Chapter VIII: Part 8

“Sh-sh-sh!” She put her hand to her breast to still the beating of her heart. She could hear the sound of hoofs falling muffled on the soft ground, and a man’s voice speaking in a soothing sing-song. She listened. It was Peter’s voice, reassuring the horse, asking him what kind of a bag of nerves he was for a cow pony, to get frightened at a bear? Judith stood tall and straight among the pines. Surely he could not blindly pass her by. He must feel the joy in her heart that all was well with him. The hoofs came nearer, the man’s voice sounded but intermittently, as he got his horse under better control. She felt as if he must come to her, as if some overpowering consciousness of her presence would speak from her heart to his; but his eyes scanned the distant trail for a glimpse of Kitty or Kitty’s horse. Judith saw that his head was bound in something white and that it bore a red stain, but he held himself well in the saddle. He was not the man to heed a tumble. He urged the horse forward, never looking towards the tree-trunks, his face white and strained with anxiety as he scoured the trail for evidences of Kitty. The horse, with a keener sense than his master, shied slightly as he passed the group of pines where Judith stood; but Peter’s glance was for the open trail, and as she heard him canter by, so close that she could have touched his stirrup with her hand, it seemed as if he must hear the beating of her heart.

“Oh, blind eyes, and ears that will not hear, and heart that has forgotten how to beat! Yes, go to that pale, cold girl! You speak one language, and life for you is the way of little things!”

She waited till the last sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away and all was still in the tremulous green of the forest. Judith’s mind was busy with the image of their meeting, the man bringing the joy of his youth to the calm divinity who could feel no thrill of fear in his absence. She broke into the running gait and hurried through the forest to the Daxes’.

XVI. In The Land Of The Red Silence

The beef-herd, that had been the pivotal point of the round-up and had made the mighty plain echo to its stampings and bellowings, beating up simooms that choked it with thirst, blinded it with dust, confounding itself on every side by the very fury of its blind force, had trailed for a week, tractable as toys in the hands of children. Little had happened to vary the monotony for the cow-punchers that handled the herd—they grazed, guarded, watered, night-herded the cattle day after day, night after night. Pasturage had been sufficient, if not abundant. The creeks were running low and slimy with the advance of summer, but there had been sufficient water to let the herd drink its fill at least once a day.

The outfit ate its “sow-belly,” soda-biscuit, and coffee three times a day, and smoked its pipes, but was a little shy on yarns round the camp-fire.

“This yere outfit don’t lather none,” commented the cook to the horse-wrangler, over the smoke of an early morning fire.

“Don’t lather no more than a chunk of wood,” agreed the horse-wrangler. “That’s the trouble with a picked-up outfit like this. Catch ‘W-square’ men kowtowing to a ‘XXX’ boss, even if he is only acting foreman.”

Simpson, the origin of whose connection with the “XXX” was rather a sensitive subject with that outfit, had begun to take his duties as a cattle-man with grim seriousness; he was untiring in his labors; he spent long hours in the saddle, he took his turn at night herding, though he was old for this kind of work. He condemned the sheep-men with foul-mouthed denunciations, scoffed at their range-rights, said the sheep question should be dealt with in the business-like manner in which the Indian question had been settled. He was an advocate of violence—in short, a swaggering, bombastic wind-bag. He talked much of “his outfit” and “his men.” “What was good enough for them was good enough for him,” he would announce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone, when the food happened to be particularly bad. He split the temporary outfit, brought together for the purpose of handling the beef-herd, into factions. He put the “XXX” in worse repute than it already enjoyed—he was, in fact, the discordant spirit of the expedition. The men attended to their work sullenly. Discord was rife. The one thought they shared in common was that of the wages that would come to them at the end of the drive; of the feverish joy of “blowing in,” in a single night; perchance, of forgetting, in one long, riotous evening, the monotony, the hardship, the lack of comradery that made this particular drive one long to be remembered in the mind of every man who had taken part in it.

Meanwhile the herd trailed its half-mile length to the slaughtering pens day after day, all unconscious of its power. When the steers had trailed for about a fortnight, the question of finding sufficient water for them began to be a serious one. The preceding winter had been unusually mild, the snow-fall on the mountains averaging less than in the recollection of the oldest plains-man. Summer had begun early and waxed hot and dry. The earth began to wrinkle, and cracked into trenches, like gaping mouths, thirsty for the water that came not. Such streams as had not dried shrank and crawled among the willows like slimy things, that the herd, thirsty though it was from the long drives, had to be coaxed to drink from.

