Chapter VII: Part 7

Presumably Judith was a favorite guest of the Yellett household, and not without reason. She took her place in the circle about the homely, steaming fare, with an ease and grace that suggested that dining off the ground was an every-day affair with her, and chairs and tables undreamed-of luxuries. Mary envied her ready tact. Why could she not meet these people with Judith’s poise—bring out the best of them, as she did? The boys talked readily and naturally—there was even a flavor to what they said. As for herself, try never so conscientiously and she would be confronted by frank amusement or shy distrust. Even “paw” beamed at Judith appreciatively as he consumed his meal with infinite, toothless labor. The Spartan family became almost sprightly under the pleasantly stimulating influence of its guest.

“What kind of basques are they wearing this summer, Judy?” inquired Mrs. Yellett, regarding her guest’s trim shirt-waist judicially. “I reckon them loose, meal-sack things must be all the go since you and Miss Mary both have ’em; but give me a good, tight-fittin’ basque, every time. How’s any one to know whether you got a figure or not, in a thing that never hits you anywhere?” questioned the matriarch, not without a touch of pride anent her own fine proportions.

“You really ought to have a shirt-waist, Mrs. Yellett. You’ve no idea of the comfort of them, till you’ve worn them.”

“I don’t see but I’ll have to come to it.” Her tone was frankly regretful, as one who feels obliged to follow the behests of fashion, yet, in so doing, sacrifices a cherished ideal. Mary Carmichael choked over her coffee in an abortive attempt to restrain her audible hilarity. Judith, without a trace of amusement, was discussing materials, cut, and buttons; the plainswoman had proved herself the better gentlewoman of the two.

“Get me a spotty calico, white, with a red dot, will you, the next time you’re over to Ervay? Buttons accordin’ to your judgment; but if you could get some white chiny with a red ring, I think they’d match it handsome.” She frowned reflectively. “You’re sure one of them loose, hangy things ’d become me? Then you can bring it over Tuesday, when you come to the hunt.”

“What hunt?” asked Judith, in all simplicity.

“Why, the wolf-hunt. Peter Hamilton come here three days ago and made arrangements for ’em all to have supper here after it was done. ’Lowed there was a young Eastern lady in the party, Miss Colebrooke, who couldn’t wait to meet me. Course you’re goin’, Judy? You’ve plumb forgot it, or somethin’ happened to the messenger. Who ever hyeard tell of anythin’ happenin’ in this yere county ’thout you bein’ the very axle of it?”

Judith had not betrayed her chagrin by the least change of countenance. To the most searching glance every faculty was intent on the shirt-waist with the ringed buttons. Yet both women felt—by a species of telepathy wholly feminine—that Judith was deeply wounded. Loyal Sarah Yellett decided that Hamilton’s guests would get but a scant supper from her if her friend Judith was to be unfavored with an invitation, while Judith, in her own warm heart, resented as deeply as Peter’s slight of herself, his tale of Miss Colebrooke’s impatience to meet Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch’s dominant personality evoked many a smile even from those most deeply conscious of her worth; but it wasn’t like Peter to make a spectacle of his ruggedly honest neighbor. Nevertheless she remarked, coolly:

“I sha’n’t be able to bring your shirt-waist things up Tuesday, I’m afraid, Mrs. Yellett, but I’ll try to bring them towards the end of the week.” Then, with a swift change of subject, “How are the boys getting on with their education, Miss Carmichael?”

The boys looked at Mary out of the corners of their eyes. Their prowess in the field of letters had not been publicly discussed before. Mary Carmichael, emboldened by Judith’s presence, looked at her tormentors with a judicious glance.

“The girls are doing fairly well,” she replied, suppressing the mischief in her eyes, “but the boys, poor fellows, I think something must be the matter with them. Did they ever fall on their heads when they were babies, Mrs. Yellett?”

“Not more than common. All babies fall on their heads; it’s as common as colic.”

“Poor boys!” said Mary, with a manner that suggested they were miles away, rather than within a few feet of her. “Poor boys! I’ve never seen anything like it. They try so hard, too, yet they can make nothing of work that would be play for a child of three. They must have fallen on their heads harder than you supposed, Mrs. Yellett.”

“Perhaps their skulls were a heap frailer than I allowed for at the time,” said Mrs. Yellett, with similar remoteness, yet with a twinkle that showed Mary she understood the situation.

“An infant’s skull doesn’t stand much knocking about, I suppose, Mrs. Yellett?”

“Not a great deal, if there ain’t plenty of vinegar and brown paper handy, and I seldom had such fancy fixings in camp. It’s too bad my boys should be dumb ’n account of a little thing like vinegar and brown paper.”

“Maw, they be dumb as Injuns,” declared Cacta, preening herself, while the Messrs. Yellett reapplied themselves to their dinner with ostentatious interest.

“Well, well!” said Mrs. Yellett; “it be a hard blow to me to know that my sons are lackings; there’s mothers I know as would give vent to their disapp’inted ambition in ways I’d consider crool to the absent-minded. Now hearken, the whole outfit of you! Any offspring of mine now present and forever after holding his peace, who proves feebleminded by the end of the coming week, takes over all the work, labor, and chores of such offspring as demonstrates himself in full possession of his faculties, the matter to be reported on by the gov’ment.”

