Chapter II: Part 2

Night had fallen before they made the first break in their journey. The low, beetle-browed cabin that faced them in the wilderness carried in its rude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur’s art—a world of desolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney and curtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but this shortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs, a device at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect was that of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actual rumbling of the stage, felt its confused motion the more strongly in imagination, and hardly knew whether she was eating canned tomatoes, served uncooked directly from the tin, fried steak, black coffee, and soda biscuit, in company with the fat lady, the stage-driver, and the woman who kept the road ranch, or if it was all some Alice in Wonderland delusion.

The fat lady had brought her own bedding—an apoplectic roll of bedquilts—and these she insisted on making a bed of, despite the protests of the ranch-woman, who seemed to detect a covert insinuation against her accommodations in the precedent. Miss Carmichael profited by the controversy. The landlady, touched no doubt by the simple faith of a traveller who trusted to the beds of a road-ranch, or because she was young or a girl, led the way in triumph to her own bedroom, and indicating an imposing affair with pillow-shams, she defied Miss Carmichael to find a more comfortable bed “in the East.”

In the unaccountable manner of these desert conveyances, that creak and groan across the arid wastes with an apparently lumbering inconsequence, the stage that brought the travellers to the Dax ranch left at sunrise to pursue a seemingly erratic career along the North Platte, while Miss Carmichael and the fat lady were to continue their journey with one Lemuel Chugg, who drove a stage northward towards the Red Desert, when he was sober enough to handle the ribbons.

Breakfast was largely devoted to speculation regarding the approximate condition of Mr. Chugg—would he be wholly or partially incapacitated for his job? Mrs. Dax, flirting a feather-duster in the neighborhood of Miss Carmichael in a futile effort to beguile her into giving a reason for her solitary journey across the desert, took a gloomy view of the situation.

But Miss Carmichael kept her own counsel. Not so the fat lady. Falling into the snare ingenuously set for another, she divulged her name, place of residence, and the object of her travels, which was to visit a son on Sweetwater. Furthermore, she stated the probable cause of every death in her family for the past thirty-five years. Miss Carmichael felt an especial interest in an Uncle Henry who “died of a Friday along of eating clams.” He stood out with such refreshing vividness against a background of neutralities who succumbed to consumption, bile colic, and other more familiar ailments of the patent-medicine litany. But loquacity, apparently, like virtue, is its own reward, for the landlady scarce vouchsafed a comment on this dismal recitative, while Miss Carmichael remained the object of her persistent attentions.

But there seemed to be no topic of universal interest but Chugg’s condition, Mrs. Dax finally asserting, “Before I’d trust my precious neck to him, I’d get Mr. Dax to shoot me.”

Meditating on this Spartan statement, Mary and the fat lady became aware for the first time of a subtle, silent force in the domestic economy. But so unobtrusive was this influence that one had to scrutinize very closely, indeed, to detect the evanescent personality of Mrs. Dax’s husband. Leander was his name, but it is safe to say that he swam no Hellesponts for the masterful wife of his bosom. Otherwise he was slender, willowy, bald; if he ever stood straight enough to get the habitually apologetic crooks out of his knees, he would be tall; but so in the habit was he of repressing himself in the marital presence that Leander passed for middle height. He waited on the table at breakfast with the dumb submissiveness of a trained dog that has been taught to give pathetic imitations of human servility. But no sooner had his lady left the room than Leander began quite brazenly to call attention to himself as a man and an individual, coughing, rattling his dishes, and clearing his throat. Mary and the fat lady, out of very pity, responded to these crude signals with overtures equally frank, and Leander ventured finally to inquire if they aimed to spend the night at his brother’s ranch, it being the next mess-box between here and nowhere. They admitted that his brother’s ranch was their next stopping-place, and Leander went through perfect contortions of apology and self-effacement before he could bring himself to ask them to do him a favor. It would have taken a very stern order of womankind to refuse anything so abject, and they blindly committed themselves to the pledge.

“Tell him I send my compliments,” he whispered, and, looking about him furtively, he repeated the blood-curdling request.

“Is that all?” sniffed the fat lady, at no pains to conceal her disappointment.

“It’s enough, if it was known, to raise a war-whoop and stampede this yere family.” His glance at the door through which his wife had disappeared was pregnant with meaning.

“Family troubles?” asked the fat lady, as a gourmet might say “Truffles.”

“Looks like it,” said Leander, dismally. “Me and Johnnie don’t ask for nothin’ better than to bask in each other’s company; but our wives insists on keepin’ up the manœuvres of a war-dance the whole endoorin’ time.”

“So,” said the fat lady, as a gourmet might tell of a favorite way of preparing truffles, “it’s a case of wives?”

“Yes, marm, an’ teeth an’ nails an’ husbands thrown in, when they get a sight of each other’s petticoats.”

“I’ve known sisters-in-law not to agree,” helped on the fat lady, by way of an encouraging parallel.

“While I deplores usin’ such a comparison to the refinin’ and softenin’ inflooance of wimmen, the meetin’ of the Dax ladies by chanst anywheres has all the elements of danger and excitement that accompanies an Injun uprisin’.”

The travellers looked all manner of encouragement.

“You see, my wife’s a great housekeeper; her talent lies”—and here Leander winked knowingly—“in managin’ the help.”

“Land’s sake!” interrupted the fat lady. “Why don’t you kick?”

