Simpson, the origin of whose connection with the “XXX” was rather a

sensitive subject with that outfit, had begun to take his duties as a

cattle-man with grim seriousness; he was untiring in his labors; he

spent long hours in the saddle, he took his turn at night herding,

though he was old for this kind of work. He condemned the sheep-men

with foul-mouthed denunciations, scoffed at their range-rights, said

the sheep question should be dealt with in the business-like manner in

which the Indian question had been settled. He was an advocate of

violence—in short, a swaggering, bombastic wind-bag. He talked much of

“his outfit” and “his men.” “What was good enough for them was good

enough for him,” he would announce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone,

when the food happened to be particularly bad. He split the temporary

outfit, brought together for the purpose of handling the beef-herd,

into factions. He put the “XXX” in worse repute than it already

enjoyed—he was, in fact, the discordant spirit of the expedition. The

men attended to their work sullenly. Discord was rife. The one thought

they shared in common was that of the wages that would come to them at

the end of the drive; of the feverish joy of “blowing in,” in a single

night; perchance, of forgetting, in one long, riotous evening, the

monotony, the hardship, the lack of comradery that made this particular

drive one long to be remembered in the mind of every man who had taken

part in it.

Meanwhile the herd trailed its half-mile length to the slaughtering

pens day after day, all unconscious of its power. When the steers had

trailed for about a fortnight, the question of finding sufficient water

for them began to be a serious one. The preceding winter had been

unusually mild, the snow-fall on the mountains averaging less than in

the recollection of the oldest plains-man. Summer had begun early and

waxed hot and dry. The earth began to wrinkle, and cracked into

trenches, like gaping mouths, thirsty for the water that came not. Such

streams as had not dried shrank and crawled among the willows like

slimy things, that the herd, thirsty though it was from the long

drives, had to be coaxed to drink from.

Discontent grew. The acting foreman, who was a “XXX” man, and a

comparative stranger to that part of the country, refused to consult

with the “W-square” men in the outfit, who knew every inch of the

ground. The acting foreman thought the Wetmore men looked down on him,

“put on dog”; and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven

due west instead of skirting to the north by the longer route, where

they would have had the advantage of drinking at several creeks before

crossing Green River. Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard,

and he insisted upon his order in spite of the Wetmore men’s

protestations.

The character of the country began to change, the soil took on the

color of blood, even the omnipresent sage-brush began to fail the

landscape; sun-bleached bones glistened on the red soil, white as

ulcers. All the animal trails led back from the country into which they

were proceeding. The sky, a vivid, cloudless blue, paled as it dipped

earthward. The sun looked down, a flaming copper shield. There was no

sign of life in all the land. Even the grasshoppers had left it to the

sun, the silence, and the desolation. To ears accustomed to the

incessant shrilling of the insects, the cessation was ominous, like the

sudden stopping of a clock in a chamber of death. Above the angry

bellow of the thirsty herd the men strained their ears again and again

for this familiar sound of life, but there was nothing but the

bellowing of the cattle, the trampling of their hoofs, and sometimes

the long, squealing whinny of a horse as he threw back his head in

seeming demand to know the justice of this thing.

Across the red plain snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric

reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A

cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a

weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a

thousand steers, a handful of men and horses, in the land of the red

silence? It had seen the comings and goings of many peoples, and once

it had flowed with streams; but that was before the curse of God came

upon it, and in its harsh, dry barrenness it grew to be a menace to

living things.

The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had

scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had

weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for

thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as

rapidly as the enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit.

Creek after creek that they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.

The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun,

tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red

plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over

which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing

its tortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as a

fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen,

perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper’s bed. Sometimes the

dragon curled itself into a ball, and the foreman sung out that they

were milling, and the men turned and rode away from it, then dashed

back at it, after getting the necessary momentum, entered like a flying

wedge, fought their way into the rocking sea of surging bodies, shouted

from their thirst-parched throats imprecations that were lost in the

dull, sullen roar. Then the dragon would uncoil and again trail its way

over the red waste-lands.

A red sun had begun to set over a red earth, and the men who had been

out since noon-scouring the country for water, returned to say that

none had been found, and they began to look into each other’s faces for

the answer that none could give. At sunset they made a dry camp; there

was but enough water left to cook with. Each man received, as a

thirst-quenching ration, a can of tomatoes. After supper they

consulted, and it was agreed to trail the herd till midnight, taking

advantage of the coolness to hurry them on as fast as possible to Green

River. The grave nature of their plight was indicated by the fact that

no one smoked after supper. Silent, sullen, they sat round, waiting for

the foreman to give the order to advance. He waited for the moon to

come up. Slowly it rose over the Bad Land Hills and hung round and full

like a gigantic lantern. The watches were arranged for the night with a

double guard. Every man in the outfit was beginning to have a feeling

of panic that communicated itself to every other man, and as they

looked at the herd, tractable now no longer, but a blind force that

they must take chances with through the long watches of the night,

while the thirst grew in the beasts’ parched throats, they foresaw what

would in all probability happen; they thought of their women, of all

that most strongly bound them to life, and they sat and waited dumbly.

The moon that night was too brilliant for benisons; the gaunt, red

world lay naked and unshriven for the sin that long ago had brought

upon it the wrath of God. The picture was still that of the grotesque

Chinese screen, with the headless dragon crawling endlessly; but the

dream was long, centuries long, it seemed to the men listening to the

bellowing of the herd. And while they waited, the red grew dull and the

dragon dingy, and its fury made its contortions the more horrible; and

that was all the difference between day and night in the land of the

red silence. Sometimes the dragon split, and joints of it tried to turn

back to the last water it had drunk; for cattle, though blinded with

thirst, never forget the last stream at which they have quenched

thirst, and will turn back to it, though they drop on the way. But the

men pressed them farther and farther, and for yet a little while the

cattle yielded.

At midnight the saddle-stock was incapable of moving farther. One horse

had fallen and lay too weak to rise. The others, limping and foot-sore,

no longer responded to quirt and rowel. The foreman ordered the herd

thrown on the bed ground for the night. The herders for the first watch

began to circle. The rest of the outfit took to its blankets to snatch

a little rest for the double duty that awaited every man that night.

Now it is a time-honored belief among cow-men that the herd must be

sung to, particularly when it is restless, and to-night they tried all

the old favorites, the “Cow-boy’s Lament” being chief among them. But

the herd refused to be soothed, and round and round it circled; not

once would it lie down.

The moon gleamed almost brazen, showing the cruel scars, the trenches

torn by cloud-bursts, the lines wrought by the long, patient waiting of

the earth for the lifting of the wrath of God. Imperishable grief was

writ on the land as on a human face. The night wore on, the watches

changed, the herd continued restless; not more than a third of it had

bedded down. The third watch was from one o’clock to half-past three in

the morning. Simpson and another “XXX” man, with two of the Wetmore

outfit, made up a double watch, and rode, singing, about the herd, as

the long, dreary watch wore away. The cattle’s lowing had taken on a

gasping, cracked sound that was more frightful than the maddened bellow

of the early evening. Simpson, who was past the age when men live the

life of the saddle, felt the hardship keenly. He had ridden since

sunrise, but for the respite at noon and the scant time at the dry camp

while the evening meal was being eaten. He was more than half asleep

now, as he lurched heavily in the saddle, crossing and recrossing his

partner in the half-circle they completed about the herd. Suddenly the

sharp yelp of a coyote rang out; it seemed to come from no farther than

twenty yards away. The cattle heard it, too, and a wave of panic swept

through them. Simpson stiffened in his saddle. The sound, which was

repeated, was an exact reproduction of a coyote’s yelp, yet he knew

that it was not a coyote.

The herd rose to its feet as a single steer, and for a second stood

undetermined. From a clump of sage-brush not more than two feet high

fluttered something long and white like a sheet. It waved in the wind

as the cry was repeated. The herd crashed forward in a stampede,

Simpson in the lead on a tired horse, but a scant length ahead of a

thousand maddened steers bolting in a panic of thirst and fear.

“Hell’s loose!” yelled the men in their blankets, making for the

temporary rope corral to secure horses. Simpson, tallow-colored with

fear, clung like a cat to his horse, and dug the rowels in the beast’s

flanks till they were bloody and dripping. He had seen Jim Rodney’s

face above the white cloth as it fluttered in the face of the herd that

came pounding behind him with the rumble of nearing thunder. He was too

close to them to attempt to fire his revolver in the air in the hope of

turning them, but the boys had evidently got into their saddles, to

judge by the volley of shots that rang out and were answered. Simpson

alone rode ahead of the herd that tore after him, ripping up the earth

as it came, bellowing in its blind fury. His horse, a thoroughly

seasoned cow-pony, sniffed the bedlam and responded to the goading

spur. She had been in cattle stampedes before, and, though every fibre

ached with fatigue, she flattened out her lean body and covered ground

to the length of her stride at each gallop. The herd was so close that

Simpson could smell the stench of their sweating bodies, taste their

dust, and feel the scorch of their breath. The sound of their hoofs was

like the pounding of a thousand propellers. From above looked the moon,

round and serene; she had watched the passing of many peoples in the

land of the red silence. The horse seemed to be gaining. A few more

lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one side and let the

maddened cattle race to their own destruction. All he asked of God was

to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug the rowel

and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; the chorus

of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the pound,

pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.

Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly. “God! What is

it?” as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole. “Up, up,

you damned brute!” but the mare’s leg had cracked like a pipe-stem. In

his fury at the beast Simpson began kicking her, then started to run as

the cattle swept forward like a black storm-cloud.

The next second the great sea of cattle had broken over horse and

rider. When it had passed there was not enough left of either to

warrant burial or to furnish a feast for the buzzards. A few shreds of

clothes, that had once been a man, lay scattered there; a something

that had been a horse.

XVII.

Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst

The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent

with her habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were

involved. Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the

experience of moving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the

delay, and could only explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett

received reports of the dearth of pasturage on the ground that she

wished each fresh educational germ to take as deep root as possible

before transplantation. So that when Mrs. Yellett, shortly after

Leander Dax’s arrival at camp in the capacity of herder, announced that

she and Leander were to make a trip to the dipping-vat that had kept

Ben from his classes for the past ten days, and invited the “gov’ment”

to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.

The Yelletts’ “bunch” of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and

the matriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that

number, as she wished always to give the flock her personal

supervision.

“‘The hen that’s the surest of her chicks is the one that does her own

settin’,’” was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellett

succinctly summed up the case.

Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to

the market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the

matriarch had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in

Wyoming. Often she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the

wonders of this new world with remarkable aptness, that she had

constantly to fight against the inclination to increase her business of

sheep-raising, but that as soon as she should begin to hire herders or

depend on strangers things would go wrong. With the assistance of her

sons, she therefore managed the entire details of the herd, with the

exception of those occasions on which Leander lent his

semi-professional co-operation.

As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness,

surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological

doctrine that Mrs. Dax’s husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed

from his wife’s masterful presence, Leander dared to be an “agnostic,”

as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His

iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw’s gusty protests against life

in general, but it was Leander’s way of asserting himself, on the rare

occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet

advanced by every religion. The mere use of certain familiar expletives

drove him, ordinarily mild and submissive though he was, to frantic

gesticulation and diatribe. Mary Carmichael could not make out, as she

watched the comedy with growing amusement, whether poor Leander really

believed that he was the first of doubting Thomases, or whether he took

an unfair advantage of the lack of general information in his casual

audiences to set forth well-known opinions as his own. Whatever its

basis may have been, Leander sustained the rôle of doubter with

passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of rage and hoarseness over

arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by cow-punchers and

sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw the traps,

going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling headlong

into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale

constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from

food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.