No sovereign, issuing a proclamation of war, could have assumed a more formidable mien than Mrs. Yellett, squatting erect on the prairie, crowned by her rabbit-skin cap. Mary and Judith, with bland, impassive expressions, noted the effect of the mandate. There was not the faintest symptom of rebellion; each Brobdingnag accepted the matriarch’s edict without a murmur.

With an air of further meditation on the efficacy of brown paper and vinegar at the crucial moment, Mrs. Yellett suddenly observed:

“The lacking, like the dog, may be taught to fetch and carry a book; but to learn it he is unable.”

“Maw, does it say that in the Book of Hiram?” asked Clematis.

“It says that, an’ more, too. It says, ‘The words of the wise are an expense, but the lovin’ parent don’t grudge ’em.’”

Mary Carmichael had noticed, as her alien presence came to be less of a check on Mrs. Yellett’s natural medium of expression, that she was much addicted to a species of quotation with which she impartially adorned her conversation, pointed family morals, or administered an occasional reproof. These family aphorisms were sometimes semi-legal, sometimes semi-scriptural in turn of phrase, and built on a foundation of homely philosophy. They were ascribed to the “Book of Hiram” and never failed of salutary effect in the family circle. But the apt quotations that she had just heard piqued Mary’s curiosity more than before.

“Do you happen to have a copy of the Book of Hiram, Mrs. Yellett?” she asked, in all innocence, supposing that the ‘homely apothegms were to be found at the back of some patent-medicine almanac. Judith Rodney listened in wonder. The question had never before been asked in her hearing.

“I lost mine.” Mrs. Yellett folded her arms and looked at her questioner with something of a challenging mien.

“What a pity! I’ve been so interested in the quotations I’ve heard you make from it.”

“What’s the matter with ’em?” she demanded, pride and apprehension equally commingled.

Judith Rodney rushed to the rescue:

“Nothing is the matter with them, Mrs. Yellett,” she said, with her disarming smile, “except that there is not quite enough to go around.”

The matriarch had the air of gathering herself together for something really worth while. Then she tossed off:

“‘’Tain’t always the quality of the grub that confers the flavor, but sometimes the scarcity thereof.’”

Perhaps it has been the good-fortune of some of us to say a word of praise to an author, while unconscious of his relationship to the book praised. Mark the genial glow radiating from every feature of our auditor! How we feel ourselves anointed with his approval, our good taste and critical faculty how commended! It is a luxury that goes a long way towards mitigating the discomfitures caused by the reverse of this unctuous blunder.

“The Book of Hiram,” said Mrs. Yellett, angling for time, “is a book—it do surprise me that it escapes your notice back East. You ever heard tell of the Book of Mormon?”

Mary assented.

“Well, the Book of Hiram is like the Book of Mormon, only a heap more undefiled. The youngest child can read it without asking a single embarrassing question of its elder, and the oldest sinner can read it without having any fleshly meditations intrudin’ on his piety.”

The Yellett family had by this time dispersed itself for the afternoon, and the matriarch and the two girls started in to clear away the meal and wash the dishes.

“That’s the kind of book for me,” continued Mrs. Yellett, vigorously swishing about in the soapy water. “Story-books don’t count none with me these days. It’s my opinion that things are snarled up a whole lot too much in real life without pestering over the anguish of print folks. Flesh and blood suffering goes without a groan of sympathy from the on-lookers, while novel characters wade to the neck in compassion. I’ve pondered on that a whole lot, seem’ a heap of indifference to every-day calamity, and the way I assay it is like this: print folks has terrible fanciful layouts given to their griefs and worriments by the authors of their being. The trimmings to their troubles is mighty attractive. Don’t you reckon I’d be willin’ to have a spell of trouble if I had a sweeping black velvet dress to do it in? Yes, indeed, I’d be willin’ to turn a few of them shades of anguish, ‘gray’s ashes,’ ‘pale as death,’ and so on, if they’d give me the dress novel ladies seems to have for them special occasions.”

“But you used to like novels, you know you did, Mrs. Yellett,” observed Judith Rodney.

“Yes, I didn’t always entertain these views concernin’ romance. You wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when I just nacherally went careerin’ round enveloped in fantasies. I was young then—just about the time I married paw. Every novel that was read to me, I mean that I read”—Mrs. Yellett blushed a deep copper color through her many coats of tan—“convinced me that I was the heroine thereof. And, nacherally, I turned over to paw the feachers and characteristics of the hero in said book I happened to be enjoyin’ at the time. Paw never knew it, but sometimes he was a dook, and it was plumb hard work. Just about as hard as ropin’ a mountain-lion an’ sayin’, ‘remember, you are a sheep from this time henceforth, and trim your action accordin’.’ I’d say to paw, ‘Let’s walk together in the gloaming, here in this deserted garden’; and paw would say, ‘Name o’ Gawd, woman, have you lost your mind? It’s plumb three hundred and fifty miles to the Tivoli beer-garden in Cheyenne, and it ain’t deserted, either!’

“Then I’d wring my hands in anguish, same as the Lady Mary, an’ paw would declare I was locoed. He seemed a heap more nacheral when I pretended he was ‘Black Ranger, the Pirate King.’ His language came in handy, and his cartridge-belt and pistol all came in Black Ranger’s outfit. Yes, it was a heap easier playing he was a pirate than a dook. All this happened back to Salt Lake, where me an’ paw was married.”