Leander sighed softly. “I tried to once. As an experiment it partook of the trustfulness of a mule kickin’ against the stony walls of Badger Cañon. But to resoom about the difficulties that split the Dax family. Before Johnnie got mislaid in that matrimonial landslide o’ his, he herds with us. Me an’ him does the work of this yere shack, and my wife just roominates and gives her accomplishments as manager full play. She never put her hand in dirty water any more than Mrs. Cleveland sittin’ up in the White House parlor. Johnnie done the fancy cookin’; he could make a pie like any one’s maw, and while you was lost to the world in the delights of masticatin’ it, he’d have all his greasy dishes washed up and put away—”

“No wonder she hated to lose a man like that,” interrupted the fat lady, feelingly.

“But he took to pinin’ and proclaimin’ that he shore was a lone maverick, and he just stampeded round lookin’ for trouble and bleatin’ a song that went:

“‘No one to love, None to caress.’

“Well, the lady that answers his signal of distress don’t bear none of the brands of this yere range. She lives back East, and him and her took up their claims in each other’s affections through a matrimonial paper known as _The Heart and Hand_. So they takes their pens in hand and gets through a hard spell of courtin’ on paper. Love plumb locoes Johnnie. His spellin’ don’t suit him, his handwritin’ don’t suit him, his natchral letters don’t suit him. So off he sends to Denver for all the letter-writin’ books he can buy—_Handbook of Correspondence_, _The Epistolary Guide_, _The Ready Letter-Writer_, and a stack more. There’s no denyin’ it, Johnnie certainly did sweat hisself over them letters.”

“Land’s sakes!” said the fat lady.

“Yes, marm; he used to read ’em to me, beginnin’ how he had just seized five minutes to write to her, when he’d worked the whole day like a mule over it. She seemed to like the brand, an’ when he sent her the money to come out here an’ get married, she come as straight as if she had been mailed with a postage-stamp.”

“The brazen thing!” said the fat lady.

“They stopped here, goin’ home to their place. My Lord! warn’t she a high-flyer! She done her hair like a tied-up horse-tail—my wife called it a Sikey knot—and it stood out a foot from her head. Some of the boys, kinder playful, wanted to throw a hat at it and see if it wouldn’t hang, but they refrained, out of respect to the feelin’s of the groom.

“From the start,” continued Leander, “the two Mrs. Daxes just hankered to get at each other; an’ while I, as a slave to the fair sex”—here he bowed to the fat lady and to Miss Carmichael—“hesitates to use such langwidge in their presence, the attitood of them two female wimmin shorely reminds me of a couple of unfriendly dawgs just hankerin’ to chaw each other.

“At first, Johnnie waited on her hand an’ foot, and she just read novels and played stylish all the time and danced. She was the hardest dancer that ever struck this yere trail, and she could give lessons to any old war-dancin’ chief up to the reservation. No dance she ever heard of was too far for her to go to. She just went and danced till broad daylight. Many a man would have took to dissipation, in his circumstances, but Johnnie just lost heart and grew slatterly. Why, he’d leave his dishes go from one day till the next—”

“There’s more as would leave their dishes from one day till the next if they wasn’t looked after.” And the wife of his bosom stood in the door like a vengeful household goddess. Mr. Dax made a grab for the nearest plates.

IV. Judith, The Postmistress

The arrival of Chugg’s stage with the mail should have been coincident with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from “Town,” but Chugg was late—a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local lethe waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to forget that woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and incidentally to hear a chapter of prairie romance.

Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which the travellers had breakfasted. Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of dictator, with absolute sway. Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and staff, executed marvellous feats of domestic engineering. The late breakfast-table, swept and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United States post-office, prepared to transact postal business, and for the time being to become the social centre of the surrounding country.

Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped and climbed and dipped again over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world without end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom, so small that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn into a horseman.

There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was ridden. No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting, Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground imperceptibly and is a delight to the eye. It needed but the solitary figure to signify the infinitude of space in the background. In all that great, wide world the only hint of life was the galloping horseman, the only sound the rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs. The rider, now close enough for Miss Carmichael to distinguish the features, was a thorough dandy of the saddle. No slouching garb of exigence and comfort this, but a pretty display of doeskin gaiter, varnished boot, and smart riding-breeches. The lad—he could not have been, Miss Carmichael thought, more than twenty—was tanned a splendid color not unlike the bloomy shading on a nasturtium. And when the doughty horseman made out the girl standing in the doorway, he smiled with a lack of formality not suggested by the town-cut of his trappings. Throwing the reins over the neck of the horse with the real Western fling, he slid from the saddle in a trice, and—Mary Carmichael experienced something of the gasping horror of a shocked old lady as she made out two splendid braids of thick, black hair. Her doughty cavalier was no cavalier at all, but a surprisingly handsome young woman.

Miss Carmichael gasped a little even as she extended her hand, for the masquerader had pulled off her gauntlet and held out hers as if she was conferring the freedom of the wilderness. It was impossible for a homesick girl not to respond to such heartiness, though it was with difficulty at first that Mary kept her eyes on the girl’s face. Curiosity, agreeably piqued, urged her to take another glimpse of the riding clothes that this young woman wore with such supreme unconcern.

Now, “in the East” Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day at dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by not betraying this, the attempt was rather a failure.

“Are you surprised that I did not wait for an introduction?” the girl in the riding clothes asked, noticing Mary’s evident uneasiness; “but you don’t know how good it is to see a girl. I’m so tired of spurs and sombreros and cattle and dust and distance, and there’s nothing else here.”