“The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue

that Jonah never come out of the whale’s belly,” the matriarch had told

Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander’s disadvantages as a herder. And

the first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: “Leander

Dax, you’d have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from

bein’ a infidel, but there’s one p’int on which you are particularly

locoed, and that’s Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in

the hist’ry of the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no

call to fret hisself over Jonah and his whereabouts—none whatever.

There’s a lot of business round this here camp that’s a heap more

pressin’. Now, Leander Dax, if I do hereby undertake to hire, engage,

and employ you to herd sheep, do you agree to renounce discussions,

arguments, and debates on the late Jonah and his whereabouts durin’

them three days? God A’mighty, man, any one would think you was Jonah’s

wife, the interest you have in his absence!”

“I come here to herd sheep,” Leander had brazenly retaliated. “I ’ain’t

come to try to make you think.”

Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the

journey to the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon

was the rudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout

pole. Though she saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary

Carmichael, discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to

ask where she was going to sit, and listened with interest to a

discussion between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses

it would take to get the dip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp

and splendor, was for taking six, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried

simplicity to a fault, was in favor of only two. They finally

compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch the extra two.

Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage of

the delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of “Brainard’s Beneficial

Blackthorn.”

“Paw’s as hard to manage as a bent pin,” she remarked, in an aside to

Mary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she,

with the agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head

under her arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, if

beneficial, dose.

“There, there, paw,” she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a

baby, “don’t take on so! It’s all gone, and I can’t have you sick on my

hands.”

But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent

language, whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with

a drink of condensed-milk and water, “to wash down the nasty taste,”

she told him, soothingly.

A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels

of sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while

Mrs. Yellett looked doubtfully at a “gov’ment” who could not handle

barrels. Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and

Leander, the long pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral

column, from which huge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at

the rear a foot or so of bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing

about the same proportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a

fox-terrier does to the dog.

Mrs. Yellett kissed “paw” good-bye, explaining to Mary, in extenuation

of her weakness, that she would never forgive herself if she neglected

it and anything happened to him during her absence. She then climbed to

the front barrel and secured the ribbons. Leander had brought out three

rolls of bedding of the inevitable bed-quilt variety, but Mrs. Yellett

scorned such luxury while driving, and accordingly gave hers to the

“gov’ment” for a back-rest. Mary sat on the lower row of barrels, with

her feet dangling, using one roll of bedding for a seat and the other

comfortably arranged at her back as a cushion.

Madam called sharply to the horses, “Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat-kerat!”

and they started off at a rattling pace, the barrels of dip creaking

and squeaking as they swayed under their rope lashings. Mary bounced

about like a bean in a bag, working loose from between the bed-quilt

rolls at each gulley, clinging frantically to barrel ends, shaken back

and forth like a shuttle. Indeed, the drive seemed to combine every

known form of physical exercise. Mrs. Yellett herself was in fine

fettle; she drove sitting for a while, then rose, standing on a narrow

ledge while she held the four ribbons lightly in one hand and tickled

the leaders with a long whip carried in the other. She drove her four

horses over the rough road with the skill of a circus equestrienne,

balancing easily on the crazy ledge, shifting her weight from side to

side as the wagon rattled down gullies and up ridges, the horses

responding gallantly to the shrill “Hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat! hi-kerat!”

Her costume on this occasion represented joint concessions to her sex

and the work that was before her, as the head of a family at the

dipping-vat. She still wore the drum-shaped rabbit-skin cap pulled well

down over her forehead for driving. The great, cable-like braids of

hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head an appearance of

denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were still blowing about

her face, perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness. She wore a

man’s shirt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from which the

bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr.

Yellett’s trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher’s boots, that met

the hem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the

originality of her dress.

The wagon had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert

dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became

conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in

her back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the

freight carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch

of the wagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the

peril of life and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of

barrels, gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving

camp some two hours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have

shrivelled away to a wraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin,

had waned to the vanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed

horribly, yet his frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called

to Mrs. Yellett, but her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon,

the clatter of four horses’ hoofs, and the continual “Hi-hi-hi-kerat!

hi-kerat!” of the driver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth

and back to the road in indescribably pathetic pantomime. “Perhaps the

poor creature wants to turn back and die in his bed, like a Christian,

even if he isn’t one,” thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander

still emitting the most inhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf

mutes in distress. Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the

name of many profane things what was the matter with her companions.

Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett

proved a better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.

“God A’mighty!” she said, “he’s lost his false teeth!” And without

another word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that

fell little short of sleight-of-hand.

The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how

far back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the

inadequacy of the English language to reproduce his toothless

enunciation. Catching, as Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett’s

remarks only, she received something of the one-sided impression given

by overhearing a telephone conversation:

“What did you have ’em out for?... You didn’t have ’em out?... I just

shook ’em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth

had been shut, you couldn’t have lost ’em.... You was a-yawnin’, eh?

Well, you are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your

mouth full o’ china teeth. Your yawnin’ ’ll put us back a good hour an’

we won’t reach camp before sundown.”

At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to

search along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the

place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them

by this landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary

get down “and help to prospect for them teeth.” As Mary clambered down

she heard a fragment of the matriarch’s monologue, which, being duly

expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather

take ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in

the way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally

speaking, man had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.

“Talk about a woman bein’ at the bottom of everything!” sniffed Mrs.

Yellett; “I be so sick of always hearin’ about ‘the woman in the case!’

Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left

exclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: ‘A skunk may have his

good p’ints, but few folks is takin’ the risk of waitin’ round to get

acquainted with ’em.’”

While Mary was still “prospecting,” a glad cry roused her attention,

and Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.

“Quit smilin’ like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!” called out Mrs.

Yellett. “Do you want to lose ’em again?”

So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the

Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was

resumed.

It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had been

oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly

penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some

unknown quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to

the marrow. The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and

plunging as if they had scent of something menacing. Across the horizon

a dark cloud scudded, no bigger than your hand.

“Cloud-burst!” announced Mrs. Yellett.

“Cloud-burst, all right enough,” agreed Leander, and he turned up his

coat-collar in simple preparation for the deluge.

There flashed into Mary Carmichael’s mind a sentence from her physical

geography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her

school-days: “A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the

whole cloud had been precipitated at once.” She wanted to question her

companions as to the accuracy of this definition, but before she had

time to frame a sentence the real cloud-burst came, with a splitting

crack of thunder; then the lightning flashed out its message in the

short-hand of the storm, across the inky blackness, and the water fell

as if the ocean had been inverted. In the fraction of a second all

three were drenched to the skin, the water pouring from them in sheets,

as if they had been some slight obstruction in the path of a waterfall.

The wagon was soon in a deep gully, with frothing, foaming, yellow

water up to the hubs of the wheels. Mrs. Yellett, like some goddess of

the storm, lashed her horses forward to keep them from foundering in

the mud, and the wagon creaked and groaned in all its timbers as it

lurched and jolted through the angry torrents.

Each moment Mary expected to be flung from the barrels, and clung till

her finger-tips were white and aching. From the drenched red bedquilts

a sticky crimson trail ran over the barrel heads, as well as over

Mary’s hands, face, and dress. Still they forged on through the deluge,

Mrs. Yellett shouting and lashing the horses, holding them erect and

safe with the skill she never lost. The fur on her rabbit-skin cap was

beaten flat. The great, wet braids had fallen from the force of the

water and hung straight and black, like huge snakes uncoiled. She was

far from losing her grip on either the horses or the situation, and

from the inspiring ring of her voice as she urged them forward it was

plain that she took a fierce joy in this conflict of the elements.

It was bitterly cold, and Mary reflected that if Leander’s teeth

chattered half as hard as hers did, without breaking, they must,

indeed, be of excellent quality. The storm began to abate, and the sky

became lighter, though the water still poured in torrents. As soon as

her responsibility as driver left her time to speak, Mrs. Yellett lost

no time in fastening the cloud-burst to Leander.

“This here is what comes of settin’ up your back against God A’mighty

and encouragin’ the heathen and the infidel in his idolatry. I might

’a’ knowed somethin’ would happen, takin’ you along! ‘And the heathen

and the infidel went out, and the Lord God sent a cloud-burst to wet

him,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett from the apocryphal Scriptures that never

yet failed to furnish her with verse and text.

The infidel, from his side of the wagon, began to display agitation.

His jaws worked, but he said nothing.

“You ’ain’t lost them teeth again, have you?”

He nodded his head wretchedly.

“‘And the Lord took away the teeth of his enemy, so that he could

neither bite nor talk,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett to the miserable man, who

could make no reply.

“Wonder you wouldn’t see the foolishness o’ being a heathen and a

infidel, and turn to the Lord! You ’ain’t got no teeth, and it takes

your wife to herd you. ‘And the Lord multiplied the tribulations of his

enemy.’ You got no more show standin’ up agin the Lord than an insect

would have standin’ up agin me.”

She had Leander, at last, just where she wanted him. He was forced to

listen, and he could make no reply. She alternately abused him for his

lack of faith and urged him to repentance. Leander raged, gesticulated,

turned his back on her, mouthed, and finally put his fingers in his

ears. But nothing stemmed the tide of Mrs. Yellett’s eloquence; it was

as inexhaustible and as remorseless as the cloud-burst.

It continued bitterly cold, even after the rain had stopped falling,

and the heap of sodden bedclothes furnished no protection against the

chilling dampness. It was growing dark; there was no red in the sunset,

only a streak of vivid orange along the horizon, chill and clear as the

empty, soulless flame of burning paper. There were no deep, glowing

coals, no amethystine opalescence, fading into gold and violet. All was

cold and subdued, and the scrub pines on the mountain-tops stood out

sharply against this cold background like an etching on yellow paper.

Mrs. Yellett’s self-inspired scriptural maxims were discontinued after

a while, either because she could think of no more, or because the

rain-soaked, shivering, chattering object towards which they were

directed was too abject to inspire further efforts. Leander huddled on

the barrel that was farthest from Mrs. Yellett, and wrapped himself in

the soaked red bedquilt. The dye smeared his face till he looked like

an Indian brave ready for battle, but there was no further suggestion

of the fighting red man in the utter desolation of his attitude. Mary

Carmichael, on her barrel, shivered with grim patience and longed for a

cup of tea. Only Mrs. Yellett gave no sign of anxiety or discomfort;

she drove along, sometimes whistling, sometimes swearing, erect as an

Indian, and to all appearances as oblivious of cold and wet as if she

were in her own home.

The gathering darkness into which the horses were plunging was

mysterious and appalling. Objects stood out enormously magnified, or

distorted grotesquely, in the uncertain light. It was like penetrating

into the real Inferno, like stumbling across the inspiration of Dante

in all its sinister splendor. It was the Inferno of his dream rather

than the Inferno of his poem; it had the ghastly reality of the unreal.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if we had a smash-up in Clear Creek,” said

Mrs. Yellett, just by way of adding her quota of cheerful speculation.

She ducked her head and whispered in Mary’s ear:

“It’s all along of me hirin’ _him!_ I wouldn’t be surprised if paw

died. I’m thinkin’ of shakin’ him out after his teeth. ‘Take not up

with the enemy of the Lord, lest he make of you also an enemy.’”