Mrs. Yellett looked towards the mountain-range that separated her from the Mormon country, and her listeners realized that she was verging perilously close to confidences. Mary Carmichael, who dreaded missing any detail of the chronicle that dealt with paw in the rôle of apocryphal duke, hastened to say:

“And you lost your taste for romance, finally?”

“In Salt Lake I was left to myself a whole lot-there was reasons why I didn’t mingle with the Mormon herd. Paw was mighty attentive to me, but them was troublous times for paw. I pastures myself with the fleetin’ figures of romance the endoorin’ time and enjoys myself a heap. When paw wasn’t a dook or a pirate king, unbeknownst to himself, like as not he was Sir Marmaduke Trevelyun, or somebody entitled to the same amount of dog.

“’Bout this time a little stranger was due in our midst, and the woman who came to take care of me was plumb locoed over novels, same as me, only worse. She just hungered for ’em, same as if she had a longin’ for something out of season. She brought a batch of them with her in her trunk, we borrowed her a lot more, some I don’t know how she come by. But they didn’t have no effect; it was like feedin’ an’ Injun—you couldn’t strike bottom. She read out of ’em to me with disastrous results happenin’, an’ that cured me. The brand on this here book that effected my change of heart was _The Bride of the Tomb_. I forget the name of the girl in that romance, but she was in hard luck from the start. She couldn’t head off the man pursooin’ her, any way she turned. She’d wheel out of his way cl’ar across country, but he’d land thar fust an’ wait for her, a smile on his satanine feachers.

“I got so wrought up along o’ that book, an’ worried as to the outcome, ’most as bad as the girl. Think of it! An’ me with only three baby-shirts an’ a flannel petticoat made at the time! Seemed ’s if I couldn’t hustle my meals fast enough, I just hankered so to know what was goin’ to happen next! I plumb detested the man with the handsome feachers, same as the girl. Me an’ her felt precisely alike about him. And when he shut her up in the family vault I just giv’ up an’ was took then an’ there, an’ me without so much as finishin’ the flannel petticoat! I never could endure the sight of a novel since. Perhaps that’s why Ben is so dumb about his books—just holds a nacheral grudge against ’em along of my havin’ to borrow slips for him.”

“Has the Book of Hiram anything to say against the habit of novel reading, Mrs. Yellett?” inquired Judith, demurely.

She paused for a moment. “It’s mighty inconvenient that I should have mislaid that book, but rounding up my recollections of it, I recall something like this: ‘Romance is the loco-weed of humanity.’”

“So you don’t approve of the Mormon Bible?” ventured Mary.

“I jest nacherally execrates Mormonism, spoken, printed, or in action,” she said, with an emphasis that suggested the subject had a strong personal bearing. “I recall a text from the Book of Hiram touching on Mormon deportment in particklar an’ human nature at large. It says, ‘Where several women and one man are gathered together for the purpose of serving the Lord, the man gets the bulk of the service.”

She broke off suddenly, as if she feared she had said too much. “Judy,” she demanded, “is Mis’ Dax busy with Leander now?”

“Not more than usual,” smiled Judith.

“Jest tell her for me, will you, that I want to hire her husband to do some herdin’; Leander’s handy, ’n’ can work good an’ sharp, if he is an infidel. An’ I like to have him over now an’ then, as you know, Judy. As the Book of Hiram says, ‘It’s neighborly to ease the check-rein of a gentled husband.’ But you tell him I don’t want to hear any of his ever-lastin’ fool argufyin’ ’bout religion. Leander ’d stop in the middle of shearin’ a sheep to argue that Jonah never came out o’ the whale’s belly. I ain’t no use for infidels, ’less they’re muzzled, which Leander mos’ generally is.”

With the feeling that there was an excellent though unspoken understanding between them, the two girls walked together to the top of the path that wandered away from camp towards a bluff overlooking wave after wave of foot-hills, lying blue and still like a petrified sea.

“I’m still dying to know who wrote that letter,” begged Mary.

“It was written by a lady who is very anxious to return to Washington, and she took that means of getting one more vote. Her husband is going to run for the Senate next term. We hear a good deal of that side of politics, you know.”

“It was certainly convincing,” remarked the victim of the letter. “My aunts detected many virtues in the handwriting.”

“But now that you are really here, isn’t it splendid? Mountains are such good neighbors. They give you their great company and yet leave you your own little reservations.”

“But I fear I can never feel at home out-of-doors,” Mary announced, with such a rueful expression that they both smiled.

“Perhaps, then, it depends on the frame of mind. I’ve had longer than you to cultivate it.”

Mary looked towards the mountains, serene in their strength. “Awesome as they are,” she laughed, “they don’t frighten me nearly as much as Ben and Ned. They are really very difficile, my pupils, and I feel so ridiculous sitting up back of that tub, teaching them letters and the spelling of foolish words, when they know things I’ve never dreamed of. The other day, out of a few scratches in the dust that I should never have given a second glance, one of them made out that some one’s horses had broken the corral and one was trailing a rope. Whereupon my pupil got on a horse, went in search of the strays, and returned them to men going to a round-up. After that, the spelling of cat didn’t seem quite so much of an achievement as it had before.”