“Where I come from it’s just the other way—too many petticoats and hat-pins.”

The horseman who was no horseman dropped Miss Carmichael’s hand and went into the house. Mary wondered if she ought to have been more cordial.

From the back door came Leander, with dishcloths, which he began to hang on the line in a dumb, driven sort of way.

“Who is she?” asked Mary.

“Her?” he interrogated, jerking his head in the direction of the house. “The postmistress, Judith Rodney; yes, that’s her name.” He dropped his voice in the manner of one imparting momentous things. “She never wears a skirt ridin’, any more than a man.”

Mary felt that she was tempting Leander into the paths of gossip, undoubtedly his besetting sin, but she could not resist the temptation to linger. He had disposed of his last dish-cloth, and he withdrew the remaining clothes-pin from his mouth in a way that was pathetically feminine.

“She keeps the post-office here, since Mrs. Dax lost the job, and boards with us; p’r’aps it’s because she is my wife’s successor in office, or p’a’ps it’s jest the natural grudge that wimmin seem to harbor agin each other, I dunno, but they don’t sandwich none.”

Leander having disposed of his last dish-towel, squinted at it through his half-closed eyes, like an artist “sighting” a landscape, saw apparently that it was in drawing, and next brought his vision to bear on the back premises of his own dwelling, where he saw there was no wifely figure in evidence.

“Sh-sh-h!” he said, creeping towards Mary, his dull face transfigured with the consciousness that he had news to tell. “Sh-sh—her brother’s a rustler. If ’twan’t for her”—Leander went through the grewsome pantomime of tying an imaginary rope round his neck and throwing it over the limb of an imaginary tree. “They’re goin’ to get him for shore this time, soon as he comes out of jail; but would you guess it from her bluff?”

There was no mistaking the fate of a rustler after Mr. Dax’s grisly demonstration, but of the quality of his calling Mary was as ignorant as before.

“And why should they do that?” she inquired, with tenderfoot simplicity.

“Stealin’ cattle ain’t good for the health hereabouts,” said Leander, as one who spoke with authority. “It’s apt to bring on throat trouble.”

But Mary did not find Leander’s joke amusing. She had suddenly remembered the pale, gaunt man who had walked into the eating-house the previous morning and walked out again, his errand turned into farce-comedy by the cowardice of an unworthy antagonist. The pale man’s grievance had had to do with sheep and cattle. His name had been Rodney, too. She understood now. He was Judith Rodney’s brother, and he was in danger of being hanged. Mary Carmichael felt first the admiration of a girl, then the pity of a woman, for the brave young creature who so stoutly carried so unspeakable a burden. But she could not speak of her new knowledge to Leander.

She glanced towards this childlike person and saw from his stealthy manner that he had more to impart. He walked towards the kitchen door, saw no one, and came back to Mary.

“There ain’t a man in this Gawd-forsaken country wouldn’t lope at the chance to die for her—but the women!” Leander’s pantomimic indication of absolute feminine antagonism was conclusive.

“The wimmin treats her scabby—just scabby. Don’t you go to thinkin’ she ain’t a good girl on that account”; and something like an attitude of chivalrous protection straightened the apologetic crook in his craven outline.

“She’s good, just good, and when a woman’s that there’s no use in sayin’ it any more fanciful. As I says to my wife, every time she give me a chance, ‘If Judy wasn’t a good girl these boys about here would just natchrally become extinct shootin’ each other upon account of her.’ But she don’t favor none enough to cause trouble.”

“Are the women jealous of her?”

“It’s her independence that riles ’em. They take on awful about her ridin’ in pants, an’ it certainly is a heap more modest than ridin’ straddle in a hitched up caliker skirt, same as some of them do.”

“And do all the women out here ride astride?” Mary gasped.

“A good many does, when you ain’t watchin’; horses in these parts ain’t broke for no such lopsided foolishness as side-saddles. But you see she does it becomin’, and that’s where the grudge comes in. You can’t stir about these foot-hills without coming across a woman, like as not, holdin’ on to a posse of kids, and ridin’ clothes-pin fashion in a looped-up skirt; when she sees you comin’ she’ll p’r’aps upset a kid or two assoomin’ a decorous attitood. That’s feemi_nine_, and as such is approved by the ladies, but”—and here Leander put his head on one side and gave a grotesque impression of outraged decorum—“pants is considered unwomanly.”

“Leander! Leander!” came in accusing accents from the kitchen.

“Run!” gasped Mrs. Dax’s handmaiden; “don’t let her catch us chinnin’.”

Mary Carmichael ran round one side of the house as she was bidden, but, like Lot’s wife, could not resist the temptation of looking back. Leander, with incredible rapidity, grabbed two clothes-pins off the line, clutched a dish-towel, shook it. “Comin’! comin’!” he called, as he went through the farce of rehanging it.

The lonesomeness of plain and foot-hill, the utter lack of the human element that gives to this country its character of penetrating desolation, had been changed while Mary Carmichael forgathered with Leander by the clothes-line. From the four quarters of the compass, men in sombreros, flannel shirts, and all manner of strange habiliments came galloping over the roads as if their horses were as keen on reaching Dax’s as their riders. They came towards the house at full tilt, their horses stretching flat with ears laid back viciously, and Mary, who was unused to the tricks of cow-ponies, expected to see them ride through the front door, merely by way of demonstrating their sense of humor. Not so; the little pintos, buckskins, bays, and chestnuts dashed to the door and stopped short in a full gallop; as a bit of staccato equestrianism it was superb.