But there was no accent of apprehension in Mrs. Yellett’s dismal

prognostications of the evil that might befall her for employing

Leander. She spoke more with the air of one who produces incidents to

prove an argument than of one who anticipates a calamity.

Leander, toothless and wretched, sitting on the side of the wagon,

began to show symptoms of joy comparable to that of the vanguard of the

Israelites, catching their first glimpse of the Promised Land. Touching

Mary Carmichael on the shoulder, he pointed to a white tent and the

remains of a camp-fire. Already Mrs. Yellett had begun to “Hallo, Ben!”

But Ben was at work at the vat, which was still a quarter of a mile

further up the mountain; so Mrs. Yellett, throwing the reins to Leander

and bidding him turn out the horses, lost no time in building a fire,

putting on coffee, and making her little party comfortable. So various

was her efficiency that she seemed no less at home in these simple

domestic tasks than when guiding her horses, goddess-like, through the

cloud-burst. And Mary Carmichael, succumbing gradually to the

revivifying influence of the fire and the hot coffee, acknowledged

honestly to herself a warmth of affection for her hostess and for the

atmosphere Mrs. Yellett created about her that made even Virginia and

her aunts seem less the only pivot of rational existence. She felt that

she had come West with but one eye, as it were, and countless

prejudices, whereas her powers of vision were fast becoming increased a

hundredfold. How very tame life must be, she reflected, as she sat

smiling to herself, to those who did not know Mrs. Yellett, how

over-serious to those who did not know Leander! Yet, after all, she

knew that the real basis of her readjusted vision was her brief but

illuminating acquaintance with Judith Rodney. To Mary, freed for the

first time in her life from the most elegantly provincial of

surroundings, Judith seemed the incarnation of all the splendor and

heroism of the West. And in the glow of her enthusiasm she decided then

and there not to abandon the Yellett educational problem till she

should have solved it successfully. She might not be born to valiant

achievement, like these sturdy folk about her, but she might as well

prove to them that an Eastern tenderfoot was not all feebleness and

inefficiency.

“Leander!” called Mrs. Yellett. “Just act as if you was to home and

wash up these dishes.”

XVIII.

Foreshadowed

Alida awoke, knowing what was to happen. She had dreamed of it, just

before daylight, and lay in bed stupefied by the horror of it, living,

again and again, through each frightful detail. It had happened—there,

in the very room, and before the children; the noise of it had startled

them; and then she woke and knew she had been dreaming. In the dream

the noise had wakened the children—when it really happened they must

never know. It wouldn’t be fair to them; they needed a “clean start.”

What had she done to keep them quiet? There had been a thunderous

knocking at the door. She had expected it and was prepared; because the

lock was feeble, she had shoved the old brown bureau against the door.

Nothing had happened. What a fool she was to lie there and think of it!

There was the brown bureau against the wall; she could hear the deep

breathing of Jim in the room beyond. Jim had been unequal to the task

of conventionally going to bed the night before, and she had put a

pillow under his head and a quilt over him. She was the last woman in

the world to worry about Jim, drunk, or to nag him for it when sober.

But she didn’t like the children to see him that way.

What was it that she had done to quiet the children when “they” rode

up? She had done something and they had gone to sleep again, and

she—and she—oh no, it hadn’t happened. What a fool she was to lie there

thinking! There were the children to rouse and dress, and breakfast to

cook, and Jim—Jim would be feeling pretty mean this morning; he’d like

a good cup of coffee. She was glad he was alive to make coffee for.

She got up and, in the uncertainty bred of the dream, felt the brown

bureau, felt it hungrily, almost incredulously. The brown bureau had

been pushed against the door when they had come, and knocked and

knocked. Then they had thundered with the butts of their six-shooters,

and the children had wakened, and she had called out to them:

“Sh-sh! It’s only a bad dream. Mammy will give you some dough to bake

to-morrow.”

And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call,

“For God’s sake, don’t wake the children!”

And they had called out, “Let him come out quiet, then.”

And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door—the

weather-beaten door—with its crazy lock that didn’t half catch. The

brown bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded

in. Then she had done something to quiet the children—it was queer that

she could not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream

still lived within her, horribly distinct and real.

What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not

think about it another minute. She began to dress, but her fingers were

heavy, and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency.

Repeatedly she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some

one of the links in that pitiless memory—what they had said to Jim; his

undaunted replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room

because Jim had told her to.

She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with

sleep, did not reassure her.

“Mammy,” said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid

list, the victim of a cactus thorn, “my toe’s all well; can I go

barefoot?”

“Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a

young lady, if you run barefoot now?”

Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her

small feet together and contemplated them. The toe was still

suspiciously inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with

a Spartan courage that won her a place in the annals of household

valor, had the day before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle

the torturing cactus thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the

operation, though afterwards she had taken the piece of dried apple

that was offered her and devoured it to the last bite, as only just

compensation for her sufferings.

“Dimmy dot a tore toe, too.” But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about

offering proofs of his affliction. At the peril of his equilibrium, he

clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over

on the bed in apparent anguish.

“Less see, Jimmy,” asked his mother, anxiously.

“Don’t bleeve him, mammy. He ’ain’t ever cried. He’d a cried, for sure,

if his toe was sore.” At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of

her aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.

“Let mammy see, Jimmy,” and Alida bent over her son and heir.

“Doth Dimmy det any apple?” The wee man sometimes succeeded in making

terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though

feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with

the air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother

squarely in the eyes.

She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted

the horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she

answered him with quiet firmness.

“Jimmy must not tell stories.”

“Less see,” insisted Topeka.

“He dassent,” affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.

“It hurths me,” and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. “It hurths me,

my tore toe!”

His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby

hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by

the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus

thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to

make coffee.

“I with I had a tore toe,” he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery

of his deception. “I with I toud det a tore toe ’thout the hurt.”

But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in

the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go

into the room where their father was sleeping. She went back and found

that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still

regretted that his perfectly well toe did not entitle him to

gastronomic consideration. Topeka, who had arrived at an age where

little girls, in the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no

keener delight than plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till

they present an appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a

peeled onion, put down the brush with guilty haste at sight of her

mother.

“I’m goin’ to dress him soon as I’ve done my hair.”

“Any one think you was goin’ to be married, the time you’ve took to

it.”

“It’s gettin’ so long,” urged Topeka.

“I wouldn’t give it a chance to grow no longer while Jimmy was waitin’

to get dressed. And don’t go into the front room. Your father’s gettin’

his sleep out.”

Topeka opened her round eyes. There was always something suspicious

about that sleep her father had to get out, but she felt it was

something she must not ask questions about. Her mother lingered; she

dreaded to be alone in the kitchen. The little, familiar intimacies

between herself and her children scattered the horrors of the dream

which would come back to her when she was again at the mercy of her

thoughts.

“Judy, s’pose you dress Jimmy this morning! I want Topeka to help me

get breakfast.”

“Yessum,” said Judith, dutifully. “Is he to have his face washed?”

“He certainly is, Judy. I’s ashamed to have you ask such a question.

’Ain’t you all been brought up to have your faces washed?”

But young Judith seemed disinclined to take up this phase of family

superiority. She merely inquired further:

“Is he to have it washed with soap, maw?”

“He shore is. Any one would think you had been born and raised in

Arizony or Nebrasky, to hear you talk. I’m plumb ashamed of you, Judy.”

“But, ’deed, maw, I ain’t big enough to wash his face with soap. It

takes Topeka to hold his head.”

The subject of the discussion still sat on the edge of the bed, a small

lord of creation, letting his women folk arrange among themselves who

should minister to his wants. As an instrument of torture the

washcloth, in the hands of his sister Judy, was no ignoble rival of the

cactus thorn. The question of making terms for his sufferings again

appealed to him in the light of a feasible business proposition.

“Muvvy, tan’t I have the apple? Judy hurts me a lot when she wathes my

face wis soap.”

“Yes, you can have the apple, honey; and, Judy, you be gentle with him.

Don’t rub his features up, and be careful and don’t get soap in his

eyes.”

“No’m.” And Judy heroically stifled the longing to slick her hair, like

Topeka’s, with the wet hairbrush. There were easier tasks than washing

the face of her younger brother.

When Topeka and her mother were alone in the kitchen, Topeka grinding

the coffee and all unconsciously working her jaw in an accompaniment to

the coffee-mill, her mother bent over her and said:

“Did you dream of anything last night?”

Topeka simultaneously stopped working the coffee-mill and her jaw, and

regarded her mother solemnly. She did not remember having been thus

questioned about her dreams before.

“No’m,” she answered, after laborious consideration. But something in

her mother’s face held her.

“You’re sure you didn’t dream nothing?”

“Yes, maw.”

“Did Judy or Jim say that they dreamed anything?”

“Jim said he dreamed he had a pup.”

“Was that all? Think hard, Topeka!”

Topeka held the handle of the coffee-mill in her hand; her jaw

continued to work with the labor of her mental process. “I’ve thought

hard, maw, and all he told was about the pup.”

Alida went back to her bedroom and again felt the brown bureau. “What’s

the matter with me, anyhow? It’s the lonesomeness, and they bein’ agin

Jim the way they are. God, this country’s hard on women and horses!”

When breakfast was over, and young Jim had received the reward of his

valor in presenting a brave face to his ablution, and Judith the reward

of her skill, the evidence of which almost prevented the young martyr

from smiling while he enjoyed his treat, their mother sent them all to

play in the cañon. She told them not to come home till she should come

for them, and if any one should ask about their father, to say that he

was away from home. And this, as well as the mystery of her father’s

“getting his sleep out,” roused some slight apprehension in Topeka, who

was old for her age. They were seldom sent to the cañon to play. Topeka

looked at her mother as she had when questioned about the dream, but

there was no further confidence between them.

“You do as your sister Topeka tells you, and remember what I said about

your papa,” Alida said to the younger children. Jim and Judy clasped

each other’s hands in mute compact at the edict. Their sister Topeka

had a real genius for authority; they were minded all too well when she

swayed the maternal sceptre vicariously.

Alida made fresh coffee for Jim when the children had gone. She made it

carefully; there was this morning, unconsciously, about each little

thing that she did for him, the solemnity of a funeral rite. Struggle

as she would, she could not divest her mind of the conviction that what

she did this day she did for the dead. She would go to the door and

listen to his breathing, and tell herself that she was a fool, then

wring her hands at the remembrance of the dream.

As he tossed, half waking, she heard him groan and curse the cattle-men

with oaths that made her glad she had sent the children from home. Then

she bent over him and woke him from his uneasy slumber.

“Jim, don’t you want me to bathe your head? And here’s some nice, hot

coffee all ready for you.”

Jim woke slowly to a realization of his troubles and his blessings. His

wife was bathing his head with hands that trembled. Not always had she

greeted his indiscretions with such loving forbearance. He noticed,

though his waking faculties were not over-keen, that her face was pale

and frightened, and that her eyes, meeting his, held a dumb,

measureless affection.