“But they need the spelling of cat so much more than you need to understand trail-marks. Why don’t you try a little strategy with them? Perhaps a bribe, even? It seems to me I remember something in history about the part played in colonization by the bright-colored bead.”

Sundry wood-cuts from a long-forgotten primer history of the United States came back to Mary. In that tear-stained, dog-eared volume, all explorers, from Columbus down to Lewis and Clarke, were unfailingly depicted in the attitude of salesmen displaying squares of cloth to savages apparently in urgent need of them.

“How stupid of me not to remember Father Marquette concluding negotiations with a necklace!”

“Frankly plagiarize the terms of your treaty from Père Marquette, and there you are!”

“You are so splendid!” said Mary, impulsively, remembering Judith’s own sorrows and the smiling fortitude with which she kept them hidden. “You make me feel like a horrid little girl that has been whining.”

Judith looked towards the mountains a long time without speaking.

“When you know them well, they whisper great things that little folk can’t take away.”

She turned back towards camp, walking lightly, with head thrown back. Mary watched her. Yes, the mountains might have admitted her to their company.

XV. The Wolf-hunt

Judith awakened with all the starry infinitude of sky for a canopy. In the distance loomed the foot-hills, watchful sentinels of her slumbers; and, sloping gently away from them, rolled the plain, like some smooth, dark sea flowing deep and silently. Judith, a solitary figure adrift in that still ocean of space, sat up and watched the stars fade and saw the young day peer timorously at the world that lay before it. Her mind, refreshed by long hours of dreamless sleep, turned to the problem of impending things, serenely contemplative. The passing of many mornings and many peoples had the mountains seen as the wreathed mists came and went about their brows, and to all who knew the value of the gift they gave their great company, and to such as could hear, they told their great secrets. Judith’s prayer was an outflowing of soul to the great forces about her, a wish to be in harmony with them, to remember her kinship, to keep some measure of their serenity in the press of burdens. The way of the Indian was ever her way when circumstance raised no barriers; the four walls of a house were a prison to her after the days lengthened and the summer nights grew warm. To the infinite disapproval of that custodian of propriety, Mrs. Dax, she would make her bed beneath the stars, night after night, and bathe in the cold, clear waters of the stream that purled from the white-capped crest of the mountains.

“Nasty Injun ways!” scoffed Leander’s masterful lady, consciously superior from the intrenchment of her stuffy bedroom, that boasted crochet-work on the backs of the chairs and a scant lace curtain at its solitary window.

Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk till it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows. A quarter of a mile above was another pool, hidden like a jewel in its case of green, broidered with scarlet roseberries and white clematis; and towards this she bent her steps, as time was a-plenty that morning. She kept to the stones of the creek for a pathway, jumping lightly from those that were moss-grown to those that hid their nakedness in the dark, velvet shadows of early morning, her white feet touching the shallow stream like pale gulls that dipped and skimmed. “Diana’s Pool,” as she called it, was always clear. It lay half hid beneath a shelving rock, a fount for the tiny, white fall that crooned and sang as it fell. And here she bathed, as the east flamed where the mountains blackened against it. Gold halos tipped the clouds, that melted presently into fiery waves, then burst into one great aureole through which the sun rode triumphant, and it was day.

She had kept post-office the day before, and it would not be till day after to-morrow that the squires of the lariat would come again to offer their hearts, their worldly goods, their complete reformation, if she would only change her mind. It was all such an old story that she had grown to regard them with a tenderness almost maternal. But to-day was all her own, and the spirit of adventure swelled high in her bosom as she thought of what she had planned. It was warm and close and still in the Dax house as Judith made her way softly to her own room and began her preparations for the long journey she was to take afoot. To walk in the abominations devised by the white man for the purpose of cramping his feet would have been a serious handicap to Judith. The twenty miles that she would walk before nightfall was no very great undertaking to her, but it was part of her primitive directness to accomplish it with as little expenditure of fatigue and comfort as possible. Moreover, who could steal through the forest in those heeled things without announcing his coming and frightening the forest folk, and sending them skurrying? And Judith loved to surprise them and see them busy with their affairs—to creep along in her soft, elk-hide moccasins and catch their watchful eyes and see the things that were not for the heavy-booted white man.

She might have inspired Kitty Colebrooke to a sonnet as she stepped out into the glad morning light, in short skirt and jacket, green-clad as the pines that girdled the mountains, with a knapsack with rations of bread and meat and the wherewithal to build a fire should she wander belated. She softly closed the door, not to awaken Leander and his slumbering lady, and broke into the running gait that the Indians use on their all-day journeys, the elk-hide moccasins falling soft as snow-flakes on the trail. Dolly she missed chiefly for her companionship, for Judith had not the white man’s utter helplessness without a horse in this country of high altitudes. When she walked she breathed, carried herself, covered ground like her mother’s people, and loved the inspiration of it.