Discontent grew. The acting foreman, who was a “XXX” man, and a comparative stranger to that part of the country, refused to consult with the “W-square” men in the outfit, who knew every inch of the ground. The acting foreman thought the Wetmore men looked down on him, “put on dog”; and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven due west instead of skirting to the north by the longer route, where they would have had the advantage of drinking at several creeks before crossing Green River. Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard, and he insisted upon his order in spite of the Wetmore men’s protestations.

The character of the country began to change, the soil took on the color of blood, even the omnipresent sage-brush began to fail the landscape; sun-bleached bones glistened on the red soil, white as ulcers. All the animal trails led back from the country into which they were proceeding. The sky, a vivid, cloudless blue, paled as it dipped earthward. The sun looked down, a flaming copper shield. There was no sign of life in all the land. Even the grasshoppers had left it to the sun, the silence, and the desolation. To ears accustomed to the incessant shrilling of the insects, the cessation was ominous, like the sudden stopping of a clock in a chamber of death. Above the angry bellow of the thirsty herd the men strained their ears again and again for this familiar sound of life, but there was nothing but the bellowing of the cattle, the trampling of their hoofs, and sometimes the long, squealing whinny of a horse as he threw back his head in seeming demand to know the justice of this thing.

Across the red plain snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a thousand steers, a handful of men and horses, in the land of the red silence? It had seen the comings and goings of many peoples, and once it had flowed with streams; but that was before the curse of God came upon it, and in its harsh, dry barrenness it grew to be a menace to living things.

The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as the enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit. Creek after creek that they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.

The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun, tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing its tortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as a fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen, perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper’s bed. Sometimes the dragon curled itself into a ball, and the foreman sung out that they were milling, and the men turned and rode away from it, then dashed back at it, after getting the necessary momentum, entered like a flying wedge, fought their way into the rocking sea of surging bodies, shouted from their thirst-parched throats imprecations that were lost in the dull, sullen roar. Then the dragon would uncoil and again trail its way over the red waste-lands.

A red sun had begun to set over a red earth, and the men who had been out since noon-scouring the country for water, returned to say that none had been found, and they began to look into each other’s faces for the answer that none could give. At sunset they made a dry camp; there was but enough water left to cook with. Each man received, as a thirst-quenching ration, a can of tomatoes. After supper they consulted, and it was agreed to trail the herd till midnight, taking advantage of the coolness to hurry them on as fast as possible to Green River. The grave nature of their plight was indicated by the fact that no one smoked after supper. Silent, sullen, they sat round, waiting for the foreman to give the order to advance. He waited for the moon to come up. Slowly it rose over the Bad Land Hills and hung round and full like a gigantic lantern. The watches were arranged for the night with a double guard. Every man in the outfit was beginning to have a feeling of panic that communicated itself to every other man, and as they looked at the herd, tractable now no longer, but a blind force that they must take chances with through the long watches of the night, while the thirst grew in the beasts’ parched throats, they foresaw what would in all probability happen; they thought of their women, of all that most strongly bound them to life, and they sat and waited dumbly.

The moon that night was too brilliant for benisons; the gaunt, red world lay naked and unshriven for the sin that long ago had brought upon it the wrath of God. The picture was still that of the grotesque Chinese screen, with the headless dragon crawling endlessly; but the dream was long, centuries long, it seemed to the men listening to the bellowing of the herd. And while they waited, the red grew dull and the dragon dingy, and its fury made its contortions the more horrible; and that was all the difference between day and night in the land of the red silence. Sometimes the dragon split, and joints of it tried to turn back to the last water it had drunk; for cattle, though blinded with thirst, never forget the last stream at which they have quenched thirst, and will turn back to it, though they drop on the way. But the men pressed them farther and farther, and for yet a little while the cattle yielded.