“What th’ hell are you babying me for?” But his roughness did not

deceive her woman’s wits. He was not getting the lecture he

anticipated, and this was his way of showing that he was not

embarrassed by her kindness. The morning sunlight was pitilessly frank

in its exposure of the grim pinch of poverty in the mean little room,

but the woman was unconscious of these things; what she saw was that

Jim, the reckless, Jim, the dare-devil terror of the country, Jim, who

had married and settled with her into home-keeping respectability, Jim,

who had struggled with misfortune and fallen, had, young as he was,

lost every look of youth; that hope had gone from his dull eyes, and

that his face had become drawn until the death’s-head grinned beneath

the scant padding of flesh. But he was to-day, as always, the one man

in the world for her. In making a world of their own and reducing their

parents to supplementary consideration, their children, whom she had

sent away that she might be alone with him, had given a different

quality to the love of this pair that had known so many curious

vicissitudes. The responsibilities of parenthood had placed them on a

tenderer, as well as a securer footing; and as she saw his age and

weariness, he recognized hers, and both felt a self-accusing twinge.

“That’s a blamed good cup of coffee,” he said, by way of relieving the

tension that had crept into the situation. “Any one would think you was

settin’ your cap for me ’stead of us being married for years.”

Alida sighed. “It’s better to end than to begin like this,” she said,

in the far-away voice of one who thinks aloud. The word “end” had

slipped out before she realized what she was saying, and the knowledge

haunted her as an omen. She glanced at him quickly, to see if he had

noticed it.

“Why did you say end?” He saw that her eyes were full of tears and

chafed her. “You ain’t thinking of divorcing me, like Mountain Pink

done Bosky?”

“Oh, Jim,” she said, and her face was all aquiver, “I never could

divorce you, no matter what you done.” And then the grim philosophy of

the plains-woman asserted itself. “I never can understand why women

feed their pride on their heart’s blood; it never was my way.”

He did not like to remember that he had given her cause for a way.

“There’s a lot of women as wouldn’t exactly regard me as a Merino, or a

Southdown, either;” he gulped the coffee to ease the tightness in his

throat.

“They’d be women of no judgment, then,” she said, with conviction.

Jim’s head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand. His

profile, sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain

of Sioux blood. He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk

himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl

and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her

woman’s penalty and come into her woman’s kingdom; who had made a man

of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly

gone with him into the wilderness and become an alien and an outcast.

These things unmanned him as the sight of the gallows and the rope for

his hanging could not have done. Shielding himself with an affected

roughness, he asked:

“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve been drinking like a beast

of an Indian, and you give me coffee instead of a tongue-lashing.”

The color had all gone out of her face. She gasped the words:

“Jim, I dreamed it last night—they came for you!”

She cowered at the recollection.

“Did they get me?” he asked. There was no surprise in his tone. He

spoke as one who knew the answer.

“Yes, the children saw. The noise woke them.”

“You mustn’t let ’em see, when—they come. They’ve a right to a fair

start; we didn’t get it, old girl.”

“The children gave it to us,” and she faced him.

“Yes, yes, but we want them to have it from the start, like good

folks.”

They looked into each other’s eyes. The memory of dead and gone madness

twinkled there a moment, then each remembered:

“You must hurry, Jim. You haven’t a moment to lose. I dreamed it was to

be to-night—they’ll come to-night!”

“The game’s all up, old girl! If I had a month I couldn’t get away.

Morrison’s been looking for me over to the Owl Creek Range; he’s

back—Stevens told me yesterday. He’ll be heading here soon. The price

on my head is a strain on friendship.”

“Have the sheep-men gone back on you?”

“Yes, damn them! A thousand dollars is big money, and they’ve had hard

luck!”

“They deserve it; I hope every herd in the State dies of scab.”

“There wasn’t a scabby sheep in our bunch. What a sight they were,

loaded with tallow! There wasn’t one of them that couldn’t have

weathered a blizzard; they could have lived on their own tallow for a

month.”

She tried to divert his attention from his lost flock. When he began to

talk about them the despair of his loss drove him to drink. She was

ground between the millstones of his going or staying. If he stayed

they would come for him; if he went, they would apprehend him before he

was ten miles from the house.

“Jim, we got to think. If there’s a chance in a thousand that you can

get away, you got to take it; if there ain’t, the children mustn’t

know. We got to think it out!”

“There ain’t a chance in a thousand, old girl. There ain’t one in a

million. They’re circling round in the hills out here now, waitin’ for

me, like buzzards waitin’ for the eyes of a dyin’ horse.”

She rocked herself, and the clutching fingers left white marks on her

face, but the eyes that met his glittered tearless:

“Then there ain’t nothing left but to face it like a man?”

“That’s all there be.” He might have been giving an opinion on a matter

in which he had no interest.

“Then there ain’t no use in our having any more talk about it?”

“’Tain’t just what you’d call an agreeable subject,” he answered, with

the sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony

of death.

She was tempted to kiss him—they were not given to demonstrations, this

pair—then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they

anticipated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.

“Do you want your breakfast now?”

“I guess you might bring it along.”

And for the same reason that she refrained from kissing him, she

repressed a desire to wring the neck of a young broiler and cook it for

his breakfast, remembering that she had heard they gave folks pretty

much what they wanted when they wouldn’t want it long. So Jim got his

usual breakfast of bacon, uncooked canned tomatoes, soda-biscuit, and

coffee. She sat with him while he ate, but they spoke no more of “them”

or of how soon “they” might be expected. She told him that young Jim

had pretended that morning that he had a cactus thorn in his foot, so

that he might have a piece of dried apple. And old Jim, in an excess of

parental fondness and pride, said: “The damned little liar, he’ll get

to Congress yet!”

But the children were a dangerous topic for overstrained nerves at this

particular time, so Alida told Jim that she had put the black hen to

set and she thought they’d have some chickens at last. Jim smoked while

Alida washed the dishes, and when Jim’s back was turned she examined

the lock on the door—a good push would open it. Then she looked at the

brown bureau, and the recklessness of despair came into her eyes. In

the room beyond, Jim was reading a two weeks’ old newspaper and

smoking. He looked like a lazy ranchman taking his ease.

As she went about her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed

things as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the

shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as

if it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color

of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the

grasshoppers, that was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried,

and their slimy beds crept along the willows like sluggish snakes.

Gaunt range-cattle bellowed in their thirst, and the parched earth

crackled beneath the sun that hung above the house like a flaming disk.

Sometimes she sank beneath the burden of it; then she would wring her

hands and call on God to help them; they were beyond human power. She

and Jim were alone all the morning; they did not again refer to what

they knew would happen. He read his old paper and she put her house in

order. She did it with especial care. It was meet to have things seemly

in the house of the dead. And every time she glanced at Jim she

repressed the desire to fling herself on his breast and cry out the

anguish that consumed her.

At noon she brought the children home to dinner, and afterwards Jim

taught them to throw the lasso and played buffalo with them. Alida did

not trust herself to watch them; she stayed in the kitchen and saw the

sunbeam grow pale with the waning of the day, the day whose minutes

dragged like lead, yet had rushed from her, leaving her the night to

face. At sundown she cooked supper, but she no longer knew what she

did. A crazy agility had taken possession of her and she spun about the

kitchen, doing the same errand many times, finding herself doing always

something different from that she had set about doing. The molten day

was burning itself out like a fever; hot gusts of air beat up from the

earth, but the woman who waited felt chilled to the marrow, and took a

cloak down from a peg and wrapped it about her while she waited for the

biscuit to bake. At supper they sat down together, the man and his wife

and their three children. The children were in fine spirits from the

fun they had had that afternoon. Never had daddy been so nice to them.

He had taught Topeka to throw the lasso so well that she had caught the

cat once and little Jim twice; and daddy had played he was a buffalo

and had charged them all with his head down, till they screamed in

terror. But daddy seemed more quiet through the meal, and once mother

started up and cried:

“What’s that?”

She ran to the door with her hand pressed to her side, but daddy called

after her:

“Don’t you know the cowards better than that? They’ll wait for

nightfall.”

But these things had not worried the children, with their heads full of

playing buffalo and throwing the lariat.

“Jim,” said his father, before they went to bed, “remember you are the

man of the family.” But young Jim was already nodding with sleep.

Topeka and Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were

glad to go to bed.

The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun

had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool

of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The

outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the

half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day

the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves

flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to

palpitate with the intensity of its fever. The bellowing of the

thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped with the twilight that brought

no dew to slake their parched throats. In the hills the coyotes wailed

like lost souls. It was night bereft of benisons, day made frightful by

darkness. All the heat of a cycle of desert summers seemed concentrated

in that house in the valley where the man and his wife waited. Each

sound of the desert night Alida translated into the trampling of

horses’ feet; then, as the sound would die away, or prove to be but

some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose its pinch on

her features, and she would stare into her husband’s face with eyes

that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked and

filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting.

“Jim,” she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, “I am

going to fasten up the house.”

“Do you hear them?” he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred

to the finer senses of women.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till

it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he

put into:

“Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by

fastening that?”

“Jim, I must,” and her voice broke. “They may think you are not here,

that it’s only me and the children, and that’s why the house is

fastened.” She got up and began to move about as though her thoughts

scourged her to action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his

pipe.

“Do anything you blame please,” he said, more by way of humoring her

than from faith in her stratagem. He felt strong enough to face his

destiny, to meet it in a way worthy of his mother’s people.

Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night. Each

thing she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was

as if she were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a

sinister prophecy. Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she

might not break the spell by doing things differently from the way she

had dreamed them. Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly,

and she swung it to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind

seemed likewise to sway hither and thither. Should she fasten the door

and push the bureau against it, as it had been in the dream, or should

she leave door and windows gaping wide for them? And then, as one who

walks and does familiar things in sleep, she shut the door and turned

the key. Jim smiled at her, but she could no longer look at him. One of

the children wailed fretfully from the room beyond. Sleep had become a

scourge in the stifling heat. One by one she lowered the windows and

nailed them down; then she dragged the brown bureau against the door,

took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and sat down with Jim to

wait.

“What are you going to do with them toys?” he asked, as he saw her

examine the chambers of one of the six-shooters.

“You ain’t going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are

you?” she reproached him.

“’Ain’t we agreed that it’s best to keep onpleasant family matters from

the kids?” He smiled at her bravely. “The remembrance of what we’re

anticipatin’ ain’t going to help young Jim to get to Congress when his

time comes, nor it ain’t going to help the girls get good husbands,

either. This here country ain’t what it was in the way of liberality

since it’s got to be a State.”

“Sh-sh-sh!” she said. “Is that the range-cattle stampedin’ after water,

or is it—” They listened. The furniture in the room crackled; there was

not a fibre of it to which the resistless heat had not penetrated. On

the range the cattle bellowed in their thirst-torture; in the intervals

of their cries sounded something far off, but regular as the thumping

of a ship’s screw. The woman did not need an answer to her question.

The steady trampling of hoofs came muffled through the dead air, but

the sound was unmistakable. She put her arms about the man’s neck and

crushed him to her with all her woman strength. “Oh, Jim, you’ve been a

good man to me!”

“Steady—steady.” He strained her close to him. “They’d be, by the sound

of them, on the straight bit of road now, before the turn. Soon we’ll

hear their hoofs ring hollow as they cross the plank bridge.”

His plainsman’s faculty was as keen as ever; his calculation of the

horsemen’s distance was made as though he were the least concerned. All

Alida’s courage had gone, with the dread thing at hand. She clung to

him, dazed.

“They’re sober, all right enough.”

“How do you know?”

“They’d be cursing and bellowing if they were drunk.”

The hoofs rang hollow on the little plank bridge that crossed the ditch

about a stone’s-throw from the door. Not a word was said either within

or without. The lynchers seemed to have drilled for their part; there

was no whispering, no deferring to a leader. On they came, so close

that Jim and Alida could hear the creaking of their saddles. There was

the clank of spurs and the straining of leather as they dismounted,

then some one knocked at the door till the warped boards rattled.