The eerie shadows of the desert drew back and hid themselves in the mountains. The day began with splendid promise—the day of the wolf-hunt, of which no word had been spoken to her by Peter. She, too, was going hunting, but silently and unbidden she would steal through the forest and see this mysterious woman who played fast and loose with Peter, who loved her apparently all the better for the game she played. What manner of woman could do these things? What manner of woman could be indifferent to Peter? Judith was consumingly curious to see. And, apart from this naked and unashamed curiosity, there was the possibility that at sight of Miss Colebrooke there might come a relaxation of Peter’s tyrannous hold upon her thoughts, her life, her very heart’s blood. Would her loyalty bear the test of seeing Peter made a fool of by a woman she could dismiss with a shrug—a softly speaking shrew, perhaps, who played a waiting game with her finger on the pulse of Peter’s prospects? For there was talk of a partnership with the Wetmores. Or a fool, perhaps, for all her sonneting, for there are men who relish a weak headpiece as the chiefest ornament of women, especially when its indeterminate vagaries boast an escape-valve remotely connected with the fine arts. Or a devil-woman, perhaps—an upright wanton who could think no wrong from very poverty of temperament, yet kept him dangling. The possibility of Kitty’s honesty, Judith in her jealousy would not admit. Had she gone to the devil for him, stood and faced the drift of opinion for his sake, that Judith could have understood. But what was the spinning of verses to a woman’s portion of loving and being loved? Even Alida, through all her distracting anxieties, had in her heart the thrice-blessed leaven, reasoned the woman of the plains, who might, according to modern standards, be reckoned a trifle primitive in her psychological deductions. And, withal, Judith was forced to admit that there was something simple and true about a man who would let a woman make a fool of him, whoever the woman was.

Perhaps with this hunting would end the long reign of Peter as a divinity. Judith was tired, not in her vigorous young body, because that was strong and healthful as the hill wind, but tired in heart and mind and life. Her destiny had not been beautiful or happy before he invaded it, but it had been calm, and now serenity seemed the worthiest gift of the gods. It was not that she loved him less, but that she had so long reflected upon him that her imagination was numb; her thoughts, arid, unfruitful as the desert, turned from him to the problems that beset her, and from them back to him again, in dull, subconscious yearning. She could no longer project an anguished consciousness to those scenes wherein he walked and talked with Kitty. Her Indian fatalism had intervened. “Life was life,” to be lived or left. And yet she felt herself a poor creature, one who had lived long on illusion, who had bent her neck to the yoke of arid unrealities. The pale-haired woman who kept him with her miserliness of self, who intruded no sombre tragedy of loving, was well worth a trip across the foot-hills to see. And yet, Judith reflected, it was the portion of her mother’s daughter to make of loving the whole business of life, even if she rebelled and fought against it as an accursed destiny. It was in her inheritance to know and live for the wild thrill of ecstasy in her pulses, to feel trembling joy and despair and frantic hope, that exacted its tribute hardly less poignant; as it was, also, to feel a shivering sensitiveness in regard to the loneliness and bitterness of her life, to have the same measureless capacity for sorrow that she had for loving, to have a soul attuned to the tragedy of things, to love the mighty forces about her, to feel the reflection of all their moods in her heart, and, lastly, it was her destiny to be the daughter of a half-Sioux and a border adventurer, and to feel the counter influences of the two races make forever of her heart a battleground.

Her light feet scarcely touched the ground as she sped swiftly through all the network of the hills; and more than once her woman’s heart asked the question, “And, prithee, Judith, if from henceforth you are only to hold fellowship with the stars and have no part in the ways of men, why do you walk a day’s journey to catch a glimpse of a pale-haired woman?”

She knew the probable course of the wolf-hunt. She had been on scores of them, galloped with Peter after the fleeing gray thing that swept along the ground like the nucleus of a whirling dust-devil. At least she was sure of the place of their nooning—a limpid stream that ran close to many young pine-trees. Here was a pause in the rugged ascent, a level space of open green, thick with buffalo grass. Many times had she been here with Peter, sometimes with many other people on the chase—sometimes, and these occasions were enshrined in her memory, each with its own particular halo, with Peter alone; and they had fished for trout and cooked their supper on the grassy levels. It was in Judith’s planning to arrive before the hunting-party, to hide among the thickets of scrub pine that grew along the steep cliffs and overlooked the grassy level, to take her fill of looking at the pale-haired girl and the hunters at their merrymaking, and, when she had seen, to steal back across the trail to the Daxes’. They would not penetrate the thickets where she meant to hide, and, should they, she was prepared for that contingency, too. She had brought with her a bright-colored shawl that she would throw over her head, and with the start of them she could outrun them all, even Peter. Had she not outdistanced him easily, many times, in fun? Through the tangle of tree-trunks that grew not far from the thicket, they would think she was but a poor Shoshone squaw lying in wait for the broken meat of the revellers.

By crossing and recrossing the tiny creeks that trickled slow and obstructed through the gaunt levels of plain and foot-hill, she had come by a direct route to the fringes of the pine country. And here she found a world dim, green, and mysterious. It was wellnigh inconceivable that the land of sage-brush and silence could, within walking distance of desolation, show such wealth of young timber, such shade and beauty. Her noiseless footfalls scarce startled a sage-hen that, realizing too late her presence, froze to the dead stump—a ruffled gray excrescence with glittering bead eyes that stared at her furtively, the one live thing in the tense body.