And then the wherefore of all this dashing horsemanship, this curveting, prancing, galloping revival of knightly tourney effects was apparent—Judith Rodney had opened post-office. She had changed her riding clothes; or, rather, that portion of them to which the ladies took exception was now concealed by a long, black skirt. Her wonderful braids of black hair had been twisted high on her head. She was well worth a trip across the alkali wastes to see. The room was packed with men. One unconsciously got the impression that a fire, a fight, or some crowd-collecting casualty had happened. Above the continual clinking of spurs there arose every idiom and peculiarity of speech of which these United States are capable. There is no Western dialect, properly speaking. Men bring their modes of expression with them from Maine or Minnesota, as the case may be, but their figures of speech, which give an essential picturesqueness to their language, are almost entirely local—the cattle and sheep industries, prospecting, the Indians, poker, faro, the dance-halls, all contribute their printable or unprintable embellishment.

Judith managed them all—cow-punchers, sheep-herders, prospectors, freighters—with an impersonal skill that suggested a little solitary exercise in the bowling-alley. The ten-pins took their tumbles in good part—no one could congratulate himself on escaping the levelling ball—and where there’s a universal lack of luck, doubtless also there will be found a sort of grim fellowship.

That they were all more or less in love with her there could be no doubt. As a matter of fact, Judith Rodney did not depend on the scarcity of women in the desert for her pre-eminence in the interests of this hot-headed group. Her personality—and through no conscious effort of hers—would have been pre-eminent anywhere. As it was, in this woman-forsaken wilderness she might have stirred up a modern edition of the Trojan war at any moment. That she did not, despite the lurking suggestion of temptation written all over her, brought back the words of Leander: “If Judy wasn’t a good girl, these boys would just nacherally become extinct shooting each other upon account of her.”

And yet what a woman she was! It struck Miss Carmichael, as she watched Judith hold these warring elements in the hollow of her hand, that her interest might be due to a certain temperamental fusion; that there might lie, at the essence of her being, a subtle combination of saint and devil. One could fancy her leading an army on a crusade or provoking a bar-room brawl. The challenging quality of her beauty, the vividness of color, the suggestion of endurance and radiating health in every line, were comparable to the great primeval forces about her. She was cast to be the mother of men of brawn and muscle, who would make this vast, unclaimed wilderness subject to them.

At present neither pole of her character, as it had been hastily estimated, was even remotely suggested. The atmosphere in the post-office was, considering the potential violence of its visitors, singularly calm. And Judith, feeding these wild border lads on scraps of chaff and banter, and retaining their absolute loyalty, was a sight worth seeing. She had the alertness of a lion-tamer locked in a cage with the lords of the jungle; the rashly confident she humbled, the meek she exalted, and all with such genuine good-fellowship, such an absence of coquetry in the genial game of give and take, that one ceased to wonder at even the devotion of Leander. And since they were to her, on her own confession, but “spurs and sombreros,” one wondered at the elaboration of the comedy, the endless wire-pulling in the manipulation of these most picturesque marionettes—until one remembered the outlaw brother and felt that what she did she did for him.

“You right shore there ain’t a letter for me, Miss Judith. My creditors are pretty faithful ’bout bearing me in mind.” It was the third time that the big, shambling Texan who had been one of the company at Mrs. Clark’s eating-house had inquired for mail, and seemed so embarrassed by his own bulk that he moved cautiously, as if he might step on a fellow-creature and maim him. Each time he had asked for a letter he took his place at the end of the waiting-line and patiently bided his time for the chance of an extra word with the postmistress.

“They’ve begun to lose hope, Texas.”

She shuffled the letters impartially, as a goddess dispensing fate, and barely glanced at the man who had ridden a hundred and fifty miles across sand and cactus to see her.

“That’s the difference between them and me.” There was a grim finality in his tone.

“What, you’re going to take your place at the end of that line again! I’ll try and find you a circular.”

He tried to look at her angrily, but she smiled at him with such good-fellowship that he went off singing significantly that universal anthem of the cow-puncher the West over:

“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie,
In a narrow grave just six by three,
Where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me.
Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“Ain’t there a love letter for me?” The young man who inquired seemed to belong to a different race from these bronzed squires of the saddle. He suggested over-crowded excursion boats on Sunday afternoons in swarming Eastern cities. He buttonholed every one and explained his presence in the West on the score of his health, as though leaving his native asphalt were a thing that demanded apology.

“Yes,” answered the postmistress, with a real motherly note, “here is one from Hugous & Co.”

A roar went up at this, and the blushing tenderfoot pocketed his third bill for the most theatrical style of Mexican sombrero; it had a brass snake coiled round the crown for a hat-band, and a cow-puncher in good and regular standing would have preferred going bareheaded to wearing it.

“She seems to be pressing her suit, son; you better name the day,” one of the loungers suggested.

“The blamed thing ain’t worth twenty-five dollars,” the young man from the East declared. A conspicuous silence followed. It seemed to irritate the owner of the hat that no one would defend it. “It ain’t worth it,” he repeated.

“I think you allowed you was out here for your health?” the big Texan, who had returned from the corral, inquired.

“Betcher life,” swaggered the man with the hat, “N’York’s good enough for me.”

“But”—and the Texan smiled sweetly—“the man who sold you the hat ain’t out here for his.”