Jim could feel the thudding of Alida’s heart as she clung to him, but

when the knock was repeated a new courage came to her, and she left Jim

and went on her knees close to the outer wall.

“Jim, is that you?” she called, and now every sense was trained to

battle; her voice had even a sleepy cadence, as if she had been

suddenly roused.

“That won’t do at all, Miz Rodney. We know you got Jim in there, just

as certain as we’re out here, and we want him to come out and we’ll do

the thing square, otherwise he can take the consequences.”

Jim opened his mouth to speak, but she, still on her knees beside the

wall, gained his silence by one supplicating gesture. There was a

sleepy, fretful cry from the room beyond—the noise had roused one of

the children.

“Sh-sh, dear,” she called. “It’s only a bad dream. Go to sleep again;

mother is here.”

Through the warped door came sounds of the whispering voices without,

drowned by the shrieking bellow of the cattle. There was not a breath

of air in the suffocating room. Jim bent towards Alida:

“I’m goin out to ’em. They’ll do it square, over on the cotton-woods;

this rumpus’ll only wake the kids.”

But she shook her head imploringly, putting her finger to her lips as a

sign that he was not to speak, and he had not the heart to refuse,

though knowing that she made a desperate situation worse.

“Gentlemen”—she spoke in a low, distinct voice—“Jim ain’t here. He’s

been away from home five days. There’s no one here but me and the

children; you’ve woke them up and frightened them by pounding on the

door. I ask you to go away.”

“If he ain’t in there, will you let us search the house?” It was

Henderson that spoke, Henderson, foreman of the “XXX” outfit.

“I can’t have them frightened; please take my word and go away.”

“Whas er matter, muvvy?” called Judith, sleepily. Young Jim was by this

time crying lustily. Only Topeka said nothing. With the precocity of a

frontier child, she half realized the truth. She tried to comfort

little Jim, though her teeth chattered in fear and she felt cold in the

hot, still room. Then Judith called out, “Make papa send them away.”

“Your papa ain’t here, Judith.” But the fight had all gone out of

Alida’s voice; it was the groan of an animal in a trap.

“Where’s papa gone to?”

“Sh-sh, Judith! Topeka, keep your sister quiet.”

It was absolutely still, within and without, for a full minute. Then

Alida heard the shoving of shoulders against the door. Once, twice,

thrice the lock resisted them. The brown bureau spun across the room

like a child’s toy. The lynchers, bursting in, saw Alida with her arms

around Jim. When the last hope had gone it was instinct with her to

protect him with her own body.

“Go into the kids, old girl, this is no place for you.” And there was

that in his voice that made her obey.

Something of the glory of old Chief Flying Hawk, riding to battle, was

in the face of his grandson.

“Remember, the children ain’t to know,” he said to his wife; and to the

lynchers, “Gentlemen, I’m ready.”

XIX.

“Rocked By A Hempen String”

Alida heard the mingled sounds of footsteps and hoofs grow fainter on

the trail. The children looked at her to tell them why this night was

different from all others—what was happening. But she could only cower

among them, more terrified than they. She seemed to be shrunken from

the happenings of that day. They hardly knew the little, shrivelled,

gray woman who looked at them with unfamiliar eyes. Alida gazed at the

little Judith, and there was something in her mother’s glance that made

the little one hide her face in her sister’s shoulder. Young Judith it

was who all unwittingly had told the lynchers that her father was at

home, and in Alida’s heart there was towards this child a blind,

unreasoning hate. Better had she never been born than live to do this

thing!

It was the wee man, Jim, who first began to reflect resentfully on this

intrusion on his slumbers. He had been sleeping well and comfortably

when some grown-ups came with a lot of noise, and his father had gone

away with them. It had frightened him, but his mother was here, and why

should she not put him to sleep again?

“Muvvy, sing ‘Dway Wolf.’” And as she paid no heed, but looked at him,

white-faced and strange, he again repeated, with his most insinuating

and beguiling tricks of eye and smile:

“Muvvy, sing ‘Dway Wolf’ for Dimmy.”

The child put his head in his mother’s lap, and Alida began, scarce

knowing what she did:

“‘The gray wolves are coming fast over the hill,

Run fast, little lamb, do not baa, do not bleat,

For the gray wolves are hungry, they come here to kill,

And the lambs shall be scattered—’

No, no, Jimmy, muvvy cannot sing. Oh, can’t you feel, child? Judith,

Judith, why were you ever born?”

It was still in the valley. Had they come to the dead cotton-woods yet?

Had they begun it? The children shrank from this gray-faced woman whom

they did not know and but yet a little while had been their mother. An

awful silence had fallen on the night. The range-cattle no longer

bellowed in their thirst; the hot wind no longer blew from the desert.

A hush not of earth nor air nor the things that were of her ken seemed

to have fallen about them, muffing the dark loneliness as by invisible

flakes. The children had crouched close together for comfort. They

feared the little, gray-faced woman who seemed to have stolen into

their mother’s place and looked at them with strange eyes.

Jimmy looked at the woman who held him, hoping his mother would come,

and he could see them both. And while he waited he dropped off to

sleep; and little Judith, hiding her head on Topeka’s shoulder, that

she might not see the look in those accusing eyes, presently dreamed

that all was well with her again; and Topeka reflected that if her

mother should ask her in the morning whether she had dreamed last

night, she would have a fine tale to tell of men riding up, and loud

voices, and trying of the door, and father going away with them. Her

mother had questioned her this morning when nothing had happened to

warrant it. Surely she would ask again to-morrow, and Topeka could

tell—she could tell—all.

Alida looked at her three sleeping children—his children, and yet they

could sleep. Into her mind came that cry of utter desolation, “Could ye

not watch with me one hour?” And God had been deaf to Him, His son,

even as He was deaf to her.

The children were sleeping easily. The hush that had hung like a pall

over the valley had not lifted. Had they done it? Was it over yet? She

went to the door and listened. Surely the silence that wrapped the

valley was a thing apart. It was as no other silence that she could

remember. It was still, still, and yet there was vibration to it, like

the muffled roar within a shell. She strained her ears—was that the

sound of horsemen going down the trail? No, no, it was only the beating

of her foolish heart that would not be still, but beat and fluttered

and would not let her hear. Yes, surely, that was the sound of hoofs.

It was over then—they were going.

She would go and look for him. Perhaps it would not be too late—she had

heard of such things. A dynamic force consumed her. She had no

consciousness of her body. Her feet and hands did things with

incredible swiftness—lighted a lantern, selected a knife, ran to the

corral for an old ladder that had been there when they took possession

of the deserted house; and through all her frantic haste she could feel

this new force, as it were, lick up the red blood in her veins, burn

her body to ashes as it gave her new power. She felt that never again

would she have need of meat and drink and sleep. This force would abide

with her till all was over, then leave her, like the whitened bones of

the desert.

It was dark in the valley, but the menacing stillness seemed to be

lifting. The range-cattle had again taken up their plaint, the sounds

of the desert night swept across the stony walls of the cañon. Alida

knew that it must have happened at the dead cotton-woods. There were no

other high trees about for miles. Again she listened before advancing.

There was no sound of hoof or champing bit or men moving quickly. They

had gone their way into the valley. She ran swiftly, her lantern

throwing its beam across the scrubby inequalities of ground, but for

her there was no need of its beacon. To-night she was beyond the

halting, stumbling uncertainties of tread to which man is subject.

There was magic in her feet and in her hands and brain. Like the wind

she ran, the wind on the great plain where there are no foot-hills to

hinder its course. The black, dead trees stood out distinctly against

the starry sky, and from a cross-limb of one of them dangled something

with head awry, like a broken jumping-jack, something that had once

been a man—and her husband. She could touch the feet of this frightful

thing and feel its human warmth. A wind came up from the desert and

blew across the cañon’s rocky walls into the valley, and the parody of

a man swayed to it.

She had been expecting this thing. For weeks the image of it had been

graven on her heart. Sleeping or waking, she had seen nothing but his

dangling body from the cross-limb. Yet with the actual consummation

before her, she felt its hideous novelty as though it were unexpected.

At sight of it the force that had borne her up through the happenings

of that day went out of her, and as she stood with the knife and the

rope, that she had brought in the hope of cheating the lynchers,

dangling from her nerveless hand her helplessness overcame her. Again

and again she called to the dead man for help, called to him as she had

been accustomed to call when her woman’s strength had been unequal to

some heavy household task.

Far down the trail she could hear the gallop of a horse coming closer,

and mingled with the sounds of its flying feet was a voice urging the

horse to greater speed in the shrill cabalistic “Hi-hi-hi-ki!” of the

plains-man. What was it—one of them returning to see that she did not

cheat the rope of its due?—to hang her beside him, as an after-thought,

as they hanged Kate Watson beside her man? Let them. She was standing

near the swaying thing when horse and rider gained the ground beside

her, and what was left to her of consciousness made out that the rider

was Judith. She pointed to it, and stood helpless with the dangling

rope in her hand.

“Are we too late?” Judith almost whispered, as she caught Alida’s cold,

inert hands. “I dreamed it all and came. If I could have dreamed it

sooner!”

Alida did not seem to hear, neither could she speak. She only pointed

again to the thing beside her.

Judith understood. The women had a task to share, and in silence they

began it. The lynchers had done their work all too well. Again and

again the women strove with all their strength to take down the

dangling parody of a man, which in its dead-weight resistance seemed in

league with the forces against them. At last the thing was done. Down

to a pale world, that in the haggard gray of morning seemed to bear in

its countenance something of the pinch of death, Judith lowered the

thing that had so lately been a man. She cut the rope away from the

neck, she straightened the wry neck that seemed to wag in pantomimic

representation of the last word to the lynchers. They’d have to reckon

with him on dark nights, and when the wind wailed like a famished wolf

and when things not to be explained lurked in the shadows of the

desert.

The morning stillness came flooding into the cup-shaped valley like a

soft, resistless wave. Something had come to the gray, old

earth—another day, with all its human gift of joy and woe, and the

earth welcomed it though it had known so many. The sun burst through

the gold-tipped aureole of cloud, scattering far and wide lavish

promises of a perfect day. The earth seemed to respond with a thrill.

No longer was the pinch of death in her countenance. The valley, the

mountains, the invisible wind, even the dead cotton-woods, seemed

endowed with throbbing life that contrasted fearsomely with the

terrible nullity of this thing that once had been Jim Rodney.

Alida had ceased to take any part in the hideous drama. She sat on the

ground, a crouching thing with glittering eyes. It was past

comprehension that the sun could shine and the world go on with her man

dead before her. Judith had become the force that planned and did to

save the family pride. While her hands were busy with preparations for

the dead, she rehearsed what she would say to this and that one to

account for Jim’s absence. The silence of the men who had done this

thing would be as steadfast as their own.

And there were the children. Through all her frantic search for things

in the house, Judith remembered that she must step softly and not waken

the children. With each turn of the screw, as her numbed consciousness

rallied and responded afresh to the hideous realization of this thing,

there came no release from the tyrannous hold of petty detail. She

remembered that she must be back at noon to hold post-office, and there

would be the endless comedy to be played once more with her cavaliers.

They must never suspect from word or look of hers. And there was the

dance to-night at the Benton ranch—she hid her face in her hands. Ah,

no, she could not do this thing! And yet they must not suspect. She

must contrive to give the impression that Jim had cheated the rope.