At midnight the saddle-stock was incapable of moving farther. One horse had fallen and lay too weak to rise. The others, limping and foot-sore, no longer responded to quirt and rowel. The foreman ordered the herd thrown on the bed ground for the night. The herders for the first watch began to circle. The rest of the outfit took to its blankets to snatch a little rest for the double duty that awaited every man that night. Now it is a time-honored belief among cow-men that the herd must be sung to, particularly when it is restless, and to-night they tried all the old favorites, the “Cow-boy’s Lament” being chief among them. But the herd refused to be soothed, and round and round it circled; not once would it lie down.

The moon gleamed almost brazen, showing the cruel scars, the trenches torn by cloud-bursts, the lines wrought by the long, patient waiting of the earth for the lifting of the wrath of God. Imperishable grief was writ on the land as on a human face. The night wore on, the watches changed, the herd continued restless; not more than a third of it had bedded down. The third watch was from one o’clock to half-past three in the morning. Simpson and another “XXX” man, with two of the Wetmore outfit, made up a double watch, and rode, singing, about the herd, as the long, dreary watch wore away. The cattle’s lowing had taken on a gasping, cracked sound that was more frightful than the maddened bellow of the early evening. Simpson, who was past the age when men live the life of the saddle, felt the hardship keenly. He had ridden since sunrise, but for the respite at noon and the scant time at the dry camp while the evening meal was being eaten. He was more than half asleep now, as he lurched heavily in the saddle, crossing and recrossing his partner in the half-circle they completed about the herd. Suddenly the sharp yelp of a coyote rang out; it seemed to come from no farther than twenty yards away. The cattle heard it, too, and a wave of panic swept through them. Simpson stiffened in his saddle. The sound, which was repeated, was an exact reproduction of a coyote’s yelp, yet he knew that it was not a coyote.

The herd rose to its feet as a single steer, and for a second stood undetermined. From a clump of sage-brush not more than two feet high fluttered something long and white like a sheet. It waved in the wind as the cry was repeated. The herd crashed forward in a stampede, Simpson in the lead on a tired horse, but a scant length ahead of a thousand maddened steers bolting in a panic of thirst and fear.

“Hell’s loose!” yelled the men in their blankets, making for the temporary rope corral to secure horses. Simpson, tallow-colored with fear, clung like a cat to his horse, and dug the rowels in the beast’s flanks till they were bloody and dripping. He had seen Jim Rodney’s face above the white cloth as it fluttered in the face of the herd that came pounding behind him with the rumble of nearing thunder. He was too close to them to attempt to fire his revolver in the air in the hope of turning them, but the boys had evidently got into their saddles, to judge by the volley of shots that rang out and were answered. Simpson alone rode ahead of the herd that tore after him, ripping up the earth as it came, bellowing in its blind fury. His horse, a thoroughly seasoned cow-pony, sniffed the bedlam and responded to the goading spur. She had been in cattle stampedes before, and, though every fibre ached with fatigue, she flattened out her lean body and covered ground to the length of her stride at each gallop. The herd was so close that Simpson could smell the stench of their sweating bodies, taste their dust, and feel the scorch of their breath. The sound of their hoofs was like the pounding of a thousand propellers. From above looked the moon, round and serene; she had watched the passing of many peoples in the land of the red silence. The horse seemed to be gaining. A few more lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one side and let the maddened cattle race to their own destruction. All he asked of God was to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug the rowel and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; the chorus of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the pound, pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.

Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly. “God! What is it?” as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole. “Up, up, you damned brute!” but the mare’s leg had cracked like a pipe-stem. In his fury at the beast Simpson began kicking her, then started to run as the cattle swept forward like a black storm-cloud.

The next second the great sea of cattle had broken over horse and rider. When it had passed there was not enough left of either to warrant burial or to furnish a feast for the buzzards. A few shreds of clothes, that had once been a man, lay scattered there; a something that had been a horse.

XVII. Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst

The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent with her habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were involved. Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the experience of moving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the delay, and could only explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett received reports of the dearth of pasturage on the ground that she wished each fresh educational germ to take as deep root as possible before transplantation. So that when Mrs. Yellett, shortly after Leander Dax’s arrival at camp in the capacity of herder, announced that she and Leander were to make a trip to the dipping-vat that had kept Ben from his classes for the past ten days, and invited the “gov’ment” to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.

The Yelletts’ “bunch” of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and the matriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that number, as she wished always to give the flock her personal supervision.