Judith hid her head and stamped letters. The boys were suspiciously quiet, then some one began to chant:

“The devil examined the desert well, And made up his mind ’twas too dry for hell; He put up the prices his pockets to swell, And called it a—heal-th resort.”

The postmistress waited for the last note of the chorus to die away, and read from a package she held in her hand—“‘Mrs. Henry Lee, Deer Lodge, Wyoming.’ Well, Henry, here’s a wedding-present, I guess. And my congratulations, though you’ve hardly treated us well in never saying a word.”

The unfortunate Henry, who hadn’t even a sweetheart, and who was noted as the shyest man in the “Goose Creek Outfit,” had to submit to the mock congratulations of every man in the room and promise to set up the drinks later.

“I never felt we’d keep you long, son; them golden curls seldom gets a chance to ripen singly.”

“Shoshone squaw, did you say she was, Henry? They ain’t much for looks, but there’s a heep of wear to ’em.”

“Oh, go on, now; you fellows know I ain’t married.” And the boy handled the package with a sort of dumb wonder, as if the superscription were indisputable evidence of a wife’s existence.

“Open it, Henry; you shore don’t harbor sentiments of curiosity regarding the post-office dealings of your lady.”

“Now, old man, this here may be grounds for divorce.”

“See what the other fellow’s sending your wife.”

Henry, badgered, jostled, the target of many a homely witticism, finally opened the package, which proved to be a sample bottle of baby food. At sight of it they howled like Apaches, and Henry was again forced to receive their congratulations. Judith, who had been an interested on-looker without joining in the merriment, now detected in the tenor of their humor a tendency towards breadth. In an instant her manner was official; rapping the table with her mailing-stamp, she announced:

“Boys, this post-office closes in ten minutes, if you want to buy any stamps.”

The silence following this statement on the part of the postmistress was instantaneous. Henry took his mirth-provoking package and went his way; some of the more hilariously inclined followed him. The remainder confined themselves absolutely to business, scrawling postal-cards or reading their mail. The pounce of the official stamp on the letters, as the postmistress checked them off for the mail-bag, was the only sound in the hot stillness.

A heavily built man, older than those who had been keeping the post-office lively, now took advantage of the lull to approach Judith. He had a twinkling face, all circles and pouches, but it grew graver as he spoke to the postmistress. He was Major Atkins, formerly a famous cavalry officer, but since his retirement a cattle-man whose herds grazed to the pan-handle of Texas. As he took his mail, talking meantime of politics, of the heat, of the lack of water, in the loud voice for which he was famous, he managed, with clumsy diplomacy, to interject a word or two for her own ear alone.

“Jim’s out,” he conveyed to her, in a successfully muffled tone. “He’s out, and they’re after him, hot. Get him out of the State, Judy—get him out, quick. He tried to kill Simpson at Mrs. Clark’s, in town, yesterday. The little Eastern girl that’s here will tell you.” Then the major was gone before Judith could perfectly realize the significance of what he had told her.

She threw back her head and the pulse in her throat beat. Like a wild forest thing, at the first warning sound, she considered: Was it time for flight?—or was the warning but the crackling of a twig? Major Atkins was a cattle-man: her brother hated all cattle-men. How disinterested had been the major’s warning! He had always been her friend. Mrs. Atkins had been one of the ladies at the post who had helped to send her to school to the nuns at Santa Fé. She despised herself for doubting; yet these were troublous times, and all was fair between sheep and cattle-men. Major Atkins had spoken of the Eastern girl; then that pretty, little, curly-haired creature, whom Judith had found standing in the sunshine, had seen Jim—had heard him threaten to kill. Should she ask her about it—consult her? Judith’s training was not one to impel her to give her confidence to strangers, still she had liked the little Eastern girl.

These were the perplexities that beset her, sweeping her thoughts hither and thither, as sea-weed is swept by the wash of the waves. She strove to collect her faculties. How should she rid the house of her cavaliers? She had regularly to refuse some half-dozen of them each day that she kept post-office.

In a few minutes more the group in the post-office began to disperse under the skilful manipulation of the postmistress. To some she sold stamps with an air of “God speed you,” and they were soon but dwindling specks on the horizon. To others she implied such friendly farewells that there was nothing to do but betake themselves to their saddles. Others had compromised with the saloon opposite, and their roaring mirth came in snatches of song and shouts of laughter. She fastened up the little pile of letters that had remained uncalled for with what seemed a deliberate slowness. Each time any one entered the room she looked up—then the hope died hard in her face. Leander came in with catlike tread and removed the pigeon-holes from the table. The post-office was closed. Family life had been resumed at the Daxes’.

Judith left the room and stood in the blinding sunlight, basking in it as if she were cold. The mercury must have stood close to a hundred, and she was hatless. There was no trace of her ebullient spirits of the morning. Her head was sunk on her breast and she held her hands with locked fingers behind her. It was hot, hot as the breaths of a thousand belching furnaces. A white, burning glare had spread itself from horizon to horizon, and the earth wrinkled and cracked beneath it. From every corner of this parched wilderness came an ominous whirring, like the last wheezing gasp of an alarm-clock before striking the hour. This menacing orchestration was nothing more or less than millions of grasshoppers rasping legs and wings together in hoarse appreciation of the heat and glare; but it had a sound that boded evil. Again and again she turned towards the yellow road as it dipped over the hills; but there was never a glimpse of a horseman from that direction.