Yes, she must go and dance, and, if need be, dance with his very

murderers. Jim’s children were to have the “clean start” that he

intended, and they would have to get it here. There was no money for an

exodus and a beginning elsewhere.

Alida still crouched beside the long, even tarpaulin roll that Judith

had prepared with hands that knew not what they did. But now Judith

gently roused her and put in her hand a spade; already she herself had

begun. But Alida stared at it dully, as if she did not understand. Then

Judith pointed to something black that had begun to wheel in the sky,

wheel, and with each circular swoop come closer to the roll of

tarpaulin. Then Alida knew, and, taking the spade, she and Judith began

to dig the grave.

XX.

The Ball

The dance in the Benton ranch was the great social event of the

midsummer season. The Bentons had begun to give dances in the days of

plenty, when the cattle industry had been at its dizziest height; and

they had continued to give dances through all the depressing

fluctuations of the trade, perhaps in much the same spirit as one

whistles in the dark to keep up his courage. Thus, though cattle fell

and continued to fall in the scale of prices till the end no man dared

surmise, the Benton “boys”—they were two brothers, aged respectively

forty-five and fifty years—continued to hold out facilities to dance

and be merry.

All day strange wagons—ludicrous, makeshift things—had been discharging

loads of women and children at the Benton ranch, tired mothers and

their insistent offspring. To the women this strenuous relaxation came

as manna in the wilderness. What was the dreary round of washing,

ironing, baking, and the chain of household tasks that must be done as

primitively as in Genesis, if only they might dance and forget? So the

mothers came early and stayed late, and the primary sessions of the

dances fulfilled all the functions of the latter-day mothers’

congresses—there were infant ailments to be discussed, there were the

questions of food and of teething, of paregoric and of flannel bands,

which, strange heresy, seemed to be “going out,” according to the

latest advices from those compendiums of all domestic information, the

“Woman’s Pages” of the daily papers.

Inasmuch as these more than punctual debaters must be cooked for, there

was, to speak plainly, “feeling” on the part of the housekeeper at the

Bentons’. Wasn’t it enough for folks to come to a dance and get a good

supper, and go away like Christians when the thing was over, instead of

coming a day before it began and lingering on as if they had no home to

go to? This, at least, was the housekeeper’s point of view, a crochety

one, be it said, not shared by the brothers Benton, whose hospitality

was as genuine as it was primitive. To this same difficult lady the

infants, who were too tender in years to be separated from their

mothers, were as productive of anxiety as their elders. A room had been

set apart for their especial accommodation, the floor of which,

carefully spread with bed-quilts and pillows, prevented any great

damage from happening to the more tender of the guests; and they rolled

and crooned and dug their small fists into each other’s faces while

their mothers danced in the room beyond.

By nightfall the Benton ranch gleamed on the dark prairie like a

constellation. Lights burned at every window; a broad beam issued from

the door and threw a welcoming beacon across the darkness and silence

of the night. The scraping of fiddles mingled with the rhythmic scuffle

of feet and the singsong of the words that the dancers sung as they

whirled through the figures of the quadrille and lancers. About the

walls of the room where the dancing was in progress stood a fringe of

gallants, their heads newly oiled, and proclaiming the fact in a

bewildering variety of strong perfumes. Red silk neckerchiefs knotted

with elaborate carelessness displayed to advantage bronzed throats; new

overalls, and of the shaggiest species, amply testified to the social

importance of the Benton dance.

As yet the dancing was but intermittent and was engaged in chiefly by

the mothers with large progeny, who felt that after the arrival of a

greater number of guests, and among them the unmarried girls, their

opportunities might not be as plentiful as at present. One or two

cow-punchers, in an excess of civility at the presence of the fair, had

insisted on giving up their six-shooters, mumbling something about

“there being ladies present and a man being hasty at times.” In the

“bunk-room,” which did duty as a gentleman’s cloak-room, things were

really warming up. There was much drinking of healths, as the brothers

Benton had thoughtfully provided the wherewithal, and that in excellent

quality.

Costigan was there, and Texas Tyler, who had ridden sixty miles to

“swing a petticoat,” or, if there were not enough to go round, to dance

with a handkerchief tied to some fellow’s sleeve. By “swinging a

petticoat” it was perfectly understood among all his friends that he

meant a chance to dance with Judith Rodney. Year in and year out Texas

never failed to present himself at the post-office on mail-days, if his

work took him within a radius of fifty miles of the Daxes. No dance

where the possibility of seeing Judith was even remote was too long a

ride for him to undertake, even when it took him across the dreariest

wastes of the desert. Texas had been devoted to Judith since she had

left the convent, and sometimes, perhaps twice a year, she told him

that she valued his friendship. On all other occasions she rejected his

suit as if his continual pressing of it were something in the nature of

an affront. Yet Texas persevered.

“Well, here’s lukin’ at you, since in the way of a frind there’s

nothing better to look at!” and Costigan drained a tin cup at Texas

Tyler.

“Your very good health,” said Texas, who was somewhat embarrassed by

what was regarded as Costigan’s “floweriness.”

“Begorra, is that Hinderson or the ghost av the b’y?” Costigan’s roving

eye was arrested by the foreman of the “XXX,” who stood drinking with

two or three men of his outfit. He was pale and ill-looking. He drank

several times in succession, as if he needed the stimulant, and without

the formality of drinking to any one. The two or three “XXX” men who

were with him seemed to be equally in need of restoratives.

They talked of the cattle stampede in which several of the outfits had

been heavy losers. Some nine hundred head of cattle had been recovered,

and members of the different outfits were still scouring the Red Desert

for strays.

Something in the nature of a sensation was created by the arrival of

the Wetmore party. The women were frankly interested in the clothes,

bearing, and general deportment of the New-Yorkers. Rumors of Miss

Colebrooke’s beauty were rife, and there was a general inclination to

compare her with local belles. Such exotic types—they had seen these

city beauties before—were as a rule too colorless for their

appreciation. They liked faces that had “more go to them,” was the

verdict passed upon one famous beauty who had visited the Wetmores the

year before. In arrangement of the hair, perhaps, in matters of dress,

the judges were willing to concede the laurels to city damsels, but

there concession stopped. But evidently Kitty, to judge from the

elaboration of her toilet, did not intend to be dismissed thus

cursorily. She herself was delicately, palely pretty, as always, but

her hair was tortured to a fashionable fluffiness, and the simplicity

of her green muslin gown was only in the name. It was muslin disguised,

elaborated, beribboned, lace-trimmed till its identity was all but lost

in the multitude of pretty complications.

“Did you know that old Ma’am Yellett had a school-marm up to her

place?” asked one of the men, apropos of Eastern prettiness.

“Well, well,” Costigan reminisced, “’tis some av thim Yillitt lambs

thot’s six fut in their shtockings, if Oi be rimimbering right. Sure,

the tacher ought to be something av a pugilist, Oi’m thinkin’.”

“I seen her the other day, and a neater little heifer never turned out

to pasture. Lord, I’d like to be gnawing the corners of the primer

right now, if she was there to whale the ruler.”

“Arrah,” bayed Costigan, “but the women question is gittin’ complicated

ontoirely, wid Miss Rodney—an’ herself lukin’ loike a saint in a church

window—dalin’ the mails an’ th’ other wan tachin’ in the mountains.

Sure, this place is gittin’ to be but a sorry shpot for bachelors loike

mesilf.”

“I ain’t mentionin’ no names, but there’s a man here ain’t treatin’ a

mighty fine woman square and accordin’ to the way she ought to be

treated.”

The information ran through the circle like an electric shock. Men

stopped in the act of pledging each other’s healths to listen. Loungers

straightened up; every topic was dropped. The man who had made the

statement was the loose-lipped busybody who had suggested to his host

that he give up his six-shooter since there were “ladies present.”

“What the hell are you waiting for?” queried Texas Tyler, savagely.

“You’ve cracked your whip, made your bow, and got our attention; why

the hell don’t you go on?”

The man looked about nervously. He was rather alarmed at the interest

he had excited. The next moment Peter Hamilton had walked into the

room. There was something crucial in his entrance at this particular

time; it crystallized suspicion. The gossip took advantage of the

greetings to Hamilton to make his escape. Texas Tyler left the

bunk-room immediately and looked for him in the room with the dancers.

The fiddles, in the hands of a couple of Mexicans, had set the whole

room whirling as if by magic. As they danced they sang, joining with

the “caller-out,” who held his vociferous post between the rooms, till

the room was full of singing, dancing men and women, who spun and

pirouetted as if they had not a care in the world. But Texas Tyler was

not of these, as he looked through the dancers for his man. There was a

red flash in the pupils of his eyes, and he told himself that he was

going to do things the way they did them in Texas, for, of course, he

knew that the loose-lipped idiot had meant Judith Rodney and Peter

Hamilton. Never before had such an idea occurred to him, and now that

it had been presented to his mind’s eye, he wondered why he had been

such a blind fool. Never had the singing to these dances seemed so

absurd.

“Hawk hop out and the crow hop in,

Three hands round and go it ag’in.

Allemane left, back to the missus,

Grande right and left and sneak a few kisses.”

He rushed from the room and down to the stable. At sight of him some

one leaped on a horse and rode out into the darkness.

“Who was that?” asked Texas of a man lounging by the corral.

“That was—” and he gave the name of the loose-lipped man.

Texas cursed long and picturesquely. Then he went back to the bunk-room

and tried to pick a quarrel with Peter Hamilton, who good-naturedly

assumed that his old friend had been drinking and refused to take

offence.

Peter went in to ask Kitty to dance with him. All that evening he had

been waiting anxiously for Judith. Meanwhile he had used all his

influence as a newly appointed member of the Wetmore outfit to soothe

the ruffled feelings of the cattle-men. Of the tragedy in the valley he

had heard no rumor.

Kitty had come to the point where she was willing to waive the

Récamier-Chateaubriand friendship in favor of one more personal and

ordinary. In fact, as Peter showed a disposition to regard as final her

answer to him on the day he had spurred across the desert, Kitty, with

true feminine perversity, inclined to permit him to resume his suit.

His acquiescence in her refusal she had at first regarded as the

turning of the worm; after the wolf-hunt, however, her meditations were

more disturbing. She had never told Peter of that strange woodland

meeting with Judith, yet Judith’s beauty, her probable hold over Peter,

the degree of his affection for her were rankling questions in Kitty’s

consciousness. In the stress of these considerations Kitty lost her

head completely for so old a campaigner. She drew the apron-string

tight—attempted force instead of strategy.

Kitty and Peter finished their waltz, one of the few round dances of

the evening.

“How perfectly you dance, Kitty! It’s a long time since we’ve had a

waltz together.”

The cow-punchers looked at Kitty as if she were not quite flesh and

blood. Such flaxen daintiness, femininty etherealized to angelic

perfection, was new to them, but their admiration was like that given

to a delicate exotic which, wonderful as it is, one is well pleased to

view through the glass of the florist’s window.

Peter was deferentially attentive and zealous to make the Wetmore party

have a thoroughly good time, yet he did all these things, as it were,

with his eye on the door. He was not obviously distrait; he was the man

of the world, talking, making himself agreeable, “doing his duty,”

while his subconsciousness was busy with other matters. It was rather

through telepathy than through any lack of attention paid to her that

Kitty realized the state of things, and in proportion to her

realization came a feeling of helplessness; it was so new, so

unexpected, so cruel. He seemed drifting away from her on some tide of

affairs of the very existence of which she had been unconscious.