“‘The hen that’s the surest of her chicks is the one that does her own settin’,’” was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellett succinctly summed up the case.

Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to the market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the matriarch had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in Wyoming. Often she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the wonders of this new world with remarkable aptness, that she had constantly to fight against the inclination to increase her business of sheep-raising, but that as soon as she should begin to hire herders or depend on strangers things would go wrong. With the assistance of her sons, she therefore managed the entire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on which Leander lent his semi-professional co-operation.

As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax’s husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his wife’s masterful presence, Leander dared to be an “agnostic,” as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw’s gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander’s way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion. The mere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild and submissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe. Mary Carmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growing amusement, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first of doubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack of general information in his casual audiences to set forth well-known opinions as his own. Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustained the rôle of doubter with passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of rage and hoarseness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by cow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw the traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling headlong into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.

“The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that Jonah never come out of the whale’s belly,” the matriarch had told Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander’s disadvantages as a herder. And the first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: “Leander Dax, you’d have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein’ a infidel, but there’s one p’int on which you are particularly locoed, and that’s Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in the hist’ry of the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no call to fret hisself over Jonah and his whereabouts—none whatever. There’s a lot of business round this here camp that’s a heap more pressin’. Now, Leander Dax, if I do hereby undertake to hire, engage, and employ you to herd sheep, do you agree to renounce discussions, arguments, and debates on the late Jonah and his whereabouts durin’ them three days? God A’mighty, man, any one would think you was Jonah’s wife, the interest you have in his absence!”

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

Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the journey to the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon was the rudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout pole. Though she saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary Carmichael, discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to ask where she was going to sit, and listened with interest to a discussion between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses it would take to get the dip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp and splendor, was for taking six, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried simplicity to a fault, was in favor of only two. They finally compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch the extra two.

Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage of the delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of “Brainard’s Beneficial Blackthorn.”

“Paw’s as hard to manage as a bent pin,” she remarked, in an aside to Mary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she, with the agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head under her arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, if beneficial, dose.

“There, there, paw,” she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a baby, “don’t take on so! It’s all gone, and I can’t have you sick on my hands.”

But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent language, whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with a drink of condensed-milk and water, “to wash down the nasty taste,” she told him, soothingly.

A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels of sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while Mrs. Yellett looked doubtfully at a “gov’ment” who could not handle barrels. Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and Leander, the long pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral column, from which huge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at the rear a foot or so of bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing about the same proportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a fox-terrier does to the dog.

Mrs. Yellett kissed “paw” good-bye, explaining to Mary, in extenuation of her weakness, that she would never forgive herself if she neglected it and anything happened to him during her absence. She then climbed to the front barrel and secured the ribbons. Leander had brought out three rolls of bedding of the inevitable bed-quilt variety, but Mrs. Yellett scorned such luxury while driving, and accordingly gave hers to the “gov’ment” for a back-rest. Mary sat on the lower row of barrels, with her feet dangling, using one roll of bedding for a seat and the other comfortably arranged at her back as a cushion.

Madam called sharply to the horses, “Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat-kerat!” and they started off at a rattling pace, the barrels of dip creaking and squeaking as they swayed under their rope lashings. Mary bounced about like a bean in a bag, working loose from between the bed-quilt rolls at each gulley, clinging frantically to barrel ends, shaken back and forth like a shuttle. Indeed, the drive seemed to combine every known form of physical exercise. Mrs. Yellett herself was in fine fettle; she drove sitting for a while, then rose, standing on a narrow ledge while she held the four ribbons lightly in one hand and tickled the leaders with a long whip carried in the other. She drove her four horses over the rough road with the skill of a circus equestrienne, balancing easily on the crazy ledge, shifting her weight from side to side as the wagon rattled down gullies and up ridges, the horses responding gallantly to the shrill “Hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat! hi-kerat!” Her costume on this occasion represented joint concessions to her sex and the work that was before her, as the head of a family at the dipping-vat. She still wore the drum-shaped rabbit-skin cap pulled well down over her forehead for driving. The great, cable-like braids of hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head an appearance of denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were still blowing about her face, perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness. She wore a man’s shirt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from which the bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr. Yellett’s trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher’s boots, that met the hem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the originality of her dress.