The sun wanted an hour of noon when Judith rested by the stream, bathed her face and hands, flushed from the long walk, ate the bread and meat, then lay on the bed of pine-needles, brown and soft from the weathering of many suns and snows. She had been all day in the company she loved best—the earth, the sky, the sun and wind—and in her heart at last was a deep tranquillity. Thus she could face life and ask nothing but to watch the cloud fleeces as they are spun and heaped high in the long days of summer; in soberer moods to watch the thoughts of the Great Mystery as He reveals them in the shifting cloud shapes; to penetrate further and further into the councils of the great forces. Thus did she dream the moments away till the sun was high in the blue and threw long, yellow splashes of light on her still body, on the soft pine-needles, beneath the boughs. But there was no time for further day-dreams if she intended to forestall the hunters at the place of nooning. She followed a game trail that lay along the stream, ascending through the dense growths till she reached the top of the jutting rocks. Her hair was loosened, her skirt awry, and the pine-needles stood out from it as from a cushion. Much of the way she gained by creeping beneath the low branches on her hands and knees. No white woman would be likely to follow her reasoned the daughter of the plains. It would be a little too hard on her appearance. And here, by lying flat and hanging over the jutting knob of rock, with a pine branch in her hand, she could see this mysterious woman and Peter and the hunters.

She broke a branch to shade her face, she looked down on the grassy level. She waited, but there was no sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft ground. The shadows of the pines contended with the splashes of sunlight for the little world beneath the trees. They trembled in mimic battle, then the shadows stole the sunlight, bit by bit, till all was pale-green twilight, and there was no sound of the hunters.

The hunters, meanwhile, had not been altogether successful in the chase. The necessary wolf had been coy, and they, perforce, had to compromise with his poor relation, the coyote—a poor relation, indeed, whose shabby coat, thinned by the process of summer shedding, made it an unworthy souvenir to Miss Colebrooke. But it was not the lack of a wolf that robbed the hunting-party of its zest for Kitty. She could not tell what it was, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the day from the beginning. She rode beside her cavalier in a habit the like of which the country had never before seen, and Peter, usually the most observant of men, had no word for its multitude of perfections. In the first realization of disappointment with the day, the hunt, the hardships of the long ride, her perturbed consciousness took up the problem of this missing element and tried to adjust itself to the irritating absence. Kitty wondered if it were something she had forgotten. No, there were her two little cambric pocket-handkerchiefs, remotely suggestive of orris, and bearing her monogram delicately wrought and characteristic. It was not her watch, the ribbon fob of which fluttered now and then in the breeze. It was not veil nor scarf-pin nor any of the paraphernalia of the properly garbed horsewoman. And yet there was something missing, something she should have had with her, something the absence of which was taking the savor from the day’s hunting.

It must be the very bigness of this great, splendid world that gave her the sense of being alone at sea. Intuitively she turned and looked at Peter riding beside her. There was something in his face that made her look again before accepting the realization at first incredulously, then with frank amusement. Peter had scarcely spoken since they left the ranch. She had come down to breakfast so sure of her new riding-habit. The Wetmore girls had been moved to hyperboles about its cut and fit and the trim shortness of the skirt—short riding-skirts were something of a novelty then. The fine gold hair, twisted tight at the back of the shapely head, was like a coiled mass of burnished metal, some safe-keeping device of mint or gold-worker till the season of coining or fashioning should come round. The translucent flesh-tints, pearl-white flushing into pink—“Bouguereau realized at last,” as Nannie Wetmore was in the habit of summing up her cousin’s complexion—was as marvellous as ever. The delicate firmness of profile gave to the face the artificial perfection of an old miniature, rather than of a flesh-and-blood countenance, and all these were there as of yore, but the marvel of them failed of the customary tribute. Kitty, on scanty reflection, was at no loss to translate Peter’s reserve into a language at once flattering and retributive. In her scheme of life he was always to be her devoted cavalier, as indeed he had been from the beginning. She loved her own small eminence too well to imperil her tenure of it by sharing its pretty view of men and things with any one. In country house parties she loved the mild wonder that the successful _littérateuse_ could fight and play and win her social triumphs so well. She loved the star part, and next to playing it she enjoyed wresting it from other women or eclipsing them completely in some conspicuously minor rôle, while, in the matter of dress, Miss Colebrooke went beyond the point decreed by the most exigent mandates of fashion. When hats were worn over the face, her admirers had to content themselves with a glimpse of her charming mouth and chin. When they flared, hers fairly challenged the laws of equilibrium. She danced with the same facility with which she rode, swam, and played tennis. In doing these things supremely well she felt that she vindicated the position of the woman of letters. Why should one be a frump because one wrote?

Her friendship with Peter was to endure to greenest old age, more platonic, perhaps, than that of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand. It was to be fruitful in letters that would compare favorably with the best of the seventeenth century series. Even now her own letters to Peter were no sprightly scrawl of passing events, but efforts whose seriousness suggested, at least in their carefully elaborated stages of structure, the letters of the ladies of Cranford.

But in the course of these Western wanderings, undertaken not wholly without consideration of Peter, there had appeared in the maplike exactness of her plans an indefinite territory that threatened undreamed-of proportions. It menaced the scheme of the letters, it shook the foundations of the Chateaubriand-Récamier friendship. The unknown quantity was none other than the frequent and irritating mention of one Judith Rodney, who, from all accounts, appeared a half-breed. Her name, her beauty, some intrinsic charm of personality made her an all too frequent topic, except in the case of Peter. He had been singularly keen in scenting any interrogatory venue that led to the mysterious half-breed; when questioned he persistently refused to exhibit her as a type.