V. The Trail Of Sentiment

Within the house the travellers had disposed themselves in a repressed and melancholy circle that suggested the suspended animation of a funeral gathering. The fat lady had turned back her skirt to save her travelling dress. The stage was late, and there was no good and sufficient reason for wearing it out. A similar consideration of economy led her to flirt off flies with her second best pocket-handkerchief. Mrs. Dax presided over the gathering with awful severity. Every one truckled to her shamefully, receiving her lightest remarks as if they were to be inscribed on tablets of bronze. Leander, his eyes bright with excitement at being received in the family circle on an equal footing, balanced perilously on the edge of his chair, anticipating dismissal.

“Chugg’s never ben so late as this,” said Mrs. Dax, rocking herself furiously. She strongly resembled one of those mottled chargers of the nursery whose flaunting nostrils seem forever on the point of sending forth flame. Leander, the fat lady, and Miss Carmichael meekly murmured assent and condemnation.

“And there ain’t a sign of him,” said Mrs. Dax, returning to the house after straining the landscape through her all-observant eye, and not detecting him in any of the remote pin-pricks on the horizon, in which these plainsfolk invariably decipher a herd of antelope, an elk or two, or a horseman.

“Bet he had a woman in the stage and upset it with her,” said Leander, in the animated manner of a poor relation currying favor with a bit of news.

Mrs. Dax regarded him severely for a moment, then conspicuously addressed her next remark to the ladies. “Bet he had a woman in the stage, the old scoundrel!”

“Wonder who she was?” said Leander, with the sparkling triumph of a poor relation whose surmise had been accepted. But Mrs. Dax had evidently decided that Leander had gone far enough.

“Was you expectin’ any of your lady friends by Chugg’s stage that you are so frettin’ anxious?” she inquired, and the poor relation collapsed miserably.

“You’ve heard about Chugg’s goin’ on since ‘Mountain Pink’ jilted him?” inquired Mrs. Dax of the fat lady, as the only one of the party who might have kept abreast with the social chronicles of the neighborhood.

“My land, yes,” responded the fat lady, proud to be regarded as socially cognizant. “M’ son says he’s plumb locoed about it—didn’t want me to travel by his stage. But I said he dassent upset a woman of my age—he just nacherally dassent!”

Miss Carmichael, by dint of patient inquiry, finally got the story which was popularly supposed to account for the misdemeanors of the stage-driver, including his present delinquency that was delaying them on their journey.

It appeared that Lemuel Chugg, then writhing in the coils of perverse romance, was among the last of those famous old stage-drivers whose talents combined skill at handling the ribbons with the diplomacy necessary to treat with a masked envoy on the road. His luck in these encounters was proverbial, and many were the hair-breadth escapes due to Chugg’s ready wit and quick aim; and, to quote Leander, “while he had been shot as full of holes as a salt-shaker, there was a lot of fight in the old man yet.”

Chugg had had no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart, and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance of the “before treatment” view of a chiropodist’s sign. This darling of his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg’s earliest manhood. It had been his only love—till he met Mountain Pink.

Mountain Pink’s husband kept a road-ranch somewhere on Chugg’s stage-route. She was of a buxom type whose red-and-white complexion had not yet surrendered to the winds, the biting dust, and the alkali water. Furthermore, she could “bring about a dried-apple pie” to make a man forget the cooking of his mother. Great was the havoc wrought by Mountain Pink’s pies and complexion, but she followed the decorous precedent of Cæsar’s wife, and, like her pastry, remained above suspicion.

Her husband, whose name was Jim Bosky, seemed, to the self-impanelled jury that spent its time sitting on the case, singularly insensible to his own advantages. Not only did he fail to take a proper pride in her beauty, but there were dark hints abroad that he had never tasted one of her pies. When delicately questioned on this point, at that stage of liquid refreshment that makes these little personalities not impossible, Bosky had grimly quoted the dearth of shoes among shoe-makers’ children.

Whatever were the facts of the case, Mountain Pink got the sympathy that might have been expected in a section of the country where the ratio of the sexes is fifty to one. Chugg, eating her pies regularly once a week on his stage-route, said nothing, but he presented her with a red plush photograph album with oxidized silver clasps, and by this first reckless expenditure of money in the life of Chugg, Natrona, Johnson, Converse, and Sweetwater counties knew that Cupid had at last found a vulnerable spot in the tough and weather-tanned hide of the old stage-driver.

Nor did Cupid stop here with his pranks. Having inoculated the stage-driver with the virus of romance, madness began to work in the veins of Chugg. He presented Mountain Pink with the gray woollen stocking—not extracting a single coin—and urged her to get a divorce from the clodlike man who had never appreciated her and marry him.

Mountain Pink coyly took the stocking so generously given for the divorce and subsequent trousseau, and Chugg continued to drive his stage with an Apollo-like abandon, whistling love-songs the while.

Coincident with Mountain Pink’s disappearance Dakotaward, in the interests of freedom, went also one Bob Catlin, a mule-wrangler. Bosky, with conspicuous pessimism, hoped for the worst from the beginning, and as time went on and nothing was heard of either of the wanderers, some of Mountain Pink’s most loyal adherents confessed it looked “romancy.” But crusty old Chugg remained true to his ideal. “She’ll write when she gets good and ready,” and then concluded, loyally, “Maybe she can’t write, nohow,” and nothing could shake his faith.