Further and further he had drifted, till intelligible speech no longer

seemed possible between them. They said the foolish, empty things that

people call out as the boat glides away from the shore, the things that

all the world may hear, and in his eyes there was only that smiling

kindness. How had it come about after all these years? What was it that

had first cut the cable that sent him drifting? What was it? She must

think. Oh, who could think with that noise! How silly was their singing

as they danced, how uncouth!

“All dance as pretty as you can,

Turn your toes and left alleman;

First gent sashay to the right,

Now swing the girl you last swung about,

And now the one that’s cut her out,

And now the one that’s dressed in white,

And now the belle of the ball.”

The dancers seemed bitten to the quick with the tarantula of an

ecstatic hilarity; their bodies swayed in perfect harmony to the swing

of the fiddles and the swell of the chorus. The most uncouth of them

came under the spell of that mad magic. Their movements, that in the

beginning of the dance had been shy and awkward, became almost

beautiful; they forgot arms, hands, feet; their bodies had become like

the strings of some skilfully played instrument, obediently responsive

to rhythm, and in that composite blending of races each in his dancing

brought some of the poetry of his own far land. The scene was amazing

in its beauty and simplicity, like the strong, inspirational power and

rugged rhythm of some old border minstrel. One by one the dancers

glowed with better understanding; discordant elements, alien nations

were fused to harmony in this vivid picture.

Peter turned to Kitty, expecting to see her face aglow with the warmth

of it. She stood beside him, the one unresponsive soul in the room, on

her lips a pale, tolerant smile.

“Aren’t they splendid, Kitty, these women? More than half of them work

like beavers all day, and they have young children and dozens of

worries, but would you suspect it? They’re just the women for this

country.”

Now in the present state of affairs almost any other subject would have

been better calculated to promote good feeling than the one on which

Peter had alighted. Kitty’s thoughts had perversely lingered about one

who, though not one with these women, had yet their sturdy

self-reliance, their acquiescence in grim conditions, their pleasure in

simple things. Kitty’s apprehension, slow to kindle, had taken fire

like a forest, and by its blaze she saw things in a distorted light;

her present vision magnified the relations of Peter and Judith to a

degree that a month ago she would have regarded as impossible. “He is

her lover!” was the accusation that suddenly flashed through her mind,

and with the thought an overwhelming desire to say something unkind,

something that should hurt him, supplanted all judgment and reason.

“Oh, it’s a decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you.

And an artist, of course—but isn’t it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to

idealize them because they are having a good time? There’s no virtue in

it. It is conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and

have just as many little children to look after, and yet not have these

dances you praise them for coming to.”

“I’m afraid you find us and our amusements a little crude. Evidently

the spirit of our dances does not appeal to you; but I did not suppose

it necessary to remind you that they should not be judged by the

standard of conventional evening parties,” said Peter, hurt and angry

in his turn.

“Us, our amusements, our dances? So you are quite identified with these

people, my dear Peter, and I had thought you an ornament of cotillions

and country clubs. I can only infer that it is somebody in particular

who has brought about your change of heart.”

Peter flushed a little, and Kitty kept on: “Some of the native belles

are quite wonderful, I believe. Nannie Wetmore tells of a half-breed

who is very handsome.”

Peter set his lips. “At the expense of spoiling Nannie’s pretty

romance, I must tell you that the lady she refers to is not only the

most beautiful of women, but she would be at ease in any drawing-room.

It would be as ridiculous to apply the petty standards of ladyhood to

her as it would to—well, imagine some foolish girl bringing up the

question at a woman’s club—‘Was Joan of Arc a lady?’” Peter spoke

without calculating the conviction that his words carried. He was

angry, and his manner, voice, intonation showed it.

Kitty, now that her most unworthy suspicions had been confirmed by

Peter’s ardent championing of Judith, lost her discretion in the pang

that gnawed her little soul: “I beg your pardon, Peter. When I spoke I

did not, of course, know that this young woman was anything to you.”

“Anything to me? My dear Kitty, I’ve never had a better friend than

Judith Rodney.”

The dance was at its flood-tide. The exhilaration had grown with each

sweep of the fiddle-bow, with the sorcery of sinuous, swaying bodies,

with the song of the dancers as they joined in the calling out of the

figures, with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses,

with the leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled

as leaves circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool. The dancing Mrs.

Dax split her favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of

which her long list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel

if need be. Her dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had

something of the surge of the west wind sweeping over a field of grain.

Sometimes she waved back her partner and alone danced a figure, putting

to the music her own interpretation—barbaric, passionate, rude, but

magnificently vivid. And the dancers would stop and crowd about her,

clapping hands and stamping feet to the rhyming movement of her body,

while against the wall her hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood

and glared in a fury of disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly

meanwhile and exercising the utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs.

Johnnie’s train.

The “XXX” men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the

merriment, keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the

hospitable bottles were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell

that had bound them all day. Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not

lost its tallow paleness despite the number of his potations, put his

head through the door to have a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was

caught in the outermost eddy of the whirling throng, and was soon

dancing as madly as the others. The rest of the “XXX” party still

hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed hospitable. They were

still dusty from their long ride of the early morning, and more than

once their fear-quickened imaginations had been haunted by the spectre

of the dead cotton-woods, from which something heavy and limp and warm

had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had secured the dancing

Mrs. Dax for a partner. The “caller-out,” stationed between the two

rooms, warmed to his genial task. He improvised, he put a wealth of

imagination and personality into his work, he showered compliments on

the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax’s feet, he joked Henderson on his pallor, he

attempted a florid venture at Kitty. Miguel put fresh magic into his

bowing, José’s fiddle rioted with the madness of it.

Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her

heart cried out in protest at the thing she must do. It was the utmost

cruelty of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day

that they had killed him. But she must do it, that his children might

evade the stigma of “cattle-thief,” that the shadow of the gallows-tree

might not fall across their young lives, that the neighbors might give

credence to the tale of Jim’s escape from his enemies, that Alida and

she might earn the pittance that would give the children the “clean

start” that Jim had set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance

and be the merriest of them all that these things might happen, but

again and again she deferred the dread moment. The light, the music,

the voices, the shuffle of the feet came to her as she stood forlorn in

the grateful darkness. On the wall the shadows of the dancers,

magnified and grotesque, parodied their movements, as they contended

there, monstrous, uncouth shapes, like prehistoric monsters gripping,

clinching in some mighty struggle; and above it all sang out the wild

rhythm of Miguel’s fiddle, and young José’s bow capered madly.

Judith drew close to the window, and the merriment struck chill at her

heart like the tolling of a knell. She saw the pale face of Henderson

gleam yellow-white among the dancers, and, watching him, the blood-lust

of the Indian woke in her heart. The rest of the room was but a blur;

the dancers faded into swaying shadows; she saw nothing but Henderson

as he danced that he might forget the gray of morning, the black, dead

trees, and the grotesque thing with head awry that swayed in the breeze

like a pendulum. He dreaded the long, black ride that would bring him

to his camp, for he alone of the lynchers remained. Something was

drawing his gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled

against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax

woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the

accompaniment of Miguel’s fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that

dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a

vengeance. And as he danced and swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell

on the window opposite, and Jim Rodney’s face looked in at him,

beautiful in its ecstasy of hate—Rodney’s face, refined, sharpened,

tried in some bitter crucible, but Rodney’s face! Henderson could not

withdraw his fascinated gaze. He stood in the midst of the dancers like

a man turned to stone. He put up his hand to his eyes as if to brush

away a cloud of swarming gnats, then threw up his arms and rushed from

the room. The dancers paused in their mad whirl. Miguel’s bow stopped

with a wailing shriek. Every eye turned towards the window for an

explanation of Henderson’s sudden panic, but all was dark without on

the prairie. The magic had gone from the dance, the whirlwind of

drapery that had swung like flags in a breeze dropped in dead air.

“What was it?” the dancers asked one another in whispers.

And for answer Judith entered, but a Judith that was strange to them.

There was about her a white radiance that kept the dancers back, and in

her eyes something of Mary’s look, as she turned from Calvary. The

dancers still kept the position of the figures, the men with their arms

about their partners’ waists, the women stepping forward; they were

like the painted figures of dancers in a fresco. And among them stood

Judith, waiting to play her part, waiting to show her world that she

could dance and be merry because all was well with her and hers. But

the bronzed sons of the saddle hung back, they who a day before would

have quarrelled for the honor of a dance. They were afraid of her; it

would be like dancing with the death angel. She looked from face to

face. Surely some one would ask her to dance, and her eyes fell on

Henderson, returning from the bottled courage in the bunk-room. Some

word was due from him to explain his terror of a moment ago.

“Oh, Miss Judith, I thought you was a ghost when I seen you at the

window.”

“A ghost that’s ready to dance.” She held out her hand to him. In her

gesture there was something of royal command, and Henderson, reading

the meaning in her eyes, stepped forward. Her face, almost a perfect

replica of the dead man’s, looked at him.

“I bring you greeting from my brother,” she said. “He has gone on a

long journey.”

Henderson started. Through the still room ran the murmur, “Rodney’s

outwitted them; he’s played a joke on the rope!” And Judith, his

dare-devil sister, had come with his greetings to Henderson, leader of

the faction against him! The tide had turned. The applause that is ever

the meed of the winner was hers to command. The cattle faction were

ready to sing the praises of her splendid audacity. In their hearts

they were glad in the thought that Jim had outwitted them.

Miguel’s bow dashed across the strings, and he drew from the little

brown fiddle music that again made them merry and glowing. The magic

came back to the dance, the blood leaped again with the merry madness,

and they swept to the bowing like leaves when the first faint wail of

winter cries in the trees.

Hamilton, standing apart with Kitty Colebrooke, had been a dazed

witness of the scene. With the rest he had watched the entrance of

Judith, had been stunned by the change in her appearance, had seen her

triumph and heard the rumor of Jim’s escape, and his heart had warmed

with the good word. She had probably managed the plan, and had come

to-night, in the joy of her triumph, to hurl in their faces that she

had outwitted them. And she had paid the penalty of her courage—her

face told that. What a woman she was! Her heart would pay the penalty

to the last throb, and yet she could dance with the merriest of them.

And as she danced she seemed to Peter Hamilton, in her white draperies,

like a cloud of whirling snow-flakes drifting across the silence of the

desert night. She was the one woman in all the world for him, though

his blind eyes had faced the light for years and had not known it. He

had squandered the strength of his youth in the pursuit of a little wax

light, and had not marked the serene shining of the moon.

“And a man there was and he made his prayer—” he quoted to himself.

Well, thank God that it had not been answered. He would take her away

from here. She could take her place in his family and reflect credit on

his choice. His family, his friends—he winced at the thought of their

possible reception of the news. But Judith’s presence would adjust

these difficulties. He would present her to Kitty now, that his old

friend might see what manner of woman she was. Kitty, he felt, would be

kind in memory of the old days. She would give to them both in

friendship what she had denied him in love. And as he warmed to the

thought he turned to the woman of his youth. And she read a look in his

face that had not been there in a long time. Had he, then, come back to

her? Was the distance from bark to shore lessening as the sea of

misunderstanding diminished?

“Kitty, we were speaking a moment ago of Miss Rodney. You would like to

know her, I’m sure. We’ve been such good friends all these years while

you were deciding that what I wanted was not good for us—and deciding

wisely, as I know now. Look at her! You’ll understand how she has

helped me keep the balance of things. When she’s finished dancing

you’ll let me bring her to you, won’t you?”

