of making petition, in the shadow of

the statue of the Virgin Mary, and how Sister Angela had scattered the

stones and told her to pray instead to the Blessed Lady. She still

prayed to the Blessed Lady every day; but sometimes, too, she reared

little mounds of stones in the desert when she was very sad and the

kinship between her and the dead gods of her mother’s people seemed the

closer for their common sorrow.

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

Indian song.

“Sing him a verse for me, Judith. Heaven knows I need something to

straighten out my infernal luck. Tell the Hayoka that I’m a good fellow

and need only half a chance. Tell him to prosper my present venture.”

She had begun to chant the invocation, then stopped suddenly. “I must

not; you know I am a Catholic.” Suspicion that had been scotched, not

killed, raised its head. “What was his present venture?” Her eye had

not changed in expression, nor a tone of her voice, but in her heart

was a sickening distrust for all things.

A belated moon had come up. The level plain, on which their horses

threw grotesque, elongated shadows, was flooded with honey-colored

light. Each straggling clump of sage-brush, whitening bone and bowlder,

gleamed mysterious, ghostly in the radiant flood-tide. They seemed to

be riding through a world that had no kinship with that black, formless

void through which they had groped but yet a little while. Then

darkness had been upon the face of the deep. Now there was a miracle of

light such as only the desert, in its desolation, knows. To Judith,

with a soul attuned to every passing expression of nature, there was

significance in this transition from darkness to light. The sudden

radiance was emblematic of her belated perception, coming as it did

after a blindness so dense as to appear almost wilful. Her mind was

busy with a multitude of schemes. Fool though she had been, she would

not be the instrument of her brother’s undoing.

“I’ve come too far,” she cried, in sudden dismay. “I should have

stopped at the foot of the divide. I’ve never been over the trail

before.”

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

wilderness?”

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

resolution.

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

With which she cracked Dolly sharply with her heel and began to retrace

her way over the trail. Peter turned his horse and followed, with the

feeling of utter helplessness that a man has when confronted with the

granite obstinacy of women. Judith had meanwhile expected that the

announcement of her mythical appointment with Tom Lorimer would be

received differently. Tom Lorimer’s reputation was of the worst. An

Eastern man formerly, an absconder from justice, rumor was busy with

tales of ungodly merrymaking that went on at his ranch, where no woman

went except painted wisps from the dance-halls. But Peter was too loyal

a friend, despite his shortcomings as a lover, to see in Judith’s

statement anything more than a sisterly devotion so deeply unselfish

that it failed to take into account the danger to which she subjected

herself.

However, it was plainly his duty to prevent an unprotected rendezvous

with Lorimer, to reason, to plead, and, if he should fail to bring her

to a reasonable frame of mind, to go with her, come what would of the

result. There were reasons innumerable why he, a cattle-man, should

avoid the appearance of dealing with the sheep faction, he reflected,

grimly. Lorimer owned sheep, many thousand head. His herds had been

allowed to graze unmolested, while smaller owners, like Jim Rodney, had

been crowded out because his influence, politically, was a thing to be

reckoned with. So Peter followed Judith, pleading Judith’s cause; she

did not understand, he told her, what she was doing; and while perhaps

there was not another man in the country who would not honor her

unselfishness in coming to him, Lorimer’s chivalry was not a thing to

be reckoned with, drunken beast that he was. And Judith, worn with the

struggle, tried beyond measure, made reckless by the daily infusion of

ill-fortune, pulled up the mare and laughed unpleasantly.

“You think I’m going to see Lorimer about Jim? I’m going with him to a

merrymaking. We’re old pals, Lorimer and I.”

“Judith, dear, has it come to this, that you not only distrust an old

friend, but that you try to degrade yourself to hide from him the fact

that you are going to your brother’s? You’ve never spoken to Lorimer. I

heard him say, not a week ago, that he had never succeeded in making

you recognize him. You deceived me at first when you spoke of meeting

him—I thought you had a message from Jim—but this talk of merrymaking

is beneath you.” He shrugged his shoulders in disgust. He felt the

torrent of grief that rent her. No sob escaped her lips; there was no

convulsive movement of shoulder. She rode beside him, still as the

desert before the sand-storm breaks, her soul seared with white-hot

iron that knows no saving grace of sob or tear. She rode as Boadicea

might have ridden to battle; there was not a yielding line in her body.

But over and over in her woman’s heart there rang the cry: “I am so

tired! If the long night would but come!”

Peter drew out his watch. “It’s a quarter to eleven. We’ll have a hard

bit of riding to reach Blind Creek before midnight.”

Then he knew as well as she, perhaps better, the route to Jim’s

hiding-place; she had never been there as yet. And if Peter knew,

doubtless every cattle-man in the country knew. What a fool she had

been with her talk of meeting Tom Lorimer! A sense of utter defeat

seemed to paralyze her energies. She felt like a trapped thing that

after eluding its pursuers again and again finds that it has been but

running about a corral. Physical weariness was telling on her. She had

been in the saddle since a little past noon and it was now not far from

midnight. And still there was the unanswered question of Peter’s

errand. It was long since either had broken the silence. A delicious

coolness had crept into the air with the approach of midnight. Judith,

breathing deep draughts of it, reminded herself of the stoicism that

was hers by birthright.

“Peter”—her voice lost some of its old ring, but it had a deeper

note—“Peter, we make strange comrades, you and I, in a stranger world.

We meet on Horse-Thief Trail, and there is reason to suppose that our

errands are inimical. You’ve pierced all my little pretences; you know

that I am going to my brother, who is an outlaw—my brother, the rope

for whose hanging is already cut. And yet we have been friends these

many years, and we meet in this world of desolation and weigh each

other’s words, and there is no trust in our hearts. Our little faith is

more pitiful than the cruel errands that bring us. I take it you, too,

are going to my brother’s?”

“I’m going there to see that you arrive safe and sound, but I had no

intention of going when I left camp. You’ve brought me a good twenty

miles out of my way, not to mention accusing me of ulterior motives.

Now, aren’t you penitent?” He smiled at her, boyish and irresistible.

To Judith it was more reassuring than an oath. “It’s like dogs fighting

over a picked bone; the meat’s all gone. The range is overworked; it

needs a good, long rest.” He turned towards Judith, speaking slowly.

“What you have said is true. We’re friends before we’re partisans of

either faction. I’m on my way to a round-up. There’s been an unexpected

order to fill a beef contract—a thousand steers. We’re going to furnish

five hundred, the XXX two hundred and fifty, and the “Circle-Star” two

hundred and fifty. Men have been scouring the enemy’s country for days

rounding up stragglers. It will go hard with the rustlers after this

round-up, Judith.”

She felt a great wave of penitence and shame sweep over her. She had

not trusted him; in her heart she had nourished hideous suspicions of

him, and he was telling her, quite simply, of the plans of his own

faction, trusting her, as, indeed, he might, but as she never expected

to be trusted.

“Peter, do you know that sometimes I think Jim has gone quite mad with

these range troubles. He’s acted strangely ever since his sheep were

driven over the cliff. He’s not been home to Alida and the children

since he has been out of jail, and you know how devoted to them he has

always been! He spends all his time tracking Simpson. Alida wrote me

that she expects him to-night, and I’m going there on the chance.”