When Mountain Pink and the mule-wrangler returned as bride and groom and set up housekeeping on the remainder of Chugg’s stocking, and on his stage-route, too, so that he had to drive right past the honeymoon cottage every time he completed the circuit, they lost caste in Carbon County. Chugg never spoke of the faithlessness of Mountain Pink. His bitterness found vent in tipping over the stage when his passengers were confined to members of the former Mrs. Bosky’s sex, and, as Leander said, “the flask in his innerds held more.” And these were the only traces of tragedy in the life of Lemuel Chugg, stage-driver.

Judith had continued her unquiet pacing in the blinding glare while the group within doors, somnolent from the heat and the incessant shrilling of the locusts, droningly discussed the faithlessness of Mountain Pink, dozed, and took up the thread of the romance. Each time she turned Judith would stop and scan the yellow road, shading her eyes with her hand, and each time she had turned away and resumed her walk. Mary, who gave the postmistress no unstinted share of admiration for the courage with which she faced her difficulties, and who had been seeking an opportunity to signify her friendship, and now that she saw the last of the gallants depart, inquired of Judith if she might join her.

They walked without speaking for several minutes, enjoying a sense of comradeship hardly in keeping with the brevity of their acquaintance; a freedom from restraint spared them the necessity of exchanging small-talk, that frequently irritating toll exacted as tribute to possible friendship.

The desert lay white and palpitating beneath the noonday glare, and from the outermost rim of desolation came dancing “dust-devils” whirling and gliding through the mazes of their eerie dance. “I think sometimes,” said Judith, “that they are the ghosts of those who have died of thirst in the desert.”

Mary shuddered imperceptibly. “How do you stand it with never a glimpse of the sea?”

“You’ll love it, or hate it; the desert is too jealous for half measures. As for the sea”—Judith shrugged her fine shoulders—“from all I’ve heard of it, it must be very wet.”

Each felt a reticence about broaching the subject uppermost in her thoughts—Judith from the instinctive tendency towards secretiveness that was part of the heritage of her Indian blood; Mary because the subject so closely concerned this girl for whom she felt such genuine admiration.

Judith finally brought up the matter with an abruptness that scarce concealed her anxiety.

“You saw my brother yesterday at Mrs. Clark’s eating-house; will you be good enough to tell me just what happened?”

Mary related the incident in detail, Judith cross-examining her minutely as to the temper of the men at table towards Jim. Did she know if any cattle-men were present? Did she hear where her brother had gone?

Mary had heard nothing further after he had left the eating-house; the only one she had talked to had been Mrs. Clark, whose sympathy had been entirely with Jim. Judith thanked her, but in reality she knew no more now than she had heard from Major Atkins.

Judith now stopped in their walk and stood facing the road as it rolled over the foot-hills—a skein of yellow silk glimmering in the sun. Then Mary saw that the object spinning across it in the distance, hardly bigger than a doll’s carriage, was the long-delayed stage. She spoke to the postmistress, but apparently she did not hear—Judith was watching the nearing stage as if it might bring some message of life and death. She stood still, and the drooping lines of her figure straightened, every fibre of her beauty kindled. She was like a flame, paling the sunlight.

And presently was heard the uncouth music of sixteen iron-shod hoofs beating hard from the earth rhythmic notes which presently grew hollow and sonorous as they came rattling over the wooden bridge that spanned the creek.

“Chugg!” exclaimed Leander, rushing to the door in a tumult. There was something crucial in the arrival of the delayed stage-driver. His delinquencies had deflected the course of the travellers, left them stranded in a remote corner of the wilderness; but now they should again resume the thread of things; Chugg’s coming was an event.

“’Tain’t Chugg, by God!” said Leander, impelled to violent language by the unexpected.

“It’s Peter Hamilton!” exclaimed Mrs. Dax.

“Land’s sakes, the New-Yorker!” said the fat lady. Only Judith said nothing.

Mr. Hamilton held the ribbons of that battered prairie-stage as if he had been driving past the judges’ bench at the Horse Show. Furthermore, he wore blue overalls, a flannel shirt, and a sombrero, which sartorial inventory, while it highly became the slim young giant, added an extra comedy touch to his rôle of whip. He was as dusty as a miller; close-cropped, curly head, features, and clothes were covered with a fine alkali powdering; but he carried his youth as a banner streaming in the blue. And he swung from the stage with the easy flow of muscle that is the reward of those who live in the saddle and make a fine art of throwing the lariat.

They greeted him heartily, all but Judith, who did not trust herself to speak to him before the prying eyes of Mrs. Dax, and escaped to the house. Chugg’s latest excursion into oblivion had resulted in a fall from the box. He was not badly hurt, and recuperation was largely a matter of “sleeping it off,” concluded Peter Hamilton’s bulletin of the condition of the stage-driver. So the travellers were still marooned at Dax’s, and the prospect of continuing their journey was as vague as ever.

“Last I heard of you,” said Mrs. Dax to Hamilton, with a sort of stone-age playfulness, “you was punching cows over to the Bitter Root.”

“That’s true, Mrs. Dax”—he gave her his most winning smile—“but I could not stay away from you long.”

Leander grimaced and rubbed his hands in an ecstasy of delight at finding a man who had the temerity to bandy words with Mrs. Dax.

“Hum-m-m-ph!” she whinnied, with equine coquetry. “Guess it was rustlers brought you back as much as me.”

Judith, who had entered the room in time to hear Mrs. Dax’s last remark, greeted him casually, but her eyes, as they met his, were full of questioning fear. Had he come from the Bitter Root range to hunt down her brother? The thought was intolerable. Yet, when he had bade her good-bye some three weeks ago, he had told her that he did not expect to return much before the fall “round-up.” She had heard, a day or two before, that he was again in the Wind River country, and her morning vigil beneath the glare of the desert sun had been for him.