And Kitty, who had expected much different words, struggled with the

meaning of these unexpected ones. The strangeness of the pain

bewildered her. Her dazed consciousness refused to accept that Peter

was asking permission to present to her a woman whom she thought should

not have been permitted to enter her presence. There was about her a

white flame of anger that seemed to lick up the red blood in her veins

as she turned to answer:

“She is undeniably handsome, Peter, but I do not care to meet your

mistress.”

He bowed low to her as Lieutenant Swift, of Fort Washakie, who was of

the Wetmore party, came to claim Kitty’s hand for the next dance.

Judith and Henderson were leading the last figure, their hands clasped

high in an arch through which the dancers trooped in couples. Again and

again he tried to catch Judith’s eye, but her glance never once met

his. Her great, wide eyes had a far-away look as if they saw some

tragedy, the shadow of which would never fall from her. She was,

indeed, the tragic muse in her floating white drapery, the tragic muse

whose grief is too deep for tears. He watched her as she swept towards

him in the figure of the dance, the head thrown back, slightly

foreshortened, the mouth smiling with the smile that knows all things,

the eyes holy wells of truth. He saw in her something of the tenderness

of Eve, for all the blending of the calm modern woman, capable in

affairs, equal to emergency. It was like her to contrive her brother’s

escape and then to dance with the very men who had knotted the noose

for his hanging. Henderson was bowing to her, the dance was over, and

the next moment she was alone.

“Is it you, Peter?” She thrust a strand of hair back from her temple.

Her eyes rested on him for a moment, then wandered, till in their

absent look was the rapt expression of the sleep-walker. The

dark-rimmed eyes had in their depths the quiet of a conflagration, and

Peter, seeing these things, and knowing the gamut of all her moods, saw

that he had been mistaken. She had not come, to dance in triumph, in

the face of her brother’s enemies. There was no triumph in her face,

but white, consuming despair.

“Did you ask me to dance?” Again she put back the strand of hair.

“Forgive me for being so stupid, but I’ve kept post-office to-day, and

had a long ride, and I danced with Henderson.”

He drew her arm within his and led the way out through the crowd of

dancers to the star-strewn night. She did not speak again, nor did she

seem to notice that they had left the room with the dancers. She turned

her face towards the lonely valley, where the drama of her brother’s

passing had been consummated, and something there was in her look as it

turned towards the hills that told Peter.

“Tell me, Judith, ‘what has happened?”

For answer she pointed towards the valley. “They did it last night at

the dead cotton-woods. Henderson led them. I could not stay with Alida.

I had to come here to dance that no one might suspect.”

Her voice was steady, but low and thrilling. In its deep resonance was

the echo of all human sorrow. There was no hint of accusation, yet

Peter felt accused. He felt, now when it was too late, that his

position had been one of almost pusillanimous negligence. From the

beginning he had taken a firm stand against violent measures. He had

talked, argued, reasoned, inveighed against violence; no later than a

week ago he had ridden across the desert to tell Henderson that the

Wetmore outfit would take no part in violence of any sort, and that the

cattle outfit that did resort to extreme measures would miss the

support of the “W-Square” in any future range business. But it had not

been enough. He should have made plain his position in regard to

Judith. With her as his future wife the tragedy of the valley would not

have been possible.

From the ranch-house came the swell of the fiddles, the rhythmic

shuffle of feet, the song of the dancers, dulled by distance. Beside

him was Judith, a white spirit, the woman in her dead of grief. And

yet, through all the grim horror of the tragedy she remembered the part

that had been allotted to her, threw all the weight of her personality

on the side of the game she was playing.

“You must be on our side, Peter, and when there is talk of Jim’s

absence you must imply that he is East somewhere. You will know how to

meet such inquiries better than we women. Henderson will be only too

glad. You should have seen the wretch when I held out my hand to him

and told him to dance with me. He came, white and shambling; we have

nothing to fear from Henderson. Alida has no money to go away with. She

and I must stay here and make a beginning for the children, and, Peter,

we want you to help us.”

He had no voice to answer her brave words for a minute, and then his

sentences came uncertain and halting.

“You must think me a poor sort of friend, Judith, one who has been

blind till the eleventh hour and is then found wanting. I feel so

guilty to you, to your brother’s wife, to that little child who put out

his arms so trustfully to me that night, but I never imagined that

things would come to such a pass as this. The smaller cattle outfits

have been doing a good deal of blustering, but the more conservative

element supposed that they had them in check, and did not for a moment

think that they would take the law into their own hands. Believe me,

this lawlessness has been in the face of every influence that could be

brought to bear, and it shall not go unpunished.”

She spoke to him from the darkness, as the spirit of grief might speak.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that is the justice of the

plains. But, Peter, it is but poor justice. What’s done is done, and

fresh violence will not give back Alida her husband nor the little ones

their father. What we need is friends, one or two loyal souls who,

though knowing the hideous truth of this thing, will stand by us in our

pitiful falsehood. I have told no one, nor shall I, but you and—Peter,

you must not laugh at your fellow-conspirator—Leander.”

He took her hands in his and pressed them; big hands they were, and

hardened by many a homely task, but withal tender and with the healing

quality of womanliness in the touch of their warm, supple fingers. But

to-night she did not seem to know that he held them, nor to be

conscious of his presence. The woman in her was dead of grief. The

white spirit in her place, that plotted and planned that Jim’s children

and Jim’s wife might not from henceforth walk in the shadow of the

gallows, was beyond the prompting of the flesh. And again she spoke to

him in the same far-away voice, with the same far-away look in her

eyes.

“You must know, Peter, that Leander is at heart of the salt of the

earth. I told him about it all, and he asked to be given the commission

to deal with the men. He has risen to his post magnificently. I heard

him swear the wretches to secrecy, hint to them that he had a great

story to tell them. They were frightened, and listened. And the poor

little man that we have so despised told them convincingly how Jim had

made good his escape—even Henderson half believes we saved him.”

Peter hoped that she would accuse him of his half-heartedness

indirectly, if not openly. It would have made his conscience more

comfortable, and his conscience troubled him sorely to-night. It was

that fatal habit of procrastination that had brought this thing about.

He had hesitated all these weeks about Judith, and while he had

threshed out the pro and con of her disadvantageous family connection,

this hideous tragedy had happened.

“Peter”—and now her eyes seemed to come back to earth again, to lose

something of the far-away look of the sleep-walker—“Peter, I’m cruel to

speak to you of these things now. When your heart is full of your own

happiness, I come to you like a dark shadow with this tragedy. But I am

glad for the good that has come to you, Peter. Perhaps Miss Colebrooke

told you of the day I met her in the wood, the day of the wolf-hunt.

She was so beautiful, I understood—”

“Judith, I hardly know how to say what I am going to, I feel that I

have been such a bad friend to you, but you must hear me patiently.

Together, if you are willing, after knowing all of me that you do, we

must look after your brother’s children. That night in the little house

in the valley, when the little chap came to me, don’t you remember,

there was something fine and fearless in the way he did it. ‘You may

belong to the cattle side of the argument,’ he seemed to say, ‘but I

trust you.’ Now, Judith dear, that boy’s faith in me is not going to be

shaken. We must look after them together. It is a very little thing you

have asked of me, my dearest, but a very big one that I am asking of

you. Do you understand, my Judith, it is you that I want? Don’t think

of me as I have been, Judith, but as you are going to make me. I want

you to give me the right now, this evening, to share all this trouble

with you. Do we understand each other, Judith? Is it to be? And will

you come back with me now, into the room where they are dancing, and

let me present you to them, to the Wetmores, as _my_ Judith, my

betrothed?”

“But, Peter, I don’t understand. I—I thought you and Miss Colebrooke

were—”

“That’s all over, Judith. I did love her once. Oh, you dear, brave

woman, I’m not a hero from any point of view, and you know it. It’s but

a sorry lover that’s making his prayer to you, my dearest; but you

won’t judge, I know, beloved, you will love me instead?”

Judith turned towards the valley. Her whole being throbbed with a

passionate response to the man who stood so humbly before her, but

there were duties that came first. Her mind was full of Alida and her

children, and her eyes still sought Peter’s imploringly.

“You will be a good friend to them, Peter—to Jim’s people? I cannot

talk to you of anything else to-night. Your heart is big, Peter, but

you cannot feel, perhaps—”

“Listen, Judith. Whatever friendship and protection I can give your

family you may count upon from now till the end of time. I will be

theirs as I am yours. I feel your grief, but I want to soothe it, too.

And if you love me, and I feel, Judith, that you do, you must let them

all see to-night, these people who know us both, that we stand together

before all the world for better or worse. Think, Judith, and you will

see that you owe it to yourself, to me, to all these men, who reverence

you as the one woman, the one ideal in their lonely lives.”

She could not speak. The moment was too full, the strain had been too

great; but she smiled surrender, and Peter caught her tenderly in his

arms and kissed her once—his Judith she was now, his heroine. Then,

without another word, he drew her arm through his and led her back to

the lights, where the dancers still held high carnival.

Judith’s half-sister, Eudora, was making a pretty quarrel by perversely

forgetting the order in which she had given her dances. The girl was so

undeniably happy that Judith dreaded the grim news she must tell her.

Eudora blushed as she encountered Judith’s eye. Her half-sister ever

offered a check on Eudora’s exuberant coquetry, with its precipitation

of discussions that often ended in bullets. Leander stood on the

outermost fringe of Eudora’s potential partners. He would not have

dared to maintain it openly, yet he was sure the pretty minx had

promised that dance to him.

“Dance with Leander, dear, and don’t let those men begin quarrelling.

I’ve something to tell you, presently,” said Judith.

Texas Tyler stood glowering at them from the doorway. He would not

catch Judith’s eye as she tried to speak to him. Kitty sat alone for

the moment. She had sent the young lieutenant to fetch her a cup of

coffee, but as Peter approached with Judith she averted her eyes.

“Kitty, may I present to you my fiancée, Miss Rodney?”

Kitty rose superbly to the situation. She might, indeed, have made the

match she was so overjoyed in the good-fortune of her old friend Peter.

She made no reference to the woodland meeting—she hoped for the

happiness of seeing them in town. And she bade Peter tell the good news

to Nannie Wetmore, they would be so glad. Nannie swallowed a grimace

and proffered a cousinly hand. She had suspected some such news as this

when she saw that things were not going well with Kitty and Peter.

“Better one dance with a good partner that can swing ye than several

with a feeble partner that leaves ye to swing your own corners!”

Judith looked up, smiling. She recognized the characteristic utterance

of her old friend Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch had sustained a

breakdown, and arrived, in consequence, when the dance was half over,

but she was philosophical, as always, in the face of misfortune, and

loudly attested her pleasure in the renowned pedal feats of her

partner, Costigan.

Behind came Mary Carmichael, looking brown and happy. From the attitude

of the group around Judith and Peter Mary divined what had happened,

and came to add her congratulations. Even Mrs. Yellett forgot to choose

an axiom as her medium of expression, and kissed Judith publicly, with

affectionate unction. Henderson had effaced himself, and Leander, proud

of his triumph and Judith’s commendation, sat in a corner and smiled

contentedly. Ignorant of the drama to which they had played chorus, the

dancers still riotously swung one another up and down the length of the

room, and from the little brown fiddles came the gay music of Judith’s

betrothal.

THE END