Judith of the Plains Part 19

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 att.i.tude 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 Pere Marquette, and there you are!"

"You are so splendid!" said Mary, impulsively, remembering Judith's own sorrows and the smiling fort.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstance 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 alt.i.tudes. 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 G.o.ds. 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 s.p.a.ce of open green, thick with buffalo gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.sy 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 gra.s.sy 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 k.n.o.b 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 gra.s.sy level.

She waited, but there was no sound of hoofs falling m.u.f.fled 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 mult.i.tude 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 ma.s.s 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 _litterateuse_ 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 role, 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 Recamier 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 pa.s.sing 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-Recamier friendship. The unknown quant.i.ty 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.