Mrs. Dax regarded them with the mercilessness of a death-watch; she remembered the time when Hamilton’s excuses for his frequent presence at the post-office had been more voluble than logical. But now he no longer came, and Judith, for all her deliberate flow of spirits, did not quite convince the watchful eyes of Leander’s lady—the postmistress was a trifle too cheerful.

“Mrs. Dax,” pleaded Peter, boyishly, “I’m perishing for a cup of coffee, and I’ve got to get back to my outfit before dark.”

“Oh, go on with you,” whinnied the gorgon; but she left the room to make the coffee.

Judith’s eyes sought his. “Why don’t you and Leander form a coalition for the overthrow of the enemy?” His voice had dropped a tone lower than in his parley with Mrs. Dax; it might have implied special devotion, or it might have implied but the passing tribute to a beautiful woman in a country where women were few—the generic admiration of all men for all women, ephemerally specialized by place and circumstance.

But Judith, harassed at every turn, heart-sick with anxiety, had anticipated in Peter’s coming, if not a solution of her troubles, at least some evidence of sustaining sympathy, and was in no mood for resuscitating the perennial pleasantries anent Leander and his masterful lady.

The shrilling of the locusts emphasized their silence. She spoke to him casually of his change of plan, but he turned the subject, and Judith let the matter drop. She was too simple a woman to stoop to oblique measures for the gaining of her own ends. If he was here to hunt down her brother, if he was here to see the Eastern woman at the Wetmore ranch—well, “life was life,” to be taken or left. Thus spoke the fatalism that was the heritage of her Indian blood.

The thought of Miss Colebrooke at Wetmore’s reminded her of a letter for Peter that had been brought that morning by one of the Wetmore cow-boys.

“I forgot—there’s a letter for you.” She went to the pigeon-holes on the wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and brought him a square, blue linen envelope—distinctly a lady’s letter.

Peter took it with rather a forced air of magnanimity, as if in neglecting to present it to him sooner she drew heavily on his reserve of patience. Tearing open the envelope, he read it voraciously, read it to the exclusion of his surroundings, the world at large, and—Judith. He strode up and down the floor two or three times, and called to Leander, who was passing:

“Dax, I must have that gray mare of yours right away.” He went in the direction of the stable, without a second glance at the postmistress, and presently they saw him galloping off in the opposite direction from which he had come. Mrs. Dax came in with a tray on which were a pot of coffee and sundry substantial delicacies.

“Where’s he gone?” she demanded, putting the tray down so hard that the coffee slopped.

“I dunno,” said Leander. “He said he’d got to have the gray mare, saddled her hisself, and rode off like hell.”

Mrs. Dax looked at them all savagely for the explanation that they could not give. In sending her out to make coffee she felt that Peter, whom she regarded in the light of a weakness, had taken advantage of her affections to dupe her in regard to his plans.

“Take them things back to the kitchen,” she commanded Leander.

Mary Carmichael involuntarily glanced at Judith; the fall of the leaf was in her cheek.

Peter Hamilton, bowed in his saddle and flogging forward inhumanely, bred rife speculation as to his destination among the group that watched him from the Daxes’ front door. Mrs. Dax, who entertained so profound a respect for her own omniscience that she disdained to arrive at a conclusion by a logical process of deduction, was “plumb certain that he had gone after ‘rustlers!’” Leander, who had held no opinions since his marriage except that first and all-comprehensive tenet of his creed—that his wife was a person to be loved, honored, and obeyed instantly—agreed with his lady by a process of reflex action. The fat lady, who had a commonplace for every occasion, didn’t “know what we were all coming to.” Miss Carmichael, who was beginning to find her capacity for amazement overstrained, alone accepted this last incident with apathy. Mr. Hamilton might have gone in swift pursuit of cattle thieves or he might be riding the mare to death for pure whimsy. Only Judith Rodney, who said nothing, felt that he was spurring across the wilderness at breakneck speed to see a girl at Wetmore’s. But her lack of comment caused no ripple of surprise in the flow of loose-lipped speculation that served, for the time being, to inject a casual interest into the talk of these folk, bored to the verge of demoralization by long waiting for Chugg.

Judith preferred to confirm her apprehensions regarding Hamilton’s ride, alone. She knew—had not all her woman’s intuitions risen in clamorous warning—and yet she hoped, hoped despairingly, even though the dread alternative to the girl at the Wetmore ranch threatened lynch law for her brother. Her very gait changed as she withdrew from the group about the door, covertly gaining her vantage-ground inch by inch. The heels of her riding-boots made no sound as she stole across the kitchen floor, toeing in like an Indian tracking an enemy through the forest. The small window at the back of the kitchen commanded a view of the road in all its sprawling circumlocution. Seen from this prospect, it had no more design than the idle scrawlings of a child on a bit of paper; but the choice of roads to Good and Evil was not fraught with more momentous consequences than was each prong of that fork towards which Hamilton was galloping.

The right arm swung towards the Wetmore ranch, where at certain times during the course of the year a hundred cow-punchers reported on the stock that grazed in four States. At certain seasons, likewise, despite the fact that the ranch was well into the foot-hill country, there might be found a New York family playing at life primeval with the co-operation of porcelain bath-tubs, a French _chef_, and electric light.