Kitty knew that she had treated her long-suffering cavalier with scant consideration the day he had spurred across the desert to see her. True, she had written him on her arrival, but, with feminine perversity of logic, thought it a trifle inconsiderate of him to come so soon after that trying railroad journey. An ardent resumption of his suit—and Peter could be depended on for renewing it early and often—was farthest from her inclination at that particular time. She intended to salve her conscience at the wolf-hunt for her casual reception of his impetuous visit. But apparently Peter did not intend to be prodigal of opportunity.

“How garrulous you people are this morning!” Nannie Wetmore challenged them. Peter came out of his brown study with the look of one who has again returned to earth.

“You don’t find it like the drop-curtain of a theatre, now that you’ve seen it?” he questioned Kitty. For she had doubted her pleasure in the mountains, in the conviction that they would be too dramatic for her simple taste.

Kitty closed her eyes and sighted the peaks as if she were getting the color scheme for an afternoon toilet.

“Mass, bulk, rather than line—no, it’s not like a drop-curtain, but it’s distinctly ‘hand-painted.’ All it needs is a stag surveying the prospect from that great cliff. It’s the kind of thing that would sound well in a description. Oh, I assure you I intend to make lavish use of it, but it leaves nothing to one’s poor imagination!”

Peter had a distinct feeling of being annoyed. No, she could not appreciate the mountains any more than they could appreciate her. They were incongruous, antipathetic, antipodal. Kitty, in her pink and white and flaxen prettiness and her trim habit, was in harmony with the bridle-path of a city park; in this great, lonely country she was an alien. He thought of Judith and the night they had climbed Horse-Thief Trail, of her quiet endurance, her keen pleasure in the wild beauty of the night, her quality of companionship, her loyalty, her silent bearing of many burdens. Yet until he had seen them both against the same relentless background, he had never been conscious of comparing the two women.

Nannie Wetmore had fallen behind. She was riding with a bronzed young lieutenant from Fort Washakie. The two ahead rode long without speaking. Then Peter broke the silence impatiently:

“You did not really mean that, did you?” He was boyishly hurt at her flippant summing up of his beloved blue country. And Kitty, tired with the long, hard ride, and missing that something in Peter that had always been hers, turned on him a pair of blue eyes in which the tears were brimming suspiciously. They were well out of sight of the others, and had come to the heavy fringes of a pine wood. Was it the psychological moment at last? Then suddenly their horses, that had been sniffing the air suspiciously, stopped. Kitty’s horse, which was in advance of Peter’s, rushed towards the thicker growth of pines as if all Bedlam were in pursuit. Peter’s horse, swerving from the cause of alarm, bolted back across the trail over which they had just made their way. A large brown bear, feeding with her cub, and hidden by the trees till they were directly in front of her, had caused the alarm.

And presently the hush of the shadowy green world in which Judith lay was broken by a light, sobbing sound. It had been so still that, lying on her bed of pine-needles, she had likened it to great waves of silence, rolling up from the valley, breaking over her and sweeping back again, noiseless, green from the billowing ocean of pine branches, and sunlit. Judith bent over the rocky ledge and saw a girl making her way down the game trail, dishevelled and tearful. Her hat was gone, her pale-yellow hair, that in shadow had the greenish tinge of corn-silk, blew about her shoulders, her trim skirt was torn and dusty, and she looked about, bewildered, hardly realizing that through the unexpected course of things she had been stranded in this great world of sunlit splendor and loneliness. She closed her eyes. The awful vastness and solitude oppressed her with a deepening sense of calamity. Suppose they never found her? How could she find her way in this endless wilderness, afoot? She sank to the turf and began to cry hysterically.

Judith knew in a flash of instant cognition that this was Miss Colebrooke. Amazement seemed to have dulled her powers of action—amazement that she, who had stolen to this place and crouched close to earth that she might see the triumph of this preferred woman, and, having seen and paid her grievous dole, steal away and take up the thread of endless little things that spun for her the web of life, was forced instead to be an unwilling witness of the other’s distress. Judith had risen with her first impulse, which had been to go to Kitty, but half-way through the thicket she hesitated and reconsidered. Undoubtedly Peter would come soon, and Peter’s consolation would be more potent than any she could offer. She shrank in shuddering self-consciousness at the thought of her presence at their meeting, the uninvited guest, the outgrown friend and confidante, blundering in at such a time, pitifully full of good intentions. She recoiled from the picture as from a precipice that all unwittingly she had escaped. What madness had induced her to come on this expedition? A sudden panic at the possibility of discovery possessed her; suppose Peter should find her skulking like a beggar, waiting for broken meats? She looked at the image of herself that she carried in her heart. It was that of a proud woman who made no moan at the scourge of the inevitable. Many burdens had she carried in her proud, lonely heart, but of them her lips gave no sign. In her contemplative stoicism she felt with pride that she was no unworthy daughter of her mother’s people, and catching a glimpse through the trees of the abjectly waiting woman who, though safe and sound, could but wait, wretched and dispirited, for some one to come and adjust her to the situation, Judith felt for her a wondering pity at her helplessness. She waited, expectant, for the sound of Peter’s horse. Surely he must come at any moment, overcome with apologies, and she—Judith hid her face in her hands at the thought—she would steal away through the thicket at the first sound of hoofs. But as the minutes slipped by and still no sign of Peter, a sickening anxiety began to gnaw at her heart. Had something happened to him?