The wagon had been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in her back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freight carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch of the wagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the peril of life and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of barrels, gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving camp some two hours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have shrivelled away to a wraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin, had waned to the vanishing point. He opened his lips and mouthed horribly, yet his frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called to Mrs. Yellett, but her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon, the clatter of four horses’ hoofs, and the continual “Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat!” of the driver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth and back to the road in indescribably pathetic pantomime. “Perhaps the poor creature wants to turn back and die in his bed, like a Christian, even if he isn’t one,” thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander still emitting the most inhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf mutes in distress. Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the name of many profane things what was the matter with her companions.

Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved a better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.

“God A’mighty!” she said, “he’s lost his false teeth!” And without another word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that fell little short of sleight-of-hand.

The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how far back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the inadequacy of the English language to reproduce his toothless enunciation. Catching, as Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett’s remarks only, she received something of the one-sided impression given by overhearing a telephone conversation:

“What did you have ’em out for?... You didn’t have ’em out?... I just shook ’em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth had been shut, you couldn’t have lost ’em.... You was a-yawnin’, eh? Well, you are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your mouth full o’ china teeth. Your yawnin’ ’ll put us back a good hour an’ we won’t reach camp before sundown.”

At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to search along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them by this landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary get down “and help to prospect for them teeth.” As Mary clambered down she heard a fragment of the matriarch’s monologue, which, being duly expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather take ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in the way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally speaking, man had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.

“Talk about a woman bein’ at the bottom of everything!” sniffed Mrs. Yellett; “I be so sick of always hearin’ about ‘the woman in the case!’ Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left exclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: ‘A skunk may have his good p’ints, but few folks is takin’ the risk of waitin’ round to get acquainted with ’em.’”

While Mary was still “prospecting,” a glad cry roused her attention, and Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.

“Quit smilin’ like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!” called out Mrs. Yellett. “Do you want to lose ’em again?”

So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was resumed.

It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had been oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some unknown quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to the marrow. The horses flung up their heads and sniffed it, rearing and plunging as if they had scent of something menacing. Across the horizon a dark cloud scudded, no bigger than your hand.

“Cloud-burst!” announced Mrs. Yellett.

“Cloud-burst, all right enough,” agreed Leander, and he turned up his coat-collar in simple preparation for the deluge.

There flashed into Mary Carmichael’s mind a sentence from her physical geography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her school-days: “A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the whole cloud had been precipitated at once.” She wanted to question her companions as to the accuracy of this definition, but before she had time to frame a sentence the real cloud-burst came, with a splitting crack of thunder; then the lightning flashed out its message in the short-hand of the storm, across the inky blackness, and the water fell as if the ocean had been inverted. In the fraction of a second all three were drenched to the skin, the water pouring from them in sheets, as if they had been some slight obstruction in the path of a waterfall. The wagon was soon in a deep gully, with frothing, foaming, yellow water up to the hubs of the wheels. Mrs. Yellett, like some goddess of the storm, lashed her horses forward to keep them from foundering in the mud, and the wagon creaked and groaned in all its timbers as it lurched and jolted through the angry torrents.

Each moment Mary expected to be flung from the barrels, and clung till her finger-tips were white and aching. From the drenched red bedquilts a sticky crimson trail ran over the barrel heads, as well as over Mary’s hands, face, and dress. Still they forged on through the deluge, Mrs. Yellett shouting and lashing the horses, holding them erect and safe with the skill she never lost. The fur on her rabbit-skin cap was beaten flat. The great, wet braids had fallen from the force of the water and hung straight and black, like huge snakes uncoiled. She was far from losing her grip on either the horses or the situation, and from the inspiring ring of her voice as she urged them forward it was plain that she took a fierce joy in this conflict of the elements.

It was bitterly cold, and Mary reflected that if Leander’s teeth chattered half as hard as hers did, without breaking, they must, indeed, be of excellent quality. The storm began to abate, and the sky became lighter, though the water still poured in torrents. As soon as her responsibility as driver left her time to speak, Mrs. Yellett lost no time in fastening the cloud-burst to Leander.

“This here is what comes of settin’ up your back against God A’mighty and encouragin’ the heathen and the infidel in his idolatry. I might ’a’ knowed somethin’ would happen, takin’ you along! ‘And the heathen and the infidel went out, and the Lord God sent a cloud-burst to wet him,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett from the apocryphal Scriptures that never yet failed to furnish her with verse and text.

