Judith of the Godless Valley Part 5

"Because!" replied Doug. "Jude, you get down and get started on Swift."

Astonishment, amus.e.m.e.nt, anger, pursued their way across the older man's face. Judith put out her tongue at her brother.

"Chase yourself, Doug Spencer! You're not my boss, you bet!"

John put his foot on the hub. "Good-by, Doug; I hope you recover from your insanity by to-night."

Douglas put an unsteady hand on his father's shoulder. "She can't go with you, Dad!"

His father struck him roughly aside. Douglas ran around the wagon. Judith was sitting on the edge of the rick. He reached up, pulled her into his arms, ran her into the feed shed, turned the key in the padlock and put the key in his pocket. As he turned, his father met him with a blow between the eyes. Mary Spencer appeared on the doorstep, pale and silent.

It was but the work of a moment to subdue the boy, and to unlock the door.

"Get into the wagon, Judith!" ordered John.

Douglas strode uncertainly to his father's side. "Judith, you go get on your horse!"

The young girl stood staring at the two, something impish in the curl of her lips, something wistful and unafraid and puzzled in her beautiful gray eyes. Back of the two men lay the unblemished blue white of the snow-choked fields and in awful proximity to these, Dead Line Peak flung its head against the cloudless heavens. Judith looked from the Peak to father and son as though deliberately appraising them. John, with ashen hair, with bloodshot eyes and the tell-tales lines from nose to lip corner, but handsome, dominating, choleric, with his reputation as a conqueror of women, as a subduer of horses, as a two-gun man. Douglas, with his thatch of gold blowing in the cold morning air, thin, awkward, only a boy but with a spirit glowing in his blue eyes that Judith never before had seen there. The girls of Lost Chief were sophisticated almost from the cradle. Judith could interpret the lines in her stepfather's face. But she did not know what the strange light in Douglas' eyes might mean. Suddenly she sprang to Swift's back and put her to the gallop.

"You know what to expect when you come back, miss!" roared John.

But Judith did not seem to hear. Spencer turned to his son. "Now, sir, you go into the house and get the whip!"

Douglas did not stir. "You aren't going to whip me any more, Dad. If you want to fight me, put up your fists."

Mary Spencer ran through the snow toward the two. "Don't fight him, John!

Don't! He's just a child!"

John whirled at her with his fists raised. Douglas jumped before his step-mother and caught the blow on his raised elbow.

"And that'll be about enough of that, too, Dad!"

John caught his breath, then poured out a string of oaths and invectives, ending with, "Now before I thrash the cussedness out of you, young fellow, what excuse have you got to put up?"

"I haven't any." Douglas was still pale and his voice broke, childishly.

"Only, all of a sudden it seems cowardly to me for you to hit Mother.

She's not a child. You haven't got the excuse that you're training her.

And you know she can't hit you. You're a good fighter, but I notice you don't hit Peter Knight or Charleton Falkner, any time they peeve you a little. It was all right to lick me and Jude when we were little. But now I warn you. I'm going to hit back. And you got to leave Judith and her mother alone."

John Spencer stood staring at his son. Twice he raised his heavy fist to strike him. Twice he dropped it. Douglas, still pale and trembling, wondered at his own temerity. He always had been so terribly afraid of his father!

"So you don't intend to obey me any more!" sneered John.

"Sure I do," replied Douglas. "Only I'm not going to be licked into doing things blind, and I'm going to take care of Jude."

John uttered a contemptuous oath.

Doug swallowed with an effort but his steady temper was well under control and he went on, "I'd like to be as good a rider and rancher as you are and handle a gun as good as you do, but I'm hanged if I want my woman to be as scared of me as Mother is of you."

"Think yourself a man, eh? Well, I'll tell you, young fellow, as long as you live in that house, there, you'll obey and take the lickings I give you. My father built that house and I was born in it and so were you.

Hemen come from our breed and only a sissy refuses to obey. I may not be as well educated as my ancestors back East were, but I'm just as well trained as any of 'em and you're going to be too. We Spencers boss our own households. Go get me that whip!"

"No, sir, I won't do it," replied Douglas, a steady burning light in his eyes.

"You mean you'll stand up to me and fight after you saw the way I could handle you a few minutes ago?"

"Yes, sir, I do."

For a long moment there was silence, while Mrs. Spencer twisted her hands together and Doug and his father stared at each other. Then John gave a short laugh.

"By Sitting Bull! if you haven't got nerve, Doug! Go saddle Buster and get up to the old ranch after those three-year-olds." Then he climbed into the hay wagon, shouted at the team and was off.

Douglas' lips parted. The color returned to his face. Then he sat down weakly on the lower bar of the buck fence and burst into tears, and he was more frightened by his own tears than he had been by his father's anger. Mary Spencer knelt in the snow before him and tried to pull his head to her shoulder.

"Doug! Doug! You are a man!" she whispered. "You are a man!"

Douglas struggled heavily with the strangling sobs and after a moment sat erect and embarra.s.sed.

"Douglas, what happened? How did you come to do it?"

"Something he said to Jude last night scared me," mumbled Doug.

Mary tightened her hold on the boy's arm. "I've been so afraid! So afraid! And no one to talk to!"

"Haven't you ever warned Jude about it?" demanded Douglas, with a sudden sensing of a debt mothers owed to daughters that Mary might not be discharging.

Mary shrank. "O, I couldn't, Doug!"

Douglas looked at her scornfully. "I don't see why that isn't your job."

Mary rose from her knees. She twisted her work-scarred hands together and looked at the boy with pathetic wistfulness.

"Don't you see, Doug, that I couldn't make her understand? She's still such a child she'd just laugh at me."

"Child!" scoffed Douglas, forgetting his own previous estimate of Judith.

"She knows a whole lot more than you do!"

Mary laughed drearily. "Now you're talking like a child!" Then her voice cleared with unwonted purposefulness. "No one who hasn't been married can possibly understand men, or fear them or despise them, like they ought to be feared and despised. When I think what I was before I married and what I am now, I feel like I wanted to put Judith where she never could see a man. It's not right that a woman should suffer so. It's not right to lose all your dreams like I've lost mine. Marriage was never meant to be so."

Douglas scowled in his astonishment. Mary had been feeling like this all along when he'd been thinking of her as without nerve! Here, then, was somebody else lonely, like himself and Judith.

"I'm sorry, Mother," he said awkwardly. "I'll do what I can to change it."

"You can't do anything, my dear. What I'm suffering is in the nature of things."

"Well, anyhow, you ought to warn Jude," repeated Douglas.

"I can't!" said Mary. "Doug, if I do she'd guess how cowardly I am and how I suffer--in my mind, I mean," and she put her hands over her face with a dry sob.