She did not wait to ask herself the question twice. She crawled the length of the thicket with incredible rapidity, gained the pine forest, and made her way beneath the low-hanging boughs; without stopping to protect herself from them she gained the open space and ran quickly to Kitty.

“Are you hurt? What has happened?”

Kitty looked up, startled at the voice. She had not heard the sound of the moccasined feet. Her wandering, forlorn thoughts crystallized at sight of the woman before her. A new lightning leaped into her eyes as she recognized Judith. There was between them a thrilling consciousness that gave to their mutual perception a something sharp and fine, that grasped the drama of the moment with the precision and fidelity of a camera. And through all the wonder of the meeting there was in the heart of each an outflowing that met and mingled and understood the potential tragedy element of the situation.

“You are Miss Rodney, I believe?”

Kitty was conscious of something strange in her voice as she looked into the dark eyes, wide with questioning fear. Ah, but she had amazing beauty, and a something that seemed of the very essence of deep-souled womanliness! The two women presented a fine bit of antithesis, Kitty, flower-like, small, delicately wrought, the finished product of the town, exotic as some rare transplanted orchid growth. And in Judith there was a gemlike quality: it was in the bloom of her skin, the iridescent radiance of her hair, that was bluish, like a plum in sunlight; it was in the warm, red life in her lips, in the pulsing vitality of the slim, brown throat; in every line was sensuous force restrained by spiritual passion.

Kitty told of the accident in which her horse had thrown her and disappeared in the pine fringes, leaving her stunned for a moment or two; and how she had finally pulled herself together and followed what appeared to be a trail, in the hope of finding some one. She dwelt long on the details of the accident.

“Yes, but Peter, what has happened him?” Judith chose her words impatiently. She was racked with anxiety at his long delay, and now she hung over Kitty, waiting for her answer, without the semblance of a cloak for her alarm.

There was reproof in Kitty’s amendment. “I don’t know which way Mr. Hamilton’s horse went. It started back over the trail, I think.”

Judith clasped her hands. “Let us go and look for him. Why do we waste time?” But Kitty hung back. She was shaken from her fall, and upset by the events of the morning. Besides, her faith in Peter’s ability to cope with all the exigencies of this country was supreme. And chiefest reason of all for her not going was a something within her that winced at the thought of this fellowship that had for its object the quest of Peter.

“Oh, don’t you see,” pleaded Judith, “that if something had not happened to him he would have been here long ago?”

Judith’s anxiety awoke in Kitty a new consciousness. What was she to him, that at the possibility of harm, a fear not shared by Kitty, she should throw off a reserve that every line of her face pronounced habitual? In her very energy of attitude, an energy that all unconsciously communicated itself to Kitty, there was the power that belongs to all elemental human emotion—the power that compels. Kitty rose to follow Judith, then hesitated.

“I’m sure nothing has happened him. No, I’m really too unstrung by my fall to walk.” She sank again to the bowlder on which she had been sitting.

To the woman of the world, Judith’s ingenuous display of feeling had in its very sincerity a something pitiable. How could she strip from her soul every fold of reserve and stand unloved and unashamed, sanctified, as it were, by the very hopelessness of her passion? How could women make of their whole existence a thing to be rejected, reflected Kitty, who, giving nothing, could not understand. She looked again at the bronzed face beside her, so bold in outline, so expressive in detail. Yes, she was beautiful, and yet, what had her beauty availed her? The thought that she herself was the preferred woman throbbed through her for a moment with a sense of exaltation. The next moment a haunting doubt laid hold of her heart, held up mockingly the little that she and Peter had lived through together, the lofty plane of friendship along which she had tried to lead his unwilling feet sedately, his protests, his frank amusement at her serious pretensions to a career. How much fuller might not have been the intercourse between him and this woman, who, in all probability, had been his comrade for years? And she had been idealizing him, and his love for her, and his loneliness! Kitty stood with eyes cast down, while images crowded upon her, leaving her cold and smiling.

“But think,” pleaded Judith; “if you don’t come it will take me longer to search the trail-marks. You could show me just where the horses ran—”

Kitty’s eyes were still on the ground. She did not lift them, and Judith, realizing that further appeal was but a waste of time, turned and ran swiftly down the trail.

“He is her lover,” said Kitty; and all the wilderness before her was no lonelier than her heart.

Swift, intent, Judith traced Kitty’s footprints. They followed the game trail, the one she herself had taken earlier in the day. She traced them back through the pine wood about a hundred rods, and then the trail-marks grew confused. This was unquestionably the place where the horses had taken fright, circled, reared, then dashed in different directions. She traced the other horse, whose tracks led under low-hanging boughs. It would have been a difficult matter for a horse with a rider to clear; and now the impression of the horse’s shoes grew fainter, from the lighter footfalls of a horse at full gallop.

“Ah!” A cry broke from her as she saw the marks had become almost eliminated by something that had dragged, something heavy. Those long-drawn lines were finger-prints, where a hand had dragged in its vain endeavor to grasp at something. A sickening image came persistently before her eyes—Peter’s upturned face, blood-smeared and disfigured.