The infidel, from his side of the wagon, began to display agitation. His jaws worked, but he said nothing.

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

He nodded his head wretchedly.

“‘And the Lord took away the teeth of his enemy, so that he could neither bite nor talk,’” quoted Mrs. Yellett to the miserable man, who could make no reply.

“Wonder you wouldn’t see the foolishness o’ being a heathen and a infidel, and turn to the Lord! You ’ain’t got no teeth, and it takes your wife to herd you. ‘And the Lord multiplied the tribulations of his enemy.’ You got no more show standin’ up agin the Lord than an insect would have standin’ up agin me.”

She had Leander, at last, just where she wanted him. He was forced to listen, and he could make no reply. She alternately abused him for his lack of faith and urged him to repentance. Leander raged, gesticulated, turned his back on her, mouthed, and finally put his fingers in his ears. But nothing stemmed the tide of Mrs. Yellett’s eloquence; it was as inexhaustible and as remorseless as the cloud-burst.

It continued bitterly cold, even after the rain had stopped falling, and the heap of sodden bedclothes furnished no protection against the chilling dampness. It was growing dark; there was no red in the sunset, only a streak of vivid orange along the horizon, chill and clear as the empty, soulless flame of burning paper. There were no deep, glowing coals, no amethystine opalescence, fading into gold and violet. All was cold and subdued, and the scrub pines on the mountain-tops stood out sharply against this cold background like an etching on yellow paper.

Mrs. Yellett’s self-inspired scriptural maxims were discontinued after a while, either because she could think of no more, or because the rain-soaked, shivering, chattering object towards which they were directed was too abject to inspire further efforts. Leander huddled on the barrel that was farthest from Mrs. Yellett, and wrapped himself in the soaked red bedquilt. The dye smeared his face till he looked like an Indian brave ready for battle, but there was no further suggestion of the fighting red man in the utter desolation of his attitude. Mary Carmichael, on her barrel, shivered with grim patience and longed for a cup of tea. Only Mrs. Yellett gave no sign of anxiety or discomfort; she drove along, sometimes whistling, sometimes swearing, erect as an Indian, and to all appearances as oblivious of cold and wet as if she were in her own home.

The gathering darkness into which the horses were plunging was mysterious and appalling. Objects stood out enormously magnified, or distorted grotesquely, in the uncertain light. It was like penetrating into the real Inferno, like stumbling across the inspiration of Dante in all its sinister splendor. It was the Inferno of his dream rather than the Inferno of his poem; it had the ghastly reality of the unreal.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if we had a smash-up in Clear Creek,” said Mrs. Yellett, just by way of adding her quota of cheerful speculation. She ducked her head and whispered in Mary’s ear:

“It’s all along of me hirin’ _him!_ I wouldn’t be surprised if paw died. I’m thinkin’ of shakin’ him out after his teeth. ‘Take not up with the enemy of the Lord, lest he make of you also an enemy.’”

But there was no accent of apprehension in Mrs. Yellett’s dismal prognostications of the evil that might befall her for employing Leander. She spoke more with the air of one who produces incidents to prove an argument than of one who anticipates a calamity.

Leander, toothless and wretched, sitting on the side of the wagon, began to show symptoms of joy comparable to that of the vanguard of the Israelites, catching their first glimpse of the Promised Land. Touching Mary Carmichael on the shoulder, he pointed to a white tent and the remains of a camp-fire. Already Mrs. Yellett had begun to “Hallo, Ben!” But Ben was at work at the vat, which was still a quarter of a mile further up the mountain; so Mrs. Yellett, throwing the reins to Leander and bidding him turn out the horses, lost no time in building a fire, putting on coffee, and making her little party comfortable. So various was her efficiency that she seemed no less at home in these simple domestic tasks than when guiding her horses, goddess-like, through the cloud-burst. And Mary Carmichael, succumbing gradually to the revivifying influence of the fire and the hot coffee, acknowledged honestly to herself a warmth of affection for her hostess and for the atmosphere Mrs. Yellett created about her that made even Virginia and her aunts seem less the only pivot of rational existence. She felt that she had come West with but one eye, as it were, and countless prejudices, whereas her powers of vision were fast becoming increased a hundredfold. How very tame life must be, she reflected, as she sat smiling to herself, to those who did not know Mrs. Yellett, how over-serious to those who did not know Leander! Yet, after all, she knew that the real basis of her readjusted vision was her brief but illuminating acquaintance with Judith Rodney. To Mary, freed for the first time in her life from the most elegantly provincial of surroundings, Judith seemed the incarnation of all the splendor and heroism of the West. And in the glow of her enthusiasm she decided then and there not to abandon the Yellett educational problem till she should have solved it successfully. She might not be born to valiant achievement, like these sturdy folk about her, but she might as well prove to them that an Eastern tenderfoot was not all feebleness and inefficiency.

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

XVIII. Foreshadowed

Alida awoke, knowing what was to happen. She had dreamed of it, just before daylight, and lay in bed stupefied by the horror of it, living, again and again, through each frightful detail. It had happened—there, in the very room, and before the children; the noise of it had startled them; and then she woke and knew she had been dreaming. In the dream the noise had wakened the children—when it really happened they must never know. It wouldn’t be fair to them; they needed a “clean start.”

What had she done to keep them quiet? There had been a thunderous knocking at the door. She had expected it and was prepared; because the lock was feeble, she had shoved the old brown bureau against the door.

Nothing had happened. What a fool she was to lie there and think of it! There was the brown bureau against the wall; she could hear the deep breathing of Jim in the room beyond. Jim had been unequal to the task of conventionally going to bed the night before, and she had put a pillow under his head and a quilt over him. She was the last woman in the world to worry about Jim, drunk, or to nag him for it when sober. But she didn’t like the children to see him that way.

What was it that she had done to quiet the children when “they” rode up? She had done something and they had gone to sleep again, and she—and she—oh no, it hadn’t happened. What a fool she was to lie there thinking! There were the children to rouse and dress, and breakfast to cook, and Jim—Jim would be feeling pretty mean this morning; he’d like a good cup of coffee. She was glad he was alive to make coffee for.

She got up and, in the uncertainty bred of the dream, felt the brown bureau, felt it hungrily, almost incredulously. The brown bureau had been pushed against the door when they had come, and knocked and knocked. Then they had thundered with the butts of their six-shooters, and the children had wakened, and she had called out to them:

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

And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call, “For God’s sake, don’t wake the children!”

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

And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door—the weather-beaten door—with its crazy lock that didn’t half catch. The brown bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded in. Then she had done something to quiet the children—it was queer that she could not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream still lived within her, horribly distinct and real.

What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not think about it another minute. She began to dress, but her fingers were heavy, and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency. Repeatedly she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some one of the links in that pitiless memory—what they had said to Jim; his undaunted replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room because Jim had told her to.

She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with sleep, did not reassure her.

“Mammy,” said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid list, the victim of a cactus thorn, “my toe’s all well; can I go barefoot?”

“Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a young lady, if you run barefoot now?”

Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her small feet together and contemplated them. The toe was still suspiciously inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with a Spartan courage that won her a place in the annals of household valor, had the day before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle the torturing cactus thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the operation, though afterwards she had taken the piece of dried apple that was offered her and devoured it to the last bite, as only just compensation for her sufferings.

“Dimmy dot a tore toe, too.” But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about offering proofs of his affliction. At the peril of his equilibrium, he clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over on the bed in apparent anguish.

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

“Don’t bleeve him, mammy. He ’ain’t ever cried. He’d a cried, for sure, if his toe was sore.” At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of her aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.

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

“Doth Dimmy det any apple?” The wee man sometimes succeeded in making terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with the air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother squarely in the eyes.

She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted the horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she answered him with quiet firmness.

“Jimmy must not tell stories.”

“Less see,” insisted Topeka.

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

“It hurths me,” and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. “It hurths me, my tore toe!”

His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

“I with I had a tore toe,” he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery of his deception. “I with I toud det a tore toe ’thout the hurt.”

But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go into the room where their father was sleeping. She went back and found that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still regretted that his perfectly well toe did not entitle him to gastronomic consideration. Topeka, who had arrived at an age where little girls, in the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no keener delight than plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till they present an appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a peeled onion, put down the brush with guilty haste at sight of her mother.

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

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

“It’s gettin’ so long,” urged Topeka.

“I wouldn’t give it a chance to grow no longer while Jimmy was waitin’ to get dressed. And don’t go into the front room. Your father’s gettin’ his sleep out.”

Topeka opened her round eyes. There was always something suspicious about that sleep her father had to get out, but she felt it was something she must not ask questions about. Her mother lingered; she dreaded to be alone in the kitchen. The little, familiar intimacies between herself and her children scattered the horrors of the dream which would come back to her when she was again at the mercy of her thoughts.

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

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

“He certainly is, Judy. I’s ashamed to have you ask such a question. ’Ain’t you all been brought up to have your faces washed?”

But young Judith seemed disinclined to take up this phase of family superiority. She merely inquired further:

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

“He shore is. Any one would think you had been born and raised in Arizony or Nebrasky, to hear you talk. I’m plumb ashamed of you, Judy.”

“But, ’deed, maw, I ain’t big enough to wash his face with soap. It takes Topeka to hold his head.”

The subject of the discussion still sat on the edge of the bed, a small lord of creation, letting his women folk arrange among themselves who should minister to his wants. As an instrument of torture the washcloth, in the hands of his sister Judy, was no ignoble rival of the cactus thorn. The question of making terms for his sufferings again appealed to him in the light of a feasible business proposition.

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

“Yes, you can have the apple, honey; and, Judy, you be gentle with him. Don’t rub his features up, and be careful and don’t get soap in his eyes.”

“No’m.” And Judy heroically stifled the longing to slick her hair, like Topeka’s, with the wet hairbrush. There were easier tasks than washing the face of her younger brother.

When Topeka and her mother were alone in the kitchen, Topeka grinding the coffee and all unconsciously working her jaw in an accompaniment to the coffee-mill, her mother bent over her and said:

“Did you dream of anything last night?”

Topeka simultaneously stopped working the coffee-mill and her jaw, and regarded her mother solemnly. She did not remember having been thus questioned about her dreams before.

“No’m,” she answered, after laborious consideration. But something in her mother’s face held her.

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

“Yes, maw.”

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

“Jim said he dreamed he had a pup.”

“Was that all? Think hard, Topeka!”

Topeka held the handle of the coffee-mill in her hand; her jaw continued to work with the labor of her mental process. “I’ve thought hard, maw, and all he told was about the pup.”

Alida went back to her bedroom and again felt the brown bureau. “What’s the matter with me, anyhow? It’s the lonesomeness, and they bein’ agin Jim the way they are. God, this country’s hard on women and horses!”

When breakfast was over, and young Jim had received the reward of his valor in presenting a brave face to his ablution, and Judith the reward of her skill, the evidence of which almost prevented the young martyr from smiling while he enjoyed his treat, their mother sent them all to play in the cañon. She told them not to come home till she should come for them, and if any one should ask about their father, to say that he was away from home. And this, as well as the mystery of her father’s “getting his sleep out,” roused some slight apprehension in Topeka, who was old for her age. They were seldom sent to the cañon to play. Topeka looked at her mother as she had when questioned about the dream, but there was no further confidence between them.

“You do as your sister Topeka tells you, and remember what I said about your papa,” Alida said to the younger children. Jim and Judy clasped each other’s hands in mute compact at the edict. Their sister Topeka had a real genius for authority; they were minded all too well when she swayed the maternal sceptre vicariously.

Alida made fresh coffee for Jim when the children had gone. She made it carefully; there was this morning, unconsciously, about each little thing that she did for him, the solemnity of a funeral rite. Struggle as she would, she could not divest her mind of the conviction that what she did this day she did for the dead. She would go to the door and listen to his breathing, and tell herself that she was a fool, then wring her hands at the remembrance of the dream.

As he tossed, half waking, she heard him groan and curse the cattle-men with oaths that made her glad she had sent the children from home. Then she bent over him and woke him from his uneasy slumber.

“Jim, don’t you want me to bathe your head? And here’s some nice, hot coffee all ready for you.”

Jim woke slowly to a realization of his troubles and his blessings. His wife was bathing his head with hands that trembled. Not always had she greeted his indiscretions with such loving forbearance. He noticed, though his waking faculties were not over-keen, that her face was pale and frightened, and that her eyes, meeting his, held a dumb, measureless affection.